Talk:Pathological science

Attribution

I'm impressed that Irving Langmuir managed to co-author a paper published in 1989 despite being dead since 1957. How did he manage this astonishing feat ? Did he write his bit in 1956 and then send it to his co-author who took his time over the rest ? Or is it someone else of the same name -- in which case the beginning of the article needs changing. --Derek Ross 03:01 Apr 24, 2003 (UTC)

"A New Kind of Science" and Wolfram

I saw that someone removed mention of Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" from this article. I had originally placed mention of it in the pseudoscience article, but someone suggested that it did not really belong there because ANKOS does not really have any following (adherents who believe in the path being preached by Wolfram), and a field must have some kind of following to qualify as a psuedoscience. Fields with just one adherent (the author in this case) would more properly belong to an article on "crank science" or "pathological science" or "junk science" or some other descriptive term.

All the reviews that I have read to date of ANKOS have been, frankly, scathing, though all the reviewers have been too polite (or more likely, too afraid of lawsuits) to call it pseudoscience. Yet the article on ANKOS has been rewritten recently to remove any hint of what seems to be universally critical opinion regarding the work. So someone please tell me, where is the proper place on the Wikipedia to point out that in the opinion of many, Wolfram has gone off the deep end. --Grizzly 06:40, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

"removed mention of Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science""?

ANKOS does not really have any following

"adherents"?

"path being preached by Wolfram"?

"field must have some kind of following to qualify as a psuedoscience"? Woh ... that's entirely POV ... he has some ppl [ie. a limited group] that follow him ..

"Fields with just one adherent"? is theredata to support that?

"the author in this case"? yea he's a smart guy ...

"properly belong to an article on "crank science""? bzzt ... =-] I think it wouldn't fit there ... mabey abit fringe (and speculative), but not psuedo ... more like protoscience ...

"pathological science"? he is on a mission ...

""junk science""? IYO again I see ...

"descriptive term"? hmmm ... =-\ ...

"All the reviews that I have read to date of ANKOS have been, frankly, scathing"? hmmm ... I'll look into that ...

IYO "reviewers have been too polite"? I see the POV now ...

"or more likely, too afraid of lawsuits" rightly so ...

"call it pseudoscience"? no ... because it's not ...

"Universally critical opinion"? I don't think that is the case ... though criticism should be acknowledged ...

"where is the proper place on the Wikipedia to point out that in the opinion of many, Wolfram has gone off the deep end"? In the protoscience article or in the specified article ... --Sincerely, JDR

It defnitely belongs in the ANKOS article. That article is currently nothing more than a summary of the book, and is strongly POV (supporting the book's arguments). I would recommend rearrange the article so there's a section on a summary, and a section on criticisms, including rebuttals of the criticisms. If I knew the criticisms myself I would work on it. --zandperl 14:09, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Bad criticism

Geez-uss! What an article!

Ok, I have removed the entirety of the "Criticisms" section. Not a single example offered had ever been referred to as "pathological science". Hell, with the possible exception of Mpemba effect and Halton Arp, they all predate the invention of the term.

Oh sure, people didn't believe the examples, but that's not even remotely the same thing. If someone can offer examples of things that were called pathological science and later turned out not to be, put it in there.

For the record: just because people say you are full of crap doesn't mean they say you're involved in pathological science. read the &^%$%^ definitions people!!! --Maury

You have missed the point of the examples entirely. It is not that there were called pathological because that term was only coined in the early twentieth century. The point is that critics of the concept claim that those issues satisfied Langmuire's criteria quite as soundly as do N-rays. What would help the article be NPOV would be a table of those examples showing exactly what Langmuire would have thought was pathological about them. I agree that the old article was a mess and you have done a brave job in cleaning it up but I think it is now less NPOV. --Cutler 10:13, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)

None of those examples were pathological, for precisely the reasons you quote. You state that "those issues satisfied Langmuire's criteria quite as soundly as do N-rays", yet I claim that with the two exceptions I offered, none of them come even remotely close to satisfying any of the conditions.

To be pathological the experimenter must be working on something at the edge of detectability, and defend it with ad-hoc "answers". Would you agree that this is the crux of Langmuire's definition?

Let's take the most modern of the examples given in the original article, prions. Did prions fit any of the "rules" for pathological science? Was it at the limit of detectability? No. Were there claims of great accuracy? No. Were critisms met with ad-hoc answers? No. Did the ratio of supporters fade to oblivion? No.

Prions, in fact, are exactly typical for science. A new idea was offered that flew in the face of current thinking, and the supporters offered more and more, stronger and stronger, evidence for their position. After a while the evidence became overwhelming. There is nothing pathological about this example, no one has ever called it that, nor does this example illustrate anything out of the ordinary: this is the normal evolution of a theory -- and the same is true of Vitamin C, Alfvén waves and most of the other examples offered.

