Cultivating uncertainty

In Haruki Murakami's haunting and surreal short story "Kino" (from his collection Men Without Women), Kino is a quiet and unassuming bar owner whose preferred way of spending his evenings -- splitting his time between serving his few customers and deciding which jazz record to play next -- is upended when a man named Kamita starts showing up.

It isn't every night, but when he's there it's always the same.  He orders a whiskey with water and ice, sits reading his book, then pays up and leaves.  Kamita, Kino tells us, "looks like he could be yakuza," but there isn't really anything concrete he bases this assessment on.  Although there is that one night, when two thugs seem to be intent on beating Kino up, and Kamita tells them to meet him outside instead -- then twenty minutes later Kamita comes back in, unruffled and unperturbed, and calmly tells Kino that the two "won't bother him again."

Other than that, Kamita seems to be a perfectly ordinary thirty-something, enjoying his quiet drink and his book.  But still, there's something off kilter about the whole situation, as if what we're seeing isn't quite real.  That sense magnifies as the story progresses.  Kino's cat mysteriously disappears.  Then he starts seeing snakes everywhere he goes.  He asks his aunt -- who had once owned the building housing his bar -- if she'd seen snakes around the place, and she says she hasn't.  But then she cryptically adds, "[Snakes] often help guide people.  But when a snake leads you, you don't know if it's in a good direction or a bad one...  [A snake] hides its heart somewhere outside its body, so it doesn't get killed.  If you want to kill a snake, you need to go to its hideout when it's not there, find its beating heart, and cut it in two."

All through this, we become increasingly unsure if what we're experiencing through Kino is real.  Murakami is the master at creating a believable Unreliable Narrator -- where we're never certain how much to trust.  Especially when the mysterious Kamita tells Kino one evening that it's absolutely imperative he close the bar "before the rain comes," and leave town.  Kino is instructed not to stay in one place for more than a day or two, and send postcards to his aunt -- no message, don't write his name, just his aunt's address and a stamp -- so Kamita will know he's okay.  "She asked me to keep an eye on you," Kamita tells Kino, "to make sure nothing bad happened...  When it's all right for you to return, I'll get in touch with you."

Amazingly, Kino accepts all this with few questions.  Closes his bar, and leaves... just as the rain starts to fall.  But a few days into his trip he ignores one of the directives, and puts his name and a short message on a postcard to his aunt.  That evening, there's a knock on his hotel room door, quiet but insistent.  It goes on for hours:

Kino pulled the covers up, shut his eyes, and covered his ears with his hands.  I'm not going to look, I'm not going to listen, he told himself.  But he couldn't drown out the sound.  Even if he ran to the far corners of the Earth and stuffed his ears full of clay, as long as he was still alive those knocks would relentlessly track him down.  It wasn't a knocking on a door in a business hotel.  It was a knocking on the door to his heart.  A person couldn't escape that sound.

And that's where we leave him.  We never find out who's behind the door, or even if there was someone at the door.  We never find out who Kamita is, why he did what he did, or how he had a connection to Kino's aunt.  We never learn for certain the significance of the snakes and the disappearance of his cat.  It is weird, surreal, evocative, tantalizing -- and ultimately, we're left to figure out the answers for ourselves.

This kind of ending drives some people crazy.  Me, I love it.  It's the kind of story that stays with you, rather than just handing you the whole thing tied up in a neat package with a ribbon on top.  It keeps you working at it, trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together.  All the clues are there, it seems to say to the reader.  You're smart enough to figure this out.

It's why one of my favorite Doctor Who episodes in recent years is the haunting "73 Yards."  The Doctor's companion Ruby is being followed by an old woman who always stays exactly 73 yards away from her, making enigmatic hand gestures.  Ruby, of course, can't get close to her, but anyone else who approaches the old woman and speaks to her ends up terrified, running away in fear -- and then turns against Ruby, refusing to have anything more to do with her.  (In two horrifying scenes, this includes the stalwart Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, and Ruby's own mother.)  We get hints at the end of who the old woman is and what's going on, but it's never really resolved completely; certainly, we never see the whole picture.

It's creepy, unsettling... but also brilliantly plotted and deeply intriguing.

One of the most critical things for developing an understanding of how things work is a tolerance for uncertainty.  The rush to find an answer -- any answer -- is completely antithetical to true knowledge.  On one level, I get it; it'd be nice if things were simple.  It'd all be so much less trouble.  But the basis of curiosity is in the suspension of that tendency, of allowing yourself not to know for a while, but to think, "Okay, I can do this.  Let's see how this all works."

The drive to fill in the answer blank and be done with thinking is a large part of what's gotten us into the political situation we now have in the United States.  It's the "All we have to do is..." mentality.  All we have to do is... put tariffs on other countries, and industry will come roaring back to our own.  Get rid of all the illegal immigrants, and our streets will be safer.  Cut the size of government, and waste and fraud will magically disappear.  Believe what Donald Trump says, world without end, amen.

And it's fed by the talking heads on the news, too, who give us little bite-sized pieces, nice and manageable -- and due to our tendency to gravitate toward the media we already believed, nothing that'll challenge our preconceived notions.  Nothing that forces us to question.  

Nothing that says, "Here are the actual facts.  Now, put them together.  You don't need me to tell you what to believe, you're smart enough to find the answer yourself."

Psychologist Todd Kashdan said, "If we are interested in producing a population of critical thinkers armed with courage, resilience, and a love of learning and discovery, then we must recognize, harness, and cultivate curiosity."  But the flipside of that is if you want to produce a population of people who will blindly follow an amoral autocrat, who will swallow every last bit of party-line propaganda from his mouthpieces, then make them incurious, unquestioning, and the unable to sustain uncertainty.

The frightening truth is that the last thing our current elected leaders want is a populace who asks uncomfortable questions, who probe deeper, who tolerate ambiguity, who examine their own biases and those of the people they meet.  No, they want followers who'll wear a gold pin with Donald Trump's face on it.  It's easy to get scared people to fall for hero worship -- and scared people are far more susceptible to bullying by the greedy and power-hungry.  

