Alternative medicine: worth a try?
A Daily Dish reader who asked to remain anonymous recently wrote in about their experiences using psilocybin, also known as “magic mushrooms,” for medicinal purposes. Andrew Sullivan received so many emails about mainstream marijuana use that he and his writing team compiled them into a book — and something similar has been happening lately on the topic of psilocybin. At the Dish, it’s a sociopolitical conversation mostly about the legal status of drugs, but that’s not really what I want to talk about today.
This reader wrote:
I take small (no more than a pinch or two) quantities of psilocybin every day. Not to get high, not to unwind, but to try to heal my body. For 5+ years I’ve had an autoimmune problem that’s demyelinating my peripheral nerves – it’s called neuropathy. I do take a monthly treatment of gamma globulin to try to stabilize it, but the prognosis is for a long slow decline. Since “western medicine” doesn’t really have a clue and basically has the equivalent of sledgehammers to treat this thing, I’ve tried a host of non-Western modalities, including acupuncture and Chinese herbs, homeopathy, bio-energy balancing and strict diet. Not entirely no dice, but my condition is still declining. I suppose my fail-safe maneuver is to visit Lourdes or John of God in Brazil.
Anyway, fortunately I’ve also got contacts in the spiritual community of “medicine”, who have given me the idea of using what folks in Mexico call “the little healers”. I have a scientist friend who used it in small quantities daily to recover from bad asthma. It is reputed to help with the immune system (as well as anxiety and depression).
I am as yet too scared to undertake a full trip, which evidently can be like 6 months or a year’s worth of therapy in a few hours, but someday I will work up to it. I am befriending it right now, and I feel the mushrooms are helping my condition. You could call it merely a result of magic thinking, but what harm can it possibly cause? It’s natural, and I am determined to use whatever I can to heal.
Did you catch it? “Since ‘western medicine’ doesn’t really have a clue … I’ve tried a host of non-Western modalities.” “My fail-safe maneuver.” “The spiritual community of ‘medicine.’” “It is reputed to help.” Medicine wasn’t working out for this person, so they figured they might as well try alternative medicine as a backup. This is an attitude I’ve grown accustomed to hearing, but the frequency with which it’s repeated doesn’t make it any easier to comprehend or any more pleasant.
I think it was Tim Minchin who said it best: “Do you know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? Medicine.” These “non-Western modalities,” so appealing to our (misguided) sense of reverence toward any and all ancient wisdom, are all things that haven’t been proved to work, or have been proved not to work. Let’s take a look, shall we?
- Acupuncture: Sticking little needles all over the body at particular points, believed to heal a wide variety of ailments by manipulating “qi” or “energy flow” in some vague, magical way. It turns out that merely pretending to give someone acupuncture has equal, if not greater, healing power. Hmm.
- Chinese herbs: This is pretty nonspecific. Suffice it to say that there are plenty of herbs that do have curative effects, and many of the ones we know about have been used in actual medicines, but the simple fact that something is an herb doesn’t make it healthy by definition. The fetishization of eastern/Chinese wisdom doesn’t make an herb curative, either.
- Homeopathy: I, too, used to think that “homeopathy” was a synonym for “natural remedy.” But it turns out that it’s based such blatant magical thinking, it’s shocking that any generally sane person could buy into this scam. Homeopaths believe that the more dilute something is, the more powerful it is, so they dilute their “medicines” far beyond the point where a single molecule of the “active ingredient” would even be present in the solution. And about that active ingredient — they believe that “like cures like,” so to treat a symptom you should take something which would cause that symptom. Luckily (I guess), they dilute it into nonexistence first.
- Bio-energy balancing: What does this even mean? What is “bio-energy,” and how might an “imbalance” of it relate to peripheral neuropathy? This is just a nonsense phrase, an attempt to sound scientific and convince gullible people to open their wallets.
- Lourdes: I can only hope these last two were offered tongue-in-cheek. The shrine at Lourdes is about as credible a source of miracles as a burnt grilled cheese sandwich.
- John of God: This guy is a con artist. Perhaps he’s fooled himself too, but when you get right down to it he performs carnival tricks and scams people out of their money. Not a very good “fail-safe maneuver,” if your definition of “fail” is anything like mine.
