Bad Science

by Ben Goldacre

You cannot reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.

This process of professionalising the obvious fosters a sense of mystery around science, and health advice, which is unnecessary and destructive. More than anything, more than the unnecessary ownership of the obvious, it is disempowering. All too often this spurious privatisation of common sense is happening in areas where we could be taking control, doing it ourselves, feeling our own potency and our ability to make sensible decisions; instead we are fostering our dependence on expensive outside systems and people.

can very happily view posh cosmetics—and other forms of quackery—as a special, self-administered, voluntary tax on people who don’t understand science properly.

As Voltaire said: ‘The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.’

Believing in things which have no evidence carries its own corrosive intellectual side-effects,

The philosopher Professor Harry Frankfurt of Princeton University discusses this issue at length in his classic 1986 essay ‘On Bullshit’. Under his model, ‘bullshit’ is a form of falsehood distinct from lying: the liar knows and cares about the truth, but deliberately sets out to mislead; the truth-speaker knows the truth and is trying to give it to us; the bullshitter, meanwhile, does not care about the truth, and is simply trying to impress us:

as George Orwell first noted, the true genius in advertising is to sell you the solution and the problem.

Imagine a table with four cards on it, marked ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘2’ and ‘3’. Each card has a letter on one side, and a number on the other. Your task is to determine whether all cards with a vowel on one side have an even number on the other. Which two cards would you turn over? Everybody chooses the ‘A’ card, obviously, but like many people—unless you really forced yourself to think hard about it—you would probably choose to turn over the ‘2’ card as well. That’s because these are the cards which would produce information consistent with the hypothesis you are supposed to be testing. But in fact, the cards you need to flip are the ‘A’ and the ‘3’, because finding a vowel on the back of the ‘2’ would tell you nothing about ‘all cards’, it would just confirm ‘some cards’, whereas finding a vowel on the back of ‘3’ would comprehensively disprove your hypothesis. This modest brainteaser demonstrates our tendency, in our unchecked intuitive reasoning style, to seek out information that confirms a hypothesis: and it demonstrates the phenomenon in a value-neutral situation. This same bias in seeking out confirmatory information has been demonstrated in more sophisticated social psychology experiments.