I get that we live in uncertain times, and as someone who has had a lifelong struggle with anxiety and depression, no one knows better than me how uncertainty can provoke fear.  But I'm asking you to hold that fear in your hands for a while.  Examine it and be curious about it.  Ask it questions.  Find out about your biases -- we've all got them, but they're not dangerous as long as you keep them where you can see them.  This approach may not be as instantly gratifying as having Fox News tell you, "Here's what to think," but in the end, it'll be worth it.

Believe me about this much, at least; in the final tally, a deep understanding is worth the anguish of being in the dark for a while.

Be brave.  I trust you to figure the answers out.

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The unanswerable

Humans are boundlessly curious, and that's a good thing.  Our drive to understand, to cure our ignorance about the world around us, is the engine that powers science.  In my 32-year career as a science teacher, one of the things I strove the hardest to accomplish was to urge my students never to be content to shrug their shoulders and stop trying to understand.

Like most things, though, this curiosity has a downside, and that is when it turns into a desperation to have an answer, any answer, whether it's supported by the evidence or not.  Saying "I don't know, and may never know" is sometimes so profoundly uncomfortable that we settle into whatever explanation sounds superficially appealing -- and forthwith stop thinking about it.

Taking a scientific, skeptical view of things requires not only that you have the drive to understand, but that you can tolerate -- and know the scope of -- the limits of your own knowledge.  As theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler put it, "We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance.  As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance."

What got me thinking about this is a story I ran into on the site Coast to Coast, which specializes in oddball speculation about unexplained phenomena.  The headline was "Mysterious Stone Carving Stumps Archaeologists in England," just the latest in umpteen popular media stories about some new discovery that "has scientists baffled."

To read this stuff, you come away with the impression that scientists do nothing all day but sit around scratching their heads in puzzlement.

In any case, the contents of the story are interesting enough.  A curious stone carving was discovered by some archaeologists investigating a Late Bronze Age site on Nesscliffe Hill, near Shrewsbury.  Without further ado, here's the carving:

Paul Reilly, one of the archaeologists studying the site, said that the carving is "indicative of two different types of technology, grinding and carving...  It appears to depict some kind of figure with the indentation being its head and the various scratches representing two long horns and two small horns, a central body line and two arms, one held up and the other down, the upward one showing a possible hand holding a pipe or a weapon...  Placing it in historical context, however, is another challenge altogether...  The carving has similarities with Late Bronze Age carvings of figures in horned helmets.  The region was once the domain of a Roman tribe known as the Cornovii, a name that has been suggested to reference to the ‘horned ones’.  The figure also could represent a horned deity cult in the Roman army as depicted at several military sites across Britain."

Note how many times Reilly uses words like "appears" and "could be" and "possible" and "suggested."  The fact is -- as he admits up front -- he doesn't know who carved the figure and why.  Dating such finds is a challenge at best, and this one is especially problematic; it was found in loose soil that had been used to backfill a trench from an earlier dig, so it was not in what archaeologists call "a secure context" (i.e., pretty much where it had been placed when its maker set it down millennia ago).

None of this is all that unusual; this kind of thing happens all the time in archaeology, and is in fact way more common than finding an artifact and being able to ascertain exactly when it had been created, by whom, and why.  But what got me thinking about our need to find an answer, any answer, was how Tim Binnall -- who wrote the article about the discovery -- wound up his piece by asking if any of his readers could "solve the mystery of the stone carving," and asked them to submit their answers to him at Coast to Coast.

Now, I know part of this is just an attempt to engage his readers, and there's nothing wrong with that.  I always love it when readers post comments and questions here at Skeptophilia (well, almost always -- I could do without the hate mail).  But immediately I read that, my reaction was, "Why on earth would some random layperson's opinion on the carving have any relevance whatsoever?"  He is, in essence, asking people to form opinions about an artifact for which even the experts have nothing more than speculation.

This is where we cross over into the territory of preferring any answer at all over admitting that we simply don't know, and may never know.

I'm deliberately leaving this in the realm of an obscure archaeological find, because (notwithstanding Binnall's request) few of us are going to get passionately emotional about a carved piece of rock from Bronze Age England.  But I'm sure you can come up with lots of other, more highly charged, examples of this -- questions for which our desire to have answers overrides the fact that we simply don't have enough evidence to conclude anything.  And some of these answers to unanswerable questions are believed with enough fervor that people will die for them -- and there are those who will unhesitatingly kill you if your answer is different from theirs, or worse, if you state outright that you don't know, and in reality, neither do they.

These are not easy issues.  As I said earlier, a lot of it comes from a source that is, at its heart, a positive thing; the drive to know.  But honesty is as important as curiosity, and that includes an honest assessment of what we understand and what we do not.  I'll conclude with a quote from another brilliant physicist, Richard Feynman: "I would far rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned."

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Mushrooms on Mars

So far loyal readers of Skeptophilia have sent me four different links to the same underlying story, along with a message along the lines of "Whaddya think of this?"  The links all take various angles on a paper by Rhawn Gabriel Joseph and Xinli Wei in Advances in Microbiology claiming that photos taken by the Mars rover Curiosity show the presence of live fungi.

Without further ado, here are the photos, which are real enough:

[Photos are in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

When I saw the top photo, my immediate thought was that if you think the only way to explain wiping away stuff and having it reappear is if the stuff is a living organism, you need to come take a look at how long furniture in my house remains clean after being dusted.  I'll admit that I'm kind of housework-impaired, and chances are one day I'll go missing and when people come to investigate they'll find me trapped inside an enormous dust bunny, but still, the fact remains that "dirt blows around" seems to be a universal tendency.  Second, the lower photo looks like a fungus or at least fungus spores, but saying "it looks like X, so it is X" is not how science is done.

The claim has generated a lot of hype and also a lot of backlash from actual science types, such as this scathing piece by Tristan Greene over at TheNextWeb, wherein Joseph and Wei basically get their asses handed to them for leaping to an entirely unwarranted conclusion based on a handful of photographs that can be explained by any number of other, more likely hypotheses.  There are lots of microscopic round things besides fungal spores, so without any sort of biochemical analysis there's no way these can conclusively be labeled as alive, much less as terrestrial-type fungi.

