LC

UNIT 3 - Science and Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience - a claim belief or practice which is presented as scientific but does not adhere to the scientific method

  • superstitious beliefs which are relatively harmless such as Goodluck charms, or opening an umbrella indoors imparts bad luck

  • nutritional beliefs - gluten free food is healthier, detox diets etc.

Wishful thinking and the Placebo effect

Alternative medicine - wide range of practices where pseudoscience is applied to health

  • acupuncture, magnet therapy, reflexology

  • no more effective then placebo effect

operate on placebo effect; person experiences a real improvement in their symptoms after receiving a treatment with no active ingredients, simply because they believe it will help

  • the larger the expectation, the larger the overall effect

    • larger sugar pill delivers more pain relief then the smaller sugar pill

  • in real life - close door button on elevator

double blind method is used in clinical trials, where neither the patient nor the researcher know whether they are getting the placebo

not in use anymore, now its compared with the effects of the previous best drug on the market

Dangerous forms of alternative medicine - 15 year old in 2013 dies from type 1 diabetes because his parents refused to give him insulin as they didnt believe in doctors

What is Scientific

  • If there is a way to disprove the claim, in principle, then it can be considered a scientific claim and its validity tested by an experiment

  • pseudoscience prays on the public’s ignorance by making vague unfalsifiable claims such as ‘i can bend spoons with my mind but not right now’ cant really be disproven.

  • pseudoscience is also full of examples which are easily falsifiable, and have been disproven by countless studies yet people still choose to believe them

    • eg vaccines cause autism

  • how to protect yourself from pseudoscience;

    • ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’

    • question the source of information

    • ‘the simplest explanation is usually the right one’

    • motivations behind the claim should be investigated - and identifying ones own biases