*ding* You've got mail!

It's inevitable that as Skeptophilia has grown in popularity, it's also attracted some attention of the less-positive sort.

Let me say up front that I appreciate most of the comments I get, even the ones that disagree with me.  As I pointed out to one person who took exception to something I posted -- and then apologized for appearing negative -- I wouldn't be much of a skeptic if I didn't admit it when I was wrong, had incomplete information, or was simply ignorant about a topic, so there was no need to apologize for taking me to task for it.  (And in point of fact, after my discussion with the person in question, I decided I was far enough off base that I went back and deleted the post.)

But all you have to do is look at the comments section of pretty much any example of online media to find out that there's a whole other side of this phenomenon.

So for your entertainment, today I'd like to present to you a sampling of some recent-ish comments I've gotten on posts, and a short response to each from me.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons RRZEicons, Mailbox, CC BY-SA 3.0]

1.  After a post in which I scoffed at the idea that some lady in Romania had somehow taken a photograph of her dead grandma in hell:

You're laughing now, but you won't be once you're dead yourself and join the damned in hell.

Well, you're right insofar as I won't be laughing after I'm dead.  If dead people laughed, it would give a whole different vibe to your typical funeral.  (On the other hand, it'd still be better than what happened at Mr. Redpath's poor Grandmama's funeral in the Doctor Who episode "The Unquiet Dead.")  As far as where my eternal soul -- presuming I actually have one -- will end up once I've shuffled off this mortal coil, there are a lot of other options various religions have dreamed up besides the Christian heaven and hell, so maybe there'll be choices.  As I've mentioned before, my personal favorite is Valhalla.  This might necessitate my having a Viking funeral, which I think would be kind of cool, but I'm not sure my wife will go for it.

2.  After a post on alternative medicine:

I hate closed-minded idiots like you.  I hope Big Pharma is paying you well.

I wish Big Pharma was paying me at all.  They're way behind on sending out their Shill Checks, and I'm hoping they get their asses in gear soon because at the moment I'm making one-eighth of bugger-all as a novelist.

3.  A response to a post, I've forgotten which, because it could be pretty much any of them:

You sure do swear a lot.

Fuckin' right I do.  My mom, who was a complete prude, tried her best to cure me of it, saying stuff like "People use bad words only if their vocabulary is so poor they don't know any appropriate ones."  With the wisdom of age, I've come to the conclusion that there's nothing whatsoever wrong with my vocabulary, and if an off-color word is the right one for the occasion, I'm damn well going to use it.  In any case, if the occasional swear word makes your eyes cross, you're not going to have much fun here at Skeptophilia.

4.  In response to a post I did about musical taste:

The fact that you sing the praises of Ralph Vaughan Williams tells me everything I need to know about the depth of your knowledge of classical music.  He's the favorite composer of shallow pseudo-intellectuals.

Opinion (n.) /əˈpɪn·yən/ -- a judgment about something or someone based upon personal experience and belief rather than universal or provable facts.

5.  After one of my recent posts criticizing Donald Trump -- I forget which, because once again, there are a bunch to choose from:

Trump is the president.  He won, and you libtards better get used to it.

I know he won, because it's why I had to renew my Xanax prescription last week.  As far as getting used to it -- I think everyone in this country is going to have to get used to a lot of things, including higher food prices, internment camps and deportations, cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, elimination of VA health care benefits, loss of access to vaccines, and amoral plutocrats in charge of everything.  To name a few.

But by all means, don't let me stop you from celebrating while you've still got reason to.

6.  After a post about an ultra-Christian preacher who thinks that masturbation summons "sex demons:"

I don't get on social media to read filth like this.

Then... um... don't read it?  No one's forcing you to read anything.  This reminds me of the old story about the woman who called the police because she could see out of her back window that some teenage boys were skinnydipping in the nearby river.  So the police came, and (showing admirable restraint) told the boys to go swim somewhere else.  Well, an hour later, the police got a second call from her with the same complaint.

The police said, "So, you can still see the boys through your window?"

And the woman said, "No, but I can if I climb up on my roof and look through my binoculars."

