So, Columbia University has a lot of problems right now.
For one thing, it seems we’re falsifying or misrepresenting some of the statistics for our college ranking.
Also, our most famous professor offers tips on “What Your Astrological Sign Can Tell You About Your Health.”
This raises some interesting issues about intellectual diversity in academia. It’s easy to laugh at Dr. Oz for promoting crap like this:
People that fall under the Aries sign are known for being resourceful, assertive, and headstrong. An Aries can tend to “ram or dive in to things head first.” When an Aries feels blocked, this pent-up energy may appear in the form of migraines, sinus issues, or even jaw tension.
I’d call this sort of thing “pseudoscientific crap,” but it’s so dumb that it doesn’t even reach the level of pseudoscience. Throw in a few p-values, man, just for appearances’ sake!
So, yes, easy to laugh at this, also it seems reasonable to get angry at Oz when he trades off his university affiliation and medical credentials (“the straight-talking guy in the blue scrubs”) to say things like:
“You may think magic is make believe but this little bean has scientists saying they’ve found the magic weight loss cure for every body type—it’s green coffee extract.”
“I’ve got the No. 1 miracle in a bottle to burn your fat. It’s raspberry ketones.”
“Garcinia Camboja. It may be the simple solution you’ve been looking for to bust your body fat for good.”
Hey—whassup with that?? We already have the magic weight loss cure for every body type: it’s green coffee extract! Who needs the raspberry ketones or the garcinia camboja? One magic weight loss cure for every body type is enough, no?
But . . . given that 30% of Americans believe in astrology, it’s no surprise that some nontrivial percentage of university-affiliated doctors are going to have the sort of attitude toward scientific theory and evidence that would lead them to have strong belief in weak theories supported by no good theory and no good evidence.
So what’s the right level of diversity here? No way we would want 100% of Columbia medical school faculty believing in astrology and a “miracle in a bottle to burn your fat.” Even 30% seems a bit too high—after all, astrology is B.S., and belief in astrology is at best a bit of harmless laziness, at an intermediate level an aggressive signal that you’re not gonna let mere science get in the way of your scientific claims, and at worst could lead to actual bad advice.
Imagine you go to your doctor at Columbia University Medical Center with some actual aches and pains, maybe something really serious, and he tells you that your problem is that you’re an Aries, and your pent-up energy may appear in the form of migraines, sinus issues, or even jaw tension. Or suppose you have issues with your weight, and he tells you, “this pent-up energy may appear in the form of migraines, sinus issues, or even jaw tension.” That’s a problem, no?
But should Columbia have 0% of medical school professors who believe in astrology . . . is that too low? Maybe it’s good to have one or two mavericks, just in case there’s something to all that mumbo jumbo. Just like that University of Auckland has that statistician who is active in the vaccine denial movement.
Also, astrology is ridiculous but it’s no more ridiculous than believing that Thor is throwing down thunderbolts or that Moses parted the Red Sea or that Jesus was married or that those creaking sounds in the attic are coming from ghosts or whatever. If we kept everyone who had an irrational belief out of the university, the place would be empty!
Ideally maybe we’d have something like 15% of Columbia medical faculty believing in astrology: lower than the national average because we’d hope our faculty to know better, but comfortably different from zero to keep us somewhat representative of the general population. And then ideally these 15% would be kept someplace where they wouldn’t cause much damage. For example they could be in the Department of Surgery. Surgery doesn’t involve astrology and it doesn’t involve magic weight loss cures, so you could have all sorts of wacky beliefs there and not cause any damage, right?
There’s still the problem that the doctors who believe in astrology and magic weight loss cures (or perhaps don’t believe but are willing to lie about it for money and media exposure) can trade on the Columbia name. But that’s an unavoidable price of viewpoint diversity, and the solution is not to purify the university and purge it of knaves and fools but rather to move beyond the idea that, just because someone is associated with a prestigious organization, that they actually know what they’re talking about.
P.S. Does Oz really believe in astrology? I can see three possibilities:
1. He’s a straight-up believer, gets his chart done every year, etc. Could be. As noted above, surveys say that millions of Americans believe in astrology so it makes sense that some doctors will believe in it too. And I guess it wouldn’t interfere too much with his performance as a surgeon, as long as he not like, Sorry, I’m skipping the handwashing thing today because Mars is in retrograde.
