The ECREE principle and the lost polar pyramids

I'm often asked why I am so confident in my disbelief of all of the ideas I lump together as "woo-woo" -- ghosts, psychics, Bigfoot, UFOs, conspiracy theories, crystals, homeopathy, and so on.

That question contains two misleading words: "confident" and "disbelief."  As I've mentioned before, in the absence of evidence either way, I'm anything but confident.  If there is no particular scientific reason that something is impossible -- for example, as in the case of Bigfoot -- I am perfectly willing to sit there not knowing whether it's real, forever if need be.  I might doubt a particular sighting of Bigfoot, based upon the circumstances, but I am in no way saying the the whole phenomenon is impossible.  As a scientist, any level of confidence in the complete absence of evidence is an absurd stance.   I neither believe nor disbelieve in Bigfoot; it is, at this point, a possible, but unproven, assertion, and I am content to leave it that way indefinitely until such time as hard evidence is uncovered.

On the other hand, there are cases in which I lean toward disbelief because the claim is so outrageous (although again, perhaps not scientifically impossible) that my sense is that the burden of proof is on the person making the claim, not on me to disprove it.  Here, the ECREE Principle comes into play -- Carl Sagan's dictum that Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.  Yes, I know this isn't some kind of scientific law, it's only a rule of thumb, but taken as such, it works pretty damn well, keeping us from demanding the same level of evidence for every claim regardless of its plausibility.

Which brings us to the Lost Polar Pyramids.

Any time I hear someone mention the word "pyramid," my skepti-senses are automatically activated, because so much patent nonsense has been claimed about them.   You have your Pyramids-As-Energy-Collectors crew, not to mention your Egyptian-Pyramids-Were-Built-By-Aliens crew and your Curse-Of-The-Pyramids crew, all vying for the craziest phenomenon to attribute to what honestly are just piles of rocks, albeit very impressive ones.   And now, we have the claim that human-constructed pyramids have been discovered in Alaska and Antarctica.

If you read the articles in question, you'll find that mostly what the writers do is to show you some photographs and say, "Wow!  Isn't this weird!  Pyramids in the polar regions!  They have to be artificial constructs."  In the case of the Alaska article, we have testimony from a retired intelligence officer named Douglas Mutschler that he and others detected an "underground pyramid" while monitoring the seismic waves from a Chinese nuclear detonation.  The author supports this claim with an aerial shot showing something with a vaguely squarish contour that is so hard to see that in the article, you have to be told where in the photograph to look.  In the Antarctic article, all we're given is some photographs with pointy-topped rocky structures, and we're told they're manmade pyramids.

(Let's for the moment ignore the fact that the Alaska article also goes into something the author refers to, with unintentional comic effect, as the "Alaska Bermuda Triangle," a region bounded by Juneau, Anchorage, and Barrow where allegedly planes tend to disappear.  This is a whole different argument, involving a whole different set of assumptions and implausibilities -- so we'll concentrate for the time being simply on the "human-constructed pyramids in the polar regions" claim.)

Ob Hill and McMurdo Station, Ross Island, Antarctica [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Alan Light, Ob Hill and McMurdo Station, CC BY 2.0]

So, back to the ECREE principle.  Is the idea of a set of manmade pyramids in Alaska and the Antarctic an "extraordinary claim?"  Given the small population of Alaska, and the absence of an archaeological record of large-scale building there, not to mention the nonexistence of a human population in Antarctica until the mid-20th century, I'd say we have here a pretty outlandish idea.  Is it impossible?  Maybe not.  But a fuzzy aerial shot, the twenty-year-old testimonial of one man, and some random pictures of pointy mountaintops are just not sufficient grounds for accepting that there's something weird going on.  As I've pointed out before, there are many examples of purely natural geological formations that have straight lines, right angles, polygonal cross-sections, and so on.  If you want me to believe that what I'm looking at is some mysterious artifact of a mysterious culture, built in an entirely unexpected place, what we currently have has not met any sort of minimum standard for evidence.   You'd better head on back to your alleged pyramids and bring us back something better if you want the scientific world to sit up and take notice.