7.  After a post about hoaxes and conspiracies in which I mentioned that my all-time favorite book was Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum:

Ooh, well, aren't you just the most sophisticated scholar in the room.  Reading Eco is the modern equivalent of pretending you actually enjoy James Joyce.

Well, given that I'm the only person in the room at the moment, I'm the most sophisticated scholar here kind of by default.  The only other vaguely sentient being in my office is my puppy Jethro, who is a lovely little dog but (and I mean this in the kindest possible way) has the IQ of a peach pit.  But leaving that aside, allow me to correct an apparent misapprehension on your part.  I hate posturing and conceit as much as you seem to, and if I didn't like Foucault's Pendulum I certainly wouldn't have felt inclined to say I did out of some misguided sense that it would impress people.  And as far as your not liking Eco, I'll simply refer you to the definition of "opinion" I posted earlier.

Anyhow, those are a few selections from the mailbag.  Following Irish writer Brendan Behan's observation that "there's no such thing as bad publicity," I'd say, keep those cards and letters comin'.  I certainly can't stop people from responding negatively to what I post, and then indignantly informing me of the fact, but I can then save up their responses for a subsequent post.

Consider yourself forewarned.

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Wrongness

I get a lot of negative comments.

It comes with the territory, I suppose, and I knew when I started writing this blog fourteen years ago that I would have to develop a thick skin.  Given the subject matter, there's hardly a post I do that won't piss someone off.  Here's a sampling of comments, and a brief description of the topic that elicited them:

• You are either ignorant or just stupid.  I'm putting my bet on the latter.  (after a post on machines that are supposed to "alkalinize" water to make it more healthful)
• Narrow-minded people like you are the worst problem this society faces.  (after a post on "crystal healing")
• I am honestly offended by what you wrote.  (after a post on alternative medicine)
• I can't say I warm to your tone.  (after a post on ghost hunting)
• That is the most ignorant thing I have ever read.  I could feel my IQ dropping as I read it.  (after a post in which I made a statement indicating that I think recent climate change is anthropogenic in origin)
• I hate smug dilettantes like you.  (after a post on mysticism vs. rationalism)
• You are a worthless wanker, and I hope you rot in hell.  (from a young-earth creationist)

My skin isn't thick enough that some of these don't sting.  For example, the one that called me a "smug dilettante" has a grain of truth to it; I'm not a scientist, just a retired science teacher, and if my educational background has a flaw it's that it's a light year across and an inch deep.  Notwithstanding that in a previous century people like me were called "polymaths," not "dabblers" or "dilettantes," the commenter scored a point, whether he knew it or not.  I'm well-read, and have a decent background in a lot of things, but I'm not truly an expert in anything.

Other disagreements on this list have been resolved by discussion, which is honestly what I prefer to do.  The comments that came from the posts on alternative medicine and ghost hunting generated fruitful discussion, and understanding (if not necessarily agreement) on both sides.

Most of the time, though, I just don't engage with people who choose to use the "Comments" section (or email) as a venue for snark.  You're not going to get very far by calling me ignorant, for example.  I make a practice of not writing about subjects on which I am ignorant, so even if I make an offhand comment about something, I try to make sure that I could back it up with facts if I needed to.  (Cf. this site, apropos of the individual who thinks I am ignorant for accepting the anthropogenic nature of recent climate change.  Plus, I once had the amazing Bill McKibben give me a thumbs-up for one of my climate change posts, which counts for a great deal.)

That said, what a lot of people don't seem to recognize about me is the extent to which my understanding of the world is up for grabs.  Like anyone, I do have my biases, and my baseline assumptions -- the latter including the idea that the universe is best understood through the dual lenses of logic and evidence.

But everything else?  My attitude is, if you want to try to convince me about Bigfoot or chakras or crystals or astrology or your particular take on religion or anything else, knock yourself out.  But you'd better have the evidence on your side, because even if I am a dilettante, I have read up on the topics on which I write.

