637. The Mentally Hazardous Gray Zone Between Woo-woo And Science

637.   The Mentally Hazardous Gray Zone Between Woo-woo And Science

One important task of science is to draw a clear line between irrational beliefs and rational knowledge derived from evidence.   Responsible scientists accentuate this line.  

People being disappointed with modern scientific medicine often turn to so called alternative medicine.   While some of it is outright quackery, some parts of traditional non-western medicine are an unfortunate mixture of absurd beliefs with methods, which sometimes and under specific circumstances seem to be beneficial.    These benefits deserve scientific research.  

Researching the claims of alternative medicine is important.  But it can only lead to curative progress, when beneficial effects are thoroughly cleansed of the contamination by woo-woo beliefs.   

The line between science and quackery needs to be sharpened and emphasized.    Accidentally appearing to validate woo-woo beliefs, while in fact only validating their collateral benefits blurs this line instead,  It is a fallacy, which contributes to the persistence of all quackery.    


The following study presenting beneficial effects of QiGong on cancer patients is an example of scientists having irresponsibly blurred the line by attributing unwarranted value to an irrational belief:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130125142244.htm 

Presenting the lump method and entire package of what is called QiGong as beneficial is a dangerous and irresponsible fallacy.   

"qigong is traditionally viewed as a practice to cultivate and balance qi (chi) or what has been translated as "intrinsic life energy"."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qigong

The existence of such a qi is a typical woo-woo belief in the alleged existence of something too vague and elusive to allow finding evidence of its existence by experiments or observations.   QiGong is centered around this woo-woo belief.    Without the belief in this qi, QiGong would not be QiGong.   Therefore there cannot ever be a scientific QiGong.    QiGong is woo-woo or it is not QiGong.  

The fallacy of the study is the misrepresentation of appearing to validate a woo-woo belief, while it in reality only validates the outcome of specific behaviors.    Nothing in the study validates QiGong as a belief based method.   

Responsible science needs to refrain from ascribing benefits to woo-woo beliefs.    Studying methods like QiGong scientifically requires a very careful separation between rationally describable physiological effects of behaviors and obsolete irrational woo-woo beliefs. 

Once there is evidence for real benefits of any method, as was found in the study, a responsible scientific approach cannot end there.  Its task includes to also attribute the curative effects to evident causes and replace wrong ascriptions to woo-woo beliefs. 

Step 1 requires the evaluation of all claims like the existence of a qi.    Unless evidence for the existence of qi can be found, the concept of QiGong as a package has to be discarded.    Whatever has an effect, it is not QiGong.   It makes no sense to believe, that specific exercises influence an imaginary qi, which then does the cure, as long as there is no evidence for the existence of that qi.

Step 2 requires to distinguish between the specific woo-woo belief and general placebo effects.  

Step 3 requires to find those behaviors, gymnastics, practices and/or exercises, which are the real and direct cause of the observed benefits.   Whenever behaviors lead to beneficial results, research is important, but with the focus on the behaviors themselves.

The result of such research can lead to the definition of an independent curing method, which only coincides with the woo-woo method by the application of some same behaviors.   Such a method therefore needs a clear distinction by being given a different, non-woo-woo name.    It could be 'xyz'-exercises, where xyz can be any name.  

544. My Fantasy Of The Golden Age Of Neuroscience

544.   My Fantasy Of The Golden Age Of Neuroscience

The last half century has been the age of great electronic and technological progress.    This enabled the ubiquity of the impact of media bringing along also the collateral damage of invisible, subtle and unrecognized emotional harm to many people.  The media have enhanced the already innately detrimental effect of the obsolete male instinctive urges even more in the wrong direction, as oversexation and promiscuity have been made a social norm.   
Men's instinctive tendency to the asymmetrical attitude towards women (entry 543) has been implicitly and subtly reinforced as a consequence of this unfortunate social norm.
 

