The dangers of pseudoarchaeology

One of my ongoing peeves is that so many people put more faith in popular media claims than in what the scientists themselves are saying.

This can take many forms.  We have the straw-man approach, usually done with some agenda in mind, where someone will completely mischaracterize the science in order to convince people of a particular claim, and for some reason said people never think to find out what the scientists actually have to say on the matter.  (One example that especially sets my teeth on edge is the young-Earth creationists who say that the Big Bang model means "nothing exploded and created everything" and forthwith dismiss it as nonsense.)

An even more common form this takes is the current passion many people have for shows like Monster Quest and Ancient Aliens and Ghost Hunters, which aim to convince viewers that there is strong evidence for claims when there is actually little or none at all.  This kind of thing is remarkably hard to fight; when you have a charismatic figure who is trying to convince you that the Norse gods were actually superpowerful extraterrestrial visitors, and supporting that claim with evidence that is cherry-picked at best and entirely fabricated at worst, non-scientists can be suckered remarkably easily.

But "hard to fight" doesn't mean "give up," at least to archaeologist David Anderson of Radford University (Virginia).  Because he has absolutely had it with goofy claims that misrepresent the actual evidence, and is publicly calling out the people who do it.

Anderson's quest started in February, when a claim was made on The Joe Rogan Experience that a famous piece of Mayan art, from the sarcophagus of Mayan King K’inich Janaab’ Pakal, who died in 683 C.E., showed him ascending into the skies in a spaceship:

It's one of the favorite pieces of evidence from the "Ancient Aliens" crowd.  But the problem is, it's wrong -- not only from the standpoint that there almost certainly were no "Ancient Aliens."  They evidently never bothered to ask an actual expert in Mayan archaeology, because that's not even what the art is trying to depict. Anderson was infuriated enough that he responded to Rogan in a tweet: "Dear @joerogan… [the piece of Mayan art you mentioned] depicts [Pakal] falling into the underworld at the moment of his death."  The "rocket" beneath the king's body, Anderson explains, is a depiction of the underworld, and the rest of the "spaceship" is a "world tree" -- a common image in Mayan art, not to mention art from other cultures.

Rogan, to his credit, thanked Anderson for the correction, but some of his fans weren't so thrilled, and railed against Anderson as being a "mainstream archaeologist" (because that's bad, apparently) who was actively trying to suppress the truth about ancient aliens for some reason.  Anderson, for his part, is adamant that archaeologists and other scientists need to be better at calling out pseudoscience and the people who are promoting it.  He cites a study done at Chapman University (California) showing that 57% of Americans polled in 2018 believe in Atlantis (up from 40% in 2016) and 41% believe that aliens visited the Earth in antiquity and made contact with early human civilizations (up from 27%).

Anderson says, and I agree, that this is a serious problem, not only because of how high the raw numbers are, but because of the trend.  I know it's not really a scientist's job to make sure the public understands his/her research, but given the amount of bullshit out there (not to mention the general anti-science bent of the current administration), it's increasingly important.

You may wonder why I'm so passionate about this, and be thinking, "Okay, I see the problem with people doubting climate science, but what's the harm of people believing in ancient aliens?  It's harmless."  Which is true, up to a point.  But the problem is, once you've decided that evidence -- and the amount and quality thereof -- is no longer the sine qua non for support of a claim, you've gone onto some seriously thin ice.  Taking a leap into pseudoscience in one realm makes it all that much easier to jump into other unsupported craziness.  Consider, for example, the study that came out of the University of Queensland that found a strong correlation between being an anti-vaxxer and accepting conspiracy theories such as the ones surrounding the JFK assassination.

So learning some science and critical thinking are insulation against being suckered by counterfactual nonsense of all kinds.  Which is why yes, I do care that people are making false claims about a piece of Mayan artwork... and so should you.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one; Atlas Obscura by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton.  The book is based upon a website of the same name that looks at curious, beautiful, bizarre, frightening, or fascinating places in the world -- the sorts of off-the-beaten-path destinations that you might pass by without ever knowing they exist.  (Recent entries are an astronomical observatory in Zweibrücken, Germany that has been painted to look like R2-D2; the town of Story, Indiana that is for sale for a cool $3.8 million; and the Michelin-rated kitchen run by Lewis Georgiades -- at the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera Research Station, which only gets a food delivery once a year.)

