Podcast Teaser: Nonsense on Stilts

Okay, okay, this time we are being a bit self-indulgent. Our next podcast will focus on my new book, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk. You can find an e-version here. (Meanwhile, you can check out our latest episode, on the Anthropic Principle.) Still, the topic is interesting, and it will surely generate stimulating discussions on our blog.

The book, broadly speaking, is about what philosopher Karl Popper famously called the demarcation problem: how do we tell the difference among science, non-science and pseudoscience? Popper’s answer was his criterion of falsification, the idea that a hypothesis, in order to count as scientific, has to be falsifiable in principle.

As I explain at the beginning of the book, however, this didn’t quite work, because there are plenty of examples in the history of science where hypotheses had apparently been falsified by the available data, and yet they were retained for the time being because they were sufficiently promising, elegant, pragmatic, or what not (examples include the Copernican theory, which initially didn’t do much better than Ptolemy’s, and of course Newtonian mechanics, which apparently failed to explain the anomalies in the orbit of Uranus, and then definitely failed at a similar task where Mercury was concerned — in the first case the reason was the existence of the then unknown Neptune, in the second case that Mercury is close enough to the sun that relativistic effects become relevant).

A large part of the book then explores what I consider to be the much more complex relationship among science, non-science and pseudoscience, ranging from solid science like fundamental physics and evolutionary biology to definite pseudosciences of astrology and creationism. In the middle are the more interesting borderline areas that include the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, evolutionary psychology, and even superstring theory, to name but a few.

Nonsense on Stilts also investigates some of the major players that mediate public understanding of science: experts, think tanks, and of course the media broadly construed. Think tanks, for instance, are rather curious organizations, originally conceived as “universities without students,” independent research groups having the goal of advising the government on complex policy issues. But many (though not all) of them are now clearly ideological outlets that don’t do research as much as start out with pre-determined positions that are then backed up by ad hoc sifting through the available evidence.

I also get into the whole issue of expertise, which plays such an important role especially in media presentations of issues such as evolution, climate change, HIV-AIDS, or the alleged connection between vaccines and autism. What makes someone an expert, exactly, and how is the non-technical public supposed to arrive at an informed opinion when two people with PhD’s seem to be seeing the same problem from entirely antithetical and mutually incompatible points of view?

More to the point: why do we care? Because, I argue in Nonsense on Stilts, nonsense hurts and kills. It hurts the environment, if we keep denying climate change, and it kills people who don’t take anti-HIV drugs because they believe conspiracy theories that blame the American government and Big Pharma for the epidemics. Or at the very least, as Stephen Jay Gould once put it: “Skepticism or debunking often receives the bad rap reserved for activities — like garbage disposal — that absolutely must be done for a safe and sane life, but seem either unglamorous or unworthy of overt celebration.” I’d say, let’s celebrate the disposal of pseudo-intellectual garbage!