Rhawn Gabriel Joseph, however, is not a man to take this sort of criticism lying down.  Saying Joseph is "combative" is a little like saying Stalin had "anger management issues."  He has sued NASA for ignoring his previous claims about life on Mars, sued Springer (the academic publishing company that publishes the journals Nature and Scientific American) for retracting one of his papers, and on his website defiantly proclaims that he has "published major scientific studies in the fields of neuroscience, development, embryology, evolution, quantum physics, consciousness, genetics, and astrobiology."

Funny, if he's an expert in basically everything, how just about every reference to him in actual scientific journals describe him as a "crank," a "kook," and "a self-aggrandizing spotlight seeker."

Then there's the issue of the journal the paper is published in -- Advances in Microbiology.  AiM is one of the journals owned by SCIRP -- Scientific Research Publishing -- a China-based company long associated with predatory, pay-to-play practices:

[T]here may be some strong and honest articles published in SCIRP journals. However, these articles are devalued and stigmatized by association with all the junk science that SCIRP publishes.  The authors of the good articles are being victimized by the publisher’s policy of publishing pseudoscientific articles like “Basic Principles Underlying Human Physiology.”  SCIRP only rarely retracts articles, preferring instead to protect the interests of its customers, the paying authors.

Oh, and apropos of not much, here's the photo of himself he has on his website:

No, I'm not joking.

The issue here goes back to the ECREE Principle; Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.  Okay, maybe those are Martian fungal spores.  But before you can conclude that, you'd better have some damn good evidence supporting your claim, something more than "we see stuff moving around":

Hundreds of dimpled donut-shaped "mushroom-like" formations approximately 1mm in size are adjacent or attached to these mycelium-like complexes.  Additional sequences document that white amorphous masses beneath rock-shelters increase in mass, number, or disappear and that similar white-fungus-like specimens appeared inside an open rover compartment.  Comparative statistical analysis of a sample of 9 spherical specimens believed to be fungal "puffballs" photographed on Sol 1145 and 12 specimens that emerged from beneath the soil on Sol 1148 confirmed the nine grew significantly closer together as their diameters expanded and some showed evidence of movement.

Look, no one would be more excited than me if the rovers did discover Martian life.  Honestly, it's not that I think microbial life on Mars is all that unlikely.  It's just that you don't support your claims in science by pointing and yelling, "Hey, lookit that!" over and over.  If these are fungal spores, then there are a lot of them, so it's only a matter of time before they'll be detected by the actual rigorous biochemical analysis the rovers are equipped to do.

And I can guarantee that the results will be published in a reputable science journal, not an open-access affair like Advances in Microbiology, and almost certainly the lead author won't be some Disco-Era refugee who claims to be the intellectual equivalent of Stephen Hawking, David Eagleman, Charles Darwin, Carl Sagan, and Gregor Mendel put together.

So, sad to say, that's where the issue stands.  If I'm wrong, I will happily eat crow and publish an update and/or retraction.  I'd like to think the firestorm Joseph has ignited will cause him to retreat in disarray, but his motto seems to be "Death Before Backing Down," so I'm guessing this isn't the last we'll hear from him on the topic.  Stay tuned.

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I have often been amazed and appalled at how the same evidence, the same occurrences, or the same situation can lead two equally-intelligent people to entirely different conclusions.  How often have you heard about people committing similar crimes and getting wildly different sentences, or identical symptoms in two different patients resulting in completely different diagnoses or treatments?

In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, authors Daniel Kahneman (whose wonderful book Thinking, Fast and Slow was a previous Skeptophilia book-of-the-week), Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein analyze the cause of this "noise" in human decision-making, and -- more importantly -- discuss how we can avoid its pitfalls.  Anything we can to to detect and expunge biases is a step in the right direction; even if the majority of us aren't judges or doctors, most of us are voters, and our decisions can make an enormous difference.  Those choices are critical, and it's incumbent upon us all to make them in the most clear-headed, evidence-based fashion we can manage.

Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein have written a book that should be required reading for anyone entering a voting booth -- and should also be a part of every high school curriculum in the world.  Read it.  It'll open your eyes to the obstacles we have to logical clarity, and show you the path to avoiding them.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The cost of regret

"But what would have been the good?"

Aslan said nothing.

"You mean," said Lucy rather faintly, "that it would have turned out all right – somehow?  But how?  Please, Aslan!  Am I not to know?"

"To know what would have happened, child?" said Aslan.  "No.  Nobody is ever told that."

"Oh dear," said Lucy.

"But anyone can find out what will happen," said Aslan.  "If you go back to the others now, and wake them up; and tell them you have seen me again; and that you must all get up at once and follow me – what will happen?  There is only one way of finding out."

This passage, from C. S. Lewis's novel Prince Caspian, has always struck me with particular poignancy, because one of the most consistent themes of my life has been regret at not having made different decisions.  People I dearly wish I had not hurt.  Opportunities I passed up because of my shyness and risk-aversion.  More specific ones, like my (all things considered) terrible decision to live at home while going to college.  My (at the time) barely-acknowledged choice to keep my bisexuality hidden for decades.

It's not, mind you, that I'm unhappy with my life as it is.  I have a wonderful wife, two sons I'm proud of, and spent 32 years in a rewarding career that I discovered quite by accident,  as a consequence of other seemingly unrelated decisions I made.  I have seventeen books in print, something I have dreamed about since elementary school.  I live in a wonderful part of the world, and have had the good fortune to travel and see dozens of other wonderful places.

And I'm aware of the fact that things could have turned out far worse.  Whatever else you can say about the decision, my choice to live at home during college, with conservative, strait-laced parents who kept close tabs on me, kept me out of all sorts of trouble I might otherwise have gotten into.  If I'd come out as bisexual in college, it would have been in around 1980 -- and this was right at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when the disease was still poorly understood, and a diagnosis was tantamount to a death sentence.

