The problem is that you're biased - confirmation bias, expectation bias, selection bias, optimism bias, observer expectancy effect, the list goes on - and you end up learning all things except the truth.
As long as it does something beneficial who cares after all what the bias is? Placebo may play a role in it but once again, what do we care about here, whether something is beneficial or whether it can be explained why it is beneficial? For some the former and for some the latter, ofc depending on perspective.
You can't easily measure if something is beneficial. Which is precisely why a bunch of plants that people were taking before for different ailments were found to have absolutely no medical value when tried through a scientific method.
And in the age of social media, individual confirmation bias and a megaphone is the best way to promote non-science to hordes of people.
Placebo can provide actual benefit to an individual. Easing suffering, thus reducing stress levels, which in turn help body to function better.
But you are quite right, individuals with strong confirmation bias and a large social media following are harmfull.
Still, that does not mean individuals should not perform harmless experiments. Individuals should experiment. But they should not claim their findings as universal truths.
> Placebo can provide actual benefit to an individual.
It depends what you refer to when you talk about a placebo. What people call the "placebo effect" is in practice "regression to the mean" in most cases, which is the fact that you would get better over time even if you did absolutely nothing. You will notice that placebo 'effect' works best in contexts where the illness has a psychological component (mental illnesses and the like), but absolutely fail to show any effect at all in other contexts like viral infections.
> Individuals should experiment. But they should not claim their findings as universal truths.
I agree, but how can you prevent people from claiming that something worked for them if they are absolutely convinced of it. It's an unsolvable problem.
Do I understand correctly that you oppose people searching holistic remedies to their ills because they might accidentally get better, and a percentage of these might accidentally turn into snake oil salespeople?
> that you oppose people searching holistic remedies to their ills
Nope, I am for individual freedoms as long as it happens in their private sphere.
> a percentage of these might accidentally turn into snake oil salespeople
the problem is that bullshit takes a lot more time to debunk that it takes to spread. So you end up with hoaxes, false claims, rumors, confirmation bias spreading through other people's minds with extreme speed because of how we communicate right now. And my point is that as long as you can't make people understand that "anecdotal evidence" means absolutely nothing, you can't stop this from happening: it means you will end up with bullshit spreading everywhere and good Science being ignored or simply drowned in a torrent of unfounded claims.
I used to be of the opinion that it doesn't affect me directly so I don't care. But as more of us don't care, it becomes more common place, and then our (more gullible) relatives start taking in this information and will not listen to you because everyones knows it works! Whatever "it" is.
So no, I believe that we must actively fight false information. Not "we" in an individual sense, but "we" as a society, and that means regulation.
Maybe there are more reliable ways to achieve the benefit for a greater number of people. Science offers an approach to discovering this, and the "why" - the theory - is what drives science.
Yes it's beneficial if something works, but I want to know why it works too and not just believe in random pseudoscience. Also, determining if something really works is hard.
I want to understand the mechanism. If there's something true there then you may be able to use that directly, you can also avoid untrue things that are harmful (history is full of these harmful 'treatments'). [0]
Without this people just end up wearing energy crystals, while dismissing real medicine for homeopathic nonsense that can lead to death [1][2].
Humanity has used the scientific method to barely rise above the collection of hocus pocus explanations. It's worth the effort not to fall back into that. [3]
Not knowing how it works does not make it pseudoscience. It is enough if you can show through double blind that it works. For quite a few established medications which work we do not known how they work.
Just because you don’t know how something works doesn’t mean it’s pseudoscience. You just might not understand the mechanism.
There’s a greater risk that something you think works actually doesn’t though if you don’t test it.
There’s also a greater risk that claims people make about things in this untested space are more likely to be false.
Part of the reason it’s important to test and understand the mechanism is that people are good at deluding themselves with all sorts of biases and made up false explanations.
There's a big difference between wearing crystals because you believe it improves your life, and doing a physical exercise that changes your mental state.
If one can't confirm changes in their own mental state, especially profound changes, I'd suggest that's a far bigger and more pressing problem than anything you've listed.
> I'm sure people believe they confirm 'profound changes in their own mental state' from energy crystals too.
Not sure about you, but if someone tells me "I've been exercising lately and mentally I feel much better" I don't say "but does homeopathy really work" and wink at them.
There's a lot of evidence that exercising is healthy and helps people improve their mental state so that analogy doesn't work.
The point is if someone says they're getting a benefit from something that doesn't have a ton of evidence around it - my first instinct would be to be skeptical but curious.
When someone takes that skepticism and implies that the "far bigger and more pressing problem" is that I can't determine the obvious benefits it makes me more skeptical, not less.
