Pointless Question #57

This one may potentially fall into Pointless Debate: What do you think about Super Registration Acts if the real world suddenly started producing supers?

Email Duel!

Just letting you know I've thrown down the gauntlet to an email I received. Chances are, you'll be seeing the results somewhere down the line.

Okay, I admit it, it's Dave Mabus. He decided to go directly to my personal email instead of comment spam, so it's a bit more personal, and I've been wanting him to throw down. I wouldn't be surprised if he chickens out of answering some simple questions:

1) If he's saying Nostradamus predicted a swine flu epidemic, why wasn't he sending emails about it years ago? The real answer, of course, is that it's a postdiction made after swine flu hit the media blitz.

2) How can us skeptics have "disconfirmation bias" in regards to the evidence for ID/Creationism if they can't even figure out what sort of evidence they're looking for?

Economic Skepticism

It's a subject I don't see covered very often, except in threads that tend to attract bad examples of Libertarians. (I'm currently unable to think of a good example of a Libertarian, unfortunately.) I'm mostly familiar with some fairly obvious stuff, like MLM scams and Ponzi schemes, but I'm not all that great at understanding economic problems. Suggestions for websites with good explanations of economic principles and some counter-intuitive things would be greatly appreciated.

Doggerel #185: "What Makes You So Sure Science Can Find the Answers?!"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

The completely honest answer is simple: We don't know that science can find an answer to a problem. We won't know until we looked for answers and found one. We can't know whether or not something is impossible, so I prefer the optimistic route with science: Keep dreaming up good ideas, and never be content with bad ones.

Of course, just because scientists are having a hard time finding an answer doesn't mean that unscientific modes of thought stand a chance. Usually when people endorse "other ways of knowing," they're asking us to be governed by biases. Science is about the removal of bias so that we can have genuine confidence in the conclusions we arrive at. Gut instinct, "common sense," and so forth can be useful for snap judgments, but when you're exploring the unknown, the weird, and the unanswered, you can't let your thinking by handicapped by your usual biases.

Pointless Fun: War of the Lions

Just saw this at TIGS. Haven't played it yet, but thought I'd give some indirect linky support. Update to come after I've played it. Hope Anubis is on the roster, since most of you humans tend to over-represent your own species when you invent deities.

Speedy Q&A #2

Q: What's the difference between an unpredictable god who works in mysterious ways, a random god, and no god?

A: Damned if I know.

Altie Stuff

What got me started on that earlier longer-than-usual post was this by Steven Novella. He addresses some old, outdated cliches by alties who apparently don't pay attention to the current medical scene:

At Georgetown Medical School where I trained (I graduated in 1991) we were taught the “biopsychosocial” model of medicine - which means we view the patient in the context of their biology, their psychology, and their social situation. This was not just a slogan - it was a central part of the clinical culture that we were taught. It is simply a straw man to say that scientific medicine does not consider the whole patient - even 18 years ago this was already being fully integrated into mainstream medicine, before it became fashionable among the promoters of dubious treatments.

I suspect the "holism gambit," as Dr. Novela puts it, has been around for decades, rather than something new. Could probably be traced back to homeopathy, since that made a lot of spiritual claims in the early days. It's probably just one the cliche meme that's resurged in popularity, and based only on the fact that the alties of the past invoked it, not because they could identify a genuine, systematic fault in the system.

Here's another comment from Dr. Novela:

Dixon confuses the ethics of informed consent and patient autonomy with the scientific basis of medical treatments. Medical ethics already dictate that patients are in control of their own medical decisions. Also, as I said above, the old paternalistic model of “doctor knows best” has been gone for a generation. The current model of practice is one of patient collaboration and informed consent.

The idea that this Dixon character would expect anything else these days is worthy of headdesking. Seriously, who's ever run into a doctor who won't accept questions or discuss your condition? Methinks this might have gotten started with closed-minded alties misrepresenting their doctors in order for them to fit their comfortable stereotypes.

