Variable Fragment

Ars technica wrote an article using explanations of homeopathy as an example of how you can tell pseudoscience from real science. It’s not the most clearly written argument, but it covers the points.

A quick explanation of homeopathy: you put some “stuff” in water, then you dilute it. The real kicker is that in homeopathy you dilute the original solution so much that there are zero molecules of the original “stuff” in it. In fact, it’s claimed that the more you dilute it the more powerful it gets. When you drink the water it will have medicinal powers as a result of the water having “memory” of the stuff that was in it. And there really are zero molecules of stuff in the water. Let’s be clear: homeopathy has beneficial effect only through the placebo effect. There’s no evidence at all that there is such a thing as “water memory” or an inverse dose response (more diluted water works better).

As pointed out in the Ars article it’s pretty remarkable that this is a concept that’s really from alchemy, and there are still people who subscribe to it.

In the end, this overview provides a clear demonstration of tactics used by many practitioners of pseudoscience: make a large number of vaguely scientific arguments in the hope of making the desired conclusion seem inevitable. It is essential to recognize that a disconnected assemblage of weak arguments does not create a single, strong scientific argument.

Homeopathy arguments are not for consumption by scientists. Their claims are ridiculous and their arguments just doesn’t make any sense. But they don’t present their arguments to scientists, they present them to regular people, potential customers. They present their arguments to people who don’t have the experience or training to be able to tell a good experiment from a bogus one.

They say you can use statistics to lie with numbers, but that’s only if you present your fake statistics to an untrained person. A real statistician can tell if you are lying with numbers. For example, at drug companies like my own there are whole departments of statisticians who’s job is to design studies and analyze results from drug trials. That’s why homeopaths present their results to regular people who can’t tell a bad statistical analysis from a good one, and when a real statistician points out the flaws the homeopath shouts them down and makes scientific sounding claims. They can’t convince the statistician, but they aren’t trying to. They are trying to confuse the audience, you. A real drug test is a carefully designed statistical experiment with an express goal of being able to distinguish between placebo effect and real drug action. These are the tests that homeopathy fails.

Homeopathy (and pseudoscience in general) makes liberal use of big, important sounding words in order to mislead the layman, but to an expert who actually understands everything that is being said, the claims are nonsense. Don’t trust someone who talks science to a non-scientist, but doesn’t talk science to scientists. They are trying to fool you.  From the article:

quantum entanglement, structured water, and silica are essentially unrelated explanations, and any support for one of them makes no difference to the others. Yet, somehow, presenting them all at once is supposed to make the case for water’s memory harder to dismiss.

A key characteristic of real science is that it lets you predict new things. You think you understand something so you say “if my idea is true, then I can go do this totally new experiment and I should get result X. If I don’t get result X then my idea is wrong.” Homeopathy doesn’t have this characteristic. Their claims about the memory of water and microstructures and all that crap can’t be tested, and the homeopath makes vague, hand-waving claims about what’s going on, but they can’t test it. If they do test it they get inconclusive results. This is not how science works.

The best clue to bad science is that the regular person is the primary audience. In real science, scientists convince other scientists first, then go tell non-scientists. A fake scientist is generally just trying to make money, so they skip the verification and go straight to the customer.

I do agree with their conclusions:

if the practice of homeopathy turns water into a mechanism for helping individuals feel better via a placebo effect, then the only issue with it becomes ensuring that it doesn’t prevent people who really need medical intervention from getting it.

I don’t care if you want to go do something harmless.  I don’t think homeopathy should be banned.  But it’s very expensive, and there are people who are spending time and money on fake treatments who need real medicine, and they aren’t getting it.

I suggest that you read, if nothing else, the conclusion to the Ars article where they list the characteristics of pseudoscience.

• Ignore settled issues in science: We know a great deal about the behavior of water (and evolution, and other contentious topics), but there are many efforts to introduce new science without ever addressing the existing body of knowledge. As such, many of the basic tenets of topics such as homeopathy appear to be ungrounded in reality as we understand it.

People claim that science is always changing, and since we don’t know everything then anything could be true.  It’s true that we are always coming up with new ways of understanding things, but here’s the part of the puzzle that you may be missing: Every new theory includes the results of the old one.  When we thought the Earth was flat, it’s because it looks flat when you are standing on it.  When we realized it was round, we understood that it only looked flat because it’s very large.  None of the evidence for the Earth being flat was wrong, it was just a subset of all evidence.  The equations that describe relativity (time dilation etc) simplify to regular Newtonian physics when things are moving slowly.  My point is, the things we know now will never be wrong, but they will be incomplete.  And any new theory will still have to incorporate the current evidence.  And the current evidence is incompatible with the claims of homeopathy.