2. He doesn’t believe in it at all; he just figures that some of his fans are into astrology so he wants to serve them too. Just like, if you’re a celebrity and you don’t follow football, you might still claim a Super Bowl preference just to stay in the mix.
3. Somewhere in the middle: he doesn’t really believe, but he wants to run this astrology material and get the clicks, so he kind of fogs up his mind a bit and says, Hey, who knows, maybe astrology is true, right? They all laughed at ESP and embodied cognition and himmicanes, but after all the published papers, NPR mentions, and PNAS talks, who’s laughing now, right?
Really, though, it doesn’t matter what a public figure believes, deep down or otherwise; what matters is what he says, and there Oz is perfectly clear: whether it’s astrology, or a “magic weight loss cure” or a “miracle in a bottle to burn your fat,” he says it’s real.
Again, then, the question is: What is the role of this sort of promotion of pseudoscience at a place like Columbia? Should it be grounds for termination? Should the director of the university hospital say, For reasons of academic freedom we can’t fire the guy but we loudly disagree with his promotion of these scams? Should we grudgingly tolerate the wacky or corrupt ideas pushed by some of our faculty on the rationale that this is part of our free exchange of ideas? Or, looking at this from a more positive direction, should we celebrate the delightful unorthodoxy of a med school professor promoting “magic,” “miracle” cures? Should we celebrate this step in the direction of a faculty that looks more like the ghost-believing America that exists outside the ivy-covered walls? Indeed, should we more actively ensure that we ramp up the astrology-believing segment of the professoriate to reach that 30% number? I guess my personal preference would be the second or third of the options listed in this paragraph, but all of them are, in one way or another, legitimate possibilities.
>astrology is ridiculous but it’s no more ridiculous than believing that Thor is throwing down thunderbolts or that Moses parted the Red Sea
Just so I understand your argument here – you are equating anyone who believes in a divine being that acts on the physical world with anyone who believes in astrology or quack nutritional cures? Is that a correct summary of one of the arguments of this post?
Jd:
No, I’m not equating these people—actually, I don’t know what it would mean to equate people! Just read what I wrote literally: “Also, astrology is ridiculous but it’s no more ridiculous than believing that Thor is throwing down thunderbolts or that Moses parted the Red Sea or that Jesus was married or that those creaking sounds in the attic are coming from ghosts or whatever. If we kept everyone who had an irrational belief out of the university, the place would be empty!” To say that different people have different ridiculous or irrational beliefs is not to equate them.
Gotcha. I should have said “beliefs”, not “people”. “no more ridiculous” seems like ‘no more or less’, which is equating them.
I find the post a little confusing, because it seems you switch back and forth between belief and action within the same argument. You give an example of a physician who *treats* a patient based on astrology, and then directly after the example you pose the question about what % of Columbia professors should *believe* in astrology. Shouldn’t the question have been be what % of Columbia professors promote astrology and practice it in their respective scientific field? You switched from an example of medical (mal)practice to a question about personal belief.
>Ideally maybe we’d have something like 15% of Columbia medical faculty believing in astrology: lower than the national average because we’d hope our faculty to know better, but comfortably different from zero to keep us somewhat representative of the general population. And then ideally these 15% would be kept someplace where they wouldn’t cause much damage.
So, earlier you equated (“no more than”) the belief in astrology to the belief in “Moses parted the Red Sea” (a well known Judeo-Christian example of divine intervention). Does that mean that ideally you might have only 15% of Columbia medical faculty believe in divine beings that act on the physical world? Because you would “hope our faculty to know better”?
This post strikes me as more of a post about what a person’s beliefs say about their credibility as a scientist (or academic) than simply about intellectual diversity.
Jd:
I got the number of 15% by dividing 30% by 2. A lot more than 30% of Americans believe in divine beings, and I would indeed guess that the percentage of Columbia medical faculty who believe in divine beings is lower than that of the U.S. population. One big difference here is that astrology does not have the social support that belief in a divinity does, in American society.
Just to be clear, I would not say that ideally only x% of Columbia faculty would hold some religious belief. Such a statement would seem really wrong! Nor would I flip it around and say that I want at least x% to hold some belief or other.—that would seem wrong too. Belief in astrology seems different, somehow; it doesn’t have the same role in our culture.
