Hotfoot

I am often stunned by the level of credulity exhibited by some folks.

Take, for example, the incident that occurred a few days ago at a four-day motivational seminar called "Unleashing the Power Within" hosted by speaker Tony Robbins.  According to the article, Robbins's seminars cost between $1,000 and $3,000 to attend, and the high point of the thing is that you get to walk barefoot on red-hot coals.

[image courtesy of photographer Jens Buurgaard Nielsen and the Wikimedia Commons]

Me, I'd pay $1,000 to avoid having to walk on red-hot coals.  But these people evidently thought this was a great idea.  And to be fair, apparently there are circumstances in which you can walk on coals and not get burned -- and a good, physics-based explanation of how that can happen.

The problem is, it doesn't always work out that way, and when it doesn't, major ouchies occur.  Which is what happened last week in Dallas, Texas...

... to thirty seminar participants.

Now I can see how one person could get burned, or two, or maybe even three.  But you'd think that when the 23rd person shrieked "HOLY FUCK MY FEET ARE BURNING OFF" that the remaining participants would go, "Okay, maybe not."  What did Robbins do, line the participants up in decreasing order of intelligence, or something?

So Dallas Fire Rescue was called in, and thirty people were treated for injuries.

"It felt like someone had taken a hot iron and pressed it against my feet " said seminar participant Paul Gold of West Palm Beach, Florida, who suffered second-degree burns on both feet.  "In hindsight, jumping off would have been a fantastic idea.  But when you're in the spirit of the moment, you're kinda focused on one task."

I dunno, I think I'd have to be pretty damn focused not to think of getting off a bed of hot coals when my feet are about to burst into flame.

Gold added that he thought he'd signed a hold-harmless waiver before participating.  He signed something, he was certain about that, but isn't sure what it said.

Which supports my contention that the firewalkers weren't chosen for their critical thinking ability.

Another participant, Jacqueline Luxemberg, said that part of the problem was that a lot of the participants weren't following the leaders' directions, but were concentrating more on taking selfies and videos.  So look for a rash of Facebook photos with captions like, "This is me just before my lower legs caught on fire."

Look, I'm all for facing your fears.  There is something pretty empowering about facing down something you thought you couldn't handle, achieving a goal you were sure you would never manage.  But there are far better ways to do it than tromping across a bed of red-hot charcoal briquets.  For one thing, whether you get burned or not has nothing to do with your mental state -- it's physics, pure and simple.  Second, there's a decent chance you'll end up with blisters all over the soles of your feet, which has got to make walking uncomfortable for a week or two thereafter.

And third, you're putting thousands of dollars into the hands of people who are trying to convince you that walking on hot coals is a great idea.  Myself, I can think of lots of other uses for a thousand bucks than giving it to Tony Robbins.  Add to that the woo-woo mystical trappings a lot of those people weave into their presentations, and I'll get my motivation elsewhere, thanks.

Chopra on AIDS

At what point does someone cross the line into giving advice so dangerous that the people involved in promoting him are morally culpable if they participate?

Look, it's not that I'm against free speech.  I also believe strongly in the caveat emptor principle -- that people have a responsibility to be well enough informed on matters of science and medicine that charlatans can gain no traction.  But influential people also have a responsibility, and that is to use that influence with care, to consider the harm their words could do, to make certain that what they're saying is scientifically correct (and making amends when they misspeak).

Of course, the most egregious example of how this can go wrong is the current measles outbreak in California, which has sickened 84 people so far and is still accelerating.  The CDC states that the outbreak is "directly attributable to the anti-vaxxer movement," and notes that even with treatment, measles "is a miserable disease" that can cause serious complications and death.  And we can lay the blame for the resurgence of this disease at the feet of such purveyors of unscientific bullshit as Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy, who despite mountains of verified, reliable research are still claiming that vaccinations are unnecessary at best and dangerous at worst.

But we've talked about the anti-vaxxers before, and they're hardly the only example of this phenomenon.  Just a couple of days ago, for example, we had none other than Deepak Chopra putting his two cents in (although that's vastly overestimating its worth), and he gave his opinion about AIDS...

... and said it wasn't caused by HIV.

The HIV virus [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Chopra was being interviewed by Tony Robbins, and the following exchange took place:

Chopra: HIV may be a precipitating agent in a susceptible host. The material agent is never the cause of the disease. It may be the final factor in inducing the full-blown syndrome in somebody who’s already susceptible. 

Robbins: But what made them susceptible? 

Chopra: Their own interpretations of the whole reality they’re participating in. 

Robbins: Could that be translated into their thoughts, their feelings, their beliefs, their lifestyle? 

Chopra: Absolutely.

He goes on to say, "I have a lot of patients with so-called AIDS... that are healthier than most of the people who live in downtown Boston.  They haven't had a cold in ten years...  Someone's told them they have this disease, and they've bought into it.  The label is not the disease, the test is not the disease."

Robbins responds with a comment about a doctor who has stated that HIV is only capable of killing "one helper-T cell out of ten thousand," and Chopra agrees, saying that to get sick from it, we have to "facilitate the process with our own thoughts and beliefs, convictions, ideas, and interpretations."

Then they have the following discussion:

Robbins: There's a test that doesn't even test for the virus, and when they get a positive test, what happens to them? 

Chopra: Then they make it happen. 

Robbins:  Maybe they take something like AZT, a side effect of which is immune suppression...  What keeps us locked into this trap?  What keeps us locked in this trap where we keep promoting a philosophy of fear where we must depend on someone or something outside of ourselves to keep ourselves healthy? 

