UFO ‘studies’ have come a long way since the days of Billy Meier, when you could just throw a pie plate or a hubcap into the air and take a polaroid, and presto … proof of flying saucers! Now in these days of Photoshop and CGI, you can get much more elaborate and realistic images — none of those silver blurs anymore. DJ Chubakka introduced me to a weird world of modern UFO enthusiasts.
Nowadays you can read the markings right off the hulls of the spaceships.
Chris Mooney makes a point about the supernatural thriller genre.
Indeed, nearly five years ago I wrote a column entitled “Conversion Fantasies” in which I made the following point: In movies and TV series about the paranormal, the sterotypical “skeptic” figure always seems to convert into a believer by the end. And why does this occur? Well, because in fiction, the author can control the laws of nature, and in these fictional narratives (which show an abundant lack of creativity), the supernatural always turns out to be real.
I think an excellent example of this trend is the Scooby Doo cartoon. Way back when I was a young’un, they always ended the same way: the Scooby Doo gang would always discover that the monster/spectre/alien was actually Old Man Cargill, dressed in a costume, trying to keep visitors away so they wouldn’t discover his secret uranium mine, and they always led him away in handcuffs at the end, while he muttered, “If it weren’t for those darned kids, I would have gotten away with it.” I know, the cartoon was cheesily and cheaply animated, the plots were boring and predictable, and the characters were annoyingly trite, but at least they had a consistent message that the supernatural wasn’t real.
That changed last time I saw it — the ghosts were “real”. It was very strange: it was a badly done cartoon, waning in popularity, and instead of trying to reinvigorate it by, say, coming up with creative plots, or getting better artwork, or making the characters more interesting, they chose to throw away the one novel element of the show. The supernatural resort is often the act of lazy hacks.
I’m not going to be quite as down on the supernatural in fiction as Mooney is — I do like a good cheesy horror flick now and then — but I agree with him that the conversion narrative always seems to run in one direction only, and it’s gotten a bit tired. How about a movie where a confirmed, praying, ghost-fearing, gullible person sees the evidence and is enlightened, and sees at last the sufficiency of natural mechanisms? I don’t just mean discovering it’s Old Man Cargill under the sheet, but gets their whole worldview shaken up and realizes that hey, looking for material causes works.
That would be a hard one to write, I suspect, and me and Chris Mooney don’t represent a very big share of the market.
Poor Deepak Chopra is crying again at the nastiness of the blogosphere’s reaction to his idiocy.
I’m pausing at the end of a long series of posts on the mind outside the brain to reflect on science, bad manners and objectivity. Bad manners are the norm in the blogosphere, and no one who dips into that world should bring along a thin skin. Salt air stings but it’s refreshing at the same time. There’s a raffish lack of respectability to blogs, however, that drive away good people and good minds. Insulting boors abound here, and it’s easy enough to go elsewhere and enjoy a civilized debate.
Oh, no—this article about Craig Schaffer in America’s Finest News Source reminds me of me.
Eddy said he has tried repeatedly to pull Schaffner back from the precipice of lucidity.
“I admit, science might be great for curing diseases, exploring space, cataloguing the natural phenomena of our world, saving endangered species, extending the human lifespan, and enriching the quality of that life,” Eddy said. “But at the end of the day, science has nothing to tell us about the human soul, and that’s a critical thing Craig is missing. I would hate for his soul to be lost forever because of a stubborn doubt over the actual existence and nature of that soul.”
An important change: UCL is reinstating Colquhoun’s blog on its servers and has announced that it “continues strongly to support and uphold Professor Colquhoun’s expression of uncompromising opinions as to the claims made for the effectiveness of treatments by the health supplements industry or other similar bodies”.
University College London caved in to complaints from alternative medicine quacks and asked Professor David Colquhoun to remove his skeptical blog from their university servers. Ben Goldacre summarizes the complaints:
They objected, for example, to his use of the word “gobbledygook” to describe Red Clover as a “blood cleanser” or a “cleanser of the lymphatic system”. Somebody from the “European Herbal and Traditional Medicine Practitioners Association” complained that he’d slightly misrepresented one aspect of herbalists’ practice. One even complained about Colquhoun infringing copyright, simply for quoting the part of their website that he was examining. They felt, above all, that this was an inappropriate use of UCL facilities.
