This will be my first post on alternative medicine. In it, I will try to cover the prominent excuse people give when taking things like homeopathy: “If it doesn’t help me, at least it won’t hurt me”, otherwise known as “what’s the harm?”.
Edzard Ernst, the first Professor of Complementary Medicine (University of Exter) to ever exist, defined complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) as “health care which lies for the most part outside the mainstream of conventional medicine”. Alternative medicine, as defined by nsf.gov, refers to “all treatments that have not been proven effective using scientific methods”.
The opposite of the above two is “evidence-based medicine”, defined as “the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients”. (I’ll take a look at THAT much, much later.)
With the definitions out of the way, let’s look at what proponents of alternative medicine propose, using homeopathy as an example: Proponents of homeopathy are often heard to say that homeopathy has no side effects.*
So, the reasoning goes, if it can’t harm you, you can just take it anyway. (I’ll assume, for the sake of this post, that alternative medicine has no beneficial effects what so ever. I’ll explore this in later posts.)
There are two rebuttals to this:
1) Spending money on alternative treatments can result in you not having money for proper medication. Approximately $34 billion are spent on CAM in the US alone. A direct comparison of a homeopathic fever remedy and ibuprofen showed that the homeopathic remedy cost $7.05, while ibuprofen cost $6.98. That’s not a huge difference and it also doesn’t address whether the homeopathic remedy will actually help against the fever. The difference, $0.07, is negligible, but in favour of the evidence-based treatment.
I might make a later post detailing the cost of the alternative treatment vs the evidence-based treatment, but for now even a cursory look at common treatments shows that “alternative medicine is less expensive than evidence-based medicine” is, at best, misleading.
2) Spending time on alternative treatments can delay access to real treatment.
Bob Marley didn’t allow the amputation of his cancerous toe due to religious reasons and sought out alternative treatments. He died. Former President Warren G. Harding died after his homeopathic practitioner did some weird stuff on him.
In total, What’s the harm? documents around 370,000 deaths, 305,000 injured and nearly $3 billion in economic damages due to pseudo-science, of which surely more than half can be traced back to CAM.
So the next time someone tells you to go to a practitioner of CAM, politely decline, show them the above website and go to a real, licensed doctor. They’re far from perfect, but at least they can do some things right.
*It must be noted at this point that any and every remedy, be it a placebo or a real remedy, can have side effects due to the nocebo effect. What is meant is “no side effect due to the active ingredient”.
Future projects on the topic:
In my next post, I’ll look at why studies in medicine are important.
My third post will deal with a few alternative treatments and look at their benefits.
A series of posts sometime in the future will look at evidence-based medicine, what it is and how much evidence there really is.
Just a brief pause from my series on critical thinking, to follow in the footsteps of my fellow League of Reason bloggers and post a brief introduction to myself, my interests and this blog.
As you can tell from my rather unimaginative username, my name is Laurens. I am a 25-year-old male from the UK. I have recently completed an Access to HE Diploma in Natural Sciences which covered Chemistry, Biology and Ecology. I hope at some point in the future to pursue a degree in a scientific area, although this dream has been halted by finance issues. My main scientific interest lies in evolution, and I wrote a dissertation on the evolution of bipedalism in hominins (I may post this here at some point, if you’re interested?). I find the natural history of our planet, and the diversity of life extremely fascinating, so expect some future posts on this topic.
I am also quite a creative person. I studied art previously, and I enjoy painting and drawing. I am a guitarist/singer and post covers and original songs on my youtube channel. And am also in the process of learning card magic—which I feel ties in strongly with some principles of scepticism; mainly through providing insight into how our minds can be fooled. I am toying with the idea of elucidating this further in a series of blog posts here, depending on whether you guys think that would be interesting or not.
If you have any questions about me, or this blog let me know in the discussion thread.
He_Who_Is_Nobody will hopefully have started a trend: He talked about himself. And his goals on this blog. And he gave us some insight into his future blog plans.
I’ll follow suit.
This is me.
Just so you can put a face to the name.