One of the worst parts with this Dixon guy is he tries to present science-based medicine as treating people as a bunch of "lab rats." Apparently, he's completely oblivious to how alternative "medicine" works. From my standpoint, they're typically the sort who push for the deregulation of human experimentation. I tend to notice it more in the vaccine-autism crowd, who want to be able to perform all sorts of experiments on their children with dangerous, debunked, wholy implausible "treatments." Worse, the quacks involved often aren't interested in keeping detailed records. Real doctors keep track of their patients so that if a treatment has previously unknown side effects, interactions, or something else, they can be more readily spotted and compared to find correlations. Neglect of that sort of resource is fairly common among quacks, who are often after positive testimonials so that they can feed their prejudices and/or make more money.

Get Out of the Circular Mill!

I am writing this post in hopes that many woos - fans of creationism, "alternative medicine", conspiracy theories, psychics, alien visitations, cryptozoology, and so forth are directed here. I'll be speaking to you as best I can.

There is a phenomenon among antkind known as the "circular mill." (more here) This happens when part of an army ant colony ends up going in a circle and each ant follows the ants in front of it. As a result, they continue traveling in a circle, usually until they die of exhaustion. I've read about this as an illustration of the dangers of groupthink: The circular mill happens because each ant's decision becomes dependent on other ant decisions, and not on the environment or the end goal of their activities. Given ants' comparatively simple nature, you can't expect them to have a reflective moment. You're different. You're a sapient being. You're capable of introspection, self-doubt, and reevaluation. That's why many of us skeptics get easily frustrated when we see you going in circles and repeating cliches as justification for your behavior. I hate when someone doesn't exercise their ability to think independently, and, unfortunately, there aren't "woos" who express themselves in a manner that convinces me that they've given the matter any genuine thought.

I'll be forming an informal list of some of the priorities you should focus on:

First: You do not argue from authority in a scientific blog debate.

In an ideal world for scientific discourse, there would be no need for the concept for authority. Unfortunately, we live in a world where snap decisions must be made. If, for example, a spider bites me and my arm goes numb shortly thereafter, I would go to the nearest hospital's emergency room and trust the doctors to pick out the right treatment (and hopefully expedite that decision by describing the spider that bit me). If the world didn't have such time constraints, it'd be reasonable to argue over the matter, compare evidence for various antivenom concoctions, get an education in toxicology, and so on. In the real world, where there are time constraints, other things to do, etcetera, authorities in various fields are a handy time saver.

What separates a scientist from a layperson isn't a magical property that renders one beyond question. A trained scientist is a person who knows how to evaluate evidence, where to look for evidence, and has a large collection of the conclusions from that evidence memorized, usually for quick decisions. The latter two traits are time saving measures. If the doctor treating my spider bite knows what kind of neurotoxin the described spider secretes as well as a drug to counteract it right off the top of his head, he can treat me that much faster. In a life or death situation, his memorized knowledge or ability to quickly locate the appropriate recorded knowledge would be invaluable.

Extend the example to longer time periods: If I have a condition that could irreparably harm me over days instead of hours, he could tell me what he thinks is happening, what he plans to do, and why he thinks it's the appropriate treatment. If I happen to know about some factor in myself or my medical history that could affect that treatment negatively, I'd be able to tell him, and he'd be able to change his decision accordingly. Of course, having a medical history that can be provided while he makes the decision saves more time. As an authority, he's expected to have the knowledge of what conditions to look for.

Extend it further: I have a slower condition that'll cause problems over the course of decades. At that level of time, I should be encouraged to research that condition for myself so that I can reasonably discuss it with my doctor. If I find good evidence that raises questions about a decision, I can bring that to his attention, get second opinions from other experts, etcetera. That's how doctors do things these days. That's pretty much how skeptics like me expect our doctors to work these days.

So, to hammer the point home: Authority is a time-saving tool, not an absolute source of information. In my typical blog conversation, I am not interested in saving time. I'm interested in learning.

The danger in blindly trusting in a person's authority is that you're basing your decisions purely on someone else's. In a pinch, that may be a useful quality, but if you have time to think, you should keep an eye on the environment and the larger picture so that you can respond appropriately if that person's actions don't fit what's going on.

Second: Know how to evaluate evidence.

