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I'm getting kind of an asshole reputation for always arguing with friends who are deeply into C/AM. But I'm also starting to realize it's exactly like arguing w

by Udo 14y ago

I'm getting kind of an asshole reputation for always arguing with friends who are deeply into C/AM. But I'm also starting to realize it's exactly like arguing with a religious person - there is absolutely nothing you can say to make them realize their faith is based on fallacies. There is absolutely no correlation between the general intelligence of a person and the ridiculousness of their belief claims. You could be talking astrophysics one minute and the next you're into a strange shamanistic wonderland where science doesn't exist. I really do think it's a faith-like mental virus. On the whole, it doesn't worry me too much - everyone is entitled to their little domains of craziness and I know I have my own. But what does worry me is the observation that C/AM believers in my environment are almost always women. It feels like a big gaping hole in everything we achieved with women's rights and education. Within my extremely limited horizon of living in a western industrial society, this is in fact the single most worrying trend. It's like a large part of our women went to a parallel universe "girls school", whereas the men in the mean time learned about science and reasoning. I'm at a total loss as to where this gender disparity comes from, but there has to be a vector somewhere. If anyone has any ideas, I'm looking forward to hearing them. If there is anything to be done about this, I'd like to volunteer my time for it.

JPKab 14y ago
I've found that, at least amongst 20 and 30 something age groups, women tend to be more religious too. Now that is my crappy anecdotal observation. It would be interesting to see some real data on that. I'm convinced that the whole C/AM thing taps into an instinctive love of purity. We are wired to care about cleanliness and purity in our food sources. Perhaps women are wired even more this way (the fact that they have superior senses of smell to men might also explain it). The Nazi movement took advantage of many people's innate belief that purity of anything (in their case genetics) is a good thing no matter what. There was an article posted not too long ago about fireplaces, and how bad for you they really are. There are two kinds of people: those who will readily evaluate facts which contradict their pre-conceived beleifs, and those who will immediately dismiss them.
- Udo 14y ago
  I really refuse to accept that women are just "wired for faith", it sounds too similar to the Victorian notion that somehow women are naturally wired for irrationality. There has to be a social reason why this spreads among women, there is a gap somewhere in science education that leaves women more vulnerable to this. And I actually watched it spread. The transmission seems to be helped by exploiting trusted relationships among network nodes, so to speak. But that still doesn't explain why someone is susceptible to the attack in the first place. I'm also skeptical about the purity idea, because it's an arbitrary (and wrong) definition of purity to begin with and there is really no reason why women should be hard-wired to fall for these things. This is traditionally the moment where completely made-up cavemen analogies are introduced, but those are exactly as unscientific as C/AM itself.
  - bitwize 14y ago
    Women are more prone to fall for BS because we enculturate them to believe that emotions and warm fuzzy feelings are a more reliable guide than science and logic. Third-wave feminism is partly to blame; the notion that science and logic are "patriarchal" and that not oppressing women entails a warm and fuzzy "feminine" replacement for disciplined thought is the third wave's doing. Thinking logically, critically, and skeptically is an ungendered activity. Women are as capable of and welcome to it as men are; we should be encouraging the females of our kind to apply reason and evidence to their judgements! Sadly, we're the culture that produced Oprah and turned her into a media mogul powerful enough to make the foundations of the earth tremble.
    - Udo 14y ago
      This is purely an image problem for science education, then. Because there is absolutely nothing warm and fuzzy about the "natural state" or whatever romanticized notion we're entertaining about nature. Applied science, and more importantly, the ability to apply science, enables people to build, cure, protect, predict, ensure, improve, discover, and many other things that are intrinsically more warm and fuzzy than, say, naturally dying of a curable disease.
darxius 14y ago
> I'm at a total loss as to where this gender disparity comes > from, but there has to be a vector somewhere. If anyone has > any ideas, I'm looking forward to hearing them. If there is > anything to be done about this, I'd like to volunteer my > time for it. I'm not sure, but I think a lot of it is marketing. I'm not sure about the numbers but I have a feeling there are more stay at home moms then there are dads. Commercials during the day are highly targeted at this demographic and its possible that this is where most of the misinformation comes from. Also, I know women are proven more emotional than men. Does this also encompass the "spiritual" side of things (a trait which a lot of alternative medicines have)?
- illuminate 14y ago
  The stay at home mom thing does make a lot of sense, there's a strong homeschooling mindset among extremely left-wing moms and extremely right-wing moms, and both tend to be very into CAM.
chez17 14y ago