Right, so where do I come from? Well, I’m a 22 year old student at the Pedagogical Highschool of Vienna, studying “English as a foreign language” and “Geography and Economics” (G&E). I studied “History and Political Sciences” and G&E for 2.5 years at the University of Vienna. I’m training to become a teacher and should be finished next year. Hopefully.
I also take some courses (both online and IRL) on biology.
Currently, I have five post series in mind:
1) Making education a priority. I’ll talk about why schools/Unis/kindergarten/etc. are the way they are and what we should do to improve them.
2) Politics. I already started on that here. Basically, I know a lot of politicians, especially in the EU, so I have a bit of insight. I’ll counter Euro-sceptics and lash out at idiot politicians.
3) Medicine. My flatmate studies medicine and I like to read about it, so between us we’ve got quite a bit covered. I also have a few doctors in the family: My Aunt and Uncle, plus their son who’s about to start studying it, my other Aunt and Uncle, her Father, plus her mother’s a pharmacist. The intent here is to look at some alternative medicine, at some good medicine and at the business and politics of medicine.
4) Science in the news. I’m not sure if I’ll get to that, but it’s one of my pet peeves. Idiot journalists who butcher real science. Gah, hate.
5) Biology. I’ll say upfront that I have no degree in biology, but I’ve got some people who will look through these particular posts. Here, I mainly want to talk about some obscure creationist claims and I may post monthly paper reviews, depending on the time I have.
I’ll also be in the show, I hope, so see you there!
I hope you’ll enjoy my posts. If there’s anything else you want me to post about, any questions you might have: PM me and I’ll (probably) be happy to comply.
In my last post I spoke about issues and how to spot them in an argument. This post will follow in a similar fashion, about how to spot conclusions and premises in an argument.
Conclusions
I spoke briefly about how to find conclusions in my previous post. In a sound argument the conclusion should be a statement that follows logically or can be inferred or deducted from the premise(s). Generally these tend to follow what I’d term indicator words such as the following:
Therefore
Ergo
Consequently
Thus
Generally the sentences that follow these words are a conclusion to part of, or the entire argument. Of course these words aren’t always used, one might conclude their argument by saying ‘so in conclusion…’ or ‘this shows that…’. With a little practise you should have no problem being able to find the conclusions in someone’s argument.
Premises
Premises are the bulk of an argument, they are the reasoning that supports the conclusion(s) that you make. These can be statistics, facts, examples, logic, refutations of counter arguments, and so on. These are essentially the pieces of information that you wish to use to convince someone that the conclusion(s) you are drawing are valid.
Examples
Here are some example arguments, with the premises in yellow, and the conclusions in red:
In 2011 there were 8,748 alcohol-related deaths in the UK, heavy drinkers increase their risk of liver problems, cancer and other health issues, therefore alcohol should be more strictly controlled by the government.
46% of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form, this calls for a great effort to improve science education in the United States
[NOTE: These arguments do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the author, they merely serve as examples for education purposes]
Non-sequiturs
Sometimes a conclusion will not follow from a particular premise, or series of premises. This is called a non-sequitur (literally meaning ‘it does not follow’). Here’s an example that many of you will be familiar with:
There is no evidence for evolution, therefore creationism is true.
The conclusion does not follow because it excludes the possibility of both evolution and creationism being false.
In order to spot non-sequiturs, it is advisable to read through the premises of an argument, and think about what kind of conclusions could logically be drawn from them (assuming that all the premises are true). If the conclusion differs greatly from the conclusions that you think are reasonable to have drawn from the premises, then it’s likely that this person has made a non-sequitur.
General tips when making arguments
In order to make your argument as sound as possible, there are some important things to consider when coming up with your premises and conclusions. These are: does my conclusion follow from my premise(s)? Are there any logical flaws in my premise(s)? Is there any research/facts that counters my conclusion(s)? Have I cited references for my argument? Are these references trustworthy? What are the counter arguments to my position?
If you continually scrutinize your arguments in such a way, you will inevitably come up with stronger ones. If you find that your argument is flawed in any way, the most honest thing you can do is discard it. That doesn’t necessarily mean changing your position, it might just mean finding better arguments. However, if you find that no arguments tend to support your position, then the most humble thing you can do is change your position, rather than defending it with bad arguments just to maintain your bias.
