You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘sceptics’ category.
You may have detected a skeptical vein in me whilst reading. I am skeptical. I am a scientist, it’s my job! Furthermore, I am a geologist who specializes in groundwater. I earn money through the planning and delivery of water (potable or construction water typically) to major projects. Part of that process is the exploration for water. Through a combination of looking at maps, on the ground reconnaissance, and clever things like geophysics, I decide where precisely to drill water wells. It is a scientific process, with a lot of learning along the way. You really do get better with experience, and for me anyway, my background in gold and nickel exploration has helped. I’ve been doing all these various exploration tasks for a several years now (about 6 in fact) and definitely I’ve improved. I know how drill rigs work and I have a decent idea of how (basically) to tease out from the local geology in a given area the better places to look for water (or gold, or nickel or whatever). Again, it relies on the collective knowledge from generations of geological science. Knowledge that I started to learn at university.
Enough about my scientific credentials already! Why I write this is that I am currently working on a project where we are trying to find enough groundwater for the construction of 100km of railway. Railway line construction requires a lot of water (about 800,000L per day every 10-15km of line in this case).
We’re working in a pastoral area, sheep and wheat country. The geology is pretty much granite through and through, and anyone who knows what that’s like will tell you that water is scarce. Surface water is practically non-existent and groundwater is hard to come by. This is nearly a desert. How do I know this specifically in this area? Because I have been talking to the local farmers. These guys have been breaking their backs for generations, eeking out the precious value this land will throw up to those who persevere. The one thing that determines success or otherwise more than anything is water. Stock need it to survive, and having no mains water system, a farmer’s house supply relies on it. Subsequently, the farmers invest a large amount of thought and effort into finding water. The country is pock-marked with drill holes and windmills. With this effort comes a culture of great interest in the techniques deployed to find that precious water.
From my discussions, the number one technique employed to find water here is water divining (“water witching” or “water dowsing”, depends where in the world you are). Before you sigh and stop reading, consider this: a water bore can cost more than $10,000 whether or not you actually find water. A farm would quickly go broke drilling holes if their success rate wasn’t too good. But then, hiring geological consultants such as myself is not cheap either, and materially adds to the cost.
What you need is a method of locating the holes yourself (or even getting a mate to do it for a few beers). Enter divining. You know who they are – they’re the ones with bent pieces of wire or Y-shaped sticks who wander about and find the “stream” and tell you where to drill. There is no scientific evidence for its efficacy whatsoever. Indeed there is scientific evidence that demonstrates that diviners have success rates no better than chance (for a good summary, I do recommend the Wiki page). This scientific ‘disproof’ has been around for at least half a century. Despite claims by practitioners to the contrary, we can probably consign water diving to the quack-bin and declare it bogus. Hocus pocus pseudoscience.
BUT, does it work “in the real world”? Given that so many still use it, even rely on it, what residual value might it poses for the farmers out here?
Well, my unscientific study of the local farmers deploying this unscientific technique suggests that it is valuable indeed. The process of divining has located many successful bores in this district (together with a largely unmentioned number of failed bores!). Any geologist will tell you that drilling completely at random will not give you a good success rate. To this end, drilling on “crossing streams” found by diviners is not random. There is a great deal of local land knowledge that is deployed when divining, thus narrowing the focus of the search. The divining really then just delivers a reason for siting the drill rig in a particular location. With limited resources at-hand, this is perhaps just what is needed – comfort in spending the money.
So how am I to react when confronted with several ‘divined locations’ (I can’t help but make the mistake of pronouncing it ‘divine locations’ here!)? This is difficult country to explore, and even I, the skilled geologist, have limited data. My locations are beset with large error margins. In fact I will plan for a certain failure rate given the known geology.
I decided to let them have the run of it for a while, as the divined spots had some features that made them acceptable exploration targets. One diviner, we’ll call him ‘Bruce’, comes with, it is said, a 100% success rate! (Forgive my skepticism, 100%?) I have spent the last week drilling his targets. So far, we’ve drilled four holes. The first one was an absolute gusher! More water than we hoped for. Even the farmer, lets call him ‘Barry’, said he’d never seen anything like it! Then the second came up with water too. Not as much, but adequate.
At this stage, I’m running through the stats in my head. This is getting like some sort of baseball or cricket statistic. Surely the ‘run’ must end soon. But then comes the third hole, better than the second. So Bruce is 3 from 3. Pretty good. Don’t worry, I’m not about to be ‘converted’.
