The pseudoscience of numerology
Jim Carey was on Jay Leno’s talk show very recently promoting his new movie The Number 23. As it turns out, the number 23 has a lot of significance to Jim Carey. Also, as it turns out, Jim Carey is a total loony. He’s really into numerology, which is the pseudoscience of adding different numbers together and pretending that the results mean something. In Jim Carey’s case, he thinks the number 23 is special, and so he sees it everywhere he goes — in his hotel room number, in the dates of important events in his life, in the lengths of his name added to other people’s names, etc. None of it actually means anything, of course.
He’s suffering from confirmation bias. If he actually tried looking for other numbers (say, 22 or 24), he’d be seeing them everywhere too. It’s trivial to make pretty much any number just by adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing other numbers that appear in the course of daily life. It’s kind of sad that people believe in this nonsense, and even worse that it was espoused on national television with no countering voice of sanity present. Jay Leno was clearly not into any of it, but like any good talk show host, he never disagrees with his guests. Just look at all of the crazies out there in entertainment anyway: Madonna, Tom Cruise, Mariah Carey — if you want to survive as a talk show host, you just have to smile and nod. There’s no shortage of idiocy in the celebrity realm.
February 20th, 2007 at 01:04
luckily, none of the loonies and idiots are on the web…
but seriously, just b/c people see things others of us don’t doesn’t make them lunatics. that’s the same closeminded approach that has been proved incorrect far more often than anyone cares to count, going all the way back to the “lunacy” of the earth being round. mankind has always denigrated and tried to humiliate those who see things differently or outside the box. if you disagree, fine, you disagree. but it doesn’t make anyone less right or less intelligent than yourself. these types of comments merely label oneself in other ways, ways we generally do not like. rather than absolve ourselves of opening our minds, lets show disdain for the mediocracy (mediocre aristocracy) and start accepting other opinions as possible - and exploring the worlds that those ideas open up. otherwise, what’s the point? we can all just sit around and call each other names and feel good about our little thrones.
February 20th, 2007 at 01:18
I’m not sure what you are getting at - the post above is very open-minded, and in particular points out several reasons why numerology is flawed. Maybe in the future you should consider making arguments that actually support your position rather than ad hominem attacks. Also, your example of the “lunacy of the Earth being round” is simply false. No learned man since before the ancient Greeks seriously thought the Earth was flat. In fact, in Columbus’s day, it was well known the Earth was round, but instead there was a debate over the value of the circumference. Columbus deliberately choose estimates for the circumference of the Earth (and the poorly known length of the Eurasian continent) to make the distance he would have to travel as small as possible. He estimated about 3000 miles - which was a far cry from the actual distance, but by happy coincidence, was about the distance to the American continent.
February 20th, 2007 at 08:06
There’s also a huge difference between the Earth being spherical and numerology. The shape of the Earth falls under the realm of science. It can be confirmed experimentally, and its exact sphericity has been measured by our satellites to an error margin below a meter.
Compare that with numerology, which makes no “predictions” that can be scientifically confirmed. There’s a huge difference between real science and pseudoscience, and it always makes me sad to hear people try to defend pseudoscience by invoking real science’s name.
When was the last time that pseudoscience made the transition to real science anyway? I can’t really think of a good example. That the Earth was round was never a pseudoscience - it was a legitimate scientific theory from the get-go.
February 20th, 2007 at 11:58
oh contraire. calling people “loony” and that their world is filled with “idiocy” is hardly open-minded. that is judgemental and close-minded. please go find for me in the realm of science (which would include psychology - the science of the mind) wherein those labels are scientific and open-minded examinations of the human condition and its beliefs.
and you are relying so heavily on your science that you are missing the point. look, not long ago we thought the earth was flat. i don’t care if it was science or incantation. what looks like pseudoscience to us now may very well be scientific in 100 years. the advances we make in 100 years now are beyond imagination. that is the point. it is now generally accepted that there are 11 dimensions. 11! twenty, thirty years ago that theory would be considered insane, “loony”. yet here we are. there is so much of this universe and earth that we don’t understand - yet we think we do, b/c we have “science”. well, our science is rudimentary, my friends. and with every passing decade, we find out just how rudimentary it was 10 years ago. and that trend will continue. too often our minds are feebly attempting to justify our rightness - and therein lies the closemindedness. you know nothing more of pseudoscience than you do of the exact essence of a black hole - yet will fight to the death the rightness of your opinion about it. that’s all i’m saying. is it right or wrong? it’s not for me to say. i just say it’s cool to explore and be open to the fact that maybe there’s something there that in thirty or forty years, we’ll unlock.
February 20th, 2007 at 14:13
Again, you fail to respond to the several very factual claims made in the actual article. I will not defend the use of the terms “loony” and “idiocy”, because I do not have to. You have yet to make a single argument that would actually logically support your position. Also, you made another factual error: It is not at all generally accepted that there are 11 dimensions. That is a prediction of certain versions of string theory, and even its most die-hard proponents would not claim that it is in any way proven. I am wondering what evidence you have to support your claim that science 10 years ago would be considered “rudimentary” today. Also, black holes are quite well understood, in terms of general relativity. While this has no real bearing on this argument, I would suggest you check your “facts” in the future before you post them on the internet, where some poor unsuspecting soul might believe them.
February 20th, 2007 at 15:41
This does offer evidence that string theorists are doing a better job of evangelizing the public than, say, “real” physicists (I kid, I kid, somewhat …).
