Deepak Chopra, of all people, sent me a link to an account by a professional skeptic of an Anomalous Event That Can Shook His Skepticism to the Core, published in Scientific American. It’s embarrassingly bad, a story that would have scarcely passed muster at the old Fate magazine.
He was tinkering with an old gadget he and his wife had inherited from her deceased grandfather — a transistor radio. He put new batteries in, pounded on it a bit, and couldn’t get it working, so he put it away in a drawer.
The Totally Unexplainable, Really Weird Miracle that Skepticism Can’t Explain: months later, it spontaneously started working.
Yeah, that’s it.
Underwhelmed, are we?
Not this author and professional skeptic.
Jennifer is as skeptical as I am when it comes to paranormal and supernatural phenomena. Yet the eerie conjunction of these deeply evocative events gave her the distinct feeling that her grandfather was there and that the music was his gift of approval. I have to admit, it rocked me back on my heels and shook my skepticism to its core as well. I savored the experience more than the explanation.
The emotional interpretations of such anomalous events grant them significance regardless of their causal account. And if we are to take seriously the scientific credo to keep an open mind and remain agnostic when the evidence is indecisive or the riddle unsolved, we should not shut the doors of perception when they may be opened to us to marvel in the mysterious.
What, exactly, are we supposed to keep an open mind about here? That Jennifer’s dead grandpa wafted over from Germany with a ghostly soldering iron, and patched up an old radio…and then, since it stopped working the next day, decided “enough music for you!” and broke it again?
The only thing I marvel at is that Scientific American employs this guy.
We can’t figure out how this thing started working again.
Therefore ghosts! Or some silly supernaturalistic explanation. Nevermind trying to actually figure out what happened.
Wow, did not know that Abrahamic god was good with electronics ! Being a geek, now I am all shook-up. Thank you Chops! Thank you!
A dangerous trap to fall into… assuming there is a supernatural explanation when a natural explanation isn’t immediately apparent. Even worse, *making up* an explanation (Oh, Grandpa musta done it!) without the slightest bit of evidence it was Grandpa (maybe it was the ghost of Tesla or Marconi? Why not? As long as we’re making up stuff…)
Wait…the “professional skeptic” is…Michael Shermer.
I’m trying to be charitable (not that Shermer inspires much charity in me), but I’m not clear on what he’s trying to say here. To be honest, however, it doesn’t exactly strike me as he’s arguing for the intervention of a ghostly grandpa. Most like “yes, it might have a rational explanation, but it had an emotional impact and that’s what counts,” with a side serving of “it’s special because it happened to me.” It might not be outright paranormal, but it does seem to have a “think less, feel more” aura, which doesn’t seem to be a very skeptical outlook.
Someone needs to explain to Chopra the concept of a cold solder joint.
Miracle! I can resurrect my cordless phone handsets by removing the batteries, and putting them back in switching positions, without recharging them.
Nothing but a bit of corrosion at a contact point.
Isn’t this literally a case of “fucking magnets, how do they work?”
He’s actually, really writing about ghost grandpas.
I’m now kind of relieved that I let my subscription to SA lapse.
Nice job, Professional Skeptic. Your skepticism is pretty pathetic when you append that “had it happened to someone else I might suggest” part.
Can we be done with him now? I’d think his prior atrocious behavior would have soured any community on his presence, but surely even his hyper-rational defenders ought to be through with him now that he’s revealed how utterly shallow his skepticism actually is?
Yes, assigning a specific, magical, cause to this event is “too far”. But still, is he not saying that it was such an extraordinary event that his emotions just mindlessly latched onto the supernatural to answer the skeptic’s mantra of “everything is caused by something”? Really, is he talking about hypotheses of why the radio started playing, or discussing the weird directions his mind went after hearing that radio start up, inexplicably? Am I giving him too much leeway, totally giving him excuses for this weak article in Scientific American? I’ve experienced similar phenomena and always say, “A ghost did it.” with a smirk, to ridicule such thinking patterns. So I’m doing the same with Chopra here, projecting my behavior into this nonsense. tiptoeing away now…
Seriously, as a former lighting technician, I can’t count the number of times when even the simplest of electronic circuits repeatedly passed every possible test except for actually working and then spontaneously started working later, only to cut out when it was most important. It’s well known that you ought to keep entire spare light fixtures around and just swap out the whole thing and trouble shoot it later to avoid just such problems. He’s not just a bad skeptic and a rapist (am I allowed to say that?), he’s also a terrible electrician.
I love how he’s couched everything. He hasn’t come right out and said “oooh the ghost of my wife’s grandfather caused the transistor radio to start working again”…he just hints at it.
He just talks about keeping an open mind.
He just talks about how his skepticism is shaken to its core.
it seems like these “ghosts” are as ineffective and dependent on coincidence and impotence as gods are. If these beings can influence the physical world, why always in such useless ways that can be assigned to the actions of humans or simple physics?
Now, if the radio began playing with no batteries, that would be a much better story.
consciousness razor, #8
Hahaha, I didn’t think about that but it really is, isn’t it?
Fucking electromagnetism and bipolar junctions, how do they work?
