Backfire

One of the many things that baffles me about my fellow humans is how hard it is for people to say, "Well, I guess I was wrong, then."

I mean, I'm sure I've got as many idées fixes as the next guy.  There are parts of my worldview I'm pretty attached to, and models for how the universe works that I would be absolutely astonished to find out were incorrect.  But I'd like to think that if I were to be presented with hard evidence, I'd have no choice but to shrug aside my astonishment and say it.

"Well, I guess I was wrong, then."

This attitude, however, seems to be in the minority.  Many more people will hang onto their preconceived notions like grim death, sometimes even denying evidence that is right in front of their eyes.  I distinctly recall one student who, despite being a young-earth creationist, elected to take my AP Biology class, about which I was up front that it was taught from an evolutionary perspective.  She was quite friendly and not at all antagonistic, and one time I asked her what her basis was for rejecting the evolutionary model.  Did she doubt the evidence?  Did it strike her as an illogical stance?  Did the whole thing simply not make sense to her?

No, she assured me -- she knew the evidence was real (and overwhelming); the whole argument was impeccably logical and made good sense to her.

She simply didn't believe it.  Despite all of the science she knew (and excelled at; she damn near aced my class, which was no mean feat), she simply knew that the Bible was literally true.

I didn't question further -- my aim, after all, was understanding, not conversion -- but I left the conversation feeling nothing but puzzlement.  My only conclusion was that she defined the word knowledge very differently than I did.

To take a less emotionally-charged example, let me tell you a story about a man named John Murray Spear.

Spear was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1804, and from a young age attended the Universalist Church, eventually studying theology and being ordained.  He became minister of the congregation in Barnstable, and using his position fought for a bunch of righteous causes -- women's rights, labor reform, the abolition of slavery, and the elimination of the death penalty.

Spear, though, had another set of interests that were a little... odder.

He was a thoroughgoing Spiritualist, believing not only in the afterlife -- after all, that belief is shared by most Christian sects -- but that the spirits of the dead could and did communicate with the living.  He delved into the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and Franz Mesmer, both of whom had attempted to give a scientific basis for spirit survival (and for the related belief in a soul as a substance or energy independent of the body).  Spear's obsession eventually brought him into conflict with the Universalist Church leaders, and in the end he followed his heart, giving up his ministerial position and breaking all ties with the church.

In 1852 he wrote a tract in which he claimed to be in contact with a group called the "Association of Electrizers," which included not only Spear's namesake, the Universalist minister John Murray, but Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Benjamin Rush.

You have probably already figured out that all of these men were dead at the time.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

This didn't stop Spear.  He produced documents with texts from Murray et al., and which included their signatures.  Asked by skeptics how ghosts could sign their names, Spear claimed that okay, he'd held the pen, but the ghosts had guided his hand.  The texts contained information on how to combine technology and Spiritualism to create a source of energy that would elevate humanity to new levels, so he set about building a machine in a shed on a hill in Lynn, Massachusetts that he claimed would release a "New Motive Power" using a "messianic perpetual motion machine."

Whatever the fuck that means.

So Spear and a few followers got to work building their machine out of copper wire, zinc plates, magnets, and one (1) dining room table.  After months of effort, Spear and an unnamed woman he called "the New Mary" held a ceremony where they "ritualistically birthed" the machine in an attempt to give it life.  Then they turned it on.

Nothing happened.

After a couple more abortive attempts to get it going, Spear's Spiritualist friends got fed up, destroyed the machine, and told Spear he could go to hell.

This is the point where you'd think anyone would have said that magic phrase -- "Well, I guess I was wrong, then."  Not Spear.  Spear became even more determined.  He seemed to follow that famous example of a faulty logical chain, "Many geniuses were laughed at in their time.  I'm being laughed at, so I must be a genius."  He kept at it for another two decades, never achieving success, which you no doubt could have predicted by my use of the phrase "perpetual motion machine."  It was only in 1872 that he said he'd received a message from the Association of Electrizers telling him it was time to retire.

But until his death in Philadelphia in 1887, he handed out business cards to all and sundry saying, "Guided and assisted by beneficent Spirit-Intelligences, Mr. S. will examine and prescribe for disease of body and mind, will delineate the character of persons when present, or by letter, and indicate their future as impressions are given him; will sketch the special capacities of young persons...  Applications to lecture, or hold conversations on Spiritualism, will be welcomed."

