The Unreliability of Testimony

Believe nothing of what you hear

and only half of what you see.

-Edgar Allen Poe

     Should we believe what we hear? Why is it so easy for us to believe what people have to say? We like gossip, we like hearing stories, it makes us feel good. The problem is that the human mind is so easily fooled. Now, I don't claim to be above being fooled, I will admit that I have been fooled many times, and fallen prey to the shortcuts of our mind. I believe this is one of the most important aspects to learn in being able to make good decisions based on reliable evidence. Because of the many different ways our mind can be fooled, we should never take eyewitness testimony, or anecdotal evidence as truth, or reality. I'm not saying that everyone is a liar, but that we are easily fooled into believing something that is false.

     Think back to elementary school. I'm sure many of us remember playing the telephone game, where the teacher would whisper a phrase into the fist persons ear, and then it had to be passed on down the line. If you never played this game, I encourage you to look it up and try it. As I'm sure was the case, the last person to have this phrase passed to them would then say it out loud, and I'm sure it was never the same as the original. This is a great example of how information gets corrupted being passed on orally, or through eyewitness testimony.

     There are many ways we can be fooled into thinking something false. Our being prone to believe in anecdotal information is one of them. If anyone has facebook, this is a great example, if you're anything like me, I see weekly someone sharing some information that is false, but they believe to be true. There is a few websites dedicated to debunking a lot of these Internet “urban myths”. So lets talk about all the different ways our brains can be fooled, and why we shouldn't believe what we hear.

     Lets start with confirmation bias. This happens when we want to believe one way, we tend to find information that confirms our beliefs, and discredit information that disagrees with our beliefs. This is a well documented phenomenon. We are all prone to confirmation bias, even myself. This is something we should all work to be aware of. So if you're talking to someone who believes a certain way, chances are they have looked and trusted all the information that agrees with the way they think, and won't tell you any contradictory information.

     Lets talk about some logical fallacies. These are ways our brains get tricked into thinking something sounds logical, when really it isn't. I've posted a list of these in an earlier post, but I will cover some more here.

     Argument from ignorance. This is when one goes from a statement of uncertainty to a statement of certainty. For example, I don't know what those lights are in the sky, they must be aliens from another planet. Or I don't know what that noise was in the house, therefore it must be a ghost. You can see where the logic is failing in this. You cannot go from an abject statement of uncertainty, to an abject statement of certainty.

     Argument from authority. Just because someone claims they are an expert, or has initials after their name, doesn't always make them right. One of the times we see this is when a PhD in one field, makes statements or assertions about a field they know little about. Just because someone has a PhD in physics, it doesn't make them an expert in biology.

     Argument from popular belief. Just because a lot of people believe it's true, it must be true. It doesn't matter how many people believe in something, it doesn't make it true. Also it doesn't matter how few people believe in something, it doesn't make it false. The Earth will continue to travel around the Sun, regardless of how many people believe it's true or not.

     These are common arguments that can lead to false beliefs. They can trick people into believing something that might not be true. We have had an entire culture of UFOs spring up because of people making an argument from ignorance. Now with the advent of everyone having a cell phone with a camera and the Internet, these sightings are being recorded and quickly identified.

     I'm going to go quickly into the placebo effect, as I covered it in my last post. People can think something makes them better, when the reality is that it did nothing. The placebo effect can work both ways though. If someone thinks something is bad for them, they will get sick from it. This is referred to as the “nocebo” effect. The nocebo effect is one of the common arguments against electromagnetic radiation, and people getting sick from it.

Cum hoc ergo propter hoc. I've discussed this before as well. It states that a correlation between two variables implies causation. There are a lot of people, always falling for this in many situations. We have evolved great pattern recognition ability. However this great ability sometimes sees patterns and connections that aren't there.

This brings us to patterning. Because we are so good at seeing patterns, we tend to see patterns in true randomness. Many conspiracy theories come from us noticing patterns in random events. Or connecting things that have no relation. Most people have trouble recognizing a random pattern as random. The reason for this is that randomness naturally has clumping. We tend to see this clumping as a pattern.

In conclusion, there are lots of ways we can be fooled into believing something false. This doesn't make us dumb, or liars. This technique of using anecdotal evidence to get you to believe something is used extensively by the people peddling pseudoscience and pyramid scams. Beware, if someone is trying to convince you of something and all they're presenting you is success stories, chances are they are scamming you. I know we've all seen this sales pitch before, don't fall for it, demand real evidence for the efficacy of a product or system. Before we believe what someone tells us, we should look at the evidence backing this up. Now, we can get into a philosophical discussion of what needs evidence, and when we should trust someone at their word, but we won't.

