Reminder: Skeptics’ Circle
Don’t forget: if you’re planning to submit a post to the Skeptics’ Circle this time around, get it to me before midnight EST tonight. You can leave a comment here if you like, but the preferred method of submission is to email z [at] thoughtcounts [dot] net.
Skeptics’ Circle #104
Space City Skeptics has just posted the 104th edition of the Skeptics’ Circle. Those of us now in the swing of spring semester and perhaps coming up on our first set of exams may find it hauntingly familiar! (Sadly, I’m referring only to familiarity of the test theme, rather than the multiple choice format in particular…. Oh, how I miss those bygone days.) There’s plenty of interesting content there, but do make sure you check out the Perky Skeptic’s post about feeding trolls, and save some of that inspiration for next time you feel discouraged by the number of people who are wrong on the internet.
I’ll be hosting the next edition of the Skeptics’ Circle here on February 12, so please send me your submissions by the previous midnight (EST). Email them to z [at] thoughtcounts [dot] net.
Reading the arXiv
I’m a big fan of the arXiv.org database. (If you’ve never heard of it: pronounce it just like “archive.” Think the Greek letter chi, written like an X.) It contains papers from lots of fields in math and science. The arXiv makes research more accessible to researchers and laymen (laypeople?) in several ways. It’s difficult to get access to journal articles without a subscription, or a university library system with a subscription. Also, it takes time for articles to get printed, for purely logistical reasons, but people sometimes post their papers before publication. Lastly (in my list at least), a lot of research wouldn’t otherwise be published, but even things like null results add to the sum of our knowledge and are valuable to record, and the arXiv is a good a place to put them.
That being said, the arXiv is not a peer-reviewed journal, and should not be treated as such. Some articles have gone through review, but not all. Some papers are early drafts, and are still undergoing review. Some articles have questionable methods, or assume blatantly wrong premises. (We frequently encounter this phenomenon when presenting and discussing papers in “journal club.” I assume we are not the only ones noticing this.) You do need to be a registered author to submit a paper to the arXiv, and you’re not supposed to lie about who you are, but no one is there checking your work.
Daphne was just pointing out the ridiculously alarmist Fox News coverage of a new arXiv article about black holes at the LHC. She makes a lot of great (and funny!) points about their inaccurate and misleading interpretation of the article, and I don’t have anything to add there. What really got me about the story is that the Fox reporters based their entire story on a paper only published on the arXiv. I’m not questioning the researchers’ methods or conclusions — hep-ph is not my subfield, and besides, their claims are certainly not what is reported on Fox News’ site — but I am pretty sure that no one at Fox is qualified to question them either, which means that they shouldn’t take everything they find on arXiv at face value. It’d be like reading Wikipedia and then reporting that the European Union has announced a new policy that ALLY WUZ HERE!!1!
I want information to be freely available just as much as the next intellectual. However, we have to be cautious. The internet may be the great leveller, but that means it sometimes obscures the difference between good ideas and bad ones.
Skeptics’ Circle #103
The first Skeptics’ Circle of the new year is up over at Bug Girl’s Blog. Go check it out! There’s lots of good stuff there to help you recover from the withdrawal I’m sure you faced, going without a Skeptics’ Circle for nearly an entire month.
I particularly enjoyed Kylie’s interview with Dr. Mark Henn at PodBlack Cat. They talk about what it means to be a deist, and whether that is really at odds with skepticism (as well as whether atheism and skepticism really go hand-in-hand). Lots of good stuff going on in the comments there, too. I was also fascinated by Whitney’s post at diapsalmata about a literary hoax that has fooled several academics. She shares her comparative media studies insight about what this can tell us about what makes good evidence, and what distinguishes the past from the present.
Don’t forget to submit your work to the next Skeptics’ Circle, over at Space City Skeptics, before it goes up on the 29th.
Praise for the Pope
Yes, you read that right. Pope Benedict XVI has recently made an announcement I think is worthy of some praise. The Vatican is updating its rules on claims of miraculous visions or experiences, requiring more rigorous investigation. From the Daily Mail:
The first step will be to impose silence on the alleged visionaries and if they refuse to obey then this will be taken as a sign that their claims are false.
