World-wide weirdness

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!

Sorry — I’m not talking to you today

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.

Vegas, baby!

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.

The consequences of the erosion of critical thinking

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.

(via)

Now I’m embarrassed

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?

The Sheldrake phenomenon

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.

We happy hooligans

My brief summary of the position of apologists for religion, The Courtier’s Reply, continues to rankle the believers, and they continue to make responses that only make me laugh at their cluelessness. The standard rebuttal is to claim that I was making an argument in favor of ignorance in the face of theological scholarship, followed by a laundry list of esteemed theologians … but never, and I mean absolutely never, even the slightest attempt to address the core of my criticism — not once have they presented a solid, confirmable reason to believe in a deity.

Here’s the latest example, and it follows the formula perfectly. How dare Myers accuse Tillich and Buber and Bonhoeffer and Gandhi and Bishop Tutu and Piaget and a long set of dropped names of promoting false beliefs? Yet, as usual, he cannot bring himself to actually discuss the substance of the issue: where is the evidence for his god? Listing invisible flounces, transparent ruffles, and phantasmal frills is simply a confirmation of the validity of my parable.

And yes, I do accuse his honor roll of theological luminaries of perpetuating lies, of credulity, and often, of pettifogging rhetoric. When someone advances remarkable claims of remarkable phenomena, like N rays or cold fusion or polywater (or natural selection or chemiosmosis or endosymbiosis), we demand evidence and skeptical evaluation…but not for religion. God always gets a pass from the people who already believe. They claim the existence of the most powerful, all-pervasive force in the universe, yet will provide not a single shred of support. And worse, this bozo calls the demand for evidence “hooliganism”.

If that’s the case, I’m proud to be a hooligan.

Martians!

Mars seems to bring out the kooks. I was pointed to the bizarre Xenotech “research” site, which consists entirely of the delusional fantasies of Sir Charles W. Shults III, Scientist (yes, that’s what he calls himself). His research program? He gleans photographs from Mars probes for random shapes that look biological to him. Here, for instance, is the “clearest and most perfect trilobite” he has found in these pictures.

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It’s a good thing he marked up that one photo with his imaginary lines—I’ve seen a lot of trilobites, and I wouldn’t have seen one in his rock if he hadn’t pulled out the crayon.

There’s more! He has a whole gallery of apophenia — it’s an amazing example of a hyperactive pattern detector.

Aquarius: Beware the nitrate levels in your tank, and do a filter change. Your guppies are pregnant. The air line to the little plastic treasure chest is at risk for getting clogged. Don’t overfee…what? It’s what? Aquarius, not aquarist?

Never mind.

Astrology disproven!

It’s 2008 — I think astrology has been dead for a few centuries. But OK, it’s been shown to be worthless again. A large study of thousands of “time twins” — people who were born at the same time — has concluded that there are no correspondence between them.

Researchers looked at more than 100 different characteristics, including occupation, anxiety levels, marital status, aggressiveness, sociability, IQ levels and ability in art, sport, mathematics and reading – all of which astrologers claim can be gauged from birth charts.

The scientists failed to find any evidence of similarities between the “time twins”, however. They reported in the current issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies: “The test conditions could hardly have been more conducive to success . . . but the results are uniformly negative.”

Big surprise.

Don’t look for astrology to vanish, though. Here’s the real surprise in the story.

Some of the most popular figures in the field, such as Russell Grant, Mystic Meg and Shelley von Strunckel, can earn £600,000 or more a year.

A single profitable astrology website can be worth as much as £50 million.

When the Daily Mail discovered that its expert on the zodiac, Jonathan Cainer, was about to leave the newspaper in 1999, it reportedly offered him a £1 million salary and a £1 million bonus to stay. He still preferred the offer at the Daily Express: no salary but all the money from his telephone lines.

Obviously, I’m in the wrong business. Maybe I need to start inserting the occasional horoscope reading in my blog posts.

Pisces: You will be busy exchanging ions across your gill membranes today — watch out for predators, and trust your lateral line organs.