 All right, what's up welcome to another episode of lunchtime with Luke this episode I think it might be a little longer, but I'm talking about some sort of important Maybe a little big-brained, but it's a it's a I guess an editorial take you're not gonna hear that much But I think it's important to get out there, and that is nowadays you hear a lot of people talking about pseudo science you hear a lot of people talking about scientific consensus and Stuff like this now. I'm gonna go ahead and tell you what I think about the idea of pseudo science I don't like it. Let me let me explain why a while back. Let's say back back before Knowledge was institutionalized in the way that it is now nowadays Universities are literally billions and billions and billions of dollars of industry really and they people in an academic field compete for money they compete for Government grants and stuff like that They compete for resources and there's a lot of bureaucratic stuff involved and that defines a lot of how You know academics either deal with other ideas or deal with you know That that's how the theory internal kind of things kind of operate a lot of things a lot of decisions Unfortunately are made for money Now one hallmark of this, you know when you look at the early 20th century And academia was becoming sort of institutionalized in the same way if you're in a field where there are a bunch of competing ideas It's important for you your Particular idea or your particular methodology to win out above all others Now it is my firm belief now the concept or the term pseudo science has floated around for a couple centuries now Originally referred to just alchemy, but of course their big brain takes to talk about alchemy is a misunderstood subject But that's for some another video but in the past hundred years or so the term pseudo science is used all the time and It's my theory that this became a concept that is pseudo science doesn't mean bad science. It doesn't mean science that Accidentally arrives at the wrong conclusion pseudo science the idea behind it is that there are some methods at looking at problems Or there are some theoretical frameworks that Aren't even true or false. They are not even they don't even reach Whatever met, you know, maybe your metric is you know a kind of paparian falsifiability That's usually the thing that people talk about nowadays But however you talk about it pseudo science is supposed to be some method of inquiry that isn't even true or false It's not even worthy of consideration now you can say whatever you want about this But it's my theory maybe my conspiracy theory that pseudo science is Which wasn't a big idea a hundred or so years ago became a big deal after academia become became highly institutionalized it became a big business and you know Thousands of people are academics and they're competing for a whole bunch of money and it's important for them to win out now Why do why do I say this I say this because Calling if you're competing against some other framework theoretical framework it's one thing to say that their framework is wrong or That's just another way of looking at things But it's more biding to say something like their theoretical framework is just not even science. It's pseudoscience It's not even worthy of consideration Now first off depending on how you define the theoretical framework every theoretical framework is pseudoscience like every You know to I mentioned popper a second ago So popper Karl popper originally popularized the idea of pseudoscience as we now know and he proposed his idea of course if you don't know is You know pseudoscience is something that is not falsifiable. Okay, you can't disprove a pseudoscience So his original examples were things like Marxism. So in if you're a Marxist if you're a good Marxist You can basically explain anything that happens in the world. That sounds like a good thing But for popper the idea is you could explain You know, let's say the interest rates increase You can have a reason for why that happens or let's say the interest rates Decrease you can have a reason for that as well There's no there's no set of facts in the world that can disprove your worldview And he argues that of Marxism and a couple other things that aren't super important now. I'll say of course I am not a Marxist. I'm very un-Marxist. I'm very anti-Marxist But when I'm addressing a Marxist, I don't feel the need to say that their framework is not It's just technically not even worthy of consideration And in fact if that is the standard you hold for you know, something like Marxism really any theoretical framework works exactly like this So in linguistics for example, we have you know, since the 50s 60s 70s, however You want to calculate it? We've had this thing generative grammar Chomsky and grammar if you want to call it that but because it's sort of stems from Noam Chomsky But you know generative grammar is as a theoretical framework is really not falsifiable Okay, you know, I don't like generative grammar. I think anyone who knows me knows that but I'm not saying that is a bad thing I'm saying if you're a good generative grammar and you can look at any data set and you can make it Compatible with your theory really your theory in the same way that Marxism is is a theoretical language for talking about the world And that's not even unvaluable sometimes when I'm talking to a linguist about a particular Linguistic phenomenon even though I don't believe in generative grammar I find it helpful sometimes to use their terms because they might have a way of describing a phenomenon or not But the method of assessing whether this framework is legitimate or not Shouldn't be whether there's some data point that can falsify it now some bit I think Chomsky has said oh generative grammar could be falsified if you know There were counting in languages, which is or something like that or accounting meaning like you know number or like Numbers in grammar in the sense of like oh in this position this number position something happens Of course in reality generative grammar could do something like that In fact, there are many linguistic phenomena that are so-called second position phenomena or sometimes third position phenomena That happens all over the place in generative grammar has basically conventionalize a way of dealing with them But I don't necessarily