This is a common failure point I get frustrated dealing with a number of you. There are different levels of quality when it comes to evidence. To continue on a medical side, a large repeated double-blind, placebo-controlled study is golden. Each part of that is designed to reduce or eliminate bias. Many people underestimate the body's ability to heal itself, the mind's ability to deceive itself or rationalize away symptoms, unaccounted for factors, and plain dumb luck and coincidence. Large studies with many subjects are better than small studies or individual anecdotes because a larger number of subjects will dillute coincidences. Patients must be blinded to which treatment they get (with their consent, of course) because knowing they've gotten the "real" treatment will change how they look at their symptoms, usually for the better. The experimenters must be blinded so that they won't consciously or unconsciously fudge the results in one direction or the other. The experiment must be repeatable so that other, independent researchers with different biases can see if they can get the same results.

Sometimes, compromises have to be made. In medicine, it's often for ethical considerations. You wouldn't test a vaccine against placebo because it'd be unethical to ask parents, children, and those around them to risk death or disfigurement by infectious diseases for the sake of testing a vaccine that might be only slightly more effective or less prone to side effects than the standard of care. In other cases, it might be limitations on evidence. For example, there might only be one known fossil of a newly discovered species to work with.

Anecdotes and eyewitness tales are the worst kind of evidence because they involve the highest number of compromises, and often when those compromises are unnecessary. They leave in the biases of the witnesses, which leads me to my next point:

Third: Everyone is biased.

Everyone. Ev-er-yone. Yes, that includes you and me. Albert Einstein is attributed as saying "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." The sentiment is essentially correct. We learn by observation, but if we don't temper our minds with reason, those prejudices can never be overcome. Skepticism is anathema to closed-mindedness.

Most people who call skeptics closed-minded seldom understand what the word really means or why we've rejected certain ideas. (It's important to note that rejection is a tentative state, not an absolute.) To deal with the topic of open-mindedness, I'll refer you to QualiaSoup's excellent YouTube video, which also covers many of these points:



It's because of our biases that we need to use the scientific method. Science is essentially about the minimization and removal of biases. When someone asks me to trust in "other ways of knowing," the only alternative they typically offer me is another set of biases. One of the particular galling sets of biases are those of "faith," which just strike me as putting oneself up to be a god. I'm just another fallible being, and I don't have the arrogance to assume I'm right before I even look at an argument. I may have a great deal of confidence in my position, but I always allow for the possibility that I'm wrong. And with a number of topics, if I'm wrong, it's cause for celebration.

Fourth: Please don't quote stereotypes.

A major irritation for me in blog discussions is that "woos" will often refer to stereotypes they have of skeptics they've learned from television, even if there's blatant contradiction. If you want to impress me, try asking questions about what I think instead of relying on what others in the circular mill say I think. There are far too many internet trolls who spend their time telling me what I think or what my position is and ignoring my protestations when I explain what I truly believe and why I believe it. If you think I've performed a stereotypical, irrational thing, tell me exactly where it happened and get me to explain that action or quote.

Pointless Question #56

Congratulations on your purchase of the HyperCorp Antimatter Lasgun 9000. Would you like to download a custom intimidating activation tone?

(My answer: The sound of the Ghostbusters' proton packs charging up.)

Doggerel #184: "There's No Such Thing as 'Probably' in Science!"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

This particular doggerel was once spouted by an old troll named John Best. It demonstrates just how poorly he grasps science. "Probably" is what science is based on. Certainty is only for religious fanatics and mathematicians. Only the latter have a legitimate claim. Whenever you conduct an experiment, you have to keep open to the possibility something unknown is influencing the results, that factors outside the lab might produce exceptions, and so forth. I can drop apples all day to measure the effects of gravity and derive various laws and principles from the act, but there may very well be some sort of undiscovered anti-gravity phenomenon somewhere out there in deep space. That's speculation right now, but with any scientific knowledge, any new discoveries can change our understanding of the universe.

Additionally, with repeated experiments, especially "noisy" ones like medicine, statistical analysis becomes paramount. If you're trying to see if a chemical causes a response, you can't just try it on one person or cell culture and say it's so. You have to try it on multiple subjects and see if it's different from those not affected by it. That's what double-blind control studies are about. There has to be a statistically significant difference between the two groups. If you find one big enough to pass that bar, you haven't proven without a doubt that it has an effect, just that there's a very big chance it does. That's what the "p-value" is about: The chance that the effects could have been attributable to random chance. There's a chance if you repeat the experiment, you might find you just got lucky. It's unlikely but possible. That's one more reason why experiments are supposed to be replicable: Each successful replication makes it more unlikely to be chance.

