It has been announced that Phil Plait is to be the new president of the James Randi Educational Foundation. This can’t be. I’ve never been entertained by Phil doing a card trick. Besides, James Randi is supposed to go on forever.
One consolation is that everyone is going to have to escalate the obligatory Plait bashing at the next Amazing Meeting.
One of the splendid people I met in Denver told me about her attendance at a bizarre lecture a few months ago — and she sent me a link to her summary. If you want to experience a second hand glimmering of Native American woo, with UFOs, magic origins, transparent white people, anti-evolution, and quantum physics, there you go.
Yesterday, I blitzed through a tiny slice of the Mensa meeting in Denver. My time was really tight, so after arriving on Thursday for a fabulous Pharyngufest, I only got to sit through two talks in the morning session before mine, and then whoosh, I was off to the airport and hurtling through the sky at 475mph to get back home.
I had time to look through the program at least, and I hate to say it, but Mensa meetings are better organized than the big meetings of most atheist groups I’ve been to (this is a peeve of mine — atheists give bad meetings, although I’m sure Margaret Downey will prove me wrong this fall). There were parallel sessions and a great deal of diversity in the subjects — which is especially good since there is a lot of credulous woo at Mensa, mixed in with the critical thinking — and plenty of time scheduled for socializing, which is the whole point of such events. The content was very mixed, however, and I sat through two talks that were not, I hope representative. I later realized I could have gone to the atheist meet-and-greet that was scheduled concurrently with the ID talk I saw, which probably would have been a much better use of my time.
The first talk I saw was “Is evolution incompatible with Intelligent Design?” by Edwin Chong. This was an attempt at a philosophical justification for regarding a weak form of ID as fully compatible with acceptance of a strong form of evolution. It was OK, not as horrible as it could have been, but the speakers motivation was transparent: it was a typical post hoc justification of a belief in god. I had a couple of major objections. One was his claim that ID is a legitimate scientific pursuit, made on the basis of the fact that they actually make epistemological claims, that is, that they express an intent to pursue a scientific line of investigation. Personally, I do not accept the fact that they have an honest intent; there’s too much bad scholarship and far too much willingness to distort the truth at the Discovery Institute. I also don’t think an intent to do research is sufficient to call it science. You also have to have some kind of evidential foundation, building on past observations — you have to be able to answer the questions “how do you know that?” or “why do you expect that result?” with something more than “because I wish it were so.”
A good chunk of the end of his talk was a long discussion of the nature of a god who would be compatible with both ID and evolution, in which you could have an omnipotent, omniscient designer who interferes in an indetectable way by selecting probabilistic outcomes, but in which you also do not have a deterministic universe. It was overwrought, I thought, a lot of intellectual masturbation to justify the existence of something Chong wishes were there, but for which he has no evidence at all.
The second talk was pure crazy. James Carrion of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, got up to tell us whose intelligence was controlling the craft. We got a short history of the UFO movement, from scattered reports of ‘foo fighters’ in WWII to the incident that started it all, the 1947 report of flying saucers in formation over Mt Rainier, to modern day accounts. He showed some of the McMinnville UFO photos, and seemed to think these were good examples of UFO evidence — they look like poorly photographed pie plates, if you ask me. Carrion thinks that UFOs are actually high tech craft built by our government that are being tested or used in secret missions. It was telling that when he said his reason for believing this was that it seemed much more likely than that aliens flew here that our government is lying to us, that there was much nodding of heads in the audience. Many of the questions revealed a weird conspiracy theorist mindset in the crowd. The best question was when one woman asked him to give the single most persuasive piece of evidence that UFOs exist…and Carrion couldn’t do it. The best he could do is cite trace evidence. He thought that soil changes (which he did not or could not describe) at purported UFO landing sites were evidence that something unusual had happened there; people in the audience actually chimed in with crop circle stories. Who knew ropes and boards were our government’s secret high technology?
What I find most damning about the whole UFO movement is that, as Carrion explained, they’ve got 60 years of history and absolutely nothing to show for it other than accumulated and often contradictory anecdotes. I say, cut through the crap: it’s a testimony to the imperfection of human perception and the suggestibility of the human mind, nothing more.
Then I gave my talk, which went in the other direction. It was OK, but I’m still working on getting this message across, which is really difficult to do: that the important evidence for evolution is all molecular, and that we’ve got this incredible wealth of detail available. I think I went over the audience’s heads in a few places. Oh, well — I’d rather credit my listener’s with more knowledge than less, and challenge them a little bit to learn more, than to dumb it down. I still have to work at making the abstractions of the molecular evidence more entertaining, though.