Interestingly, the anonymous email-writer acknowledged the effectiveness of these alternative treatments: “Not entirely no dice, but my condition is still declining.” I’d chalk “not entirely no dice” up to the placebo effect, given the list that was offered and what we know about those “modalities” from scientific investigations.
I understand that people with long-lasting, painful medical conditions want some way to make themselves better. However, wanting something doesn’t make it so. The popular notion that “alternative medicine” is worth a try when you’re in dire straits can definitely be harmful. It distracts people from, and sometimes interferes with, proven science-based medical treatments. It wastes people’s time and money. In the rare cases where “alternative medicine” is not just a modern-day version of dancing around a bonfire or sacrificing a goat, where it has some actual direct physical effect, it can be very dangerous — because it isn’t regulated, hasn’t been adequately tested, and is not well-understood.
What about psilocybin? I admit I don’t have the scientific background to have an educated opinion. Perhaps it could be used for some valid treatments; our current legal framework might be constraining adequate research into these possibilities. What I can say with more certainty is that the attitude so perfectly encapsulated here — in which treatments which are “non-Western,” “spiritual,” or endorsed by “folks” in developing countries are given privileged status over evidence-based medicine — is what motivated this writer to try it. And that attitude is dangerous.
Michael Specter on the Charlie Rose Show
I’m watching Michael Specter, a science writer for the New Yorker, on the Charlie Rose Show right now. I’d never heard of this guy before but I adore him already. (I’m also admittedly not usually a fan of Charlie Rose, I suppose because I’ve fallen victim to the flashiness of modern media — I struggle to stay awake for his one-on-one interviews in front of a black screen for a full hour. The interviews are usually brilliant, though, and this is no exception.) The show’s bio of Specter says he’s just written a book called Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens our Lives. The interview and the book are about some of the same things he covers for the New Yorker: the current anti-vaccination chaos and its effects, misconceptions about organic food and genetically engineered crops, obsession with vitamins and supplements that don’t do any good … among other things. A few highlights that I managed to type before the moment passed by:
- Insightful line from Specter: “Science isn’t a company, it isn’t a country, it’s a method of doing something.” People often oppose scientific consensus and dispute the results of study after study because they claim that political and business interests shaped the results. To be sure, some funding-source bias may slip through occasionally, and a couple so-called “researchers” pop up from time to time who are outright sleazy. But to portray the entire institution of science as something so malleable, so easily lobbied and influenced, is to misunderstand deeply the concepts at the root of science.
- Explaining that eating locally grown, organic food is a nice goal but not a workable solution to the problems of starvation in the developing world, Specter emphasizes, “We’re not going to be serving everyone Swiss chard from the backyard. We’re just not.” The normally somber Charlie Rose starts giggling and says, “That’s true.”
You can watch the interview here once it goes online, probably later on Wednesday.
Astronomy at home
If you’re looking for a constructive way to use your critical thinking skills in your spare time, then I have some good news for you: Galaxy Zoo wants your help!
In partnership with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Galaxy Zoo is looking for volunteers to help with image processing: identifying what types of galaxies SDSS has seen, and trying to understand how observed galaxy collisions may have happened. It might seem like these jobs would be a perfect application for computers. Actually, image identification is harder than you’d think – if it wasn’t, Captcha would be useless – and collision simulations are very cumbersome programs to run. The human eye (with brain attached) is a better tool for these sorts of problems, if you can get enough eyes (and brains) working together on all the data. And that’s exactly what Galaxy Zoo was set up for.
No scientific background is necessary. There are very helpful and easy-to-understand tutorials on how to answer the questions they’ll ask about each image. All you really need is your eyes, and you’ll be contributing to astrophysics research in no time. So go help out!
(Thanks to Elles for posting about this over at Teen Skepchick.)