In college, I worked part time fixing VCRs. I had gotten a machine with bad audio and had plugged it in and let it run just to see what it would do. I was running a Schwarzenegger movie, sans sound, and working on something else. Suddenly, the sound came on…Arnold said “F**k you”…and the sound went off again. Absolutely true story.
Weird. Definitely weird. But I never attributed supernatural causes to the event.
Well Chopra isn’t exactly what you’d call a skeptic or a scientist. He’s better defined by snake oil salesman, woo peddler, new age believer and generally being an all round quack. Or to put it more bluntly believing in ghosts is one of the more normal things he (professes) believe(s) in. That is how far that guy is of the deep end.
Yeah…totally not surprising. Anyone who has worked with old electronics knows that they can be finicky. Because the wires are old, so the connections are poor, etc. This is like electronics 101. Unless, I suppose, this is a person of privilege who has no problem replacing his old electronics the moment they start “acting up” (for lack of a better phrase), and thus don’t understand these basics of electronics.
Oh, FFS. Well, I think that addresses my pondering as to if this was a person of privilege. The answer would seem to be “Yes.”
Presumably, Ghost Gramps also manipulated the radio station’s programming schedule to make sure a love song was playing at just the right moment.
This sort of reminds me of my much younger days when I was crashing on a friend’s couch for a while. Every night when I went to sleep I’d swear someone was talking to me. After a few days I made my friend stay up with me to see if he could hear it too, sure enough he heard the voices as well. This went on for a few weeks, we got another friend who was right into all sorts of woo to listen and we all heard it. The friend into woo swore we’d tapped into some otherworldly spirit, we’d best pay attention to what it was trying to tell us. It wasn’t until I was up alone sitting next to the old stereo that I figured out what it was. The stereo, even when turned off, was picking up the CB radios from the trucks that were going up and down the main road outside all night. If I listened closely I could make out actual conversations between drivers. To this day I’ve never been able to convince my friends of the actual source of the voices.Sometimes people just don’t want a mundane explanation, even if it’s the right one.
And, because that is just sooooo bad…I can’t help but now mock Shermer. Off to the side of the SA article are recent tweets by contributors. So, here’s a recent tweet from Shermer:
I can’t help now but wonder if he’s tweeting this because he had thought himself that such reports were true.
Sounds like an old capacitor came to life briefly and then gave up the ghost for good.
>reads article
>looks at URL
>looks at byline
……wtf. WTF. Really? SciAm is publishing ghost stories by Michael Shermer? I have never felt so deep a need for reaction GIFs as I have right now. Specifically, this one and this one.
I mean, sure, savoring the experience and not the explanation: I get that. What I can’t deal with is that final paragraph: what do we need to remain agnostic about? Something can be explainable and still personally meaningful, it doesn’t have to be caused by a conscious agent to be emotionally significant to a conscious agent! And I’m saying this about an article in SciAm written by Shermer! Aaaaaugh wtf.
I’m going to go work on my thesis and maybe the world will be back to normal when I finish.
Hey, can his ghost grandfather make radio programming not suck, cause that might shake my skepticism.
I’m just going to let that set there.
The most I can say is when it comes to Mr. Shermer, expectations are extremely low, and in that sense, he didn’t disappoint.
And then at the wedding Bill Cosby popped up in translucent form and threw Jello pudding pops poltergeist-style at Shermie.
Lets see, three months from late June would be late September.
Guess what people do in late September, particularly at a large family gathering? They turn on the central heating.
It could have been a bad capacitor or a bad solder connection making contact or any of a large number causes. But turning on the heating and/or having large numbers of people in the house are exactly the sort of thing that could cause the effect.
Or even simpler, one of the guests opened the desk while they were in the bedroom and knocked it.
The funniest part might be that several people above (because PZ buried the lede) had no problem believing this was something from Deepak Chopra.
gussnarp @ 13:
+8
Who Cares @ 19:
Yeah, we know. This isn’t about Chopra, it’s about a man who makes his living being a professional skeptic, who wrote an article about Gramps the Ghost and His Transistor Radio in Scientific American magazine. Got it now?
Wait… But, no. What?
Skepticism isn’t something that can be “shaken.” It’s a way of approaching things you can’t explain, not a belief about the unexplained. I’m sorry to have to do this, because Shermer is an asshole, but here he is just 5 years ago (a post titled “I want to believe” on his website). Apologies in advance for the long quote.
Is skepticism only for other people?
Uh-Oh Department:
From the linked article:
Holy shit! I belieeeveee! We just had a bit of an emergency as a leaky pipe caused a bit of ceiling to collapse, I was bemoaning the fact our hand held vacuum had just broken. Thought I’d give it one more go, maybe tinker a bit more with it … And it just worked, I didn’t know this was jebus’s blessing from the chopra dimensions. I will go and say three hail Ickes immediately to give them proper recognition and ensure a winter free of leaky pipes.
Goodness.
Oooo, that has happened to me! Spirits! Talking! For real!
A few years back, my bf (now one of the exes) went to the bathroom to have a tinkle. He came back, visibly shaken, and said that he had heard a voice calling his name.
So we went back to the bathroom and listened. Lo and behold, there WAS a voice calling him, and it seemed to come from the toilet bowl. We stood there, staring down at the water, listening to a tiny ghostly voice calling him: Johnnyyyy …. Joooohnnnyyyy…
It took a few minutes to figure out that his phone, which he kept in the front pocket of his jeans (yes, that was the days of yore, when it was cool to have teeny weeny mobile phones), had managed to call his father all by itself, and he was at the other end, trying to tell his son to hang up.
