Doggerel #140: "Emotion"

-Professor Farnsworth: "She's become a slave to her emotions! Just like every woman. Especially you, Leela."
-Leela: *SLAP*

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

Since woos think logic is incompatible with emotion, many think emotion is a sign of logical shortcomings. While it's true that emotional investment can cloud someone's judgment, it doesn't mean that being emotional automatically negates the logic behind your position.

You can be jealous. You can be irritated. You can be angry and noisy. And if you've got a solid line of evidence and rational arguments, you can also be right. That's what's important in the argument, since we're out to establish the truth. A person's tone of voice does not play a role in that decision.

We are human beings, not computers. We have needs and desires, and when we've got what looks like a good grasp of a problem and its solution (or know the problems in someone else's "solution"), and if it matters to us, we're very capable of being emotional, even if we're being rational every step of the way. Skeptics like me don't like the idea of people being cheated out of money, time, and possibly even life by psychics, alties, and religious fundamentalists. We're rational because we care.

You've All Seen This by Now

We've all seen and identified with this XKCD comic making the rounds. I'll add a discussion question: What's the most trivial thing you've done this over?

An Image I Need to Use Sometime

That 123 Book Meme

I won't tag anyone, but here's what mine resulted with. Interpret it as you will.

The rules: Pick up the nearest book with over 123 pages. Go to page 123, go to the 5th sentence. Post the following three sentences:

"...And everyone looking so..." Chickenwire floundered "...happy. In a sad way, o' course."
"Yeah."

Doggerel #139: "Malpractice"

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

This entry into the list isn't so much a word that's misunderstood, but one that's thrown up as a distraction. It will come up in just about any thread where a skeptic talks about quackery, in an effort to cast evidence-based medicine in the worst possible light. There's one severe problem with that, though:

Malpractice and efficacy are not related. A car is an efficacious method of transportation. You can put something in a car and observe it move. If drivers get into accidents, that doesn't change the fact that cars have efficacy. Woos are asking us to invest in flying carpets, which are no better than inaction. That's usually the issue at hand: Can the woos prove that their treatments are better than inaction? Questions about malpractice are usually just evasions of that issue.

Malpractice is the medical equivalent to a car accident. Sometimes it's bad luck, sometimes it's negligence, sometimes it's flaws in the system, sometimes it's even incompetence. Those sorts of things are important to iron out. If you want to talk about malpractice, you'll want to know where and why those problems occur. It has nothing to do with the efficacy of the treatments. The problem is not in the theory, but in the practice.

An additional problem with talking bout malpractice is that it's hard to get numbers with alties: One of the most common problems I see brought up when I read about an altie practitioner being hit with licensing issues is bad or even nonexistent record keeping. That makes it much harder to compare malpractice rates, even if woo worked. But woo doesn't work. Taking useless, and therefore unnecessary action is just as bad as malpractice. And woos are doing it every time they practice if they can't prove efficacy.

Malpractice exists in evidence-based medicine. Doctors, insurance companies, and so forth are doing their best to combat the causes. Woos, however, are seldom interested in really discussing whether or not their treatment actually works. The ones who distract with malpractice numbers effectively admit it.

Well, That's Embarrassing

I generally don't know anything about celebrities, nor do I comprehend the level of buzz about them. Well, it seems Sylvia Browne couldn't do much better than I could in regards to predicting what Jennifer Lopez was going to do with her life.

Doggerel #138: "Logic"

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

Woos often like to pretend that skeptics all have pointy ears, that we're beyond emotion, etcetera. Especially when we see through appeals to emotion and heartfelt, if misguided warnings. Of course, we're people, too. We're just more consistent than most people.

First, one of the woo abuses of the term implies that logic is something incredibly restrictive, and that their favorite woo is beyond it all. This usually gets into silly special pleading pretty quickly, when they claim that results exist, but they can't be measured. How they measured them is left an open question.

Second, woos will often use fallacies of "logical" people to try to convince us that we shouldn't discount stuff. One of these is the famous Sherlock Holmes quote, "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." That one in particular, as well as many other lines of 'woo logic' tend to be based on a lack of imagination. Holmes's quote relies on the presumption (and hubris) that you know all the possibilities. Usually, the woos in question don't even know what a skeptic's stance is on the issue, and thus can't attack the real lines of logic and assumptions being used.

Third, woos treat logic as if it were somehow antithetical to emotion. Quite frankly, I don't see how. Emotion seems like a natural extension of logic to me. Heck, it forms a large part of my sense of humor: A lot of jokes rely on the listener being able to spot holes in someone's logic, or reversal of expectations arrived at through logic. That must be why I see so few woos with a sense of humor.

Further Expansion

Haven't been getting a lot of comments over at my Game Development Limbo blog, though I've been given some good reasons from individuals who have some log-in related hurdles. If you're interested in my random game-related thoughts and ideas, send me your email address so that I can invite you.