think that falsifiability is a good metric for pseudoscience But anyway, my point wider is that the concept of pseudoscience I think has that particular purpose of you can write off an alternate or alternative way of thinking as Simply being not worthy of consideration not even dealing with it now I know a thing Associated with that is the idea of scientific consensus and that is the idea that It's almost like a wig history view of science that really only a redditor could believe in or only someone who does isn't exposed to I guess how things actually work in academia could possibly believe in maybe I'm saying that arrogantly but um You know it's the idea that you know scientists There's this incremental movement in science and that is we gradually get closer to the truth We have the peer review system and you know it's supposed to be effective and it gradually moves us step by step and if even if we're way off now in the future It's gonna lead us in the right direction and the thing you have to keep in mind is again When you have a theoretical framework which in order to even look at the world you have to have a way of interpreting data As long as you have one of those you're going to have it you know that you could be a generative grammarian or you could be a Marxist or something like this and Any kind of data points you can integrate into your worldview and that's not necessarily going to change it That's just going to you know, maybe detail you you might Marxism might be a terrible philosophy That might be totally off and might produce drastically terrible Consequences, but that doesn't mean you can't make sense of the world with it You know in in scientific terms now what I'm what I'm trying to say is that in any scientific field Just having more work done or having more incremental science having more papers come out that You know have all these impressive p-values or something due to the way that you know Scientific consensus works you can find yourself on what is effectively I guess a local maximum if you know what I mean That is There might be some better More elegant way of understanding the world that might I guess get at the lower level mechanisms Help us actually understand things deeper But we can still be stuck in a local maximum where we see we feel like we know everything and there's nothing more to do So anyway now additionally in this now one of the problems. I think that pseudoscience Brings as a concept is the idea that the only proper science There is to do is this kind of incremental science that is you can't have anything that is You know pseudoscience, you know, I guess if you talk to someone with a view like this They will say something like oh well if you come into science with ulterior motives, you know, let's say You have you belong to some weird religious cult and they have weird ideas about the world or let's say you have You know some particular Ideology is convenient for you or maybe it just it seems more elegant to you You just like some ideas more than others there's a tendency for people to Say that that's a bad thing now my perspective is pretty much everyone has I mean literally everyone has a perspective Literally everyone has interests literally everyone has biases and for me the difference is not having biases are not having them But it's being honest about the perspective you have Versus pretending you don't have it and pretending your objective or even worse not being aware of the perspective that you have That's even more. That's even more dangerous because there are a lot of people who You know will get entrenched in a field and they'll internalize all the assumptions about that field and Then they'll be totally unable to question it now in reality We're scientific progress if something like that even exists But where scientific innovation comes from is from pseudoscience. It comes from crazy ideas It comes from ideas that are motivated stupidly now I put up a blog post sort of related to this a couple months ago and I use the example of plate tectonics So plate tectonics used to be a pseudoscience. It was mocked as a pseudoscience for decades Especially in the United States now plate tectonics. Where did it come from? Well, it came from the elementary Observation that well. Hey, dude. I'm actually Hey, dude, like South America it like sort of fits into Africa man Like maybe like dude the continents just like float and like that's that's originally how they got to where they were Dude, like what if that's the case now? That's a stupid idea. It's also an idea. That's true I mean, it's now accepted as being basically true and it wasn't accepted as true through incremental science It was just gradually, you know gradually there was a kind of paradigm shift and people acknowledged it But it's a stupid idea that had a stupid motivation, but it also ended up being true another example in linguistics a while back there was a lady You know, she was a scholar Maria Gimbutis. Okay. Now she had I guess this was around the 60s 70s She had all these crazy feminist notions. All right That you know people don't even feminists don't believe in nowadays That is she had this idea. She was an archaeologist by trade if that's a trade by by scholarly pursuits and you know, she had found a bunch of old European figurines that were really thick, you know these kind of feminine idols from early Europe and she created this entire world view that Pre-Indo European Europe was filled with you know goddess worship and you know all this kind of stuff You might be familiar with like the Da Vinci code That's actually related to her kind of or this sort of strand of thinking But it was a whole bunch of more or less nonsense pulled from very flimsy data. Now one of her I guess part of that World view was the idea that Indo-European people moved into Europe and conquered these peaceable people and Imposed the patriarchal society blah blah blah and the Indo-Europeans she associated with a particular archaeological culture in You know sort of I guess the Ukraine area now her idea is not You know her worldview is not really scientific. She reached You know crazy conclusions and had a crazy motivation But her views about Indo-Europeans are basically now accepted to be true. They had a bad motivation She might have had gone through bad thinking or you know a bad Mental trail of thought to reach