Will those with a connection to the Women’s Self/Mutual-Defense Grapevine please let the rest of us know if Shermer’s marriage this June has any effect on his reported behavior?
I predict there’ll be a claim to the effect that there’s a telos (!!) which has something to do with more and more Freedom!!!!11!!, ergo Libertarianism. But it will all be so badly written and confusing and ignorant, it might be pretty hard to tell what the fuck he’s actually saying.
Of course no dry solder joint ever caused an intermittent failure that magicly repairs itself when you touch it, or you shake it – that never happens unless grandpa’s ghost is in the room.
WHY ARE WE ACCUSING A DEAD GRANDFATHER OF ELECTRICAL MALFEASANCE WITHOUT WITNESSES?! WE COULD BE RUINING A POTENTIALLY INNOCENT MAN’S AFTERLIFE! INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY!
You can’t make this shit up.
Now there’s a real skeptic at work, Anthony K. Good work. To answer your questions, you evidently have an “emotional interpretation,” and because those are significant, that means we should remain agnostic about these deep, mysterious profundities. That’s just science.
RIGHT ANTHONY
ALSO WHY DO WE BELIEVE THE CLAIM THAT GRANDPA WAS EVEN DEAD WHERE IS THE DEATH CERTIFICATE HUH SOME SKEPTIC
And that man was…Michael Shermer! Now you know the rest of the story!
So you have at least two options when dealing here with the absence of Jennifer’s grandfather. They could acknowledge that he’s gone, remember all the great times they had, ruminate on some regrets and vow to make current relationships better, and articulate their desire to have the loved one present.
Or they could pretend he was there saying exactly what they want him to say.
One of these approaches may be better for dealing with loss, but that’s up to each of us to determine I guess.
In fairness there’s no reason to characterize this story as an illustration of the couple being unable to “deal with” grandpa being gone. I don’t think they were *actually* pretending he was there.
I’m going to concur with Andrés Diplotti @#5 on this one. Shermer has some similar stories at the beginning of The Believing Brain illustrating how any of us can be susceptible to illogical beliefs. His story about himself is not the oft repeated story of his alien abduction, but his belief in Libertarianism. This piece isn’t very well written as it really fails to bring home the point. However, I’ve noticed Shermer’s writing has taken a turn for the worse in the last year or so, while his ideas seem to have jumped the shark.
Then I guess I missed the point entirely.
“Light as a feather, stiff as a board, light as a feather, stiff as a board”. If I hadn’t done it myself, I might not believe in levitation….and yet, even with Adam, who had hit puberty that summer, and must have weighed, like, 120 pounds, we just lifted him up off Sarah’s floor, effortlessly. I was THERE, man, it really happened!
A light in one of my aquariums went off yesterday, a few seconds later it blinked for a few times, then went off again and several hours later it turned on for a short while.
Aliens.
So Shermer has taken his skepticism, the one thing that made him not an absolute waste of oxygen, and flushed that down the toilet. Buh, bye!
As someone who has worked to diagnose and fix various kinds of faulty electronic circuits for about 40 years, I am entirely unimpressed with this “supernatural’ radio. It could easily be due to a cold solder joint, a poorly bonded transistor lead, a shorted electrolytic capacitor, a corroded contact, etc. Intermittent failures are a bitch to diagnose, but they are not in the least bit rare. “Ghosts did it” is in fact an explanation that I and others have used to explain a failure that seems to have healed itself, but none of us would have the combination of chutzpah and oatmeal-for-brains necessary to write a non-joking article about it for Scientific American.
LOL @49.
Aquarists are all too familiar with the mysteries that arise in fish-keeping.
Plecos, for instance, often sold as ‘algae eaters’, will chew the slime coat off of fancy goldfish when they get big and hungry enough. Leaves them looking like a half-eaten cob-of-corn the next morning. Took a lot of reading to figure out what the hell was happening.
Is it unduly cynical of me to suggest that Shermer may be laying the groundwork for a career change, in the event that skeptics finally have had it with him? Deepak Chopra would gladly throw some “honoraria” his way, and while I doubt he would get the big Templeton Prize, the Templeton Foundation has lots of other grants to give out.
I mean, I think the most likely explanation is what robro suggests @46: that this was intended to say “hey, I have these experiences, too, and it’s always different when it happens to you even if intellectually you’re confident there’s a non-supernatural explanation” and he just didn’t grasp how that vague pontificating about doors of perception would sound. But once in a while it’s fun to wear the old tinfoil hat.
I read that article as: “Weird coincidence happened and it had this emotional effect that briefly overrode my rational faculties. The human mind is funny that way”. All of which is true, even interesting. But then he tacks on this pompous non-conclusion of a final sentence about open-mind-doors-of-perception-marvel-mysterious and I no longer know what the hell he’s getting at. The most charitable interpretation I can come up with is that he was under the gun on the column deadline, and this lame-ass finish was the best he could come up with (admit it: we’ve all done the same on one or two school essays). OTOH, I got the feeling when I read Why People Believe Weird Things that Born Again Skepticism was just his latest fad to tack on the end of all the woo he’d been through before. Maybe I’m right about that, and he’s starting a transition to some new kind of woo.