Whatever or not Dr. Oz actually believes, I’m pretty sure that many Columbia faculty believe in astrology and ghosts. For most people, these are costless beliefs, and in any case, all of us, myself included, believe in some things without real evidence.
I suspect the reason why my post is confusing is that I genuinely don’t know what to think about all this. On one hand, I think intellectual diversity is a good thing, and I think it’s important to respect people’s religious beliefs. On the other hand, I find Dr. Oz’s promotion of astrology as an explanation for “migraines, sinus issues, or even jaw tension” to be irresponsible and unethical, unless he really believes in it, in which case I’d find it disturbing in a different way, and this does seem somehow related to his promotion of miracle cures. I do think intellectual diversity is part of this, in that part of intellectual diversity is supporting the expression of ideas with which we disagree.
But it’s not up to me, nor should it be! Indeed, I was forced out of an academic department for using Bayesian methods, which my colleagues seemed to think was a violation of scientific principles in some way.
I see. Well, I just thought I would point out how this reader understood the blog post as written. I agree it is a confusing topic. I certainly think there is a large difference between a held belief and the held belief becoming the actual intervention.
As far as the Dr. Oz example goes, I agree with what you are saying. And, I will admit that what a person believes does influence how I personally view their credibility as a scientist! Not sure I can help it. I suspect everyone does this at some level. However, at the organization or system level, I think much more care should be taken, and we should err on the side of intellectual diversity.
I do like this line – “move beyond the idea that, just because someone is associated with a prestigious organization, that they actually know what they’re talking about.”
The Moses story (in its entirety) certainly strained credulity to the breaking point for me, at a young age. Ten plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, and then 30-40% of the Israelites decide they can invent a new, more useful god by melting some trinkets to make a golden calf? Who are then murdered right after the original god gives Moses the commandment, “Thou shalt not murder”?
Plus I’ve always wondered how much mud is at the bottom of the Red Sea and how easy it would be to get all one’s belonging across it. And what army would chase you across it.
If you can move all that water, why not simply pick up all the Israelites and their stuff and fly them away from Egypt, without all the drama and slaughter of innocents?
So I for one concur, that particular example of a divine being acting on the physical world should not be believable. But who’s generalizing?
I always figured Moses (or whoever the story is really based on) knew about the timing of a low tide and took advantage. Kind of like the Columbus story where he used knowledge of an eclipse to convince some Native Americans to give them food because “God” was angry.
@ JimV
30-40% of the Israelites decide they can invent a new, more useful god by melting some trinkets to make a golden calf?
It never made any sense to me until a few years ago it struck me that the golden calf must have been an image of the Apis Bull .
As you suggest, there is a difference between what someone believes and what they say. I’d advocate open diversity in the former – I don’t want to police the beliefs of any faculty member. However, when those beliefs lead to actions (words, in this case), they need to clearly distinguish between what they can say on the basis of their expertise and what they believe because they are human and have a right to believe whatever they want. It is the failure to distinguish between these two things that infuriates me. I think that should be considered malpractice and should take precedence over number of publications, citations, grants, etc.
In your example, if Dr. Oz were treating me as a patient and advocated be taking green coffee extract to cure my weight problem, he legally might be subject to a malpractice suit. But if he says this in an article or on TV, using his credentials to support the statement, that should similarly be considered malpractice. If, instead, he gets on TV and says, “this is what I believe, but it is not conventional medical wisdom nor is it supported by any reasonable scientific evidence,” then I am fine with him saying whatever he wants.
+1
This post reminds me of a discussion among economists about what is the right amount of employee theft that companies should tolerate. It’s not 0%, because the cost of getting to that level would outweigh the benefit. From a purely practical perspective, it would probably be too costly to get to 0% crazy ideas among faculty.
Michael:
I have some crazy ideas myself, so I wouldn’t want it to be 0.
If a physician treating me spouted nonsense, it wouldn’t matter if said nonsense were based on astrology or mainstream religion or new age mystical stuff or Wicca. I’d leave immediately and seek advice from someone who wasn’t a quack.
It’s not for me to “equate” one set of irrational beliefs with another. I’ll leave that sort of argument to those with a dog in the fight, so to speak.
There are a few nostrums among medical practitioners that appear to be “science” based but might as well be astrology. The near-automatic prescription of Statin drugs is but one example. At this point in time, believing in the efficacy and safety of Statins might as well be a superstition.
