How to tell a quack from a visionary and what to do about it
What makes someone a quack versus a visionary? How do we know that someone making claims that seem crazy isn’t just, well, right, and we are just too stuck in our ways, too brainwashed by society, to see it?
Let’s admit that there have been times when people have proposed ideas that have been roundly rejected only to be proved right later on. A classic example is when women died in childbirth in the 19th century of a mysterious illness called puerperal fever.
A doctor named Semmelweis eventually discovered through trial and error that handwashing with chlorine dramatically reduced the incidence of this fever. This was in 1846 before germ theory existed. He thought the doctors were spreading “corpse particles” from cadavers they were studying to the women giving birth in the hospital.
Semmelweis tried mightily to spread this information only to be rejected again and again.
Semmelweis was right but the poor man died in an insane asylum in 1865.
Doctors would not start scrubbing until the 1870s.
Semmelweis was rejected largely because he lacked tact and was not a heavyweight in the field of medicine at the time, just a lowly Hungarian practitioner.
Now look at the case of Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet biologist and all around bad character. Lysenko’s main focus in life seems to have been trying to destroy his enemies by currying favor with Stalin and promoting a quack theory of evolution called Lamarckism.
Lamarckism, named after Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, was an alternative theory of evolution that predated Darwin’s theory of natural selection. In his theory, plants and animals do not pass on their traits by having more offspring and surviving longer. They actually take on traits from their environment and pass those on to their offspring.
We know that this does not occur and even then everyone knew better, but Lysenko had the ear of Soviet leader Josef Stalin, and whatever Stalin believed, no matter how crazy, was fact in the USSR.
Lysenko impressed Stalin with his claims that superior Soviet science, grounded in Lamarckian evolution, could improve Soviet crop yields, ending some of the famines that had been endemic to Russia since the dawn of civilization. Brought to you by the same people who orchestrated the Ukrainian famine called Holodomor and the deaths of millions from starvation, what could go wrong?
Lysenko deftly manipulated the higher ups using Soviet ideology to arrest and imprison thousands of biologists and other scientists who resisted his theories. Many were executed or imprisoned including some who might actually have saved Soviet agriculture.
He used the Soviet propaganda machine to portray himself as a genius, and it allowed him to denounce Western genetics which was making leaps and bounds at the time. In 1948, genetics was declared “bourgeois pseudoscience”.
Over all this time, Soviet agricultural output declined.
Lysenkoism did not disappear after the death of Stalin either. Although some imprisoned biologists were released, later Soviet leaders embraced it too. Criticism of Lysenkoism was not allowed until the mid-1960s.
Soviet biology never recovered.
Although later epigenetics pointed to some potential to inherit traits in a Lamarckian way, Lysenko had claimed it was the primary mechanism for inheritance. We know, and have since the mid-19th century, that inheritance is Darwinian, meaning that environment only influences it indirectly based on an organism’s fitness to survive and produce offspring.
Lysenko was a quack.
An interesting contrast in the two cases is that in one case, educated people, doctors, refused to see the evidence put before them and labeled Semmelweis a quack or at least ignored him. In the other case, uneducated people prevented the educated, who knew Lysenko was a quack, from speaking out by threatening and imprisoning them.
Why do we have trouble spotting quacks?
Our preconceived notions get in the way. We want to believe that they are true and so we reject information to the contrary. In the case of the doctors, they didn’t want to believe that they were the cause of puerperal fever spreading. In the case of the Soviet leaders, they wanted to impose their ideology on science, believing theirs to be superior to Western.
While quacks manipulate us to get what they want, visionaries must work against our entrenched beliefs.
I’m an expert in physics, so I have an advantage in evaluating claims and spotting quacks in that science. Many of us do not have the expertise to evaluate quack claims which is why experts are so important.
Which brings me to the pandemic and why the quacks won it.
We saw during the pandemic how expert advice could become corrupted by political expediency and a desire to manipulate the public. Nowhere near as bad as Lysenkoism, but in the same vein. Even with the best intentions, lies coming from experts, who have their own preconceived notions blinding them, destroys the public’s confidence in them and gives quacks an opening to perpetuate their false claims and narratives.