Anyways: confirms my decision to drop my SciAm sub over a decade ago.
I will simply reproduce my comment on the Shermer rides again! thread:
I agree with Andrés Diplotti in 5, robro in 46, screechymonkey in 51, and Eamon Knight in 52.
Nothing wrong with giving a personal spin on such experiences, but it just seems like Shermer failed to stick the landing.
I may be kind of cynical here, but I can’t help but think that this article of Shermer’s will hurt his reputation in the Skeptic’s Movement far more than his well-documented sleaziness.
Considering what people they are (presumably) paying to make their blogging software halfway usable, I’m actually not surprised.
I’m still quite disappointed, though.
The “Arson, Murder and Jaywalking” trope used to its fullest effect! :-)
OK, my day is officially saved.
:-D :-D :-D :-D :-D
Heh.
I really didn’t expect to laugh so much in this thread!
QFT.
Finally the expected headdesk.
…aaaaand back to ROTFL!
*wise nodding*
I’M NOT SAYING IT WAS ALIENS
BUT IT WAS ALIENS
…That would make sense.
=======================
I hate you, blockuqote. I hate you personally.
@SallyStrange, I thought that. Then I realized that Shermer spends rather a lot of time with folk who DO make this type of story up all the time.And he has a perfect motive to do so.
Shermer is finished in the Skeptic movement but he is still buddy-buddy with D’Souza and helped him avoid a spell in the big house. So there’s his bolt hole.
Step 1: He finds a radio that mysteriously mends itself in a desk drawer.
Step 2: He finds God hidden in the lint trap on his clothes dryer.
Step 3: ….
Step 4: Profit!
Not sure what step 3 involves but step 4 will involve helping D’Souza separate movement conservatives and their cash.
There are precedents. Perhaps the best known being Irving Kristol (father of Bill) who was forced to quit the Trotskyite movement after it was discovered that he had informed on his rivals to Hoover, McCarthy and co.
Mkay, let’s try using some rational thinking.
He put in new batteries, but the radio didn’t work. So he put it away.
Now the most common things to fail in a radio, after the batteries, are the switches, battery contacts, and the electrolytic capacitors.
So it’s quite likely that the radio didn’t play due to a corroded battery contact or dirty power switch.
Three months later, after a few temperature cycles, after some jostling perhaps as the drawer was used, the corrosion gets punctured through and the radio turns on. Now the electrolytic capacitors are probably very leaky at first, so the radio stages are biased off, so you don’t get any immediate sound, but after a few hours sometimes the capacitors reform themselves and the radio starts “magically” playing. Often highly distorted at first because the transistors are not running quite in their linear range due to the capacitor leakage, but eventually they often play quite well.
The one curious coincidence is that it was tuned to a station. The chance that the guy had spun the dial when the radio wasn’t working and ended up dead-center on a station, now THAT is nearly miraculous.
@george 58 Not only the dial setting is suspicious, I had one of those radios and it was pretty sensitive to how it was positioned.
Here is a site with links to the circuit diagram:
http://www.radiomuseum.org/r/philips_happy_90al070_90_al_070.html
Rather more likely that there is a similar story out there on the web that is an almost but not quite exact fit.
Oh man I just read the linked article. Nice title there PZ :)
Right, it’s pure Chopra-bait as it’s written. I don’t know what his motive could be. Unless he’s trolling us Freefromlogicandmanliness Thoughtfascinazi Bullypants. “I didn’t REALLY think my dead grandpa turned on Ke$ha for me! Argle bargle!”
Now if the radio were playing a news broadcast from the future…
RealSkeptic™…Well how do you know if you don’t try it? … /RealSkeptic™
The grandpa is supposed to use the radio to communicate with the family.
Not that I’m stealing this for a short story or anything.
This sounds like another version of an old parlor trick that was a common act in the psychic guru seminar circuits back in the ’70’s. Uri Geller was known for it, and I saw Thelma Moss (best known for her Kirlian photography of human auras) do it as a tribute to Geller and to demonstrate that “psi” was real. Back then it was done with watches. What Moss did was ask people to bring to her seminars an old stopped watch (which at that time would almost always be a hand-wound mechanical escapement watch), which, at the proper time and if the psychic powers were properly aligned, would be expected to start running again.
Moss didn’t attribute the power to herself, but to Geller. Near the end of the seminar, she played a video tape of Geller concentrating on a similar stopped watch, picking it up, moving it around, even shaking it, and eventually the second hand would start moving. Moss’s audience members were supposed to do the same thing, and Uri Geller’s psychic power, having been preserved on the video tape, would assist in starting the watches. With several dozen people shaking their old watches, she got a half-dozen or so to report a miraculous re-start. Some reported that their old watch was running again even before Thelma started the tape. That was attributed to the possibility that Geller’s power could transcend time itself, and work just because the video tape was there in the room, even if it wasn’t playing at the time the watch started. All of this was done with the best pseudo-skeptical stage patter, about just keeping an open mind to the possibility that this audience, here and now, was witnessing an unexplainable mystery of psychic powers.
