Author Simon Singh Puts Up a Fight in the War on Science

Several years ago in the U.S., many of the Religious Right-oriented media outlets complained of stores putting up "Happy Holidays" signs instead of the traditional "Merry Christmas" signs. Despite the fact that this had already been relatively common practice for some time. Nonetheless, the "issue" was created and lots of people decided to be outraged about it. Everyone else rolled their eyes.

Difference is, people die from bad science. No one does if a christmas tree is nomenclatured a holiday tree.

>> Antiscientific and pseudoscientific attitudes will get corrected; it’s just a question of how painful that process is going to be.

Not necessarily true.

Things like astrology, alternative healing, etc. have been there for thousands of years and they just don't seem to be going away.

Roger Penrose makes some very interesting remarks on origins of these in his book "The Road to Reality". He says that ancient humans observed the influence the Sun had on their lives (day/nights, seasons, etc.) and also of the moon (tides, etc.). And there came a wrong inference that "all" heavenly objects have such an influence (astrology). He also speculates ancient humans figuring out geometrical shapes and finding naturally occurring crystals having those perfect shapes. And there came another wrong inference that such perfect natural objects must have powers to cure all that is not perfect (crystal healing).

More than a few thousands of years later, going from development of first scientific thought process in human beings (e.g.: astronomy) all the way to today, plenty of people still believe in these things (e.g.: astrology).

The third thing Penrose mentions amongst some of the first things humans learned is earth being flat, which again was a wrong inference (looks flat at human scales, must be flat at larger scales too). It took so much pain to fix this and that could only be done because a very simple evidence could ultimately be produced that everyone could see and understand by seeing a single photograph (of the round earth taken from the space). (Aside: And now humans wonder if the universe is flat. Penrose has beautifully connected some most ancient things in the human thought process to the most modern ones.)

I doubt such simple evidence is ever going to come against astrology and alternative healing, for one that it would be a lack of evidence instead. What was a "photograph" of a "round" earth there, would here be a "plot" of an uncorrelated variable (say improvement in health) against dependent variable (use of crystals) showing a "round" blob (no correlation) instead of a round earth. Just that this time, majority of humans are not able to follow (what some of us call) such simple a plot!

The muddled presentation is due a combination of factors.

One is that the scientists tend not to counter the pseudo-scientific idiocy that's rampant -- even though it's mind-numbingly obvious to anyone who isn't a complete idiot that it's pure BS with Star Trek style technobabble strewn throughout, the technobabble without any real science to counter it convinces the unwashed masses. The scientists would be doing themselves a huge favor if they spoke out more.

Which leads to point 2, which is that exactly the same organizations that fund a lot of that science are also going out of their way to muddle the message and stifle the scientists. NOAA has actually been intentionally altering the messages that the scientists have been releasing, and also preventing the scientists from speaking with anyone directly.

Combine that with the press and the government intentionally working to hide the message, and it's no surprise that most of what you end up seeing is pseudo-science rather than real science. It's not much different from the government's claims that the Gulf oil spill is 75% cleaned up...

http://www.amazon.com/Storm-World-Hurricanes-Politics-Warmin...