I've recently been reminded of an interview that was, sad to say, in one of my art history books. One of the crazy things said in it was that the London fog didn't exist until someone decided to paint it. Cue facepalm.
Now, I'm not sure he meant it literally, but he did seem to think that no one really experienced it until it was painted, as if no one took a moment to admire the landscape on a foggy day before then. I find it alarmingly common among PoMos to think that some form of human experience or expression is sacrosanct. I also find it enormously silly when some of these sorts lash out against a new medium, like digital art. Hell, there were some who complained about store bought paints because "real" artists made their own. New media may require different approaches, but there's nothing inherently wrong or shallower about them. It's perfectly possible for some artsy type to make a video game that's on par with the classics.
Of course, I have to drift this subject into how science is done. Science strives to remove the subjectivity of the human element. A thermometer makes a certain reading, and unless you buy into PoMo epistemology, that reading will be the same for anyone. Put simply, it doesn't matter who uses the thermometer, it only matters how they use it and how they handle the data. Done with enough double checking against experimenters accidentally or intentionally biasing the instrument, you will get a more accurate result with thermometers than you will without them.
Being able to quantify such things rubs many PoMos the wrong way. A lake measured at a certain temperature may feel very different depending on who's getting in when. On a hot day, the relatively cool water may feel refreshing. For someone experiencing hypothermia after being locked in a fridge, the water may feel warm. Either way, it's X degrees, and the human aspect changes the subjective experience. Knowing what the temperature is will tell us how different people may experience it, as well as things like what chemists can do with it. Sometimes I wonder if PoMos try to pad their schedule by making sure there's always more to gibber about.
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It's up at Blue Genes.
Open thread as usual, but saying being a skeptic is as easy as ABC is FORBIDDEN!
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Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.
Sometimes, it's easy to dismiss something as absurd: It contains internal contradictions, like a "round square." It flies in the face of better evidenced ideas, like a perpetual motion machine that violates the laws of thermodynamics. This doggerel isn't about those sorts of things. Many woos seem to be under the impression that skeptics reject anything supernatural because it's the absurd in some other senses of the word.
First, there's the entirely subjective idea of certain beliefs being "silly." Hollywood isn't completely set against us, since every once in a while, they'll have a believer in the supernatural acting in a silly manner for the sake of comedy. I may crack a joke or two relating to that stereotype, but that has nothing to do with my dismissal of pseudoscience. Silly things happen in real life, after all.
Next, there's "absurd" in the counter-intuitive sense: This is very much real. I've heard many a quote from quantum physicists about how you never really understand QM, you just get used to it. Our minds were built for survival, not discovery, and we have a lot of mental shortcuts we use in our intuition. These shortcuts are useful in our everyday lives in the "middle world," but science doesn't confine itself to the everyday: Physicists work with particles so tiny and events so brief they, as Dr. Manhattan says, could be hardly said to have happened at all. Astronomers study things over vast distances, involving masses that dwarf our little blue marble. We should expect the unexpected in those circumstances.
Finally, there's "absurd" in the fantastical sense: The sort of wonderful things we often use escapist fiction to experience. We've sent men to the moon and back. We've sent robots to other planets. We can prevent treat diseases and injuries that would be a death sentence only decades ago. We can communicate almost instantly to people on the other side of the world. The world is already full of fantastic wonders, and I'm most certainly amendable to increasing the number. The world is already "absurd" in this sense.
"Woo" beliefs are not fundamentally different in any of these senses. The difference is in the logic and evidence used to support it.
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There's a quote in military that I think applies to just about any large-scale goal. It usually goes something like this:
"Amateurs study tactics, veterans study strategy, but masters study logistics."
That's probably why I'm almost always a Worker when I play Fat Princess.
But onto how this relates to conspiracy theories, and something I hope Debra will think about:
Usually, when I hear a conspiracy theory, I try to ask what I consider to be important questions that can be summarized as this: How did they get the resources, and how did they get them to where they needed to be?
If the conspiracy posits some unknown technology, they tend to run into trouble on how science works: The days when a lone scientist could make large breakthroughs is pretty much gone. There's little reason to believe that the government could hire only a handful of scientists and make something the rest of the world working together couldn't. The reason for this is we've gotten some very good broad strokes of how the universe works. The new technology-enabling discoveries we have to work on involve very large undertakings: Huge machines to smash particles together, large clinical trials on drugs to see if they actually have an effect, and so on. Science is a team sport, and whenever you increase the number of people involved, the harder it is to keep it secret.