With the advent of digital watches, the practice seems to have lost its popularity, possibly due to the difference in the modes of failure between mechanical escapements and integrated circuits. Or, as Shermer warns us, would suggesting such a mundane probable explanation be to “shut the doors of perception when they may be opened to us to marvel in the mysterious”?
Shermer wrote:
So is this just rewording Sagan’s joyful observance of a flower as beautiful without knowing exactly how it is so? I read this as saying, “Don’t close your eyes when presented with a mystery; keep looking around, maybe you’ll figure it out.” But no, I’m mis-reading. Sherman is saying, “Enjoy the mystery; mystery is beautiful also.” Yes, I too, enjoy mysteries, some are beautiful; as is. Some I take as puzzles to figure out. This article by Shermer is just such a mystery: a puzzle, to figure out. We [I got a frog in my pocket] understand that your homesick wife emotionally attached an emotional meaning to that mystery. Empathize with her, you’re emotionally bonded to her. Don’t deny her emotional response, but gently discuss with her: her emotions. Skepticism is different than universal denial. My response to your article is that what shook your skepticism was the apparent conflict between explaining the mystery and denying it outright. Don’t attack the mystery as “random occurrence”, but talk about why she responded so emotionally to that occurrence. DISCUSS it, don’t TELL her. But speaking of Sagan, that reminds me of Feynman’s phrase [paraphrased], “that Science won’t let us fool each other, and yourself is the easiest to fool”.
Michael “Skeptic Schmeptic” Shermer
“You’re listening live to The Road Home with Grandpa, so sit right back in that Oldsmobile’s velvet bench seat as we cruise on through rush hour. If you’re heading south, be advised that 99th street is about as blocked up as me after one of Granny’s world-famous shepherd’s pie. Police are on the scene, but if you’ve got an alternative route home, or just some of Ol’ Doc Heywood’s Prune Juice, take it. We’ll have another traffic update after the commercial break, but in honour of my good friend, Michael Shermer, and his latest in Scientific American, let’s give a listen to another doctor I’ve always relied on: it’s Doctor and the Medics with ‘Spirit in the Sky’!”
Anthony K @68
Shermer’s more of a fan of “Blurred Lines.”
Minor correction to my earlier comment: “HER dead grandpa”.
“Coming up later on KDED, Casey Kasem presents The Afterworlds Top 40, but first…
(the opening bars of Grinderswitch’s ‘Pickin’ the Blues’ play)
Hello everybody, John Peel here. Tonight I’ve got brand new music from Nick Drake, Syd Barrett, The Ramones, and Joe Strummer. Let’s start the show with Muddy Waters, live in studio…”
@69: ouch!
@71: bravo!
The opening number.
Yes, apophenia can be fascinating to experience and/or observe but I would think someone with the title ‘Professional Skeptic’ would at least have heard of it before. For fuck’s sake.
Whoa, this article sounds like the uplifting dreck in Readers Digest. Shame on you SciAm for publishing quasi-spiritual nonsense, and anything written by mshermer. I can derive all sorts of significance from the fact that changing one vowel transforms his name into Msharmer, but that is neither marvelous or mysterious. Neither is the radio playing , but it was a nice bit of meaningful coincidence for the nuptials and especially the bride. I sincerely hope her marriage is happy, but I cannot help but notice that A) she is isolated from her friends and family and B) most of her possessions were destroyed in transit. Combine that with the long history of abusive behavior exhibited by her spouse and all I see are giant red flags.
All the real-life ghost stories in this thread made me laugh.
So did Shermer’s. Very derisively.
So I guess the ‘American’ in ‘ScientificAmerican’ is much like the ‘alternative’ in ‘alternative medicine’.
@61,
Well, maybe I can help you out.
I have a subscription to SciAm, and I read this piece of nonsense yesterday evening. My first thought was “My, what a coincidence! The accusations of sexual harassment and rape are still swirling around, obviously not going to die. And he chooses this week to publish an affecting little tale about his recent marriage and how wonderfully tender this moment with his new wife’s grandfather’s radio was. Oh, and did he mention that he just got married to a wonderful woman?”
Because, after all, a man who just married a wonderful woman with a wonderful grandfather who left her a miraculous radio that plays fortuitously chosen music at exactly the right moment…such a man could never be guilty of sexual misconduct. There must be some mistake.
Honestly, If I were running a church, I’d be going all out to sign Shermer up. He’s ripe for a come-to-Jesus conversion. And that would just teach those nasty old FTB bullies, and Skepchicks, and assorted feminists who’ve been so dreadfully unkind to the lad.
I didn’t think that Shermer could lower my opinion of him, but he has actually managed it. I honestly thought that, whatever his flaws as a person, at least he had a clue about skepticism.
Maybe this is a job application for the woo-wing. Maybe he figures that he has no more future in atheism, so he’s shifting his market. Frankly, I’d be okay with that.
Makes perfect sense. Shermer just endorsed Chopra. Chopra now endorses Shermer.
Shermer is shaken to the core by ghosts.
Time passes.
Shermer finds God.
Chopra rejoices.
“I used to be an atheist, and look what a horrible person I was! But now PRAISE JEEBUS!! I is saved!!”
Profit.
Wait …
Deepak Chopra is the woomeister.
Dinesh D’Sousa is the corrupt apologist, who Shermer plead should be let off easily for election fraud.