Heuristics for reality
This is part 2 in my response to Chris Guin. Here, I’m going to begin by setting aside some of the direct ties to religious beliefs, and talk about Chris’s general statements about how we gain knowledge about reality. Here’s the bulk of it, an explanation of why we shouldn’t be so preoccupied with Biblical contradictions in the first place:
Modern Western culture has things backwards, I believe, when it comes to the big picture of how the world works. We feel that “the ground truth” is logical, governed by strict laws, mathematical – even binary – in character, and that our emotions, perceptions, will, desire, consciousness, and languages are “heuristics” – that is, ways of simplifying a complex underlying reality to better get by in and understand the world. The idea is that, if we simply had a computer quick enough and powerful enough, we could crunch all the numbers in the universe and have perfect knowledge.
But what if that has it mostly backwards? What if the base of reality is perception, consciousness, will, desire, and language (”the word”), and our logic and reason are simply “heuristics” to help us simplify a complex, probabilistic, subjective, and personal universe to get by in it? I think there’s good evidence that this is the case. For example, the deeper one gets into physics, the less “sense” everything starts to make. As a computer science student, I spent plenty of time in classes proving that there are things that computers can’t do – problems that can’t be solved in a reasonable amount of time. True logic knows its own limits.
The first thing I want to do in response to this is clear up some of the confusion about what the science actually says. Chris, I don’t understand how the fact that computers take a long time to solve certain problems is relevant here. Sure, EXP ≠ P, and while that may be inconvenient it doesn’t have any great significance for the value of logic. You may be going for something more along the lines of undecidability and/or incompleteness. In that case, yes, there are some things that no algorithm can compute; there will always be some mathematical truths which are unprovable with a given set of axioms. While this is true, and while it’s also true (in the more poetic, humanities-ified version) that there are some questions in life that logic can’t answer, I don’t think this is a reason to reject the answers that logic can provide. That would be like rejecting the concept of evolution because it doesn’t answer cosmological questions about the origin of the universe, or like rejecting the principles of electricity because electricity can’t bake you a pie from scratch. Like throwing out your crescent wrench because it isn’t a soldering iron.
When you say that “the deeper one gets into physics, the less ‘sense’ everything starts to make,” I assume you’re referring to quantum mechanics, and maybe also chaos theory. As a physicist myself, I have to tell you that this just isn’t true. I suspect that you’re seeing physical laws and theories that are counterintuitive to you, and erroneously classifying these as nonsensical and illogical. However, they are completely logical (and, much to my undergraduate surprise – at least in the case of quantum mechanics – can eventually become intuitive).
So, I can say with confidence that nobody well-informed on the science believes that “if we simply had a computer quick enough and powerful enough, we could crunch all the numbers in the universe and have perfect knowledge.” Quantum physics and chaos theory cast a whole lot of doubt on the determinism aspect, and the computing aspect is unrealistic whether you’re talking about complexity or computability. But (and this is my real point) so what? It’s still all based in logic. Logic with limits, sure. But logic nonetheless. And the fact that limits exist way out on the horizon is no reason to reject the repeatedly verified, reliable information we can glean from working inside those limits.
Second: what is this illogical universe that you’re talking about, Chris? You suggest that perhaps “the base of reality is perception, consciousness, will, desire, and language” and perhaps the universe is “complex, probabilistic, subjective, and personal.” The universe might be complex? Of this I have no doubt. Logic is not inconsistent with complicated systems. Reality might be based on language? I have no idea what this means, but feel compelled to point out that while subjective connotations exist within language, we couldn’t communicate at all unless we agreed on rules of syntax and a set of definitions – in other words, some basic axioms. A completely idiosyncratic string of sounds is not a language by any normal understanding. A probabilistic universe? This is my favorite one. See above… the “regular” universe is already understood in a probabilistic way.
So let’s distill what you are really proposing. I see two main ideas in the remainders of your lists. One (for perception, consciousness, subjective, personal) is a Matrix-esque “What if the universe I experience is completely dependent on my own senses and awareness?” The other (for will, desire, maybe personal again) is basically, “If I want reality to be like this, reality is like this.” I think I’ve shown why your supposed “good evidence” for this isn’t actually. I don’t think we have any evidence that these pictures of reality might be true. But I also think that this hypothetical universe you suggest is not an illogical one. It’s simply a different set of premises, new axioms from which we might build up the rules that would govern reality. “When I close my eyes, whatever I was looking at ceases to exist,” for example, might be a new rule. Or perhaps, “If I wish for something to be true, it happens.” You haven’t done away with logic in your hypothetical world.