The fourth hole comes. I press on, drilling deeper than I usually would. Barry is telling me I have to go deeper, Bruce is never wrong! Bare in mind, this is hard, dry granite. No water in that. But then, sure enough, there’s the water! This time though, it’s minimal; not enough for a bore. So how to call this? 3.5 out of 4?
It’s hard to explain this without saying that there was simply a network of water baring fractures in the granite that would have been found anyway. That would be the logical, geologically appropriate explanation. I happen believe this to be the case. We may even have been able to detect the fracture systems with the right geophysics. And then, we might have drilled proper ‘geological holes’. But, like Bruce the diviner might agree (perhaps not) how will I ever know? We can’t drill everywhere, and geophysics for this kind of exploration is costly in both time and money with limited chance of improving the success rate.
So, what is the upshot of this? Well, I have spent a week drilling holes and conversing with Barry. We get on well and he has been helpful above and beyond the call. It has been a pleasure. What about the divining? Well, Barry wouldn’t let me drill anywhere that didn’t come approved by Bruce anyway. So, the upshot is that we have a happy landholder, and a happy geologist drilling good water bores (the task for which I am paid). Everyone’s a winner, except, perhaps, science. I come out of this a little miffed that I couldn’t show Barry a better way. But then I’m not from round here. It seems that local knowledge has beaten science in this round. Next time, I will have better data, and a better story. I hope.
I still don’t believe that we wouldn’t have found the water without Bruce though!!
Ok, so chiro could be considered low-hanging fruit. Not many doctors take it seriously and many people are sceptical. Hardly world-changing stuff for me to have a go at it.
On the other hand, many people (including some of my friends) have been through it and swear by it for certain circumstances. There may even be some truth to some of the benefits of some manipulations (although, for instance, a Cochrane review on lower back pain seem to dispute this, with no conclusive evidence either way, and no advantage over medical approaches).
I’m not going into the clinical efficacy of particular components of chiropractic treatments. I have my view on that, but that’s not the point I want to make here. I would point out, also, that I am not a doctor. I am doing this based on a reasoned analysis. I welcome comment or correction.
What I want to take issue with is a document (pamphlet) that I had brought to me by a friend who’s daughter (12 years old) had just been to a chiro for a regular “treatment”.
I have no problem with preventative care (if it can be shown to be effective). I do have a BIG problem with the contents of the brochure, because it pedals a load of nonsense dressed up as fact, with no references (not in the pamphlet anyway – you have to go online for that, which can be hard whilst in the clinic). Indeed, it even contains messages designed to implant the idea in parents heads that vaccination is the wrong thing to do. This is a patent absurdity (I hardly need to go into the countless lives saved through immunization, nor indeed the great deal of suffering that people no longer have to go through at the hands of diseases like polio or smallpox). Any how, I am going to take you through the text of this pernicious pamphlet. Bare with me, this is a little longer than normal.
“The Astonishing Dr. You”, a critique.
First, look at its first pages. I do this to give you a taste. The full brochure can be found here.
Now, “each effect has a cause”. Let’s start with that. One can only assume these people have God on their side because this just begs for an infinite regress argument. And look at that lovely picture of a nebula. Doesn’t that just fill you with awe at how incredibly large and complex the universe is. But, there is a reason for it, because there is “an intelligence”. Actually, it is more likely that universal constants are responsible for the “balance” we perceive. But then, just how balanced are things? Thermodynamics strongly argues against any notion of order coming from chaos. Furthermore, how do they know that “what seems unnecessary has purpose”? What do they have in mind, the appendix? That had a purpose, it just doesn’t serve it anymore. All this is beside the point anyway, as this is a pamphlet about helping real people with real problems, apparently. Not an auspicious start.
I thank a particular FaceBook page that had the text of this pamphlet, and from here I’ll just analyze the text. Here goes. My notes in blue.
Over at Science and The Media, the blog of my university class (of the same name), a small debate is going on about balance in science reporting (obviously hot button because of climate change).
ScientistMags stated in reply: “I think it’s time to balance out the scales of critique by highlighting good science journalism. It would also be an opportunity to demonstrate critical thinking in practice to people who normally do not think about the credibility of what they come across.”