that conclusion But we now see that you know Considering that crazy idea idea for a bit it actually seems like it's pretty much true Well, not the paleolithic Europe being all peaceful and stuff But her specific statements about the Indo-European culture moving into Europe what archaeological culture they're associated with that's now pretty much accepted to be True despite the fact that she you know got it You know, you know with sort of funny motivations now in the same way, you know my experience in academia I'll tell you this, you know, there are a lot of fancy papers with with a bunch of fancy statistics But the reality is a lot of people reach their conclusions I mean no one no one waits till the data to make their conclusions. I'll just be realistic about that and You know a lot of these people don't even know how to use statistics now I I will tell you my I don't believe in using bad statistics because I I honestly avoid statistics visit because I think in Most situations despite the fact that people use it all the time. It's not appropriate to use And I tend to avoid it now I will say in my experience there have been for example I remember there was a time when I was in graduate school I still am in graduate school, but there was one professor who you know had a friend of mine, you know illicit grammaticality judgments on a Likert scale and that's like, you know From one to seven how acceptable is this sentence is how acceptable is this sentence and what she did with the data? Her statistics was taking all the Likert scale numbers and adding them up and then comparing them Which is absurd you wouldn't even like I wouldn't do that as an elementary schooler but that's how she did it and You know she reached the conclusions she wanted to and that's how she reads and I'm sure when that ends up in a Published paper it's gonna be much more refined But that's that's like do you even understand where the Likert scale is where there was another time I was asked by a professor to do, you know, he had asked me Here take some data and I want you to you know, I want you to analyze this data I want you to find out, you know, what's really going on and I was like what kind of tests you want me to do You want me to do Anovas, you know an analysis of variance or something else and he was like well, you know what just take the numbers Add them together and look at the averages and compare them and see which one is bigger and I was like, okay I mean, you're not gonna you don't care about noise or anything like that But you know, I say this not to say that any of these people are bad scholars or something like that But it does sort of get at one, you know But it does sort of get at the fact that a lot of the decision-making that people actually make in the fields is Not this pre it's not this pretense that people put out there of these Scientific papers with all these numbers and stuff that you know every there are no there are no Leaks in the data or something like that. A lot of it is just intuitional stuff or Stuff you sort of squint your eyes and look at data and you sort of see what you want to see And that that is even with all the pretenses. We haven't Transgressed further than that. So what I'm saying, I'm not saying we should have no no standards in science What I'm saying is we should have no pretense. Now another example. I was thinking about Was You know, there are a lot of people who get upset at this guy Graham Hancock I don't know if you heard of him. He you know, he basically he's this boomer who writes some Books about how there was, you know, possibly an ancient civilization, you know and Archaeologists, they don't want to admit it in this ancient civilization that was you know It's cultural tendrils are all over the world and all these ancient cultures or whatever and you know Whatever he's sort of popular and in boomers and stuff like that I guess I think it was on Joe Rogan and got popular because of that But there are a lot of people in the field who would just get really mad at this guy They'll call him a pseudo scientist a pseudo archaeologist and my perspective is thing with Graham Hancock is Graham Hancock Or and other people like this. They don't pretend to be anything that they're not Graham Hancock if you read his books It's not him pretending to be some hardcore scientist. It's him saying. Oh, I found this random thing and oh man I remembered from this Google search that Someone said something about this archaeological inscription and I compared all this stuff and hey look at this. Maybe this is interesting None of it is him trying to be some hardcore guy It's just him throwing ideas out there in my point as I said earlier is that a lot of times scientific innovation comes from people with stupid ideas who state them stupidly for stupid reasons and when you put up these arbitrary I Guess arbitrary rules as for what should be pseudoscience or what should be real science you're yeah You're getting rid of a bunch of crap, but that's not the issue You're getting rid of all of everything that can possibly challenge your assumptions even if they're ugly looking So my perspective, you know my perspective, you know, you might know that I'm I'm sort of a proponent of the ideas that are associated with Paul fire Aband and that is epistemological anarchism and I think that's a meme worthy term. I mean because he didn't invent the idea really It's just the default way that all people in all times have looked at science. That is What what that's supposed to mean is there are no standards per se for science Everything is you know all methods of analysis everything from hardcore statistics to folklore to religion to rumor to You know Experiments all of this kind of stuff is worthy of consideration And we should always take it in mind and that doesn't mean abolishing our standards But all pretty much all scientific works that were made before this, you know Arrow where we have to pretend of something different all scientific works made before then Really they combine Hardcore science hardcore work with lots of baseless speculation lots of Emotion lots of bias, and there's nothing wrong with that in fact With what your biases are it is more informative for everyone else out there So anyway, this has been a sort of long boomer rants or lunchtime with Luke Smith Wars, but I will see you guys next time