Friday, March 25, 2016

The Secret

The "secret" has been previously pubished in a variety of forms.  Each, in its heyday. had many adherents.  Each has subsequently disappeared into the miasma of  miracle cures, and has eventually been  replaced by a newer and presumably upgraded version.  For instance, "the Power of Positive Thinking" was a best-seller a few decades back.  The newer "Secret" has nothing new.

Points to consider:  Firstly, if this book (or all its predecessors) are to be considered as some sort of scientific proposal, it is missing enough sandwiches to spoil the picnic.  The article in Wikipedia states that a principle of the "theory" is that  positive thinking sends out "vibrations" in some form to which the universe responds.  A few questions arise:  What are "vibrations"?  Vibrations of what?  At what speed do these vibrations travel?  Even at the speed of light a relatively small amount of the universe would be included in your lifetime.  So one has to assume that these vibrations affect your immediate environment, social and physical.  If this theory were true, how would it fit into all the knowledge that we have about how the universe functions?

What power feeds these vibrations?  Your brain?  Can these vibrations be detected or is this only a metaphor which is to be taken seriously? 

Secondly, what receives these vibrations?  Does money or gold or good luck have a set of receptors?  Does gold bullion or the stock market listen to your  personal wants and arrange itself so that you are supplied?  And why would it do this?

In genuine science, a proposal has to meet several criteria to be considered seriously:  It must be plausible, which is to say, it should not disagree with theories known to be valid, and second, it must be testable, which is to say, falsifiable.  A theory must be  clear enough that an experiment can be devised which will demonstrate the validity or lack of validity of the theory. How many people reading this book have ever heard of "Occam's Razor"?

A proposal that depends only on the testimony of satisfied customers is essentially identical with a proposal to sell  you snake oil  or some swampland in Arizona.   Market schemes and political positions are also examples.  They depend on the willingness to suspend disbelief.  Personal experience is the worst and least valid form of evidence, which is why eye-witness testimony is considered the weakest of evidence.  There is always someone who claims (and may even believe) that they have had an experience which validates an unusual belief,  such as those people  who believe that they have been abducted by aliens in a flying saucer.  They also seem to believe they have been  anally probed, but that's probably just a coincidence.

More importantly, people with a strong belief tend to encounter evidence that supports their belief.  Psychologists (like me) call this "confirmation  bias".  When we have a belief not only do we tend to notice events that support our belief but we tend to discount or ignore evidence that disputes our belief.  This is at least one of the reasons that ALL religions find evidence to support their beliefs.  People can believe in a benevolent universe or all-loving god while watching children being killed by horrible diseases or fires.  That "must have just been an exception".

Richard Wiseman (whom you should look up and read) devised a series of common-sense experiments  to illuminate this factor.  In his experiments (and I'm simplifying and summarizing) he divided experimental subjects (i.e.humans) into two groups, one group believing they are "lucky" and the other believing they are "not lucky."  He arranged for a confederate to drop money near where they were seated.  The "lucky" subjects were far more likely to find the dropped money than the "unlucky" subjects, thus proving to both groups that their preconceptions were correct.

We attend  to what  supports our assumptions.  We disbelieve or ignore that which does not. This "evidence" does not prove we were right.  In  Wiseman's studies, exactly the same amount and kind of luck were present for each subject.  Yet each subject experienced proof that they were right. 
So those people who read "The  Secret" and believed it also found evidence that they were right, and the  universe rearranged itself  to meet their desires.  This undoubtedly was convincing to them.  That, however, does not make it true.

I am pretty sure that the authors of this book expected to make some money from it.   And I'm  sure they did. So does that make their  theory valid?