I hope you can see why I, having read your inaccurate generalizations of science and your unclear assertions on the nature of reality, was somewhat baffled as I reached the point in your post where you claimed that God is outside the bounds of logic:
[Logic] is seldom the appropriate tool for understanding the eternal and the divine. After all, as God is perfectly supreme and in no way bound by our universe, on what basis can anyone “logic around” with God? God is outside of time, cause and effect, and even the proposition that something can not be both X and not X. Trying to reason about God as though any of these assumptions were true often results in goofy conclusions – consider the kerfuffle about predestination, or interminable arguments about the divinity/humanity of Christ, or the nature of the afterlife, or the nature of the trinity.
However, even though I don’t buy your build-up about how we should accept the possibility of a logic-free reality, I think I can be satisfied with this characterization of your God. After all, those “goofy conclusions” and “kerfuffles” resulted from contradictory passages of scripture. But you say you would reject those debates entirely in favor of a God outside of cause and effect, and while I’m not sure what exactly “outside” means, the most obvious interpretation would seem to indicate that he doesn’t cause anything. I have no idea how this could be consistent with God creating the universe, God giving Moses commandments, God sending Jesus to the people, or even God inspiring people to live good lives on a day-to-day basis in the present. God is outside of cause and effect, so nothing can be the effect of his cause.
Moreover, if we read the Bible and find that God supposedly commanded that we do X, who cares? Wherever God is, X and not-X might be the same! If the Bible says that God made a covenant with his people to protect them in exchange for their abiding by his rules, who cares? This presumes that God is okay with an initial act (rule-following) implying a resulting act (God’s protection), which may very well not be true if he exists outside of cause and effect! Any supposed sequence of events can’t be treated as truth, because God is outside of time! It is impossible to know anything about God at any time by any means, least of all by reading the Bible. In fact, it would seem that there can be no evidence, no reason to believe in this God at all.
At the very least, with this picture of God there is no reason to value what the Bible says for its own sake, no reason to suppose that the Bible says anything true. If God is not bound even by the rule that X = X and X ≠ not-X, how can you rely on the Bible or any sentence you read about God as a source of any knowledge about God whatsoever?
Happy Thanksgiving!
To my American readers, Happy Thanksgiving! (And to my Canadian readers, a very belated Happy Thanksgiving. To any who don’t fall into one of those categories… I don’t know, you can have some pie too. It’s delicious!)
I’m hoping to see more of you in the near future. I’ve got a couple posts queued up, and plan to write some more over my long weekend in order to get back on my blogging horse. Metaphorically.
For now, I’ll share with you this interesting tidbit posted at Space City Skeptics last Thanksgiving: there’s nothing about turkey that would make you sleepy when you eat it. The whole tryptophan thing is basically a myth. So, as they say, stop worrying and enjoy your turkey!
Creationist insecurity
Via the delightfully snarky Ron Britton over at Bay of Fundie, I heard about this conference/webcast called “Darwin Was Wrong” [link to program PDF]. It’s sponsored by the Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa and some group called Logos Research Associates, Inc. (Sounds sciencey!) The program itself sounds like a real train wreck, with talks such as “Darwin Was Wrong About Science,” “Darwin Was Wrong About the Fossil Record,” and “Darwin Was Wrong About God,” but out of some kind of morbid curiosity I’m going to try to watch the webcast—today’s talks are just starting now.
It’s not my goal to rebut all the stupid claims made by the speakers in these talks. First, because nobody who cares about this event would care what I have to say, but second, because I’m sure it’s been done before. I’m also in touch with the fact that, no matter how much creationists would like to paint it that way, scientists don’t worship Darwin’s word as the ultimate and unquestionable truth. (And hey, guys, if you want to criticize that way of thinking as unscientific and therefore invalid… look in the mirror.) Bottom line: sure, there were some particular claims and conjectures that Darwin put forth in his writings which we now have evidence against, but we still appreciate his work and groundbreaking ideas. We adjust and modify our theoretical models in light of new evidence, new data to compare our models with. That’s how science works.
