When the filmmaker Nanfu Wang moved to the US from China, circa 2012, she was “attracted by the freedom”. She had never seen a protest. On a Christmas visit to her family, she was in Wuhan when the first reports emerged of an unknown virus that caused a pneumonia-like illness. In her new documentary, In the Same Breath, she follows the pandemic’s progress, alternating between China and the US and finds the same problem in both countries: who can you trust to tell you the truth? The Chinese government tried to cover up the pandemic at its first emergence; then-US president Donald Trump airily said it would vanish “like magic” with the warm weather. Both governments made major missteps in managing the pandemic. Viewed that way, Covid-denying protesters no longer seemed quite so crazy.
Much has shifted since. Western medical agencies have come to accept that masks work; the world’s scientists have made safe and effective vaccines; new variants have brought new risks; and each of these has brought new conspiracy theories. Of all of them, the longest-running and the most persistent is rumors about the virus’s origin. Every potential final verdict ratchets up the uncertainty. The latest as I type is the published report of the 90-day investigation US president Joe Biden ordered.
“My friends think I’m crazy,” a friend said last year, before going on to state his belief that the SARS-Cov-2 is a human-created virus, potentially a bioweapon, that escaped from a lab (the “lab leak hypothesis”) rather than, as scientists were insisting, one that hopped from animals to humans (zoonotic transfer). My friend has vast respect for science, so I know that when solid evidence emerges he will accept it. But for more than a year he’s expected that the lab leak hypothesis will eventually be proved correct and his friends will revise their opinion to “prescient”.
Like so many things, this issue has several strands. First: the question of where Covid originated. Second: the life cycle of the lab leak hypothesis-as-conspiracy theory. Third: the question of what we do if evidence emerges that it was a lab leak.
The last of those is above my pay grade.
The second is easier. Time magazine dates the first suggestions of a lab leak to right-wing politicians in January 2020, amplified in February when Chinese researchers issued a pre-print suggesting that “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan”. Former president Donald Trump was already calling it the “Chinese virus” and dropping dark hints about its origin. A week later, the researchers did the single thing most likely to send conspiracy theories into high gear: they withdrew the paper before it could be peer-reviewed. For more than a year the idea simmered but was repeatedly dismissed.
I can sort of understand the appeal. “Random zoonotic leap that could happen again any time” is terrifying. “These terrible people did this horrible thing” provides the satisfaction of someone to blame and offers the possibility of a prevention strategy.
Mainstream interest in the lab leak hypothesis hit in May 2021, when Nicholas Wade published an essay promoting the lab leak hypothesis, first at Medium and then in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. For my friend, Wade’s history as a science writer for the New York Times lends him credibility, despite the taint of Trump’s embrace. Soon afterwards, Times colleague Donald G. McNeil, Jr analysed Wade’s piece and noted how much new information had emerged since his own article on the topic was killed a year earlier because scientists were dismissing the possibility of a lab leak. “We still do not know the source,” he wrote, concluding that the evidence continues to shift towards a lab leak.
Wade’s piece is certainly not Meme Zero – my friend was not the only one who “has a hunch”, and anyway journalists report trends rather than create them – but it provided the weight and amplification necessary to cue the rest of the media. A search turns up soon-afterwards pieces at CNN, the Washington Post, the LA Times, Bloomberg, Vanity Fair, radio station WNYC, Foreign Policy, and MIT Technology Review. Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal particularly embraced it, running two news stories and two op-eds in just a couple of weeks. The subject has remained on the radar ever since: despite the lack of new facts, the Guardian, the Washington Post, and The Week all covered it as a controversy in the first couple of weeks of August.
In Congressional hearings, Antony Fauci has had to (im)patiently correct numerous accusations (many from Kentucky Congressman Rand Paul) that the NIH was funding “gain of function” research at the Wuhan lab, and the implication that such research was designed to develop bioweapons.
Yesterday, Biden’s commission released its report: unanimous agreement among the eight agencies involved in the investigation that the virus was not bioengineered (whew!). But: there was less consensus about the virus’s origin. Five agencies “assess with low confidence” that the virus transferred to humans from an infected animal. One is confident that it was a lab leak. The other three couldn’t reach a conclusion. More information is needed!
The calls for further investigation continue to come from all parts of the house. Getting this right – or admitting that we can’t be sure – really *matters*. Our preparation for future pandemics requires an accurate understanding of what happened.
Science communication is a challenge in itself. It demands training, practice, and a good deal of patience. There are some issues that are hard to communicate even for natural-born talents or seasoned, trained professionals. Being a bacterial geneticist and having worked with genetic modification in the lab, genetics is both my favorite scientific subject to talk about, and also the hardest.
While many other controversial issues like climate change and evolution have to deal with politics and ideology much more than with their scientific basis, genetics is about the understanding of basic scientific concepts, and our own – sometimes unnoticed – sense of morality and culture.
Few people outside academia, or even from different academic fields, have an actual grasp of how biotechnology works. It is no wonder that surveys show that genetic modification in foods and drug development has a higher acceptance among scientists than among the public in general. A survey conducted by Pew Research showed that while 88% of scientists from the American Association for the Advancement of Science believe that GM foods are safe, the general public is nowhere near as convinced, with only 37% of the population regarding GM food as safe. It is the widest gap between expert and general public opinion in the biomedical sciences.
Surveys conducted in the US by the National Science Foundation and in Brazil by DataFolha/Instituto Questão de Ciência show that more than 40% of the US population and 73% of the Brazilian population (a country with a largely agricultural-based economy!) are afraid of GM foods.
Is it the lack of knowledge about GM biotechnology that drives people’s fears? According to William Hallman, of Rutgers University, who specialises in risk perception, people tend to overestimate how much they know about a subject, and draw their conclusions and make choices from there.
A survey conducted by Hallman showed that while people had very little knowledge of what GM food is, whether or not they are consuming it, and how it could (or couldn’t) affect their health or the environment, they had very strong feelings about it, and made decisions based on those feelings. Many really believed that they had never eaten anything genetically modified, and others had no idea of what crops in the US are GMOs. Some who reported that they were against GM foods, did, however, report that they were in favour of research into developing trees that could clean contaminated air or water, and into more nutritious crops to help malnourished children in poor countries – which, of course, are applications of GM technology.
In the same survey, Hallman used a set of questions to assess how much the respondents knew about how food is grown in the US. Only 22% admitted to knowing very little, but the replies to other questions showed that most respondents really overestimated their actual knowledge. The problem, according to Hallman, is that if people already believe that they master the subject, they are unlikely to seek more information about it.
He concludes that people often take mental shortcuts based on gut feeling, rather than knowledge. Commenting on the results of his survey, he states that when it comes to GM foods, most people “have not heard very much, they do not know very much, they have never talked about it, they are unaware that they are eating it, and yet they have an opinion”.
Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at the New York Univeristy, and author of “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion”, offers an explanation for this strong “gut feeling”. He hypothesizes that the human mind is guided by what he calls moral foundations. When these moral foundations are disrupted, we feel uncomfortable. He proposes six modules of moral foundations that guide human attitude and vary according to culture and background: Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, Sanctity/degradation, and Liberty/oppression.
According to such a model, we could argue that genetic manipulation would violate the “sanctity” and “fairness” foundations, as people perceive it to be a violation of the sacredness of nature, to the benefit of large multinational corporations. This violation of moral foundations could lead to the gut feeling that there is just something wrong about GM foods. After all, many religious traditions (and, even among non-religious people, a lingering intuition based on the prevalent religious culture) suggest that meddling with the “essence” of things represents hubris, an attempt to play God. Today, many people equate DNA with “essence”, as we can see in the idiom “it is in my DNA…”. Centuries of mythology, folklore and science fiction (Frankenstein was originally published in 1818) led to the belief that every time humanity tries to interfere with the “natural order”, punishment follows.
Maybe it’s time to direct our efforts not only to providing scientific knowledge – the gap between scientists and public in GM food perception shows that it is still a necessary effort – but also to addressing people’s fears, with a better understanding of where these fears come from. Working with community leaders and even faith leaders could be one way to start.
Biotechnology can save lives, ensure food security, provide vaccines against local and global diseases, develop new medicines and help to deal with environmental issues. But if we don’t communicate properly, hesitancy among people and policy makers will ensure all of these potential gains remain exactly that – mere potentials.
This was an influential review, prompting follow-ups in 2004 and 2010, the latter of these being for the Cochrane Collaboration. Each of these papers draws comparable conclusions: there is little evidence placebos have powerful clinical effects, and such effects which are measured are difficult to distinguish from bias. Despite this, the narrative of the ‘powerful placebo effect’ persists.
One of the more common claims made for the strange and magical power of the placebo is that peptic ulcers heal faster when you take four placebo pills, rather than two. This is clearly an extraordinary claim. Four inert pills clear ulcers faster than two inert pills? Four times zero is greater than two times zero? Could this really be true?
The origin of these claims is a pair of papers by the medical anthropologist Daniel Moerman. The first, published in Medical Anthropology Quarterly in 1983, was titled General Medical Effectiveness and Human Biology: Placebo Effects in the Treatment of Ulcer Disease (“General Medical Effectiveness” apparently being Moerman’s preferred term for placebo effects, at least at the time).
In this analysis, Moerman searched the MEDLINE database for clinical trials published between 1977 and 1980 investigating the drug cimetidine, which is commonly prescribed for ulcers. Rather than looking at the effects of cimetidine itself, he focussed his attention on patients from the control groups. These patients had been given no active medication but many had their ulcers cured anyway, with some studies showing up to 90% recovery rate. Other studies showed geographical effects, with patient controls in studies conducted in Germany shown to be far more likely to recover than their counterparts in, say, Denmark.
Moerman’s characterisation of these observations, that “therefore placebos are ‘stronger’ in Germany” and “it is possible to heal ulcers in nearly all patients with inert treatment” arguably stray into the territory of rhetoric. He also betrays his underlying assumptions when he claims placebo effects are patients “respond[ing] to the form, not the content, of the treatment […] a biological response to a symbolic stimulus”. Nevertheless, there are legitimate questions to ask. Why do placebos seem to work better in Germany than Denmark? Why do controls in some studies show a 90% recovery rate, when others show 10%?
Unfortunately, the paper only very briefly entertains what I believe to be the most parsimonious explanation: some patients took some other medication and didn’t tell their doctors about it.
Unreported variables
Moerman flirts with the idea that patients quietly taking antacids could account for the wide variation in results, before dismissing this because “there is even more evidence to suggest antacids are not effective”. However, these data were gathered before the widespread acceptance of H Pylori as responsible for almost all peptic ulcers. While patients may have been asked to refrain from taking antacids, or at least record their antacids use, it is unlikely this extended to avoiding antibiotics. In those studies with an apparently large placebo effect patients may have been inadvertently curing their ulcers while medicating for something else entirely. Of course, there is no way Moerman could have known this at the time, as Barry Marshall would not swallow his infamous bottle of H Pylori until the following year.
Moerman’s second prominent paper came sixteen years later. This time joined by several co-authors, “Placebo effect in the treatment of duodenal ulcer” was published in the British Journal of Pharmacology in December of 1999. In the introduction, the authors reference Moerman’s earlier work on peptic ulcers and placebo, and go on to ask if the frequency of placebo administration might influence the healing process.
To answer this question, they conducted a systematic review, searching the literature for double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trials on ulcer medication. The ulcers studied must be uncomplicated (no perforation or bleeding), they must be assessed by endoscope (a camera down the throat), and the endpoint of the study must be a ‘healed ulcer’. The treatment plan must be pills, and must be administered four times a day (each meal and again at bedtime), or twice a day (morning and bedtime).
The result was 79 papers, from which the authors promptly discarded the active treatment data, and looked only at the controls. They found that after four weeks 44% of patients had ‘healed ulcers’ after taking placebo four times a day, while just 36% of patients had ‘healed ulcers’ after taking placebo twice a day. They concluded:
We found a relation between frequency of placebo administration and healing of duodenal ulcer. We realize that the comparison was based on nonrandomized data. However, we speculate that the difference between regimens was induced by the difference in frequency of placebo administration.
What I find interesting about this conclusion is that they state they found a relationship, but don’t claim that it is causal. They acknowledge that the data is not randomised, and that this is a limitation. And they characterise as ‘speculation’ the notion that the difference was induced by varying the frequency of administration. This is far more tentative, far more careful language, than you might hear when this claim is repeated today.
Not only that, but in the discussion the authors offer a number of other possible explanations. They point out that the “two pill” trials were generally more modern, having been conducted from 1980 onward, where the “four pill” trials were mostly earlier. A secondary analysis, which excluded data before 1980, found no significant difference between the four pills and two pills regimens.
They also point out that the trials are subject to selection bias, as different clinicians for different studies were responsible for deciding if a patient fit with the study requirements, and that some (but not all) of the trials excluded patients who did not fully comply with the treatment plan.
However, the biggest source of bias in my opinion is one they don’t really mention, which relates to the definition of ’placebo effect’. This paper offers the following definition:
any therapeutic procedure which has an effect on a patient, symptom, syndrome or disease, but which is objectively without specific activity for the condition being treated.
I would argue this is too narrow a definition, especially for the data from this study. A better definition might be “any effect measured after an intervention, other than a response to an active treatment.”
Control groups, and accounting for bias
As I mentioned in my previous article for The Skeptic, the reason control groups exist is to capture as many uncontrolled and non-specific effects as possible – statistical regressions, learned responses, the natural course of the disease, etc – so they can be subtracted from the effects measured in the final analysis and we can confidently attribute what is left to the specific effect of the intervention.