There's any number of ways the course of my life could have been deflected into an alternate path, and led me to somewhere very different.  Big decisions -- where to go to college, who to marry, what career to pursue.  Tiny actions with big effects, such as Donna Noble's choice of which direction to turn at an intersection in the mind-blowing Doctor Who episode "Turn Left" -- and of which in my own case I'm almost certainly unaware because looking back, they seem entirely insignificant.  

As I said, I like my life just fine.  Even so, I've never been able to shuck the regret, and more than that the fact that like Lucy Pevensie in Prince Caspian, I'll never know what would have happened had I done otherwise.

The topic comes up because of a fascinating paper in the journal Psychological Science called "The Lure of Counterfactual Curiosity: People Incur a Cost to Experience Regret," by Lily FitzGibbon and Kou Muryama (of the University of Reading), and Asuka Komiya (of Hiroshima University).  They did a risk/choice/reward assessment task with 150 adults, and after the task was completed, the volunteers are allowed to pay for information about how they would have fared had they chosen differently.

It turns out, people are willing to pay a lot, even when they find out that they chose poorly (i.e. they would have had a greater reward had they made a different choice), and even though knowledge of their poor decision causes regret, self-doubt, and worse performance on subsequent tasks.  The authors write:

After one makes a decision, it is common to reflect not only on the outcome that was achieved but also on what might have been.  For example, one might consider whether going to a party would have been more fun than staying home to work on a manuscript.  These counterfactual comparisons can have negative emotional consequences; they can lead to the experience of regret.  In the current study, we examined a commonly observed yet understudied aspect of counterfactual comparisons: the motivational lure of counterfactual information—counterfactual curiosity.  Specifically, we found that people are so strongly seduced to know counterfactual information that they are willing to incur costs for information about how much they could have won, even if the information is likely to trigger negative emotions (regret) and is noninstrumental to obtaining rewards.

Why would people seek out information when they know ahead of time it is likely to make them feel bad?  The authors write:

One explanation for seeking negative information is that people may also find it interesting to test their emotional responses—a mechanism that might also underlie so-called morbid curiosity.  Counterfactual information of the kind sought in the current experiments may be desirable because it has high personal relevance—it relates to decisions that one has made in the recent past.  People’s desire for information about their own performance is known to be strong enough to overcome cognitive biases such as inequality aversion.  Thus, opportunities to learn about oneself and the actual and counterfactual consequences of one’s decisions may have powerful motivational status.

Chances are, if I was able to do what Donna did in "Turn Left" and see the outcome had I chosen differently, I'd find the results for my life's path would be better in some aspects and worse in others.  Like everything, it's a mixed bag.  Given the opportunity to go back in time and actually change something -- well, tempting as it would be, I would be mighty hesitant to take that step and risk everything I currently have and have accomplished.

But still -- I'd like to know.  Even if in some cases, I'd have done far better making a different choice, and then would add the certainty of having made a bad decision on top of the more diffuse regret I already have.  The temptation to find out would be almost irresistible.

Maybe it's better, honestly, that we don't see the long-term consequences of our actions.  Fortunate, to put it in Aslan's words, that "Nobody is ever told that."  It's hard enough living with knowing you fell short or behaved badly; how much worse it would be if we saw that things could have been far better if we'd only chosen differently.

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Just last week, I wrote about the internal voice most of us live with, babbling at us constantly -- sometimes with novel or creative ideas, but most of the time (at least in my experience) with inane nonsense.  The fact that this internal voice is nearly ubiquitous, and what purpose it may serve, is the subject of psychologist Ethan Kross's wonderful book Chatter: The Voice in our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It, released this month and already winning accolades from all over.

Chatter not only analyzes the inner voice in general terms, but looks at specific case studies where the internal chatter brought spectacular insight -- or short-circuited the individual's ability to function entirely.  It's a brilliant analysis of something we all experience, and gives some guidance not only into how to quiet it when it gets out of hand, but to harness it for boosting our creativity and mental agility.

If you're a student of your own inner mental workings, Chatter is a must-read!

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The risk of knowing

One of the hallmarks of the human condition is curiosity.  We spend a lot of our early years learning by exploring, by trial-and-error, so it makes sense that curiosity should be built into our brains.

Still, it comes at a cost.  "Curiosity killed the cat" isn't a cliché for nothing.  The number of deaths in horror movies alone from someone saying, "I hear a noise in that abandoned house, I think I'll go investigate" is staggering.  People will take amazing risks out of nothing but sheer inquisitiveness -- so the gain in knowledge must be worth the cost.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The funny thing is that we'll pay the cost even when what we gain isn't worth anything.  This was demonstrated by a clever experiment described in a paper by Johnny King Lau and Kou Murayama (of the University of Reading (U.K.)), Hiroko Ozono (of Kagoshima University) and Asuka Komiya (of Hiroshima University) that came out two days ago.  Entitled "Shared Striatal Activity in Decisions to Satisfy Curiosity and Hunger at the Risk of Electric Shocks," we hear about a set of experiments showing that humans will risk a painful shock to find out entirely useless information (in this case, how a card trick was performed).  The cleverest part of the experiments, though, is that they told test subjects ahead of time how much of a chance there was of being shocked -- so they had a chance to decide, "how much is this information worth?"

What they found was that even when told that there was a higher than 50% of being shocked, most subjects were still curious enough to take the risk.  The authors write:

Curiosity is often portrayed as a desirable feature of human faculty.  However, curiosity may come at a cost that sometimes puts people in harmful situations.  Here, using a set of behavioural and neuroimaging experiments with stimuli that strongly trigger curiosity (for example, magic tricks), we examine the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying the motivational effect of curiosity.  We consistently demonstrate that across different samples, people are indeed willing to gamble, subjecting themselves to electric shocks to satisfy their curiosity for trivial knowledge that carries no apparent instrumental value.