In my next post I shall look into some ways in which premises can be flawed, misleading or plain wrong.
Any comments, questions, suggestions etc. about this post are welcome in the discussion thread.
Seeing as how this will be my first blog post, I thought I would start by giving my CV.
I am currently a contract archaeologist; my specialty is human and faunal remains (I am not using that much today). I have been on excavations in Hawaii, Spain, and in my great state of New Mexico. I obtained my Bachelor of Science with honors in Biological Anthropology from the University of New Mexico in 2010. My senior thesis was about dental microwear on extant primate populations (it can also be used to reconstruct paleo-environments). I one day hope to return to school and continue studying skeletal anatomy, paleoecology, and cladistics. I also volunteer at my local natural history museum, which I also hope to obtain a larger role in soon (hopefully specimen preparation work and excavations). To sum it up, I like bones and fossils.
My main Ethernet hobby, as many of you already know from practically all my forum posts, is debunking creationism. With part of this blog, I am hoping to add just a little more firepower to the pro-science side of this argument, not only in biology, but also in all fields that creationism tries to distort and tamper with.
The other part of this blog I am hoping to answer general questions people have about archaeology, anthropology, and paleontology; a basic “ask an archaeologist/anthropologist/paleontologist” blog. I would welcome all questions; the main thrust of my volunteer work is answering questions from the public. Thus, any questions are welcome and will be answered by me (hopefully).
For the most part that is what I would like to blog about; I may blog about other things, such as how great New Mexico is, but look forward to creationism debunking and archeo-babble.
I guess this is enough for my first post. I hope everyone will enjoy my blog as much as I enjoy writing it.
In my first post on critical thinking, I spoke a little about values and how important they are. In the next few posts I’m going to look at the various means by which one can dissect an argument into its composite parts.
The first thing that it is important to get a grasp of when listening to, or reading an argument is; what the hell are they arguing about? The subject matter of the argument is often referred to as the ‘issue’. Sometimes they can be easy to spot because the person states the issue clearly, sometimes they are more ambiguous. To give you more of an idea of what an issue is, here are some examples:
Should the USA have stricter gun control?
Does creationism have any place in a science class?
Do violent video games negatively affect children?
Should George Lucas be allowed to make more Star Wars films?
As you can see, the issue takes the form of a question. This question is what the person making the argument is trying to answer. As I mentioned earlier, sometimes this question is not actually mentioned directly during the discussion, but one can deduce the issue from looking at the conclusion of the argument. Here’s an example:
“Many people, adults and children alike suffer with obesity and the health risks that come with it. Therefore junk food should contain similar warnings to those found on tobacco products.”
We can find the conclusion by looking at indicator words, in this case “therefore,” other examples of such words include; ‘thus’, ‘so’, ‘ergo’, and ‘consequently’ etc. These words tell us that the following sentence is likely to be the conclusion of their argument. Now if we look at the conclusion above, we merely have to rearrange the sentence a little to see that the issue is; should junk food contain similar warnings to those found on tobacco products?
This all seems pretty straightforward, and probably obvious to most of you. But there are instances in which people direct a discussion off course by going for a different issue than the original one raised—be it intentionally or unintentionally. This is often called a red herring. An example of this would be a creationist stating; “scientists carried out carbon-dating on newly formed igneous rocks and they came out as forty billion years old” during a discussion about whether creationism should be taught in schools. However, this does not address the issue at hand, rather it is addressing a completely different issue of ‘does radiometric dating provide accurate results?’ (rather badly at that). This merely serves to throw the discussion off course, and for that reason it is useful to be able to derive the issue(s) from the conclusion(s) of a persons argument and see if they match up to the original issue that you began with. If they don’t then you can discard them and politely request that the discussion gets back to the real issue.