Most significantly, this also includes bias. It includes patients telling doctors what they think you want to hear. It includes patients misremembering or misreporting their symptoms. It includes judgement calls made by doctors. And this is why our definition of “placebo effect” is important. The former definition – a therapeutic effect on the patient, syndrome, symptom or disease – does not allow for effects which exist only in the data. And yet judgement calls by clinicians can do that; they can change the data without changing the patient.
Let’s say you have two patients with peptic ulcers, and it’s the job of a pair of clinicians to perform an endoscopy to assess if that ulcer has healed. And let’s also say the condition of the ulcers between those two patients is absolutely identical, and that condition is: more-or-less healed.
Let’s say you have two patients with peptic ulcers, and it’s the job of a pair of clinicians to assess if that ulcer has healed… Even if their patients were in exactly the same condition, they could have recorded them differently based on their own opinions.
The first clinician looks at the first patient, and thinks “well that’s more-or-less healed” and puts them down on the “healed” tally. The second clinician looks at the second patient, who is in exactly the same condition, and says “no, not quite there” and puts them down in the “not healed” tally. The patients’ conditions are identical; but they are recorded differently in the data.
Within the context of a single trial, this isn’t so much of an issue. You will have the same researchers making the same (hopefully blinded) calls across the active treatment and placebo wings of the trial, so biases like this should cancel out.
But when you’re comparing the placebo wing of Trial A and the placebo wing of unrelated Trial B, the biases don’t cancel any more. Amongst other things, you’re now comparing the biases and judgement of the researchers who conducted Trial A, to the biases and judgement of the researchers who conducted Trial B. Even if their patients were in exactly the same condition, they could have recorded them differently based on their own opinions.
The difference is then ascribed by later authors to a powerful and magical effect from the inert placebo, and this claim becomes one of those things we just know about placebos. We know that four pills a day are better than two, and can confidently assert as much. Because of a flawed comparison of the biases of ulcer researchers some 40 years ago.
Conspiracy theorists often employ a range of tactics that do not argue for their position, so much as perform sleight of hand tricks that only seem to point to their conclusion. Most of these tactics we label as informal fallacies. Whether they are cherry-picking results of studies, suppressing counter-evidence, or tossing out red herrings, we recognise these tactics… even if we only do so three hours later while in bed.
One such tactic, which seems substantive but is merely window dressing, is the Bewilder Gambit. It works by seeming to prove a position with technical and complex points but ultimately means nothing. I’ll explain via the Flat Earth conspiracy theory.
The Flat Earth theory has myriad problems. The most devastating problem is the physical world – no, not that the world is round (that is, after all, what they are disputing) but that the physical rules of the natural world actually prohibit the Earth from being a flat disc. Gravity necessitates the shape of the Earth, even Aristotle kind of understood this fact (De Caleo 297a9-21) though he did not understand why. As things come together, he wrote, compression and conversion of the various parts will necessarily form a sphere as the smaller parts fill in the gaps between the larger parts. Aristotle did not have the idea of gravity (indeed, he thinks that things fall because they are heavy), but the shape of the Earth he gets right. Yet, this isn’t the only problem that gravity poses. Things fall, that much is accurate, and the Flat Earthers must answer this problem.
Their solution, according to tfes.org’s wiki page, is something called Universal Acceleration. Universal Acceleration flips the problem: it is not that things fall; instead, the Earth comes up to meet them at the rate of 9.8m/s/s which we consider the rate of gravitational attraction. Let us assume for a moment that the conspiracy theory is true, which is a fun reductio ad absurdum way to argue against conspiracy theories. To compensate for Newton’s inertial laws, the Earth must be continuously accelerating. To anyone paying attention, this means that the Earth will pass the Universe’s speed limit of C within the first year. If the Earth is going to retain any kind of mass, it simply cannot exceed the speed of light. We know it contains mass because you’re reading this right now. Even the Flat Earth theory recognises this possibility and offers up this as an answer:
The presentation ends with the sentence,
As you can see, it is impossible for dark energy to accelerate the Earth past the speed of light.
I am no expert in maths. My abilities in the subject are limited to internalised algebra at no more than four places, multiplication/division at no more than two places. Since I discovered that percentages are reversible (i.e., 50% of 20 = 20% of 50), I can do those pretty effectively. Ask me about imaginary numbers, and I’ll respond with “eleventeen” faster than √-1. So, when the ∂ appears, I figure I’m out of my depth and will take this formula at face value.
The questions we are asking about gravity are too uncomfortable for them so they seek to bewilder those asking the question with this impressive looking formula.
Which is precisely what the Flat Earth people want us to think. The questions we are asking about gravity are too uncomfortable for them so they seek to bewilder those asking the question with this impressive looking formula. The formula is not just something that I do not know, but I also don’t know where I begin to look it up.
The tactic is not unique to the Flat Earth conspiracy theory. David Icke uses it in “The Biggest Secret” when he spends all of chapter six on his lineages of the British Royalty. This chapter begins with Babylonian Brotherhood Reptilians moving to Northern Italy in 466 CE (he’s spend the previous chapters getting to this point) and walking us forward through their infiltration of the entire European continent, all the while taking over financial systems and creating the idea of money. The Sovereign Citizen or “Freemen on the land” people use overly complex pseudo-legalese to convince us that signing documents in red ink will unlock millions owed to their non-corporate selves.
This “information” is presented as-is, which to an outsider seems impressive and factual. When reading through Icke’s book, I’m not going to fact-check his lineages. These are matters of objective fact, and I’m going to charitably assume that someone at least verified that they are real. I’m not going to check the legal ramifications of the Magna Carta (which somehow applies to the Sovereign Citizen movement here in the US as well) to make sure that the freemen are citing it correctly (generally, the answer is “no, they are not”).
As skeptics, we are sometimes burdened with thinking that we must retort every argument that the conspiracy theorists make. It is an unreasonable position: no one can have all the necessary information, nor should we expect them to. It’s also unreasonable when we understand that facts do not work against conspiracy theorists. Every study on the subject concludes that facts do not change people’s minds, and that conclusion is exemplified by the fact that even when reading this, most of you will still think that some kind of silver bullet fact will get through to the theorist. Thus we need a different tactic.
When confronted with these kinds of positions, we should, instead, ask, “how is this relevant?” The sleight of hand being conducted here is the illusion that what they are saying is linked to the conclusion when the conclusion is a non-sequitur. So Icke has seemingly connected a living British royal to the city of Ur – that doesn’t mean shape-shifting lizard demons are trying to separate us from the gold standard. It could only prove that perhaps all of these royal families are just really old. Just because clause XXIX of the Magna Carta states that no one shall be imprisoned without due reference to the law of the land does not mean that the presence of a Naval flag grants a get out of jail free card. Their conclusion does not follow from their premise, but it does seem like it could. To an outsider, it may seem like the law is just a confusing jumble of vernacular with the odd bit of Latin thrown in, but the law does not derive its power from a magic spell concocted out of a specific order of words.