On the one hand, you have to admire Spear's tenacity.  On the other... well, how much evidence do you need?  Surely on some level he was aware that he was making it all up, right?  He doesn't seem to have simply been mentally ill; his writings on other topics show tremendous lucidity.

But he had an idea that he wanted to be true so badly that he just couldn't resign himself to its falsehood.

I have to wonder, though, if there might be a strain of that in all of us.  How would I react if I learned something that completely overturned my understanding?  Would I really shift ground as easily as I claim, or would I cling tenaciously to my preconceived notions?  I wonder how big a catastrophe in my thinking it would take to make me rebel, and like my long-ago student, say, "Okay, I see it, I understand it, but I don't believe it"?

It's easy for me to chuckle at Spear with his Association of Electrizers and New Motive Forces and messianic perpetual motion machines, but honestly, it's because I already didn't believe in any of that stuff.  Maybe I'm as locked into my worldview as he was.  As journalist Kathryn Schulz put it, "Okay, we all know we're fallible, but in a purely theoretical sense.  Try to think of one thing, right now, that you're wrong about.  You can't, can you?"

The facile response is, "Of course not, because if I knew I was wrong, I would change my mind," but I think that misses the point.  We all are trapped in our own conceptual frameworks, and fight like mad when anything threatens them.  The result is that most of us can be presented with arguments showing us that we're wrong, and we still don't change our minds.  Sometimes, in fact, being challenged makes us hang on even harder.  It's so common that psychologists have invented a name for the phenomenon -- the backfire effect.

Perhaps Spear is not that much of an aberration after all.  And how is this desperate clinging to being right at the heart of the political morass we currently find ourselves in here in the United States?

Once again, how much evidence do you need? 

So those are my rather depressing thoughts for the day.  A nineteenth-century Spiritualist, and an attitude that is still all too common today.  At least, for all Spear's unscientific claptrap, he still found time to support some important causes, which is more than I can say for the modern crop of evidence-deniers.

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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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The child in the cemetery

It's astonishing how little a skeptical, rational approach has insulated me from having a purely visceral reaction sometimes.

I've commented to my wife that I seem to have two brains, and they don't talk to each other.  In fact, most of the time each one seems to be bound and determined that the other doesn't exist.  One is my rational brain, that tells me things like "You've been very healthy, all things considered, and the physical you had two days ago is really unlikely to have turned up anything even remotely questionable."  The other, my emotional brain, says, "You haven't gotten the results yet, which means that they are reluctant to tell you that you're dying of a rare, incurable, and horribly painful disease."

Even with less personal things, it's curious how I can have two completely independent reactions at precisely the same time.  Take, for example, the image captured on Google Street View in the Martha Chapel Cemetery, Huntsville, Texas last week.

How anyone thought of zooming in like this, on an image of a (supposedly) empty cemetery, I don't know.  At least that's my emotional brain speaking.  My rational brain says there's a clear reason -- because it's a hoax, a digitally-altered photograph.  But without further ado, here's the image in question:

If you'll look closely, there's a very convincing image of a little girl's face peeking from around the left side of the tree.

The link I provided shows the image in a variety of angles and magnifications, and also says that there's a second "ghostly image" in the picture.  You can see it in the rectangular space framed by the sapling and the two dark tree trunks on the left side of the image.  Here it is, magnified:

This one, on the other hand, just doesn't do it for me.  If you go to the link (the YouTube video it brings you to is only a minute and a half long), you can see it in even greater magnification, and it looks to me like...

... a leaf caught on the fence.  I don't see it as creepy enough to need further explanation; even considering pareidolia, the thing just doesn't look like a "human figure," but just a dark, irregular blob.

The little girl, though.  That one is, to put not to fine a point on it, freakin' creepy.  She even has a sly expression in her eyes.  I'm relatively certain it's not a ghost; I'll admit the possibility, but the likelihood of camera anomalies or an outright hoax is, in my opinion, far greater.

But my emotional brain doesn't agree.  My emotional brain, in fact, says it does not give a rat's ass about camera anomalies and hoaxes.  My emotional brain is saying, "OH DEAR GOD THAT'S A LITTLE GIRL GHOST AND THAT REALLY IS SCARY."

I'd like to be able to say that my rational brain wins the argument every single time, but truth be told, I am primarily an emotional creature -- odd, I know, for someone who is trained in science and who has waved the flag of rationalism at every opportunity.  In fact, I've often wondered if rationalism and skepticism appealed to me because it at least gave me some protection against going around having the screaming meemies every other Tuesday.

