Grok

Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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Oneof the most influential science-fiction novels of the 1960's was Stranger in aStrange Land by Robert Heinlein. The book told the story of Valentine MichaelSmith, sole survivor of a spaceship crash on Mars, who was rescued as an infantby Martians and raised with Martian thought patterns. As a young man, he isreturned to Earth, where his unconventional ways of thinking put him constantlyat odds with normal human concepts. Eventually, Smith founds a religion based onhis Martian philosophy, and though Smith is eventually lynched by a mob, heleaves behind a core of followers to carry on his  mission. It is easy to understand why the book was popular. Alienated youth who feltthat they were trapped in a world of alien and ossified thought patternsidentified easily with Smith. Unlike them, however, Smith had enormous psychicpowers. And the book buzzes with uninhibited and guilt-free sex. Smith's ultimate demise, of course, is the inevitable fate of every persecutedgenius. 

Oneof the major concepts in the book is the word Grok. Grok is a Martian verbmeaning many things: to eat, to agree, but most of all, to comprehend asituation in its entirety without having to go through meticulous analysis orengaging in reductionism. To grok something meant to have an immediate intuitivegrasp of it. For all its scientific trappings, Stranger in a Strange Land isabout Magic. Readers could fantasize about what they would do to the System ifthey had Smith's powers. And grokking meshed neatly with the 1960's emphasis on gut feelings as opposed to analytical logic. Grokking has a pragmatic useas well; if it is possible to grok, it might be possible to learn without thetime and labor that ordinary education requires. Stranger in a Strange Land is atale of the mystic as omnipotent superman. 

Heinleindid not invent the concept of grok; it's an age-old dream. An introductorygeology lab is a good place to see grokking in action. A student who tries tolearn birds, flowers or constellations will have clear gestalt clues to go on;sight identification is easy. Rocks and minerals are much harder; size and shapeare absolutely irrelevant, and even color is unreliable. The only way toidentify minerals is by using a battery of tests, but it is amazing how fewstudents perform the tests. Many students, given a specimen, will pick it up andtry to identify it on sight -after all, the instructor does. The instructor,however, has a lot more experience than the student, has probably seen everyspecimen in the study collection, and most important, knows that there are agreat many potentially similar materials that are not part of the course.Practice makes all the difference in the world. 

Just about every geologist hasencountered another "grok" situation. Somebody hands me a slab ofblue-gray rock from my area with fossils in it. The rock is easy to recognize as part of theMaquoketa Formation, which I know belongs to the Ordovician Period. I give thisinformation to the inquirer, then for good measure, toss in, "It's about450 million years old." As often as not I get a stunned look, followed by"How can you just look at a rock and tell how old it is? The answer,of course, is that I can't; I rely on the work that has been done by scoresof other geologists before me.   

Wecan see in these and similar examples some of the popular myths about intuition.Intuition is supposedly capable of the most incredible feats, is instinctive orat least easily acquired, can reach conclusions that rational thought cannot,and is a substitute for practice and rational thought. 

In recent years, manyphilosophers of science have turned their attention to so-called"non-rational" aspects of science such as creativity, insight, andintuition. Categorizing such processes as "non-rational" carries withit a fallacy: the word "rational" is considered to mean only thosethought processes that are under conscious control and proceed through aformal, step-by-step reasoning process. Most scientists do make use of hunchesand intuition, but the hunches are informed hunches and the intuition is trainedintuition. 

Scientists rarely devote much time to learning information by rote,but they do end up memorizing a lot of information through constant exposure.Creative insights often come at odd moments when we relax, but it is difficultto see how such insights could ever occur unless the individual had a greatstore of memorized information to work with and, just as important, a thoroughlyingrained habit of mulling over and interrelating bits of data. This process isso far removed from the popular "grok" concept of intuition that thereis simply no comparison. The two processes are similar in name only. 

Nobodyembodies the popular concept of scientific intuition better than SherlockHolmes, and generations of literary students have wondered how Conan Doyle thecredulous spiritualist could have created the brilliantly deductive Holmes.The answer becomes clear if we realize that popular intuition is not the same astrue scientific intuition. A good example of Holmes at work is The Adventure ofthe Blue Carbuncle. 