Can you link me to a review article on the efficacy and safety of Statins that supports your assertion? I’m genuinely unaware of the evidence behind Statins.
Search for statin here: https://www.thennt.com/home-nnt/
Most medical interventions only benefit ~1/100 patients (probably somewhat less due to the biased literature), to me it looks like statins are about standard.
There’s a common belief that by transforming an effect measure from a trial into a NNT you can identify the proportion of patients who experience “benefit”, but very few trials are actually able to estimate this.
Stephen Senn has written clearly on the topic, all of these are worth a read in my opinion:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/30-years-numbers-needed-treat-stephen-senn
https://errorstatistics.com/2018/07/11/s-senn-personal-perils-are-numbers-needed-to-treat-misleading-us-as-to-the-scope-for-personalised-medicine-guest-post/
https://errorstatistics.com/2016/08/02/s-senn-painful-dichotomies-guest-post/
This is correct, but table 1 corresponds to maximum possible net benefit. This is how the number is interpreted since placebo is typically assumed to do nothing. That is the additional assumption he is missing.
As mentioned, all these numbers are likely biased toward excess benefit due to various systematic errors as well.
@Daniel
Also, the role of cholesterol remains unclear to begin with. As usual, a pile of conflicting results has been generated:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28969682/
If you look at the synthesis and metabolism it seems pretty likely to me the primary role is as a fat-soluble anti-oxidant.
My problem with AG’s post is that he mixes examples of medical practice and personal belief. The post seems much more about what personal beliefs say about a scientist’s credibility than about “diversity”.
Anecdotally, I know many physicians who believe things that based on the language in this post would be equated with astrology – reincarnation, divine beings, and the parting of the Red Sea (not all among the same individual haha). They are all top physicians and medical school professors, and they do a top job of treating people every day with the best available medical knowledge and tools. They are credible physicians, scientists, and instructors.
I just don’t think the post treads very carefully when differentiating professional practice and personal belief.
AG writes, “Really, though, it doesn’t matter what a public figure believes, deep down or otherwise; what matters is what he says, and there Oz is perfectly clear: whether it’s astrology, or a “magic weight loss cure” or a “miracle in a bottle to burn your fat,” he says it’s real.”
It seems like this sort of addresses what I am saying, but it conflicts a bit with the gist of the rest of the post and IMHO doesn’t actually get to the issue. The main issue is not that Dr Oz says what he believes, its that the belief itself is directly related to the practice being promoted. The Red Sea analogy would be one where an engineer says, “we do not need to build the bridge over the river, because we can just part the river”. Believing in a divine being that can do that or did that in the past, is not the same thing as saying that a divine being will do that on my command. The problem is the belief itself becoming the intervention, not that there is a belief or that they speak about it.
My view is that we wouldn’t want academia (or any part of science) becoming a homogenous group of alike thinkers or believers (or lack thereof). And I doubt AG wants this either. I find this post subtly suggesting this though, in sort of a round about way.
Jd:
See the last paragraph of the P.S. in my post, also this comment. On one hand, I find it disturbing that Oz is trading off his Columbia affiliation to promote astrology and miracle cures. On the other hand, I value intellectual diversity, and I respect that part of this is respect for the expression of ideas with which I disagree. Oz is kind of a good example for this discussion because the ideas he promotes are irresponsible and unscientific, but they’re small scale. He’s not promoting ideas that would actively get people killed. In the grand scheme of things, dubious weight-loss schemes aren’t the worst thing out there.
jd –
> My view is that we wouldn’t want academia (or any part of science) becoming a homogenous group of alike thinkers or believers (or lack thereof).
I find this to be an interesting issue.
For the sake of argument, say 10% of the American public think the world is flat (I’m reasonably sure the actual number is significantly lower, a quick Google seemed to confirm that it is).
So does that mean some 15% of a university’s faculty should think the world is flat? Should it just mean that 15% of the earth science related faculty should have that belief?
These are real questions (not necessarily directed to you, however). I understand why people might think that viewpoint diversity in academia should be an important goal. But I’ve never quite understood the views of many people who get very animated on the topic. I frequently wonder if they think there should then be some kind of a quota system, or whether people should be hired in the basis of their beliefs. Generally, I would suppose not – particularly given the political orientation of people who get animated about viewpoint diversity in the academy (where generally they’d most likely object to quotes for ensuring racial diversity).