In our Flat Earth example, the final sentence is telling because there is nothing in that formula (or series of formulae) that refers to dark energy. It’s thrown in there because it is the CBD oil of explanations for the pseudoscience conspiracy theory crowd: it’s claimed to be effective at whatever it needs to be, but there’s no evidence that it peforms the function that they claim it does. While that maths represents the Lorentz factor, it is irrelevant to our initial objection to Universal Acceleration. The problem isn’t the formula. The Flat Earth theory has already rejected the natural world’s physics, but now it wants to appeal to them to justify something else.
This kind of thing works because they emulate real scientists, academics, historians, and lawyers, but they lack the proper understanding of how the actual work is done. What they offer is more accurately described as a mockery of it. Close enough to fool the people who are already predisposed to believe in it.
We know that Earth is round; we don’t need to know the intricacies of relativity to prove it.
If we set aside for a moment that the foundational underpinnings of the new documentary “The Reason I Jump” is a pseudoscientific practice called Facilitated Communication (FC), it is quite a cinematic and emotional movie. It is arguably the best pro-FC film to date. The imagery and sound score are gorgeous, as are the passages selected from the book translated by David Mitchell and Keiko Yoshida, who are themselves parents of a non-speaking autistic child. Director Jerry Rothwell skillfully weaves a rich auditory and visual narrative intent on illuminating the thoughts of Naoki Higashida, an autistic Japanese teenager, who, viewers are told, cannot “do real conversation,” but, nonetheless, has, purportedly, written a book. Viewers are urged not to judge Higashida – and by extension, other autistic people – by “the outside only.” This sentiment is one of the few redeeming messages of the film. However, this advice closely echoes the FC proponent “presume competence/do not test” mantra and raises concerns when it comes to evaluating whose voice is actually being represented in the film.
It bears saying that this review is not a judgment of Higashida, the other autistic individuals in the film, or anyone who is currently being subjected to FC. Nor is it a criticism of the parents, who are quite obviously caring and trying to do the best they can for their children. It is, however, a critique of FC – the technique – and those who continue to promote it with religious-like conviction despite scientific evidence that FC messages are facilitator controlled and, most likely, not the words of the individuals being facilitated.
In Facilitated Communication, the individual being facilitated is trained to respond to visual and auditory cues provided by an assistant or facilitator, as the pair type out sentences on a letterboard. Unfortunately, through this process, these individuals become overly dependent on facilitator cuing to know which letters to select. Facilitator control is so inextricably part of FC that organisations such as the American Speech-Language Hearing Association, American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, Association for Science in Autism Treatment and others have statements opposing its use, and further advise their members not to use FC to make any major decisions.
These observations are not, as Mitchell stated in a recent interview, “knee-jerk reactions” to FC. The phenomenon has been closely studied by the scientific and academic communities and bears resemblance to automatic writing and the use of a planchette popularised in the late 1800s (see Dillon, 1993; Hall, 1993; Green, 1994; Spitz, 1997). At times, the cuing is so subtle that the pointing behaviors of those being subjected to FC look “independent,” but anyone who understands the ideomotor response – and where to look – will be able to observe the movements of the facilitator that control which letters are selected. The person being facilitated need only extend a finger in the direction of the board; the facilitator can do the rest. The powerful messaging in pro-FC videos – in this case the beautiful poetic observations of the narrator, striking visuals, and the music accompanying it – create a magical illusion that masks facilitator control and lulls viewers into overlooking what they are witnessing on screen.
In 1990, Biklen introduced FC to the United States as a revolutionary new technique on the “assumption of its validity”. Thirty years later, Vosseller continues this tradition by promoting S2C, stating in the movie that:
If non-speakers are capable of spelling and are capable of intelligence, that really shakes the foundation of a lot of things that we’ve believed.
But, assumptions and ifs are not evidence that messages produced using FC represent the thoughts of the individuals being subjected to its use. Rather, the evidence points to facilitator control instead. Vosseller appears to be framing the discussion as if critics of FC believe that non-speaking individuals are incapable of producing independent thought. This is a false frame: evidence-based communication techniques and equipment are being used every day to support some non-speaking individuals to enhance their communication abilities without the interference of a facilitator. In the case of FC, it is the technique that is flawed, not the individuals using it.
Why does it matter if the thoughts and ideas being expressed in the film were produced using FC? Because when Higashida’s facilitated words are juxtaposed with images of other non-speaking autistic individuals, viewers cannot help but believe that the ideas being expressed represent those individuals, how they think, and how they feel. Admittedly, it is difficult not to want the FC-generated messages to be true. But the film’s aims are gutted by the pushing of pseudoscience.
The internal thoughts and feelings of the autistic individuals featured in “The Reason I Jump” are not actually represented, other than through observations by their parents and, in the case of two individuals, through the use of FC – where the typed words are, most likely, the thoughts of the facilitators, and not their own.
Representation is a problem people in the autism community wrestle with every day and, sadly, “The Reason I Jump,” fails in its efforts to advance this cause by ignoring the science behind FC (or lack thereof) and, as Paddy Mulholland suggests, quite possibly “makes the viewer less informed than they were going in”.
Research is the process of discovering new knowledge. There are three somewhat overlapping types of research:
Exploratory research tackles a problem that has not yet been clearly defined and aims to gain a better understanding of the nature of the issues involved with a view of conducting more in-depth investigations at a later stage.
Descriptive research creates knowledge by describing the issues according to their characteristics and population. It focuses on the ‘how’ and ‘what’ rather than on the ‘why’.
Explanatory research is aimed at determining how variables interact and at identifying cause-and-effect relationships. It deals with the ‘why’ of research questions and is therefore often based on experiments.
The motivation for doing research in medicine does, of course, vary. Sadly, for some it might be money, for others ambition or fame. But ideally it should be the wish to help advance our knowledge and thus create progress. The vast majority of scientists that I ever met lived up to this ideal.
I have been a researcher in several areas of medicine; my three main topics were: physical medicine and rehabilitation, blood rheology, and so-called alternative medicine (which I abbreviate SCAM these days). In all of them, my type of research was mostly explanatory, i.e. formulating a research question and trying to answer it, if possible with quantitative data. Looking back at my years as an active researcher, I find remarkable differences between doing research in SCAM and the other subjects.
New medical knowledge generated by research may be useful or useless but it should not regularly generate huge amounts of contention. Of course, there can be debates about the reliability of the findings; this is entirely legitimate, helpful, and necessary. We always need to make sure that results are valid, reproducible, and true. And of course, the debates about these issues can generate a certain amount of tension. Such tensions are stimulating, can create progress, and must be welcomed. I have been lucky to experience them in all areas of research I ever conducted.
The tension I experienced while doing SCAM research, however, was on a different scale and of a different nature – so much so that I would not even call it ‘tension’; often it seemed more like outright hostility. While doing non-SCAM research, it had never been in doubt that my work was honestly aimed at creating progress. Yet, this issue became the focal point after I had started SCAM research.