It’s chilling: a couple of anti-science kooks send in some email to the provost, and the provost goes running to one of his professors and tells him to take it all down. Rather than booting Colquhoun’s pages from their server, perhaps the timid provost ought to have been fired; the job of a provost is to lead, not to scuttle.
But then again…
I’m curious what people think: which is a poorer example of science?
A hypothesis that is tested and proven wrong, or
A hypothesis that is so nebulous that it can’t even be tested?
Lewis Wolpert has a pleasant interview in Salon today — I find most of what he says copacetic. I very much like his developmental biology textbook, but I’m afraid I found his recent popular book, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), far too scattered and unfocused to be memorable. It’s a pleasant enough read — get it and you won’t regret it — but it was more like an agreeable conversation with an intelligent and eccentric fellow than a work that will either shake you up or strengthen your views…and that also comes through in the interview. He’s pretty much a sensible skeptic who doesn’t put up with much woo-woo nonsense.
There is one part that I didn’t much care for, that would probably prompt me to start an argument if this were a conversation:
You call David Hume your “hero philosopher.” Why do you like him so much?
First of all, I don’t like any other philosopher. I think philosophers are terribly clever but have absolutely nothing useful to say whatsoever. I avoid philosophy like mad. But David Hume does say such interesting and important things. He’s very good on religion, for example. I like him for that.
That’s just me, though. If I had my druthers, I’d have a philosophy of science requirement in place for our biology majors, as an essential piece of background in a good liberal arts education—biology has gotten so huge, though, that something had to go, and that’s one we aren’t even going to try to push into the curriculum, and I’m probably the only person in my discipline who’d consider it useful.
You might not want to look at this story about the televangelist fraud, Peter Popoff around lunchtime — it contains graphic visuals of a known con artist cheerfully defrauding the sick and elderly, and it might leave you a little squeamish. Popoff was discredited by James Randi 20 years ago, as is vividly shown at the link, but he’s back now, sucking in millions of dollars every year with his lies.
There’s also a couple in the story who were sick and unemployed, and who borrowed thousands of dollars from relatives to help them pay their bills…and who instead sent all the money to Popoff, who promised them magic Jesus prosperity. It’s a veritable freakshow of stupidity—you’ll despise the con artist, but you’ll also want to kick some of his victims.
Could D’Souza be right? Does our lack of religious beliefs really impair our ability to offer help to people?
I suppose that if we actually cared, we could have
sent teams to Virginia to do useful things like
stroke sad people’s thetans and
point to chairs and trees for them (a technique that will also sober up drunks in minutes, which sounds very handy). Even if the VT students aren’t in shock or drunk, I’m sure they’ll appreciate the important study tips. Did you know that the most important thing you can do is look up words in a dictionary — the bigger the dictionary the better — and that students get stupider because they don’t know words like “chimney” and “a” and “the”?
Man, I wish I weren’t an atheist so that I could also make up stuff to help people.
Maybe I also need to wish for profound brain damage so that I wouldn’t think those “assists” were such a reeking pile of putrid inanity.
This is an amusing (but somewhat violent) movie that is an apt metaphor for the strengths of science. It starts with a Kiai Master, one of those woo-woo martial artists who claims to have the power of knocking his opponents flat with his mystical chi—and it’s awfully funny how all these martial arts students come running up and do pratfalls when he waves his hands at them. Then, in a fit of hubris, derangement, or just plain stupidity, he challenges someone to come against him with ‘mere’ natural, physical combat skills. The results are predictable and a little bit cringe-inducing.
The woo sure looks impressive when it’s performed with a mob willing to play along, but it only takes a few seconds for reality to flatten “let’s pretend”. Keep that in mind, creationists: it’s easy to find obliging crowds in your churches, but the rest of the world isn’t going to play the game with you. When the United States deludes itself into thinking creationism is legitimate, we’re setting ourselves up for another nation to knock us down with a single punch of solid science.
