Pseudoscience Strikes Again
I am a firm believer in the right of individual self-determination. This includes your right to believe what you want, even to the point of self-delusion, and even to the point where it causes you to ignore more rational advice and threaten your health and your livelihood.
A lot of psuedoscience has its basis in the placebo effect. Medical science knows all about the placebo effect, the strange fact that humans can receive real medical benefit simply by thinking that they should receive real medical benefit. Medicine has taken advantage of this more then once, but real doctors try have a very strict line beyond which this does not apply. Grandma's famous chicken soup may help you with your cold (and also providing some soothing physical effects), but it's not going to take the place of chemotherapy, or emergency antibiotics, or anti-retroviral drugs.
Some less scrupulous people have made a living off of selling the placebo effect, under a different name. They tend not to tell anyone that it's a placebo, wrapping it a wide variety of pseudo-scientific names (does anyone remember ion beams? I work on an ion beam, and if you ran it through your bedroom, the neutron radiation alone would kill everyone in your city block. Or magnets? How about magnets?). There is a certain hesitance to crack down on this sort of behavior, after all, the concept of freedom of necessity includes the freedom to be self-deluded. If a man thinks that a Scientology E-meter can reveal the source of his problems, that is his decision. If a man believes that strapping magnets to the bottom of his shoes can cure cancer, that also seems to be his choice; he has the right to choose treatments. And each of those methods has adherents who swear that the method works, who believe with religious fervor that this is the best way to handle your problems. They may be wrong, they may be influenced by the uncanny human ability to confuse correlation with causality, but at least they are completely, fervently honest.
The ones we reserve scorn for are the ones who know. The ones who sit in their office, manufacturing Soothing Ion Rays, or Magnetic Socks, or whatever else the current rage is, knowing that their devices do none of the things claimed, and laughing at the poor fools who actually bothered to buy them. We reserve contempt for the people at the headquarters of the CoS, who laugh at how much people are willing to shell out in cash to buy a device that has the same functionality as a broken multimeter.
And so we come to the ADE 651.
Like most of these devices, the ADE 651 has a long list of unsupported claims as to its capabilities, and a whole host of supporters. Like most devices, it claims to work based on scientific principles that make no sense, in this case “electrostatic magnetic ion attraction”. And like most devices, it has no scientific backing, explanation, or support, nobody can figure out how the cardboard pieces you put into it are actually supposed to help you find anything. But unlike most devices, this one doesn't claim to solve any of your medical or mental problems. This device claims to be able to find drugs, ammunition, guns, human bodies, but most importantly, explosives, and is being embraced wholeheartedly by the Iraqi Government to the tune of $85 million, and is a key element in the checkpoints they use to prevent the easy movement of weapons, wanted men, and most of all, suicide bombers.
On October 25, 155 people were killed in a massive suicide bombing. The people responsible for stopping the next one will be trying to find those explosives by trusting in a device that requires you to walk in place to charge it, and responds to the presence of explosives and ammunition by swiveling in your hand, possibly only when the contraband is on your left. And somewhere in London, someone is getting rich off the fact that more civilians are going to get killed in suicide bombings. And one can only hope that the Iraqi government wakes up; we all have the right to self-deception, but the citizens of Iraq deserve better.
A lot of psuedoscience has its basis in the placebo effect. Medical science knows all about the placebo effect, the strange fact that humans can receive real medical benefit simply by thinking that they should receive real medical benefit. Medicine has taken advantage of this more then once, but real doctors try have a very strict line beyond which this does not apply. Grandma's famous chicken soup may help you with your cold (and also providing some soothing physical effects), but it's not going to take the place of chemotherapy, or emergency antibiotics, or anti-retroviral drugs.
Some less scrupulous people have made a living off of selling the placebo effect, under a different name. They tend not to tell anyone that it's a placebo, wrapping it a wide variety of pseudo-scientific names (does anyone remember ion beams? I work on an ion beam, and if you ran it through your bedroom, the neutron radiation alone would kill everyone in your city block. Or magnets? How about magnets?). There is a certain hesitance to crack down on this sort of behavior, after all, the concept of freedom of necessity includes the freedom to be self-deluded. If a man thinks that a Scientology E-meter can reveal the source of his problems, that is his decision. If a man believes that strapping magnets to the bottom of his shoes can cure cancer, that also seems to be his choice; he has the right to choose treatments. And each of those methods has adherents who swear that the method works, who believe with religious fervor that this is the best way to handle your problems. They may be wrong, they may be influenced by the uncanny human ability to confuse correlation with causality, but at least they are completely, fervently honest.
The ones we reserve scorn for are the ones who know. The ones who sit in their office, manufacturing Soothing Ion Rays, or Magnetic Socks, or whatever else the current rage is, knowing that their devices do none of the things claimed, and laughing at the poor fools who actually bothered to buy them. We reserve contempt for the people at the headquarters of the CoS, who laugh at how much people are willing to shell out in cash to buy a device that has the same functionality as a broken multimeter.
And so we come to the ADE 651.
Like most of these devices, the ADE 651 has a long list of unsupported claims as to its capabilities, and a whole host of supporters. Like most devices, it claims to work based on scientific principles that make no sense, in this case “electrostatic magnetic ion attraction”. And like most devices, it has no scientific backing, explanation, or support, nobody can figure out how the cardboard pieces you put into it are actually supposed to help you find anything. But unlike most devices, this one doesn't claim to solve any of your medical or mental problems. This device claims to be able to find drugs, ammunition, guns, human bodies, but most importantly, explosives, and is being embraced wholeheartedly by the Iraqi Government to the tune of $85 million, and is a key element in the checkpoints they use to prevent the easy movement of weapons, wanted men, and most of all, suicide bombers.
On October 25, 155 people were killed in a massive suicide bombing. The people responsible for stopping the next one will be trying to find those explosives by trusting in a device that requires you to walk in place to charge it, and responds to the presence of explosives and ammunition by swiveling in your hand, possibly only when the contraband is on your left. And somewhere in London, someone is getting rich off the fact that more civilians are going to get killed in suicide bombings. And one can only hope that the Iraqi government wakes up; we all have the right to self-deception, but the citizens of Iraq deserve better.