Didn't Get Enough Sleep? You Might As Well Be Drunk

But this is exactly the problem, scientists in general are not trained to investigate cases where the phenomena studied is adversarial and has an interest in a given outcome. I am not saying that the man is a fraud, I don't know, but the mindset that you need to spot it will be very different from what most scientists hold. This is why I personally think that these kinds of people should at least initially be analysed by magicians and others who are trained in misdirection and illusion.

> "It saddens me that modern scientists are such cynics."

The amount of evidence required is usually proportional to the strength of the claim. In this case the man is asking us to suspend close to everything we know about how the human body processes waste and its energy requirements. Claiming that this is possible due to a deity. These are very grandiose claims and I think a lot of people are rightfully sceptical rather than cynical.

And a large, well-funded project doesn't guarantee reliability. Science involves a certain amount of trust of your peers and scientists studying these claimed phenomena often miss tricks by the participants that someone trained in deception wouldn't (there's a reason so many skeptics and "debunkers" are magicians by training). Look at Project Alpha (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Alpha) - a couple of amateur street magicians were able to make a whole department of researchers believe they had psychic powers for years without even being challenged.

When it comes down to it, science is about evidence. That's why scientists were able to overturn ideas like geocentrism - they examined them and they didn't fit with the evidence, so they had to go. Theories that had seemed "impossible" to some (certainly not all) people before them, like the Earth going round the Sun, did fit the evidence when scientifically examined and they became the accepted scientific consensus (to cut a long story short).

Scientists dismissing these studies aren't doing so based just "on their own observations". There's a very solid base of scientific, verifiable evidence that says that people need to eat. I don't think it's overly cynical to say that a couple of flaky studies should do little to change anyone's mind.

Science is based on skepticism, you can't believe something just because somebody tells you to or because you hope it is true, and you can't trust all sources of information. This is why there is a system (we can admit it is improvable) where experts on a certain area review the quality and reproducibility of a work to ensure it reaches a certain/minimum level.

Obviously, something that we consider true today can be accepted as false tomorrow (even though usually in science more than false, the change is to not complete). And that's precisely the power of science.

To the contrary, history has shown that many things are just plain impossible, and no change of state of mind will do anything to make them possible.

When the entire experiment is based around constantly monitoring someone, any time where you can't see them is a pretty serious flaw in the experiment design. Even if he was only out of view for a few seconds (and I wouldn't mind a source for that), that's all it would take to drink some gargling/bathing water or quickly have a snack that some devotee left hidden.

Smart people can certainly be wrong and often have been. Sometimes due to their own preexisting beliefs and prejudices, sometimes because they were limited by the knowledge and technology of their time, and sometimes even because they're being deliberately deceived and their particularly expertise isn't suited to catching it (I cited Project Alpha in a comment below and there are many other examples).

The key thing about science, and remember that organised science is a relatively new idea in the span of human history and one that's made tremendous advances possible in a short time, is that it's about a consensus backed up by the evidence, not any single scientist's opinion. Sure, sometimes one scientist or a small team will come up with a radically new opinion in some field. When their evidence is examined and their experiments repeated by their peers, sometimes they're a Gallileo. More often they're a Pons and Fleischmann (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion#Fleischmann.E2.80.9...). But if, and quite rightly only if, they've got good evidence and a theory that fits the facts better than any other, the consensus will shift.

It's not about cynicism, it's about rationality and skepticism. As the old saying goes, keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out.

...but everyone else is wrong a lot more often.

(We opt not to lean to the more permissive side because drivers who are drunk are indeed already responsible for a great deal of injury, loss of life, and damage)

Seriously, I can drive for fifteen minutes and see dozens of people who are driving too close together or committing some other sin. All those people who, just going into a corner, you see lighting off their brakes one after another - when all you, a little further back, have to do is roll your toes back a little to take some of the speed out.

Considering random breath tests don't seem to be that big of a thing, (I think - https://www.askthe.police.uk/content/Q723.htm - that they can't do truly random testing,) they're probably picking the people liable to be the worst examples anyway. Which I suspect is the most we can practically hope for at the moment.