I’m having a hard time thinking about topics they should have changed their minds about from recent years. Most of the stuff skeptics argue is so terribly wrong that there isn’t much chance of anything sensible ever coming out of it, and skeptics end up being more like sanity waterline plumbers than scientists. There might be an analogy to psychiatry made here. Psychiatrists deal with genuinely diseased thinking day in and day out, so if they had to assess some genuinely novel philosophy, there might be some trouble.
The most high-profile case where the scientific fringe ended up being right and skeptics had a serious opportunity for changing their minds I can think of was continental drift 50 years ago. Someone will probably want to suggest the many-worlds interpretation here. If the arguments that have been around here that internalizing MWI would actually make people change how they behave do hold, this would actually be a good example, but I’m still seeing MWI as mostly just a conceptually simpler interpretation of accepted physics.
The most high-profile case where the scientific fringe ended up being right and skeptics had a serious opportunity for changing their minds I can think of was continental drift 50 years ago.
Adult neurogenesis is a recent major reversal of longstanding dogma, but I don’t know if its proponents were ‘fringe’ or not.
Another example might be the (mental & physical) health benefits of meditation, which seems to have been the exclusive province of fringey New Age types up until the ’90s or whenever the surveys and experiments began coming out.
A good example would be one that either significantly changes how we see the world, plate tectonics definitely qualifies, or will make people change their behavior in some way if assumed true.
Adult neurogenesis is a recent discovery, but it seem to change either that much. Human brains are still finicky and brain damage is very, very scary. I’m also not aware of there being any movement for adult neurogenesis warranting the attention of skeptics before the discovery was conclusive, which there apparently was for continental drift.
Meditation is a better example though. The discovery of actual beneficial neurological changes is likely to make people meditate more. It’s not a very strong example though, as I don’t think skeptics have been very hostile to meditation itself before the findings (unlike claims that meditators can levitate, cure cancer and bring about world peace). The fact that an exercise repeated regularly through many years leads to measurable anatomical differences isn’t exactly a paradigm shift related to our understanding of human physiology either.
Adult neurogenesis is a recent discovery, but it seem to change either that much.
What, compared to plate tectonics? What utility exactly does plate tectonics have? That seems about as useful as finding the Higgs boson: providing an explanation for well-characterized and predictable phenomenon like continental drift. You can’t even predict earthquakes knowing plate tectonics.
The fact that an exercise repeated regularly through many years leads to measurable anatomical differences isn’t exactly a paradigm shift related to our understanding of human physiology either.
Here I think we have a paradigm shift over time that makes it hard to understand*. Try to put yourself back in the ’60s or ’70s—the age of Timothy O’Leary, of talking to dolphins, the Age of Aquarius, the Beatles going to India. The mind is separate from the body. Stress is just a word, not a known killer from countless studies (see the Wired article). Schizophrenia seems to be caused by mothers not loving their children. IQ is not hereditary.
How could a bunch of neurons possibly mess with the subtle chemical balances that rule the rest of the body? Are there little neurons connected to levers in glands which only fire when strange foreign syllables are repeated a lot? For that matter, how could sitting down and doing nothing whatsoever or reciting some mantra like a Buddhist monk improve your health and happiness?
If that isn’t counterintuitive, I don’t know what is.
* For a Reddit comment, I was looking up Kevin Kelly’s Maes-Garreau Law about biases of futorology toward dramatic change by the end of the futorologist’s life, and the introduction strikes me as relevant:
“Forecasts of future events are heavily influenced by present circumstances. That’s why predictions are usually wrong. It’s hard to transcend current assumptions. Over time, these assumptions erode, which leads to surprise. Everybody “knew” that people won’t work for free, and if they did that it would not be quality work. So the common assumption that a reliable encyclopedia could not be constructed upon volunteer labor blinded us to the total surprise of a Wikipedia.”
What, compared to plate tectonics? What utility exactly does plate tectonics have?
It doesn’t have much utility, but it changes the way we understand the world in a pretty big way. Not revolutionizing physics big, but turning the immense, eternal and unchanging face of the Earth into something that moves and flows in deep time is pretty impressive viscerally. Adult neurogenesis just doesn’t seem as big, even though it probably has more utility.
Viscerally big things are ones which draw the attention of the people skeptics debunk, so that’s why I’m picking them out here.
For that matter, how could sitting down and doing nothing whatsoever or reciting some mantra like a Buddhist monk improve your health and happiness?
If a brain does focused relaxation, it gets better at relaxing. I don’t see how this would have been very counterintuitive 50 years ago. The unexpected part was the causation going from mental actions to brain anatomy.
Now I’m actually interested about the history of this concept. The correlation between mental abilities and brain anatomy has been entertained for something like 200 years. Abilities getting very much better with training has been known forever. So when was the idea that training a skill could actually change the relevant brain anatomy to a degree first introduced? I’ve no idea.