I really just want to make one simple point, and that is: isn’t this all terrifically insecure? Creationists are really obsessed with trying to demonstrate that “Darwin was wrong” (just search Amazon for “darwin wrong” and you’ll see what I mean), but you practically never see a panel discussion with a handful of evolutionary biologists just riffing on how Biblical creation has a couple plot holes. Yes, the community of skeptics is growing, and yes, there are groups like the National Center for Science Education which have sprung up to advocate for evolution. But the vast, vast majority of the time, scientists are just going about their science, and ignoring the crazy fringe ideas. That’s because the crazy fringe ideas are obviously wrong. It would just be superfluous for biologists to spend one tenth the time creationists do, flailing around and shouting about how the other side is wrong. If you have no real proof of your point of view, the best you can do is insist that your opponent’s proof is insufficient, but if the evidence is on your side, you can rest assured that the evidence will speak for itself.
One other note. Lunch at this conference is being provided by Chick-fil-A. Of course.
Back starting Monday
Welcome to October, everyone. Sorry we haven’t been around in a while. Over the weekend, I’ll be queuing up some posts to get us back on track next week. In the meantime, I thought I’d leave you with this music video. Perhaps you’ve already seen it before… but I’ve watched it dozens of times now and I’m not bored of it in the least. If you haven’t seen it, it’s high time you check it out!
Cis and trans
I’ve read a couple posts by recursiveparadox lately (here: the first and the second) about the prefix/word “cis,” as in “cisgender,” meaning the opposite of “transgender.” Apparently there has been some sort of huge uproar—follow the many links in RP’s posts if you are interested—because some people think the word “cis” is a slur. It’s intended to refer only to the fact of not being trans, to help in a situation that would be awkward at best and unfairly normative at worst (since “normal” or “regular” are the words that come to mind if you are trying to name that side in a comparison).
I agree with RP when she says that, “It is not a weapon, it is a classifier, used for discourse only.” I cannot imagine why anyone would be offended by it… but my intention is not to rehash that argument or to take anyone to task. (RP does a more than adequate job.) My reason for posting is that, as a scientist, I am very excited about this term. It is awesome! It is brilliant!
I think I did hear “cisgender” once a few years ago but didn’t run into it again until I read this stuff, and I guess I didn’t see the connection before. In all the posts I read in my wild goose chase to understand this recent controversy, I only saw one passing reference to the origins of the term. I feel like explaining it might take some of the edge off the anger that folks are apparently feeling out there, so here goes.
This is trans-2-butene. The CH3 functional groups are on opposite sides of the double bond.
This is cis-2-butene. The CH3 functional groups are on the same side of the double bond.
(Images thanks to Wikipedia.) So… if your gender identity is opposite that of your birth sex, we say you are transgender. And then, if your gender identity is the same as your birth sex, what to call you? Cisgender, of course! Not an insult. Not even a value judgment. Just a clever borrowing of a simple fact from chemistry! (Science to the rescue!)
Of course, even this terminology still presents gender identity as a binary rather than a continuum; it’s not perfectly inclusive. I think we ought to be able to agree, however, that it’s a significant improvement over comparisons between “trans” people and “normal” people. Apparently, the word “cisgender” has been in use since the mid-1990s. I’m surprised it hasn’t caught on more since then.
Not so grand a bargain
I haven’t written in a while, but I promised Z that I’d start up again. I think a good way to start is to talk about Robert Wright’s New York Times op-ed from Saturday, which bothered me in a lot of ways. The title is “A Grand Bargain Over Evolution,” and the goal is to propose a “common ground” between science/atheism and religion over evolution. Very little that he says is actually wrong, but all of it is missing the point. He proposes that the religious concede that evolution is fact. He then points out that many believe evolution is a process that is bound to yield intelligent beings with an idea of morality. He says that atheists should concede that this realization of moral sense being built into a natural process can reasonably be seen as evidence that the universe was created by a supernatural being who wanted those laws of morality to be known.
