My Aunt Loves Chinese Medicine
As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.- Donald Rumsfeld, Poetic Militant of the Recent Bush Administration
It worked for my aunt, says she. But are my aunt’s assertions as good as the results of a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled experiment?
On one hand, it is, as long as I believe my aunt as much as you believe in that kind of experiment. On the other hand, if I had to make a decision regarding the use of Chinese Medicine in broader society, then such experiments are very important. These experiments are “scientific,” one would say. But what is it to be scientific, really?
To answer this inquiry, maybe we can begin by imagining a world where we have no knowledge apart from what we experience. This is often the world of a newborn – where she is given no conceptual knowledge apart from what she is able to observe, experience and make sense of. You can imagine this kid taking in all manner of sensory stimuli and slowly forming a worldview from her experiences alone.
For example, if mummy were to carry her everytime she cries, this repetition of observable phenomena translates into a fact that “If I cry, mummy will carry me and show me concern.” Without knowing it, the baby has formed a hypothesis that she treats as “true,” that crying (the cause) resuls in her being carried (the effect). Her hypothesis is testable and repeatable, but not necessarily unbiased (something worth discussing in a separate article). In any case, her hypothesis is likely to change when mummy is not around, or when she grows up.
Now, this is what being scientific is. We do it all the time, and as I’d demonstrated above, even babies do it. Science is, a method of knowing, of gaining knowledge of the world around us, with the assumption that we and the world around us are rational and orderly. The idea of unbiasness gives a character of universality to this method – that this is true not just in this one situation, but in also other situations, in fact in all situations. This degree of abstraction, the newborn is not able to put into effect, until of course, damned or otherwise, she begins to be “educated,” which to to be fair, helps every dude get up to speed on the prevailing knowledge of our times.
Unbiasness is a degree of abstraction even the common man has little interest in sustaining, Which is why we have experiments, and scientists who put them into effect. Many of these experiments choose random subjects from as broad a population as possible, and attempt to make sure no one knows what really is happening. Each observation is akin to that baby’s cry. The combined result of all the observations will allow us to make an assertion, called a hypothesis. Ludicrous as it seems, such is how we attempt to bring certainty to knowledge – which are hypotheses or theories not yet proven wrong. These theories are treated as true unless proven otherwise, and are very important when making medical decisions that affect broader society, if only because they are the best bet for assuring all of us living humans that the sick among us receive treatments that actually work well enough.
Which is why I’d prefer using the standardized language of Science – I like assurances that make sense. Sometimes it doesn’t just tell you how well it works, it might even give hints as to why it worked. That’s how it differs from my aunt, who doesn’t give me a how and why.
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