This book collects the best of the Atlas Obscura sites, organizes them by continent, and tells you about their history.  It's a must-read for anyone who likes to travel -- preferably before you plan your next vacation.

(If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!)

Straw man induction

There's a general rule of debate, and it goes something like this: you don't score any points by picking out some absurdly weak line of reasoning, characterizing your opponents as holding that view, arguing against it, and claiming victory.

This is called the straw-man fallacy, and is all too common.  It's why we have conservatives arguing that all liberals want to give away America to illegal immigrants, lock, stock, and barrel.  It's why we have liberals arguing that all conservatives want to sell us out to big corporations, and along the way, deny rights to everyone but white Christian males.

The truth, of course, is more nuanced than that on both sides, but this requires (1) thought, and (2) an admission that your opponents' views, when represented fairly, are worthy at least of intelligent consideration.  And that seems to be beyond a lot of people these days.

To take two examples of this -- one from each side of the aisle, to demonstrate that straw man arguments are no respecter of political leanings -- let's take a look at two different views of yesterday's eclipse.  Neither, I hasten to state, appears to be a parody, although you'd certainly be justified in thinking they might be.

First, we have a group called "Kentuckians for Coal," who actually protested the eclipse, claiming that even freakin' astronomical objects were conspiring to take attention away from the plight of coal miners.  The protest took place in Hopkinsville, which was along the path of totality, something that struck the Kentuckians for Coal as not being a coincidence.

Here's their mission statement:

Kentuckians for Coal is an ad-hoc coalition of miners, union officials, family members and coal users created to defend the Kentucky coal industry against encroachment from renewable energy industries and from economic development initiatives aimed at lessening America's dependence on coal.  Kentuckians for Coal stands against the eclipse and those who worship it.

Well, I think the eclipse is pretty cool, but "worship" goes a bit far.  And it's hard to see how you could be against clean, renewable energy.  I get that we're talking about people's livelihoods, here; but at some point, there needs to be a choice made whether a particular industry is worth saving when it's balanced against the long-term habitability of the Earth.  (And, I might add, that a lot of this would be moot if the government would step in and fund retraining of these out-of-work miners, and guarantee them jobs in the renewable energy industry, which is one of the fastest-growing professions in the United States.)

A few of the signs carried at the protest read as follows:

• A Mine Is A Terrible Thing To Waste
• Climate Change Is a Hoax!
• You can count on coal 24/7. You can't always depend on the sun! 
• Still Think Solar Makes Sense?
• Coal Never Quits
• You Can Depend On Coal!
• The Solar Industry Is Modernizing Us Out of Jobs!
• Coal was good enough for my forefathers, it's good enough for me!
• This much time and money spent for 2 minutes and 40 seconds

To their credit, the person carrying the last-mentioned sign was followed by someone carrying a sign saying, "That's what she said."

[image courtesy of photographer Luc Viatour and the Wikimedia Commons]

But lest the liberals in the studio audience start crowing about how much smarter and more sensible they are than the silly ol' conservatives, allow me to direct your attention to an article in The Atlantic by Brooklyn Law School professor Alice Ristroph, entitled, "Racial History in the Solar Eclipse Path of Totality," which says basically that the path of yesterday's eclipse was inherently biased against minorities.

Don't believe me?  Here's a sample:

It has been dubbed the Great American Eclipse, and along most of its path, there live almost no black people...  [A]n eclipse chaser is always tempted to believe that the skies are relaying a message.  At a moment of deep disagreement about the nation’s best path forward, here comes a giant round shadow, drawing a line either to cut the country in two or to unite it as one.  Ancient peoples watched total eclipses with awe and often dread, seeing in the darkness omens of doom.  The Great American Eclipse may or may not tell us anything about our future, but its peculiar path could remind us of something about our past—what it was we meant to be doing, and what we actually did along the way.