You might be surprised, but, because I am a “scientist”, some people I know, people who were in charge of setting policies that affected large groups of other people, late in the pandemic when there was a lot of uncertainty because of the repeated waves, actually wanted my advice on what to do. The reason was because they knew they could trust me, and I was at least a proxy expert who could interpret whether what experts were saying was reliable.
This is how bad a job some experts in public health did that people had to rely on someone who’s an expert in physics to tell them whether they should still wear masks, social distance, get vaccinated, and so on.
People got tired of being manipulated.
Now that the pandemic is largely over, the quacks seem to have won, at least in America. They haven’t won because everyone believes in one wrong thing, no. They won because they got everyone to believe in a bunch of different things, none of which were the truth.
Nobody knows what to believe any more. They are doing whatever their political persuasion says they should do, and we are worse off than ever when the next one happens.
Infectious disease isn’t the only area where this is a problem. We see the same problems in climate change and any health issue that comes within 100 meters of gender, race, or, for some unfathomable reason, firearms. It doesn’t help that there are vested interests that purposely manipulate us towards one quack or another for their own personal gain.
I think this is why everyone has to become much more literate in critical thinking, something that schools are supposed to teach but really should come from parents and other authority figures. When those whom people trust push uncritical, unsubstantiated claims, it just makes people want to think that way even more. If they ever get out of that way of thinking, they will be forever scarred by it.
It is a form of abuse.
Creationism to QAnon is on a slippery slope that leads straight to hell, and it is one taken by many.
If you do take the time to figure things out, the best way to spot a quack is to look at what evidence they present for their claims. Here are a few questions to answer about a claim:
Is it rooted in what we know about the world already or does it contradict established facts? (This is where it is handy to be able to identify reliable sources so you can figure out what the established facts actually are.)
Is it unnecessarily critical of alternative claims without presenting evidence for those criticisms being valid? (Trashing your opponents is best left to politics, not science.)
Does it base its arguments on non-evidence like personal attacks, accusations of bias, appeals to ideological purity, and other logical fallacies? (Common in politics, quacks like to sow doubt by suggesting people are biased. But everyone is biased and just because someone is biased doesn’t mean they are wrong.)
Does it attempt to establish as self-evident things that ought to be proven? (Marxists and libertarians both guilty of this one.)
Is there any objective evidence at all for its claims or does it base its evidence on manipulating or omitting facts? (Anti-vaxxers make up facts, like misrepresenting the decline of measles or deaths from polio, and draw meaningless correlations in many of their arguments.)
Does it try to invent new concepts or redefine words in an attempt to manipulate discourse about a topic or couch logical fallacies in fancy jargon? (We see this more on the left than the right, especially coming out of academics looking to make a name for themselves.)
Once you have spotted a quack, you may think you are safe but that doesn’t mean that you are if everyone around you believes in them. Knowing Lysenko was a quack didn’t save all the biologists he had imprisoned and executed. At least in a free society, speaking out may be the right thing to do, but you shouldn’t rebound from spotting the quack to becoming an evangelist for the opposing view. That is just another form of uncritical thinking.
The best way to destroy a quack’s power is present compelling evidence that their claims are wrong. While people do tend to reject evidence that conflicts with their own preconceived notions, in fact evidence can make people cling to them more strongly, it can save those who haven’t made up their minds yet. It helps to be humble but dogged about it.
If you are after a particular person, best way to convince a true believer that their belief is false is to try to get them away from the cult they’ve joined. You don’t even have to try to convince them they are wrong, but try to have a relationship with them because likely the only people they otherwise associate with are like-minded folks. They’ll never come around until they have recognized that they need to cut the cord.
If you are an expert, you have to be careful to be truthful and factual. Exaggerating or manipulating the truth to get people to do what you think is best for them is going to turn around and bite you in the end. Likewise is relying on fancy jargon or overconfident statements to try to obfuscate your own ignorance. There was a lot we didn’t know early in the pandemic, a lot less confidence on the part of the medical establishment was warranted. Appealing to your own expertise is a cop out.
Finally, sometimes the quacks win and we move on without them. Soviet/Russian biology was a lost cause but the world moved on. Eventually, people did discover the truth about handwashing. We can’t let the quacks hold us back from doing the right thing, even if we are the only ones.