In other cases, many conspiracy theories posit a government that is perfectly efficient, which is no better than invoking magic as an explanation. There's no reason to believe that the people working for the government or the conspiratorial faction are superhuman: They can make mistakes. They can have their own agendas. Ideally, governments are designed to prevent anyone from having undue influence because of various checks and balances. In reality, this often makes everything the government can do inefficient or incompetent.
The difficulty of any conspiracy increases with the level of secrecy involved: There's always someone who can grow suspicious if resources go missing. Many bureaucrats exist to keep an eye on money supplies and others to keep an eye on the ones keeping an eye on the money. For military supplies, especially nowadays with added fear of terrorism, you'd think someone would notice if a shipment of explosives went missing.
And finally, any large endeavor requires manpower. Every new person added to the conspiracy is a potential security risk. The more people you add, the more likely someone might grow a conscience or a brain and blow the whole thing wide open. Not only that, each new person, even if you could somehow guarantee their loyalty, adds to the number of people who could make a mistake or let something slip out.
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Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.
This particular Doggerel entry is a bit different from the standard sorts: It's usually only spoken in between the lines, most commonly when someone is faced with a question of "how."
I've seen a few minor arguments in my corner of the blogosphere over whether to call what doctors and medical scientists do "evidence-based medicine" or "science-based medicine." While both terms leave a good impression on me, those who favored SBM pointed out an important issue: Prior plausibility. Before investing time, money, and effort into investigating something, it's reasonable to expect an explanation for why a particular treatment might work. By asking that question and putting it in the context of what other research has shown and raised questions about, researchers can focus on more realistic ideas, instead of investigating any claim, no matter how implausible, as if all ideas were equal.
While it's true that we must bow to what good evidence says, we have to exercise pragmatism in what we study because we only have finite resources. Without looking at or presenting the larger picture of the controversies (manufactured or otherwise), a skeptic can doom himself to "play whack-a-mole" with every claimant on the internet. Demanding evidence is a good practice, but it should also come with a demand for a plausible explanation.
In my naive, pre-skepticism days, I remember a little thing from a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode that planted one of the first seeds of doubt when it comes to psychic powers: Dr. Crusher talked about Lwuxana Troi's "psilosynine" levels: A neurochemical involved in her telepathic powers. My belief in the possibility of psychic powers took a big hit: How could psychic powers work? How do the chemicals in someone's brain make all these things happen? Parapsychologists have been studying the subject for a long time, but none of the stuff I had heard or read about the topic had any guesses. I'd later come to hear invocations of quantum mechanics, but with all the tests physicists can do, you would think there'd be at least one psychic who could make an electron zig when it's expected to zag.
That's the problem with so many forms of pseudoscience: They don't explain anything, and are more often used as a wall against explanation and investigation. Even in fantasy, "It's Magic!" falls short with me: I prefer my fantasy to have consistent rules with its "phlebotinum." Without rules like that, it's easy for writers to pull things out of their back pocket to justify unforeseeable plot twists. Fiction has to make sense, and despite what some comedians say, so does real life.
Science is a rigorous process of learning the rules our universe runs on. We need to be able to understand those rules and make predictions from them to find useful ways of doing things. Additionally, a robust science is one that has new, verifiable things to look for, to explain finer details or possible exceptions.
Pseudoscience, in contrast, is usually dead from the start: There's usually no explanation, and if there is, it contains no details or mechanisms to look for. Without that, there's no predictive power: The people who propose a pseudoscientific theory usually can't guess anything about what new tools will find. Take evolution versus Creationism: Biologists can use the theory of evolution to guess where they're likely to find a fossil, both geographically and what layer of rock it will turn up in. Biologists can predict how much genetic similarity two different species will have based on when their ancestors branched off each other. Creationism can't do anything like that. Instead, they can only sit back and attempt to claim evolution's predictions for themselves.
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Welcome to a Halloween edition of "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.
There's an implicit argument that seems to come up whenever I hear someone attempt to justify the paranormal by changing the subject to quantum mechanics or other branch of science: "Real phenomenon X is weird, therefore the paranormal is real."
