The “huge quan­ti­ties of data” col­lected on the sub­ject show that the prin­ci­pal rea­son peo­ple are deceived by pseu­do­sci­en­tific claims and alter­na­tive ther­a­pies is not intel­lec­tual abil­ity, but per­sonal expe­ri­ence: a bad per­sonal expe­ri­ence with main­stream med­i­cine is the over­whelm­ing rea­son, regard­less of med­ical training.

That’s from Ben Goldacre in an inter­view for The Philoso­phers’ Mag­a­zine where he dis­cusses at length the phi­los­o­phy of sci­ence, pseu­do­science, and the med­ical prac­tice.

One impor­tant thing to recog­nise always is that an extremely good tool has to be used in the right sit­u­a­tions […] Phi­los­o­phy is one of those tools, but I’m not sure it’s the meta-tool which tells you which tool to use.

There’s some­thing very seduc­tive about the absolute pre­ci­sion and clar­ity you can get in some philo­soph­i­cal argu­ments that I think can be self-flattering and a bit mis­lead­ing, and that’s a real dan­ger. Because one thing that you really learn in med­i­cine is that hav­ing a par­tic­u­lar pro­fes­sional qual­i­fi­ca­tion or edu­ca­tional back­ground is cer­tainly a risk fac­tor for com­pe­tence in a par­tic­u­lar area, but it is not a guarantee.

Asked if he over­es­ti­mates the com­pe­tence of the gen­eral pub­lic in being able to research the over­whelm­ing num­ber of pseu­do­sci­en­tific claims and dis­cover the truth, Goldacre replies:

There are two prob­lems here. One is are you intel­lec­tu­ally capa­ble? Do you have the basic intel­lec­tual horse­power? And the sec­ond thing is, are you moti­vated? And I think what peo­ple are gen­er­ally lack­ing is the moti­va­tion, But to an extent it’s habit. […]

It’s often not about fail­ures of rea­son­ing that lead peo­ple into these blind alleys, into irra­tional­ity. It’s not because of a lack of intel­lec­tual horse­power or rea­son­ing skills. It’s because of some­thing else. It’s because of a whole com­plex inter­lock­ing web of social and cul­tural and polit­i­cal and per­sonal issues that peo­ple bring to a prob­lem. When some­body says stand­ing next to a boil­ing ket­tle can give you birth defects, as a preg­nant woman, what they’re actu­ally say­ing is, ‘I’m really freaked out by moder­nity. I just don’t like new stuff. I wish it could be a bit like it was when I was a kid, and I think that means rural, because I remem­ber spend­ing a lot of time in the gar­den.’ That’s a very crude, stylised ver­sion of it, but, you know this world.

via The Browser