Science is all about "probably." No matter how thinly you slice it, you can't arrive at perfect knowledge without being omniscient in the first place. Woos may love to depict that as a weakness of science, but it's not. Science is always open to change and growth. Those who claim to have certainty, especially if they maintain lower standards than science demands, are closing their minds.

Doggerel #183: "Common Sense"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

"Common sense" is a very nebulous term. And when it comes to science, woos find it easy to use "common sense" to reject what the evidence tells us, or to reject further analysis of a situation. The problem with this is the universe isn't necessarily what it seems to be. When you get down to tiny particles on the quantum level, well, common sense is bunk. (And no, that doesn't invalidate what science says) Our minds evolved to survive long enough to have and raise children. We have to look beyond the ego involved in assuming your intuitions and biases are infallible.

To continue with the quantum example, we don't easily understand the quantum world because we evolved in the "middle world" filled with medium-sized objects moving at medium speeds over medium periods of time. Quantum events usually go unnoticed in our world because they tend to average out. When dealing with events outside that frame, we have to resist our Newtonian biases and follow the evidence where it leads. Even if it doesn't make sense at first.

Another frame we're often stuck in is a matter of numbers. We often think in very personal terms, making us vulnerable to anecdotes. The plural of anecdote is, of course, not "data." Statistics are more abstract and impersonal, so many of us have a hard time relating. Instead, if we're, say, treated to a horror story about a child developing autism right after getting a vaccine, those who trust in the infallibility of "common sense" won't ask critical questions about timing, epidemological studies, memories biased by catastrophic, conspiratorial thinking, or ignorance of other possible explanations. In the case of autism, symptoms tend to become more noticeable around the age of vaccination, not because some eternally changing and/or unspecified "toxins" alchemically altered the child's brain. As for alternative medicine "treatments," it only takes one apparent success story to spread the good word while all the failures tend to keep quiet and just move onto other forms of woo until they get some small improvement to champion.

Common sense still has its place in the world, such as for snap judgements, and matters where little is as stake, but in a world where scientists continuously reveal deeper levels of complexity and develop better tools, scientific thinking, not gut instinct is the best method for protecting yourself. If you want to question the experts, you must approach the matter scientifically instead of spouting a collection of prejudices often called "common sense."

Doggerel Request April 2009

Just thought I'd check up on new ideas for Doggerel, and maybe do an inventory of ones I haven't used yet. In the big round number department, I've reserved some slots:

#190: "Nothing"
#200: "You Just Tear Things Down!"

Drop suggestions in the comments.

Pointless Question #55

Listen up, minions! We've been tracking a young card player who's been winning tournaments left and right. We fear he may have the potential to wield the power of the Atlantean Spirit Cards against us. The current plan is to send wave after wave of you to challenge him to a children's card game to get his rare cards and cripple his missing father's deck. Any other suggestions?

Ice Cream Cake! And Stuff.

I've got a coupon for $3 off an ice cream cake that'll expire on May 1st. I can't think of anything in particular to celebrate with it.

I've got $11.65 of gift card to spend at Best Buy.

I currently have $31 worth of credit at Game Exchange.

Pointless Question #54

Yes, despite how awesome he is, it's silly for G1 Soundwave to turn into a cassette player. At least he could be a reasonably small listening device.

But what's up with those guys who combined into a camera? Do you really need three whole Decepticons for a camera?

Doggerel #182: "I Bet You Ruin Fantasy Movies!"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

Woos love to depict us skeptics as partypoopers, even in the non-blogging portions of our lives. Often, they don't seem to notice our other blog entries on our favorite science fiction and fantasy shows, which we can enjoy. There's a sizable portion of us who are comic book geeks. We don't feel the need to slice and dice good entertainment, or at least not on our first viewing.

The fact that we've got plenty of reason to disbelieve in various phenomena in real life doesn't affect our entertainment. We're capable of what's known as "willing suspension of disbelief." Just because the universe we live in doesn't have magic or warp drive doesn't mean the fictional universe can't. Frankly, it doesn't matter how weird or magical the fictional universe is, so long as it's reasonably consistent. Few things break my suspension of disbelief faster than self-contradiction. It works pretty well with real world woo, too.

