Woo Enthymemes #7: "My Imagination is Superior!"

This particular entry was inspired in part by Chopra Fan, Rachael Good, who vomited up a great deal of hate on Skeptico.

As was pointed out later in that comment thread, woos often act as if they have a monopoly on imagination. As if it's impossible to be scientifically minded and have imagination. The problem with this, of course, is that imagination was required to come up with all the theories we take for granted, and still is needed to make advances in the various fields.

In my view, the whole act is a temper tantrum: Their imagination was wrong, therefore they have the right to shit all over everything their opponents have done. That's what woo is often about, after all. Hell, whenever a skeptic imagines a non-supernatural explanation for something, they lash out against the very notion of creativity. They think creativity is destructive because it expands outside their tiny, gray box.

Creativity shouldn't be contained by preexisting ideology. Ideas should be treated fairly: Those with merit, those that agree with the evidence and make new predictions should be held in higher regard. Those that contradict the evidence or fail to say anything useful should be dismissed until they can correct those failings. The marketplace of ideas is supposed to be a meritocracy, and science is the best method we have for determining an idea's merit.

Woo Enthymemes #6: "It's All About Brains!"

Welcome to another edition of Woo Enthymemes. My previous post covered much of this in relatively elaborate detail, but for this, I will strive to keep things simpler and more direct.

Contrary to popular belief, being smart, being right, and being a scientist is not about sheer brain power. You don't have to be a large-brained genius to make a breakthrough discovery, though it often helps. It can also hinder.

One cynical stereotype skeptics like me often face is the idea that we think we're right because we're smarter. Let's ignite that straw man before someone claims their 200+ IQ, MENSA membership, PhD, or whatever "proves" them to be smarter. It's never a matter of who's "smarter" or has the largest brain mass. Intelligence, wielded incorrectly, can be a great hindrance as well as it can be a great asset when used correctly: Intelligent people often have a great ability to rationalize bad decisions after the fact.

Parapsychology is a field with many intelligent people backing it. Early in my growing passion for skepticism, I read the Skeptic's Dictionary entry on "psi-missing" and similar rationalizations. I did have some sympathy for parapsychology, but it shrank greatly when I saw those "explanations" for failure. I already dismissed "big" performances of psychic power thanks to a particular Nova special. A magician could replicate the big tricks, and now I knew the "subtle" psychic powers were the result of some self-deception and statistical legerdemain.

My brain did not grow that day. I simply learned some new ways to look at things. People are often prone to forming layers of rationalization, and if you don't question yourself on all those layers, no enormous number of IQ points is going to help break you out of a bad idea.

Sometimes it takes a child to point out that the emperor has no clothes. As a skeptic, that's often what it feels like I'm doing: Stepping out of all the expectations I've grown up with and go over all the disconnects I see when I allow myself to be an outsider. I am not afraid to ask fundamental questions like "can you prove psi even exists?" Once I asked that question, I refused to allow myself to accept the word of others who just appeared smart.

When I did the same with science, the answers tended to be enamoring tales of elaborate experiments producing unexpected results. It didn't matter who did it so much as how they did it, and how mixing all those new pieces of knowledge produced something I took for granted. When I asked similar questions of psi-believers, I instead got venomous insults, evasions, and appeals to authorities.

Knowledge isn't just about your Intelligence score. You need the Wisdom to be cautious about your assumptions. And I just needed some Charisma-filled firebrand skeptics to excite my mind into realizing that.

Woo Enthymemes #5: "My Experience is Reliable"

Welcome to another edition of Woo Enthymemes.

This entry is often at the core of just about any anti-science viewpoint. It's true that our perception of the universe is based on experience, whether it was personal or by someone else who documented it. One big thing that separates a skeptic from a woo is that the skeptic knows his senses and memory are not all that reliable. Skeptics know that we're subject to confirmation bias, selection effects, apophenia, and so forth. We are mere mortals.

Some woos might have an awareness of their flawed nature, but they seldom put serious effort or thought into counteracting those flaws. Skeptics, on the other hand, practice the scientific method: Control for alternate explanations. Record both successes and failures. Look for others who have or will replicate the event or experiment. Double check everything. It's still not perfect, but with all these sorts of checks working together, the odds of being wrong diminish.