Chopra:  It's the collective belief system.  It's the hypnosis of social conditioning.  It's cultural, religious, social indoctrination.  

The way out, Chopra says, is realizing that "you are the field of all unbounded possibilities."

Are you mad yet?  I hope so.  Chopra is using his influence -- which is considerable -- to push people away from conventional treatment into accepting vacuous psychobabble, risking their own lives in the process.

You have to wonder how he explains the millions of deaths from AIDS in central and southern Africa.  Many of those people don't have access to medical tests and treatments; a considerable number of them don't have the scientific background to understand what the virus does to the immune system.

You also have to wonder how he'd explain the deaths of young children who contracted HIV from their mothers.  Was their disease due to their parents' lack of acceptance of "the field of unbounded possibilities?"  Or did the children themselves have problems with their "interpretation of the whole reality they were participating in?"

Chopra once was simply a laughable purveyor of woo-woo pseudoscience, of the kind that he evidenced by a statement made earlier in the interview: "You go beyond the molecules, and you find atoms.  You go beyond the atoms, and you find particles.  You go beyond the particles, and you find nothing.  You go beyond the nothing, and you find absolutely nothing."  But now he's crossed the line into endangering people's lives with his claptrap.

I'd much prefer it if people would come to recognizing how dangerous this man is through a greater understanding of science; but the unfortunate truth is that there will always be gullible, credulous, and poorly-educated people out there, and it is immoral to allow people like Chopra to prey on their lack of understanding.  I wish fervently that radio and television stations who are giving this man air time, and book publishers who are promoting his views in print, would say, "I'm sorry, sir, but you are a quack, and you're hurting people, and we're not participating."

But the sad truth is that even if what he's saying is garbage, it's lucrative garbage.  Given the profit motive that drives most of our society, I suspect that Deepak Chopra is going to continue to get richer at the expense of people who are ignorant enough or desperate enough to buy the nonsense he's selling.

Lemmings, hockey fans, and fire pits

Friday, the Silicon Valley Mercury reported that 21 people were treated at a local hospital for burns after participating in a firewalking activity at an event organized by inspirational speaker Tony Robbins.  (Source)

My first reaction was that I find it hard to fathom how 21 people were injured.  One or two, okay.  But 21?  You'd think that even by person number 5, the rest of the crowd would see that persons number 1 through 4 were writhing on the ground, screaming with agony, and would say, "Hmmm.  Maybe not.  I think I'll just watch from the sidelines, thanks."  But that's not what happened.  Mr. Robbins kept telling the participants, "C'mon!  You can do it!  This time it's really going to work!", and for some reason they kept believing him.  Perhaps he had them lined up in reverse order of IQ, so that each person in line was incrementally stupider than the previous one.

The interesting thing is that even now, Robbins and the events staff aren't admitting that walking on hot coals is basically a stupid thing to do.  "We have been safely providing this experience for more than three decades, and always under the supervision of medical personnel," a spokesperson told reporters after the fiasco on Friday.  "We continue to work with local fire and emergency personnel to ensure this event is always done in the safest way possible."

And even the injured firewalkers aren't willing to say that the problem is that "hot things will burn you."  One participant, Andrew Brenner, told reporters that he did get burned, but it was his own fault, for not having enough "faith and concentration."  "I did it before, didn't get into the right state and got burned," Brenner said.  "I knew I wasn't at my peak state.  I didn't take it as serious."

What strikes me about all of this -- besides the general observation that given a contest between "faith and concentration" and "extremely hot object," the hot object is going to win every time -- is how this is indicative of the lemming-like aspects of human behavior.  All of us, when in large groups, tend to participate in behavior that we would never dream of doing while alone or in smaller groups.  Look at the kinds of things that can happen at athletic events, concerts, and festivals.  I think it unlikely, for example, that I would paint my face, shoulders, and chest red-and-white (Cornell colors, for those of you who are non-New Yorkers) in any group with less than ten members, and the number might rise to 25 if we were talking about a freezing cold day in early March.  However, at the ECAC hockey finals, buoyed up by the energy of thousands of cheering Big Red hockey fans...?  But perhaps I've incriminated myself enough already.

It all comes from being a social primate, really.  We do what the group does, for a variety of reasons.  Most of such behavior is probably pretty harmless, honestly, and the sociologists would point to its importance in group cohesion and our sense of belonging.  Of course, the dark side of this tendency is the capacity for mob violence.  In groups, people will often break their own moral and ethical precepts, not then (if ever) recognizing the point where they crossed that line, because a sort of group mentality takes over.  As Stanislaw Lec said, "Every snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty."  And from one of my own personal favorites, Terry Pratchett: "The IQ of a mob is equal to the IQ of its stupidest member, divided by the number of people in the mob."

Leaders, from corporate CEOs to high school principals to motivational speakers, take advantage of this tendency, often with the best of motives.  Get the group stirred up; get them excited about something.  Identify a few of the major power brokers in the group (the Head Lemmings), and get them on your side.  At that point, you can propose damn near anything, and the whole group will follow you.  I've seen it accomplish great things; in my own school, five years ago, the creation of our highly successful electives program was accomplished using just such a method.  Of course, it's also resulted in riots, crusades, and wars.  Any tendency in human nature can be used for good or for evil.

Or just to make people do stupid stuff, like walking across a fire pit after the first twenty people burned their feet up, just because some silly motivational speaker was shouting, "do it! I believe in you!"