Let's take another, one that's perhaps a better illustration because it shows the opposite. The article suggested that Langmuir's introduction of the term was ironic, because he was a "believer" in the cubical atom. The implication is that he was subject to this problem himself. Yet once again this example fails on all counts. In fact its a perfect example of the difference between something being "wrong" and something being "pathological", Langmuir gave up on the concept as soon as it became clear that the Bohr model was a better solution to the problem.

Again, I'm more than willing to include examples of pathological science that turned out not to be -- in fact I think the article is missing an important part without them -- but I note again that not one of those examples was pathological. --Maury 13:29, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Let's focus on what we agree on. Am I right in thinking that you agree that the issue is around the extent to which these ideas satisfy Langmuire's criteria, rather than whether anybody actually used the term pathological? The question is then a) What were Langmuire's criteria? b) To what extent to various departures in science satisfy the criteria? Though of course, this feels all very content and PoV, rather than reporting what various people have contended? What we are trying to embark on here is a test of the usefuleness of the idea pathological science, rather than an encyclopedia article. If there are only the two of us interested in this it is not worth writing about. --Cutler 00:02, 16 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Maury Markowitz writes: "none of them come even remotely close to satisfying any of the conditions." I amended the article to point out that cold fusion also fails to meet any of the conditions set by Langumuir, except possibly #6. Skeptics often claim that cold fusion meets these conditions, but the literature shows it does not. (This does not prove that cold fusion is real. It may even be pathological for some other reasons that Langumuir never thought of.) Nowhere in the cold fusion literature does anyone claim "great accuracy." Experimentalists do not cite fantastic theories or make ad hoc excuses. They do not claim that, "many measurements are necessary because of the very low statistical significance of the results." [1] This raises an interesting point: many other scientific claims do require multiple measurements. The top quark is a good example. Yet no one says it is pathological. Even people who agree that pathological science exists would probably say that the top quark would have to meet several of these criteria before it fits. Since cold fusion does not meet any of them, logically it should not be listed in this article. However, skeptics universally claim that it does meet them, so for practical purposes it should probably be listed here with a disclaimer. Also as a practical matter, if we took it out I am sure they would quickly add it back in.

(I do not know why the skeptics keep claiming cold fusion meets these criteria. I suppose they have not read any papers on the subject. It seems odd to make a case that anyone can see is wrong as a matter of fact. In other words, you might claim that cold fusion researchers are inept, but it is a matter of fact that they say they use ordinary instruments with ordinary accuracy, and they never say they have to make multiple measurements to resolve the signal.)

On balance, I think Langumuir's rule-of-thumb criteria cause more harm than good. At best they are thought provoking, but for the most part they are used by closed minded people to ignore replicated experimental evidence. --Jed Rothwell

[1] Let me amend that. In some (but not all) studies of neutrons, statistical techniques are used. I am not aware of reports of excess heat, tritium or other evidence that required statistical techniques to separate signal from noise. Note that the quote about "many measurments" came from F. Franks, "Polywater," (MIT Press, 1981) in his discussion of Langumiur's criteria.

Criticisms: the list of examples

The current list of examples of stuff that allegedly has been misclassified as pathological science is not, in its present form, worth retention in the article.

Two of the five are so obscure that one can't even find out what they are in Wikipedia. One other (freezing hot water) is scientifically trivial, not involving any alleged scientific breakthrough in the first place. None of the non-trivial four is something that has won out over the pig-headed opposition of the Establishment and thus serves a clear example of how useless the PS concept is. (Certainly, we all understand that the key to "pathological science" is not whether it turned out right or wrong, but how the claimed discovery was handled by its proponents; but something that has turned out to be right still makes a much more convincing example.)

The list as given in this article does not show evidence that any of the items has been called pathological; nor are there apparent grounds for calling them so.

The Wikipedia articles on two non-trivial items show criticisms, but no accusations of pathological science, or allegations that such accusations have been made. They also show no good reason, under Langmuir's rules, for applying the term.

Somebody who considers the list to be valid will want to make emendations. It ain't me, babe. --Dandrake 20:24, Sep 14, 2004 (UTC)

I'm with you. The list is rubish. Moreover Langmuir's belief in the cubical atom, apparently offered as irony, is an example of something that was NOT pathological -- when Bohr's theory showed a clearly better way to conceive the atom, everyone was happy to adbandon the earlier system. Lysenkoism isn't because no one believed it; if anyone supported it, it was to stay out of jail. J-phenomenon hits on google are primarily copies of this article. Halton Arp is a crank, not pathological. Mpemba effect, as you note, is a real event and the only debate is why it happens. None of these are pathological, nor ever been named as such. As examples of things that have been "inappropriately described as either pathological science or incorrect" the list contains either items that are not pathological (and were never described as such) or things that ARE incorrect. --Maury 02:46, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)