Zombie Ideas
Or: Nonsense from beyond the grave
In his 2012 book, Zombie Economics, John Quiggon outlines a series of economic beliefs he calls “zombies” — ideas that have long outlived their natural lifespan and continue to haunt the world. Theories like “trickle-down economics”, according to Quiggon, have long been demonstrated to be false in meaningful ways yet continue to come up in policy discussions.
I found this framing interesting and decided to look at zombie ideas in others fields. What are the concepts that continue to come up, despite the best efforts of experts? I’ll be detailing examples from Psychology, Medicine, Economics, and Philosophy. If you have examples from your own field, please let me know!
Psychology: Freud
Say what you will about Freud, he’s had massive impact on the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and armchair philosophy. As one of his critics puts it:
“More than Einstein or Watson and Crick, more than Hitler or Lenin, Roosevelt or Kennedy, more than Picasso, Eliot, or Stravinsky, more than the Beatles or Bob Dylan, Freud’s influence on modern culture has been profound and long-lasting.” — John Kihlstrom (source)
It is hard to overstate the degree to which Freud’s ideas have permeated modern culture. They are, however, “mindbogglingly, catastrophically wrong.”
Here’s some key concepts advanced by Freud, which we know today to be false:
- Boys lust after their own mothers (Oedipus complex)
- Women, lacking a penis from birth, suffer from “penis envy”
- Women, due to their aforementioned penis envy, compensate by developing an intellectual profession OR having a baby
- Homosexuality is caused by men not advancing beyond what he calls the “anal phase”
- The mind is split into three parts: the Id (primitive and instinctual), the Superego (our moral mind), and the Ego (the part that bridges between the Id and Superego)
I could keep going, but I think you get the idea. These theories were asserted by Freud without any of the rigour we’d expect of psychology researchers today (which itself isn’t a very high bar, see: the replication crisis).
In Freud’s defence, I (grudgingly) admit he was right in promoting the importance of the unconscious mind as it pertains to human cognition — albeit wrong in nearly every application of this basic premise.
While these theories vary in popularity, they’ve all had their moment in the sun. These are the epitome of “zombie theories” — and it’s time to put them back in their graves.
Medicine: Anti-Vaxx
Anti-vaccination is what I’d consider to be the archetypal zombie idea. While anecdote is not strong evidence, one data point I have regarding anti-vaxx’s impact is that I am consistently advised against even writing about it. There’s a subset of anti-vaxxers who are incredibly passionate trolls, and I’ve sought to avoid their attention by foregoing writing about the topic in past posts.
So much for that.
Here’s what I’ll do. I’m going to post a large excerpt from a paper describing the series of events leading to Andrew Wakefield losing his medical lisence:
“In 1998, Andrew Wakefield and 12 of his colleagues[1] published a case series in the Lancet, which suggested that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine may predispose to behavioral regression and pervasive developmental disorder in children. Despite the small sample size (n=12), the uncontrolled design, and the speculative nature of the conclusions, the paper received wide publicity, and MMR vaccination rates began to drop because parents were concerned about the risk of autism after vaccination.[2]
Almost immediately afterward, epidemiological studies were conducted and published, refuting the posited link between MMR vaccination and autism.[3,4] The logic that the MMR vaccine may trigger autism was also questioned because a temporal link between the two is almost predestined: both events, by design (MMR vaccine) or definition (autism), occur in early childhood.