But of course, in the case of the Antarctic pyramids, there's a good reason that we might not want to know if they exist, because you H. P. Lovecraft fans probably recall what happened when scientists found an ancient city in Antarctica in "At the Mountains of Madness."  Of the two people who survived, one ended up in an insane asylum because of the horrors he'd seen.  The rest of the team variously got dissected, had their heads bashed in, or got eaten by Shoggoths.  And heaven knows, we wouldn't want that to happen.

But I digress.

In any case, what we have here is an excellent example of why I find most woo-woo claims lacking.   It is not, as I mentioned, because I don't think that there are weird things in the world; it's that if you bring a weird thing to my attention, you'd better have a pretty convincing argument to back you up.   Otherwise, like our Alaskan and Antarctic pyramid hunters, your story will just get filed in the folder labeled "Maybe, But I Doubt It."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker.  This book is, in my opinion, the most lucid and readable exposition of the evolutionary model ever written, and along the way takes down the arguments for Intelligent Design a piece at a time.  I realize Dawkins is a controversial figure, given his no-quarter-given approach to religious claims, but even if you don't accept the scientific model yourself, you owe it to yourself to see what the evolutionary biologists are actually saying.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The ECREE Principle and the Lost Polar Pyramids

I'm often asked why I am so confident in my disbelief of all of the ideas I lump together as "woo-woo" -- ghosts, psychics, Bigfoot, UFOs, conspiracy theories, crystals, homeopathy, and so on.

That question contains two misleading words: "confident" and "disbelief."  As I've mentioned before, in the absence of evidence either way, I'm anything but confident.  If there is no particular scientific reason that something is impossible -- for example, as in the case of Bigfoot -- I am perfectly willing to sit there not knowing whether it's real, forever if need be.  I might doubt a particular sighting of Bigfoot, based upon the circumstances, but I am in no way saying the the whole phenomenon is impossible.  As a scientist, any level of confidence in the complete absence of evidence is an absurd stance.  I neither believe nor disbelieve in Bigfoot; it is, at this point, a possible, but unproven, assertion, and I am content to leave it that way indefinitely until such time as hard evidence is uncovered.

On the other hand, there are cases in which I lean toward disbelief because the claim is so outrageous (although again, not scientifically impossible) that my sense is that the burden of proof is on the person making the claim, not on me to disprove it.  Here, the ECREE Principle comes into play -- Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.  Yes, I know this isn't some kind of scientific law, it's only a rule of thumb, but taken as such, it works pretty damn well, keeping us from demanding the same level of evidence for every claim regardless of its plausibility.

Which brings us to the Lost Polar Pyramids.

Any time I hear someone mention the word "pyramid," my skepti-senses are automatically activated, because so much patent nonsense has been claimed about them.  You have your Pyramids-As-Energy-Collectors crew, not to mention your Egyptian-Pyramids-Were-Built-By-Aliens crew and your Curse-Of-The-Pyramids crew, all vying for the craziest phenomenon to attribute to what honestly are just piles of rocks, albeit very impressive ones.  And now, we have the claim that human-constructed pyramids have been discovered in Alaska (Source) and Antarctica (Source).

If you read the articles in question, you'll find that mostly what the writers do is to show you some photographs and say, "Wow!  Isn't this weird!  Pyramids in the polar regions!  They have to be artificial constructs."  In the case of the Alaska article, we have testimony from a retired intelligence officer named Douglas Mutschler that he and others detected an "underground pyramid" while monitoring the seismic waves from a Chinese nuclear detonation.  The author supports this claim with an aerial shot showing something with a vaguely squarish contour that is so hard to see that in the article, you have to be told where in the photograph to look.  In the Antarctic article, all we're given is some photographs with pointy-topped rocky structures, and we're told they're manmade pyramids.

(Let's for the moment ignore the fact that the Alaska article also goes into something the author refers to, with unintentional comic effect, as the "Alaska Bermuda Triangle," a region bounded by Juneau, Anchorage, and Barrow where allegedly planes tend to disappear.  This is a whole different argument, involving a whole different set of assumptions and implausibilities -- so we'll concentrate for the time being simply on the "human-constructed pyramids in the polar regions" claim.)