My biggest problem is with the idea of a “bargain” in the first place. I have no problem with a bargain in the sense of agreeing to disagree. I can easily reach that kind of understanding (and do) all the time with individual people. I also have no problem with (and very much support) the idea of a political compromise, where government stays out of the religion-atheism debate and guarantees the right of everyone to make the decision for themselves. I am not, however, okay with the idea of a bargain over the facts. If I claim the sky is blue, and you claim it is red, we don’t decide to just split the difference and agree that it’s purple. You don’t bargain over what is true. You debate and give logical reasons and do research and try to figure out what the real answer is. This article asks us to believe something because it’s a nice middle position. I have trouble any time I’m asked to believe something for any reason other than that it’s probably true.
Wright also makes it clear that he does not fully understand the atheist argument, which is surprising considering that he just wrote a book on the history of religious belief. He states the grand compromise he proposes this way:
Believers could scale back their conception of God’s role in creation, and atheists could accept that some notions of “higher purpose” are compatible with scientific materialism. And the two might learn to get along.
Of course the idea of a “higher purpose” is compatible with scientific materialism. Atheists believe in morality, after all. I am not sure why he thinks this is a concession. He makes himself a little more clear later on:
[Atheists] could acknowledge, first of all, that any god whose creative role ends with the beginning of natural selection is, strictly speaking, logically compatible with Darwinism.
I have never seen even the most extreme and combative atheist fail to concede this. A creator-only god is logically compatible with any scientific evidence that could ever be produced, and this is fully conceded by atheists. In fact, even a much more active god is logically compatible with all scientific evidence that could ever be produced. You want to believe God created humans in their current form? Fine. You just also have to believe that God created fossils of various early humanoid species in such a way as to create an apparent link between them and other early apes. It seems to me like a really strange thing to believe, but it’s not logically inconsistent.
The point atheists make is that, while the religious view is logically consistent, there’s no reason to favor it over the non-religious view. We have every reason to believe that logical consequences of the laws of physics govern the events we see around us. Sure, those could be explained by any one of thousands of different possible religious beliefs, but why would we choose to believe any one of these supernatural explanations over any other, let alone over the simple straightforward explanation we can see in the world every day? Atheists don’t claim to disprove religion—they just claim that given the existence of these numerous logically consistent worldviews, the one that doesn’t posit the existence of a random supernatural being without any evidence of its existence is the one that is most reasonable to hold. Wright never even references this argument, and it’s hard to convince people to change their minds when you can’t even prove you understand what they already believe.
Dear Prudence
No, not the Beatles’ song, the advice column on Slate.com! I love Emily Yoffe’s advice, and the sense of humor in her columns and videos, but I have to say I found something lacking in the answers she gave regarding this math grad student who wrote to her during a Washington Post chat a few days ago. Here’s the student’s original question and her reply.
Philadelphia, Penn.: I’m a graduate student in mathematics, and my particular area is very abstract. When people ask me what I do, or see me with a textbook and ask what I’m reading, no matter how simplified an explanation I give them, inevitably the person remarks that my area is “way beyond” them or that they’d “never be able to grasp that”. I always want to tell them, “You definitely won’t with that attitude.” To me, all of these concepts are perfectly intuitive, and while I’m certainly aware that not everyone has my capacity for, or interest in, mathematics, I am still annoyed by all of these people putting themselves down to me—did they ever try to understand the subject? At least some of them might find it easier and more interesting than they expected! For some reason, they all seem to take pride in how poor their math ability is, or at the very least they aren’t troubled by it. Should I be harsher and just say “Yes indeed, this is much too hard for you”? How do you suggest I respond to these kind of comments?
Emily Yoffe: A few years ago, in an attempt to help my daughter with her math homework, I enrolled in the elementary school math prep program, Kumon. I scored at the first grade level. Even if I tried, I probably couldn’t truly understand what you’re doing. But I would be interested if you could explain what this math is used for—modeling subprime mortgages? Global warming? Then we’d have something to talk about. So ignore the self-put downs, and don’t add any of your own. Instead think of it as an opportunity to show that what you do is interesting and can—on some level—be grasped.
Later in the chat, someone else wrote in to say exactly what I’d been thinking. If I didn’t know better (I didn’t even know about this chat thing until yesterday), I’d have sworn it was actually me.