And that was it. It would have been good to get a more representative sample of the talks that were going on, but time was short. At least the people I met were smart and fun, even if those talks were a little odd!
Lest Phelps and the Texas Supreme Court leave the unfortunate impression that the US is the sole repository of lunacy in the world, Ben Goldacre’s latest column is about linking mobile phone signals to suicides — there’s a bit of hysteria in one of the British newspapers about it. I like his approach; he called the source of the frightening information, a Dr Roger Coghill, to get the data that led to his conclusion.
I contacted Dr Coghill, since his work is now a matter of great public concern, and it is vital his evidence can be properly assessed. He was unable to give me the data. No paper has been published. He himself would not describe the work as a “study”. There are no statistics presented on it, and I cannot see the raw figures. In fact Dr Coghill tells me he has lost the figures. Despite its potentially massive public health importance, Dr Coghill is sadly unable to make his material assessable.
Makes you go “Hmmmm,” doesn’t it? Too bad it didn’t make the reporting journalist ask a few pointed questions before putting it in screaming headlines. It’s also too bad they didn’t check his website, which is nothing but a catalog of quackery. Don’t buy anything!
This weekend has been busy — yesterday, I gave my talk at the Amaz!ng Meeting, and I think it went OK. I tried to go against type and gave a talk that was all science and biology*, no debunking, no godless inspiration pep talk, no railing at the state of delusional thinking and ignorance in the US. I saved all that instead for the conversations with people afterwards. I was hanging out with swarms of people all day and all night, talking myself hoarse and listening to all these interesting skeptics. I was up until 3am, at which time I discovered I was drinking something bright blue called an “Adios, Motherfucker”, which seemed like an appropriate time to finally drag myself off to bed.
Today contains many more talks, and Ben Goldacre and I are hoping to sneak away sometime today to do something which isn’t quite what you might think a pair of soft-spoken tweedy academics would normally do…but you’ll just have to wait a bit to discover what that might be. Maybe we can get away during some boring, unimportant talk, like Phil Plait’s.
Anyway, if you really must hear my terrifying opinions on various matters like religion and science, I recorded a podcast for Point of Inquiry earlier this week, so you can tune into that and listen to D.J. Grothe needle me. While I was here, I also recorded about an hour of stuff for the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, which isn’t up yet, but Steve Novella has been all over the place here at TAM6 assembling lots of material — keep an eye on that podcast for all kinds of exciting conversation, not just with me, but many other people as well.
*Well, and with a good dose of Phil Plait bashing. Unfortunately, he’s giving his talk today, and I expect retaliation and escalation.
As you read this, I’m on an airplane winging off to Las Vegas for The Amazing Meeting (Amazing Schedule here). I understand that I am expected to be Amazing, but usually all I can manage is a low-key Interesting, so it will be quite the challenge.
Anyway, I am told that I should arrange a Pharyngulation of some sort. Who else is going? What fits into our schedule? One thing we could do is look for the Bad Astronomers to arrange something, and then we crash it, elbow aside all the starry-eyed geeks, and take over. But maybe you have a better idea … share it here.
Colleen Leduc has an autistic child named Victoria who is enrolled in a public school. She recently got a terrifying phone call — her daughter was being sexually abused. We parents know well the fear and worry a threat to our children can cause, and Leduc was receiving an urgent, frantic phone call from school officials telling her that her daughter was being victimized in the worst way.
So she rushes in to this little meeting.
“The teacher looked and me and said: ‘We have to tell you something. The educational assistant who works with Victoria went to see a psychic last night, and the psychic asked the educational assistant at that particular time if she works with a little girl by the name of “V.” And she said ‘yes, I do.’ And she said, ‘well, you need to know that that child is being sexually abused by a man between the ages of 23 and 26.'”
Let’s make it worse. Reports of sexual abuse must be reported to Children’s Aid, even if it is merely a stupid remark by a credulous gawp of an aid, built on the dishonest bilking of a con artist. So Leduc now has a file opened on her and is being investigated.
I am astounded.