I am someone totally open to the idea that there are herbs/food/whatever out there that have health benefits. What I never get about people into 'herbalism' is that they just say things and expect everyone to know them to be true. "X herb is good for digestion!" "X herb is good for relaxation!" How do they know this? Never once has one of them showed me a double blind study done that shows this to be true. In America, the process to get something approved by the FDA is long and expensive. If some common herb like basil cured cancer no drug company is going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to prove it just so you can grow it in your back yard and not pay them for their trouble. However, certainly there has to be people willing to do studies on these herbs and I've never been giving one. The most disturbing thing is that this doesn't ever bother these people. Not once have a friend who is into herbs voluntarily provide any study done on any one of these herbs to prove a point. It's always just, "X herb helps with stress!" How do you know that to be true?!?!?
- amalag 14y ago
  the FDA method of approving poisons like modern medicines may not be a relevant methodology for herbs. Before you get all upset I called your favorite prescription medicine a poison, think about what it really is. A poison if taken in high doses. Ayurveda states there are 3 ways to cure disease. Food, herbs and poisons. Modern allopathy is only the third, poisons. It has very little information on how to cure through food and herbs.
  - Nursie 14y ago
    Everything in 'high doses' is a poison, even pure, distilled water. Herbs either contain active chemicals or they're a placebo. If they're a placebo they're as good as taking a sugar pill. If they contain active chemicals they contain unstandardised amounts and probably in concert with all sorts of other things that may or may not be helpful or harmful. Ayurveda is bullshit. QED.
    - up_and_up 14y ago
      > Ayurveda is bullshit My wife is an Ayurvedic practitioner, so yes I am biased, but I dont believe in every aspect of it. I can definitely say it is not "bullshit" and it is indeed helping many of her clients. She has people who come to her, that conventional docs have literally given up on. "We cant figure out what is wrong with your digestion, theres nothing more we can try" she hears stories like that all the time. People ARE being helped. Whether it is all placebo I dont know for sure. but people who literally have no other options in conventional medicine are seeing real results. They are sleeping better w/o medication, they are not having anxiety attacks anymore, I could go on and on with her stories. My wife is pretty humble about it and not selling snake oil etc. People are seeing real results.
rthomas6 14y ago
This comment comes off as sexist to me. I don't think that more women being involved with C/AM means that a larger proportion of women are irrational. Different things are popular with women and men. A large portion of both men and women are irrational. Just because a larger group of irrational women like C/AM compared to men does NOT mean that there is a larger group of irrational women. Conspiracy theories are irrational too, and seem to be much more popular with men. That doesn't mean that there are more irrational men than women.
- Udo 14y ago
  I'm not sure if you're just trolling or whether you're actually responding to the same comment I wrote. > I don't think that more women being involved with C/AM means that a larger proportion of women are irrational. At no point did I say or even imply that. In fact, I explicitly countered that notion as it was presented by another commenter. So my position is kind of the opposite of what you're alleging. Please take the time, go back and read what was actually written. As an aside, does a maneuver still count as Strawman Argument if the position of the original post is exactly reversed, or is there another term for it in that case?
  - rthomas6 14y ago
    This is the part of your comment where I thought you were implying a more general irrationality of women: >It feels like a big gaping hole in everything we achieved with women's rights and education. [. . .] It's like a large part of our women went to a parallel universe "girls school", whereas the men in the mean time learned about science and reasoning. If you're not implying that a large portion of women are less rational than men, what does this section of your comment mean? That is how I interpret it. I guess I interpreted it differently than you intended. Edit: Note that I am not saying you implied that women are inherently less rational than men, which is what I think you countered in another comment. Just that you said they are currently, due to some as-yet unknown reason. I'm trying to dispute this assumption.
    - Udo 14y ago
resu_nimda 14y ago
I wonder if this disparity only arises at the high end of intellect/education. Below that, I find men and women to be indistinguishable in terms of what kind of beliefs and thoughts they will hold (gender-related issues aside). But, it does seem that well-educated men are more likely to develop a hardline obsession with science and rationality. I think emotion and sentiment have a lot to do with it. It's easier for us to take that detached, analytic viewpoint. Disclaimer: This is a big generalization, and there are many people to whom it does not apply, but I do believe it to hold in aggregate.
- tomp 14y ago
  One theory that I've read (unfortunately, even though this is a science thread, I have no studies backing or rejecting this) is that as men are evolutionarily less valuable than women (for reproduction), the genetic variations are more pronounced in men than in women. This would mean that at the high end of intellect, more men are smarter/more rational than women, but the reverse happens at the low end; more men are also stupider than women. In statistical terms, IQ (even though intelligence is not linear) has mean 100 for both sexes, but s1 > s2, where s1 is standard variation for men, and s2 is standard variation for women. My anecdotal evidence confirms this, but unfortunately only on the high end (my male classmates got more top grades than women, though one of the smartest people I know is a female) and in a single dimension of intelligence (I'm a mathematician).