So what is a way to draw lines here, to define parameters, to quantify what is or isn’t an acceptable range around heterogeneity?
Should have been 15% across the board there
Joshua- no, that’s not what I was suggesting by my comment.
I wouldn’t see much point in trying to create diversity by matching some % of the public who held certain views…what views? where would it end? That’s impossible.
What I meant was that I wouldn’t want some panel of ‘experts’ deciding that certain people are disqualified from some scientific field because they hold a certain belief as described in this post. The post seemed to equate belief in astrology with examples from beliefs in religion.
I’ve never seen Dr Oz, but my understanding is that his ‘intervention’ is talking. He has a show. He’s an ‘expert’ (of sorts lol). So when he lays out astrology or some miracle treatment as a cure, that’s a problem because his belief is directly part of his ‘intervention’. If an engineering professor claimed students need to take structural engineering because they could part water like the Red Sea, that’s a problem. If a doctor claimed they had a miracle cure and wanted to treat you with that instead of the best practice, that’s a problem. But if all the above examples only believed in astrology, divine intervention, and miracles, but intervened with appropriate talks, engineering classes, and medical treatment, then I don’t see the problem. And it would be a dangerous precedent to disqualify them just due to a belief.
Jd:
Oz is a professor of surgery. That’s his expertise. When he talks about other aspects of medicine and health, he has no expertise to offer beyond any rando with an M.D. It’s kinda like . . . I’m a professor of political science, but if I started pontificating about Ukraine, my expertise in American politics would be close to irrelevant. The concern is that Oz is leveraging his Columbia affiliation to promote medical-related astrology and miracle cures. It’s an uncanny-valley thing: he’s talking about something that’s close enough to his area of expertise that someone might take him seriously, but not close enough that he wouldn’t say it in the first place.
jd –
> I wouldn’t see much point in trying to create diversity by matching some % of the public who held certain views…what views? where would it end? That’s impossible.
Agreed.
> What I meant was that I wouldn’t want some panel of ‘experts’ deciding that certain people are disqualified from some scientific field because they hold a certain belief as described in this post.
But ain’t members of a community have a stake stake in enforcing standards for their community?
> The post seemed to equate belief in astrology with examples from beliefs in religion.
I’m not sure in what principle you’re distinguishing a difference.
> But if all the above examples only believed in astrology, divine intervention, and miracles, but intervened with appropriate talks, engineering classes, and medical treatment, then I don’t see the problem.
But I think this begs the question. How is it determined on what basis a community should be able to enforce standards, assuming you think it is viable at some level die then to do so.
> And it would be a dangerous precedent to disqualify them just due to a belief.
I think that must necessarily be a messy determination.
If a Jewish theological seminary wants to expell a teacher because she doesn’t believe the holocaust happened (a topic which essentially lies outside of religious scholarship) shouldn’t it have a justified claim in doing so? Not meaning to go ad absurdum but to ask where in what basis you might draw some lines.
Didn’t know Mehmet was a professor at Columbia. In any case, although I don’t believe in astrology, I’d try and formalize your definition of pseudoscience. My point: there are occasions when belief in what was thought to be pseudoscience turned out to be scientifically validated. Continental drift is one example:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/when-continental-drift-was-considered-pseudoscience-90353214/
A friend, who’s math professor at MIT, is convinced that cold fusion can be created. So, how does one make a distinction between a valid pursuit of what will turn out to be a scientific principle or a validated in peer-review and one that will never be?
Sam:
Yeah, people always bring up continental drift! The other famous example along those lines is the age of the earth: A simple physics model of a cooling body implies that the earth can’t be billions of years old—but it is! The physics model does not account for the nuclear radiation keeping the earth warm from the inside. So, yeah, you can’t really be sure of anything. All I want to say on this is that, sure, that understanding that everything is possible, that’s what’s keeping afloat the belief in ESP, ghosts, miracle diet cures, “An Aries can tend to ‘ram or dive in to things head first.’ When an Aries feels blocked, this pent-up energy may appear in the form of migraines, sinus issues, or even jaw tension,” and all the rest of the things that Dr. Oz happens to be selling right now. One problem is that he doesn’t present these ideas as off-the-wall speculations; he presents them as scientific facts, and he’s using his M.D. and his media connections and his Columbia affiliations as a sort of collateral for his claims. And I think that should bother Columbia. As we’ve discussed in another context, reputation is a two-way street.
