Book Review: Voodoo Science 505
| Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud | |
| author | Robert Park |
| pages | 230 |
| publisher | Oxford University Press |
| rating | 4/5 |
| reviewer | chrisd |
| ISBN | 0195147103 |
| summary | Robert Park exposes how bad science propogates. |
The short review of Voodoo Science is that this is not a book that would make a good birthday gift for Alex Chiu or for that matter Deepak Chopra.
Voodoo Science is a happy little bon-bon of a book for the scientifically inclined. Robert Park is the head of the Washington office of the American Physical Society, and has worked inside the beltway helping the U.S. government and others understand the basics of science so they can make appropriate policy decisions. It is depressingly clear how badly they need it.
While there is a certain level of joy to be found in reading about Mr. Park's exploits debunking cranks and frauds, there is a sad realization that prominent legislators have no clue as to the physical laws that are the underpinnings of science. No, I wasn't surprised, but it was depressing nonetheless to see Trent Lott's name on a resolution designed to push through a patent on a "free energy" device, or Tom Harkin using his power to force the NIH to embrace alternative medicine as anything other than a placebo.
While fun, this isn't a perfect book. It is organized a little strangely, with subheadings throwing off the flow of reading, and at a little over 200 pages it seems too short.Park's mission with this book was not to dissect the great scientific frauds of all time, but I thought he could have spent more time on the issues he did bring up and less on trying to understand the Alex Chius of the world. Mr. Park is probably just trying to be polite, but in my reading of Voodoo Science he comes off as being too soft on the very targets of the book.
The case of cold fusion is a perfect example. His recounting of the famous events was right on, but it just fell flat when it came to to point the finger at Pons, Fleischman and the University of Utah for their complicity in fraud before the Utah state legislature. It is akin to writing a book about Enron and saying about Ken Lay: "It is likely he knew what he was doing was possibly improper."
I'd recommend Voodoo Science as a good gift to a younger reader, as it describes foundations of science in an accessible way. As you've probably gathered, an appropriate name for this book might be "The Laws of Thermodynamics and those that thought it didn't apply to them." As such, the book serves as a decent introduction to critical thinking about the physical world around us.
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Not all alternative medicine is a fraud (Score:1, Informative)
See also... (Score:4, Informative)
--Jim
The Scrooge of science (Score:3, Informative)
Weekly 'What's New' (Score:4, Informative)
Good book (Score:5, Informative)
Park's book should be read together with another one: Trust Us, We're Experts! (Amazon [amazon.com]) by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton. While there is a lot of "junk science" out there, there is at least as much corporate sponsorship behind efforts to discredit real scientific work as such. See also this story [earthisland.org] about PR efforts to discredit global warming, and my related K5 comment [kuro5hin.org].
Mars And Venus Examined... (Score:2, Informative)
A while back I did a litter searching to find out a little more about the authors of the Mars and Venus books. Here's [compuserve.com] a grain of salt to take with them.
A gravity "shield" isn't that far fetched (Score:2, Informative)
and for the slightly older reader I recommend... (Score:2, Informative)
Stephen Jay Gould, almost everything he's ever written but particularly The Mismeasure of Man [wwnorton.com].
Then there's the classic, much older but still frequently cited Charles Mackay's _Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds_ online.
(entire text available courtesy of Gutenberg)
part 1 [upenn.edu]
part 2 [upenn.edu]
part 3 [upenn.edu]
Not so fast.... (Score:2, Informative)
This is far from being consigned to the scam basket (although it may end up there). The easiest way to demonstrate this is to note that NASA has invested in research [space.com] to try to replicate Podkletnov's [amasci.com] results.
The interesting thing about gravity is that it isn't well understood by modern physics. We know how it behaves (we think) but we don't know what causes it really. This makes it equally ripe for psuedo-science as for breakthrough science. In any case, an April Fool's day scam it isn't.
There are a bunch of other links here [amasci.com] and a good overview here [rognerud.com].
Re:Placebo? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, when a drug or treatment is tested, its effectiveness is generally compared with that of a placebo. Unless the drug is significantly more effective than a placebo, it isn't considered a good treatment.
(Warning: IANAMR (medical researcher).)