From alost hat, Holmes deduces that the wearer was intelligent, preferred a certaintype of hair dressing, has grizzled hair, was once prosperous but has fallen onhard times, has no gas lines in his home, and has marital problems. Theinference of intelligence comes from the popular 19th century notion thatintelligence correlated with brain size, but a large hat may signify nothingmore than bushy hair. The inferences about hair style are based on bits of hairand hair cream on the hat. 

The elaborate scenario involving the man's life styleis based essentially on the hat being a recent and expensive style but now inpoor condition. Holmes never really considers the very real possibility that thehat might have been stolen, lost and then found by someone else, or given away. 

Holmes is, in fact an archetypical grokker. He scans the evidence, zeroes inunerringly on the correct interpretation, and rarely has to revise hishypotheses. That's part of his immense appeal. Holmes embodies Conan Doyle'sfantasies of omnipotent scientific intuition; Holmes zeroes in on the correctsolutions rarely examines alternative explanations except to dispose of them,never encounters evidence that i8 so ambiguous it cannot be used, and generallyviews formula- ting a plausible hypothesis as the solution to the problem. 

Certainly the attitude of most pseudoscientists is that having found anexplanation that agrees with most of the data, the battle is largely over. Theprincipal remaining task is to look for additional evidence to confirm thetheory. If any- one disagrees with the hypothesis, the burden is on them todisprove it. We can compare this concept of scientific intuition to actualscientific intuition by examining a real case. In the late 1940's, as scientistswere struggling to understand the   nature of theearth's magnetic field, the British Nobel physicist P.M.S. Blackett suggestedthat perhaps a new fundamental law of nature might be needed. He devised atheory that any rotating body became magnetic, and was able to fit the theory tothe case of the earth and what was then known of the masses, rotations andmagnetic fields of some stars. 

Very few of the theories we have considered inthis book went beyond this level, but Blackett did. He realized he would have todemonstrate the effect in the laboratory, and spent years perfecting a devicecapable of detecting extremely tiny magnetic fields. After years of effort,Blackett had satisfied his own curiosity and published his results in a papertitled A Negative Experiment. The theory was wrong. Blackett's labors did notgo to waste; his sensitive magnetometer was just what was needed for detectingthe tiny magnetic fields frozen in rocks and played a major role in thedevelopment of continental drift. 

The process is instructive. Blackett'sintuition suggested that a new law of physics might be in order; he even foundwhat seemed to be supporting evidence, but Blackett tested  his theory,found it not to work, and publicly admitted it. One can just pictureparanormal researchers making such an admission! 

The simple notion thatintuition is often wrong is a hard one for many people to grasp; we have seenmany cases where pseudoscientists appeal to intuition as a means of attackingsome scientific concept. Thus creationists argue that it is intuitivelyridiculous that inorganic molecules could evolve into living things;paranormalists appeal to intuition by arguing that some events are too unusualto be the result of chance or coincidence, and so on. 

One of the greatestpuzzles in the history of science is why the ancient Greeks, who were otherwisea brilliant culture clung to such faulty concepts of physics. However, whenpeople without much training in science are presented with simple physical problems, they often come up with exactly the same notionsthe Greeks did. When asked to draw the path of an object shot out over a cliff,most people draw the trajectory as horizontal or nearly so, then droppingsharply to vertical. The common cartoon convention of someone running off acliff and continuing for some distance before falling is a good example of thissort of thinking, which is exactly what the classical Greek theory implied. Itmay be simply that the Greeks failed to realize fully that intuition was not avery good tool for deducing subtle physical concepts, and that empiricalfindings should supersede intuition whenever the two conflict. In popular usage.the term "intuition" actually means a number of different things. 