So, back to the ECREE principle.  Is the idea of a set of manmade pyramids in Alaska and the Antarctic an "extraordinary claim?"  Given the small population of Alaska, and the absence of an archaeological record of large-scale building there, not to mention the nonexistence of a human population in Antarctica, I'd say we have here a pretty outlandish idea.  Is it impossible?  No.  But a fuzzy aerial shot, the twenty-year-old testimonial of one man, and some random pictures of pointy mountaintops, are just not sufficient grounds for accepting that there's something weird going on.  As I've pointed out before, there are many examples of purely natural geological formations that have straight lines, right angles, polygonal cross-sections, and so on.  If you want me to believe that what I'm looking at is some mysterious artifact of a mysterious culture, built in an entirely unexpected place, what we currently have has not met any sort of minimum standard for evidence.  You'd better head on back to your alleged pyramids and bring us back something better if you want the scientific world to sit up and take notice.

But of course, in the case of the Antarctic pyramids, there's a good reason that we might not want to know if they exist, because you H. P. Lovecraft fans probably recall what happened when scientists found an ancient city in Antarctica in "At the Mountains of Madness."  Of the two people who survived, one ended up in an insane asylum because of the horrors he'd seen; the rest of the team variously got dissected, had their heads bashed in, or got eaten by Shoggoths.  And heaven knows, we wouldn't want that to happen.

But I digress.

In any case, what we have here is an excellent example of why I find most woo-woo claims lacking.  It is not, as I mentioned, because I don't think that there are weird things in the world; it's that if you bring a weird thing to my attention, you'd better have a pretty convincing argument to back you up.  Otherwise, like our Alaskan and Antarctic pyramid hunters, your story will just get filed in the folder labeled "Maybe, But I Doubt It."

Erich Kuersten, Penn Yan, and the quality of evidence

A recent post by noted wingnut Erich Kuersten, "The Zealots of Doubt: Why Skeptics Are The New Cranks" made me feel like I had to clear up a few things.

Kuersten's screed levies a charge at people of my general outlook, one that I've heard many times:

...skepticism no longer means curious or open to new input and has instead become the refuge of the bitter and attention-seeking...  A true skeptic is not swayed either by science or religion or firsthand experience, they are not suckers but neither are they fundamentalist zealots, BUT when you deny any evidence, even if it's just firsthand accounts, because it doesn't fit your paradigm, then you are not a skeptic, you are exactly what you're seeking to expose, a religious nut, only for science instead of God. You're an anti-zealotry zealot.

He gives a few examples of what we skeptics would disbelieve in, if we were just honest and consistent with our approach:

They claim they'll believe in aliens when they can meet one in person, yet the believe in George Washington based purely on anecdotal evidence, at best, firsthand witness reports filtered down through the ages, some sketchy portraits. And if they haven't been to Morocco, how do they even find the courage to trust it's there?

So like I said, I'd heard this sort of thing before, although never from this source.  Kuersten usually spends more of his time demonstrating evidence of his curiosity and openness to new input by claiming that Bigfoots are actually telepathic proto-hominids who were slaves to the ruling aliens prior to the Great Flood of Noah.  (See my post on his ideas here.)  So I'm perhaps to be forgiven for entertaining some doubts about his reliability right from the get-go.

Let's look past that, however, and (as befits a true skeptic) look at his criticisms honestly, with no consideration of what else he's claimed.  Is he right?  Does my general disbelief in ghosts and ESP and the Loch Ness Monster mean that, if I was to apply the same principles to everything, I would also disbelieve in Morocco and George Washington?  Am I, in his words, an anti-zealotry zealot?

Well, predictably, I don't think so, and the reason has to do with quality of evidence.

Let me give you an example.

