Fact avoidance

I've learned through the years that my feelings are an unreliable guide to evaluating reality.

Part of this, I suppose, comes from having fought depression for forty years.  I know that what I'm thinking is influenced by my neurotransmitters, and given the fact that they spend a lot of the time out of whack, my sense that five different mutually-exclusive worst-case scenarios can all happen simultaneously is probably not accurate.  It could be that this was in part what drove me to skepticism, and to my understanding that my best bet for making good decisions is to rely not on feelings, but on evidence.

It surprises me how many people don't get that.  I saw two really good examples of this in the news last week, both of them centered around embattled President Donald Trump.  In the first, he was questioned about why he was putting so much emphasis on securing the border with Mexico -- to the extent of sending in the National Guard -- when in fact, illegal border crossings are at a 46-year low.  (You could argue that current levels are still too high; but the fact is, attempted border crossings have steadily dropped from a high of 1.8 million all the way back in 2000; the level now is about a quarter of that.)

I'm not here to discuss immigration policy per se.  It's a complex issue and one on which I am hardly qualified to weigh in.  What strikes me about this is that the powers-that-be are saying, "I don't care about the data, facts, and figures, the number of illegal migrants is increasing because I feel like it is."

An even more blatant example of trust-your-feelings-not-the-facts came from presidential spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has the unenviable and overwhelming job of doing damage control every time Trump lies about something.  This time, it was at a roundtable discussion on taxes in West Virginia, where he veered off script and started railing about voter fraud.  "In many places, like California, the same person votes many times — you've probably heard about that," he said.  "They always like to say 'oh, that's a conspiracy theory' — not a conspiracy theory, folks. Millions and millions of people."

Of course, the states he likes to claim were sites of rampant voter fraud are always states in which he lost, because the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote still keeps him up at night.  But the fact is, he's simply wrong.  A fourteen-year study by Loyola law professor Justin Levitt found that a "specific, credible allegation existed that someone pretended to be someone else at the polls" accounted for 31 instances out of a billion votes analyzed.

To make it clear: 31 does not equal "millions and millions."  And a fraud rate of 0.0000031% does not constitute "many times."

So, Trump lied.  At this point, that's hardly news.  It'd be more surprising if you turned on the news and found out Trump had told the truth about something.  But when asked about this actual data, in juxtaposition to what Trump said, Sarah Sanders said, "The president still feels there was a large amount of voter fraud."

Wait, what?

What Trump or Sanders, or (for that matter) you or I, "feel" about something is completely irrelevant.  If there's hard data available -- which there is, both on the border crossings and on allegations of voter fraud -- that is what should be listened to.  And when you say something, and are confronted by someone who has facts demonstrating the opposite, the appropriate response is, "Whoa, okay.  I guess I was wrong."

But that's if you're not Donald Trump.  Trump never admits to being wrong.  He doesn't have to, because he's surrounded himself with a Greek chorus of people like Sanders (and his sounding boards over at Fox News) who, no matter what Trump says or does, respond, "Exactly right, sir.  You're amazing.  A genius.  Your brain is YUUUGE."

Hell, he said a couple of years ago that he could kill someone in full view on 5th Avenue and not lose a single supporter, and we had a rather alarming proof of that this week when a fire broke out at Trump Tower on, actually, 5th Avenue -- which, contrary to the law, had no fire alarms or sprinkler system installed -- killing one man and injuring six.

The response?  One Trump supporter said that the man who died had deliberately set the fire to make Trump look bad, and then didn't get out in time.

Facts don't matter.  "I feel like Trump is a great leader and a staunch Christian" wins over "take a look at the hard data" every time.

I'd like to say I have a solution to this, but this kind of fact-resistance is so self-insulating that there's no way in.  It's like living inside a circular argument.  "Trump is brilliant because I feel like he's brilliant, so anything to the contrary must be a lie."  And when you have Fox News pushing this attitude hard -- ignoring any information to the contrary -- you can't escape.

If you doubt that, take a look at what Tucker Carlson was talking about while every other news agency in the world was covering the raid on Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's office: a piece on how "pandas are aggressive and sex-crazed."  (No, I'm not making this up.  An actual quote: "You know the official story about pandas — they’re cute but adorably helpless, which is why they are almost extinct.  But like a lot of what we hear, that is a lie...  The real panda is a secret stud with a thirst for flesh and a fearsome bite.")

That's some cutting-edge reporting, right there.  No wonder Fox News viewers were found in a 2012 study to be the worst-informed of all thirty media sources studied, only exceeded by people who didn't watch the news at all.

So sorry to end on a rather dismal note, but it seems like until people decide to start valuing facts above feelings, we're kind of stuck.  Honestly, the only answer I can come up with is educating children to be critical thinkers, but in the current environment of attacking teachers and public schools, I'm not sure that's feasible either.

In the interim, though, I'm gonna avoid pandas.  Because they sound a lot sketchier than I'd realized.

Tuesday shorts

So it's summer, at least for us folks here in the Northern Hemisphere.  Living as I do in the Frozen North (better known as upstate New York), summer is a time to celebrate the fact that it is finally warm enough most days to go outside without risking freezing off critical body parts.