There are of course some issues that cover a whole range of sub-issues. Does God exist? For example, also covers issues like what is the nature of evidence? And what are the attributes of God? etc. It is important to keep track of these and to try to make it as clear as possible what these are and how they relate to the original issue in your presentation. Once we begin to learn how to de-construct arguments to analyse their components, we can begin to make much stronger arguments ourselves. Looking for, and clearly stating the issue at hand might seem obvious, but it is important in order to argue with clarity and to begin to see whether someone’s overall argument fits together.
As always, comments, questions, criticisms and suggestions are welcome in the discussion thread.
Having just written my 1337th post on the LoR forum, I thought I’d write up my first blog post.
A very short background on me: I studied “History and Political science” as well as “Geography and Economics” for 2.5 years at the University of Vienna, without obtaining a degree. I am now almost finished with my “Geography and Economics” and “English as a foreign language” degree, BSc.
So much for that. Now with the U.S. elections just behind us and many upcoming European elections, I wanted to look at one question that’s always baffled me: Why is there so much misinformation in trivial politics? Is there a huge conspiracy, do politicians want to keep us dumb? And why do politicians implement so many bad and unnecessary laws? Why don’t they listen to good advice?
I’ll start with an example from the U.S., as seen in PZ Myers talk “A despairing perspective on American education“. At 14:29 in that video, he talks about the I35W Mississippi River bridge in Minneapolis collapsing in 2007. The bridge was constantly classified as “structurally deficient”, but apart from a plan to retrofit the bridge, nothing was done. In 2007, it collapsed and a new bridge was built in 2008. This could have been avoided if the bridge had been replaced 17 years prior to the incident, in the year of my birth, 1990.
There’s one obvious question: Why didn’t politicians react to the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDoT)? In the end, the replacement bridge cost them 234$ million, plus the cost from people not being able to commute (400,000$-1$ million per day), plus the rescue operations and finally the lawsuits. Bad decisions, based on sufficient information, cost the state at least twice as much as a completely new bridge would have cost.
Now I can’t give an answer as to why the politicians in charge did nothing, but this is, after all, just an example to highlight my point: Politicians make bad decisions even though there is enough data to come to the (obviously?) correct conclusion.
Closer to home, politicians have just tried to revamp the education system in Austria. The idea was a good one: Competency-based learning. It’s basically learning how to think instead of learning only facts. With that came a centralized baccalaureate, similar to the SAT’s in the U.S. That’s not a bad idea, because people want (and sometimes need) to be compared more or less objectively. (I’ll go into that in a later blog post.) That sounds excellent!
So why am I ranting? Well, obviously something didn’t go as planned. Do you want to venture a guess as to what went wrong? Yep, that’s right! Politicians (centre left party) made the wrong call, even though the answer should have been obvious. The whole scheme was set in motion in 2004, but back in 2008, when I was still at the other Uni, my Geography Professor always had one day where she would go to schools all around the country and teach teachers about… competency-based learning. Basically, the teachers didn’t even know what or how they were supposed to be teaching! That’s a shocker, to say the least. How can you expect a school child, even an 18-year-old, to pass a standardized test when they’ve been taught something completely different during their years at school?
I’ll offer a possible solution for this example, and then move back to the U.S. Being the centre left party, the SPÖ (Social Democratic Party of Austria) is in favour of giving the same education to all children, if possible for free. However, their political goals, admirable as they might be, conflicted with reality and with science. (One of their aims was a comprehensive school, which is no better than elite schools. That’s what people though, for various reasons, but it’s not true.) Anyway…
Now let’s get back to the U.S. There are similar problems in education, with not enough money being spent on Schools and so on. There are many avenues I could explore, but I’ll take the most obvious one: Why do Republicans push educational laws that are demonstrably stupid and impeding the education of the next generation?
We already know that women mostly voted for Obama (55% to 45%), that young people mostly voted for Obama (60% to 36%), that higher-income people tend to vote for Romney and so on. We also know that of the top 10 states in education (percentage with a degree), 10/10 voted for Obama. Of the ten worst educated states, nine voted for Romney. Now I dare you to tell me that’s a coincidence.
Top 10 best vs Top 10 worst educated states, and how they voted
This goes back to what PZ said in his talk: Republicans tend to favour bad education policies because they would be voted out of office if not for the uneducated.