When my research showed that homeopathy might not be effective, I got PERSONALLY attacked by homeopaths.
When my research showed that homeopathy might not be safe, I got PERSONALLY attacked by homeopaths.
When my research showed that chiropractic might not be effective, I got PERSONALLY attacked by chiropractors.
When my research showed that chiropractic might not be safe, I got PERSONALLY attacked by chiropractors.
When my research showed that acupuncture might not be effective, I got PERSONALLY attacked by acupuncturists.
When my research showed that acupuncture might not be safe, I got PERSONALLY attacked by acupuncturists.
When my research showed that herbalism might not be effective, I got PERSONALLY attacked by herbalists.
When my research showed that herbalism might not be safe, I got PERSONALLY attacked by herbalists.
Essentially, doing SCAM research felt like doing research not FOR but AGAINST those who should have had the most interest in it.
But why? Isn’t research a good thing?
As I said, one way to describe research is as a process of discovering new knowledge and creating progress. For me, the main difference between doing research in SCAM and non-SCAM areas was perhaps this: in conventional medicine, most players are interested in discovering new knowledge and creating progress (historically, this was, of course, not always the case but in the era of evidence-based medicine it has become the predominant attitude). By contrast, in the realm of SCAM few players are truly interested in new knowledge. Much of SCAM is based on traditions, and traditions might be endangered by new knowledge. To put it bluntly: medicine tends to be open to research and its consequences, while SCAM is mostly anti-science and not interested in finding the truth or making progress.
But why? Isn’t progress a good thing?
To me, the answer seems obvious: in SCAM, finding the truth and making progress would be bad for the business. As rigorous research would discover the truth about SCAM and as the truth rarely favours SCAM, it must be resisted.
Two examples might make the contrast clearer.
If researchers discover that a much-used conventional medicine, say Aspirin, can cause serious problems such as stomach bleeding, the average GP would welcome this knowledge and consider to be progress. They are henceforth able to take it into account, and might thus even save lives.
If researchers discover that chiropractic spinal manipulation might cause a serious problem such as a stroke or death, the average chiropractor might worry about their livelihood. Typically they would deny a causal relationship, claim that conventional medicines are much more dangerous, and carry on as before.
To express it succinctly:
Take the Aspirin away from a GP, and they will use other options.
Take spinal manipulation away from a chiropractor, or the acupuncture needle from an acupuncturist, and they will go bankrupt.
From this perspective, much of the tension and hostility I experienced while doing SCAM research can be seen as a defensive reaction of SCAM practitioners who are afraid that research might threaten the status quo and thereby endanger their livelihood. This reaction might be defensive, but sadly it does not defend the best interest of the patient.
Often, the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth is who said it.
Let us look at Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. The inconclusive search for the airliner and the lack of an official consensus regarding its disappearance has set the world buzzing for the truth. In the seven years since its disappearance, we have seen all manner of plausible-seeming theories put forward to explain the events that led to its disappearance. Some have posited that the disappearance was down to an onboard fire, like in Nigerian Airways Flight 2120. Others claim there was an airliner shootdown incident, like in Korean Air Lines Flight 007. Others still look to the pilot for answers. One thing was for certain – anything could have happened, and before we come to any conclusions as to what was most likely, we need more information.
As time went by, those looking to solve the mystery of the missing flight have grown increasingly disappointed by the lack of information and proactivity by the Malaysian government. To this day, the Ministry of Transport Malaysia (‘MOTM’) has not established an official cause of the incident, choosing instead to focus on recommendations that could prevent such an incident from happening in the future (Ministry of Transport Malaysia, 2017). Similar thoughts were echoed by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (‘ATSB’) in their final report. With the world left in the dark about what happened to MH370, we find ourselves overwhelmed by a myriad of alternative theories formulated by both experts and amateurs.
While interest in MH370’s disappearance has gradually faded over the past 7 years, a recent opportunity to speak to other aviation enthusiasts has renewed my interest in exploring the case for myself. While the natural course of action would be to speculate as to what happened, we must recognise that there are some theories that simply cannot be verified, due to a lack of evidence. Instead, we can focus on the theories that do claim to be based on evidence, to understand how conclusions, or a lack thereof, were drawn.
Let us begin by looking at three popular theories, which I will explore with the help of a pilot I spoke to, who for reasons of anonymity we can call “Pilot P”. Pilot P helped me understand each theory through the lens of someone who has plenty of flying experience, ranging from the most probable theory, to the least probable.
Theory 1: The Pilot
The first theory we will be dissecting is that the disappearance was due to a deliberate act by the pilot. Advocates claim that one of the pilots intentionally brought the plane down by first flying around Penang, then heading out and crashing the plane into the southern Indian Ocean. This is better illustrated with the official map detailing the known route that MH370 took.
Official map detailing MH370’s journey tracked on radar
According to this theory, the flight proceeded normally until there was a handover from Kuala Lumpur Area Control Centre (‘ACC’) to Ho Chi Minh ACC. Thereafter, Captain Zaharie Shah had his co-pilot leave the cockpit, perhaps under the guise of requiring him to check out some issue in the cabin. Captain Shah could then have locked his co-pilot out of the cockpit and depressurised the aircraft, knowing that, unlike in the passenger cabin, his cockpit oxygen supply could last for hours. He then donned his oxygen mask, switched off all communications with the ground and flew the plane for hours before eventually setting it down in the ocean (Kitching, 2019).
Advocates for this theory build their case as follows: Firstly, the pilot, who was from Penang, took a detour from the original route towards Beijing to circle around Penang island. According to Captain Simon Hardy, a veteran 777 pilot, this indicated that someone on board had intended to take “ a long, emotional look at Penang” (Westcott, 2015). As there were no other pilots on board according to the flight manifest, this points towards Captain Shah as the more likely pilot for the Penang detour.
Presumed MH370 flight path, with Inmarsat satellite data combined with known radar transmissions.
As you can see, there are similarities between MH370’s presumed flight path in yellow, and Captain Shah’s simulated flight in red. The latter was reconstructed from 6 data points recovered from his home flight simulator (Australian Transport Safety Bureau, 2017). If this was the truth, it might provide compelling evidence to believe that the disaster was planned. However, it is important to note that this argument relies on the accuracy of the flight path, yet the Inmarsat data relied on to construct the plane’s actual flight path cannot confirm MH370’s exact location in real time, but provides an approximation spanning from Central Asia to the middle of the southern Indian Ocean (Langewiesche, 2019). There are many other articles that extensively analyse the available data, and many of them do come to the conclusion that the fact pattern makes it difficult to deny that the Penang detour was a deliberate act – whether by Captain Shah or his co-pilot.
Lastly, Captain Shah was an examiner for the same aircraft type as MH370, meaning that he may have more easily convinced his co-pilot to leave the cockpit under the guise of checking a malfunction in the cabin, given his extensive experience. This seems particularly compelling, as Pilot P told me that under most situations, departures from the cockpit are often on a need-to basis, such as using the lavatory or conducting of checks in the cabin. Therefore, if the co-pilot did leave the cockpit, it is likely to have been under the command of Captain Shah. In addition, Pilot P mentioned that the cockpit door can be locked manually from the inside, making re-entry impossible.