There's a town in New York called Penn Yan.  Penn Yan isn't very far from where I live, but as it so happens, I've never been to Penn Yan.  I hear it's a nice place, from friends who've visited.  I've seen photographs, and it's in my road atlas, and also on Google Maps, MapQuest, and so on.  Now, let's consider two rival hypotheses:

1)  Penn Yan exists, as advertised.
2)  Penn Yan is a giant hoax designed to hoodwink credulous travelers.

I do not have direct, first-hand evidence for either of these.  Which of these hypotheses, however, would (if true) force the greatest revision of our current understanding of how the world works?  Clearly, if hypothesis #2 is correct, and Penn Yan does not exist, it leaves unanswered several questions, to wit:

What is actually in the place where I had previously assumed Penn Yan was?  A giant hole?
What earthly motive do all of the people who created the Great Penn Yan Hoax have for doing this?
How do you explain all of the photographs, maps, and other "artifacts" that attest to Penn Yan's existence?

It doesn't take much of a stretch to see that that we need a vastly higher quality of evidence to accept hypothesis #2 than we do to accept hypothesis #1.

Kuersten's problem is that he seems to think that skepticism (if only we would be fair about the whole thing) should start out as a blank slate, when in fact the skeptical, rational approach has already given us a rock-solid framework within which to understand the world.  This framework is called science.  We already know a great deal about physics, biology, and chemistry -- so when a psychic claims to be able to bend spoons with his mind, scientists aren't going to begin from the standpoint that this is as likely to be true as not.  We have a fine understanding of forces and energy; we also have a good (although less complete) grasp of how the human brain works.  Neither of these is sufficient to explain how someone could perform telekinesis.  Therefore, if you claim that you can perform mental spoon-bending, you'd better have a far higher quality of evidence than my null-hypothesis ("you're not doing any such thing") would require.  (This concept is at the heart of both Ockham's Razor and the ECREE principle, two models of critical thinking that serve as excellent rules of thumb.)

Kuersten wants to throw every idea -- however counter it is to our current understanding -- into the same pot:

Science admits it's barely begun to explore the 'other' 90% of the brain, all while ridiculing any conjecture about what the unknown 90% may consist of. Telepathy is ridiculous (why? They can't be bothered to ask their superiors for fear of being branded a kook); science admits they've catalogued less than 20% of all the creatures that exist in the ocean, but sea serpents are ridiculous.

Well, first, I'm not sure what "other 90% of the brain" he's talking about, but even allowing that he's speaking metaphorically, all he's doing here is relying on a logical fallacy called "the argument from ignorance."  "We don't know what is out there in deep space, so it could be aliens: therefore aliens exist."  "We don't know if there is an afterlife: therefore ghosts exist."  The problem with all of these claims is that skeptics need something more than the argument from ignorance, especially given that most of the claims of woo-woos like Kuersten fly in the face of one or more established, tested scientific principles.

But nevertheless: could I (and other skeptics like me) be wrong?  Of course.  As I've said over and over in this blog, I will happily revise my views on any or all of the ideas that I've poked fun at over the years.  All I need is solid evidence.  You think sea-serpents exist?  Show me a bone that we can DNA test.  You think telepathy exists?  Prove it in a controlled study.  I'm not going to say that your views are impossible, but thus far, the quality of evidence is insufficient to support them.  And in view of that, the accepted paradigm is a great deal more likely to be true.  And I'd be willing to wager my next month's salary that if I were to get on Highway 14 and head west, Penn Yan would be right there, where the map said it was.

Cloaked Romulan spacecraft and the strength of Ockham's Razor

It is an inevitable danger of being a self-styled rationalist skeptic that I may not recognize credible evidence for something bizarre when I see it, because I'd already be looking for ways to dismiss it before the dust even settled.

It's a charge that's been levied at me with some regularity.  You don't believe in ghosts, eh?  All of the photographs, videos, and eyewitness accounts are just natural anomalies and human senses being fooled?  You wouldn't accept a ghost as real if one bit you on the ass.  How about Bigfoot?  All of the accounts of Bigfoot are fakes?  Seriously?  And the psychics... just because some psychics have turned out to be frauds, you have decided that all of them are?