“Math? That’s over my head”: I think this writer deserves more of an answer. I’m a woman in physics, and nearly everyone makes a self-deprecating comment when I say so. The point really is this: there is a cultural pride in innumeracy that doesn’t exist for illiteracy—no one will brag about not being able to read, yet feel free to essentially brag about not being good at math. This is not people being candid about their abilities. It actually is a way of dismissing the importance of the field of study by implying that it has no cultural necessity or meaning. There has to be a way of responding to this, but subtly encouraging people to believe that it can be understood (with perhaps some effort—but what doesn’t take effort?). Most people can do math to at least the calculus level with time and effort, not talent. And most people can understand even high mathematical concepts, if not perform them, if they’d get past the mental block. This hurts everybody!
Emily Yoffe: I’m sure most people could change their carburetor with some time and effort, too. Instead of lecturing people about how their innumeracy hurts everyone, understand that people are complimenting you on your impressive skills. So come up with some things to say about your field that can engage even the innumerate, like me, in conversation.
I get what she’s saying here. In terms of polite conversation, certainly it’s inappropriate to lecture and berate someone who was just trying to make small talk with you. And people in math/science fields should certainly work on a simplified, clear description of their job so that they can explain it to people without four hours and a chalkboard. That part, I buy.
What I think Emily doesn’t understand, though, is that it’s quite possible (really, extremely probable) that this math grad student is not doing anything that is useful for anything, in a way that could be explained without four hours and a chalkboard. There’s a whole lot more to math than calculus and statistics. She asks, “But I would be interested if you could explain what this math is used for—modeling subprime mortgages? Global warming?” I can easily imagine the answer is, “Nothing.” Nothing like that, at least. Maybe it’s just used for solving other problems that pretty much only exist in the world of mathematics.
That’s not to say that it will never be used for anything else. There are plenty of theorems proved long ago by mathematicians that were only recently discovered to be useful for describing physical systems. The thing is, that’s not the point. We don’t expect all occupations or fields of study to be “useful” in some way that drastically betters the course of human history. Sometimes, they’re just interesting or enjoyable. Sometimes, it’s not useful in the sense of building a better mousetrap or curing the common cold, but useful in the sense of adding to our understanding of what we are made of and how the universe works. Even if we can’t build tiny computers out of that understanding, it’s good that people are developing it.
My advice to the math grad student would be: tell people how interested you are in your research. Tell them how much you love solving puzzles, and how satisfying it is to complete a proof. Then ask them about their job, and move the conversation along elsewhere.
I was saddened to see that our Dear Prudence doesn’t give any advice to the people approaching math grad students everywhere and saying things like, “Pshew, math! That stuff is way over my head.” My guess is, from the way she answers, that she has on occasion been that person. I would hope that people who make those kind of comments learn two things. First, it’s incredibly other-izing; second, it kills the conversation and puts the burden of recovery on the person you’re speaking to. Those two things make it rude, so you should find some other way to respond.
Let’s deal with the first issue. Comments like “Oh, I could never do that” and the like make it sound as though the mathematician (or scientist) is some kind of alien being imbued with freakish abilities. You may think it sounds like a compliment, but it doesn’t feel like one. It’s usually said with a tone of surprised disdain—it’s not just that you don’t know the math, but also that you would never, ever want to—so it sounds like you’re saying, “You could never be a normal person like me.”
Secondly, when people say things like, “I could never do that”… we already know. We operate under the assumption that most of the people we interact with outside the university do not have graduate degrees in math or science. You are saying something as obvious as, “Occasionally, it is cloudy outside.” Additionally, the natural responses to a statement such as this are either self-aggrandizing, insulting, or patronizing, and that is an awkward position to be put in. We struggle to find a way to respond to your remarks—hence the letter to an advice columnist. Good small talk doesn’t just mean saying the first thing that comes to mind, no matter how inane or impossible it is to answer. If you’re going to kill the conversation, do it in such a way that places the burden on yourself, and transition to a new thing to talk about.
There are bigger issues here—as we’ve said before, they encourage the already-widespread belief that it’s fine to be bad at math—but I thought it was worth pointing out that, in addition, they make for really unpleasant conversation.
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