The researchers added another neat twist -- they used neuroimaging techniques to see what was going on in the curiosity-driven brain, and they found a fascinating overlap with another major driver of human behavior:

[T]his influence of curiosity shares common neural mechanisms with that of hunger for food.  In particular, we show that acceptance (compared to rejection) of curiosity-driven or incentive-driven gambles is accompanied by enhanced activity in the ventral striatum when curiosity or hunger was elicited, which extends into the dorsal striatum when participants made a decision.

So curiosity, then, is -- in nearly a literal sense -- a hunger.  The satisfaction we feel at taking a big bite of our favorite food when we're really hungry causes the same reaction in the brain as having a curiosity satisfied.  And like hunger, we're willing to take significant risks to satisfy our curiosity.  Even if -- to re-reiterate it -- the person in question knows ahead of time that the information they're curious about is technically useless.

I can definitely relate to this.  In me, it mostly takes the form of wasting inordinate amounts of time going down a rabbit hole online because some weird question came my way.  The result is that my brain is completely cluttered up with worthless trivia.  For example, I can tell you the scientific name of the bird you're looking at or why microbursts are common in the American Midwest or the etymology of the word "juggernaut," but went to the grocery store yesterday to buy three things and came back with only two of them.  (And didn't realize I'd forgotten 1/3 of the grocery order until I walked into the kitchen and started putting away what I'd bought.)

Our curiosity is definitely a double-edged sword.  I'm honestly fine with it, because often, knowing something is all the reward I need.  As physicist Richard Feynman put it, "The chief prize (of science) is the pleasure of finding things out."

So I suspect I'd have been one of the folks taking a high risk of getting shocked to see how the card trick was performed.  Don't forget that the corollary to the quote we started with -- "Curiosity killed the cat" -- is "...but satisfaction brought him back."

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In the midst of a pandemic, it's easy to fall into one of two errors -- to lose focus on the other problems we're facing, and to decide it's all hopeless and give up.  Both are dangerous mistakes.  We have a great many issues to deal with besides stemming the spread and impact of COVID-19, but humanity will weather this and the other hurdles we have ahead.  This is no time for pessimism, much less nihilism.

That's one of the main gists in Yuval Noah Harari's recent book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.  He takes a good hard look at some of our biggest concerns -- terrorism, climate change, privacy, homelessness/poverty, even the development of artificial intelligence and how that might impact our lives -- and while he's not such a Pollyanna that he proposes instant solutions for any of them, he looks at how each might be managed, both in terms of combatting the problem itself and changing our own posture toward it.

It's a fascinating book, and worth reading to brace us up against the naysayers who would have you believe it's all hopeless.  While I don't think anyone would call Harari's book a panacea, at least it's the start of a discussion we should be having at all levels, not only in our personal lives, but in the highest offices of government.

Locking yourself into error

I got in a rather interesting -- well, I suppose you could call it a "discussion" -- with a Trump supporter yesterday.

It came about because of recent posts here at Skeptophilia that have been pretty critical of the president, his appointees, and their decisions.  After a few minutes of the usual greetings and pleasantries ("You're a liberal lackey who sucks up what the lying mainstream media says without question!", stuff like that), I asked her what to me is the only pertinent question in such situations:

"What would it take to convince you that you are wrong?"

"I'm not wrong," she said.

"That's not what I asked," I responded.  "I asked what would it take to convince you that you are wrong.  About Donald Trump.  Or about anything."

"What would it take to convince you?" she shot back.

"Facts and evidence that my opinion was in error.  Or at least a good logical argument."

"People like you would never believe it anyway.  You're swallowing the lies from the media.  Thank God Donald Trump was elected despite people like you and your friends in the MSM."

"And you still haven't answered my question."

At that point, she terminated the conversation and blocked me.

Couple that with a second comment from a different person -- one I elected not to respond to, because eventually I do learn not to take the bait -- saying that of course I have a liberal bias "since I get my information from CNN," and you can see that the fan mail just keeps rolling in.

Of course, the question I asked the first individual isn't original to me; it was the single most pivotal moment in the never-to-be-forgotten debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye over the theory of evolution in February of 2014, in which the moderator asked each man what, if anything, would change his mind.  Nye said:

We would need just one piece of evidence.  We would need the fossil that swam from one layer to another.  We would need evidence that the universe is not expanding.  We would need evidence that the stars appear to be far away but are not.  We would need evidence that rock layers could somehow form in just 4,000 years…  We would need evidence that somehow you can reset atomic clocks and keep neutrons from becoming protons.  Bring on any of those things and you would change me immediately.

Ham, on the other hand, gave a long, rambling response that can be summed up as "Nothing would change my mind.  No evidence, no logic, nothing."

The whole thing dovetails perfectly with a paper released just two days ago in the journal Political Psychology.  Entitled "Science Curiosity and Political Psychology," by Dan M. Kahan, Asheley Landrum, Katie Carpenter, Laura Helft, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the paper looks at the connection between scientific curiosity and a willingness to consider information that runs counter to one's own political biases and preconceived notions.  The authors write:

[S]ubjects high in science curiosity display a marked preference for surprising information—that is, information contrary to their expectations about the current state of the best available evidence—even when that evidence disappoints rather than gratifies their political predispositions.  This is in marked contrast, too, to the usual style of information-search associated with [politically-motivated reasoning], in which partisans avoid predisposition-threatening in favor of predisposition-affirming evidence. 

Together these two forms of evidence paint a picture—a flattering one indeed—of individuals of high science curiosity. In this view, individuals who have an appetite to be surprised by scientific information—who find it pleasurable to discover that the world does not work as they expected—do not turn this feature of their personality off when they engage political information but rather indulge it in that setting as well, exposing themselves more readily to information that defies their expectations about facts on contested issues.  The result is that these citizens, unlike their less curious counterparts, react more open-mindedly and respond more uniformly across the political spectrum to the best available evidence.

And maybe that's what's at the heart of all this.  I've always thought that the opposite of curiosity is fear -- those of us who are scientifically curious (and I will engage in a bit of self-congratulation and include myself in this group) tend to be less afraid about being found to be wrong, and more concerned with making sure we have all our facts straight.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So I'll reiterate my question, aimed not only toward Trump supporters, but to everyone: what would it take to convince you that you are wrong?  About your political beliefs, religious beliefs, moral stances, anything?  It's a question we should keep in the forefront of our minds all the time.