How skeptical I am comes from how far it is from my priors. Breathing exercises being helpful seems likely, choosing energetic or restful based on which nostril you're breathing out of sounds like bullshit so I'm more skeptical by default.
If someone tells me they're breathing out of their right nostril to become more energized - I'd probably tell them that sounds made up.
It's weird though, because exercising physically can increase stress in the short term and can greatly elevate heart rate. Exercising is really unpleasant to me and I would really rather not do so.
The only reason I choose to exercise anyway is because of the people online and the scientific evidence saying that exercise is better for you in the long term. I certainly don't feel like it in the moment, and in fact sometimes worry if my heart is going to give out as I exercise. But if I am going to believe that exercise is beneficial overall, but that you can't experience the benefits it brings until it's too late to change things, I don't really know what else to do except listen to them and keep exercising, while getting over the unpleasantness and complete draining of energy and motivation to do things I'd rather do that it causes.
Maybe that's what some things in life come down to. It either comes down to eating diets like ones with plants prioritized and getting over the fact that they don't taste as pleasant as foods with refined sugars, or accepting the impact on your health by choosing the latter. Maybe some people just make their own peace with the taste of such foods, somehow.
I don't have a tactful way to say this - but perhaps you are exercising too hard?
It might be wiser to take a progressive approach - i.e. start with a five minute walk, the next day/week/month increase it to a ten minute walk or increase the pace.
> There's a lot of evidence that exercising is healthy and helps people improve their mental state so that analogy doesn't work.
There's actually a lot of research out there. Did you try to search for any? It's not scepticism to compare something you cannot believe because you haven't bothered to investigate, with well known falsities such as crystal healing.
Not only does the research support the existence of a nasal cycle where one nostril is dominant at different times, it also supports a different pathway to the brain and a different neurological response. On top of that, psychological research shows links between breathing patterns and emotional response, in both directions, and then there's the wealth of meditative research. This stuff isn't controversial.
From [Taste and Smell]:
> The FN model may also explain the observation by Sobel et al. [36] that, when performing an odor threshold test, humans sniff longer when using the nostril with the lower flow rate. (Subjects usually have different flow rates in their two nostrils because of cyclic changes in the size of their nasal cavities.)
From [Nature]:
> The flow of air is greater into one nostril than into the other because there is a slight turbinate swelling in one. The nostril that takes in more air switches from the left to the right one and back again every few hours
From [Stanford News]:
> Michael Leon, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at the University of California at Irvine said… [the] data suggest, that the olfactory system maximizes the ability of its distributed receptor neurons to encode differentially absorbing odors.
From [Measuring and Characterizing the Human Nasal Cycle]:
> Nasal airflow is greater in one nostril than in the other because of transient asymmetric nasal passage obstruction by erectile tissue. The extent of obstruction alternates across nostrils with periodicity referred to as the nasal cycle. The nasal cycle is related to autonomic arousal and is indicative of asymmetry in brain function. Moreover, alterations in nasal cycle periodicity have been linked to various diseases.
From [Hemispheric lateralization in the processing of odor pleasantness versus odor names]:
> These findings are consistent with previously demonstrated neural laterality in the processing of olfaction, emotion and language, and suggest that a local and functional convergence may exist between olfaction and emotional processing.
From [Respiratory feedback in the generation of emotion]:
> This article reports two studies investigating the relationship between emotional feelings and respiration. In the first study, participants were asked to produce an emotion of either joy, anger, fear or sadness and to describe the breathing pattern that fit best with the generated emotion. Results revealed that breathing patterns reported during voluntary production of emotion were (a) comparable to those objectively recorded in psychophysiological experiments on emotion arousal, (b) consistently similar across individuals, and (c) clearly differentiated among joy, anger, fear, and sadness. A second study used breathing instructions based on Study 1’s results to investigate the impact of the manipulation of respiration on emotional feeling state. A cover story was used so that participants could not guess the actual purpose of the study. This manipulation produced significant emotional feeling states that were differentiated according to the type of breathing pattern. The implications of these findings for emotion theories based on peripheral feedback and for emotion regulation are discussed.
I could go on.
As to meditative practices, there's been extensive research for nigh on 50 years now, and for the past 20 (at least, as far as I'm aware) they've been using fMRI scanners to provide objective results[Oser] on the link between meditation as a practice and mental state.
Thanks for the links, a lot of interesting stuff there.
I think this is actually a good example of the point I'm trying to make.
There appears to be an underlying mechanism here that's worth understanding that may have real effects. None of this suggests that left nostril 'relaxation' and right nostril 'energy' is a real thing. The closest may be that last link which I don't have access to.