And in honor of the better weather, we're gonna have some shorts here on Skeptophilia.

[image courtesy of photographer Tinou Bao and the Wikimedia Commons]

No, not those kind of shorts, not that I don't approve thereof.  I'm talking about a brief survey of wacky stories around the world. 

We'll start in China, whence came yesterday's story about setting your crotch on fire to improve your sex life, so it's not surprising that we can find other loony ideas there.  From a story on the BBC News we find out that a zoo in Chengdu has forbidden its resident panda cubs from predicting the winner of the World Cup.

My first thought was: if you believe not only in psychic stuff, but in non-human animals being able to do psychic stuff, how would you go about forbidding it?  Would you stand in front of the pandas' enclosure, and say in a stern voice, "No clairvoyance allowed!  I mean it!"?  Would you watch for signs of mental telepathy from the pandas, and withhold their bowls of bamboo shoots when they do it, so as to discourage panda ESP?

But it turns out that they're actually not forbidding the pandas from speculating amongst themselves, they're simply forbidding them from cluing their handlers in on what they're picking up from the aether.  You might remember the whole Paul-the-Octopus nonsense a few years ago, wherein an octopus in a sea life center in Oberhausen, Germany gained worldwide notoriety when it would select the winner of various World Cup matches by taking food out of containers labeled with the flags of the competing teams' countries, and seemed to do so with great accuracy.  And people took him seriously.  His prediction that Germany would beat Argentina -- which turned out to be correct -- prompted an Argentine chef to post octopus recipes online.

But of course, the whole thing didn't pan out, either literally or figuratively, and his incorrect prediction that Germany would beat Spain in the final game turned out to be wrong, which kind of ended his popularity in his home country.

So the Chinese basically put the quietus on a plan to have the Chengdu panda cubs predict the match outcomes a similar way, that is, by selecting food from containers with flags.  The Chengdu research facility simply said that the "authorities had stepped in and halted the plans," without further explanation.  Meaning that any conversations, telepathic or otherwise, that the pandas have about sports will have to remain amongst their own kind.

Next, we have a story from Canada that gives us the good news that in the afterlife, everyone gets to be happy and contented and blissful.  Somewhat less good, at least in my mind, is that "everyone" includes "psychotic genocidal dictators."

Canadian psychic Carmel Joy Baird has sparked something of a tempest in a teapot by her claim that even Adolf Hitler has mellowed since his bad old Nazi days.  "He's with great-granny on the other side," Baird said in a television interview, in a quote that I swear I'm not making up.

Well, of course this didn't sit well with most fair-minded folks.  "Ms. Baird is entitled to her opinion about what happened to Hitler in the next world," said Len Rudner, director of community affairs and outreach at the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs in Toronto.  "We are much more concerned with what he did in this world, which was to attempt to annihilate the Jewish people.  This is far more important to remember.  The souls that deserve our attention are the souls of the people that were murdered during Hitler's genocide and the souls of those who grieve them."

Which is certainly fair enough, although no one is addressing the point that Baird herself appears to be a fruitcake.  I mean, do people really think this woman is able to find out about the post-mortem status of major world figures?  If so, we should put it to the test.  For example, it'd be nice to know what actually happened to Amelia Earhart, Jimmy Hoffa, and D. B. Cooper.  I don't care so much if they're happily chatting with their great-grannies, but it'd be kind of cool to know what became of them during their last days on Earth -- a matter that Baird should easily be able to clear up for us.


Finally, we'll head to England, where some Shropshire sheep farmers are claiming that "aliens in UFOS" are "lasering" their sheep.

Apparently, the sheep have been found dead, with "neat holes" in their bodies, and also missing important organs such as brains and eyes.  The deaths came to the attention of Phil Hoyle, who has investigated other cases of strange livestock mutilation, and who came to the farm near Radnor Forest where the sheep were killed.  The area, says Hoyle, is also a hotspot for UFO sightings -- and the two are connected.

"The technology involved in these attacks is frightening," Hoyle said, in an interview with The Sun.  "These lights and spheres are clearly not ours.  They are built by technology and intelligence that's not from here."

About the UFO sightings, Hoyle said, "For a short while it looked more like a Star Wars battle."  He interviewed farmers after the incident, and said that "all but one had some type of unusual disappearance of animals or deaths with strange injuries."

Which of course raises the question of why superpowerful, ultra-intelligent aliens from another planet would use their awesome technology to zip light years across the galaxy, visit Earth, and then come away with nothing but some sheep brains.  Can't you just picture when the captain of the ship returns to his home world?

Captain of alien ship:  "Look, your exalted excellency!  At the cost of millions of bars of Ferengi latinum, we have traveled to the third planet around the star Sol, and we have come back with... this."

*captain holds up three sheep brains and assorted eyes*

Leader of alien planet:  "That's it.  Guards, feed the captain to the Rancor."

(Okay, I know, I mixed my science fiction universes up.  So shoot me.)


So anyway, there we have it:  some summer shorts for your perusal.  Psychic pandas, Adolf in the afterlife, and Shropshire sheep slayings.  I hope you enjoyed them.  As for me, the weather's nice, so I think it's time for a nap in the hammock.  Wearing shorts, of course.