Science, quacks and reputation
I’ve been giving some thought lately to the concepts of quackery and legitimacy, of reputation and credibility. What is it that constitutes acceptance by the scientific community, and what is it that causes some people to be considered charlatans?
Take, for example, the concept I’ve been discussing recently, that belief determines biology. There is no shortage of disdainful pages decrying this type of nonsense as New Age mysticism.
That belief determines biology may or may not be true. That it is New Age mysticism may or may not be true. What sparks my curiosity, though, is the basis on which these determinations are made, and the messianic conviction with which they are delivered.
For example, there’s nothing New Age-y about the idea that our emotions produce physical consequences. We need look no further than adrenaline to prove a scientifically accepted and tangible mind-body connection.
And quantum physics has certainly shown to the satisfaction of the scientific community that matter is energy, and energy matter—this isn’t new.
Being only the merest layperson in this discussion, I am not trying to make a scientific argument one way or the other. What I am trying to understand, and what I welcome enlightenment on, is what makes one person a revolutionary scientist and another person a quack. I’m trying to understand the process by which some radical ideas are accepted as ‘true’ and propagate memishly throughout laboratories across the globe while others languish in tea rooms and underfunded, second-rate schools.
I’m quite confident that Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point arguments and Duncan Watts’ equally convincing counterarguments could offer us some lessons here, lessons about what makes an idea go viral and how much of a theory’s success depends on its timing.
I can only say that I would hope that those in our midst charged with exploring the mysteries of the universe would be the ones with the most open minds, just as I would hope that our politicians would be the ones with the greatest capacity to empathize with people from all walks of life—even (gasp!) those from the other party.
I invite your speculations if you know nothing of the topic, and your well-informed wisdom if you happen to be enmeshed in it. Help me understand the forces at work here, so that we can all become more aware.
February 8th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Provocative column, Kaila. Being as I am enmeshed in the “alternative healing” approach, I have often wondered. From my observations, “quack” is a designation often given to people who sell stuff supposed to affect your health, especially if the stuff is not mainsteam - i.e. snake oil. Making sweeping statements about how to manage your health, without attribution, and promoting ideas that don’t connect with what the majority believes, or “knows” to be true, also qualifies. If you just deal in off-the-wall ideas, the “quack” appellation is slower to stick, especially if you’re not trying to sell something. From what I’ve seen, if you just drop an off-the-wall (disconnected) idea into the conversation, you get ignored. If you attack the status quo without a clear step-by-step rationale, you get attacked back, and quick. The best way to get new ideas into the mainstream is to build them on existing knowledge, step by step, so people can follow your thinking and when you get to the point, they go “ah! I see.”
Take a look at that seminal work by Thomas Kuhn, “The Structure of scientific revolutions”, where he discusses what happens when new ideas are injected into “normal science.” This is the classic that gave us the notion of “paradigm shift.”
February 12th, 2008 at 1:42 am
Thanks for the comment! I’ll definitely take a look at the book. I just read a piece about writing effective headlines that advocated combining “knew and new”: something people can connect with that’s already in their frame of reference coupled with something totally different. Seems the same holds true in science