This seems to be the most compelling theory to me, and I can understand why it has gained traction. The impossibility of interrogating a deceased pilot, coupled with scant remains, has led to inferences that are as difficult to deny as they are to prove. However, it is easy to pin the blame on someone who is unable to take the stand and defend himself – a point Pilot P agreed with. We will never know what went through Captain Shah’s mind then, and it is unfair to pin the blame on him unless it can be proved.
Equally, while the evidence may appear persuasive, it relies on some very specific assumptions for the theory to hold true. Firstly, it would require extraordinary effort to descend and fly the plane unnoticed around the island of Penang, with the sole purpose of Captain Shah viewing the lights of Penang for one last time before crashing the plane down in the middle of the southern Indian Ocean. In my opinion, if what the captain really wanted was to crash the plane, it would be unnecessary for him to then fly the great length to the southern Indian Ocean – he could have brought the aircraft down in the South China Sea, the Andaman Sea, or anywhere else close by. The southern Indian Ocean seems too specific of a location.
Also, the pilot theory relies on a chain of assumptions that make it unlikely: first, the pilot must have been determined to crash the aircraft; second, the pilot must have successfully convinced the co-pilot to leave the cockpit; third, there had to be no traffic in the vicinity that would have noticed its deviation; fourth, there would have to be no fighter jets scrambled to intercept the plane as it was criss-crossing the Malaysia-Thailand border; and fifth, there would have to be no communication from the plane to the ground when the crew suspected something awry and still had time to react. That is a lot of unlikely scenarios that must happen in succession for the plot to work – in my opinion, it vastly lowers the likelihood of this theory.
Another reason the theory is unlikely is that the satellite data unit which maintains communication links had sent a log-on request to Inmarsat’s satellites after it had been switched off. It also sent hourly ‘handshake’ acknowledgements to those satellites. This meant that someone was in the cockpit and had control over communication links (Llewelyn, 2020). It is highly improbable that the plane would have continued its communication with satellites if it had been ‘hijacked’ by Captain Shah, given that a suicidal pilot would likely seek to hide his tracks by turning off all forms of communications and relying only on navigational aids. Hence, what we already know and have available as evidence do not cohere with the theory, and thus I think even this theory can be ruled out.
Theory 2: Aircraft malfunction
Let us now consider the second theory – aircraft malfunction. There are two variations within this theory: hypoxia – a fatal loss of oxygen – or a fire.
Hypoxia could have occurred intentionally, as described in the first theory, but it could also have been the result of an aircraft malfunction, such as the failure of the pilot to pressurise the aircraft. The latter is likely ruled out, as experienced pilots have stated that the tight turns made just as the plane approached Vietnamese air space had to be manually controlled (Supra n 3). Further, if the plane had issues with pressurisation, there would have been warnings on the flight instruments to indicate that the aircraft was not pressurised. While the failure of these instruments cannot be ruled out, the pilot should still have been able to bring the plane down safely by making a tight turn and heading back towards Malaysia – unless something happened like with Helios Airways Flight 522. In Flight 522, the pilots elected to troubleshoot rather than donning their emergency oxygen supplies – which led to hypoxia-induced disorientation before the pilots passed out, leaving the plane to crash after it ran out of fuel.
Assuming that the Inmarsat satellite data and presumed flight route can be trusted, a viable argument might be that Captain Shah was able to control the plane until after the final turn towards the southern Indian Ocean, where he may have then been overcome by hypoxia, and the plane crashed as with Flight 522. However, the flight path seems to suggest that the plane was under controlled flight, which seemingly rules out the possibility of Captain Shah suffering from hypoxia.
The second explanation is a catastrophic fire onboard that brought it down before it could reach safety (Goodfellow, 2014). It is speculated that fire could have started in the cargo hold due to MH370 transporting lithium-ion batteries, a known hazard in light of the fires onboard 787 jets. Such fires could be paralleled to UPS Airlines Flight 6, where an uncontrollable lithium-battery fire in the cargo hold spread rapidly through the aircraft and caused the 747 jet to crash soon after take-off.
This is a straightforward theory, which hypothesised that the pilot turned back, heading straight towards the nearest airport, Langkawi, but could not make the airport in time due to technical difficulties and a lack of time. Communication links may have been severed due to the fire consuming the electrical wirings. However, this theory is problematic for 2 reasons. Firstly, recovered debris showed no signs of a pre-crash fire. Charring, if any, were localised and suggested a post-crash fire (BBC Australia, 2016). Secondly, this theory is self-contradictory: if the fire was catastrophic enough to have caused incapacitation of the pilot, it should logically have burnt through the plane before it could trek across the Thailand-Malaysia border and into the Indian Ocean, as there would not have been anyone actively fighting the fire by that point.
Having almost ruled out the plausibility of this theory, let us examine the third, and most interesting theory – the possibility of a North Korean hijacking and intervention.
Theory 3: North Korea
The North Korean theory advocated for by Redditor Brock_McEwen argues that officials falsified the time that contact with MH370 was lost, and that the plane was actually contacted later by other aircraft in the vicinity. He further speculates that reports, that have since disappeared, indicated a mayday signal from the aircraft, and was coupled with witness reports of a fiery plane crash in the South China Sea alongside a debris field spotted by other passenger jets. The theory claims that satellite images of a debris field were also subsequently removed from the database of the satellite companies that took them (McEwen, 2021).
In this post, McEwen also explains that North Korea most likely ‘cyberjacked’ the aircraft – using internet or communication links to hijack – which led the aircraft to be shot down over the South China Sea. He argues that North Korea did this to show its ability to bring down any aircraft it wants, and that it would do so if provoked or in self-defence. Additionally, he asserts that the ‘official’ consensus, that the aircraft went down in the southern Indian Ocean, is false. Further, he claims that the wreckage found in the Indian Ocean was planted. Mr McEwen explains that a reason for such a massive coverup would be to prevent the collapse of global economies, as air travel is a large revenue generator.
As with the other explanations, this conspiracy theory is easily disproved for a number of reasons. Firstly, North Korea is unlikely to possess the technologies that allow for ‘cyberjacking’. The patent for a similar technology was only filed in 2006 by Boeing, who confirmed that it was not installed on any aircraft (Supra n 1 at section 1.6.10). Nevertheless, even if Boeing was lying, and North Korea has successfully replicated this technology, targeting MH370 seems an odd decision, and one that would have significantly less impact than, for example, downing Air Force One. Besides, if North Korea had wanted to further prove a point through the cyberjacking of aircrafts, we would likely have seen more MH370-style disappearances, given the tensions between North Korea and the West.
