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How could one (and should one) convert someone from pseudoscience?
I've known for a long time that some people who are very close to me are somewhat inclined to believe the pseudoscience world, but it always seemed pretty benign. In their everyday lives they're pretty normal people and don't do any crazy things, so this was a topic I mostly avoided and left it at that. After all - they seemed to find psychological value in it. A sense of control over their own lives, a sense of purpose, etc.
Recently I found out however that at least one of them seriously believes Bruce Lipton, who in essence preaches that happy thoughts cure cancer. Now I'm starting to get worried...
Thus I'm wondering - what can I do about it? This is in essence a religious question. They believe this stuff with just anecdotal proof. How do I disprove it without sounding like "Your religion is wrong, convert to my religion, it's right"? Pseudoscientists are pretty good at weaving a web of lies that sound quite logical and true.
The one thing I've come up with is to somehow introduce them to classical logical fallacies. That at least doesn't directly conflict with their beliefs. But beyond that I have no idea.
And perhaps more important is the question - should I do anything about it? The pseudoscientific world is a rosy one. You're in control of your life and your body, you control random events, and most importantly - if you do everything right, it'll all be OK. Even if I succeed in crushing that illusion, I have nothing to put in its place. I'm worried that revealing just how truly bleak the reality is might devastate them. They seem to be drawing a lot of their happiness from these pseudoscientific beliefs, either directly or indirectly.
And anyway, more likely that I won't succeed but just ruin my (healthy) relationship with them. Maybe it's best just not to interfere at all? Even if they end up hurting themselves, well... it was their choice. Of course, that also means that I'll be standing idly by and allowing bullshit to propagate, which is kinda not a very good thing. However right now they are not very pushy about their beliefs, and only talk about them if the topic comes up naturally, so I guess it's not that bad.
Any thoughts?
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Comments (53)
Ask them the same question I suggest you ask yourself to be less wrong: "what evidence or argument would convince you this specific belief is in error or inconclusive?" If the answer is 'I don't know' then consider finding out. If the answer is 'none' then it's not an evidence or argument based choice so evidence or argument won't change anything. If the answer is 'this evidence / argument' then either the evidence / argument is there or it isn't. If it isn't then the claim is provisionally true, and in no way off limits to further questioning.
Decide if your are talking to your friend or if you are talking to the abstraction of 'pseudoscience' and don't confuse the two.
Possibly asking something like "you're good at finding points that back up your beliefs, but you also need to spend time thinking about points that might contradict your beliefs. How many contradictory points can you think of over the next five minutes?"
One approach may be to see if you can find the scientific research that some of the hype is extrapolated from, and discuss that. In the case of Bruce Lipton, that may mean finding and discussing scientific papers about epigenetics and about the effects of low-level magnetic fields on biological systems. If you read the actual papers, and understand them enough to explain them to someone with less of a scientific background, then that could be a starting point for discussing the topics with your friends.
I'm not sure if that will help. But many things that look like pseudoscience have something real that is related to them. Talking about the real things can help separate them out from the bullshit.
Science journalism in general is pretty terrible. Someone has to go way beyond what is offered by mainstream media to have any kind of clue. It's a lot of work, and a lot to expect the average person to do, especially when so many scientific journals are paywalled.
Instead of attempting to shatter the illusion, one thing to do may be to demonstrate techniques for dealing with things when they are uncertain, and out of one's control. If it is a psychological crutch, then having techniques to replace it, rather than a new vision of the world, may remove the need for the crutch.
Some people are more open to different points of view than others. I would start with the people who are at least somewhat open to considering other ideas. And also be prepared to listen to them and find out what it is that they think is important about their beliefs. You may share more common ground than you think. Or they may have had personal experiences that are extremely different from yours. You can probably learn something.
That seems extremely dangerous. Most of the time, this will just make people better at rationalization, and many things that are usually considered fallacies are actually heuristics.
Everything is dangerous.
If it works, it can be misapplied.
If it doesn't work, it displaces effort from things that do work.
Sure, but inside view/contrarianism/knowledge of most biases seem like things that ideally should be reserved for when you know what you're doing, which the person described in the OP probably doesn't.
LOL. Word inflation strikes again with a force of a million atomic bombs! X-)
Are you really arguing for keeping ideologically incorrect people barefoot and pregnant, lest they harm themselves with any tools they might acquire?
No, but attempting to go from irrational contrarian to rational contrarian (thinking about arguments, for instance by considering fallacies, is contrarian-ish) without passing through majoritarian seems like something that could really easily backfire.
