A voice from the static

There's a fallacy out there that is a little on the tricky side, even more so because it appears so straightforward at first.  It's called the single-cause fallacy.

Put simply (pun intended) it's the idea that complex realities can be attributed to single, often easy-to-state, causes.  The debate over slavery caused the American Civil War.  Teen violence is attributable to violent movies, TV, and video games.  High crime in American border states is caused by illegal immigration.

The problem is, the universe is a complex place, and it is rare to find just about anything that is solely due to one causative factor.  But it's a natural human tendency to gravitate toward simplistic explanations -- the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is something we all fall prey to.

Critical thinking, after all, is hard work.

I ran into an interesting (and less fraught, at least for most people) example of this in an article called "Electronic Voice Modulation: Voices of the Dead?", by James Alcock.  Because this article is from Scientific American, it follows Betteridge's Law -- the answer is "No" -- so the question, of course, is, "If they're not the disembodied voices of dead people, what are they?"

For those of you unfamiliar with EVPs, the gist is that you usually start with one of two things -- either an audio recording made in an empty room, or presumed "white noise" (such as the static from a radio tuned between nearby stations).  You then listen and see if you can hear words, phrases, or entire sentences.  And according to many people, these are communications from the spirits of the departed.  They're often really hard to hear, such as this one that is supposed to be a male voice whispering "Save me" (I've been through it several times, and I'm still flummoxed.)  This one is a little clearer, and includes phrases like "She'll never believe us," "She's back," and "Oliver."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Omegatron, White-noise, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What's difficult about this is that even setting aside two of the more obvious explanations -- (1) EVPs really are communications from the dead, and (2) they're hoaxes -- there are multiple explanations proposed for what's going on here:

1. Cross-modulation.  This happens with radio and TV static, where a device picks up snippets of a broadcast from some other medium.
2. Apophenia.  Apophenia is a brain phenomenon, where we look for (and often find) patterns in random stimuli.  Our brains are pattern-seeking devices; they often misfire and see or hear patterns that aren't there.
3. Suggestion/priming.  Note that lots of recorded examples of EVPs caption the audio track (at the relevant moment) with what the Dead Person is supposedly saying.  As James Randi said, "You can't miss it when I tell you what's there."  (This is often what's going on with allegations of backmasking, where singers are accused of including encoded, usually satanic, messages in their songs that can only be deciphered when the song is played backwards.  The message is usually indecipherable until the listener is told what it supposedly says -- at which point it jumps out.)
4. Artifacts.  These can be inadvertent alteration of the original recording because of filtering, frequency enhancement, and application of noise reduction, or even -- in old EVP claims from the days of cassette tapes -- re-recording over previous audio that didn't completely erase the original.
5. Raising the noise floor of the recording. The noise floor is the sum of all the noise produced by the electronic device itself, and thus a way to produce white noise from which EVP enthusiasts can then try to extract signals.  The problem is, this introduces another post-recording effect, because the white noise itself is usually then filtered, often using a spectral glide filter to enhance any vowel-like sounds that might occur in the recording -- something familiar to anyone who likes the music of rockers like Peter Frampton.  The processing is actually making the recording more likely to sound like speech to listeners, even if there's nothing there.
6. Wishful thinking.  It's no coincidence that positive responses to EVPs where there was no priming occur in people who already believed that EVPs are communications from the spirit world -- nor that EVP investigators almost always hear messages in their own native languages.

So EVPs -- prominently featured on all the ghost hunting programs, YouTube channels, and so on -- are not attributable to one simple cause, and that's even if you set aside for the moment the possibility that they're missives from the disembodied souls of the dead.

And that's the difficulty, isn't it?  You have some strange set of phenomena, and perhaps you explain one of them (e.g. "this particular EVP was cross-modulation, where we picked up a blip from a nearby radio station"), but you can't then jump to the conclusion that they all have that explanation.  Each instance has to be evaluated on its own merits, which is time-consuming and often frustrating.

It's why I have some sympathy for the skeptics who are inclined to dismiss them all (as well as all UFO sightings, cryptid sightings, and so on) and be done with it.  The danger, of course, is throwing out the wheat with the chaff.  You may have seen a strange story that was making the rounds -- a paper in Nature, of all places -- that was about the discovery of some odd UFOs (or UAPs -- unidentified aerial phenomena -- as I guess we're now calling them) on eighty year old photographic plates from Palomar Observatory, that showed some mysterious moving objects that "are not easily accounted for by prosaic explanations."  There was a weak correlation between their appearance and known nuclear testing, but even that seems to be a stretch.  Even the ordinarily hard-edged skeptic Sabine Hossenfelder admits that they're a mystery.  As one commenter responded, "It's never aliens... until it is."

So we're back to "critical thinking is difficult."  Blanket disbelief (i.e. cynicism) is just as lazy as gullibility is.  We have to come back time and again to the actual evidence, logic, and principles of scientific induction -- and keep your mind open, although (as Walter Kotschnig put it) "... not so open that your brains fall out."

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