Avid readers might now howl in protest and say something like: “That’s a generalization! I’m educated/uneducated and I voted for Romney/Obama!”
Yes, of course. I have to make some generalizations, otherwise this post isn’t going anywhere. To analyse this phenomenon in depth and to do it proper justice, I’d have to write at least a book about it. I’m still confident that the overall message would remain the same. The next few paragraphs contain generalizations so sweeping that even I cringe, but like I said… text length and time and all…
So the (very short) answer to the questions I posed is this: Extremist (both left and right wing) parties as well as moderately right wing/conservative parties tend to have bad education policies because their ideas are not compatible with reality, their voters would stop voting for them if they were educated.
Now some might think of me as a left-wing hippy, so let me take the wind out of your sails right away: Left wing parties have an equally bad reason to favour bad politics. In my Austrian example, bad policies were implemented because of ideological reasons, even though they were contrary to what science said and even though they could not be implemented in the time span allotted. I think that’s true for most parties: Decisions are made to get re-elected, which includes staying true to your ideology, however wrong it may be.
Even more avid readers than the above might now raise their hands and say: “But that doesn’t answer your question at all. Why don’t they simply drop their idiotic policies in exchange for some good ones? Why don’t people change their votes after a party has done them a disservice?”
And this, dear reader, is where my (partially rational) mind can’t quite follow any more. Why don’t they? It should be so simple. Is it possible that it’s got something to do with what I alluded in the topic “How to debate/argue – tips and tricks” as well as what is stated outright in the “Psychology of Belief” series, namely that people are so set in their ways that we can’t change them? At least, we can’t change them without a lot of effort involved.
There’s a positive and a negative message to all this.
The negative: If we don’t turn this around, our grandchildren might end up in a world run down by the likes of our current-day Republicans.
The positive: Change is on the way. The number of Skeptics (people who need evidence to be swayed, who possibly even think scientifically), not pseudo-skeptics like the Euro-Skeptic movement, is growing. Maybe if the next few Presidents all over the world could be Skeptics… Ah, I can dream, can’t I?
So what’s the conclusion to this post? Be skeptical, in all areas of life. Be it politics, science, medicine, the supernatural… Skepticism is a good thing and there’s too little of it in the world today. I’ll end with a quote and something to think about:
“Trying to figure out how something works on that deep level, the first ninety-nine explanations you come up with are wrong. The hundredth is right. So you have to learn how to admit you’re wrong, over and over and over again. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s so hard that most people can’t do science. Always questioning yourself, always taking another look at things you’ve always taken for granted, […] and every time you change your mind, you change yourself.” –Sauce
My guess is, that’s why politicians don’t change their views: Because they’d have to admit that they’re wrong. And that’s one thing they can’t admit, under pain of expulsion. If a politician ever admits (s)he’s wrong, they’ll soon be kicked from the party. So the next time you vote, look out for two things:
1) If a politician says that they know the answer, vote for the other party.
2) If a politician can admit they’re wrong, vote for that one.
For my debut here at the League of Reason blogs, I thought I would make a few posts outlining some thoughts and ideas about critical thinking that I have picked up on my travels. I hope this will generate some interesting discussion. Thoughts, comments, criticisms and suggestions are very welcome in the discussion thread. In this first post I shall discuss values and the assumptions that we all make based upon them.
Every individual you encounter holds a unique set of personal values. In other words, concepts and principles that are uniquely important to them. I shall provide a by-no-means-coprehensive list of a few things that I personally value below to give an example:
Truth
Kindness and compassion
Liberty
Knowledge
Creativity
I am of course, liable to agree with someone who shares these values on many issues, however if I were to encounter an individual who values concepts and principles that are at odds with my own, we are likely to disagree fervently on many topics.
The reason that this is important is because our values often remain unstated. For example I may argue in favour of the legalisation of cannabis, due to the value that I place on liberty—and thus all of my arguments will be derived from this stand point, however I may never actually state this value outright during a discussion. Thus all my arguments assume that liberty is valuable without actually explaining why.
If we use a typical theistic argument, such as; “I believe in God because I have experienced him working with me in my life, and have spoken to him through prayer.” What values might you think this person has? How do they differ from your own values?