The closest I can recall woos ever coming to this is the appeal to popularity, which is only the countermeasure of multiple people doing the same thing. Those others, however, seldom do anything to rule out alternative causes for the results or check against all our various cognitive biases. In short, without going through all the hoops of the scientific method, you're being sloppy and opening yourself up to simply confirm your biases.

That's why I want to hear about experimental protocols and statistical analysis of the results instead of just another ghost anecdote.

Woo Enthymemes #4: The Myth of Passive Observation

Welcome to another edition of Woo Enthymemes. This entry was inspired by remembering some guy on a news article comment thread who was rambling on in a superior tone of voice about how the Double Slit Experiment put us skeptics in our place in regards to the existence of the supernatural. Cue my rolling eyes. I have yet to meet a woo who can tell me something I didn't already find boring in an "old news" sort of way about quantum mechanics.

Put simply, the typical quantum woo's amazement at the Double Slit Experiment comes from being stuck in the "Middle World," full of medium-sized objects moving around at medium speeds over medium periods of time, many of which involve agents we can perceive with our standard array of senses. All the objects they observe aren't heavily affected by being observed. Our minds were "built" by evolution to live in that world because resources spent understanding the "Big World" (of galaxies, dark matter, and illions of years), the "Small World" (of electrons, quarks, and femtoseconds), and the "Dense World" (of singularities and the instant of the Big Bang) was not conducive to having and raising children.

There is still a piece of my mind left in the savanna that gapes in wonder when I hold two repelling magnets against one another: They're inanimate objects, and yet they "struggle" to avoid meeting one another, as if they have their own locomotion, pushing against my fingers in a desperate effort. I know intellectually, of course, that like magnetic charges repel like charges. There's no intention there, anymore than water "wants" to flow downhill.

The myth of passive observation is born of our heritage as inhabitants of the Middle World. Let's say I'm in a dark cave and I want to examine a particular rock. I can shine a flashlight on it to look at it. I can pick it up and feel its shape. I can chip off a tiny sliver of it and perform various tests to determine its composition. All of these methods of observation change the rock. Shining light on it warms it up ever so slightly. Picking it up leaves traces of my skin's oils on it while picking off dust. Removing a sliver subtracts from the rock's overall mass. Because a human can be very delicate in the Middle World, these changes can be quite minimal. The danger of this, however, is that it can lead us to the hubris of thinking we can observe the universe as if we are not a part of it.

That is where things go wrong when a thoughtless person looks at the results of experimenting in the Small World of Quantum Mechanics. The word "quantum" refers to the smallest possible changes. Warming up a rock by a fraction of a degree in the middle world may be negligible, but the same sort of energy addition in a Quantum experiment could very well excite an electron into the next orbital shell or pin down the uncertain particle to a particular location, collapsing its wave function. The latter is precisely what happens in the Double Slit Experiment: Electrons are extraordinarily tiny particles with tiny mass. When we experiment with single electrons, we don't have the messy interactions of the Middle World to average out all the strange individual behaviors. Working with fundamental particles could be akin to moving an egg with a piece of construction equipment: We're hamfisted Middle World creatures manipulating objects that can be altered with the most delicate of touches.

The reason I am repeatedly impressing that fact in this blog post is because this is an issue that we were not made to think about. We take it for granted that we can look at something without changing it, mostly because the changes we inflict when being delicate are so small we can't casually observe them. While scientists are aware of this fact, many laymen who read their work have not raised their awareness. That is why many quantum woos out there can act surprised that observation can have effects: If they naively believe that we are separate from the experiment, they can believe it's magic when "passive" observation can have active effects. There is no such thing as passive observation. There is only active observation that strives to have negligible effects. In the Small World of QM, there is no "negligible."

Woo Enthymemes #3: "Words are More 'Real' Than the Things They Describe"

This enthymeme particularly bugs me, and most often comes up with Creationists: Many seem to think that a species can't change, like there's some barrier that trims out any mutations beyond some arbitrary limit to diversity. The problem is that "species" is a loose label humans invented for convenience.
Let's take horses, for example. If you were to introduce a person without preconceptions to a horse and a zebra, it probably wouldn't be surprising if he thought they were the same species, just with different fur patterns. They are in the same genus, so they do have a lot of similarity. But they are different species, since they can't produce fertile offspring. Take dogs as well: Thanks to human breeding efforts, they come in a vast variety of forms, but many can interbreed. Naturally, with that variety, it's not hard to convince some people that some breeds aren't dogs at all.