Next, the allegations that the wreckage were planted don’t ring true, because it is logistically difficult to mask a salvage operation in the high seas, before transplanting the evidence to a completely separate location. While it might be argued that currents could have brought some of the wreckage to the Indian Ocean, the sheer distance required for the wreckage to travel makes it almost impossible to be the case. Additionally, there is little to no reason for the American, Australian, Malaysian or North Korean governments to collude and conduct such a covert operation, as it would simply pave the way for North Korea to then claim responsibility for the shooting of the plane, using evidence of the wreckage – and the subsequent mass cover-up – as a bargaining chip for what the regime wants.
Finally, the cover-up theory is almost impossible, as it relies on finding a common need for global powers to stay silent against North Korea. Given that more than half of the people onboard MH370 were Chinese citizens, if North Korea had indeed ‘cyberjacked’ the aircraft, such an event would certainly anger China. China is one of North Korea’s closest allies, and would likely turn against the regime, much to North Korea’s detriment. Besides, the logistical arrangement for such a cover-up would likely be prohibitively expensive – far more so than actions such as sanctions against North Korea.
Conclusion
In analysing three of the most popular theories for its disappearance, we are no nearer to the truth behind what happened to MH370. The scant availability of evidence leads to ideas that are often far-fetched and ridiculous, with little to no link between known evidence. This is made worse by alternative news outlets perpetuating alternative theories, where links between the theory and evidence are difficult to draw, in order to increase traffic to their websites.
Thus, I hope that this article inspires you not to buy into compelling theories straightaway, but instead sit down and pick them apart one by one. Regardless of whether we trust official reports and the mainstream media, I believe it is critical that we actively exercise logic and compassion, questioning every fact and evidence brought to the table when determining what truly happened.
Certainly, judgment made regarding this incident must be done with caution and compassion for both the family of those who are missing, and to fellow aviators, who will always find this topic painful to revisit. Speculation without merit only serves to aggravate the grieving families, not just by giving them false hope, but also unnecessarily draining them of their resources and energy in researching and following up on supposed ‘theories’. Only impartial treatment and analysis of evidence from different perspectives can help all of us get closer to the truth and providing the closure needed by the families of the 239 souls on board.
Without doubt, as more evidence might surface in the future, I believe we may be able to join the dots and uncover the truth behind the disappearance of MH370. But until that happens, we should continue to vigorously test theories with every information we have before we claim to know the truth.
References
Ministry of Transport Malaysia. (2017). Safety Investigation Report, MH370. Ministry of Transport, Malaysia.
Westcott, R. (16 April, 2015). Flight MH370: Could it have been suicide? Retrieved from BBC News: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31736835
Tom Westbrook, J. F. (3 October, 2017). Report on MH370 finds ‘initially similar’ route on pilot’s flight simulator. Retrieved from Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-malaysia-airlines-mh370-idUSKCN1C8090
Australian Transport Safety Bureau. (2017). The Operational Search for MH370. Canberra: Australian Transport Safety Bureau.
Kitching, C. (17 June, 2019). ‘Depressed’ MH370 captain ‘locked co-pilot out of cockpit and crashed jet’. Retrieved from Daily Mirror: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/depressed-mh370-captain-locked-co-16530787
Langewiesche, W. (17 June, 2019). What Really Happened to Malaysia’s Missing Airplane. Retrieved from The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-malaysia-airlines/590653/
Llewelyn, A. (26 February, 2020). MH370 breakthrough: Expert explains plane’s fate as US pilot’s claim ridiculed. Retrieved from Daily Express: https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/1247339/mh370-news-malaysia-airlines-flight-370-jeff-wise-byron-bailey-spt
Goodfellow, C. (18 March, 2014). A Startlingly Simple Theory About the Missing Malaysia Airlines Jet. Retrieved from wired magazine: https://www.wired.com/2014/03/mh370-electrical-fire/
Engel, P. (16 October, 2015). Aviation expert presents a new theory for what happened to missing flight MH370. Retrieved from Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/exploding-batteries-in-mh370-cargo-hold-2015-10
BBC Australia. (22 September, 2016). MH370 search: Doubts over ‘debris burn marks’. Retrieved from BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-37437651
McEwen, B. (March, 2021). MH370: New credible evidence of location. Retrieved from reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MH370/comments/ly736i/mh370_new_credible_evidence_of_location/gqulhw7?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Ohconfucius. (October, 2013). MAS Plane. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MAS_plane.jpg
English is a wonderfully flexible language, and modern lexicographers tend towards descriptivism rather than trying to stem the tide of new meanings. Definitions change with usage, with one most notable example being “literally”, which in English dictionaries has both the original meaning, and also the sense often employed today, in which literally is used to mean “virtually” or “metaphorically”. While it upsets Daily Mail comment pedants, this is how English has always worked; if a term is widely used to mean something, then that’s what it means.
Which brings us to a different group of pedants: skeptics. I confess that I have railed against the use of certain terms being used incorrectly – and suspect many readers have too. Where should we stand our semantic ground, and where are we trying to close the linguistic barn door after the horse has bolted?
‘UFOs’
What some more pedantic skeptics think it means: unidentified objects that are, you know, flying.
What everyone else thinks it means: alien spaceships
I hear UFO and think that the speaker means an object that’s flying and hasn’t been specifically identified. Unfortunately, the rest of the world thinks of alien spaceships, to the point that the Cambridge Dictionary definition is:
an object seen in the sky that is thought to be a spacecraft from another planet
The reports make it very clear that they believe some reports to be “sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misperception” and that others may be “technologies deployed by China, Russia, another nation, or non-governmental entity”, rather than presuming aliens, though that explanation isn’t ruled out. Someone in the US government has been thinking hard about this very issue, referring to UAP – unexplained aerial phenomena – rather than UFOs, presumably in an effort to avoid the assumptions and stigma associated with the term. Those efforts are laudable and maybe an approach for us to consider pursuing, but for now everyone from The Economist to The New York Times still goes with the term UFO in their headlines.
It seems to me that we skeptical pedants have already lost this one.
‘Chiropractors’ (also: ‘Osteopaths’)
What skeptics think it means: Pseudoscientific practitioners of unproven and broadly ineffective treatments that use spinal manipulation.
What everyone else a lot of other people think it means: back doctors.
This was one of several early entry points for me to the world of skepticism. A ridiculously tall chap, I was prone to joint and back pain even in my relative youth. On one visit to the doctor I mused out loud that maybe what I needed was to be referred to a chiropractor or osteopath. The GP almost physically recoiled from me and assured me that while physiotherapy might be required, an osteopath or chiropractor most certainly was not. Your curious young author went home and spent a good amount of time on the internet untangling the difference.
Like a good portion of the general public, I had mistakenly thought that chiropractor simply referred to specialist back doctors, when of course chiropractic is based on the idea that vertebral misalignment is responsible for all manner of health conditions, and can be cured through spinal manipulation. Of course studies have failed to show that it is an effective treatment for any condition, although there may be some evidence for use in certain back conditions.