by Udo 14y ago

JPKab 14y ago

I've found that, at least amongst 20 and 30 something age groups, women tend to be more religious too. Now that is my crappy anecdotal observation. It would be interesting to see some real data on that. I'm convinced that the whole C/AM thing taps into an instinctive love of purity. We are wired to care about cleanliness and purity in our food sources. Perhaps women are wired even more this way (the fact that they have superior senses of smell to men might also explain it). The Nazi movement took advantage of many people's innate belief that purity of anything (in their case genetics) is a good thing no matter what. There was an article posted not too long ago about fireplaces, and how bad for you they really are. There are two kinds of people: those who will readily evaluate facts which contradict their pre-conceived beleifs, and those who will immediately dismiss them.

Udo 14y ago
I really refuse to accept that women are just "wired for faith", it sounds too similar to the Victorian notion that somehow women are naturally wired for irrationality. There has to be a social reason why this spreads among women, there is a gap somewhere in science education that leaves women more vulnerable to this. And I actually watched it spread. The transmission seems to be helped by exploiting trusted relationships among network nodes, so to speak. But that still doesn't explain why someone is susceptible to the attack in the first place. I'm also skeptical about the purity idea, because it's an arbitrary (and wrong) definition of purity to begin with and there is really no reason why women should be hard-wired to fall for these things. This is traditionally the moment where completely made-up cavemen analogies are introduced, but those are exactly as unscientific as C/AM itself.
- bitwize 14y ago
  Women are more prone to fall for BS because we enculturate them to believe that emotions and warm fuzzy feelings are a more reliable guide than science and logic. Third-wave feminism is partly to blame; the notion that science and logic are "patriarchal" and that not oppressing women entails a warm and fuzzy "feminine" replacement for disciplined thought is the third wave's doing. Thinking logically, critically, and skeptically is an ungendered activity. Women are as capable of and welcome to it as men are; we should be encouraging the females of our kind to apply reason and evidence to their judgements! Sadly, we're the culture that produced Oprah and turned her into a media mogul powerful enough to make the foundations of the earth tremble.
  - Udo 14y ago
    This is purely an image problem for science education, then. Because there is absolutely nothing warm and fuzzy about the "natural state" or whatever romanticized notion we're entertaining about nature. Applied science, and more importantly, the ability to apply science, enables people to build, cure, protect, predict, ensure, improve, discover, and many other things that are intrinsically more warm and fuzzy than, say, naturally dying of a curable disease.

darxius 14y ago

> I'm at a total loss as to where this gender disparity comes > from, but there has to be a vector somewhere. If anyone has > any ideas, I'm looking forward to hearing them. If there is > anything to be done about this, I'd like to volunteer my > time for it. I'm not sure, but I think a lot of it is marketing. I'm not sure about the numbers but I have a feeling there are more stay at home moms then there are dads. Commercials during the day are highly targeted at this demographic and its possible that this is where most of the misinformation comes from. Also, I know women are proven more emotional than men. Does this also encompass the "spiritual" side of things (a trait which a lot of alternative medicines have)?

illuminate 14y ago
The stay at home mom thing does make a lot of sense, there's a strong homeschooling mindset among extremely left-wing moms and extremely right-wing moms, and both tend to be very into CAM.

chez17 14y ago

I am someone totally open to the idea that there are herbs/food/whatever out there that have health benefits. What I never get about people into 'herbalism' is that they just say things and expect everyone to know them to be true. "X herb is good for digestion!" "X herb is good for relaxation!" How do they know this? Never once has one of them showed me a double blind study done that shows this to be true. In America, the process to get something approved by the FDA is long and expensive. If some common herb like basil cured cancer no drug company is going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to prove it just so you can grow it in your back yard and not pay them for their trouble. However, certainly there has to be people willing to do studies on these herbs and I've never been giving one. The most disturbing thing is that this doesn't ever bother these people. Not once have a friend who is into herbs voluntarily provide any study done on any one of these herbs to prove a point. It's always just, "X herb helps with stress!" How do you know that to be true?!?!?