The next episode in the saga was a short retraction of the interpretation of the original data by 10 of the 12 co-authors of the paper. According to the retraction, “no causal link was established between MMR vaccine and autism as the data were insufficient”.[5] This was accompanied by an admission by the Lancetthat Wakefield et al.[1] had failed to disclose financial interests (e.g., Wakefield had been funded by lawyers who had been engaged by parents in lawsuits against vaccine-producing companies). However, the Lancet exonerated Wakefield and his colleagues from charges of ethical violations and scientific misconduct.[6]
The Lancet completely retracted the Wakefield et al.[1] paper in February 2010, admitting that several elements in the paper were incorrect, contrary to the findings of the earlier investigation.[7] Wakefield et al.[1] were held guilty of ethical violations (they had conducted invasive investigations on the children without obtaining the necessary ethical clearances) and scientific misrepresentation (they reported that their sampling was consecutive when, in fact, it was selective). This retraction was published as a small, anonymous paragraph in the journal, on behalf of the editors.[8]
The final episode in the saga is the revelation that Wakefield et al.[1] were guilty of deliberate fraud (they picked and chose data that suited their case; they falsified facts).[9] The British Medical Journal has published a series of articles on the exposure of the fraud, which appears to have taken place for financial gain.[10–13] It is a matter of concern that the exposé was a result of journalistic investigation, rather than academic vigilance followed by the institution of corrective measures. Readers may be interested to learn that the journalist on the Wakefield case, Brian Deer, had earlier reported on the false implication of thiomersal (in vaccines) in the etiology of autism.[14] However, Deer had not played an investigative role in that report.[14]” — Source: Indian Journal of Psychiatry
In sum: Andrew Wakefield falsified data because he had an undisclosed financial conflict of interest, and the paper that suggested a link between vaccines and autism was retracted.
Thank goodness that medical myth is put to rest! … Right?
Nah. Anti-vaccination beliefs, inspired by Wakefield’s now-retracted research, are going strong. This belief has found its home in mommy-blogs and other assorted pseudoscientific websites. This is a zombie idea, and should have died for good the first time around.
Economics: Trickle-Down
Want to kickstart the economy? Cut taxes on the wealthy, subsidize businesses, and generally make supply-side production cheaper. Additional profits will flow down from companies and the wealthy to the workers. This way, you only have to help some people and they’ll help everyone else in turn!
Ha Ha Ha.
But seriously, trickle-down economics was a dismal failure. It was tried in the 70s and 80s, and the tax cuts on the wealthy have persisted to this day. Despite this, median real household income has fallen in America, and general wages for individual workers has seen significant reductions. The supposed benefits of trickle-down policies have failed to materialize, and it’s time to move on.
Quiggon — the writer of zombie economics — used this as an example in his own book. He instead believes the evidence is in favour of trickle-up-style economic policy: giving more power to workers, establishing a healthy middle class, and not continually giving incentives to the wealthy in the hopes they’ll use their newfound surplus for good.
Philosophy: Trolley Problems
As a disclaimer: Philippa Foot, originator of the trolley problem, has done nothing wrong and I love the memes that have come out of this bit of philosophy.
The Trolley Problem is a classic in introductory philosophy classes. We are told to imagine a trolley barrelling down a track upon which is tied five individuals. You are standing in front of a lever which can shift the trolley to another track, where one individual is also tied down. What do you do?
Here’s the options:
- You don’t pull the lever, letting 5 people die
- You pull the lever, killing one person
The tension inherent to this problem is that pulling the lever constitutes actively killing one person, whereas not pulling the lever is passively letting 5 people die. Alternate formulations involve a hypothetical fat man whose total mass is such that being pushed in front of the trolley would stop it from killing 5 people.
The conclusion many first year philosophy students take from this is that utilitarianism — pursuing the greatest good for the greatest number of people — is obviously true and good and why isn’t everyone utilitarian already?
The interesting part about the trolley problem is not the utilitarian versus virtue ethics debate — what’s interesting is how people change their principles according to variations of the experiment. Pulling the lever, pushing the fat man, or even throwing yourself on the tracks yield different intuitions, and that’s interesting!
Instead, we get non-philosophers assuming hard moral problems are solved because haven’t you heard of the trolley problem?
Of all the “zombie ideas” I’ve outlined in this post, this is probably the most controversial example. The trolley problem is not problematic per se, only the garbled, malformed interpretation so many people have of it.
Zombie Ideas Are Everywhere
I chose the four fields I’m most familiar with, but the problem of zombie ideas is everywhere. I could have written the same post with examples from finance, marketing, media studies, political science, and everything in between.
I’d encourage you to think about your own field of interest. What are the zombie ideas you see there? Feel free to comment or reply to this post and let me know — maybe there’s room for another post in this area.
Thanks for reading.