Andrew:
Your point seems to be of fraud that’s a subset of pseudoscience. For clarity, I’d separate the two. Mehmet seems to be active in seemingly illegal activities.
Much as I despise what Dr. Oz does, I come down on the side of radical free speech. Today’s lunatic idea may well be tomorrow’s Nobel-winning discovery. Back when I was a medical student at Columbia (shortly after the extinction of the dinosaurs) the field of immunology was in its infancy. We knew little about how the immune system worked, and clinical immunology consisted of giving allergy shots, a practice whose scientific basis was pretty much non-existent at the time. I knew a couple of faculty members who believed that one-day immunology would be at the very heart of medicine, and that it would cure cancer. The rest of the faculty considered them “nut jobs.” Well, nobody has cured cancer yet, but today the one truly successful treatment for otherwise abysmally fatal malignant melanoma is an immunotherapy. It plays a growing adjunctive role in the treatment of some other cancers as well. It’s a good thing we didn’t silence those “nut jobs.”
Agreed that the vast majority of kooky ideas never bear fruit, and many persist as zombies. But we do not have the wisdom to distinguish them from the ones that will eventually triumph. So silence nobody.
I generally agree. Even if I believe that astrology will never completely fail in the marketplace of ideas, silencing people isn’t the way to go. The First Amendment is still a good thing.
However, I read Andrew’s question more as “Can Dr. Oz be justified on the grounds of intellectual diversity,” and I think the answer is no. “Intellectual diversity” shouldn’t mean “some of us think about things; the rest, not so much.” There’s a difference between arriving at conclusions outside the mainstream based on an examination of the evidence and deciding to make a buck off quack remedies. Columbia (or licensing bodies) could try to hold him accountable for some level of intellectual rigor without violating free speech.
There is (or at least used to be) a distinction between commercial speech and other kinds of speech, with more regulation allowed for the former. What Oz is saying sounds a lot like commercial speech.
Sure. But even if he weren’t selling anything, nothing prevents Columbia from saying, you know what? You can talk about astrology all you want but unless you have more evidence than we think you do, we don’t want to be associated with it.
There’s a difference between ideas that are (i) wacky but testable, (ii) wacky and not testable, even in principle, and (iii) wacky, testable, and already demonstrably false beyond any reasonable doubt. I, and I think most scientists, are certainly fine with #1. Category #2 is where a lot of acrimony comes up. I think astrology falls into Category 3, and I’d be fine with simply declaring it nonsense and not falling under the umbrella of “intellectual diversity” since the first word in that doesn’t apply.
I have no idea of Dr Oz’s motivations, but I’d bet on “#2 He doesn’t believe in it at all; he just figures that some of his fans are into astrology so he wants to serve them too.” I’m always amazed by how many people believe in astrology, but perhaps “believe” is too strong a word — no one actually mounts a defense of it; it’s like a piece of clothing they toss on without giving it much thought.
In contrast, if you want some infuriating pseudoscience people really are passionate about, check out https://journals.aps.org/prper/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.18.010119? “Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A case study”
Oz promotes weight loss, but he also promotes fat acceptance, as in this video.
Andrew writes, “Should the director of the university hospital say, For reasons of academic freedom we can’t fire the guy but we loudly disagree with his promotion of these scams? Should we grudgingly tolerate the wacky or corrupt ideas pushed by some of our faculty on the rationale that this is part of our free exchange of ideas?”
Why is this a hard problem? You can believe whatever you want and say whatever you want, but the First Amendment doesn’t protect your speech when you are working and neither should any notion of academic freedom. If Oz gives advice to his patients that is wachy, he should be disciplined or fired. If he gives that advice on TV and the chief of medicine, thinks the audience may believe Columbia is endorsing it (silence is consent), they should issue a statement disavowing Oz. If he makes a political speech, Columbia should mind its own business. I think academics have some crazy expansionist veiw of academic freedom. Should you be allowed to mislead your students about basic statistical concepts? The answer is no. Otherwise, what is the point of the University. Diversity of viewpoints is great. Diversity of beliefs for its own sake is nonsense. Within disciplines, we can safely distinguish areas that are not a matter of opinion and treat certain statements as lies.