amalag 14y ago
the FDA method of approving poisons like modern medicines may not be a relevant methodology for herbs. Before you get all upset I called your favorite prescription medicine a poison, think about what it really is. A poison if taken in high doses. Ayurveda states there are 3 ways to cure disease. Food, herbs and poisons. Modern allopathy is only the third, poisons. It has very little information on how to cure through food and herbs.
- Nursie 14y ago
  Everything in 'high doses' is a poison, even pure, distilled water. Herbs either contain active chemicals or they're a placebo. If they're a placebo they're as good as taking a sugar pill. If they contain active chemicals they contain unstandardised amounts and probably in concert with all sorts of other things that may or may not be helpful or harmful. Ayurveda is bullshit. QED.
  - up_and_up 14y ago
    > Ayurveda is bullshit My wife is an Ayurvedic practitioner, so yes I am biased, but I dont believe in every aspect of it. I can definitely say it is not "bullshit" and it is indeed helping many of her clients. She has people who come to her, that conventional docs have literally given up on. "We cant figure out what is wrong with your digestion, theres nothing more we can try" she hears stories like that all the time. People ARE being helped. Whether it is all placebo I dont know for sure. but people who literally have no other options in conventional medicine are seeing real results. They are sleeping better w/o medication, they are not having anxiety attacks anymore, I could go on and on with her stories. My wife is pretty humble about it and not selling snake oil etc. People are seeing real results.

rthomas6 14y ago

This comment comes off as sexist to me. I don't think that more women being involved with C/AM means that a larger proportion of women are irrational. Different things are popular with women and men. A large portion of both men and women are irrational. Just because a larger group of irrational women like C/AM compared to men does NOT mean that there is a larger group of irrational women. Conspiracy theories are irrational too, and seem to be much more popular with men. That doesn't mean that there are more irrational men than women.

Udo 14y ago
I'm not sure if you're just trolling or whether you're actually responding to the same comment I wrote. > I don't think that more women being involved with C/AM means that a larger proportion of women are irrational. At no point did I say or even imply that. In fact, I explicitly countered that notion as it was presented by another commenter. So my position is kind of the opposite of what you're alleging. Please take the time, go back and read what was actually written. As an aside, does a maneuver still count as Strawman Argument if the position of the original post is exactly reversed, or is there another term for it in that case?
- rthomas6 14y ago
  This is the part of your comment where I thought you were implying a more general irrationality of women: >It feels like a big gaping hole in everything we achieved with women's rights and education. [. . .] It's like a large part of our women went to a parallel universe "girls school", whereas the men in the mean time learned about science and reasoning. If you're not implying that a large portion of women are less rational than men, what does this section of your comment mean? That is how I interpret it. I guess I interpreted it differently than you intended. Edit: Note that I am not saying you implied that women are inherently less rational than men, which is what I think you countered in another comment. Just that you said they are currently, due to some as-yet unknown reason. I'm trying to dispute this assumption.
  - Udo 14y ago

resu_nimda 14y ago

I wonder if this disparity only arises at the high end of intellect/education. Below that, I find men and women to be indistinguishable in terms of what kind of beliefs and thoughts they will hold (gender-related issues aside). But, it does seem that well-educated men are more likely to develop a hardline obsession with science and rationality. I think emotion and sentiment have a lot to do with it. It's easier for us to take that detached, analytic viewpoint. Disclaimer: This is a big generalization, and there are many people to whom it does not apply, but I do believe it to hold in aggregate.

tomp 14y ago
One theory that I've read (unfortunately, even though this is a science thread, I have no studies backing or rejecting this) is that as men are evolutionarily less valuable than women (for reproduction), the genetic variations are more pronounced in men than in women. This would mean that at the high end of intellect, more men are smarter/more rational than women, but the reverse happens at the low end; more men are also stupider than women. In statistical terms, IQ (even though intelligence is not linear) has mean 100 for both sexes, but s1 > s2, where s1 is standard variation for men, and s2 is standard variation for women. My anecdotal evidence confirms this, but unfortunately only on the high end (my male classmates got more top grades than women, though one of the smartest people I know is a female) and in a single dimension of intelligence (I'm a mathematician).