The visionaries will next be visited by psychiatrists, either atheists or Catholics, to certify their mental health and to verify whether they are suffering from conditions of a hysterical or hallucinatory character or from delusions of leadership.
The third step will be to investigate the person’s level of education and to determine if they have had access to material that could be used to falsely support their claims.
If the visionary is considered credible they will ultimately be questioned by one or more demonologists and exorcists to exclude the possibility that Satan is hiding behind the apparitions in order to deceive the faithful.
Okay, so it’s not perfect, but you have to admit, it’s a major improvement! The Pope, allegedly in favor of belief in talking snakes and men surviving for days inside the stomachs of enormous fish, thinks you might be delusional about that time you saw the Virgin Mary in your macaroni and cheese. Pope Benedict XVI has said, and implicitly stands for, many ideas and policies that I disagree with. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to congratulate him for making a solid move in the right direction.
The message from the Vatican here is that religious claims shouldn’t be believed automatically. Evidence should be carefully considered. The claimant’s motives should be considered. We’re all accustomed to thinking this way about the estimate from the plumber or the infomercial on late-night TV. However, most people aren’t able to think this way about religion, even the ones who are very savvy with home repairs. Now, the Pope is telling Catholics that they should do it. Sure, he still says that the Vatican gets the final call on what’s true and what’s not. It’s still the Vatican. However, it’s kind of a slippery slope towards wholesale skepticism of dogma, and the Pope will do a much better job of convincing Catholics to head that way than I ever could.
Thanks to John Armstrong for his rant that lit a fire under my skeptical behind about this, and also to RichardDawkins.net which posted the article I read first.
Learning opportunities
I found myself in two frighteningly similar, yet significantly different situations while on winter break. One occurred at the home of a family member I was visiting. I found several books and pamphlets on homeopathy and other associated woo, and naturally became concerned about how deeply the woo had spread. The other happened at a party I was at with friends. I heard one person (a new friend who I don’t know all that well) tell another (a friend of mine for many years) that he had been having some mental and physical problems recently but that thankfully he’d found a “good homeopath.” I was sitting next to the conversation and could have easily jumped in, but I wasn’t being talked to directly.
My proper course of action in the first situation was obvious. Knowing this family member well, I couldn’t believe that they would honestly buy into homeopathy if they knew exactly what it meant. I sat them down and flipped through the books, explaining about dilution and succussion, using ipecac as a cure for nausea, and so on. It took less than two minutes to convince them to get rid of the books, though we talked a little longer about the details because of their curiosity. It turned out that the books were bought used and on sale very cheap, and seemed worth picking up because they looked like medical encyclopedias. We decided to throw the books away rather than donate them or bring them to a used book store, so that no one else would be fooled by them. Later, they asked me to look through a pile of books about medicine and to pull out the ones based on pseudoscience. It would have been nice to have taught them how to identify woo, rather than just how to run potential woo by me for evaluation, but overall I consider it a success.
I had quite the moral dilemma in the second situation, though. I didn’t know the person that well, wasn’t clearly a part of the conversation, and wasn’t sure whether it was actually a teachable moment. I heard him explain that he got worse before he got better — a classic hallmark of issues like a cold or a headache that appear, worsen, and heal on their own over time, and good evidence that homeopathic treatment is unrelated to the healing process. I squirmed in my seat and tried to make eye contact with a known-skeptic friend on the other side of the room. The real dilemma happened when he explained how the mind and body are so interconnected, and how so many ailments are psychosomatic. He used this as evidence for the necessity of “holistic” medicine, but I thought, good point! Maybe if you have a fake medical problem, it’s not so bad to treat it with fake medicine. This may even work for some real but not-too-serious problems — the placebo effect actually does help some people get better faster than they would have without it.
I decided not to say anything. I just complained about it later to that skeptic friend across the room, who never noticed my desperate stares. I think it was the right call because it would have made a scene and made people unhappy and upset (in a way I was safe from while visiting family). People don’t tend to learn from what you tell them, if telling them makes them very upset. Still, I know there is plenty of harm possible from this kind of stuff, and I feel bad about not even trying to intervene.