I am as prone as the next guy, though, to getting it wrong sometimes.  And I am well aware of the fact that we can slide into error without realizing it.  As journalist Kathryn Schulz said, in her phenomenal lecture "On Being Wrong" (which you should all take fifteen minutes and watch as soon as you're done reading this):

How does it feel to be wrong?  Dreadful, thumbs down, embarrassing.  Those are great answers.  But they're answers to a different question.  (Those are) the answers to the question, "How does it feel to realize you're wrong?"  Realizing you're wrong can feel like all of that, and a lot of other things.  It can be devastating.  It can be revelatory.  It can actually be quite funny...  But just being wrong?  It doesn't feel like anything...  We're already wrong, we're already in trouble, but we still feel like we're on solid ground.  So I should actually correct something I said a moment ago: it does feel like something to be wrong.  It feels like being right.

To those who are provoked, even pissed off by what I write: good.  We never discover our errors -- and I'm very much including myself in this assessment -- without being knocked askew once in a while.  Let yourself be challenged without having a knee-jerk kick in response, and you have my word that I'll do the same.  And while I don't like having my erroneous thinking uncovered any more than anyone else, I will take a deep breath and admit it when I screw up.  I've published retractions in Skeptophilia more than once, which has been a profoundly humbling but entirely necessary experience.

So keep those cards and letters coming.  Even the negative ones.  I'm not going to promise you I'll change my mind on every topic I'm challenged on, but I do promise that I'll consider what you've said.

On the other hand, calling me a "worthless wanker" didn't accomplish much but making me choke-snort a mouthful of coffee all over my computer.  So I suppose that the commenter even got his revenge there, if only in a small way.

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Don't read the comments

I've said it before; whenever I look at a news story, especially one on a controversial topic like climate change, prayer in schools, or evolution, I always regret reading the comments section.  The comments mostly seem to be written by screaming extremists.  If I had a nickel for every time I saw the words "idiot," "moron," and "dumbass" in reader comments, I'd be a rich man.  Instead, I always come away feeling like there's no hope for the human race.

Turns out that I'm not alone.  A recent study at the University of Wisconsin (described here, in an outstanding article written by Chris Mooney; but if you want to read the original paper, the link has been taken down, for some reason) looked at how people react to reading comments from other readers.  Each of the 1,183 volunteers read a blog post on the dangers of nanotechnology; the control group's version had a comments section that was neutral/civil, but the other half read one where the comments were steeped in fire and vitriol.

The results, if unsurprising, should be worrying to anyone who has an interest in seeing the public respond rationally to media.  The researchers found that across the board, the people who read the nasty comments responded by becoming more extreme in their own viewpoints.  If you already (prior to reading the post) thought that the risks of nanotechnology were minimal, you became even more sure of your position.  If you were already worried about the risks, you became more sure of that.  The audience, in other words, polarized, but not because of the facts -- the information presented was the same in both cases -- but because of watching how others responded.

This is entirely explainable based on the way our brain works.  Given emotional activation, the rational centers of our brain get out-shouted.  We react with a sort of mob mentality if we basically agreed with the comment; "Yeah!  You tell him!  Go get him!  Wish I'd thought to say that first!"  If we disagreed with the comment, our fear/anxiety centers are activated; we feel that our stance is besieged, and we double down on our beliefs because we feel they've been threatened.

Notice that in neither case do we respond logically.

This is a troubling result.  For one thing, in issues of public policy that involve science -- such as what to do about climate change, and whether intelligent design deserves equal time in public schools -- we should be striving to discuss things more rationally, not less.  The tendency of the human brain's logic centers to shut down when presented with emotionally-charged responses to media makes it even harder to keep these discussions in the realm of fact.

It's one of the inevitable downsides of the internet.  Back when I was a kid, if you didn't like a news story, you had the option to write a letter to the editor, which was tedious and time-consuming, and there was no guarantee your letter would be printed even if you sent it.  Now, anyone can respond to a news story... and does.  Regardless of whether they know anything factual about it.  They have the right to free speech, dammit, and they're gonna exercise it.  And the University of Wisconsin study shows that this is, on the whole, not a good thing for anyone.  As study co-author Dietram Scheufele said, reading the comments section of an article is like "reading the news article in the middle of the town square, with people screaming in my ear what I should believe about it."

The whole thing reminds me of a quote from the late great writer and thinker Isaac Asimov:  "Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'."