This is generally overlooked, ignored and denied, and society pays a high price for this.  Women suffer directly and more knowingly from commodification and objectification forced upon them.   Men are deprived of the higher emotional benefits of bonded monogamous commitment, but they are usually oblivious of this, because the deprivation is hidden behind the superficial immediate satisfaction available by the abuse of female bodies.  They are not even aware of what they are depriving themselves of, as they never had a chance to experience anything better due to being exposed to the oversexation too early during childhood.         


Regularly reading newsletters informing about really amazing results of research in neuroscience has led me to wonder, whether we may now be at the onset of the age of neuroscience.  It even has the potential to become the golden age for women, would neuroscience achieve the very significant goal of removing the slippery slope of the ongoing reinforcement of the worst male behaviors and attitudes.   

While women's mere complaints about suffering from commodification and asymmetrical attitudes (entry 543) are dismissed by men as female shortcomings, the growing evidence of effects observed by brain imaging methods is more difficult to disregard.    Hard and multiple evidence could finally have an impact upon men's persistent denial, how their own instincts are a real problem requiring to be dealt with.  

If this insight would be widely accepted, then this could lead to the application of medical science and neuroscience to develop methods to reduce men's needs for sexual homeostasis down to a beneficial level, where is seizes to damage women.   While the body of unattached females would no longer trigger any urges for abuse in men, they would instead always be attracted first to a woman's mind and personality, before they are attracted to her body.  

It would certainly be easy to create some pills, which combine the bonding of oxytocin and a reduction of libido or even some appliance for brain stimulation for this purpose.    A bonding helmet for men similar to Persinger's helmet would be a great invention.   

What a dream:   A helmet stimulating a man's brain, and even the worst jerk would become a caring, responsible, bonding, monogamous nice guy, feeling a need for commitment.    This would give women the option to reject any man, who refuses to use this helmet.   A helmet could thus free humanity from the scourge of male promiscuity.  

But I am taking my fantasy even one step further to mere science fiction.    If it were not just a helmet, which a man can decide to use or not, but if it were a chip to be planted in every man's brain, this could really create a paradise on earth: 
There would only be nice and decent men never hurting a woman.   No more rape, no more adultery, no more using and dumping, no more predators making women miserable by the degradation of pursuing them as prey.   No more prostitution, no more pornography,   A woman would be safe to chose, where she wants to be at any time of the day or night without risking to be attacked.  

All the above are far fetched and unrealistic dreams, as long as men generally do not have any insight, how much their excessive sexuality does not enhance but destroy the emotional quality of life, which is a potential of human cognition but only when it is unrestricted and undistorted by instincts.   The obstacle are all those men lacking any comprehension of the benefits for themselves of any method resulting  in the replacement  of the primitivity of their being animals with true humane happiness.  

 

Men's choice to either allow themselves to be controlled by their instincts or to control the instincts are rarely ever motivated by consideration of women's dignity or by the rational question of equality or by doubting the justification of asymmetrical attitudes (entry 543).

Throughout history and up to now, sometimes men have and still do fight against their instinctive urges for sexual homeostation, but the reason is always religious or philosophical and not any consideration for women.   They focus upon their success or failure concerning their self-control as a part of their self-esteem and self-worth.   They do not reject instinctive urges as a distortion of men's cognition concerning the attitude towards women, they do not value the avoidance of damage to women.    Sparing women is not their goal, it is only a lucky collateral benefit.     
The catholic priest, who succeeds in keeping his hands off his house keeper does not do this by respect and consideration for the woman.   He does this by fear of punishment in the afterlife and as a prevention of feeling a failure and looser due to his vows of celibacy.   

534. The Pseudo-Evidence Fallacy

534.   The Pseudo-Evidence Fallacy

Whenever someone bases the decision, how to treat another person, on a belief, which is so strong, that it impedes and overrides the rational perception and comprehension of evidence and reality, there are more or less fatal consequences for at least the misjudged person, often for both. 