If you don't want to post it in a comment, you can drop your address in an email to me:

As the Pointless Fun Turns

Well, it time for a little more pointless fun. We've been extended for another infinity seasons, including plastic surgery for my character, who will now be played by a lolcat who appeals to a better demographic. He's also apparently secretly the long lost twin brother of several other people.

Anyway, onto the fun:

Retro Sabotage: Classic games with punchlines. Usual thanks to Nodwick.

---
Someone's having the time of his life:


This would be a lot better if they kept the sound at a consistent level. Silence ruins a lot of it:


Searching for random Nintendo stuff. This was weird:

81st Skeptics' Circle

It's up at the Conspiracy Factory.

Open thread as usual, except quoting the Evil Overlord List and thus revealing our secrets to the world is FORBIDDEN.

The Quackometer's Back!

You can't keep a good thing down. He's changed to an ISP with more spine, so I think he'll be safe from censorship for a while.

Doggerel #137: "Dimension"

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

I've read Flatland and Sphereland. I recommend you read them, too, if you've been overly contaminated by the typical sci-fi use of the term. A lot of woos are. I think "dimension" is a poor term for alternate universes, elseworlds, different planes of existence, etcetera. "Dimension" better refers to height, width, depth, time, and the various dimensions those cosmologists are working on. I heard we're up to ten or so. If you want to add some more, show us the math.

In the old days, religion liked to hide heaven in the sky and hell deep underground. Now that we can examine those areas, some woos have resorted to hiding magic in alleged dimensions. Of course, that doesn't change the fact that their woo doesn't do what they claim it does. It only serves to make it look harder to verify, as if science only worked like sci-fi scanning devices and was so easily limited.

Another use of the term is less "scientific" and more illustrative, often dealing with convenient abstractions for complex processes. One example, from my days of playing Magic: The Gathering was "card advantage," which essentially dealt with the benefits of increasing the number of cards working for you at any time: Draw more, prevent your opponent from drawing, kill two enemy cards with one of yours, etcetera. That's one aspect of a complex process. Though I've encountered it less often, sometimes woos like to talk about these sorts of dimensions to make an issue appear more complex when such dimensions can be studied independently of others.

Doggerel #136: "Deep"

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

Back when I was a kid, my mind was continuously buzzing with religious questions. You know the usual conflicts: Omnipotence versus evil, precognition versus free will, etcetera. Nearly all of them were outright contradictions. People regarded as "deep" just slapped the "paradox" label on them, told stories that failed as metaphor, and just generally didn't answer it. Meanwhile, people like me who kept asking questions, pointing out the cracks in bad metaphors, and preferred uncertainty or even dissatisfaction over false certainty were labeled "shallow." This kind of experience made me wonder if the brainless blond cheerleaders on TV sitcoms grew up to be philosophy professors. Thankfully, that doesn't seem to be the standard case.

Needless to say, woos love to think of themselves as "deep" and will advertise. The problem that they commonly face when dealing with skeptics is that they haven't thought about their favorite transcendent woo and the implications it would have if it were true. Sometimes they'll slap on a layer of ad hoc, and then ignore the implications of that layer. For example, psychics will complain that they can't work in the presence of a skeptic, often to the point that they'll claim physical discomfort from our evil, negative thought waves. Well, then, it should be an easy matter to test their ability to sense skeptics. Lock 'em in a room and see if they get a headache when James Randi walks by. At that point, they typically drop the attempt to add "depth" to the woo and start ad hominems.

My preferred method of determining who's really "deep": who's got the most detail down with the fewest fallacies. So far, I'm seeing a very strong correlation between woo and shallowness.

The Days of Our Pointless Fun

Well, I've been leading a double life on another blog (give me your email if you want to see Bronze Dog's Game Development Limbo), been in the witness protection program, since I have to testify it was I who shot Caleb Rentpayer.

So, to keep you occupied:

Eyemaze: Website full of games, including the very cool Grow series. The creator's feeling under the weather right now, so help him get better.

Submachine 5: Interesting point-and-click exploration game. I should probably try out the earlier ones.

Here's some near-lethal nostalgia fuel:



Items on my "Definite buy" list: Fez and Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.

The usual thanks go to Nodwick and TIGS.

Teach This Old Dog a New Trick

I suddenly remembered a quote from a math humor book I read back in junior high. It went something like this:

"The laws of probability are so cleverly formatted that no experiment can refute or prove their validity."

It won't surprise me if there's been a lot of debate about this that may have settled the issue centuries ago, but I haven't been able to come up with a way to falsify the laws of probability from my armchair bit of math. Any particular experimental result is possible under the laws of probability: Some are just more probable than others, and there's no magical cutoff for improbability.

If I can't get anywhere with them, I think I might just have to stick them into the same category of assumptions as "the external universe exists" and "the laws of physics are consistent."

BOYCOTT NETCETERA

Le Canard Noir's blog has been taken down because the cowards at Netcetera. They caved into the threats of some nobody quack, despite being clearly legally protected. The Thought Police and book burners live.