So it seems like I have to put up with having two personalities who give every evidence of hating each other's guts.  I guess it could be worse.  At least they don't get into verbal arguments.  Because people already think I'm eccentric enough without my going around acting like this guy.  Or these guys, depending on how you look at it.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is part hard science, part the very human pursuit of truth.  In The Particle at the End of the Universe, physicist Sean Carroll writes about the studies and theoretical work that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson -- the particle Leon Lederman nicknamed "the God Particle" (which he later had cause to regret, causing him to quip that he should have named it "the goddamned particle").  The discovery required the teamwork of dozens of the best minds on Earth, and was finally vindicated when six years ago, a particle of exactly the characteristics Peter Higgs had described almost fifty years earlier was identified from data produced by the Large Hadron Collider.

Carroll's book is a wonderful look at how science is done, and how we have developed the ability to peer into the deepest secrets of the universe.

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

Clean sweep

It will hardly merit mention to regular readers of this blog that, given an odd circumstance, I will look first for a rational, scientific explanation.  Although my field is biology, I know enough of the basics of the other sciences to have a good shot at coming up with a plausible explanation for most of what I see -- or, failing that, at least to recognize when a proposed explanation doesn't make sense.

Which brings me to the strange case of the standing brooms.

Apparently over the last few months, there have been multiple reports of brooms staying standing up after being set on end, sometimes for hours.  People report that they were resistant to falling over even if bumped or pushed, and several folks stated that it felt like a "strange force" was keeping the brooms upright.

Naturally, once this sort of thing starts to be reported, we have a veritable explosion of silly explanations. Here is a sampling of ones I saw on various websites:

• planetary alignment creating a change in the gravitational pull
• solar flares
• static electricity
• Mercury going into retrograde motion
• ghosts
• the position of the Moon
• the position of the broom relative to "ley lines"
• tapping into "psychic energy currents"

Reading the impassioned exponents of each of those so-called explanations made me want to weep softly and bang my head on my computer keyboard, but I decided to gird my loins and see if I could find anyone who had a more sensible approach.  I found a wonderful and clear explanation on the site ThoughtCo, written only a couple of months ago, which attributes the phenomenon to simple physics -- almost any object will stand upright if it has a flat surface of some kind, and you can get the object's center of gravity to stay over its base of support.  Voilà -- a standing broom!

Of course, woo-woos never give up that easily.  Or sometimes at all.  The "comments" section was filled with rants about how no, it wasn't simple physics, because the broom would only stand up on second Tuesdays when the Moon was full and the appropriate words were chanted.  It can't just be a simple explanation!  It can't!

It is a mystery to me why so many people don't find the world as it is sufficiently wonderful and weird -- they feel like they have to make stuff up, push natural phenomena into supernatural molds, turn everything into some kind of paranormal mystery.  Isn't what actual, reputable scientists are currently discovering -- especially in fields like quantum mechanics, cosmology, neurology, and nanotechnology -- awe-inspiring enough?  Why do you need to muddy the whole situation by making stuff up, or coming up with loony explanations for what you see?

Now, mind you, I'm not saying that there aren't things that haven't been explained yet.  There are plenty, and good science is always pushing the envelope of what's known.  But I am confident that any real phenomenon is ultimately going to be explainable by science, because that's what science does.  It may seem supernatural now, but that's just because we don't yet comprehend what's going on.  As Robert Heinlein said, "Magic is science we don't understand yet."

But the brooms, alas, aren't even that; it's just simple mechanics at work.  No need to invoke solar flares or planets in retrograde.   I'm glad, actually; the whole thing brought up memories of Fantasia, which I'd really rather not think about.  That movie scared the hell out of me when I was a kid.

Invasion of the star jelly

Skeptics and rationalists hear the accusation rather frequently that their assumption that everything has a rational explanation is as much a faith as any religion is.  Our conviction that all allegations of paranormal phenomena -- aliens, precognition, ghosts, witchcraft, and so on -- are probably bunk is based on an assumption about how the world works, and because it is an assumption, it is by definition an irrationally-held unprovable assertion.

Take the case of "Star Jelly."  The Lake District, in northern England, just had a bout of Star Jelly a few weeks ago, following a wind and rain storm.  What is it, you might ask?  Not something, I hasten to state, that you'd want to use to accompany your peanut butter sandwich.  Star Jelly is a whitish, gelatinous substance, sometimes found in great globs, out in the woods and hillsides -- usually discovered in the early morning, as if it had appeared suddenly at night. It was first recorded in the 14th century, and has since shown up hundreds of times -- most famously as a two-meter wide disk that showed up near Philadelphia in 1950, inspiring the movie The Blob.