Because once you answer that question with a defiant "nothing could convince me," you have effectively locked yourself into whatever errors you may have made, and insulated yourself from facts, logic, evidence -- and the truth.

Bring on the documentaries

I was in my junior year of college when Carl Sagan's Cosmos first aired.  I, and several of my friends, were absolutely riveted.  After each episode we'd eagerly discuss what we'd learned, what amazing stuff about the universe Dr. Sagan had expounded upon.  I was blown away both by the visual artistry (although it looks antiquated today, back in 1980 it was seriously impressive), and by the music, which was and is absolutely stunning.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I also remember, however, the backlash Sagan himself received from other scientists.  He was derided as a "popularizer," scorned as someone who presented pretty pictures and watered down, common-language analogies rather than actual hard science.

I thought this was pretty mean-spirited, but I didn't realize how common that perception was in the scientific world.  Four years later, as a graduate student in oceanography at the University of Washington, I found out that there was really only one pair of words that was considered so vulgar that no one was allowed to utter it: "Jacques Cousteau."  Cousteau was an object of derision, not a "real scientist" at all, just a guy who spoke in a cheesy French accent and liked to get filmed while scuba diving.  In fact, my adviser once told me that he made a point of never accepting a graduate student who mentioned Cousteau's name in their interview.

So this irritation with people who make science accessible to the layperson runs deep, although I have to hope that this is changing, with a few truly first-rate scientists writing books to bring the latest research to the masses (Stephen Hawking, Sean Carroll, Brian Greene, Kip Thorne, Roger Penrose, Lee Smolin, and Lawrence Kraus come to mind).

It's a good thing.  Because to judge from a piece of research published this week in Advances in Political Psychology, there's more to be gained from popularizing science than just encouraging children to pursue science as a career; fostering a fundamental curiosity about nature is essential to eradicating biased thinking across the board.

Called "Science Curiosity and Political Information Processing," the paper, written by Dan Kahan of Yale University et al., looks at how best to move people from leaning on their own preconceived notions to evaluating the strength of claims based on evidence.  The research looked at how watching science documentaries engenders a curiosity about how the world works, and correlates with a lower likelihood of biases in arguments on subjects like anthropogenic climate change.

Kahan spoke with Chris Mooney, science writer over at The Washington Post, and explained what the research by his team had shown.  "It just so happened that, when we looked at the characteristics of [people who watch science documentaries], they seemed to be distinct politically," Kahan said.  "They stood out by being, as a group, less likely to feed the current polarization of political opinion on scientific matters such as climate change.  The data we’ve collected furnish a strong basis for viewing science curiosity as an important individual difference in cognitive style that interacts in a distinctive way with political information processing."

The most fascinating part of the research is that the difference doesn't seem to be related to scientific training, but scientific curiosity.  Having established a scale for measuring curiosity, Kahan et al. looked at both liberals and conservatives and assessed them for biased thinking.  Mooney writes:

Armed with the scientific curiosity scale, Kahan’s new study first demonstrated that while liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans with higher levels of proficiency in scientific thinking (which he calls “ordinary science intelligence”) tend to become more polarized and divided over the scientifically supported risks involved in both climate change and fracking, Democrats and Republicans with higher levels of science curiosity don’t.  Rather, for both groups, the more curious they are, the more their perceptions of the risks tend to increase...  [T]he study also contained an experiment, demonstrating that being possessed of heightened levels of scientific curiosity appeared to make political partisans more likely to read scientific information that went against their predilections.

The final statement is, to me, the most important.  An absolutely critical feature of the scientific view of the world is the ability to continually question one's base assumptions, and to look at the data with a skeptical eye.  And I am not using the word "skeptical" to mean "doubting," the way you hear people talk about "climate change skeptics" (a phrase that makes my skin crawl; no actual skeptic could consider the evidence about climate change questionable).  I am using "skeptical" in its literal sense, which means giving a rigorous look at the data from every angle, considering what it's telling you and examining the meaning of any trends that you happen to observe.  Which, of course, means entertaining the possibility that your prior understanding may be incorrect.  To me, there is no better indication of a truly scientific mind than when someone says, "Well, after examining the evidence, turns out I was wrong about that after all."

So we should be thankful for the popularizers, who follow in a long tradition of work by such greats as Sagan and Richard Feynman.  Children need to have their curiosity about the universe piqued early, and the flames fanned further by watching cool science shows that open their eyes to what a fascinating place we live in.  Think about what it would be like if we had a nation full of people who were committed to looking at the world through the lenses of evidence, logic, and critical thinking instead of prejudice and stubborn adherence to their own biases.

It's a nice possibility to think about, isn't it?

Killing the cat

If there is one feature that is nearly universal to humans, it's curiosity.

I suffer from this myself.  When there's something I don't know -- even if it doesn't concern me -- I become kind of obsessed with finding it out.  It's not because I'm a gossip; in fact, I'm completely trustworthy with secrets (should you ever be tempted to tell me some salacious detail about yourself).  So even though I have no intention of ever doing anything with the knowledge, I still want to know.

Turns out, I'm not alone.  A study published last week in Psychological Science by Bowen Ruan and Christopher Hsee at the University of Chicago has shown that people are driven to find out things -- even when they know ahead of time that what they're trying to find out might well be unpleasant.

[image courtesy of photographer Julián Cantarelli and the Wikimedia Commons]

Ruan and Tsee set up a series of tests in which the outcome might be known to be pleasant (or at least neutral), known to be unpleasant, or could be either.  In one, they had a set of gag "electric pens" that deliver a painful shock when you press the button.  Test subjects were given either red pens (you know you'll get a shock from those), green pens (you know you won't be shocked), or yellow pens (you could either get a shock or not).  They then counted the number of times participants pressed the button.

Yellow pens got clicked twice as often.  (Oddly, the green pens got clicked the least.  I guess that a painful, but interesting, outcome is still preferable to a boring one.)

