Pathological science & pseudoscience
Pathological science: The pathology at work is more akin to what the medical community would call malpractice. Another way to describe it would simply be “bad science” (which was the title of my 1993 book on cold fusion). “These are cases,” as Langmuir put it, “where there is no dishonesty involved but where people are tricked into false results by a lack of understanding about what human beings can do to themselves in the way of being led astray by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions.” [Taubes, 191103]
Pseudoscience: Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method.[1][Note 1] Pseudoscience is often characterized by contradictory, exaggerated or unfalsifiable claims; reliance on confirmation bias rather than rigorous attempts at refutation; lack of openness to evaluation by other experts; absence of systematic practices when developing hypotheses; and continued adherence long after the pseudoscientific hypotheses have been experimentally discredited.[2] [wiki]
Let’s start with what sets pathological science apart from normal science. It is not whether some experimental result or conclusion happens to be wrong. Being wrong is a natural state of scientific research. If a researcher publishes a paper, makes a claim, and none of his peers take it seriously, if it remains on the fringes of research, that’s also a natural occurrence even in a healthy scientific endeavor. Ideas come and go. They have to earn credibility — as do the researchers who promote them — and other researchers have to see the ideas as sufficiently important and likely to be right that they are worth the time and effort to study. At that point, ideally, experimental results are either refuted or they’re not, and the research community embraces them or moves on.
The pursuit becomes pathological only when these bogus phenomena are accepted as more likely to be real than not, when they become serious subjects of scientific inquiry. In the case of Langmuir’s examples, hundreds of papers had been published on each, and that was in an era when hundreds of papers was a significant number. With this experimental support, these non-existent phenomena survived as subjects of research and discussion for 10 to 20 years before fading away. “The ratio of supporters to critics rises up to somewhere near 50%,” Langmuir noted, “and then falls gradually to oblivion.”
Another critical thing to understand about pathological science, as Langmuir described it, is that it is not the result of scientific misconduct — i.e., fraud. If someone commits fraud and uses manipulated data to make a claim for a meaningful new discovery, other researchers are going to try and replicate it and fail. The fraud will be exposed. That’s the end of the story. When scientists expose fraud, they’re doing their job as scientists. In Langmuir’s examples, the researchers promoting pathological science hadn’t faked or manipulated evidence in a way that would get them, if caught, expelled from the field or in danger of losing funding. They weren’t trying to deceive their peers, which is the essence of fraud; instead, they were deceiving themselves. The deception was internal, not external. [Taubes, 191103]
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The pathology at work is more akin to what the medical community would call malpractice. Another way to describe it would simply be “bad science” (which was the title of my 1993 book on cold fusion). “These are cases,” as Langmuir put it, “where there is no dishonesty involved but where people are tricked into false results by a lack of understanding about what human beings can do to themselves in the way of being led astray by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions.” [Taubes, 191103]
[. . .]
This is what Langmuir called “pathological science,” which he defined simply as the “science of things that aren’t so.” His lecture discussed a series of examples, already fading from institutional memory back then — N rays, the Davis Barnes effect, the Allison effect — and the surprisingly consistent manner in which pathological science plays out. Cold fusion was just the latest thing that wasn’t so. It was by no means the first and certainly not the last. [Taubes, 191103]
[. . .]
The concept of pathological science may be among the most important, most misunderstood, and least discussed in all of science. It may describe an exceedingly common state of affairs, and yet, to discuss that possibility is often to be perceived as challenging the primacy of science and so to seem anti-science. As such, the only researchers who tend to bring it up are from disciplines such as experimental physics, which is relatively immune to the pathology (for reasons we’ll discuss). Other researchers will then typically respond with a “what the hell do they know about our discipline?” kind of intellectual shrug.
The implication is that scientists are not supposed to criticize the scientific endeavor, let alone the scientific endeavors of others, and yet the immune system of science is built on just that kind of criticism: institutionalized skepticism, as it’s often known. The situation is problematic. To understand what’s likely happening in the kinds of health-related research disciplines discussed on the CrossFit website, though, it may be necessary to have a familiarity with pathological science — what it looks like and, well, smells like. [Taubes, 191103]
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The relevant question today and the reason for this post (and arguably for the direction of my career as a science journalist since the mid-1980s) is how common is this kind of pathological science? The subtext of many of the posts on CrossFit.com is that pathological science may be more the norm than the exception, specifically in the disciplines of science that are relevant to our health. Is it? [Taubes, 191103]