Normally, I'd instinctively focus a lot of rage at the anti-speech actions of the quack involved and how he stands for the destruction of civilized society, but given that the same ISP has caved in for the third time to such threats, they don't deserve any revenue. If they can't offer any protection for your material, they aren't worth the money.

So, if you're expressing unpopular opinions on Netcetera, I highly recommend you find a new service and make a backup of all your stuff before they open up the doors for the internet book burners.

Comic Find

I've recently come across Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and currently going through the archives. Here's where I found out about it, and here's a comic that reminded me of twoofer logic in a way.

Doggerel #135: "Holistic"

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

Alties love to claim that their favorite woo "treats the whole person" or similar crap in their advertisements. The most effective criticism I can think of for the typical altie "holistic" treatment: They can't prove that it treats any part of the person.

Of course, moving beyond that obvious angle, alties often don't seem used to explaining how they treat the whole person in a way that real medicine doesn't. Real medicine has to keep track of you. That's why medical records are so important. They have to factor in things like allergies, genetic quirks, and general health to see if you can handle the side effects and such. (Naturally, anything that has an effect pretty much has to have side effects.) I don't see alties doing much on that front. As Eddie Izzard pointed out of chiropractic:

So I had to go see a chiropractor in New York, and they're different to osteopaths, chiropractors, because of the spelling. Of course, they're both very powerful figures on the Scrabble board, though... "Chiropractor... chiropractor... chiropractor... 93 letters, chiropractor." And they crack your bones, that's what they do, they crack your bones! And they take x-rays, but it’s pointless, because whatever is wrong with you… "You've got a bad back, I'm gonna crack your bones.” “You've got diphtheria, I'm gonna crack your bones.” “Your head's come off! I'm gonna crack your bones.” “It looks like your mother! I'm going to crack your bones. "

Put simply, I don't see alties doing much to take the whole person into account. They have a habit of just prescribing standard treatments.

One annoying thing that often comes up is that alties often have good bedside manner, which they'll advertise as treating the 'spirit'. Of course, they often have a lower patient load, and often don't have to do much of anything, so it's often easier for them to maintain. Would be nice if some of these people could have the cobwebs in their heads cleared out so that they could go into nursing and put that bedside manner to better use. Having a friendly relationship to the medical staff can often do good in the form of better treatment compliance and stress reduction, but people with illnesses need real medicine to go with the kind gestures.

Finally Getting to my Deityhood

Well, Tom Foss started a meme. Somewhere, I got tagged invisibly, though I was going to get around to it regardless of whether or not I got tagged. Some of this is going to involve repetition of ideas.

I'm going to have to try having some fun with the whole Bronze Dog God thing.

1. Resources will not be scarce. At least not in the "real" world. The only places I'd make scarce resources are game worlds/boards/servers. The first games to operate on those principles will be praised by the gamer community as an innovative abstract concept that livens up gameplay.

2. Time will be tangled up for maximum convenience. Go ahead and take a nap, go to work, class, get in the proper mood, or whatever. Your friends on the game server won't even notice you went afk. This, however, might lead to some interesting conversations, requiring an extensive system of grammar for all the different verb tenses. I will haven grantek everyone automatic fluency in this grammar before any problems arise.

3. Who needs death? Indefinite lifespans are fine by me. If someone manages to get bored despite everyone putting out lots of entertainment, they can pick out a memory wipe, bliss-out, or whatever. Some people will appreciate having a reformatted newb to train.

4. Not science, SCIENCE! Like Tom, I'd make Hollywood/comic book/videogame super science a possibility. Who needs square cube laws and laws of motion getting in the way of building a giant honking robot to fly over your infinite back yard?

Suggestions for expansion are appreciated.

Email Policy

I haven't been getting much direct email lately, but after reading a post here and there about others giving an expectation of privacy, I should probably outline what you can expect from mine.

1. If it's not related to the usual science/skepticism/atheism thing, I won't post your email unless you want me to.

2. If it's hate mail, it will be posted, dissected, and mocked. I don't get much at this point. This policy may change if I get a sudden influx. This is subject to some upcoming restrictions.

3. I won't post people's real names and locations unless they already use them online at a blog or something. If, for example, I get some invective from a Disco Institute top member with his name, photograph, and address on the Disco Institute website, I won't shy away from calling him by name. If I get an email labeled "Bob Smith" and he signs the email itself with "ScientologyLuvums317" or something that's obviously supposed to be an alias, I won't expose the name.

4. If you provide a link to your blog, don't be the least bit surprised if I end up dissecting and mocking pseudoscience I might find there. Your best defense is to not be silly in your email.

5. I won't out atheists without permission. I live in a chunk of the Bible Belt, and I know how hard things can be for someone not ready to expose that part of their identity. There are a lot of amoral, nihilistic bigots who seemingly live for the purpose of making life hard for atheists. For the people who can safely and comfortably live as an outed atheist in meatspace, kudos. Not all of us have the necessary bravery and/or safe locations.