So, did I do the right thing? When do you step in to teach people about science and pseudoscience, and when should you just let it go?
Skeptical blogging brainstorm #3
In editions #1 and #2 of this series, I explained some ways I think atheist and/or skeptical bloggers can make and keep themselves relevant and useful. This is my last intended installment (at least, in such a formal sense), and I intend to use it to talk about getting the word out and educating the public. After all, the one good thing about having so many near-identical blog posts about Bigfoot, or about intelligent design, or whatever else, is that when someone searches the internet for “Bigfoot” or “intelligent design” their likelihood of finding a skeptical site instead of a credulous one is increased. Marginally, of course. Messing with Google rankings is a slow and dismal process. The goal, though, is an important one: making sure the public has an opportunity (and a meaningful probability) of hearing a skeptical perspective.
Perhaps the way to get better search traffic is something more along the lines of linking the word Expelled to the site Expelled Exposed when writing about Ben Stein’s movie. True, the traffic goes somewhere else, not our blogs (one reason I suspect it might be tempting for every blogger to write their own posts on these topics) — but if a good explanation has already been written with expertise, we should make a practice of linking to it when relevant, rather than wasting time and energy reinventing the wheel. I could imagine a pretty slick sidebar add-on or widget with a headline like, “There’s no evidence for:” and a (scrolling?) list of links beneath it, including whichever things you wanted to debunk.
With all that time we save linking to preexisting well-written skeptical essays, I’m sure we can come up with lots of other worthwhile discussion about how to more effectively express the value of a scientific mindset and a respect for evidence. Remember, lots of people aren’t on the internet as often as we are, and most people aren’t changing their mind because they read one snarky blog. They’re forming their opinions about science and evidence out there in the real world, so we should talk about and work towards taking our advocacy there.
I read several interesting posts a couple weeks ago by Steven Novella about how to improve science education, science textbooks, and support for science teachers. It’s clear just from the comments there that not everyone agrees with his opinions (although, in very large part, I do) but at any rate, it’s surely a conversation we ought to be having. Skeptics can make a great contribution to science education, in some cases by being great teachers or involved parents, but also just as regular, not-directly-related citizens, going to speak at a school board meeting or writing letters to local lawmakers. The education doesn’t just happen in school buildings, of course. Maybe we should be going door-to-door. (I know I linked a comic there, but in all seriousness, I love that idea.) Maybe we should be passing out flyers on the sidewalk in front of the Creation Museum or the Discovery Institute. These educational toys are a great example of thinking outside of the box about this issue. Both the strategies we should to get our message out and the content of our message are worth some discussion on our blogs.
As usual, I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts about this in the comments. More importantly though, I hope I’ve given you some food for thought if you have a blog of your own.
Skeptical blogging brainstorm #2
Following up on my first list of ideas, here are some more thoughts I have on what skeptics, atheists, and skeptical and/or atheist bloggers can do in order to add something new and repeat ourselves less. If you’re here via the Skeptics’ Circle #95 link to the earlier list, welcome! (And if you haven’t read the current Skeptics’ Circle, you’re welcome here too, but you should go check it out!)
The issue of community seems like the elephant in the room, which is why I want to focus on it now. We talk about the skeptical movement or the atheist community — but what are those? I feel like a shared respect for critical thinking is not enough to fuel a social organization. For a group focused on faith, it makes a bit more sense to have, well, a congregation. There are holy words to be studied and dogmas to be memorized; there are inner doubts requiring the support (or pressure, depending on how you see it) of a peer group to assuage them. I have a hard time imagining an atheist group meeting — what do you talk about there?
However absurd, I think we ought to try to foster these communities, since one real benefit to being part of a religious group is the fellowship and friendship it offers. It’s good for that to be available without having to profess beliefs in the literal truth of fairy tales and magic. So, we need to have something for those groups to do. That’s one topic for blogging I’d like to see more about. If you’re part of one of these organizations, what do you do? Even if you’re not, what do you think would make a good meeting? Do you play Trivial Pursuit? Watch movies like The Core and pick them apart MST3K-style? Do you organize a lecture series? (Who do you invite?) Tell us what works and what doesn’t, or what would get you to show up versus what would get you to unsubscribe from the mailing list. On a related note, I also like how the Skepchick blog makes use of the opportunity to advertise meet-ups.
