Falsifiability

In the information age, the burden of deciding what is true falls entirely on the reader. Search for any topic, and you will instantly find a dozen videos and articles making contradictory claims, all backed by their own version of ‘evidence.’ So, how do we choose?

Concretely, let’s take a common example: “faith-healing” vs “medicine”. At face value, they start exactly the same way. A faith healer promises, “If you truly believe, I can cure your illness.” A pharmaceutical company essentially makes the same promise, though usually in some clinical jargon like “Patients taking 500mg of Drug X clear the pathogen 40% faster.” By the time the media summarizes the medical study into a catchy headline (“Drug X Cures Illness”), the two claims look identical. Both sides say they have a cure.

Now we have two claims, naturally we will ask for evidence from both groups. The faith healer provides evidence for the claim, so do the medical scientists. Let’s take a common template of evidence provided by a faith healer:

• The setup will be an audience member, who is visibly in some pain or has a severe condition that can be noticed by the audience and the viewer.
• The faith healer will then ask some questions from the patient, establishing that yes indeed the person is in some pain or condition.
• Next, the healing process takes place. Either the patient prays in front of the healer, or the healer prays, lays hands on the patient, and declares the patient to be free from the pain or the disease.
• The person says they feel better, cries, or performs an action (like running across the stage). The crowd cheers, validating the event emotionally.

If you open YouTube and search for faith healing, you will find thousands of videos presenting the same kind of ‘evidence’ as above¹²³. The medical world, on the other hand, offers a boring alternative. It won’t be as interesting as watching that video, and sadly the burden of analyzing the results is again on the reader which is incredibly time-consuming. Let’s now consider a common template of evidence provided for drug testing for a disease:

• The scientists first state the experimental setup.
• N number of patients are chosen for the clinical trial.
• The group is divided into two, the treatment group who actually gets the drug, and the control group who gets a placebo pill.
• To eliminate bias, the doctors aren’t allowed to know who is getting the actual pill and who gets the placebo.
• Then the results from this trial are presented, the treatment group is free from the disease 40% faster than the control group on average.

Now we have two competing claims, both armed with evidence. Which is true? Is it possible that both are correct? When people watch a faith healer, a common reaction is, ‘With all this evidence, there must be some truth to it.’ But if we look closely, only one of these groups is actually taking a risk. Only one of them provides a falsifiable experiment. A falsifiable experiment is one which provides a possibility to falsify its hypothesis (or the claims here). This concept of falsifiability was first introduced by philosopher Karl Popper in his 1959 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery⁴.

The faith healer’s evidence is not an experiment at all, it is simply a demonstration of an unfalsifiable claim. What happens when a healing doesn’t work? Are the patients being blamed for not having faith? Or was it some other curse? Or was it another spirit that blocked the healing process? Or did they not focus enough when meditating? There will always be a reason for a false case. Typically, the healer themselves will introduce an immunizing stratagem (ad hoc hypotheses) ⁴ even before the demonstration is done. There’s no scenario that their claim can be falsified.

Now, look at the medical trial. This is a truly falsifiable experiment. If the drug fails to beat the placebo, the hypothesis is dead and the scientists must admit they were wrong. Because the claim takes the risk of being proven false, the data it generates is actual scientific evidence. And when a claim survives enough of these brutal, falsifiable tests, it is no longer just a guess. It becomes a scientific theory⁵ which is the absolute highest standard of well substantiated correctness we possess.