Examples:

1. A very drastic example was the alleged proof of who is a witch by throwing the unfortunate victim into the water to see if she floated or drowned.    Men believed in this cruel irrationality, even though their brain had nevertheless enabled them to become fluent in Latin.   
2. In some cultures, parents not only decide, whom to marry their children to, but they choose an alleged match following an astrologer's advice.   This has certainly caused millions of people to suffer from being tied for a lifetime to a mismatch, the worst fate being that of women being abused by a man, whom they would not have chosen.  
3. Today people are less prone to fall for very blatant irrationality.  But the more the irrational claims and beliefs mimic science, the more people are gullible to mistake pseudo-science for science.   
   NLP is a good example.   In entry 177 (The Jerks' Fascination with NLP) I already elaborated, why NLP is a belief system, and why this blend of some elements from scientific psychology with irrational and unscientific claims make this so attractive to people with a distorted self-concept as if being rational.  

In these as also in many more examples, there is a pattern of a specific fallacy:  

The person

• bases a rational decision process upon incorrect or insufficient information acquired by absurd, weird, preposterous or insane methods.   
• is unperceptive, mindblind, immune to or otherwise not impacted by any information coming directly from the target of the behavior.   The target has no influence upon what information is used to determine, how s/he is treated.
• imposes the decision upon the target or attempts to, feeling entitled and justified to do so. 

This fallacy impedes trust and as a consequence it impedes a relationship from becoming a safe haven, which is impossible without trust justified by trustworthiness.   
Trustworthiness can only be assessed by the rational method of evaluating evidence.  This method compares all of someone's verbal and non-verbal expressions and behaviors at any moment with all of this at any another time, and also with external independent sources.   
The more often this comparison is consistent, congruent and without contradictions, the more the person's overall trustworthiness can be estimated as probable.   Never discovering a lie is a part of this.

Any other method, which relies on unverified and unverifiable clues, is a hazard and misleading.   Earning trust depends not only on the own trustworthy behavior, it also depends upon the partner's ability to recognize trustworthy behavior as such by the correct perception of evidence.    Trust cannot be earned from a person using unsuitable methods.  

An honest person never lying is nevertheless not trusted by a partner using flawed methods to evaluate honesty.   The delusion of being able to rely upon firmly believed pseudo-clues makes him oblivious of reality.      
Fools believing in NLP derive the pseudo-evaluation of alleged honesty or lack thereof from the target's eye movements.   This is a hazardous fallacy, as the study quoted below clearly shows.    Eye movements can be caused, influenced and diverted by many triggers.  During any conversation, people's attention can be easily caught momentarily by events at the periphery of their vision.   
The haphazard location of such events suffices to determine the erroneous attribution of an alleged trait towards one of two errors:      
Accidental eye movements of a honest person can forfeit the chance to be trusted.  
The blind believer in NLP can also easily be mislead to trust by a liar's accidental eye movements.  

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120711205943.htm

"For decades many NLP practitioners have claimed that when a person looks up to their right they are likely to be lying, whilst a glance up to their left is indicative of telling the truth."

"Professor Richard Wiseman (University of Hertfordshire, UK) and Dr Caroline Watt (University of Edinburgh, UK) tested this idea by filming volunteers as they either lied or told the truth, and then carefully coded their eye movements.  In a second study another group of participants was asked to watch the films and attempt to detect the lies on the basis of the volunteers' eye movements.

"The results of the first study revealed no relationship between lying and eye movements, and the second showed that telling people about the claims made by NLP practitioners did not improve their lie detection skills,” noted Wiseman. "

The pseudo-evidence fallacy and commodification share the common defective acquisition of information.    In both situations, the target is excluded from being considered as a possible source when choosing, which information is used for the decision how to behave.  Both situations indicate depreciation and disrespect of the target, but it works differently.

In the case of commodification, the target is mistaken for a passive utility in a onesided relationship and therefore not considered as able to be a proactive source supplying any information.  
The pseudo evidence fallacy disregards, devalues and rejects the information input coming directly from the target.   The real information is noticed but replaced by the false beliefs.   The target is considered as a proactive source of irrelevant or worthless information.