Osteopathy is a little different, with osteopathy now increasingly merging in the USA with mainstream medicine, but the origin of osteopathy is found in pseudoscientific roots rather like chiropractic, with its founder Andrew Still claiming that he could “shake a child and stop scarlet fever, croup, diphtheria, and cure whooping cough in three days by a wring of its neck.” Yikes.
This one isn’t over, and as skeptics we should at least try to stem the tide here. If you have muscle pain, you need a physiotherapist. If you somehow missed your vaccines as a baby and have diphtheria then you need to seek urgent medical attention and antibiotics, not to be shaken or have your spine manipulated.
This distinction is well worth maintaining.
‘Placebo’ / ‘Placebo Effect’
What some GPs and doctors mean: placebos are something innocuous that you know won’t help, given to make a patient feel better temporarily, and to get the patient off your back in the process.
What some scientists and skeptics mean: patients in the placebo arm of a randomised controlled trial (RCT) to test the efficacy of a drug will be given an inert substance that looks, tastes and seems a lot like the actual treatment. The placebo effect refers to all the factors beyond the study’s control – regression to the mean, subjective improvements, other researcher errors, and so forth.
What some other skeptics, medics and scientists mean: innocuous placebo treatments create an effect, presumably caused by some hitherto unknown mechanism, that not only creates subjective improvements, but somehow also objective improvements.
What everyone else thinks: Everyone else is confused, and who can blame them when they have different qualified groups sending them such mixed messages.
Clinical researchers have known since the introduction of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) that the placebo effect was describing the bias, error, illusory effects, conditioning, and subjective improvements that they needed to account for when testing the efficacy of a new drug. The whole point of placebos, a term much older than the RCT, is that they provide an innocuous soothing result in a patient, but that they don’t do anything.
Somehow along the way (and discussed in detail by Mike Hall in more than a few episodes of the Skeptics with a K podcast) other scientists, researchers and even skeptics misunderstood this and started assuming that placebos were having real effects that could create actual, objective improvements in medical conditions, including, most famously, Dr Ben Goldacre:
The placebo effect, similarly, can mislead us all: people really can get better, in some cases, simply from taking a dummy pill with no active ingredients, and by believing their treatments to be effective.
This is not the case, however. It has been found that the effect of placebo on the patient is subjective rather than objective. Patients given sugar pills feel better, but they are not actually objectively any better.
This is one of those times when both UK and US dictionaries have this down entirely correctly, and it is incumbent upon skeptics to educate ourselves and others, because purveyors of pseudosciences such as acupuncture are already using the “powerful placebo” myth to justify their nonsense.
‘Risk’ (increased / reduced)
What scientists often mean: the measured increase or decrease in the probability of a specific thing happening when you change a variable, compared to baseline for the situation.
What almost everyone hears: if I do this thing I will be safe / If I do this thing I will be in terrible danger.
Apples fight cancer (and heart disease, and strokes) says The Daily Mail, an organ renowned for its apparent mission to decide whether everything either cures or causes cancer:
The latest pioneering research in America has revealed that drinking apple juice and eating apples can reduce the risk of heart disease.
As obsessive as the Daily Mail is on this subject, manyothernewsorganisations also report on this sort of thing, with one recent prominent example being the finding that consuming bacon and other processed meats:
can significantly raise the risk of bowel cancer, one of the deadliest forms of the disease.
The word I’m picking on here is risk (though I could have picked on significant) and the inability of newspapers remember to include the word “relative” when appropriate. Statistics are complicated, but I am sure that the average mid-market tabloid reader can cope with the following, as explained by JV Chamary:
Many people will interpret “increases the risk of colorectal cancer by 18%” to mean a rise from zero to 18%. But that increase isn’t absolute risk – it’s the relative risk.
To put the figure in perspective: the risk of developing lung cancer is 23.6 times higher among male smokers than non-smokers, so smoking increases the relative risk by 2360%. So if you started with a hypothetical 5% risk of developing bowel cancer, consuming 50g of bacon every day would only raise your risk to almost 6%.
This detail was in the original research, of course, but it is absent from some of the coverage and only alluded to indirectly in the other coverage.
Does it matter? We all know a balanced diet and minimising comparatively unhealthy foods like bacon is for the best, but in the middle of a global pandemic, understanding risk in a more nuanced way is more important than ever. As vaccine take-up slows in the UK we have probably all spoken with friends and family hesitant to be vaccinated, as they are concerned about the risks of the vaccine, even though (comparing like with like) COVID-19 is a greater risk in all adult groups compared to the Pfizer vaccine, and all age groups over 30s for the AstraZeneca vaccine.
I know that bold statements in headlines sell papers and attract eyeballs, but if people misunderstand the risk of being vaccinated (after all, it is not risk-free) compared to the risk of COVID-19, then unfortunately people could die.
What everyone elsemeans: a belief used as a basis for action; or conjecture, or speculation.
This is a source of enormous frustration for anyone arguing with creationists, who are known to insist that the theory of evolution is “only a theory”. Evolution by natural selection is a theory, of course – and it is fact! – but this argument relies partly on the lay use of the word theory, which does literally mean speculation, at least in one common usage, and has done since the late 16th century, some decades before it was used in a more scientific context.
There’s very little that can be done about this, except to be aware of the divergence in meaning in a lay and scientific context, and to remember that if you’re arguing with a creationist online you’re probably not going to convince them anyway.
‘Critical thinking’
What most skeptics and educators mean: analysing facts carefully to come to a reasoned judgement.
What other skeptics mean: I’m a critical thinker and can point out logical flaws in arguments, so I’m always right.
What some other people assume is meant: criticising.
Obviously critical thinking and criticism are different, but it isn’t helpful that some dictionaries, including Merriam Webster, don’t even attempt to define this one.
University websites are rather more useful, and I think that Stanford has it down pretty well:
Its definition is contested, but the competing definitions can be understood as differing conceptions of the same basic concept: careful thinking directed to a goal… “Critical thinkers” have the dispositions and abilities that lead them to think critically when appropriate… Controversies have arisen over the generalizability of critical thinking across domains, over alleged bias in critical thinking theories and instruction, and over the relationship of critical thinking to other types of thinking. [emphasis mine]
I’ve spoken with lecturers whose students embrace critical thinking a little too wholeheartedly, believing that they should question every single fact they’re taught to an unmanageable degree, but as a rule, higher education is all about critical thinking and professors welcome students who are critical thinkers – especially those who are willing to apply the methods to their own claims.
Skeptics also like to think that we’re critical thinkers, but I do sometimes wonder if we, too, embrace the critical a little too readily, and assume that just because we can spot a logical fallacy that we must be right, our opponent is stupid and victory is assured. Don’t forget that the average conspiracy theorist believes they’re just as rational, reflective and unbiased in their thinking as the next person, even if they actually score badly as critical thinkers!
I think that the best way for critical thinking to be more widely understood is to use it (appropriately), fly the flag for it (when appropriate), and don’t be a jerk (unless appropriate!).