Given what humans have been able to do with canines, just how flexible is this "species barrier?" And where's the magical stop sign that prevents anything from going outside it? Or is there some magically unalterable "species" DNA that isn't subject to nonlethal mutations? The problem isn't finding these things: It's that many Creationists don't understand that our labels are based on convenience, not on immutable laws or some quintessence a particular group of critters are supposed to have. Life is a moving target, and is not tethered down by squiggles on a page or patterns of sound issuing from a human's mouth. Truename Magic does not exist.

There are a bunch of living things out there. We just lump them into categories to make it easier to talk about. Mr. Ed is a horse. Fido is a dog. We know Ed's DNA is compatible with these other things we call "horses" because they contain the same characteristics we use to define him as a "horse." Just because we invented a word to describe this compatibility doesn't mean the horses are now obligated to conform in every way. With enough time, some horses might lose some of those characteristics (but not all, since, say, becoming a protostome instead of a deuterostome would kill the offspring) and become incompatible, necessitating a new species or genus name.

The objects we describe are real. The words we use to describe them are a convenience. If something defies description, it's the description that's the problem.

Woo Enthymemes #2: "Theologians are Experts in Theology!"

Welcome to the second edition of Woo Enthymemes, a new series where I cover various fundamental, unstated assumptions in woo. Today's enthymeme looks like a tautology, in the way that "biologists are experts in biology" is expected to be a tautology. It doesn't quite work out, however.

For someone to be considered a biologist, they have to demonstrate an expertise in the subject. Biologists have to be familiar with existing literature and theories, as well as conduct biological research. This shouldn't be a surprise. If you don't look closely enough, you might say something similar about theologians.

The problem: How do you conduct research into theology? How do you experiment with gods? A biologist can point to a living creature, examine it, and record observations as well as formulate theories and, by extension, make firm predictions. The subject of biology, life, exists. We can say this with great confidence. Not so much with gods. All the various sciences can demonstrate the existence of the entities they study, even ones that aren't immediately obvious or easily understood. Theology, however, has yet to demonstrate the existence of gods, much less any specific god. Without that fundamental detail, the whole edifice is founded on vapor and wishful thinking.

That's why many of my blogging friends consider theology to be on par with fandom trivia. A fan of Star Trek, for instance, can make logical deductions using the "evidence" of the TV series to explain how warp drive works, but that doesn't prove that faster-than-light travel is possible because there's no evidence that the Enterprise exists as anything more than a fictional star ship made to entertain television viewers. Gods are in no better a position than Kirk, Picard, or Sisko, and theologians are in no better a position than over-obsessed television fans who think a show is real.

Woo Enthymemes #1: "I Know What's Supernatural"

Welcome to a possible new series. Since I started the Doggerel series with "Supernatural," it seems appropriate to start this series on a similar note. While Doggerel deals with cliches skeptics like me are sick of dealing with, this series will deal with unstated assumptions that probably need more exposure.

Today's entry is "I Know What's Supernatural." The unstated assumption: That there's some unifying, identifiable quality possessed by supernatural things and/or natural things that separate them.

But what is this quality? It's not invisibility, because that'd make most of the electromagnetic spectrum supernatural, as well as even more boring things like air. For much the same reason, it's not stuff beyond our senses. There's no reason why our having particular sets of senses would define something's nature.

Instead, I'd say the barrier between the "natural" and "supernatural" is an arbitrary construct of our culture and level of familiarity. Take any electronic gizmo far enough back in time, and it'll be regarded as magical by the locals. Heck, many of our ancestors thought lightning was supernatural, but we do not. Why's that? Because we as a civilization, if not as individuals, understand how lightning works and what it is. That understanding dragged lightning down from the mystical mumbo-jumbo the priests attached to it, and put it firmly in the natural world.

There is no objective difference between "natural" and "supernatural" that would merit treating them differently. We've gained great understanding of our world and are continuing to learn through methodological naturalism, where we treat everything with an effect on the world the same way.

If I'm wrong, tell me: How can you know if something's "supernatural"?