The reason understanding the underlying mechanism is important is because it allows you to differentiate what could be real (potentially switching airflow in nostrils because "the olfactory system maximizes the ability of its distributed receptor neurons to encode differentially absorbing odors.") and what is pseudoscience "you could choose to be either energetic or restful by picking one nostril to breathe out of for awhile.".
The latter sounds suspicious to me and these links don't seem to really support it. I'm extra suspicious when there's a strong interest in motivated reasoning (yoga-affiliated people being bought into it) to find it correct. It doesn't mean it isn't true, but it's less likely to be so.
The cycle can still be a real thing, there may still be real effects, and the left/right relax/energy thing can still be nonsense. That's why understanding what's going on is useful.
Humanity has historically taken a trial and error approach to most things - medicine, engineering, cooking, etc. Advances in technology are usually the result of tinkering as opposed to directed research or science. The science usually comes later (if and when someone funds it) to explain why it works.
It's ugly, but it's how we usually lumber along. And yes, many mistakes and pseudoscience take place along the way.
I was recently reading how jet engines were developed even though no one really knew exactly how they worked (there were theories, of course).
This is the closest thing I could find on the topic online:
I think we agree - trying things you think might work is a good place to start, then you can attempt to confirm that empirically.
Predictions have to start somewhere.
What bothers me about the comment I replied to was the hostility to trying to understanding the underlying mechanism. "As long as it does something beneficial who cares after all what the bias is?" is not a good position. That kind of thing leads to people doubling down when it turns out their pet hypothesis is actually shown to be wrong (not saying that's the case here).
It can also lead to people thinking they see benefits where none exist (or where the activity is even harmful), it can lead to people making up explanations (most of human history).
It's good to be willing to try new things, but also to have a healthy skepticism.
I am usually a skeptical person and am aware that there is a lot of pseudoscience floating around. But, I think that is not necessarily a bad thing. People try things and what works is later scrutinized and better understood in a scientific way if you will. What doesn’t work will get itself out of the way eventually. You are free to practice whatever you think is understood(and also be aware that current understanding is bound to change, sometimes it does take 180’ turns). But you risk missing out on things that are not yet understood and yet beneficial. Sure, all people are at risk of wasting their time with a quack theory or practice. Again, I dont think that is a bad thing, more people may become skeptical that way
Thanks - I think that's fair, but it doesn't necessarily get out of the way without casualties.
I'm bothered when something that is still uncertain is put forward as true, I think people are generally over confident where they should be less certain. Even this can be harmful in ways people don't expect [0].
It becomes really harmful though when stuff known to be false is pushed as true (conspiracy theories like not getting cancer treatment). This leads people to not pursue treatment they desperately need. In their case they won't have the opportunity to become more skeptical afterwards.
There's also the risk of political influence pushing certain things as true that aren't and real knowledge can be lost (though I think that's less likely to happen today).
In this specific breathing case, it's benefit being real or not is probably not that big of a deal - but the underlying value of wanting to understand why something is really true or not I think is important.
> Advances in technology are usually the result of tinkering as opposed to directed research or science.
In older times yes, but you can easily demonstrate that scientific progress was WAY faster once we developed actual methods to test things in a reliable way.
It's hard to pin scientific progress to reliable testing. We also had dramatic advances in communication, travel, collaboration, computing power, and access to education, for instance. Not to mention more and bigger wars which always moves things along in certain directions (for the wrong reasons, but nevertheless)
Wrong about what exactly? I'd say I'm mostly a breathing skeptic, but if it makes you feel better, then... it makes you feel better and you aren't wrong for feeling better.
If someone observes measurable benefits after (e.g.) breathing through one nostril for a while, I'd consider it important to know exactly why. Maybe there are important things about the mechanics of respiration that we haven't understood yet. Dismissing such phenomena with "If it feels good, who cares why?" seems counterproductive in the long run.
OTOH, if no one sees measurable benefits, then the various anecdotes from practitioners really are just bias in action, and (IMO) are not worth expending further thought on.
But even if you think you’re right you may be wrong. All current understanding is bound to change when better understanding is achieved. Sometimes things that are scientifically thought to work in a certain way take turns, sometimes going into opposite directions. So even if you think you understand something, it’s healthy to keep a bit of skepticism and a bit of open mind.
We don’t even understand the placebo effect, there is little hope in learning the truth in regards to human biology as it would be too complicated, expensive, and unethical to try.
That's only a problem if you are trying to generalise your discovery and say write a paper or sell a product about it. If it's just "a thing you do" and it makes you feel good, then biases don't really matter as much as the end result.
I suspect you learn less by doing nothing. This kind of advice is probably good for normal people, but the people who need it least seem to be the ones most paralyzed by it.