Steve:
You say it’s not a hard problem, but evidently it is, given that the dean of Columbia medical school has not to my knowledge released a statement distancing the university from Oz’s statements on astrology and miracle cures, let alone tried to discipline or fire him.
Yes, politically it may be a hard problem. Aternatively stated, people are cowards. However, intellectually it is not a hard problem. It should be evident that Oz is trading on his academic association to medically defraud people. Columbia should say so. That doesn’t implicate academic freedom or intellectual diversity.
“I think academics have some crazy expansionist veiw of academic freedom.”
Badabing!!! Most excellent sir, your best comment ever.
Free speech isn’t free of consequences.
I’d love a guide to “What Your Astrological Sign Can Tell You About Your Health” where each sign’s section is just a different paraphrase of “Eat right and get exercise.” Technically correct!
Any chance that astrology could lead to stereotyping, and stereotyping could lead to real differences? Just as women may avoid math because they’re told they’re bad at it, could an Aries hear that they’re “resourceful, assertive, and headstrong,” say “yep! that’s me!” and become more resourceful, assertive, and headstrong? With a large enough sample and forking paths you could find “scientific” justification for it, too.
Matt:
There are theories along those lines, also theories that astrological sign is correlated with whether your mom had a cold when she was pregnant with you, etc. All things are possible. But mostly it seems like an after-the-fact generalization, a hope that “there must be a pony here somewhere,” as the joke has it.
Well, the current head of the CDC was previously director of infectious disease at Mass. General Hospital and a professor at Harvard (teaching about infectious disease, I presume).
She claimed no one ever mentioned waning or variants to her. That is something that nearly everyone in the world experiences at least every couple years for multiple respiratory viruses. But she was caught by surprise.
To me, that belief is on the level of “the sun will rise in the west tomorrow.” It technically could be possible somehow but is unprecedented and very unlikely. Dr. Oz’s claims are in the same boat.
I think the big issue is that a crazy belief is a warning sign of a broken epistemology. A person who literally believes in astrology or faith healing has a broken pathway to knowledge that seems to be leading them down dark corners.
Can you really trust that someone got the relatively minor issues of a scientific study correctly if they can’t see the obvious warning signs and fundamental issues with something like astrology.
Ethan:
This brings us back to the distinction with religion. You can believe that Jesus did faith healing without thinking that Oral Roberts can do it, you can believe that God intervenes in human affairs without it messing with your science, if the supernatural things occur in a different box, as it were. As you say, the astrology thing seems scary because if you really believe it, you might start recommending different treatments to people based on whether they are a ram-like “Aries” person. Or, as you say, you might migrate to those dark corners of science where the goal is belief rather than understanding. Or, conversely, perhaps belief in something unsupported by science would give you a healthy respect for uncertainty! Who knows???
Columbia professor of Math and Physics Brian Greene believes in extra dimensions (string theory), multiple distance universes (multiverse), multiple parallel universes (many-worlds), infinitely many doppelgangers, and maybe even the simulation hypothesis. But not God, of course, and not eating meat. He has written popular books on these subjects. The Dean has not disavowed him either.
Roger:
There’s theories, and there’s what the theories imply about the world. Greene’s theories are developed with the goal of explaining things like the structures of elementary particles. We have political science faculty who have mathematical theories of international relations. All these theories are far from perfect and they make wrong predictions sometimes. There are medical school faculty who do research on experimental treatments, and lots of those treatments don’t work. My problem with Oz’s advocacy of astrology is not that this is a new idea that might not work; my problem is that it’s a bad old idea that he’s presenting as fact. If I were the dean of the medical school, this would bother me, as this astrology stuff is in direct competition with actual research on migraines, sinus issues, and jaw tension. I mean, sure, string theory has its critics, but it’s kind of ridiculous to compare it to astrological discussions of “pent-up energy.” Astrology is more like that gobbledygook that Alan Sokal parodied in his Social Text article, but somehow it seems more objectionable in the medical field.
Astrological medicine apparently was big back in the 15th to 17th century. It sort of died out later but maybe Oz is reviving it.
Roger:
He’s presenting them as theories — not fact.
Like Darwin presented Evolution as just a theory. Two of Greene’s books even have the word “Reality” in the title. He certainly appears to be describing reality, as he believes in it.