Christ, could I get any more “they all look the same to me” … ?
@screechymonkey, #51:
It would be unduly cynical of you not to.
Meanwhile, in Our Fair City:
Mm hmm. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Pierce:
Oh for the…
Great. I expect it will be about the moral journey from libertarian paradise to the emotional interpretations of alcohol loading assault, to the horrors of a witch hunt. Y’know, a guy thing.
@LyleX, #79:
Ugh. I wouldn’t.
Do you know what a real predator could do with such an opportunity?
Srsly. I think the risk is a little high to be happy about Shermer getting a free community-shift.
Point.
Maybe the best that we can hope for is that he attempts to make the shift, but they reject him. That way he’ll be discredited with both sides and hopefully will no longer have access to victims.
@LykeX:
Yeah.
I’m imagining.
No, wait. Don’t speak. Still imagining.
This imagining is really satisfying.
Yes. While we’re at it, I’d also like a pony, and worldwide anti-capitalist peaceful revolt.
@78 infraredeyes:
I can’t say that the motivation is as you describe, but you very capably captured the underlying tone of the piece.
LykeX:
Yeah, that will happen. On another planet, in an alternate timeline.
Who’s gonna tell Shermer it wasn’t Grandpa, but Benny Hill?
@ Iyeska, #90:
You quote Shermer, presumably, thusly:
Nice try, but I’m far too skeptical to believe that. If he’s actually written that, the physical laws of irony would cause some sort of dimensional shift with untold ramifications for our universe… wait… where are those voices coming from? Ahh! The wall is cracking open! The light! THE HORRIBLE LIGHT!
[brief silence]
There is no PatrickG. There is only Zuul.
Shermer seriously wrote this?
So, and I’m just asking questions here, his conclusion is, “Make women an offer they can’t refuse”?
That reminds me.
“Take me now, subcreature.”
“We never talk anymore.”
See, Michael Shermer? You see how Peter Venkman did not have sex with an obviously-under-the-influence Dana Barrett? That’s how you deal with someone who’s not sober and able to consent.
Being a shit skeptic after all is a very minor issue compared to him being a fucking serial rapist. But it is sort of like salt in the wound. THIS is the Skeptic that was so skilled and important and such a brilliant fucking mind and such a stellar fucking leader that he needed to be shoved across the globe and put into the positions where he would obtain his victims. Just another quasi-competent con-man. Just another exploiter, another sociopath who relies on smooth talking to let you think that they actually know what the fuck they are talking about. The only reason Shermer was a Troo Skeptic was because there was too much competition for the priesthood.
infraredeyes@78
I was feeling something like that on reading the article too, but only diffusely
CD @ 94:
Do yourself a favour and don’t click the link and read the whole thing. I’m pretty sure it causes a brain bleed.
@97:
Yes, that’s what I meant. Was rattling around in my stomach until infraredeyes put it in words.
@95
Didn’t he also arrive for a date packing thorazine?
Anteprepro @ 96:
I was under the impression that is the new priesthood.
Now that I think of it, wasn’t Venkman also bodily shoved out of woman’s apartment after asking for a kiss?
I hate to piss on Ghostbusters, but there were some creepy/cringe-inducing moments in that movie..
Also on Shermer’s morality article: He goes on at length about needing to determine whether the “moral recipient” views something as moral and you need to ask BEFORE you do it, AND acknowledges that they need to be able to meaningfully expected to actually give an informed answer (he gives an example of a 12 year old Mormon girl meaningfully saying that polygamous marriage to 60 year olds is moral).
Basically, Shermer’s moral framework just rephrases CONSENT. And stresses it and is fully aware of why it is important and that it can be hindered. But of course, it is unsurprising that he knows that. He knows that but it doesn’t apply to him. That kind of morality is for the Rubes. Shermer’s only morality is “Shermer does what Shermer likes.” Everything else is just Philosophy. Just a giant thought experiment, for others to consider using but that Shermer views as no more compelling or as no more binding than playing a game of Sudoku.
Iyeska:
They are trying their best to make that dream come true. Once they finally design the RDF Vatican, design Dawkins’ priestly vestments, officially appoint him as the Supreme “Nope” of Atheism, appoint True Skeptics to the High Council of Nope, and make sure that all Official Atheist Meeting Halls have donation bins and stalls linked up to Paypal, THEN we can finally begin Project Neo Priest.
Like Dr Who said recently about the T-Rex that exploded into flame in Victorian London, the question to ask is ‘has this happened before’. Oh turns out the answer is yes:
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100725080825AA3ZiH1
Ghosts in radios…
It didn’t take very long to find this story on a folklore site. Would be pretty easy to write a generator for similar stories and introduce heartwarming punchlines. Isn’t this how Fox News writes stories?
@102: At risk of a de-rail: I only recently saw that movie for the first time, and yes Venkman is a Grade-A creepazoid. In one of the opening scenes he’s trying to get it on with one of his experimental subjects, then moves on to Dana Barrett (whom it is implied he gets at the end, despite her initial rejection of him). I was really disappointed in the role they gave Sigourney Weaver — damsel-in-distress who exists only to get rescued by the hero. Ripley would totally have kicked Zuul’s ass, then shoved Venkman down Gozer’s throat till it choked to death.
