Post by Amaris on Feb 10, 2010 18:10:42 GMT
www.csicop.org/si/show/stephen_fry--last_chance_to_think/
Stephen Fry interviewed for the Skeptical Inquirer by Kylie Sturgess in the Jan/Feb edition. Here is a portion of that interview, click the link to read the rest.
Very well put I think
Stephen Fry interviewed for the Skeptical Inquirer by Kylie Sturgess in the Jan/Feb edition. Here is a portion of that interview, click the link to read the rest.
Sturgess: In that documentary, apparently there’s an account of a healing ceremony in Madagascar, which is something you’ve touched upon before in your novel The Hippopotamus. Why do you think pseudoscientific claims, such as holistic healing, continue to pervade our society despite advances in medicine?
Fry: Well, my interpretation is no more valid than anyone else’s, but I would say in terms of medicine, people want to take control of their own lives, and ironically they seem to think that they are taking control of their lives more by using so-called complementary or alternative medicines than by using orthodox medicine. In other words, they think it’s a statement of originality and individuality. To you and me it seems self-evidently ridiculous, this homeopathic medicine. It is so preposterous, and yet some people I know and respect insist on believing it.
The powers of the placebo are so strong that it may be morally wrong to call homeopathy a lie because the moment you say it then a placebo falls to pieces and loses its power. I am a great believer in double-blind random testing, which is the basis of all drug testing. People still insist on things like holistic healing and things that have no real basis in evidence because they want it to be true—it’s as simple as that. If you’re dying of cancer or very, very ill, then you’ll cling to a straw. I feel pretty dark thoughts about the kind of people who throw straws at drowning, dying men and women, and I’m sure most of us would agree it’s a pretty lousy thing to do. Some of these people perhaps believe in the snake oil they sell or allow themselves to believe in it. That’s why James Randi is so good, because he knows what magicians know: if you do a card trick on someone, they will report that it was unbelievable, they describe the effect the magician wanted, and they miss out all the steps in between that seemed irrelevant because the magician made them irrelevant, so they didn’t notice them. People will swear that a clairvoyant mentioned the name of their aunt from nowhere, and they will be astonished if you then play a recording that shows that thirty-two names were said before the aunt’s name, none of which had any effect on them. That’s because they wanted to hear their aunt’s name; they wanted the trick to work, so they forgot all the failures in the same way as people forget all their dreams that have no relevance to their lives, but they mark when they dream of someone they haven’t met for ages that they see the next day. I would be astounded if everyone had coincidences like that—yet people say that is somehow closed-minded of me!
Sturgess: Of course, it’s not just the pseudosciences that pervade; there are also paranormal beliefs. I was wondering if you’re surprised that the same beliefs exist today?
Fry: No, I am not surprised. I hope I know enough about history and human nature to agree that there is one born every minute and to know that there is desperation to make sense of things, and making sense of the universe isn’t easy. Making sense of our own lives isn’t easy. There are different ways of doing it—by observing people, by reading novels and poetry, by looking at paintings, listening to music, allowing our minds to concentrate on the experiences we had and the observations we’ve made about how people behave. Then in a wider sense we can look at the world and make observations about how animals behave and what they look like and why they look like it, why rain falls, and all kinds of phenomena that occur, and we can do this by observation, experiment, repetition, and understanding. This is essentially what we call the scientific method, the empirical method, more importantly.
Or, we can cheat—we can just say “there’s an invisible person that makes it happen,” or the stars tell you, or it’s all predestined, or it’s something to do with an inborn power of the mind, which isn’t the power of learning. In other words, you can be lazy; instead of bothering to find how numbers work or observing how animals behave, you just say it’s all according to some cosmic vibration. Sad, but people naturally want to cut corners, much as water wants to go the shortest route to the sea, so human beings want to find the shortest route to the truth, but unfortunately that takes them to the great “ocean of bulls*it” that lies out there and to all those people prepared to make money out of them. All the cold-reading clairvoyants and the nonsensical astrologers and absurd ESP merchants and other such people who talk about vibrations and energies.... God, if there’s a word that drives me mad it’s “energy” used in a nonsensical way—don’t get me started!