No, Professor Ristroph, what the Great American Eclipse reminded us of is that when something gets in front of the Sun, it casts a shadow.  End of story.

But that doesn't stop her from telling us about how terrible it is that the path of totality excludes minorities; in fact, the Moon seems to have chosen its path with deliberate bigotry in mind:

About a third of Kansas City, Missouri, is black, but most of the city lies just south of the path of totality. To get the full show, eclipse chasers should go north to St. Joseph, almost 90 percent white and about 6 percent black...

Moving east, the eclipse will pass part of St. Louis, whose overall population is nearly half black. But the black residents are concentrated in the northern half of the metropolitan area, and the total eclipse crosses only the southern half.

Of course, even by her own admission, her whole argument kind of falls apart when the eclipse gets to South Carolina, but by this time, any credibility she might have had is down the toilet anyhow.  So even if you got that far -- and the article is a long one -- I doubt that'd salvage whatever it was she was trying to point out.

Now don't misunderstand me.  There are huge racial inequities in the United States, and those deserve serious attention.  Likewise, apropos of the Kentuckians for Coal, the issue of displaced workers, poor communities, and lost jobs is not one we should scoff at.

But claiming the eclipse has a damn thing to do with either one is pretty fucking ridiculous, and you're not doing your argument any good by claiming that it does.

So the take-home message is, "let's keep our eye on the ball, shall we?"  If you want to draw attention to the plight of the unemployed or the problems of race and privilege, have at it.  But saying the whole thing boils down to astronomy is idiotic.  And throwing together a straw-man argument is not going to convince anyone who wasn't already convinced.

A trio of straw men

I had three interactions in the last 24 hours that left me wanting to bang my forehead against the wall.

I was going to call them "conversations," but "conversation" implies "exchange of ideas," which is not what this was.  This was more "one person ranting at the other, followed by the target of this rant trying unsuccessfully to find some way of responding other than shouting 'Are you a moron?  Or what?'"

The common thread in all of them was the straw-man fallacy -- mischaracterizing an argument, and then arguing against that mischaracterization.  Honestly, it's a way of saying "ha ha, I win" without doing the hard work of finding out what your opponent actually believes.

The first of these interactions was over a piece I posted here at Skeptophilia a while back on the evolution of bills designed to block the teaching of evolution.  I thought the academic paper I was writing about was absolutely brilliant, but evidently not everyone does, because I received the following comment:

I don't understand how anyone can believe in the fairy tale of evolution.  You honestly expect us to believe that one animal can just morph into another by magic?  It's so easy for you to believe that a chihuahua would become a race of large sea creatures?

 So against my better judgment, I actually responded.  The whole time, my brain was shouting at me, "You doofus.  Why are you bothering?  What do you think you're going to accomplish?"  But I wouldn't listen to me.  So I wrote:

Of course evolutionists don't think chihuahuas turned into orcas.  The very fact that you can't come up with an actual example of what evolutionists are saying indicates that you're not really all that interested in the discussion, you're just looking for an opportunity to make foolish statements and then pretend you've won the argument.

He then did something kind of sneaky; he set out bait for me.

Okay, then, tell me something evolutionists do believe.

And like an idiot, I fell for it.

I responded:

Here's just one example.  Birds are clearly descended from dinosaurs, especially the deinonychid dinosaurs (including the famous Velociraptor).  They show a lot of homologous bone structure -- and in fact, some members of this dinosaur group had feathers.  Recent protein sequencing of soft tissue preserved in dinosaur bones has also supported a close relationship to modern birds.

And he responded:

Oh, okay.  So it's not chihuahuas morphing into orcas, it's a T-rex morphing into a hummingbird.  That makes so much more sense.

So I gave up...

... only to get caught again shortly thereafter by someone who posted the following image on Twitter:

And not having learned from what had happened only two hours earlier, I responded:

So the fact that they were also both crazy homicidal dictators had nothing whatsoever to do with it?

At which point the original poster called me a "sheeple," which in my opinion is a word whose use should immediately disqualify you from rational discourse in a public forum for a year, unless in that time you can show evidence of your successful completion of a college-level logic course.

