My wife has the flu (along with several other people I know), so it’s time for the usual recommendations from her mother to use a lot of vitamin C. Bad Science has fanned the flames of my natural combative streak, so I went out and tried to find a good study for the Vitamin C thing. I found this, and sent it on to the mother-in-law (who hasn’t replied yet). I also posted it in reply to a friend on Facebook’s status about dosing up on vit. C. Not long after that, a friend of hers replies with this link — implying, of course, that anyone can prove anything by linking to stuff on the Internet.
So, of course, I reply, mentioning the number of people involved in the trials I had quoted, the significance of the results etc, which are all in the article and their links, while the other link has some hand-wavey trials with very little real evidence. And while I was posting this reply (which I’ll quote, because I’m lazy):
“Your point was quite clear, which is why I had to reply: It’s very popular at the moment to roll one’s eyes and point to all the contradictory evidence on the internet, typically ending in “so in the end we don’t know as much as we think” equivocation of the options. The reality is that in many cases we do know quite well what is happening (as in the case with Vit. C), and the underlying meme that science is always to be taken with a pinch of salt is damaging to proper understanding of scientific method and results.
This story repeats itself so many times that people become less likely to investigate the real results themselves (note that I’m not saying we should just trust scientists, we should be capable of understanding and evaluating the results). This goes for antiretrovirals, vaccines and many other treatments that have been shown to work, but are being used less than they should be because of general public distrust.”
Of course, I can think of many other examples: Cell phones and/or their towers causing cancer (which is silly even on the face of it considering the power of the transmitters, but has also been pretty solidly disproved by long studies of cancer incidence), stuff in plastic water bottles causing cancer, overhead power lines, induction stoves causing sterility (same argument as with the cell phones). I think there is a general distrust of science, perhaps because people trusted science so much in the past and have become disillusioned.
So here’s the thing: science isn’t really a trust thing. The whole point of science is that the evidence should be so overwhelming when you make a positive statement that it cannot be avoided. In fact, many scientists would say that no hypothesis can ever be proved, we can just fail to disprove it after trying very hard. Reading popular media summaries of scientific work makes this difficult because headlines like “Scientists do many tests and find insufficient evidence to disprove this hypothesis” don’t really sell papers. It also doesn’t gel well with the way people talk and think in general. The problem is that most of our decisions every day are made in extremely unscientific ways, including a wide array of effects that mean we can’t even reason accurately about
our own experience. Trust is a proxy for research. If someone I trust a lot (or a source I trust a lot) says something, I am unlikely to repeat their experiments and likely to take them at their word. If I know something about the field in question, I can also interrogate my understanding of the situation to see if the results are consistent with other things I know to be true. In an ideal world, we would all be repeating all the experiments to make sure they work. In reality, we lack the time, skills and funds to do so, so trust is necessary.
Where does this leave us? We need to base our trust on good, objective measures. In science, this means being able to look at the results and weigh the evidence, not the authors or publishers. It means checking consistency of theories and avoiding repeating claims that have poor statistical significance. It means doing real science, and not
cargo cult science. More on that later.
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