"In 1985, Marshall underwent gastric biopsy to prove he wasn’t infected with H. pylori and subsequently swallowed a solution containing the bacterium, inducing his own ulcer."
That is called proving a negative.
Many people say it is logically impossible to prove a negative.
Others say it's possible. I agree with the latter. And I think it happens very often.
For example, the sentence "Most US citizens can't read Chinese language." But a properly run survey can prove that negative sentence is true.
Unless we want to tip the scales by selecting for the survey only the subset of US citizens who can read Chinese. Then we might get a whooping 99% of true positives, and then we jump to the wrong conclusion: most Americans can read Chinese.
And this would be a gross but functional way to perform a scientific fraud. Gross because most people would see the methodological trick right away, and functional because most people will believe the fraud, because "you can't prove a negative."
But how could it be that many university educated people can see a fraud and still believe it's true?
A very standard answer to this question is that most human beings are narcissists. The mental disease called narcissism impairs the brain of a person in a such way that they cannot admit they are wrong. It follows that most people are predictably irrational and highly manipulable, through induction of fear, shame and anxiety.
But all that is wrong, because narcissism is an badly defined concept, unrelated to any brain dysfunction.
There is a recent theory that narcissism is an impairment in the gray matter of the insular cortex of the brain.
This is impossible because the female brain has more gray matter than the male brain, and everyone knows that males are more narcissistic than females, so it cannot be that. This is a joke, of course.
I really wonder if people can understand the problem of attempting to turn bad metaphors into tangible, observable and measurable reality. I call that the "immanentization of the metaphor," to be as precise as humanly possible, but it's a mouthful and no one can fit that in a sign for a protest against Globalism. So let's not use that term.
First, we observe a behavior. Then we attempt to explain it with words. If we dislike the behavior, we dub it either a crime or a brain disease. If we like the behavior, we call it a "special ability of an evolved race" if we live in the 1930s, and we call it a "special gift of sustainable and resilient communities that is very important in the fight against global warming" if we live in the 2020s.
We literally invent diseases depending on our political desires to exterminate the conservative reactionaries to our disruptive revolution.
We also disinvent diseases for the same reasons.
None of it is reasonable.
We also pretend that medical science consists in telling people with poor manners that they are not flawed in their behavior, but that they have a disease in one or more organs, and through re-education and thought reform (cognitive behavioral therapy) the disease in the organs will be healed. The proof that organs are with disease is that the behavior is present, and the proof that the behavior is present is that there is a theory about organic disease.
And people believe this stuff, no matter how many times the fraud is shown to be a fraud. And this fact confirms that most people are terrible narcissists, Q.E.D.
I conclude that the most important step for people to take to restore Science to its former glory is to learn basic Chinese language ASAP.
"In 1985, Marshall underwent gastric biopsy to prove he wasn’t infected with H. pylori and subsequently swallowed a solution containing the bacterium, inducing his own ulcer."
That is called proving a negative.
Many people say it is logically impossible to prove a negative.
Others say it's possible. I agree with the latter. And I think it happens very often.
For example, the sentence "Most US citizens can't read Chinese language." But a properly run survey can prove that negative sentence is true.
Unless we want to tip the scales by selecting for the survey only the subset of US citizens who can read Chinese. Then we might get a whooping 99% of true positives, and then we jump to the wrong conclusion: most Americans can read Chinese.
And this would be a gross but functional way to perform a scientific fraud. Gross because most people would see the methodological trick right away, and functional because most people will believe the fraud, because "you can't prove a negative."
But how could it be that many university educated people can see a fraud and still believe it's true?
A very standard answer to this question is that most human beings are narcissists. The mental disease called narcissism impairs the brain of a person in a such way that they cannot admit they are wrong. It follows that most people are predictably irrational and highly manipulable, through induction of fear, shame and anxiety.
But all that is wrong, because narcissism is an badly defined concept, unrelated to any brain dysfunction.
There is a recent theory that narcissism is an impairment in the gray matter of the insular cortex of the brain.
This is impossible because the female brain has more gray matter than the male brain, and everyone knows that males are more narcissistic than females, so it cannot be that. This is a joke, of course.
I really wonder if people can understand the problem of attempting to turn bad metaphors into tangible, observable and measurable reality. I call that the "immanentization of the metaphor," to be as precise as humanly possible, but it's a mouthful and no one can fit that in a sign for a protest against Globalism. So let's not use that term.
First, we observe a behavior. Then we attempt to explain it with words. If we dislike the behavior, we dub it either a crime or a brain disease. If we like the behavior, we call it a "special ability of an evolved race" if we live in the 1930s, and we call it a "special gift of sustainable and resilient communities that is very important in the fight against global warming" if we live in the 2020s.
We literally invent diseases depending on our political desires to exterminate the conservative reactionaries to our disruptive revolution.
We also disinvent diseases for the same reasons.
None of it is reasonable.
We also pretend that medical science consists in telling people with poor manners that they are not flawed in their behavior, but that they have a disease in one or more organs, and through re-education and thought reform (cognitive behavioral therapy) the disease in the organs will be healed. The proof that organs are with disease is that the behavior is present, and the proof that the behavior is present is that there is a theory about organic disease.
And people believe this stuff, no matter how many times the fraud is shown to be a fraud. And this fact confirms that most people are terrible narcissists, Q.E.D.
I conclude that the most important step for people to take to restore Science to its former glory is to learn basic Chinese language ASAP.
Thank you for this inspiring post.