Remember, 

extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence – Carl Sagan

Alternative Medicine vs. Modern Medicine

Introduction

     This is a question I'm sure comes up often. What is the best way to treat an illness? We hear a lot about how science and modern medicine have made astounding breakthroughs in curing potentially fatal disease. We also hear about all these great things about Alternative Medicine, how it's “All natural”, how it's “Ancient Chinese Medicine”, or how it's so much safer than modern medicine. With so much information around on both of these it might seem like an enormous task to figure what will work the best. Hopefully in this article I can simplify things and hopefully make the choice seem a little bit easier.

The Placebo Effect

     While I'm sure most of the people reading this have heard of the placebo effect, this is an important issue to understand in making choices for treatment. The placebo effect was discovered in the 18^th century and is essentially a pill or procedure that does nothing, but tricks your mind into relieving the symptoms of a disease or illness. The most common form of a placebo used is a sugar pill, which is just a pill made of sugar. While modern science still doesn't understand a lot about how it works, they have discovered a lot about the effect. Research shows that 2 sugar pills are more effective than 1, and that an injection is more effective than a pill. The more invasive a procedure the more of a placebo effect it has. There are other things, such as blue sugar pills work better as a sleeping pill placebo than red sugar pills. Or a doctor in a lab coat gives out more effective sugar pills than a doctor in jeans and a T-shirt.

     So why is understanding the placebo effect important in making medical decisions? It's because sometimes, a treatment can seem like it's working even though all it's doing is creating this placebo effect.

Modern Medicine

     Modern Medicine, or western medicine as it's sometimes called is more properly known as Evidence Based Medicine. This is the medicine your doctor practices. Any drug your doctor prescribes, or recommends has been tested against a placebo and shown to work better. A lot of procedures and treatments come from a good understanding of human physiology. All of the treatments and procedures are based on scientifically sound evidence. A doctor should be able to tell you the benefits and risks of a particular treatment and what options are available.

     So how is medicine tested? A good test to see if a particular treatment is better than a placebo begins with a double blinded, randomized, placebo controlled trial. So what does all that mean? In a properly conducted trial, both the patients and the doctors are blinded, that means that the doctors giving out the medication, and the patients receiving the medication have no idea whether it's real or a placebo. The patients should be randomized using a computer algorithm or some other blinded method. A researcher selecting patients for the groups could unconsciously bias the trail in one direction. So during the trial, no one knows who is getting a placebo, and who is getting real medication, this should even extend to the statisticians doing the final tally on the numbers. Only at the end of the trial, after all the results are in should the blinding be taken off, and which group is which be revealed. In a well conducted trial, with lots of participants, we get a really good idea of the effectiveness of a treatment.

Alternative Medicine

     If modern medicine is evidence based, where does that leave alternative medicine? Well, alternative medicine is either unproven, or dis proven So either it hasn't been tested, or is difficult to test properly, or it has been tested and shown to work no better than a placebo. There are a lot of alternative therapies out there that have been tested and shown no better results than a placebo. I realize at this point my view of alternative medicine is looking pretty grim, as I am making the claim that none of it has passed a test and shown to be effective. So what happened to the alternative medicine that was tested and shown to work? Modern medicine, being evidence based, adopts any treatment shown to work, and as it's adopted, it becomes mainstream, and no longer “Alternative”.

     I'm not going to get into a description of every alternative medicine out there. That might be a topic for a later post. However be wary of any medical claims that rely on an abundance of anecdotal evidence. If I haven't made it clear yet, anecdotal evidence is completely worthless. How can you be sure that the anecdotal evidence in these claims, is simply not the placebo effect? The other effect that dis proven medicine relies on is called “Return to the mean”. This effect is best shown by your bodies natural ability to heal itself. How do you know if the anecdotal claims for these alternative therapies are not just the person getting better on their own? Truth is, we can't know, that is why we have such controlled and rigorous testing, to control for variables like this.

     One of the other claims of alternative medicine followers I hear quite often is “Big Pharma doesn't want you to know, because it's not profitable”. This claim is simply wrong. “Big Pharma” is mandated and regulated to prove that their drugs work better than a placebo, in order to bring them to market. The other part of this is that the alternative medicine industry is now making over 100 billion dollars a year. I don't know about you, but last time I checked, that seemed like a decent profit. Please don't take this paragraph as my endorsement of the pharmaceutical companies, they are definitely guilty of some shady practices for profit. Dr. Ben Goldacre is working hard to bring this shady practices to light and stop them.

Conclusion

While there are several topics I didn't discuss in this article like the ethics of selling a placebo, or particular alternative treatments, I hope there was enough information to help you make a better decision. My thoughts are this, why would you spend your hard earned money on a treatment that is either dis proven or unproven when we have a good system of evidence based medicine available. For further reading if you're interested I recommend Trick or Treatment by Edzard Ernst and Simon Singh and also Bad Science by Ben Goldacre.