That educational assistant who made such a ghastly accusation on the basis of no evidence at all should have been immediately warned that she would be fired for spreading false rumors like that. The administrators at that school who took such idiocy seriously ought to be removed from their position of trust — they are clearly unreliable. The government officials should not be harrassing Ms Leduc — rather, they ought to hunt down and fine the creepy scammer with the pathetic letter-guessing psychic fraud scheme.
Or, if they aren’t going to do that, maybe we should start our own stupid rumor that Terry Fox Elementary School has a network of secret tunnels where children are sodomized by teachers and shut the school down and put the personnel through living hell. Live by gullibility, die by gullibility. All’s fair, right?
This is what happens when a culture tells people that reason and evidence are optional, and faith is touted as a virtue. I’m sure that educational assistant thought she was doing a good thing and was trying to protect Victoria…but the filters had been stripped from her brain, she had no tools to make rational assessments of the evidence, and so she charged in to do something vile and destructive, instead.
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Minnesota is a pretty darn good state, usually fairly progressive, but sometimes…sometimes it can plunge off the deep end into the credulous muck of woo. My state has just approved the title of doctor for naturopaths. I imagine the MDs are a bit aghast, and even us Ph.D.s are feeling a bit diminished.
It’s also a law that was pushed by the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party. My party. Minnesota Democrats are responsible for elevating respect for quackery. I’m embarrassed by that, too.
If only I’d known, I would have proposed an alternative idea at the DFL caucus: we should ennoble naturopaths with an even older, distinguished title: “hedge-witch” or maybe “witch doctor”. That last one has “doctor” in it, so it should be acceptable, right?
Richard Dawkins interviewed Rupert Sheldrake on Sheldrake’s remarkable assertions about the existence of psychic abilities. Here’s Sheldrake’s rationalization:
He then said that in a romantic spirit he himself would like to believe in telepathy, but there just wasn’t any evidence for it. He dismissed all research on the subject out of hand. He compared the lack of acceptance of telepathy by scientists such as himself with the way in which the echo-location system had been discovered in bats, followed by its rapid acceptance within the scientific community in the 1940s. In fact, as I later discovered, Lazzaro Spallanzani had shown in 1793 that bats rely on hearing to find their way around, but sceptical opponents dismissed his experiments as flawed, and helped set back research for well over a century. However, Richard recognized that telepathy posed a more radical challenge than echo-location. He said that if it really occurred, it would “turn the laws of physics upside down,” and added, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
“This depends on what you regard as extraordinary”, I replied. “Most people say they have experienced telepathy, especially in connection with telephone calls. In that sense, telepathy is ordinary. The claim that most people are deluded about their own experience is extraordinary. Where is the extraordinary evidence for that?”
Hang on there. Notice the devious twist?
Extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence. So what does Sheldrake do? He simply asserts that the idea that people can read minds over long distances for the ever-so useful purpose of occasionally detecting who is making a phone call (What? We have awesome telepathic powers that do nothing more than act as a flaky version of caller ID?) is not an extraordinary claim … on the basis of the unlikelihood that people could possibly be deluded about their own experiences. The man is nuts.
People fool themselves all the time. Millions claim that Jesus talks to them; other millions claim to be following the will of Allah. People believe in UFOs and Bigfoot and that the moon landings were a hoax. It is not at all extraordinary to suggest that human beings are eminently capable of swallowing truly crazy stuff.
On the other hand, Sheldrake’s telepathy lacks a mechanism and doesn’t even make sense. His ‘experiments’ are exercises in gullibility, anecdote, and sloppy statistics. His “morphic resonance” babble is embarrassingly gullible nonsense.
And I’m afraid Sheldrake is grossly in error in the way he pursues science. You can’t just simply carry out a Fortean exercise in collecting odd anecdotes and unexplained phenomena. You have to propose mechanisms — you need to make hypotheses that can be used to guide tests of the idea. What is the mechanism behind the claimed ability of people to sense who is calling them on the telephone? Having some suggestion about how it works would allow investigators to design experiments that block the effect, or better yet, enhance the effect.
I can guess why Dawkins turned down Sheldrake when he insisted on presenting his “evidence”. It wasn’t evidence. Evidence is data that provides support for a proposition: Sheldrake has no testable proposition, no mechanism, no quantitative description of a measurable phenomenon. He has self-selected collections of numbers, addled by poor experimental design and confirmation bias, and all he’d do is reel off streams of context-free numbers accumulated in the absence of a quantifiable thesis. I’ve read enough of Sheldrake’s work to know what a godawful load of substanceless bollocks he can spew at will.