But since I never make the same mistake twice -- I make it five or six times, just to be sure -- I then got into a snarl with a Facebook friend who posted an article saying that all of the polls are wrong, that Donald Trump is going to win in a landslide.  By this time I was completely fed up with counterfactual nonsense, and I said, "How can making up reality as you go along be comforting to you?"

She immediately unfriended me, which I guess I deserved, if not for the message, for the snarky way I said it.

So apparently, I'll never learn.  Not only does engaging in arguments on the internet piss off all of the participants, it's completely futile.  And trying to reason with someone who didn't come to their conclusion using rational evidence is a losing proposition right from the get-go.  It reminds me of the quote -- attributed to several different sources -- "You can't logic yourself out of a position you didn't logic yourself into."  Or, as Thomas Paine put it, "To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead."

Straw man media

I think that mental laziness contributes more to the prevalence of media idiocy than any other factor.

I mean, let's face it.  The simplistic, single-cause vitriol poured into newspapers, magazines, and websites by the likes of Ann Coulter and Ted Rall would get nowhere if the consumers were willing to get up off their metaphorical asses and do the hard work of evaluating the actual arguments these people make.  When what they say constitutes an actual argument, that is, which is seldom.  Most of it seems to be one long free-floating ad hominem, delicately laced with unintentional irony -- such as yesterday's pronouncement by Rush Limbaugh that lesbians were obese substance abusers.

No, he apparently didn't realize why everyone else thought that this was screamingly funny.  I guess oxycodone addiction can make you a little slow on the uptake.

The problem is, once you have a critical mass of consumers who think of media as being pithy sound-bites that loudly confirm what they already thought, you have dulled the whole lot of them to learning anything from what they read.  And wasn't the original purpose of news media to inform?  I sure thought it was.

I was sent an especially good example of this by a friend and frequent contributor to Skeptophilia yesterday.  The whole thing started with an article in the Boston Globe online entitled, "Report Slams State for Lack of Corrections Reform."  In the article, posted last Sunday, writer Wesley Lowery describes a recent study by MassINC, a non-partisan research group that looked into incarceration patterns over the past forty years in Massachusetts.  The group produced a forty-page report that found, amongst other things, a puzzling statistic -- that as incarceration rates climbed steeply, the rate of violent crime was falling equally steeply.

Okay, so far, so good.  But then Michael Graham, radio talk show host and GOP consultant, weighed in with "Boston Globe-Democrat Asks: Why is Crime Going Down If We're Putting So Many Crooks in Prison?"  And in this stunning piece of investigative journalism, we read the following:

So you don’t understand why prison enrollment is going up while crime is going down? You don’t see the connection between more criminals off the street and fewer crimes in your neighborhood?

Okay….

After all, if crime is going down with all the crooks in jail, why are we wasting money keeping them in jail? Let’s let them back out on the streets.

What could possibly go wrong?

So, we have three fallacies at once here:

1)  If-by-Whiskey -- defining a term however you damn well please, and acting as if that definition were the correct one.
2)  Red Herring -- throwing in an irrelevant or misleading statement to throw your opponent off his stride.
3)  Straw Man -- recharacterizing your opponent's argument as an oversimplified or ridiculous parody of its actual stance, and arguing against that.

Mr. Graham has, probably deliberately (although as with the case of Rush Limbaugh, you can never be certain if they see it themselves), confused the rates of crime and incarceration with the raw numbers of criminals in jail and on the street.  It's not an easy point; consider how tricky it is to understand the fact that (for example) right now, the number of people on the Earth is increasing, but the rate of growth is decreasing.  If all that the report found was that the numbers of criminals on the street went down as the number of criminals in jail went up, that would hardly be surprising.  But it is curious that the rate of violent crime is declining as the rate of incarceration is increasing, and that statistic certainly deserves a better answer than the ridiculous If-by-Red-Straw-Herring Man-Whiskey that Mr. Graham saw fit to create.

I think what bugs me, however, is how easily suckered the readers are.  I read the comments following Michael Graham's article, and not one recognized what was, to me, an obvious problem with it -- half of them (the conservatives) responded with a rah-rah-right-on-dude, and the other half (the liberals) with messages decrying the inequities of the American justice system and their cost to society.  Nobody, or at least not in the first few pages of comments, said, "Wait a minute.  Your argument has a hole in it big enough to float the Queen Elizabeth through."  (The ship, not the monarch.)