February 20th, 2007 at 23:53
dear grokmoo, if you read the initial missive i sent, you would see that yes, you do have to defend those terms b/c that was the entire point of it: close minded versus open minded (and name calling, as i’ve said ad infinitum, is the former). and as far as facts - what facts? that if you focus on 22 or 24 you’ll see them? i’ve tried - doesn’t work (didn’t with 23 either). that’s the entire factual back-up necessary, apparently, in the original posting (where there were allegedly “several very factual claims made”). yes, there is debate on string theory - but between the 10 dimensionists and the 11 dimensionists. all are agreed that there are no less than 10. all of which, as i said, would have been called insanity in the preceeding decades. and if you’re too lazy to google answers, then, much as yourself, i don’t have to defend it, b/c the crux of what i’m saying has been proven so many times over on so many subjects that it’s appalling that anyone who considers themselves enough of an authority to post their musings on teh web would actually take issue with them. we are in a constant state of evolution - or at least some of us are - and that includes learning that all we have learned is still debatable. another example? is psychiatry pseudoscience? if not, then we know that breastfeeding was considered inferior and in fact harmful to babies and formula was the far healthier option. thirty years later, no one in their right mind would argue that - and it’s been “proven scientifically”. shorten the timeframe: surgeries peformed 10 years ago were, in some ways, barbaric in comparison to the elite surgery and advances that are performed now, some of which was far beyond our imagination (including, to make you happy: advances in brain surgery, thoracic and heart surgery, knee and hip surgeries). and i could focus on 24 until you’re old enough to drive, it still would occur in my life any more than it is now. does that mean it bears no significance? or that other numbers don’t either? no, it just means it bears no significance in my life. which reminds me, time to shut this off.
February 21st, 2007 at 00:59
I’m lost, what exactly are you trying to argue again? You’re not defending numerology anymore (having basically admitted it’s bunk), so what exactly is your point? That we don’t know everything yet? That’s a given.
February 21st, 2007 at 10:18
My point with string theory is that it is not at all a widely accepted theory at this point - and probably never will be. String theorists have been working for almost 30 years now, and have yet to produce any scientifically testable results. As I said, no string theorist in their right mind would try to say that it is “proven” that there really are extra curled up dimensions, and the majority of physicists are not string theorists. In fact, there is a significant fraction of the physics community that is quite vocal against string theory, with their basic argument being that it is a waste of time if no scientific predictions can be made.
I still don’t know what you are basing your assertion that this would be called “insanity” in previous decades, as much of the mathematical framework was developed by Riemann over 150 years ago. The specific idea of having curled up dimensions was actually first proposed in 1921 - by Kaluza and Klein. This theory was met with much the same reaction as string theory is today: some initial optimism that the theory would work, tempered by scientific skepticism.
I think this little anecdote illustrates a good point. It is not “close minded” versus “open minded”, but rather scientific skepticism versus blind optimism. If we just accepted any old theory without any evidence, there would never be any scientific progress made.
Regarding your example of psychiatry, if you read about some of the methodology that was used in certain experiments, even continuing to this very day, many psychiatrists would be considered very poor scientists by any other established scientific community. By psychiatry is still very young, and a lot of improvement has been made in the past 30 years, which is why it’s predictions have changed substantially. As far as surgery goes, obviously surgery techniques will continue to improve as long as the technology improves.
February 21st, 2007 at 11:08
I’m going to have to agree with Grokmoo here, and in doing so, I’ll add in some anecdotal evidence.
I took Electricity & Magnetism with one of the leaders in the field of string theory (if you’ve ever seen an American documentary on string theory released with the past decade then you’ve seen him). He didn’t bring up string theory in the course of the class at all. All of the electrical and magnetic phenomena are best explained by general relativity, not string theory. Even though he’s one of string theory’s biggest proponents, he’s smart enough to realize that its predictive power just isn’t there (yet?), and so he gave us the best education possible by teaching what is actually accepted in the field.
I also took a Physical Cosmology class last semester. Again, string theory was nowhere to be found. It was all based on general relativity and quantum mechanics. String theory just isn’t “there” yet, and it may never be. It also doesn’t help that there are some 10^500 different theorized versions of string theory (several hundred orders of magnitude more than the total number of particles in the universe), so yes, by chance, one of them could end up being “right”. But that doesn’t really say anything flattering about string theory, if they need to shoot so many shotgun pellets just to hit the target.
February 22nd, 2007 at 12:27
but that was my whole point. i don’t purport to have the answers, nor do I purport to underrstand half of what I’ve encountered in my life visa vis their interconnectedness on this planet within this universe. all i’m saying is, much like string theory, numerology may very well have a nugget, or a vein, that is not only NOT loony, but actually an understanding of the mathematical nature of the universe. do i believe in numerology? am i a proponent? no. but do i recognize the fact that there could be something there that i, and many people like me, aren’t catching? yes. my whole argument has and has always been, rather than label, disagree respectfully, and always keep re-examining that which we don’t believe in as our understanding and knowledge base changes, b/c we just might find that the landscape has changed.
“As far as surgery goes, obviously surgery techniques will continue to improve as long as the technology improves.” this was my entire point in a nutshell. you can’t say “well that’s b/c it improved” as a basis to disprove the assertion that as knowledge increases, so too does understanding. tech improves b/c of our understanding is across all mediums and spectrums, so as physics knowledge and technologies improve, so to will our theories and applications. it’s the micro of the macro.