The point is that we approach fantasy and reality differently. If we allow ourselves to accept bad reasoning and unrealistic phenomena in the real world, people can die. If we do so with a movie, the worst we risk is a bit of humiliation if we're caught indulging in a guilty pleasure. There's a difference between being easy to entertain and being gullible and open to exploitation.

Random Recall #9: Monkeys!

Kid's cartoon back in the 80's. The cast consisted of some monkeys with evil counterparts with blue-purple fur. I vaguely remember two episodes: 1) One of the reluctant mooks of the villain got disguised as one of the good monkeys, and gets attached, eventually doing a Heel Face Turn and joining the cast as one of the regular brown-furred monkeys. 2) One-shot villain comes in and gains magical control over some of the cast, turning them into angular, blocky statues or something and ordered them to steal stuff. I suspect the latter was a dream I had about the series way back when.

A Kinda Sorta of Brush With Death

Last night, I ended up remembering an experience I had as a kid. At soccer practice, someone kicked the ball in my direction and it hit me just right to knock the wind out of me. The previous times I ended up getting winded, I was able to remain standing, and occasionally sputter out a word or two. I didn't have those luxuries, that time.

I ended up falling on my back, struggling to breathe. I was in full view of the coach and my dad at the time, and they didn't overreact. I remember the coach telling someone about my condition of the moment, probably one of the kids who was understandably concerned.

As I mentioned, it was worse than all the other times I had breathing troubles, and at the time, I was worried I was going to die, and I couldn't muster the breath to say anything about how severe it was. I was focused on two things: How to communicate my level of distress and sucking as much oxygen into my lungs as I could. A few very long moments later, I felt a burning in my lungs as they got back to their regular expansion and I could get back on my feet. My dad had to convince me it wasn't as bad as I feared.

During all that time, even despite being a theist at the time, I didn't once think about God or pray for a miracle rescue. I had only the two practical options in my mind: Keep trying to breathe and get help from the people who were really there.

Doggerel #181: "Complex"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

When you don't feel like answering questions, one of the quickest ways to answer one and drop the line of inquiry is "it's complicated." If I'm watching a middle episode of Death Note, and someone steps in and asks why someone's doing something, I'd be tempted to just say, "it's complicated" and leave it at that. If I'm specifically seeking knowledge of a topic from someone who's gone through the trouble of leaving a dissenting opinion on one of my blogs, well, it's frustrating to get a brush off. It doesn't contribute to learning.

One of the more common abuses of "complex" as doggerel comes from fans of "Intelligent Design": They often assume complexity itself is a sign of design. Of course, there are plenty of instances of unnecessary complexity in life. Additionally, simplicity can be a stronger indicator of design than complexity. For example, A butter knife made from a single piece of metal is better designed than a complex array of parts that happen to have a long, flat metal surface sticking out for the purpose of spreading butter on bread.

Another difficulty is in defining complexity. Is it number of parts? Amount of DNA needed to pull it off? One alleged attempt was "Complex Specified Information," which ends up contradicting itself in its definition. Anyway, evolutionary processes can increase information quite well, and complexity with it.

Still another difficulty for ID is that if complexity can't arise without intelligence, where did the complexity of the designer come from? They usually make special exceptions in logic for this so that they don't have to explain anything.

Nothing

In the Beginning, a Nothing storm randomly stirred up a lot of Nothing and assembled an infinitely intelligent god with infinite power who created the universe. We know Nothing did this because Nothing could create a god of such vast complexity. This god created the universe in six days and slacked off for the seventh, and did so in a way that just happened to look like an orderly progression of branches that lines up with evolution. He did this because the Nothing that created him gave him the random desire to make life to look like it had the distribution of features indicative of a nested hierarchy.

There's Nothing that indicates any of this happened. Creationists take this matter very seriously. For them, Nothing is sacred. Nothing is worth fighting for. Nothing is worth dying for. For Creationists, Nothing is more important than life-saving advancements in science, the pursuit of the truth, and academic standards.

This even extends to social matters. Nothing forbids Creationists from standing up for equal rights for those of a different sexual orientation or those of different beliefs. Nothing is held higher than justice, equality, and fairness.