Onecommon meaning is the ability to perform complex actions automatically,such as driving a car, reading, playing the piano, or speaking a foreignlanguage. We often hear that the road to fluency in a language involves"thinking in that language" -- that is, not having to translateconsciously. A great deal of thought in such activities is as a subconsciouslevel, and there are many activities of this sort in science: reading graphsor maps, locating research references, and a great deal of creative activity.The "grok" philosophy holds out the hope that one can learn suchskills without the need for repetition and practice. This sort of thinkingprobably lay behind the "look-say" school of teaching reading.Adults read words all at once, so why not teach children the same way, and skipthe laborious process of learning to read phonetically? It sounds plausible, butthere seems to be an emerging consensus that the idea did not work in practice. 

It's easy to see why if we consider a languagewith a different alphabet, say Russian. Can you rapidly distinguish between roPS 40) ro P6kb and roPto K ? The three words mean, respectively, warmly,bitterly, and flowerpot! Without first knowing the alphabet, the words arestrings of nonsense symbols. After a month or so, the Russian alphabet becomesalmost second nature, but even so, I still have to stop and puzzle out somethinglike roPHonPo"OlUZESHblH (related to mining)

The difficulty of learningto recognize letters has had some interesting consequences. The star Betelgeuse was "yad al-jawsa"or "the shoulder of Orion" in ancient Arabicstar catalogs. In 1246 the medieval astronomer John of London mistakenlytranscribed the Arabic letter for "y" as "b", and Betelgeuseit has been for 700 years! 

The idea that one can obtain intuitive skills in asubject and somehow by- pass the need for practice is a seductive one, but itrarely works. Another skill that has often been labeled "intuition" isthe ability to sort relevant from irrelevant material. The ability to sift thewheat from the chaff is perhaps the most important skill a scientist can haveand it is difficult to teach. Mathematical intuition of this sorts the abilityto do approximate or order-of-magnitude calculations by knowing what quantitiesare likely to be important and which not is an extremely powerful tool. Forexample what is the volume of the Antarctic ice cap - and if it melts how muchwill it raise sea level? The "brute force" approach would perform adetailed calculation taking into account the varying thick- ness and thesprhericity of the earth. For detailed studies we may need such accuracy, but ifwe are interested in a "ball park" estimates we can multiply the areaof Antarctica by the average ice thickness to get the volume of ice, multiply by  0.9 to convert it to water and divide by the area of the oceans. The fact that calculations of this sortare possible is often a real] revelation to students. There are an enormousnumber of mathematical short cuts that are immensely valuable. They enable ascientist to check hypotheses roughly but rapidly rather than having to spend avast amount of effort doing a ten-decimal-place calculation. 

One of the veryfirst such cases was the w^work of William Harvey. who demonstrated thecirculation of the blood. Prior 14 _? to Harvey it was thought that blood wascreated in the heart and absorbed by the body tissues. Harvey argued verysimply; make the most conservative estimate of how much blood the heart moves ateach beat and calculate the amount~ that would have to be created and absorbed ina day. The answers were absurdly large. A closed circulatory system was the onlysystem that made any sense. 

This sort of intuition can be paralyzed by the"what if" syndrome~ and one of the favorite what ifs in pseudosciencehas to do with the laws of nature. What if they change? What if they aredifferent elsewhere in the universe? What if there are phenomena that cannot beduplicated at will? What if there is supernatural intervention at times? In manycases we can test the what-if and show it doesn't apply; there are soundobservational reasons for thinking that the laws of physics are the samethroughout the universe and that radioactive de _^ cay rates are constant. Inmost cases the what-if amounts to a subtle way of putting the burden of disproofon science. In most cases, the burden of proof for a what-if is on the what-iffer.

 The ability to focus on the relevant is an important form   ofintuition in all fields. The scientist who can spot the subtle signs of asuccessful new theory will be successful himself (or herself). But much of whatpasses for this form of intuition in everyday life amounts to little more thanreliance on a few superficial rules of thumb. Kicking the tires and slamming thedoors on a used car are good examples. If the /4 -? rule of thumb has a basis inreality the intuition will be sound, if not, the intuition will be unsound. Therule of thumb that drivers should travel two seconds behind the vehicle- cle infront is based on average reaction times and brake per- formance and is a usefulrule. The rule of thumb that airplane crashes come in threes is based on nothingbut fantasy. 