Yes, we realize that the world is full of things that are unintuitive, strange, or don't yet make sense. One of the fallacies that's often used to our annoyance is a presumption that human intuition and "common sense" is always useful. We evolved in the "middle world" where, like many animals, we only needed to be able to get food, avoid dangers, and have children to survive. The instincts and prejudices we grow up with are pretty useful for that, since cutting corners with those assumptions usually didn't cost us anything. Our brains were built to survive, not to divine the truth of the universe.
Scientists know that they can't rely on their assumptions and intuition. That's why science exists: To reduce or eliminate our biases whenever possible. We need this process because science is always pushing at the boundaries of our experience, going to parts of the world quite alien to us. The fact that these places are "weird" to many of us doesn't mean that they are beyond science, only that we have to be careful in how we examine them. Unfortunately, many people try to use this doggerel to mean the opposite: "The paranormal is "weird," so you just have to take my word for it as an alleged expert on it." In other words, it's invoked to deter questioning.
The universe is a strange and wonderful place when you look beyond your everyday experiences. To invoke that "weirdness" as a shield against curiosity and open inquiry is to cheapen the experience.
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Welcome to a Halloween edition of "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.
Sometimes, skeptics are easily bored. A great deal of the frustration we experience is born out of that boredom: Whenever someone tells us about some "spooky" occurrence, chances are A) We've already heard about it and know what really happened, if anything at all, B) we've already seen countless tales just like it and know many alternative explanations, or C) we find it entirely unsurprising.
One of the major problems that makes this doggerel is the unreliability of anecdotes: We know that people tend to leave out or overlook important pieces of information. People are fallible and can easily misinterpret what's going on. When we try to make sense of something, it's easy to alter our memories of an event to support the story we come up with in the process. That's why cameras and other, more objective forms of 'memory' are better trusted than eyewitnesses. And even then, reproducible forms of physical evidence rank even higher, since cameras don't necessarily capture the important details, just where they're pointed.
In other cases, we've heard a LOT of various stories with known, simple alternative explanations, and the new one you're telling probably doesn't do anything to eliminate those mundane possibilities. What matters most about evidence is quality, not quantity. Good evidence for the paranormal would falsify the many alternative explanations we use as null hypotheses. We get bored if, for example, your tale is just about you performing the same argument from lack of imagination someone else performed long before you arrived.
A lot of "spooky" tales we hear are about simple probability. The world is a big place. Lots of people do lots of things all the time. It's no surprise to us that some unlikely event happened to you. If it didn't happen to you, it could just as easily happened to someone else. As a skeptic, we're supposed to look at these sorts of things in the context of the world, not just your corner of it.
And finally, there are a lot of misunderstandings about weird events in science. One of the favorites is the double-slit experiment and similar small-scale phenomena. Usually, it's old, unsurprising news for us.
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Just picked a topic I haven't gone on about for a while.
Free energy is one of those things that sticks around. I guess being able to get something for nothing is just one of those things people wish wasn't too good to be true.
Of course, since I grew up listening to Patrick Stewart speeches, I tend to have an underlying thought that if we're just clever enough, we could find just the perfect things to solve our problems. Of course, as a skeptic, I work to keep critical thinking dominant in my mind, even if it has to give my wishful thinking a swirly. I can imagine it's possible (if very unlikely) that we might find some way to get energy that doesn't require too much effort on our part.
Not quite the case with most free energy boondoggles I hear about: Most really are supposed to be something for nothing. Just spin the magnets the right way and energy will come from some fundamental part of the universe on a silver platter, with a pretty bow on top.
Aside from the raw wishful thinking, though, I wonder if the enthusiasm might also be powered with desire to give the finger to the scientists who posited the laws of thermodynamics. As some ray of sunshine phrased them:Zeroth: You must play the game.
First: You can't win.
Second: You can't break even.
Third: You can't quit the game.
It's kind of depressing, so I guess I can't blame the sentiment. Of course, another issue is the desire to give the energy companies the finger. Yeah, fossil fuels are bad, and we've got a lot of people dragging their feet on developing practical alternatives, so it's not surprising some amateurs would like to do something to take on the Eeeee-ville faceless oil companies.