We also need to have some open dialogue about how to make these groups what we collectively want them to be. I’ve already seen a bit of writing about how to make skeptical groups more inclusive, and how (or, whether) to reach out to demographics that are underrepresented without reason in most skeptics’ organizations, but I think more people should get involved in the discussion. A few good examples, in my opinion, can be found in this pro and this contra opinion about recruiting women into skeptical organizations, as well as this post on bringing people in the arts, humanities, and social sciences into the fold. I’m sure that topics that are not specifically related to diversity, but are more generally about recruiting and publicity successes and failures, would be well-received too.
I’m planning on writing one more installment in this series, on how to be most effective at reaching out to non-skeptics and getting our message across. In the meantime, please let me know in the comments if you think I make sense or if you think I’m a lunatic.
Skeptical blogging brainstorm #1
I said in an earlier post that I planned to do a bit of brainstorming on what we as skeptical and/or atheist bloggers ought to be doing with our time, if we’re not rehashing the old skeptical and/or atheist classics. (Forgive me if I conflate atheism and skepticism a bit in this post. In my experience around the blogosphere, the two respective groups of bloggers overlap quite a lot, and their overall objectives are very closely aligned, so for all intents and purposes of this entry they are the same.) Here is what I’ve thought of since then.
My primary inclination is to suggest that we include a larger range of issues within the skeptical canon. Instead of just writing about alternative medicine or alien sightings, we can find some other aspects of life to be skeptical about as well. We can question claims made in advertising, or critique the methods in academic papers. We can point out when politicians promote blatantly false ideas. Anything with facts is worthy of a skeptic’s attention. If you’re writing a skeptical blog, rather than just being a skeptic while blogging, I understand an inclination to stick with the standard sorts of debunking. As for the rest of us, though, there are topics we can shift towards so as not to be quite as redundant.
Straight-up activism is certainly a good idea as well. If we assume, as seems to be the case, that most people reading skeptical or atheist blogs are themselves skeptics or atheists, this could be a very effective way of organizing. Hemant Mehta at Friendly Atheist has recently tapped into this on behalf of Kay Hagan, a candidate for North Carolina state senate who got attacked for planning to meet with an atheist organization. There are lots of ways that a skeptical or atheist viewpoint is relevant to politics, and if you want to create real change in society in the direction of that viewpoint, you should work to elect people you believe represent it and vote out of office those who are counterproductive. In addition to just blogging about John McCain’s comments about a link between vaccines and autism, we should be protesting about it at his speaking events. (Maybe use your blog to assemble protesters.) In addition to just writing about false advertising claims made for alternative medicine, call on your local district attorney to prosecute chiropractors and crystal healers and homeopaths in your area when they make unsubstantiated claims of healing. (Maybe use your blog to distribute a template letter to send to the DA’s office.) There’s plenty of work to be done.
Finally, there’s the question of unity as a group. There’s a lot of talk about the “atheist community” or the “skeptical movement” and what its goals are. It’s difficult to have a movement or a coherent set of group goals without some infrastructure. As much as I’m wary of the election of an atheist pope or some such central authority of a group based on thinking for yourself, I think these organizations have a place at least insofar as lobbying and publicity are concerned. Rather than have people seeing one dude here or there interviewed on the local news, or have a legislator receiving an occasional letter from individual constituents, we want to present a stronger message. A spokesperson on TV saying he represents so many millions of people looks a lot more compelling. Many groups of this sort already exist, such as Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, the National Center for Science Education, the Skeptics Society, and the Secular Coalition for America. (There are of course many others; this is just a sampling.) Joining and/or donating to these groups will make them more effective at publicizing skeptical and secular perspectives.
That’s all I’ve got for now, but not forever. I have a few other ideas still percolating, and I’ll post again about them soon. In the meantime, let me know what you think about these ideas — if they’re good, crazy, infeasible, irrelevant… whatever.
