The Hexadecimal Number of the Beast

There’s been a fun series of comments in my last G+ update, but the discussion is starting to get more involved than G+ really promotes in comments. That said, I thought I’d take a moment to respond more in detail, and more visibly, here on the front page.

The chain of comments discusses my personal crusade against quackery, and essentially pitches around two ideas. The first is, “if it’s harmless, why be upset about it?”. It seems simple enough, right? If wearing magnet bracelets is worthless but harmless, why not let people freely have their placebo-of-choice? Why stomp all over it? Every time I hear that, I have to admit, I mentally add the words “you meanie!” to the end of the question – to me, for whatever reason, it always feels like they’re there, even if they haven’t been explicitly stated.

The second question seems to be, “but if you’re close-minded, what about the stuff like this that works?” That’s a thornier proposition, and one I’ll address.

Let’s start, though, by talking about the first one: the reason I am so adamantly against pseudoscience and quackery is that, like any other foundational belief, pseudoscience requires that you accept its propositions as truth in order for the products to make sense. Put another way, if you’re buying a magnet bracelet to help with your daily aches and pains, some part of you has to accept the premise that magnets worn on your wrist affect aches and pains. Whether or not you agree with whatever woojie explanation is on the back of the card that the little silicone bracelet came on is wholly immaterial – you’re accepting a fundamental statement about reality that quite bluntly isn’t true.

The rest of your worldview builds on and through this premise. You incorporate it into your life, you use it in decision-making. This little bit of non-fact becomes something, as a human animal, you forge into what would otherwise be a set of useful, acquired knowledge for interacting with existence.

We do this all the time – there’s even a logical fallacy built around the human capacity for misassigning causes: Confirmation Bias. The lengthier version of the fallacy is the fallacy of false cause: ‘cum hoc ergo propter hoc’ – “with this, therefore because of this.” We humans, without external prompting, naturally connect events that occur in chronological order with significance. Intriguingly, it’s a great place to begin trying to understand the universe – it’s even right, some of the time. (Because lightning, thunder!) It is not, however, even correct most of the time.

Magnets may be harmless – if you discount the chineese sweatshop employee abuses for the people making them, the waste of materials that go into their construction, and the loss of dollars that little, useless bit of silicone and magnetite represent. However, pseudoscience is not.

Take, for instance, the current antivaxer movement. For the uninitiated, the story goes something like this:

“My child was diagnosed with autism right after they got their first round of vaccinations! Vaccinations cause autism! OHNOES!”

Fuel was fed to this fire when a doctor by the name of Andrew Wakefield filed a study with the New England Journal of Medicine that seemed to support the idea. Suddenly, parents everywhere were worried about vaccinations, and an entire industry – the homeopaths and alternative medicine providers – leaped at the chance to push their snake oil on the public.

Despite the fact that Dr. Wakefield’s study is a hodgepodge of errors and assumptions, that it’s been thoroughly debunked, that more research has gone into vaccines and autism as a result (good!), that Dr. Wakefield’s motives were uncovered and considered so ethically egregious that he’s been stripped of his medical license… well.. the damage is done.

Hysterical parents, led by Jenny McCarthy, have withdrawn from vaccinations en masse, using arguments like “those diseases don’t exist anymore!” and “whoever heard of someone dying from the measels?” and “shouldn’t we just be safe?” to make sure their kids don’t get vaccinated. Some have gone so far as to mail infected candy to uninfected children so that these childhood diseases can be contracted. We were at a point in this country that children didn’t have to suffer through incredibly dangerous illnesses like measels and mumps and even chicken pox.. and now parents are doing their darndest to infect their own children in the name of ‘safety!’.

As a direct result of this pseudoscience tolerance, 866 people have died since this scare began as a direct result of the antivaxer movement. 866 people have died because of quackery.

Pertussis – which was kept at bay through herd immunity in affected populations – is on the rise. Doctors are seeing their first cases of measles an mumps in decades. What’s next, a resurgence of polio after some unlucky child visits a country where it’s still endemic?

These things – homeopathy, anti-vaxxers, the alternative health movement, and even magnets and high colonics, may not be individually anything more than harmless. Their aggregate effects, however, are deadly.

Knowing the truth – taking the time to understand the issues and, more, to understand that scientific inquiry remains the only tool we humans have for uncovering the reality of the world around us – means being wholly skeptical of any claim until the evidence exists to prove its utility. That magnet bracelet may not look like much, but it’s significant of an entire class of problems that come when we assume ‘open-mindedness’ means ‘give everything the benefit of the doubt’.