So, for instance, let's say you invent a new vitamin treatment which you claim can prevent people from getting colds. In order to test it, you'd get a large number of people willing to try it out. Half of them you'd have take the new drug and half the placebo -- without, of course, telling them which is which. (In fact, in a double blind experiment, even the nurse handing out the pills doesn't know, so that s/he can't accidentally let on to the patients.)
After some period of time, you see how many of the treated patients have had colds, and how many of the placebo patients have -- and compare both numbers with the average for the population, or a control group. Now it may very well be that the placebo patients have fewer colds than the control (that's the placebo effect) -- but if your treatment is effective, the treated patients will have even fewer, because both the placebo effect and the treatment's actual effectiveness are in their favor.
(Incidentally, the last I read of the matter, placebo effects work a lot better on colds and other stress-related ailments than they do on cancer or AIDS.)
Re:Previous Performance... (Score:1, Informative)
Junkscience ... (Score:3, Informative)
double blind trials (Score:3, Informative)
Furthermore, your reference to Avogadro's number is ignorant. We actually don't understand dilution very well, but we do know that the simplistic model you assume (one in which you simply divide the moles of active agent by moles of water) does not describe the results of multiple dilutions very well at all. In actual fact, molecules often "clump" together, with more or less unknown effects on their agency inside human beings.
The tragedy, and needless danger, is created by know-it-all types who dismiss anything they don't understand rather than acting like grown-up scientists and doing research.
Oh yeh, and
As one doctor said regarding the recent governmental report on "alternative" medicines (to paraphrase), "There are only two kinds of medicine -- that which works and that which doesn't. If something that's considered to be alternative is shown to work then it's adopted. If not, it is not."
If you believe this, why all that piss, wind and vinegar about homeopathy? In the treatment of allergies and osteoarthritis, homeopathic remedies have been widely adopted. Around 32% of French and 42% of English general practitioners regularly refer patients to homeopaths. Because, presumably, they care more about making people better than about looking good in front of the Science Police.
Re:Park has been much critized himself, with reaso (Score:2, Informative)
And how come Robert Park doesn't mention the tokamak hot fusion fiasco? Could it be it's too close to home? Could it be it's competing for research funding?
Making fun of scientists on the cutting edge is nothing new, let's take just one example:
"A Severe Strain on the Credulity
As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the highest parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's rocket is a practicable and therefore promising device. It is when one considers the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one begins to doubt ... for after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left.
Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react ... Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."
There are of course countless more examples. Go read some history of science.
Re:double blind trials (Score:3, Informative)
If you reference an article, you should read it. Some quotes from that 1997 study:
"The results of our meta-analysis are not compatible with the hypothesis that the clinical effects of homeopathy are completely due to placebo. However, we found insufficient evidence from these studies that homeopathy is clearly efficacious for any single clinical condition."
"Our study has no major implications for clinical practice because we found little evidence of effectiveness of any single homeopathic approach on any single clinical condition."
Not exactly the homeopathic confirm that you make it appear.
How to get rid of Voodoo Science (Score:2, Informative)
-> Exclude Stories from the Homepage
-> Authors -> [X] chrisd
Re:Junkscience ... (Score:1, Informative)
The name is certainly appropriate, but not for the reasons the site's fans think...
Aerodynamic Misconceptions (Score:3, Informative)
I was trying to not comment on this old canard, but this is the third comment in this thread saying this and I couldn't take it any more.
When exactly is "very recently"? "Best models" according to whom?
It is true that under one simple approximation of fluid mechanics -- the one attributed to Bernoulli that discounts non-linear effects, which makes it easy for high-school students to analyse -- insects' wing-loading is too high to be explained. This doesn't even come close to being "our best models of aerodynamics".
If you didn't learn simple fluid mechanics in high-school, blame it on your pathetic school system. After all it's just plain conservation of energy and momentum. If you feel like doing some research, look up the Navier-Stokes equation -- from the 19th century.
bullshit (Score:3, Informative)
And your selective quoting of "Our study has no major implications for clinical practice because we found little evidence of effectiveness of any single homeopathic approach on any single clinical condition." is positively Orwellian. This was a meta-study of 89 separate studies, most of which analysed the effects of homeopathy in different conditions. Given that, it is quite obvious that it would never find effectiveness of any single homeopathic approach, because that wasn't what it was looking for. You wouldn't find evidence of this kind for penicillin if you took a metastudy of its use in 89 different conditions.