"Skeptic?  Pfft.  You're just as stuck in your own worldview as the rest of us."

I have to admit that these comments do give me some pause, every time I receive one.  I lean pretty hard on the ECREE principle -- Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.  But what, then, constitutes "extraordinary" evidence?  Suppose something really, truly paranormal was going on -- would I even recognize it as such?

Take, for example, the claim that's been all over the news -- that NASA released a photo of the planet Mercury that contained the faint image of a giant cloaked spaceship.  (You can read an article about this, and see images, here.)  The individual who found the image, a YouTube poster with the handle "siniXster," states that NASA's STEREO imaging satellite took a photograph of a coronal mass ejection, and that the particles emitted by the CME washed over Mercury -- catching in its wake an object of equal size that was hovering, invisible, nearby.  This disrupted the CME and rendered the object temporarily visible.

"It's cylindrical on either side and has a shape in the middle. It definitely looks like a ship to me, and very obviously, it's cloaked," siniXster said in his YouTube video about the image.

Okay.  All Star Trek references aside, my first reaction was, "An invisible spaceship as big as a planet?  Really?"  But then I thought, "Well, I've always said that it was entirely possible that there was life out there in the universe... what if there was a superpowerful alien species, with a giant ship, out near Mercury watching us, and they'd rendered their ship invisible to us using some advanced technology.  Might I just be overdoing the rationalist skeptic thing, and missing something amazing?"

Well, that possibility does exist, and I'd be a pretty poor skeptic if I didn't realize that my perceptual apparatus and brain are just as flawed as the next guy's, and my capacity for such inherent problems with inference as dart-thrower's bias is just as great.  How, then, do I decide for sure if they've stumbled upon something earthshattering?

Besides ECREE, a rule of thumb I tend to trust more often than not is Ockham's Razor; that all other things being equal, the explanation that requires you to make the least ad hoc assumptions is probably the correct one.  In this case, is there a simpler explanation that addresses all of the evidence?

Unfortunately for siniXster and others who think that we're being monitored by the Romulans, the answer is yes.  Russ Howard, head researcher in solar physics at the Naval Research Laboratory provided a nice little explanation of the photograph.  The Mercury-sized object hovering in Mercury's orbit isn't a cloaked spacecraft, Howard says.  Actually... it's Mercury:

To make the relatively faint glow of a coronal mass ejection stand out against the bright glare of space—caused by interplanetary dust and the stellar/galactic background—the NRL scientists must remove as much background light as possible.  They explained that they determine what light is background light, and thus can be subtracted out, by calculating the average amount of light that entered each camera pixel on the day of the CME event and on the previous day.  Light appearing in the pixels on both days is considered to be background light and is removed from the footage of the CME.  The remaining light is then enhanced.  When [this averaging process] is done between the previous day and the current day and there is a feature like a planet, this introduces dark (negative) artifacts in the background where the planet was on the previous day, which then show up as bright areas in the enhanced image.

But... how do I know that this is right?  Am I just trying to be superskeptic here, and leaping at the Official Explanation because it means I don't have to revise my worldview?

Answering that question as honestly as I know how, I think I still have to say "no."  Being a skeptic doesn't mean that you reject paranormal explanations out of hand just because they're paranormal; but it does mean that you have to evaluate the evidence as best you can, and accept the best explanation that's out there on the market.  My frequent critics notwithstanding, I do think I'm open-minded enough that I wouldn't be blind to evidence of something weird should it eventually happen along.  I just don't think that this is it.  Ockham's Razor is a statement about how the universe behaves, and how we can come to understand it; and in my experience, it works pretty damn well, even if it does preclude a huge cloaked Romulan spaceship, which honestly would be kind of cool if it were true.

Ockham's Razor is not a law, however; convoluted and wildly improbable events do occur, and it may well be that there are phenomena out there that lie outside the purview of our conventional scientific explanations.  If this is true, I would love to experience some of them first hand, and I hope that I would be accepting of their veracity despite my preconceived conviction that they don't exist.  Perhaps Mark Twain was right when he said, "The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to be believable."