That's meaningless hand-waving. Do you have evidence?
By the way, if it's extremely dangerous, maybe we should shut down LW -- unenlightened people can get ideas here that "could really easily backfire", couldn't they?
I don't think it's fair to say that it is meaningless. Surely it must convey some, arguably a lot, of meaning. For example, it includes the advice of making people trust authorities more, and a critique of certain traditional rationalist ideas.
In terms of evidence... well, I don't have scientific evidence, but obviously I have anecdotes and some theory behind my belief. I can write the anecdotes if you think you're going to find knowing their details relevant, but for now I'll just skip them, since they're just anecdotes.
The theory behind my claim can roughly be summed up in a few sentences:
Inside view was what got them into this mess to begin with.
This seems to be something to do with tribal politics, which is known for being annoying and hard to deal with. Probably best to not give them ammunition.
People who know a lot about biases don't seem to be any better at agreeing with each other (instead, they seem to argue much more), which indicates that they're not that rational.
Essentially, don't try to teach people 'hard mode' until they can at least survive 'easy mode'.
'Extremely dangerous' could be considered a hyperbola; what I meant is that if you push them down into the hole of having ridiculous ideas and knowing everything about biases, you might not ever be able to get them up again.
I don't think the Sequences are that dangerous, because they spend a lot of time trying to get people to see problems in their own thinking (that's the entire point of the Sequences, isn't it?). The problem is that actually doing that is tricky. Eliezer has had a lot of community input in writing them. so he has an advantage that the OP doesn't have. Also, he didn't just focus on bias, but also on a lot of other (IMO necessary) epistemological stuff. I think they're hard to use for dismissing any opposing argument.
Also my limited experience from LW meetups suggests that people who come there only for the feeling of contrarianism usually avoid reading the Sequences.
Probably for the same reason they also avoid reading a serious textbook on the subjects they have strong opinions about. (I am not saying that the Sequences are a serious textbook, but rather that the dislike towards textbooks also translates to dislike towards the Sequences and probably anything other than sensational online videos).
Thus, ironically despite various accusations against Eliezer and his education, the Sequences can act as a filter against crackpots. (Not a perfect filter, but still.)
You want it to, but that doesn't mean it actually happens :-/
Teaching people to notice fallacies explicitly pushes them into the meta (reflective) mode and promotes getting out of the inside view.
Oh. It's even worse -- I read you as "keep 'em ignorant so they don't hurt themselves" and here you are actually saying "keep 'em ignorant because they are my tribal enemies and I don't want them to get more capable".
That's... a common misunderstanding. Rational people can be expected to agree with each other on facts (because science). Rational people can NOT be expected to agree, nor do they, in fact, agree on values and, accordingly, on goals, and policies, and appropriate trade-offs, etc. etc.
Recall your original statement: "attempting to go from irrational contrarian to rational contrarian ... without passing through majoritarian seems like something that could really easily backfire". What are the alternatives? Do you want to persuade people that the mainstream is right, and once you've done that do you want to turn around and persuade them that the mainstream is wrong? You think this can't backfire?
By Inside View I meant focusing on object-level arguments, which a lot of bias/fallacy teaching supports. The alternative would be meta-level Outside View, where you do things like:
Assume people who claim to be better than the mainstream are wrong.
Pay greater attention to authority than arguments.
Avoid things that sound cultish.
etc.
I'm actually saying that everybody, friend or foe, who engages in tribal politics, should be taught to... not engage in tribal politics. And that this should be done before we teach them the most effective arguments, because otherwise they are going to engage in tribal politics.
And why is tribal politics bad? Cuz it doesn't lead to truth/a better world, but instead to constant disagreement.
Sure. But most of the time, they seem to disagree on facts too.
I think it will backfire less.
In this case I would like to declare myself a big fan of the Inside View and express great distrust of the Outside View.
Heh. Otherwise? You just said they're engaging in tribal politics anyway and I will add that they are highly likely to continue to do so. If you don't want to teach them anything until they stop, you just will not teach them anything, period.
Well, that makes sense for people who know what they are talking about, are good at compensating for their biases and avoid tribal politics. Less so for people who have trouble with rationality.
Remember: I'm not against doing stuff in Inside View, but I think it will be hard to 'fix' completely broken belief systems in that context. You're going to have trouble even agreeing what constitutes a valid argument; having a discussion where people don't just end up more polarized is going to be impossible.