If a brain does focused relaxation, it gets better at relaxing. I don’t see how this would have been very counterintuitive 50 years ago. The unexpected part was the causation going from mental actions to brain anatomy.
Why is relaxation something to get better at? Why isn’t it just the absence of effort? And even if we assume that it’s a skill, why meditation and not, say, watching The Ed Sullivan Show? Plenty of people found that relaxing.
Neuroplasticity.
A few episodes of the brainsciencepodcast deal with them, and the book of Norman Doidge: the brain that changes itself.
Nutrition is a topic that is still up for grabs.
I’m having a hard time thinking about topics they should have changed their minds about from recent years. Most of the stuff skeptics argue is so terribly wrong that there isn’t much chance of anything sensible ever coming out of it, and skeptics end up being more like sanity waterline plumbers than scientists. There might be an analogy to psychiatry made here. Psychiatrists deal with genuinely diseased thinking day in and day out, so if they had to assess some genuinely novel philosophy, there might be some trouble.
The most high-profile case where the scientific fringe ended up being right and skeptics had a serious opportunity for changing their minds I can think of was continental drift 50 years ago. Someone will probably want to suggest the many-worlds interpretation here. If the arguments that have been around here that internalizing MWI would actually make people change how they behave do hold, this would actually be a good example, but I’m still seeing MWI as mostly just a conceptually simpler interpretation of accepted physics.
Adult neurogenesis is a recent major reversal of longstanding dogma, but I don’t know if its proponents were ‘fringe’ or not.
Another example might be the (mental & physical) health benefits of meditation, which seems to have been the exclusive province of fringey New Age types up until the ’90s or whenever the surveys and experiments began coming out.
A good example would be one that either significantly changes how we see the world, plate tectonics definitely qualifies, or will make people change their behavior in some way if assumed true.
Adult neurogenesis is a recent discovery, but it seem to change either that much. Human brains are still finicky and brain damage is very, very scary. I’m also not aware of there being any movement for adult neurogenesis warranting the attention of skeptics before the discovery was conclusive, which there apparently was for continental drift.
Meditation is a better example though. The discovery of actual beneficial neurological changes is likely to make people meditate more. It’s not a very strong example though, as I don’t think skeptics have been very hostile to meditation itself before the findings (unlike claims that meditators can levitate, cure cancer and bring about world peace). The fact that an exercise repeated regularly through many years leads to measurable anatomical differences isn’t exactly a paradigm shift related to our understanding of human physiology either.
What, compared to plate tectonics? What utility exactly does plate tectonics have? That seems about as useful as finding the Higgs boson: providing an explanation for well-characterized and predictable phenomenon like continental drift. You can’t even predict earthquakes knowing plate tectonics.
Here I think we have a paradigm shift over time that makes it hard to understand*. Try to put yourself back in the ’60s or ’70s—the age of Timothy O’Leary, of talking to dolphins, the Age of Aquarius, the Beatles going to India. The mind is separate from the body. Stress is just a word, not a known killer from countless studies (see the Wired article). Schizophrenia seems to be caused by mothers not loving their children. IQ is not hereditary.
How could a bunch of neurons possibly mess with the subtle chemical balances that rule the rest of the body? Are there little neurons connected to levers in glands which only fire when strange foreign syllables are repeated a lot? For that matter, how could sitting down and doing nothing whatsoever or reciting some mantra like a Buddhist monk improve your health and happiness?
If that isn’t counterintuitive, I don’t know what is.
* For a Reddit comment, I was looking up Kevin Kelly’s Maes-Garreau Law about biases of futorology toward dramatic change by the end of the futorologist’s life, and the introduction strikes me as relevant:
It doesn’t have much utility, but it changes the way we understand the world in a pretty big way. Not revolutionizing physics big, but turning the immense, eternal and unchanging face of the Earth into something that moves and flows in deep time is pretty impressive viscerally. Adult neurogenesis just doesn’t seem as big, even though it probably has more utility.
Viscerally big things are ones which draw the attention of the people skeptics debunk, so that’s why I’m picking them out here.
If a brain does focused relaxation, it gets better at relaxing. I don’t see how this would have been very counterintuitive 50 years ago. The unexpected part was the causation going from mental actions to brain anatomy.
Now I’m actually interested about the history of this concept. The correlation between mental abilities and brain anatomy has been entertained for something like 200 years. Abilities getting very much better with training has been known forever. So when was the idea that training a skill could actually change the relevant brain anatomy to a degree first introduced? I’ve no idea.
Why is relaxation something to get better at? Why isn’t it just the absence of effort? And even if we assume that it’s a skill, why meditation and not, say, watching The Ed Sullivan Show? Plenty of people found that relaxing.
Neuroplasticity. A few episodes of the brainsciencepodcast deal with them, and the book of Norman Doidge: the brain that changes itself. Nutrition is a topic that is still up for grabs.