They repeated the procedure, this time using digital recordings -- one of a pleasant sound (running water), another of an unpleasant one (nails on a chalkboard).  Once again, the people who didn't know which they were going to hear clicked the "play" button the most often.

And yet again -- this time with pleasant natural imagery (a butterfly) and an unpleasant one (a cockroach).  Same results.

Study author Ruan said, "Just as curiosity drove Pandora to open the box despite being warned of its pernicious contents, curiosity can lure humans–like you and me–to seek information with predictably ominous consequences... Curious people do not always perform consequentialist cost-benefit analyses and may be tempted to seek the missing information even when the outcome is expectedly harmful."

What is the most interesting about this study is that Ruan and Hsee asked the participants to rank whether they felt better, worse, or the same after the tests than before.  Across the board, the participants who were presented with uncertainty -- most of whom decided to test that uncertainty even at their own risk -- felt worse afterwards.

This is pretty curious.  We're driven to do things that could be dangerous (or at least unpleasant), and feel worse afterwards, and yet... we still do them.  It seems as if our "let's find out" attitude, so lauded in science as the wellspring of our drive to understand, might have a darker side.

So we might all be Pandora, doing what we do just to see what happens, and only regretting our decisions after the fact.  Curiosity doesn't necessarily kill the cat, at least not every time -- more often, it keeps us curious felines coming back for more.

Alien rock mania

In the last week or so, there's been a sudden rash of claims of discovering alien artifacts on the Moon and Mars.

To which I respond: will you people please get a grip?

It's often hard enough, here on Earth, with the actual item in your hand, to tell the difference between a human-created artifact and an object with entirely non-human origins.  Chance resemblances and oddball natural processes sometimes result in rocks (for example) with strikingly organic-looking appearance.  For example, what do you make of this?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Looks like coral, right?  Or maybe some sort of fossilized plant?  Nope, it's a fulgurite -- a rock that forms when lightning strikes sand.

So chance appearances don't tell you much.  Especially when you are looking at a grainy photograph of the object in question.  And especially when you want very much for there to be something impressive there.

For example, we had a claim a couple of days ago over at the International Business Times that the Mars rover Curiosity had photographed what appears to be a thigh bone.  "None of the National Aeronautic and Space Administration scientists have spoken about it," the article states, with some asperity, "but the news has been going viral."

Well, when you look at the photograph, you'll see why NASA really didn't want to spend their time debunking it:

[image courtesy of NASA]

It's a rock, folks.  Being a biology teacher, I know what a thigh bone looks like, and this ain't one.  It's a rock.

Oh, and to the folks over at the IBT: you do not improve your credibility by following up the story on the Martian thigh bone with the statement, "In the past, there have been claims of noticing objects on the surface of Mars like a dinosaur spine, dinosaurs, mysterious light, a toy boat, an iguana, a cat and a half-human and half-goat face."  Just to point that out.

Then, over at The UFO Chronicles, we had Skeptophilia frequent flier Scott Waring claiming that what is almost certainly a digital imaging glitch was "clearly an alien base on the Moon."    Here's the image:

According to Waring, you can see all sorts of things in this, like a wall and the entrance to an underground facility.  Me, all I see is a black blob.  Not the first time that imaging glitches have caused a furor; remember when a glitch in a NASA photograph of the Sun caused all the conspiracy-types to claim that the Earth was about to be attacked by the Borg cube?

Then just this morning, we had another report from Mars over at UFO Sightings Daily that there's an outline of a wolf on the Martian surface.  Here's that one, which made me choke-snort a mouthful of coffee:

Helpfully colored in so that you can see it.  Sad for Mr. Wolf, however -- he seems to be missing one of his hind legs.  Maybe with the lower gravity, you can get by with three.

So anyway.  I really wish people would stop leaping about making little squeaking noises every time one of the lunar or planetary explorers stumbles on something that has a vague similarity to a familiar object.  Aren't there enough cool real things out there in space to think about?  You have to invent Moon bases, thigh bones, and three-legged Martian wolves?

I'm sticking with the science.  That's always been plenty awesome enough, as far as I'm concerned.

Rabbits in space

A few days ago I made a statement that believing in the various end-of-the-world predictions was about as foolish as thinking that we're in danger of being attacked by Giant Space Bunnies.  So imagine my surprise when the following photograph came in from the Mars rover Curiosity:

I wasn't the only one who had that reaction; the woo-woo websites were lighting up like Christmas trees with posts speculating that extraterrestrial life had been found at last, and that we were looking at a Martian Space Bunny.  "Of course," one of the sites hinted darkly, "pretty quick the scientists will cook up a 'scientific explanation' of the whole thing and sweep it under the rug.  No way will they admit that they've discovered life on Mars."

Because, you know, scientists just loathe new, groundbreaking discoveries.  The whole purpose of the Mars rover was to confirm how boring and ordinary Mars is.  It'd really suck if they discovered anything interesting up there, something worth studying.  Scientists hate that.

But even so, I had to admit that the likelihood of it actually being a bunny was pretty small.  Whatever any possible Martian life might look like, it's unlikely to resemble our terrestrial forms.  So I figured, like our abovementioned conspiracy theorist, that the Space Bunny would be explained in short order, and wasn't going to turn out to be Bugs' distant cousin.

And sure enough.  As described in an article in the website of the National Paranormal Association (and despite their name, they're pretty careful to maintain a skeptical outlook on things), the scientists noticed some odd things about the Martian Bunny.  The first was that despite the fact that the air on Mars is extremely thin, and the wind was fairly calm that day, the Bunny was moving gradually across the ground.  In the time they observed it, it moved five or six meters, without leaving a mark on the ground.  "There's no evidence of a mark that it left in the soil as it moved," Jeff Johnson, a member of the camera team, stated.  "It was light enough and small enough to not leave any ‘footprints'."