This sort of pseudo-intuition has its most tragic effects when itis used to evaluate people. The person who says "I don't care what you say,you canXt tell me blacks are as smart as whites" is absolutely right -- youcan't tell such a person anything until he is willing to accept the possibilitythat his intuition needs re-tuning. Not a great deal more founded in reality isthe "dress for success" movement. According to attire expert WilliamThourlby: "I may like a woman in a gray flannel suit, but the mere fact shehas packaged herself that way tells me, 'I'm here for my future"'.According to Thourlby, clothes with straight lines, basic dark colors and anabsence of vivid emotional colors indicates that a business person istrustworthy, competent, and has the client's best interests at heart. 

If this iswhat passes for reasoning in American business we'd better start learningJapanese. A sober and serious per- son may dress conservatively; the converse isnot true at all. Hardly a week passes that we do not see a news story in whichsomeone attired in a suit with straight lines and basic dark colors is cartedoff to prison for being untrustworthy, incompetent, or not having the client'sbest interests at heart. Anti-discrimination regulations may be burdensome, butpeople 14~l0 who reason along the superficial lines we have just seen havenobody to blame but themselves for these laws. A high-school dropout with tenminutest training can tell what sort of ward- robe a person is wearing; ahighly-paid personnel director who relies on such irrelevant clues is, ineffect, stealing his salary; he's paid to use skilled intuition and does notprovide it. He tries to "grok" instead. 

Stereotyping is the name weapply to this sort of pseudo- intuition, and pseudoscientists appeal to itregularly, by attempting to create a favorable impression of the pseudosci-entist and an unfavorable impression of the orthodox scientis-t. Part ofVelikovsky' 8 personal appeal was his ability to pro- ject the image of adistinguished elder statesman. The entire concept of creationist debates isbased on an appeal to decide the outcome of the debates on superficial clueslike the speaking style of the debater rather than on the facts. And we havedealt at length with the attempts by pseudoscientists to cast scientists in theroles of persecutors, and the use of code-words, like equating evolution withsecular humanism, to inflameaudience prejudices. 

AlbertSinstein once remarked that "common sense" was merely the collectionof preJudices we had picked up by the time we were eighteen, and there is anuncomfortable amount of truth to that observation. Folk wisdom, no matter howmuch at variance with the facts, is extremely difficult to change. A popularitem of folklore in my area is that the Fox River, which flows through the cityof Green Bay, is the only river in the world that flows north. A few minuteswith a globe   14-~r will turn up other examples, like the Nile, the worldt 8long- est river, the MacKenzie, the Bena, the Ob, the Yenisei, all over 2,000miles long, and so on. Pointing these exceptions out seems to have little effecton the durability of the be- lief. 