I want to teach them to not get endlessly more radical before I teach anything else. Then I want to teach them to avoid tribalism and stuff like that. When all of that is done, I would begin working on the object-level stuff. Doing it in a different order seems doomed to failure, because it's very hard to get people to change their minds.
So, is this an elites vs dumb masses framework? Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi?
Your approach seems to boil down to "First, they need to sit down, shut up, listen to authority, and stop getting ideas into their head. Only after that we can slowly and gradually start to teach them". I don't think it's a good approach -- either desirable or effective. You don't start to reality-adjust weird people by performing a lobotomy. Not any more, at least.
And that's besides the rather obvious power/control issues.
Hey! Hey. He. Careful there, a propos word inflation. It strikes with a force of no more than one thousand atom bombs.
Sounds as good a reason as any!
I'm not sure how much it counts, but I bet Chief Ramsay would've shut it down long ago. Betting is good, I've learned.
Extremely dangerous stuff, that...
But if betting is good, pre-commitment and co-operation are the best! X-)
Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People has already been linked in this thread here. It seems to be the steelman of tailcalled's position and I suggest you argue against it instead of trying to score cheap points by pointing out how tailcalled uses "wrong" words to express himself.
I am not much concerned about "wrong" words other than that it might generate misunderstanding and confusion, but it does seem to me that I and tailcalled have real (not definitional) differences and disagreements.
I argue with live, present people. If you want to point out the many ways in which I'm wrong, jump in :-) But I am not going to argue with texts -- among other things, they don't answer back.
The discussion so far has all been hypothetical. Does anyone who has been in this situation (on either side) have any case studies to offer? I have none.
While happy thoughts seem exceedingly unlikely to by themselves cure any sort of case of cancer, certainly persistent unhappiness can lead to many physiological changes which are associated with degenerative disease and cancer risk (stress, trouble sleeping, and so on).
As Lumifer pointed out, it's important to consider what the practical consequences are of their beliefs. If the person you're referring to simply believes that engendering a sustainably happy state of mind will decrease their cancer risk, then I doubt there's anything to worry about. But if you would expect them to refuse a proven surgical technique and instead attempt to cure themselves by hanging out with their friends and watching fun movies, then surely it would be a highly useful service to this individual to point them in a better ideological direction.
Don't introduce them to a catalog of logical fallacies. Understanding a few important logical fallacies can help people who possess a propensity to propagate new conceptions through their web of beliefs, figuring out which beliefs should stay and which should go based on their new theory. But most people don't operate in this way. Updating all the different areas of one's belief structure in accordance to a newly acquired abstract tool doesn't come naturally to most individuals. If you coax a friend down the path toward Less-Wrong-style rationality, then there may come a day where reading 37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong would be quite an enlightening experience for them. But that day is probably not today.
I wonder whether your impression that the world of pseudo-science is a rosy one, and rationality is a window into the bleak reality of human life, is the key to the frustration you're communicating here. The only language that your non-rationalist friends will appreciate is the language of concrete results. If you can't employ your ability to think rationally to become noticeably better than them at activities they pursue in a serious way, give them health advice which to them seems to miraculously clear up certain long-standing inconveniences in their life, etc., then you're not giving them any evidence that your way of thinking is better than theirs.
Use your capacity for rational thinking to succeed in concrete endeavors, and then demonstrate to them the results of your competence. One day they may ask to look under the hood--to see the source of your impressive abilities. And then the time will have come to introduce them to the abstract rationality concepts you consider important.
Stress and having trouble sleeping causes cancer?
Both conditions greatly decrease the body's ability to repair and heal. If you believe that the body has any sort of immune response to the proliferation of cancerous cells, then it would follow that stress and sleep deprivation would increase the likelihood of getting cancer.
I don't have an estimate for how much of a factor this is besides noting it as simply one more reason to make sure to avoid chronic stress and sleep deprivation.
It seems likely to me that happy thoughts would in fact reduce the rate of death by cancer, although not by very much.
The whole problem is that this is a belief that seems plausible - but is not evidence based.
There were a few promising studies, but the overall evidence base says that there's no effect.
Remember that a little bit of rationality in gullible hands can have unpleasant consequences. Next thing you know, they'll be the ones accusing you of being unreasonable.
There is a range of possible courses of action open to you. On one end, you can happily live with your friends' strange ideas and not interfere at all, even when they teach the same ideas to other people or to their children. On the other end, you can make new friends whose ideas are closer to yours and let your old friends fade from your life. My personal experience has been a case-by-case mix of both approaches.