Skeptical blogging
I struggle with the idea of blogging about being a skeptic, or writing posts full of skepticism on beliefs that are widely held by a gullible public. What’s the point?
I know there are bloggers out there going point by point through lists of reasons to believe in God, refuting every dumb thing written on Conservapedia, or answering every anti-vaccinationist nut that writes a blog comment — and I’m happy that they’re doing it. I’m happy that there are lots of web sites explaining why homeopathy and acupuncture aren’t real medicine. I just don’t understand having the necessary motivation, given that so many of those websites exist and have existed for a while now, to write new posts about old issues that have already been covered. I know I usually can’t muster it, for two main reasons.
Reason 1: Redundancy. There are scores of blog posts out there explaining why crazy thing X is not worth believing in. I’m not an expert in the truth about crazy thing X, and while I might be able to explain the arguments in a slightly more articulate fashion than a few other people out there, I couldn’t add any substantive material. All I would be doing is repeating what’s already been written.
Reason 2: Audience. True, we do get the occasional hit from someone searching “no pain spray” on Google. I’m glad that people are finding my criticism in addition to online advertisements for the product. By and large, though, the people reading skeptical blogs are skeptics. The people reading atheist blogs are atheists. It’s fun to read someone really eviscerating the writings of Ray Comfort or Dinesh D’Souza, but almost no one who believes either of them is going to be reading along with you. Anyone who is is just looking to post an angry refutation, and isn’t likely to change their mind.
I get a sort of self-congratulatory feeling from the millionth post I read about Bigfoot hoaxes or alien sightings or the argument from evil. We’re not really convincing people, we’re just trumpeting how great we are that we are capable of reason. Yeah, it’s a nice feeling, and yeah, we’re not going to be encouraged to be reasonable by anyone else, but aren’t we wasting our time? It seems like we can all get together and agree that homeopathy is full of crap, then move on to applying our critical thinking skills to new issues.
When a newspaper writes an article about how awesome pet psychics are, fine, blog about how this is stupid. When a new study comes out finally doing a thorough scientific debunking of some woo, okay, blog about that. I’m not really talking about those things. What I mean is: We know that Answers in Genesis doesn’t care about scientific facts, and we know that intelligent design is creationism. We know that the only valuable aspects of chiropractic medicine are the same as the valuable parts of back massage. We also know that so-called psychics don’t have any special powers and are just good at fishing for answers from you. Merely explaining that these people are wrong is not giving new information.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, in terms of my own blogger’s-block issues, but it came to the forefront for me as I was looking around Edger. Let me first say that this is an awesome, new site for the skeptical youth community, and I encourage you to check it out. It’s a student initiative of the Center For Inquiry. By its own description, “Edger presents hard-hitting and reasoned news, views, and event promotion on issues pertaining to secularism, atheism, science, humanism, and the cosmos, and actively promotes and celebrates international freethought activism.” That sounds great to me. However, they did something I don’t understand.
Here’s the Edger post on homeopathy. It does a good job of clearly explaining the principles of homeopathic medicine and why they make no sense whatsoever. I’m not knocking that. It’s just that we already had that, here, here, here, and here. Also here, here, and here. Don’t forget here. Or the other 405,000 hits you can get searching “homeopathy fraud” on Google. Or the 21,800 for “homeopathy debunked,” or the 202,000 for “homeopathy scam.”
I know some of those Google hits are for sites titled things like “Homeopathy: Fraud, or the Most Awesome Thing Ever?” I also know that there are 7.5 million hits for just “homeopathy,” and plenty of them are not skeptical at all. I see the value of trying to play with Google rankings. I just think this is a long, slow way to go about trying to win over people to the skeptic side. If we look at expected return per unit effort, I think it turns out to be better for skeptical bloggers to stop writing brand new posts saying, “Hey! I found someone saying something dumb!” and spend that time brainstorming new ways to educate the public effectively. (I plan to do some of that brainstorming in a future post.)
Am I wrong? Is there some reason I’ve missed? Where do you get your motivation for skeptical blogging? Please let me know in the comments.
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