[/derail]
I’m sorry, everyone. But, it was me. I did it. I routinely break into people’s houses and fix things. I’m a compulsive tinkerer and I know everybody’s got a drawer full of stuff they’re “gonna get to” one of these days. I just can’t help it. There’s a group of us, the Fix Everything Discreetly Union of Professionals (F’ED-UP), and we’ve dedicated ourselves to secretly and anonymously use our knowledge to make the world a better place by unsticking drawers, putting your keys back where you thought they were, and other tidbits of kindness.
Please don’t hate us.
rrhain @107:
That’s F’-ED up!
(thanks for the chortle!)
It is not at all surprising that sociopaths are very good at parroting back the words that give them the appearance of a person who is not completely lacking in empathy. Habitual lying and manipulating others is what they do. Every human interaction is a game to win with this type of person. They really don’t care about anything but themselves, or see anything wrong with their behavior. They also are pretty immune to any sort of therapeutic intervention or true change in behavior. They just change their stories and their hunting grounds. I’ve been reading all day, looking for an answer to how do we stop people who truly are above the law, and came across a very interesting observation that was found by an unnamed Swedish study on the subject. They observed that the worst offenders were often men of prestige and wealth, and that since a defining characteristic of a sociopath is habitual dishonesty, they also were very likely to have committed felonies as teenagers and to cheat on their income taxes. Often, the best offense was reporting these men to the IRS.
Loose wiring, faulty circuitry-any number of things that can go wrong with old radios?
Nah, I’m not saying it was ghosts-but really…
Michael Shermer: Unable to grasp concepts from trashy (albeit iconic) movies since the mid-1980s.
Or, in shorter form: OH SNAP!
OK new challenge, invent a story that hits all the same emotional notes as the Shermer one with an intentional gap that allows for an unlikely scientific explanation.
But Shermer’s story doesn’t have emotional notes. He’s a rationalist, and Dawkins says rationalism doesn’t include emotion. For real skeptical fun, read this passage aloud in the monotonous tone of a court stenographer on Law & Order, or Janine Melnitz interviewing Winston Zeddemore:
@100, 102, And yeah, billygutter01, I agree with you that there are a few cringe-inducing moments when I watch it now.
Aside from the MIRACLE of an old radio spontaneously working again for an incredibly short burst of time, he knows that it was a message. A message from beyond. From a loved one. Why?
Because of the improbable.
Because of the unthinkable.
Because of the unbelievable.
There was a love song playing on the radio at that time.
DDSKDJSKDHFKDSFSKDJKDS AMAZZZZZING DSDSKDFJSLKDFJADKFCEWD!!1!1!!!
Therefore Ghost Granddad (sequel to Ghost Dad).
anteprepo @ 103
Not only that, but abusers positively need people to care about behaving morally. They use the moral concerns of their victims like puppet strings.
Anthony, on the contrary, it is a template short story:
Jennifer and Sherms are happy because they just got married and they are celebrating!
But she is sooo sad because Grandad can’t be there because he hath kickethed the bucket.
And then her Grandad’s old radio inexplicably starts playing music.
Grandad is here after all despite the advanced state of death and so they can be happy!
so for example:
My late Aunt Petunia was an avid Game of Thrones fan. She never missed an episode. After the doctors told her that the cancer had spread to her brain and she had only 3 weeks to live, her only response was, ‘but I won’t know how season 7 ends’.
She was much tougher than the doctors expected. She wasn’t going to go without a fight! She insisted on trying every treatment, every specialist. But it was clear that the constant treatments were taking their toll.
On the day she died she looked like a wraith. Sunken cheeks, grey hair. But she was determined to visit New York to see another specialist who might have a cure, a 3 hour trip each way. I came over to drive her down. Her bag was packed in the hall in case she had to stay the night. I was just about to pick it up when she said ‘I don’t want to go. Jon Snow marries Tyrion’. And that was the last thing she said. I called the nurse who made her comfortable and she died that night in her sleep.
And as we all know, that is exactly what happens in book 7. It could have been the tumor. But I for one prefer to believe that the world is run by a deity that doesn’t lift a finger to stop wars or famines but will intervene at the last minute to tell a very wealthy white woman the endings to her soaps before she dies.
We should also, in any situation where evidence is absent or inconclusive, refrain from painting wardrobe doors onto walls and convincing ourselves they lead to fucking Narnia.
That last line is absolute bollocks:
It’s not that skeptics “shut the doors of perception”, it’s that credulous ninnies open doors that aren’t there and then simply proclaim that ghosts can walk through them and fix fucking radios. For some reason. And then break them again. For some other reason – presumably just to fuck with people. Sounds more like a gremlin than a benevolent grandghost. Unless ghosts can have dementia.
As for “marvelling in the mysterious”, this guy isn’t marvelling at a mystery, he’s not gaping in awe at something he doesn’t understand. Being intrigued by a mysterious occurrence (that is, an occurrence for which you have no explanation) is what a skeptic does; what this man is doing is the precise opposite: proposing an explanation that has absolutely no basis in fact, prior plausibility or even reasonable hypothesis. He’s saying “fairies did it” while the rest of us are still scratching our heads and asking how it happened.