In general you have to keep in mind that if you challenge someone's believe but don't convince them that their beliefs are wrong there a good chance that you increase the strength of their beliefs.
This topic is valuable me. Every time when me and my girlfriend getting involved in argument it ends up badly and we continue on holding prior beliefs. She blames me for being too rational (In hollywood sense obv, none of my efforts to convince that the word has different meaning payed off). She is absolutely sure that when you hold a skeptical position, you are getting trapped into it, so entry gate for outside view is closed and you are limiting the spectrum of possibilities. With this I'm okay because I like to think of myself as an open-minded person and I can assume that the universe is not objective. But I'm rapidly getting tired when it comes to secret meanings of events and perfect casuality and total misunderstanding of randomness. In her head there is a strange mash of esoterics, buddhism, astrology somehow combined with evolutionary biology in perfect harmony. I'm not sure whether I should try harder to convert her or give up. Maybe I gave up already, because it seems that open-minded people lack neuroplasticity
There no reason to think that trying harder would produce bigger effects. If your goal is convincing it's very important to pick your battles.
I had a disagreement with my girlfriend about the health effects of the microwave. She thinks that feeding a plant only microwaved water will kill it. That happens to be a quite testable belief and we might run the experiment even if I don't believe that it will produce additional knowledge for me.
You could check whether her beliefs make predictions about the real world and then do credence calibration games with her. You train the important rationalist skill of predicting and she might find out that some of her beliefs don't make true predictions.
Good point. However most of her opinions seem to be unfalsifiable, like how I can tell if Dao technic of Inner Smile doesn't work, maybe I'm smiling to my organs not sincerely enough
The point isn't to try to falsify her opinions but to generally encourage her to make predictions about reality and make predictions about reality as well.
If you look at the Dao technic of Inner Smile, you might start by asking her whether she thinks herself that she can perceive whether or not she's sincerely doing the technique.
Don't get attached to have a debate about truth of individual beliefs but focus on actually making predictions.
Are there any practical consequences of these beliefs? As long as they are not telling cancer patients to skip the therapy and think happy, I don't see any harm. Trying to fix other people's beliefs just because you don't like them seems to be... not a terribly productive thing to do.
Have you looked at a TV screen recently..?
If they really believe that that's the best thing for cancer patients to do, then there's a very real chance that they will do that (or, if the cancer is their own, just skip the therapy themselves). There may be value in trying to improve their thinking in advance, because once they or someone close to them actually has cancer it may be too late. (Because people don't usually make radical changes in their thinking quickly.)
Whether that outweighs the other factors here, I don't know. Especially given how reluctantly people change their minds.
Define "very real". I don't think it's a serious threat -- in such situations a stern talking-to from a doctor is usually more than sufficient. To stick to one's guns in the face of opposition from the mainstream and the authority figures (like doctors) requires considerably more arrogance and intestinal fortitude than most people have. Fanatics, thankfully, are rare.
I'm not sure what country you live in, but from a relative of mine who works in a cancer treatment centre, there are a fairly large number of patients who eschew treatment in favor of herbal remedies for instance. They eventually get treatment when said remedies don't work but the cancer would have gotten worse by then. It's partly false beliefs, wishful thinking or just avoidance of the issue. Do very many people really believe that a herbal treatment is going to cure cancer and the whole medical community is stupid? No, but for many people it gives them enough to pretend that everything is going to be okay and they don't have to worry.
I hope you're right.
Thinking that it's possible for some people to cure cancer via thought does in no way imply that all people who try succeed in that way. The traditional response of a person with a cancer diagnosis is to all things that promise help. Additional beliefs are needed to advice people against mainstream interventions.
Telling the person with cancer to think happy thoughts isn't harmful. It can have positive placebo effects.
Let's try a simpler question: What should you tell someone who's spending money on bogus "natural remedies" that can't possibly work?
My own impression is that much of pseudoscience is framed in such a way that it cannot be disproven (falsifiability). I once had a friend discuss chakra networks with me. At one point he said: "don't you think it's possible for the human body to exchange energy with the outside world?" This is technically true. Philosophy can sometimes make some very ridiculous arguments too, but those cannot be disproven either. I would instead recommend explaining scientific philosophy and why this has proven so successful.
How would you go about explaining that in a way to someone who thinks that Bruce Lipton is a scientist because
he was a professor of anatomy at respected university and to the extend that other scientists disagree with him that's simply a case of scientific controversy?