Curious, however, the rover team posted a "bunny watch" to keep an eye on the object; and it was Johnson who finally came up with a consistent, plausible explanation.  He examined the spectrum of light reflected from the object's surface, and found that it matched exactly the spectrum of light reflected from the material that composed the rover's airbag, that was deployed as it descended toward the surface.  So it seems like what we have here is of decidedly terrestrial origin -- a vaguely bunny-shaped scrap of airbag material.

So, there you are.  The search continues.  But I'm very impressed at how this was solved -- using science, logic, and skepticism.  The caution that the Curiosity team showed, in not leaping to the conclusion that this object was what it looked like, is what separates science from woo-woo.  And it's why, given the choice, I trust the scientists.  They're generally pretty good at telling fact from fiction, and airbag cloth from a Martian Space Bunny.

The Mars rover's cleaning crew

A few days ago, I posted about the contention that the NASA rover Curiosity had discovered life on Mars, in the form of a couple of UFOs and a Martian groundhog.  Today, we have the contention that the Mars lander was actually a (covertly) manned spacecraft.

What is the proof, you might ask?  It's a photograph, to wit:

What we are looking at, claims an article over at UFO Blogger entitled, "Who is Cleaning the NASA Mars Rover Curiosity?", is a man in a space suit leaning over and applying Windex to the camera lens.

Amongst the many problems with this conjecture is that if NASA was smart enough to be able to send a human crew along with Curiosity, lo under our very noses, then presumably they would be smart enough not to post photographs publicly showing the shadow of one of said crew.  Especially given that supposedly they're doing this with evil intent.  Notwithstanding that argument, the poster over at UFO Blogger says if we don't buy the manned-mission hypothesis, we can only come to one other possible reasonable conclusion -- that the Mars landing was a fake, and the rover is currently sending back photographs from the Atacama Desert (and the article conveniently has some photographs of the Atacama Desert for comparison).  Way at the end the writer admits that it could be a "shadow illusion," but you get the impression that (s)he doesn't think that's likely at all. 

And neither do the people who posted the comments section.  A couple of samples will suffice:

"Why would they pull such a scam? This government truly sucks. Not even surprised by anything anymore."

"You know guys... its becoming clear to me that NASA is doing this purposely for the 'conspiracy crowd'. they know we're not buying it yet they still have us distracted, our attention diverted, from whats really important as we waste our time and mental energy on their BS. we need to totally ignore NASA at this point."


Yup.  Those doggone attention hogs down at NASA are never satisfied unless we're watching them.

Of course, the other problem with this whole idiotic contention is that it's remarkably difficult to determine what an object looks like from its shadow.  If you think I'm exaggerating, take a look at this amazing shadow art by Sue Webster and Tim Noble, in which mounds of trash illuminated with light from a particular angle create shadows that look like people, a pair of rats having sex, two severed heads on spikes, and a variety of other things.  Add a bit of pareidolia into the mix -- the tendency of people to see human forms in random shapes -- and you've got an explanation for the shadow in the Mars photograph that doesn't require you to believe that NASA is either duping us all by sending the rover to Chile, or else sneakily including a human crew on the mission for their own nefarious purposes.

So anyhow, that's pretty much that, as far as I can see.  The rover will have to manage without any space-suited humans cleaning the camera lens, and the woo-woos will have to find another ridiculous conjecture to blather on about.  The latter might actually be a forlorn hope, because as we've seen before, once woo-woos catch hold of an idea, they hold on like grim death despite the most cogent argument to the contrary.  But at least the rest of us can go back to enjoying the photographs from Curiosity for what they are -- amazing images of our strange and uninhabited neighbor world.

Curiosity finds a shoe, a finger, and various aliens

It was only a matter of time.

Ever since NASA's roving Mars explorer Curiosity sent its first photographs back to Earth, I've been waiting for some wingnut to use one of them to "prove" something -- that aliens live there, that a superintelligent race had visited there before, or possibly that the US has had a working base there for thirty years, and President Obama visited there when he was a teenager. 

Enter the British YouTube aficionado who goes by the handle StephenHannardADGUK.  (I'm assuming his actual name is Stephen Hannard, which seems likely, so I'll refer to him by that name for the remainder of my post, and my apologies if this is incorrect.)  Hannard has analyzed the Curiosity photographs, examining them down to the last detail, and even applying various filters to them to see if anything is hiding, up there on the dusty Martian surface.  And lo, seek and ye shall find!  Hannard discovered:

An alien poking his head out of a burrow!

UFOs!

A fossilized human finger!

 A shoe!

What is NASA saying about these photographs?  Predictably, they deny that anything weird is going on.  The "UFOs" are dead pixels in the camera's imager, which have lost function and therefore create a white dot on the image that was accentuated by Hannard's use of filters.  As for the grinning alien, the fossilized finger, and the shoe, those are... rocks.  Just plain old Martian rocks.

Hannard and others, however, beg to differ.  After telling us what we're looking at, Hannard concludes with, "What are these objects?... as always, you decide."  In other words, you're free to disagree, as long as you don't mind being a Credulous Fool Who Believes Everything NASA Says.  Of course that's what NASA spokespeople would say.  They're paid to cover stuff up, especially the top-secret covert stuff that's been going on out there on Mars.

Um, yeah.  That's why they've (1) sent a roving robot up there to take photographs of everything it can, (2) had it beam those photographs back to Earth, and (3) made those photographs public.  So if NASA is acting as a covert-operations unit, it might want to rewrite its protocol manual, because right at the moment its methods of maintaining secrecy kind of suck.

Also, if these really are evidence of the presence of aliens (or humans, for that matter) on Mars, I'd really appreciate it if they'd do a better job of cleaning up after themselves and not leave shoes and severed fingers all over the place.  The Earth has gotten mucked up enough with litter and pollution, let's not start doing the same to Mars, okay?

Anyhow, that's the news from the world of Ridiculous Outer Space Alien Conspiracies.  As usual, I'm pretty certain that my missive from the world of rationality won't convince anyone who isn't already convinced, but I feel compelled to post it anyway.  Just call me a Missionary of Skepticism, proclaiming my message to anyone who will listen, lo, even unto the Grinning Alien Groundhogs of Mars.