There's certainly a lot of good intentions with the deluded (and no shortage of cynical con artists who like to cash in on them), but as hard as it is, critical thinking is more likely to help solve the energy crisis than wishful thinking alone. Just a message from a friendly neighborhood skeptic.
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I'm contemplating seeing "Fourth Kind," an alien abduction movie, and reviewing it. May need to bring a note pad, since I doubt I'd be allowed to bring in my laptop. Any thoughts?
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I came across a horde of zombies today (at least I think "horde" is the correct term for a group of zombies). So why brains? Why not the bits that don't require all the effort involved in cracking a skull?
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Seems they've marked the price down from $200 to FREE! Sounds like a deal to me. Downloaded the installer and might try a few things. Up for hearing if any of you have personal experiences to share. I'll probably hang out at their forum this weekend to find out more.
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Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.
On some level, as social beings, we have an instinct for justice. When one of "our group" is harmed, we can quickly direct our anger at who or whatever caused that harm. Much of the time, however, cynical manipulators can pull our heartstrings to persuade us into irrationality.
Many forms of pseudoscience attempt to play victim to win sympathy. They treat ridicule and criticism as persecution when it may very well be deserved. In such a case, the use of this doggerel is a subject change: Instead of defending ideas and answering criticism, the user looks for pity so that those who fall for the scheme can complain about irrelevancies like the skeptics' tone of voice or choice of language.
In other ways, the use of this doggerel can be self-fulfilling. Take, for example, a certain Big Lie: That it's illegal to pray in school in the US. It's not. The law only requires that teachers, staff, and other government employees not lead students in prayer while on the clock. But because the Big Lie is so prevalent, many people in those positions actually believe it and end up enforcing the false law, allowing those who spread the lie to claim persecution and milk people's sympathies.
Others claim that non-victims can't possibly understand, therefore all their scientific questions and efforts to point out logical fallacies are meaningless. This is hardly the case. In fact, someone who believes himself to be a victim must redouble his efforts to be objective: Having an emotional stake in the issue can easily lead to bias.
Talking about the problems caused by an injustice can be useful to ignite someone's passions, but it's no substitute for logic and scientific inquiry. Wanting to solve a problem, and knowing the true nature of the problem and its solution are entirely different things.
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Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.
This bit of doggerel is an old marketing trick that shouldn't work anymore. A patent does not indicate efficacy, only uniqueness, and sometimes not even that.
I've heard that, at least in the US, the patent office will not accept perpetual motion machines or free energy devices, taking the prudent stance that such contraptions are impossible. The decision may also have to do with how common the claims are, and how much extra useless paperwork they would produce.
Patent offices are not scientific institutions. They do not conduct in-depth experiments with every designer's ideas. They do not carry out clinical trials for the latest herbal supplements. They exist to provide an innovator with a protection against someone else copying his work, so that he can make money off his idea. Whether or not you like such things as copyright laws, this should be something to know.
If you want to know if something works, you should test it according to the principles of science and logic. If you're willing to trust someone, you should trust results in good scientific journals, conducted by people who take the necessary efforts to remove their biases. It's that methodology that credibility comes from, not a government stamp of approval.
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Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.
This entry is more specific than most, dealing primarily with Creationists. It's become a tired old cliche of theirs to ask, "How can you believe something came from nothing?"
There are many possible responses because we only have ideas for what the moment of the Big Bang might have been: We do not claim certainty or omniscience. Those of us without degrees in cosmology or astrophysics simply don't know with any great confidence. Those with them are working on the issue, and I don't know which ideas are favored.
First of all, the question is quite often used as a tu quoque fallacy: "God" isn't a useful answer to the question. Where did this "God" come from? How did he get the power to create a universe? Why did he bother? Combined with the lack of predictive ability of the god hypothesis, it's nothing but a supernatural placeholder.
Onto our guesses:
1. Something can come from nothing, so long as it's balanced out by an anti-something. That's one of the simple principles behind a lot of formula juggling done for practical science: You can get something if you also get its opposite.
2. There's no room for a nothing: Many people fail to understand that the Big Bang wasn't an explosion of stuff into empty space and time, it was an expansion of space and time itself. The very fabric of time and space were condensed with the matter. There was no "before the Big Bang" so there's no room for a "nothing," no prior time for "come from."