Astrology gives me a lot of conflicting feelings. I think that the claims are almost universally and demonstrably false, and I feel a palpable sense of annoyance since my area of interest is personality psychology.
I also realized (after a brief stint learning to read tarot cards for fun) that astrology and other new age stuff are probably closest in character to a sort of self-reflective, rudimentary therapy. It’s something that helps people form an organized narrative about the chaotic uncertainty in their lives. So I get why people like it.
Given the current intellectual climate in the U.S., we should practice saying Pennsylvania Senator Oz, currently on leave from Columbia University.
I once watched a Dr. Oz TV show where he talked about ingrown hairs. His first advice was to never pick at it. That seemed pretty crazy to me, as picking the hair loose solves the problem. It always has for me, anyway. His next advice was even crazier — he suggested getting a steroid injection in the skin near the hair! That seems rather extreme for a hair that can be easily dislodged with a dull needle. But I am not a Columbia Medical professor so maybe he knows something that I don’t know.
Andrew –
> I guess my personal preference would be the second or third of the options above,…
To clarify which set of options you were referring to…
One of your preferred options would be to “ramp up the astrology-believing segment of the professoriate to reach that 30% number?”
Joshua:
The second and third options in that paragraph are “Should the director of the university hospital say, For reasons of academic freedom we can’t fire the guy but we loudly disagree with his promotion of these scams? Should we grudgingly tolerate the wacky or corrupt ideas pushed by some of our faculty on the rationale that this is part of our free exchange of ideas?”
Was the War on Drugs based on pseudoscience (“this is your brain on drugs”) that academics almost universally supported? Should you physicians heal thyselves and before criticizing the mote in your astrologist brother’s eye? Are you ignoring logs in your own? How many lives has the false science used to support marijuana prohibition ruined?
The war on drugs has been primarily politically driven. While most academics will say that drugs are bad for you, and a few may be very anti-drug, they are (speaking anecdotally) quite tolerant. I don’t think there’s much support in academia for the war on drugs, or for the proposition that pot is any worse than tobacco or alcohol.
Will no one here defend the scholarly work of Immanuel Velikovsky?
That was intended as a reply to JimV above.
That’s DOCTOR Immanuel Velikovsky to you, bub.
I’m reminded of a narrower controversy: Prof. Michael Behe, of Lehigh University’s Department of Biological Sciences, is one of the foremost proponents of “Intelligent Design” theory. For obvious reasons, Lehigh’s bio department wants to distance itself from his views, but they can’t just dismiss him, because of academic freedom.
Instead, they posted [this statement](https://www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/News/evolution.html) to their website:
> “The faculty in the Department of Biological Sciences is committed to the highest standards of scientific integrity and academic function. This commitment carries with it unwavering support for academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas. It also demands the utmost respect for the scientific method, integrity in the conduct of research, and recognition that the validity of any scientific model comes only as a result of rational hypothesis testing, sound experimentation, and findings that can be replicated by others.
> The department faculty, then, are unequivocal in their support of evolutionary theory, which has its roots in the seminal work of Charles Darwin and has been supported by findings accumulated over 140 years. The sole dissenter from this position, Prof. Michael Behe, is a well-known proponent of “intelligent design.” While we respect Prof. Behe’s right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific.”
I dream of the day departments will post similar about the last NHST holdouts.
It will be a golden age of progress.
If Columbia could fire professors for their outrageous beliefs, then not only could it fire Dr. Oz for saying that an Aries is more likely to experience jaw tension, but it could also fire me for denying that 82.5% of our undergraduate classes have fewer than 20 students. It might have been a mistake to hire Dr. Oz in the first place, though.
Honest question (not being facetious): is belief in astrology at the same level as a belief in God?
That entirely depends on ones personal degree of beliefs in “God” and “astrology”. I agree with the Red Queen…
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
I think it’s less about the believe in God, and more about the belief in faith healing or that God will do certain things.
Interesting that https://thehill.com/media/598393-herschel-walker-asks-why-are-there-still-apes-in-discussion-about-evolution came out right after you wrote this article.
This sort of brings up a related question of whether we should strive to have “intellectual diversity” in politicians as well? Should denying evolution be a deal breaker for a politician? Might there be some value in having politicians who believe in wacky stuff as well?