3y the time we reach adulthood, we tend toregard our prejudices (some of which are true) as so self-evident they no longerneed proof. Prejudices that are incorrect will not change unless the person whoholds them recognizes that they are incorrect and makes a real effort to changethem. Pseudoscience profits enormously from this reluctance to alterdeeply-ingrained but incorrect ideas. There are deeply entrenched magicalnotions in American thought: that nothing is really impossible, that thoughtscan influence events, that vast conspiracies are afoot in the world, and thatanybody who devotes a little spare time to reading up on a subject can deal withthe subject on an expert level. Most pseudoscience is based on one or more ofthese ideas, and pseudoscience tends through constant repetition to reinforceits own set of prejudices: that psychic forces are solidly proven, that thespace program has vindicated Velikovsky, that evolution is 2'in trouble"and that many eminent scientists endorse creation- ism, and that there is solidevidence for UPO's. Hardly a month goes by that some tabloid fails to announcethe results of a poll showing that most Americans believe in psychic phenomena,UFO's, or whatever. The "poll" mentality is basically a form of wishfulfillment; if enough people believe it's true, it must be true. The problemwith popular intuition is not a lack of critical reasoning. People can beamazingly critical when it 14 -12 finding fault with the scientific evidenceagainst pseudo- science. Rather, the problem i8 that the critical reasoning   i8highly selective; the process is really our old friend doublethink. All of us,without exception, tend to relax our critical reasoning when the ideas fitwell-established patterns, and switch it on when confronted with the unfamiliar.The reason that science seems to work better than popular intuition involvesseveral factors. First, there really are some scientists at least who are awareof the hazards of preconceived ideas and try to avoid or at least be aware ofthem. Second, waiting on the sidelines in most scientific debates are a lot ofscientists who have no personal stake in the out- come and whose only demand isthat the resulting theory work. Thirdly, science deals with subjects that areunfamiliar, where intuition can scarcely be said even to exist, and where theonly possible approach is methodical, step-by-step analysis. Finally, sciencehas learned the hard way that a priori intuition is often unreliable, and thatoften ideas that run counter to intuition are true. Studies of the reasoningstyles of scientists and non- scientists have yielded some surprising results.Often scientists, who according to popular stereotype are very cautious,reason less cautiously than non-scientists; they are more willing to makeinferences and draw conclusions. Through training and experience, scientistshave an intuition of their own, but one that is often quite different frompopular in- tuition. Scientists expect phenomena to repeat, whereas thepopularity of psychic ideas and the willingness of many people 4 -13 to acceptthe notion that psychic phenomena are irreproducible \suggests that a lot ofpeople are just not entirely convinced of the principle of cause and effect.Scientists expect the laws of nature to be constant; this intuition is widelyquestioned by non-scientists.   Theresistance to new facts is most dangerous when real everyday issues areinvolved. The folklore of the right has it that a vast array of welfare cheatsiB sapping the economy and living in luxury while siring broods of illegitimatechildren. Yet in late 1979, there were 10.4 million individuals receiving AidFor Families With Dependent Children (AFDC), of whom 7.2 million were children,an average of two children per family. This is a bit different from thestereotypical welfare family with ten kids. The total welfare burden, coun tingABDC, food stamps, and Medicare came to about $35 billion. If only the 3.6million families with AFD: received benefits they would come to $9700 per familyper year, survivable but hardly enough for a Cadillac. The folklore of the lefti8 that the freeloaders are hordes of wealthy people who paid no taxes. Yet in1979, taxpayers in the income range $25,000-$30,000 paid an average of 14% oftheir adjusted gross income in taxes, those with income above $1,000,000 paid48%. Confiscating all income above $100,000 per year would have netted about $43billion, less than 8% of the 1980 Federal budget of $580 billion. How do peoplewho hold these stereotypes react when con fronted with the real data? I knowfrom personal experience in dealing with both sides of the political spectrum-- they z~ . I first ran into this phenomenon while a student atBerkeley during the late 1960's. When I went home to a fairly conservative area,I would attempt to explain what was motivating the students who were involved inprotests. Then I would go back and attempt to explain to students the resentmentfelt by outsiders. The reactions of both groups were amazingly identical. Bothgroups flatly re- fused to believe any facts that contradicted their preconcep-tions, and both stonewalled whenever the discussion seemed   tobe leading uncontrollably toward an unpleasant conclusion by interjectingabsolutely irrelevant objections. Orwell called this reasoning Crimestop: "It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceivelogical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they areinimical ... and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which iscapable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity." Blunt, but accurate. The term "intuition" is also used sometimes to describe the ability to follow several lines of reasoning or keep a variety of data in mind simultaneously. This sort of reasoning is closely related to what many philosophers of science call "holistic"; in popular language this style of reasoning is called "looking at the big picture". Pseudoscience commonly mimics or parodies this variety of intuition in several ways. One common argument, which we considered in Chapter 12, is the claim that outsiders can see things that narrow specialists cannot. It is more important to ask whether the special-ist can see things the superficial generalist cannot. Pseudoscientists oftenmanage to create the impression 14- /S of great erudition and breadth byoverwhelming the reader in n a blizzard of details. This is the style of Erichvon Daniken, and something very much like it accounted for the appeal thatVelikovsky had for many in the arts and humanities. Still earlier the writingsof Ignatius Donnelly were praised for their great scope. There is a strangepower such works have to be impressive even when the details an individualreader can check are patently absurd. Carl Sagan has recounted the story of adiscussion he had on Velikovsky with an expert on Middle Eastern history. Theexpert said that, of course the Egyptian and Assyrian history in Velikovsky wasnonsense, but he was very impressed with the science! It seems so hard to   believethat such seeming erudition is being exercised to perpetrate a perfectlyordinary, garden-variety snow job! t 