3. Something came from something else: It's possible that what we call our universe came from some event like "branes" colliding in a bigger universe, along a different sort of time axis. That universe might be eternal and infinite, or it might have come from a still larger universe ad infinitum. It may not be elegant, but I don't see any logical reason against such a progression.
I'm sure there are many other ideas I haven't covered, but just with these examples, it should be apparent that the use of this doggerel just isn't worthwhile.
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Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.
The "East" is almost a magical place for many of us "Westerners." Wildly different culture, home to many impressive tourist attractions, birthplace of many exotic martial arts, gunpowder, rocketry... and filled to the brim with so-called healers who have their own very detailed systems of medicine.
The region certainly has its own mystique, but just like "Western" pseudoscience, there's no shortage of "Eastern" nonsense, and it uses many of the same defense mechanisms and logical fallacies, whether it's the genuine article or the watered-down commercial version.
"Eastern" pseudoscientific practices like acupuncture, Ayurveda, Eastern astrology, Feng Shui, and so forth are not immune to scientific investigation. The demands of logic and evidence don't change just because some system originated from a different part of the globe.
It's true that many skeptics you encounter online may have "Western" biases, but one of the most important jobs of the scientific method is the removal or at least reduction of bias. We live in one universe that operates one objective set of rules. Our standards for understanding and revealing those rules must remain the same.
It isn't racist to judge everything fairly. To be frank, many who invoke this doggerel ask us to lower our standards for anything vaguely Asian, and that is what I find racist. In science, it shouldn't matter who came up with an idea, only if that idea has merit when tested.
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My apologies for making yet another post for the ongoing troll roast.
When I thought I might get somewhere by asking for clarification on an analogy, Gabe brought up some glurge about an irrelevant professor named "Dr. Silverstein." I'm not particularly motivated to find out if he's a real, stupid person, someone intelligent whose had his views misrepresented, or some conveniently fictional straw man, but I'll press on with burning the straw man he was used for.
I'm against the Disneyfication of history in history classes. Unfortunately, there are a lot of "PC" hippie douches out there who don't want to say anything remotely bad about someone's ancestors, and far too many people who are too milquetoast to shoulder the "controversy" of telling the truth. Yes, there were some great figures in just about every culture, but there was also a lot of barbarism. Humans are all capable of great good and great evil.
The image of Dr. Silverstein, as described by Gabe, is a racist: He wants non-whites Disneyfied, but doesn't want to convey the same "privilege" to whites. I find that sort of thought disgusting, just like I find the Disneyfication of my white ancestors disgusting. Lots of humans did wonderful things, coming from many cultures and races. Those same cultures were brutal and superstitious. The people who were able to discover or invent new things deserve their kudos.
It's only recently, with the Enlightenment, that human brutality is waning (with no shortage of setbacks and obstacles). The ideas that our society is founded upon are not a product of racial genetics, just some people in the right social, economic, and scholastic circumstances getting inspired and successfully promoting those ideas. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the scientific method are not encoded into anyone's DNA. Someone raised in an environment where others share these ideas and pass them onto the next generation will be more likely to prosper.
I'm sure a lot of us as kids went through a phase of being angry over the crimes of someone's ancestors. I imagine some very rare hippie douches never did. It'd be nice if, for example, the European settlers got together with the Indians for a turkey dinner in November and puppy-hugging like in the saccharine Thanksgiving specials, but they didn't.
One of my history professors had a saying: "Nostalgia is the destruction of history." Yes, you can celebrate great figures of the past and their contributions to the world, but don't whine like a hippie douche when someone points out the darker parts. To me, it doesn't matter if you're Gabriel or this Dr. Silverstein. Disneyfying history is wrong, and even more so when you do it selectively.
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One thing that's sometimes annoying: I don't think anyone on my PSN friends list is from my chunk of the blogosphere. Anyone here got a PS3 at all? I might as well ask who's got what systems, just so that I can remember. And maybe contemplate getting an X-Box when I see the massive list. Please, no system wars here.
My long, nostalgic list: NES, SNES, N64, Wii, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, Nintendo DS (non-Lite), PS1 to PS3, Old PSP (for homebrew), PSP Slim (to be kept up to date), 3-in-1 (NES, SNES, Genesis)
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I've recently been reminded of an interview that was, sad to say, in one of my art history books. One of the crazy things said in it was that the London fog didn't exist until someone decided to paint it. Cue facepalm.
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