I think this is a really good point that should be taken up. However, it brings up the hoary old MOP vs MOE debate. Measures of Performance in communication are relatively easy. We can objectively assess the number of good (basically correct and informative) media pieces versus the number of bad ones (sensationalised, wrong, misquoted, wrongly biased).
What are harder are Measures of Effectiveness. However, I suspect the risk of mis-educating the public through bad science is higher than the risk of no education at all from not reading good stories; that is to say, bad stories are probably more effective than good ones.
The highlighting of bad science sells books by the truckload, so we know that people are reading that. So, how do we measure the positive effect of good science (and science journalism) so that we can get out their and reinforce this work, and most importantly, measure its effectiveness?
There seems to be a common thread amongst sceptics out there that science is done via something that looks a little like the Council of Nicaea. That is to say, that a committee of scientists decides what is “doctrine” before instructing publishers what to print. There is confusion between the ways the legal system (or political system) works and how science works.
Lets have a look at some typical tasks in a scientist’s professional life:
1. Data collection. This can be the longest and hardest (and most boring) phase. This is where hours are spent over test-tubes, or, in my case, hours in the hot sun staring closely at rocks. Whilst you may be thinking about the end-game in this phase, the task is usually so routine that bias hardly exists (if it does, it is because the method itself is biased, or you’re just sloppy). Actually, there will be mistakes, but these tend to revert to the mean, so will be cancelled out in the final analysis.
2. Hypothesis generation. I put this after data collection to bait some people, but actually, it has to be said that hypotheses are generated throughout the scientific process. The important thing is that you are only testing the original hypothesis whilst conducting an experiment designed to test that hypothesis. Other ones must wait for other experiments. There is no harm in “hypothesis-driven research” – this is what science is. However, this is different to biased research driven towards a pre-determined conclusion. Note the difference – a hypothesis is actually tested, a pre-determined conclusion is circular.
3. Data analysis. Here comes the statistics. So you have the data, and you see patterns. Are they significant? This is a technical, statistical question that determines whether you can use your data (gathered in 1. above) to test the hypothesis (2. above). If there is no significant result, then there is no support for the hypothesis from your results. THIS DOES NOT MEAN IT IS DISPROVEN. It is more like an absence of evidence, which, as the saying goes, is not evidence of absence. If the results show a statistically significant result, then you can compare it with your hypothesis. Now a hypothesis can be disproved – proposing that the sky looks blue and finding it to look green would be an example. Unfortunately the opposite does not apply. If your result concurs with your hypothesis, it lends support to it, but does not prove it. It can never prove it due to a quirk of inductive logic that demonstrates that no matter how many positive examples you show in support of a proposition, since the set of possible examples is infinite, you cannot rule out a counter-example emerging next. Which is quite different from the deductive logic of mathematics, where 2 + 2 = 4 as a result of the system itself.
To make a long story short, the last juicy step is publication.
Now you run into trouble. You’ve done your experiment, and supported your brilliant earth-shattering hypothesis. Will anyone believe you?
To find out, you detail your method (and the back story – why you felt it worthy of research) and your results and a bit of discussion on what it all means. Then you send it for peer review. This is a blind (well semi-blind – sometimes people work out who the reviewers are) process where your reviewer doesn’t know who wrote the paper and is asked to appraise the science, comment, and put their opinion on whether it is fit to publish. Most papers fail this test on the first pass, and the majority never make it to publication. What tends to define success is that the paper details a properly conducted line of research taking into account previous work in a similar field. Failure in peer-review doesn’t mean that there is a conspiracy against you – it usually means your paper is either not relevant to the journal in question, or that you need to write up your science better. Without peer review, this statement cannot be made with any certainty about a paper.
Also, consider that how the media treats science is not the same as the science itself. Science is only balanced in its reporting in so far as it “objectively” reports the outcomes of research and the opinions of researchers. So 90% of scientists might agree with a broad-based position, but it only takes one from the 10% to balance a journalists report – giving a 50/50 impression. Note also the diversity of opinion that will lie within the 90% who agree – these people do not speak to a common mantra, they merely assent to certain generalisations.
So next time you see controversy about methods and “conspiracies” to promote one “side” of an argument over another, consider the above and consider that most scientists are too busy with the steps involved to also hold some sort of cabinet meeting on how to bend the entire scientific community. After all, that would be like herding cats.
