There's a scene I remember from an anime called "Blue Gender." It's a post apocalypse scenario involving giant bugs dead set on environmental revenge. The hero ends up hanging out with a girl who's only heard about the ocean.
"So, if the lake is like this," (Gestures a circle with her hands) "the ocean is like this?" (Gestures a bigger circle)
"Not even close."
"Like this?" (Gestures with her whole arm span)
"No, it's like," (Looks up) "...it's like the sky."
Often, woos seem to have no grasp of how big or how old the universe is. Science is often the art of putting numbers on things so that we can understand them.
One of the categories particularly guilty of this is the Creationist. They like to pull rather unlikely probabilities out of their back pocket using bad math, but often when they try to cite how unlikely many things are, they forget to account for the size of the universe. Many like to point out how unlikely it was that this exact ball of rock we live on would have been habitable for life, but they forget that the universe is an enormous place. If it didn't happen for Earth, there's no shortage of other planets it could have happened to. If enough people play the lottery, you can bet someone is going to win, eventually. And, thanks to the anthropic principle, the losers aren't around to complain.
Other woos, such as those who believe in psychic powers and other magical means of divination, underestimate the power of coincidence when combined with confirmation bias. For example, many people have worries about their friends manifest as dreams about them being in danger. Usually we write these off appropriately when they don't come true. Woos of this sort usually do that, except if the dream coincidentally comes true. There are enough superstitious people out there that it happens, get spread by word of mouth, and suddenly a normal form of anxiety becomes a vision of things to come. Sometimes it can take over a person's life.
This is a difficult problem to overcome. A decent grasp of mathematics helped me realize where I had be going wrong in my young woo days with just the explanation, though. About all I can think to do right now is encourage better math education and, when in an argument, push for quantitative measurements.
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Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.
One annoying aspect I deal with in many woos is that they attempt to apply fiction logic to reality. In the movies, coincidences are evidence of the villain's conspiracy. In reality, coincidences happen all the time. Correlation does not imply causation.
Consider this scenario: Ice cream sales rise at the same time burglary does. If we were to apply movie logic to this fact, we'd be accusing dairy farms of being criminal syndicates. In the real world, we have to consider that the two things could have a common cause that creates two otherwise unrelated effects: Ice cream sales and burglaries increase at the same time: Summer. Ice cream probably sells more in summer because people want something cold to consume. Burglaries probably rise because criminals think it's easier to steal from a home when the family is on summer vacation. There may be plenty of other reasons.
Coincidence is not evidence of causation. Before we can conclude there is a causation, we need a reason to think one thing causes the other, and/or control for alternative causes. This is one of the cornerstones of the scientific method: Removing the possibility of known explanations so that we can look into as yet unverified explanations.
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Trivial meatspace post: I've got a smell in my apartment my mother describes as "musty." I'm currently doing an overall cleaning in an effort to get rid of it. Though since I'm used to living here, it's hard for me to notice. Any suggestions?
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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.
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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There's a scene I remember from an anime called "Blue Gender." It's a post apocalypse scenario involving giant bugs dead set on environmental revenge. The hero ends up hanging out with a girl who's only heard about the ocean.
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