Is it at all possible that there might besubjects where popular intuition can be right and science can be wrong? Certainly. One such area is folk medicine, where apparently ab surd remediessometimes turned out to have a solid medical basis. Native Americans, as well asmany other peoples, treat ed ailments with herb teas made from willow bark.These teas contain salicylic acid, better known as aspirin. In fact, the term"salycilic" comes from the Latin word Salix, for willow. 

Another sucharea is weather forecasting. A lot of old weather sayings have a solid basis infact. A ring around the sun or moon is often the first sign of an advancingfront, and may well signify bad weather. The old saying, "Red sky inmorning, sailors take warning; red sky at night, sailors' de light" alsohas a factual basis. In middle latitudes, weather 14- /6 systems move from westto east much of the time. A red sky in G the morning means first, that the skyto the east is clear,so that any bad weather is still to the west, and second,that suspended moisture in the air i9 scattering sunlight. A red sky at nightmeans the sky to the west is clear and that any bad weather systems have alreadypassed. 

Nothing embodies American weather lore like the Old Farmer's Almanac,which was first published when George Wash ington was President and there werefifteen states. The ornate cover design has not changed since 1852 -- a decadebefore the Civil War. The formula the Almanac uses is kept a deep dark secret,but the formula may not be as deep and dark as commonly believed. AMassachusetts amateur astronomer, Francis Tagan, noted what seemed to be anexasperating tendency for 5 clear skies to occur around the time of full moon,when faint   sky objects arehard to see in the bright sky. He noted a similar pattern in the predictions ofthe Almanac, and began digging through back copies. He dug all the way back to1846(!), where he found a weather table that related the times of new, firstquarter, full, and last quarter moon to the weather, using only the time of thephase change, the season, and in some cases the wind direction. A sample entrystates that if the phase change occurs between 6 and 8 p.m., the weather in thesummer will be fair if the wind is from the northwest, rainy if the wind is fromthe south or southwest. In the win ter the wealher will be fair and frosty witha north or north west wind, rainy or snowy with a south or southwest wind. 

Tagandetailed his findings in a letter to the January, 1981 14-17 issue of 2t~_gMg~_BLeggge~. sTagan noted that the table claimed to have been derived from the workof "Dr. Herschel". William Herschel (1738-1822), his sister Caroline,and his son John were among the most emi nent astronomers of the late 18th andearly 19th centuries. In the July issue, Brian Warner of the University of CapeTown, South Africa cited ag 1842 letter by John Herschel expressing amazementover the popular story that he or his father had in vented a weather forecastingsystem. lIerschel wrote that the only such comment he had ever made was to notean apparent correlation between full moons and clear skies (as Tagan had) and tosuggest to meteorologists that the phenomenon might be worth examining.Meanwhile, theeditors of 53Y_5DoL_2LLogege~ doing some digging on their own, hadtraced the lunar weather table back to the Hagerstown Almanac of 1797. 

Aconnection between the Moon and the weather is by no means unreasonable, andalthough almost everyone has a favorite anecdote about the Old Farmer's Almanacpredicting some unusualweather pattern long in advance, careful comparisons of the accuracy of theAlmanac indicate that its forecasts are little more accurate than randomguessing. For example, the Almanac predicted that January, 1982 would be mild inthe Bast and South; actually, the weather brought record cold.