Let’s just say that, to me, the true mystery of the universe is something that is available to all, not through the arcane rules of some nonsensical, unprovable drivel—but is there for your eyes, it is there to see by just simply recognizing observable laws and repeatable instances of things like sunsets and how they work. And seeing what we’ve done on the basis of that understanding, so every time that you flick a light switch or turn on a GPS, you have to realize on what that GPS is predicated, on the science—without it the GPS couldn’t possibly work. The fact that Earth must be round, the fact that it must move at this speed, the fact that geostationary orbit means this, the fact that triangulation means that—all these things tell us so much how science is right.
Fry: Well, my interpretation is no more valid than anyone else’s, but I would say in terms of medicine, people want to take control of their own lives, and ironically they seem to think that they are taking control of their lives more by using so-called complementary or alternative medicines than by using orthodox medicine. In other words, they think it’s a statement of originality and individuality. To you and me it seems self-evidently ridiculous, this homeopathic medicine. It is so preposterous, and yet some people I know and respect insist on believing it.
The powers of the placebo are so strong that it may be morally wrong to call homeopathy a lie because the moment you say it then a placebo falls to pieces and loses its power. I am a great believer in double-blind random testing, which is the basis of all drug testing. People still insist on things like holistic healing and things that have no real basis in evidence because they want it to be true—it’s as simple as that. If you’re dying of cancer or very, very ill, then you’ll cling to a straw. I feel pretty dark thoughts about the kind of people who throw straws at drowning, dying men and women, and I’m sure most of us would agree it’s a pretty lousy thing to do. Some of these people perhaps believe in the snake oil they sell or allow themselves to believe in it. That’s why James Randi is so good, because he knows what magicians know: if you do a card trick on someone, they will report that it was unbelievable, they describe the effect the magician wanted, and they miss out all the steps in between that seemed irrelevant because the magician made them irrelevant, so they didn’t notice them. People will swear that a clairvoyant mentioned the name of their aunt from nowhere, and they will be astonished if you then play a recording that shows that thirty-two names were said before the aunt’s name, none of which had any effect on them. That’s because they wanted to hear their aunt’s name; they wanted the trick to work, so they forgot all the failures in the same way as people forget all their dreams that have no relevance to their lives, but they mark when they dream of someone they haven’t met for ages that they see the next day. I would be astounded if everyone had coincidences like that—yet people say that is somehow closed-minded of me!
Sturgess: Of course, it’s not just the pseudosciences that pervade; there are also paranormal beliefs. I was wondering if you’re surprised that the same beliefs exist today?
Fry: No, I am not surprised. I hope I know enough about history and human nature to agree that there is one born every minute and to know that there is desperation to make sense of things, and making sense of the universe isn’t easy. Making sense of our own lives isn’t easy. There are different ways of doing it—by observing people, by reading novels and poetry, by looking at paintings, listening to music, allowing our minds to concentrate on the experiences we had and the observations we’ve made about how people behave. Then in a wider sense we can look at the world and make observations about how animals behave and what they look like and why they look like it, why rain falls, and all kinds of phenomena that occur, and we can do this by observation, experiment, repetition, and understanding. This is essentially what we call the scientific method, the empirical method, more importantly.
Or, we can cheat—we can just say “there’s an invisible person that makes it happen,” or the stars tell you, or it’s all predestined, or it’s something to do with an inborn power of the mind, which isn’t the power of learning. In other words, you can be lazy; instead of bothering to find how numbers work or observing how animals behave, you just say it’s all according to some cosmic vibration. Sad, but people naturally want to cut corners, much as water wants to go the shortest route to the sea, so human beings want to find the shortest route to the truth, but unfortunately that takes them to the great “ocean of bulls*it” that lies out there and to all those people prepared to make money out of them. All the cold-reading clairvoyants and the nonsensical astrologers and absurd ESP merchants and other such people who talk about vibrations and energies.... God, if there’s a word that drives me mad it’s “energy” used in a nonsensical way—don’t get me started!
Let’s just say that, to me, the true mystery of the universe is something that is available to all, not through the arcane rules of some nonsensical, unprovable drivel—but is there for your eyes, it is there to see by just simply recognizing observable laws and repeatable instances of things like sunsets and how they work. And seeing what we’ve done on the basis of that understanding, so every time that you flick a light switch or turn on a GPS, you have to realize on what that GPS is predicated, on the science—without it the GPS couldn’t possibly work. The fact that Earth must be round, the fact that it must move at this speed, the fact that geostationary orbit means this, the fact that triangulation means that—all these things tell us so much how science is right.
Very well put I think