So, anyway, that's today's frustrated anti-media rant.  It's not like the problem would be easy to fix; clear thinking is hard work, and people seem to like easy answers.  Going har-de-har-har at a blatant straw man is certainly simpler than putting your mind to figuring out what's really going on.  I just wish so many of the media wonks weren't getting rich off of it.

E. coli, Mike Walsworth, and the Straw Man fallacy

I think the most maddening of all of the logical fallacies is the Straw Man.

In case you're not familiar with this particular infuriating ploy, the Straw Man fallacy is when the individual you're arguing with knocks down an oversimplified (or exaggerated, or flat-out incorrect) characterization of your position, and then forthwith declares that (s)he has won the argument.  Ann Coulter, that living embodiment of specious thinking, is the past master of the Straw Man; she is notorious for taking the weakest (or most extreme) viewpoints of American liberals, demonstrating that those are incorrect, and concluding from this that all Democrats (i.e. around 50% of Americans) are blithering morons.

But you've never seen an example of the Straw Man fallacy like the one I'm about to show you.

Zach Kopplin, a young man from my home state of Louisiana who has become a champion for the teaching of evolutionary biology in public school science classes, posted a video on YouTube, showing a discussion between Louisiana Senator Mike Walsworth and a high school science teacher on the floor of the state senate.  Walsworth asks the teacher if there are any experiments that have been done that demonstrate Darwinian evolution in action.  The teacher responds that there have, and proceeds to describe Richard Lenski's elegant experiment with the bacteria E. coli, in which a population of E. coli were sampled over decades, and the samples frozen, with the (unfrozen) remainder subjected to various environmental factors as selecting agents -- and at the end of the decades-long project, all of the bacteria, the various frozen ones and the ones that had been allowed to continue growing, were compared.  (Estimates are that in the duration of the experiment, over 50,000 generations of bacteria had occurred.)  Guess what?  The lineage had changed demonstrably, with novel genes cropping up (including one that allowed one branch of the "family" to metabolize citric acid).  There you are: evolution in action.

And then Senator Walsworth asked the teacher if any of the bacteria had evolved into a human.  (It may have been my imagination that immediately afterward, Senator Walsworth added, "Herp derp hurr!")

The teacher, of course, responded "No."  And one lady in the audience did a highly amusing forehead-smack.  But you could just about hear all of the creationists in the audience responding, "Well, ha!  There you go, then!  I guess Senator Walsworth showed you." 

You'd think that the transparency of this particular Straw Man would be so obvious that no one could possibly fall for it.  But this sort of response is frequent enough that you have to wonder if creationists attend special Straw Man Training Workshops in order to learn how to perform it as obnoxiously as possible.  I've had conversations with creationists (I won't dignify them with the name "arguments"), and have been asked questions like, "Have you ever seen a cat give birth to a squid?  Well, okay, then!  (Herp derp hurr.)"  You can trot out all of the evidence you want, all of the examples of evolution being directly observed in the field or in the lab, but if you can't show me an animal evolving, in one generation, into an animal from a whole different freakin' phylum, I'm not buying it.

But of course, that last statement is the crux of the matter, isn't it?  "I'm not buying it."  I've already decided what I believe (note, "believe;" not "understand").  Nothing you can do can change that.  If you establish your definitions and evidence, I'll just shift my ground so that it redefines the terms.  (Yet another fallacy, the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.)  Show me experiments that support your theory, I'll ask why those experiments didn't do something entirely different, and then sit back with a cheesy grin on my face and claim I won.

The sad fact is, by some estimates 30% of Americans do think that this constitutes "winning."  And you may think this is a tad harsh, but it's my considered opinion that anyone who is that incapable of understanding the basics of critical thinking (not to mention the basics of biology, chemistry, and scientific induction) should not be entrusted to cast a vote.

Which, now that I come to think of it, explains Mike Walsworth's presence in the Louisiana senate.