[image courtesy of photographer James Lindsey and the Wikimedia Commons]

What is it, though?  This is where it gets interesting.  Because apparently scientists have not been able to come up with a definitive answer.  The two most common answers -- that it is a mucusy material made by slime molds, or by a species of cyanobacteria called Nostoc -- are unproven.   Analysis of bits of Star Jelly have failed to show any traces of DNA, which you would expect to find if either of the above explanations are true.  Then the woo-woos got involved.  Star Jelly is, they say, one of the following:

• a substance from outer space that falls to Earth during meteor showers.
• an extraterrestrial life form.
• something to do with "chemtrails."
• the residue left behind when an alien probe self-destructs.
• ectoplasm.
• a toxic waste from top-secret government research programs.
• alien semen.

None of those explanations appeal to me, frankly, especially the last one.  You'd think that if aliens spent all of this time and effort to get to Earth, they'd have better things to do once they got here than to jack off outside during a rainstorm in the Lake District.

I'm the first to admit, however, that the scientific explanations that have been proffered thus far haven't really knocked my socks off.  But nonetheless, I'm still convinced that there has to be a reasonable explanation for the appearance of the mysterious substance.  Why is that?

A study published in 2008 in the neurology journal Cortex made the interesting claim that rationalism and a belief in the paranormal both arose from an underlying brain structure issue -- specifically, that belief in paranormal explanations was correlated with a high degree of cerebral asymmetry.  People who held paranormal beliefs, said lead researcher Günter Schulter, had undergone "perturbations in fetal development" that led to differences in the way the cerebrum was wired.  A study the following year at the University of Toronto showed that the religious and non-religious also showed a difference in brain activity, particularly in the region called the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain adapted for coping with anxiety.

So is rationalism merely a product of brain physiology, and do the critics of skepticism have a point in saying that it is itself a religion?  While our assumption that everything has a rational explanation is just that -- an assumption -- we do have one very powerful argument for our views: Rationalism works.  There are countless examples of phenomena that were once unexplained (or given paranormal explanations) that later were, by the application of basic scientific principles, successfully accounted for with no need for recourse to the paranormal.  To cite one example, which got a lot of airtime with the woo-woos -- remember the orange glop that washed ashore in huge quantities near Kivalina, Alaska a while back, prompting speculation very similar to the aforementioned Star Jelly theories?  (No one, however, seemed inclined to attribute its appearance to masturbating aliens, but otherwise the explanations were much the same.)  Well, the scientists kept saying, "We don't know what it is yet, but it has to be a naturally-occurring substance."  And after study, guess what they found?  It was eggs -- the eggs of a perfectly natural marine invertebrate species.  Rationalism wins again!

Or, to quote the inimitable Tim Minchin: "Throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be Not Magic."

As far as the Star Jelly -- I'm not troubled by the fact that they haven't figured it out yet.  I'm confident that with study, this will fall to the methods of science just as so many other mysteries have in the past.  So if my skepticism is just a product of my brain's symmetry, or its overactive anterior cingulate cortex, that's okay by me -- because whatever the cause, it has a pretty good track record of leading me to the right answers.

Analyzing the backfire

One of the most frustrating phenomena for us skeptics is the backfire effect.

The backfire effect is the documented tendency that people, when confronted with logic or evidence against their beliefs, actually hold those beliefs more strongly afterwards.  Being presented with a good argument, apparently, often has exactly the opposite effect from what we'd want.

This is understandably difficult for people like me, whose writing centers around getting people to reconsider their understanding of the universe using the tools of rationality and critical thinking.  But some recently released research has given us at least some comprehension of why the backfire effect occurs.

Entitled "Identity and Epistemic Emotions during Knowledge Revision: A Potential Account for the Backfire Effect," by Gregory J. Trevors, Krista R. Muis, Reinhard Pekrun, Gale M. Sinatra, and Philip H. Winne, the research was published a couple of months ago in the journal Discourse Processes.  The researchers designed an intriguing test to demonstrate not only that the backfire effect occurs (something that has, after all, been known for years) but to give us some understanding of what causes it.