Fractal failure.
anteprepro@96:
QFT. To me, this is the essence of the “deep rifts”. I’s sooner make common cause with a christian feminist than a skeptical misogynist, and I don’t think I’m the only one.
As a retired radio engineer with eight years of experience in radio repair at the outset of my career, I can think of several likely explanations as to why the radio suddenly sprang to life after months in a drawer, and then died again the next day. I am not impressed. In the least. In my professional experience, I’ve seen several examples of such a thing.
I’m only impressed that Michael Shermer, a “professional skeptic” who should know about things like this, is impressed. Well, he came from a background of Christian religious fanaticism before “becoming” a skeptic. And he was a skeptic of global warming, then anthropogenic global warming, long after the scientific consensus was overwhelming in each case. He’s still a conservative/libertarian, advocating for economic policies that have long since been disproven by repeated hard experience.
So his naïvety and gullibility is clearly demonstrable, and, sadly, all too often infused itself in the pages of Skeptic Magazine. Which is why I let my subscription lapse long ago. Doesn’t sound like I’ll be renewing it anytime soon. The editors at Scientific American should read some of his back issues – and then quietly take his name off their contributors’ list.
What game is Shermer playing?
I wonder if this change of pace is any related to his recent exposure.
Also, WTF, Scientific American?!
#57 Phillip Hallam-Baker:
Step 3 = Templeton Prize.
@107 rrhain
Uh, oh….beware of the wrath of Anoia, The minor goddess of Things That Stick in Drawers.
At least he didn’t attribute this little miracle to the invisible hand and the magic of the free market. I suspect he is attempting to patch his Teflon coat with this bit of “spirituality”.
I realized he was not the least bit skeptical when I read his Septicblog post blaming the sub-prime melt down on the government and denying that a lack of regulation of the banks had anything to do with it. His argument with the commenters indicated he had merely traded one fundamentalism for another. The knowledge that he was a serial “grey area” rapist came as no surprise given his amoral libertarianism.
Perhaps the new book is “The Moral Orc”.
I’m currently struggling with a rather odd network problem. A PC running Windows Vista loses its wired internet connection within 3 minutes after having booted. The hardware works fine, so there must be a non-corporeal entity at work.
So should I invest in an exorcism, or simply do a reinstall? Mind you, it is Windows Vista, so the exorcism thing is probably required with or without a reinstall.
erikschepers @ 124:
Windows Vista?
The issue isn’t ‘reinstall vs. exorcism”, it’s “trash compactor vs. flamethrower.”
Just sayin’.
erikschepers #124
I had a similar-sounding problem (also Vista) a couple of years back. Check to see if you’ve had a generic LAN driver installed via Windows update. If so, download the correct one from the hardware’s maker, uninstall the currently installed one, and re-install the maker’s. (Then do a manual Windows update, wait for it to tell you you want the LAN driver, and check the “ignore this update” box, so it won’t re-install automatically.)
Hope that helped.
This just reminded me of that drivel from Why People Believe Weird Things where he describes thinking he saw spaceships. It was drivel then and it hasn’t improved with age. At least then he bothered to work out what was really happening.
@95 Anthony K
You would think that if even a morally bankrupt character like Peter Venkman could figure this out…
well it certainly says something about where the “leaders of skepticism” are coming from and none of it is good.
@117 Hank_Says
Well that would certainly explain a few things.
Uh, yeah. It’s in Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted Darkness: Science as a Candle in the Dark: holding an old watch in your hand may melt its (likely oxidized) lubricants, so it can move again, so some of them do move again.
“If you’d tear the wall down, the crack would stay put – because the crack <pause> is not <pause> in the wall.”
– The Doctor
…Well put. :-S
It is clear that the message of the Scientific American piece is ‘take mescalin’ .
It has a bad capacitor. Everything he describes matches that as the cause. (Incidentally, I’m pretty sure every radio is a “transistor radio” these days. Well, maybe not certain hipster-marketed radios…) Capacitors store a slower feed of electricity to send out big bursts of it when needed. If they are leaking or damaged, they may fail to store the charge, so the radio won’t be able to “turn on”. However, sometimes they’ll be able to slowly build up that charge and “burst” a little of it every now and then in spite of that, which would actually explain it suddenly turning on. These things happen. You know what also happens? Sometimes damaged or poor quality capacitors explode. I’m not sure he’d have seen that as a miracle (though admittedly, capacitor explosions are a lot more likely in something directly plugged into the wall than fed by batteries).
Ooops, everything I just said was wrong, because as that guy points out, the EMOTIONAL importance is FAR more significant than any “causal explanation”, even if it’s accurate. Well, what a wonderful catch-all there.
Anri, considering the fact that is Vista, surely it should be the flamethrower, followed by the trash compactor, and the flame thrower once more? And subsequently dumping the charred remains in an active volcano. Just to be on the safe side.
Daz, I did look into the driver. It’s the standard, out-of-the-box driver from Vista, and neither the driver from the manufacturer of the network chipset (Intel) or the PC manufacturer (Compaq) fixed the issue. An identical system (Compaq, exaxt same model, only difference being the brand of DDR2 modules) uses the same out-of-the-box driver, and there are no problems with that one.
So if Memtest86+ and a complete check of the harddisk don’t reveal anything funny, a backup + reinstall it shall be.