 There seems to besomething clearly different about the weather forecasts of the Old Farmer'sAlmanac than most of the other theories we have examined, and it is worth trying)to define just what the difference is. First of all, the scope ofthe theory is modest. It doesn't purport to be a revolution n that will shakescience to its foundation, doesn't claim to i have discredited somewell-established law of nature or to have found a brand new one. All the theorydoes is claim to predict weather, and the predictions are freely admitted not tobe perfect. The theory is eminently testable; just compare last year's Almanacwith the actual weather. The theory is by no means physically implausible; thereare many plausible, if undemonstrated, ways the Moon might influence weatherpatterns. The Almanac doesn't attempt to rationalize past failures, nor does itclaim to be hounded by the meteorological Establishment. 

Assuming for themoment that the Almanac actually does no better than random guessing would, itwould still not be quite accurate to label the Almanac pseudoscience. Ifthe Almanac were to make false claims about its past performance, or base itspredictions on a demonstrably false technique, or try to rationalize away itsmistakes, we would then be justified in calling it pseudoscience. Not allerroneous ideas in science are pseudoscience. The worst we can say of the OldFarmer's Almanac is that it goes far beyond what its methods   are reallycapable of doing; no meteorologist takes seriously the idea that it is possibleto predict the weather for a specific week a year or more in advance.Pseudoscience goes beyond that level; there is an element of militant arroganceabout its wrongness. A dollar and a half spent on a copy of n the Old Farmer'sAlmanac is infinitely better spent than on virtually any of the other theorieswe have considered so far, 

 There seem to be several essential conditionsthat must occur for a folk tradition to perform as well as science. First, thesubject must be one that much of the population deals with frequently; folkremedies and weather forecasting fill the bill nicely. These are topics thatwere intimately connected with survival not too long ago. Undoubtedlyconfirmatory bias plays a role in the acceptance of folk traditions; people tendto pay more attention to successes than failures. On the other hand, this biasmay have a survival value; recall the words of the scientist who quipped that itis better to run from an occasional nonexistent tiger than not to run from anoccasional real one. Similarly, it is better to seek a harbor or get in thecrops in preparation for an occasional nonexistent storm 5 than to fail toprepare for a real one, and it may be better to accept a few nonexistent folkcures than to fail to accept a cure that works. When the consequences of afailure to act are worse than the consequences of acting wrongly, confirmatorybias may serve a useful function. 

Second, the subject must be one where sciencehas made little progress in understanding, so that there are not likely to befacts that a specialist would know but a layman would not. Even the most ardentbelievers in folk weather lore will not hesitate to use weather vanes,thermometers, and barometers! When the subject reaches levels where most peopledo not have direct insight or experience, folk tradition ceases to work. Contraryto popular folklore, the atomic bomb tests of the 1950's did not have anyappreciable effect on the weather. Similarly, if some folk medicines work,others, like whiskey for rattlesnake bite, are worthless, and some areactually harmful when they keep people with treatable conditions from seeing adoctor. 

Is there any area today where folk tradition might still be capable ofoutperforming science? Folk tradition probably does not perform as well asconventional meteorology in making day-to-day predictions, but there are twolevels where conventional meteorology has yet to develop powerful methods.One i8 t extremely local prediction; it is one thing to issue a severe weatherwatch for an area 100 miles across, another entirely to predict that aparticular spot will experience severe weather. The other, of course, is verylong-range prediction. In both these areas we ought not be surprised if somefolk methods turn out to have a real basis in fact. 

To identify an area wherefolk wisdom might work as well as orthodox science, we should look for a fieldthat is young, has yet to develop a solid body of knowledge and method, andwhere ordinary people are exposed often to the subject matter. At the risk ofengendering some disagreement, I suggest that the field that comes closest tofulfilling these criteria is sociology. 

Even here, there are some facts that aresolidly enough established that we can say with confidence that some folkbeliefs are simply wrong. Thus, it is patently not true that a white couple canhave a black child if one of the parents had a black ancestor, nor is it true,at least in our culture, that homosexuals are more prone to molest children thanheterosexuals. Nevertheless, we should be cautious about accepting the claimthat sociology has 'disproven' some deeply held social concept. In a field soyoung, it is very easy for a researcher to imposehis or her own biases on the findings by neglecting relevant factors, or byfailing to account for contradicting data. Even the venerable Margaret Mead hasbeen accused of this failing. There are also a few people, like Sir Cyril Burt,who simply made up data to support their sociological prejudices. We willconsider some of these issues more fully in the next chapter. 

