Interesting question

Over at Cosmic Yarns, Robert Scherrer poses a very interesting question based on the career of Robert Heinlein.

The whole post is here: http://www.cosmicyarns.com/2016/06/robert-heinlein-and-intellectual-fads.html

The question, if you're not interested in the whole post, is this: which of our current intellectual fashions will disappear by the end of the century?

I admit I haven't been able to come up with much, largely because I don't see many intellectual fads taken seriously as science. There's the dark matter thing (is there really undetected matter or do we need to understand gravity better?), and the whole slew of contradictory nutritional advice from the 70s onward.

Any thoughts?

Quote: Nareed

and the whole slew of contradictory nutritional advice from the 70s onward.

Any thoughts?

You could probably fill the Library of Congress with all the dietary books that have been written. How many are actually worth their weight in blank pages, I don't know.

Are you familiar with the church started
in 1968 based on Stranger in a Strange
Land. It's still around, kind of. Real
hippie-dippie stuff. I read S.I.A.S.L. when
it came out in the early 60's, I was a
member of the SciFi book of the month
club. It changed my young life, but 50
some years later I can't remember how,
exactly.

http://caw.org/content/

Quote: rxwine

You could probably fill the Library of Congress with all the dietary books that have been written. How many are actually worth their weight in blank pages, I don't know.

I wonder how many are more nutritious than the advice they peddle :) (based on the Mythbusters experiment on the nutritional content of cardboard -yes, cardboard-, probably none).

It's notoriously hard to do nutritional studies, because perforce you must follow large numbers of people for decades and rely on their reports. This means your data isn't reliable, you can't count on your subjects sticking to the study, and you can't have a control for comparison.

I wonder whether we could either 1) engineer a rat or pig or some animal to serve as a close analogue, or 2) perform short-term controlled studies with human volunteers (two-3 weeks duration) where diets could be strictly controlled.

I've a feeling that for weight loss there may be groups of metabolic types, somewhat akin to blood groups, and that's why one person loses tons effortlessly by going low-fat, while another does better going low-carb.

Quote: Nareed

...which of our current intellectual fashions will disappear by the end of the century?

I would pick:

1) Man is the cause of global warming.

2) Nuclear energy is evil.

3) All people have equal potential.

4) Human rights begin at "viability"

I think by the end of the century, we will realize that all of the above were wrong.

Neo Darwinism, climate change is bad.

This is indeed a very interesting question.

Perhaps we can learn a bit from the slogans of technology: you've all heard about 'the cutting edge of technology' and it sometimes being referred to as 'the bleeding edge'. It refers to how those with the absolute latest in technology can be at a disadvantage because the various kinks and bugs have not yet been worked out and those with a slightly older technology can outperform them due to reliability and familiarity.

Its similar to fashions: if you wear the latest fashions you will be the one who is soonest out of fashion since there is such rapid change, but a good blue blazer and chino slacks will serve you forever.

And of course there is pop psychology 101 wherein fads such as look directly into someones eyes go from a con man's trick, to popular fashion and then back to a con man's trick.. well, in the blink of an eye. "Team player" in school was a term I loathed and now its in disfavor in many places, particularly silicon valley where entrepreneurship and individuality are emphasized. People were jailed nationwide due to Facilitated Communication but that fizzled after about ten years. One woman in the UK was an expert at reading lips of people on surveillance tapes until after working on nearly seven hundred cases, some lawyers forced her to decipher actors reading from a script and she could not achieve even a one percent accuracy rating. Shaken baby syndrome and that silly four story fall nonsense persisted. I sent an article debunking it to one woman whose husband was facing charges and received a "you're a Saint" email in reply.

Diet books..... heck one journalist just showed ONE photo in review of the book's accuracy. He showed a full length photo of the very, very corpulent doctor who was the author of the book and he said absolute nothing else about the book. He didn't have to.

You only benefit from the last ten minutes of a work out. That one lasted quite a time.

Rats will choose alcohol and cocaine overdoses given even the slightest opportunity. That one lasted too.

I think my being a life long skeptic (or life long PITA, if you prefer) has helped me avoid most "fads".

Ofcourse global warming is multifactorial as is global cooling; nuclear energy can be great, Fukishima and 3MileIsland notwithstanding. Even Fukishima could have been avoided if the night shift had realized that once the salt water had invaded the supporting structure, the plant was useless and would not have been repaired or rebuilt. Had they instantly faced that reality they would have dealt with the situation with less concern for causing damage and more concern for containing it.

Viability or 'the quickening' are all fads and at various times and places abortions were commonplace. Once poor women in the US got free legal advice, they wanted divorces and abortions. One sociologist even found the crime reduction to be due solely to Roe V. Wade lessening the problem of unwanted and unsupervised brats.

Can't believe I forgot the biggest scam yet, SETI. Pseudoscience at it's worst. Playing on peoples hopes and imaginations to keep the taxpayer funds coming into NASA. The existence of extraterrestrial life is so ingrained in the public consciousness it may sadly stay around for awhile.

I think the question suffers from vague terms. What constitutes a fad? What constitutes an intellectual fad?

Consider scientific, or quasi-scientific, ideas long abandoned like phlogiston, the constancy of time, the steady-state universe, a massive object to explain the perturbations of Mercury's orbit, etc.

The first one is most interesting, because the man who first isolated and discovered oxygen and carbon dioxide, Joseph Priestly, worked within the theoretical framework, such as it was, of phlogiston. Upon finding one gas made things burn hotter, and another extinguished fire, he called the one "dephlogisticated air" and the latter "phlogisticated air."

So the notion of phlogiston wasn't a fad, but a reasonable idea that natural philosophy came up with. Even though it was wrong, it allowed for further discoveries within the theory, which ultimately proved it wrong (oh, the irony!)

When I think of intellectual fads, what comes to me are things like badly done science and pseudosciences which get taken seriously and are even applied. Things like determining someone's personality, and criminal proclivities, by the shape of their skulls (it had a name, but I forget), or social Darwinism, or Lisenkoism.

To be sure, the XIX and early XX centuries saw a number of "scientific" fads which no reputable scientist accepted. Stuff like drinking water infused with radium or exposed to radium (to increase vitality), or applying electricity to any and all health problems, or later on applying all sorts of light rays (in imitation of X-rays). This was quackery and scientists recognized it as such.

Would this count as intellectual fads?

If they do, then we have a whole slew of them right now: anti-GMO paranoia, anti-vaccine lunacy, the whole raft of "alternative medicine" practices (homeopathy, acupuncture, aromatherapy, naturopathy, chiropractic, etc.).

And then there are things like creationism, "intelligent" design, astrology, psychics, palmistry, etc.

SETI is to the NASA budget as College Football is to Alumni Donations.