This kind of argument is made from the standpoint of someone who values faith, personal experience, and intuition.
Rather than refuting this argument by saying something like “personal experience is unreliable, and prayer studies have shown that it has no effect,” it might be more worthwhile to question the values this person holds rather than the arguments that are built upon them. Ask them why they value personal experience over empiricism, explain how your values differ from their own and why you think empiricism is more valuable than personal experience. Even if you do not convince them to change their mind, you will at least gain a mutual understanding of each others viewpoint and likely have a more fruitful discussion.
I think it is very important in critical thinking to gain an understanding of values, and to be able to derive these from looking at the value assumptions that people make in their arguments. It is also important to have good arguments as to why you value the concepts and principles that you do, it will make your overall arguments far more solid.
Perhaps you may have missed it but earlier this month saw the publication of a new history on the Second World War by Norman Stone. As of yet i haven’t read the work so i cannot offer my opinion of it fully, but i am afraid i am the mood to prejudge the book in that i do not expect great things from it due to it’s length. Click on the Amazon link and you will see that it is a “Short history”, and what it means by that is the entire work is only approximately 270 pages long.
My prejudgment is based on a little bit of experience. Last year saw the release of another work, this time only 200 pages long (or 190 pages plus 6 pages of footnotes and 4 pages of select bibliography), which was a biography of Hitler by a certain A.N Wilson. Something which i have already described in these forums as “ridden with factual error” and “easily amongst the worst biographies of him that I’ve ever had the misfortune to come across, but then i also have the feeling this book was not aimed at a person like me.”
The book, like the current one from Norman Stone, was designed for a general audience, not for anyone who takes History seriously. Granted therefore we ought to judge it by some degree of looser standards compared to say some of the works i have often cited in my posts like the Biography written by Ian Kershaw or the Third Reich trilogy by Richard Evans but even so this was little excuse for the deep flaws of A.N Wilson’s book so brilliantly exposed here.
So i fear for the latest work by Norman Stone. The entire history of World War 2 is such a vast subject that in my opinion it simply cannot be covered within the space of 300 pages without omitting many of the details needed to make it a proper history of the Second World War.
This is the reason why i do not think i will be using it as a citation anytime soon. I have other works in my bookshelf such as Martin Gilbert’s “Second World War” which on page count alone is almost Three times as long as Stone’s book but my edition is also written on larger than average pages also.
(Image: A Size comparison. My copy of Martin Gilbert’s “Second World War” compared to my copy of Ian Kershaw’s “Nemesis” (pt2 of his biography of Hitler. “Hubris” or pt1 is virtually the same size) and also my copy of A.N Wilson’s “short biography of Hitler”)
I guess the final clincher in me deciding to use Stone’s work as a citation is me reading it, and i would like to hope i am wrong in my prejudgements here. But as i have laid out, i am not optimistic.
For those who haven’t kept up to date with his ramblings, Banana-man has decided to write a new book titled “The Beatles: God and the Bible” (sounds really exciting). Now i know I’m not supposed to judge a book by its cover but in this case i can infer at least that stylistically there could be much carried over from an earlier screed titled “Hitler: God and the Bible” (which I’m not going to review unless someone mysteriously sends me it as a Christmas present) in that Comfort’s using “Historical Character X” only to disseminate his own evangelical nonsense regardless of whether or not said evangelical nonsense has anything to do with said Historical character. With the latter book i mentioned, as you all may remember, he turned it’s intellectual comments into a short 33 min video which i proved the case to be. In that video he basically equated abortion to the Holocaust and added in to the mix that Hitler was not a christian by using quotations of dubious origin. Because that obviously helps his evangelical message. But even if we somehow accept that Hitler was Anti-christian anyways it would still remain the case that the comparison of the Holocaust to Abortion (which was the main point of that film) is silly, especially in the context of what the Nazis actually did with regards to the subject as i pointed out.
I mention all of this because Ray Comfort’s made a brand new movie, based upon his latest evangelical work which i guess in the spirit of the last one, i have to review right?
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