Social conventionsare also subjects that may have a definite survival value; like thetiger-in-the-bushes analogy, it is probably better to taboo an occasionalharmless practice than to fail to outlaw a harmful one. We should not be tooready to dismiss any social convention that annoys us as mere"tradition"; it may have a positive value for the society even if itis inconvenient for the individual. 

Throughout this iok I have stressed thetheme, doubtless objectionable to many pseudoscientists, that the burden ofproof is on the challenger. It has not always been so that science as we know itwas the established viewpoint; the history of science can legitimately beconsidered a history of discrediting unworkable intuitions and replacing themwith workable ones. Physics as we know it supplanted the intuitive butunworkable concepts of the ancient Greeks. The intuitive notion that the earthis immobile gave way to the astronomy of Copernicus. The intuitively-obviousconcept that the continents are fixed gave way to continental drift. Theintuitive concept that great effects must have great causes gave way to theprinciple of uniformitarianism. In all of these cases, what is now the orthodoxview was once the challenger, and had to accept the burden of proof for theeminently simple reason that there was no other way the new conceptscould hope to gain adherents. 

We should not misinterpret this process as one ofjunking intuition and replacing it with ~tsciencett. What was  usefuland valid in popular intuition became part of the scien- tific world-view aswell. The concept of superposition as used in geology is essentially acommon-sense idea; in any pile the material on the bottom was laid down first.Most of the intuitions that science has successfully supplanted might be called"default" assumptions; for lack of a better idea we assume thecontinents don't move and so on. There are other popular intuitions, notablyparanormal beliefs, where we cannot really say that science has disproven thebelief by finding another and different concept to be true. What we can say isthat the observations that should be possible if the intuitions are true are notappearing, and that the people who believe in the intuitions are not facing theimplications of the lack of evidence squarely. There are sound reasons forsuspecting these intuitions to be cases of seeing nonexistent tigers in thebushes. 

Pseudoscientists have an almost mystical faith in the power of popularintuition. They picture scientists as ivory tower dreamers who are sospecialized they are out of touch with reality. The irrepressible and inimitableHarold Hill describes the ascent of man this way in How Did It All Begin? 

Themost exciting thing of all in the whole colossal chain of events happens when abig, hairy, reeking, itching baboon in the jungle loses his hair one night. Whenhe gets up in the morning and looks at his reflection in the swamp, he shrieks:"Good Grief! I'm a people!" 

In other words, the whole thing is justtoo silly for words and regardless of the evidence, Hill won'tbelieve it because it conflicts with his intuitive beliefs. (During theScopes trial, a local shopkeeper rented a caged gorilla and put it in his storewindow so passers-by could judge for themselves the merits of evolution. Theacerbic newspaper columnist H.L. Mencken wrote, "the poor beast cowered inits cage, afraid that it might be true.") 

Intuitionis a powerful creative force, but humans create both fact and fiction. Thescientist uses his or her intuition to hunt out new facts; the novelist to findthe most imaginative plot line. By itself, intuition is powerless to generatetruth unless it is shaped and trained by experience. Intuition can never be asubstitute for data, sound knowledge of methods, or precision, nor can it everoverride solid evidence (The intuition of a scientist may lead him to discoverflaws in existing concepts, but the intuition alone means nothing; it must besupported with evidence). All the skills that enter into scientific intuition:facility in performing complex tasks automatically, ability to sort the relevantfrom the irrelevant, and ability to hold a number of lines of thinking inmind at the same time, are not inborn. They are the result of repetition,practice, observing others, and learning from mistakes. The concept of "grok"is a pleasant fantasy about being able to acquire vast knowledge quickly andpainlessly, but all experience suggests mightily that it is only a fantasy.  

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Created 6 February 2001, Last Update 15 January 2020