Prior research had suggested that the resistance we have to changing our understanding comes from the fact that being challenged brings up the whole network of why we had those beliefs in the first place.  In effect, it reminds us of why we think what we do instead of triggering us to reconsider.  The result is a mental arms race -- a contest between what we already believed and the new information.  Given that the new information is usually understood more weakly, the old framework usually wins, and the fact of its having been considered and retained gives it the sense of being even more strongly correct than it was before.

The new research by Trevors et al. focuses on a different facet of this frustrating tendency.  What their study shows is that it is the emotion elicited by being challenged that triggers the backfire effect.  When we feel that our beliefs, and therefore (on some level) our core identity, is being attacked, the negative emotions that arise cause us to shy away and cling to our prior understanding.

Specifically, what the team did was to look at people's attitudes toward GMOs, a subject rife with misinformation and sensationalistic appeals to fear.  They first assessed the participants' attitudes toward GMOs, then gave them an assessment to gauge how strongly they felt about the issue of dietary purity.  They then gave the participants a passage to read that argued against the anti-GMO position, and afterwards asked them questions designed to measure not only how (or if) their ideas had changed, but how they responded emotionally while reading the passage.

[image courtesy of photographer Rosalee Yagihara and the Wikimedia Commons]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the anti-GMOers who ranked dietary purity as a strong motivator were the most angered by reading the passage -- and they experienced the backfire effect the most strongly.  The weaker the emotional response, even if the participant was anti-GMO to begin with, the smaller the backfire.

I'm not sure that this is heartening.  So many of the ideas that we skeptics fight are deeply ingrained in people's idea about how the world works -- and therefore, on some level, entangled with their core identity.  To quote the Research Digest of the British Psychological Society, which reviewed the study:

If persuasion is most at risk of backfire when identity is threatened, we may wish to frame arguments so they don’t strongly activate that identity concept, but rather others.  And if, as this research suggests, the identity threat causes problems through agitating emotion, we may want to put off this disruption until later: Rather than telling someone (to paraphrase the example in the study) "you are wrong to think that GMOs are only made in labs because…", arguments could firstly describe cross-pollination and other natural processes, giving time for this raw information to be assimilated, before drawing attention to how this is incompatible with the person's raw belief – a stealth bomber rather than a whizz-bang, so to speak.

Which is hard to do when the emotional charge on both sides is strong, as is so often the case.  The bottom line, though, is that we humans are fundamentally not particularly rational creatures -- something worth remembering when we are trying to change minds.

The bottom line

Sometimes I wonder if what drew me into rationalism was the fact that there is a whole side of my personality that is fanatically devoted to thinking irrationally.

In other words, my skepticism has evolved as a kind of internal defense mechanism.  On the one hand, I am capable of putting together evidence logically, making correct inferences, and thinking calmly and dispassionately about a wide variety of subjects.  On the other, I am simultaneously capable of being a wildly illogical neurotic who misinterprets everything, comes to conclusions that are based in fear and anxiety rather than fact, and if allowed, will run around in circles babbling incoherently in complete freak-out mode.

The whole thing comes up because yesterday I had the Medical Procedure For People Over 50 That Must Not Be Named.  I was, actually, five years overdue for the MPFPO50TMNBN, because I was heavily invested in pretending that it didn't exist.  I have spent the last five years completely convinced that screening and early cancer detection are absolutely critical, and also that the safest bet was to avoid the procedure entirely because if I had it, the doctor would tell me that I had three months to live.

But my wife and two friends finally twisted my arm into making an appointment.  The result was that I spent three weeks following scheduling my visit in an increasing state of panic.  I found myself having thoughts like, "Wow.  I wonder if this is the last time I'll hear this song, given that I have a terminal illness?" and "I hope my family will be able to get over their grief and move on quickly."  Knowing that these were ridiculous things to think -- I have absolutely zero incidence of cancer in my family, back to all eight great-grandparents, I'm not and have never been a smoker, I exercise regularly and eat right -- made no difference at all.

Of course, the closer it got, the worse it got.  Two days ago I had to start what is, honestly, the worst phase of the procedure, which is a thing with the innocent name of "prep."  "Prep" involves drinking ten glasses full of a liquid that appears to be chilled weasel snot.  After the second glass, I was reacting a little like Dumbledore did when Harry Potter had to force him to drink all the liquid from the basin so they could get the Horcrux.

But the taste is not the worst part.  The worst part is that the weasel snot causes a set of symptoms that I will not describe more fully out of respect for the more delicate members of my readership.  Suffices to say that I have it on good authority that "prep" was ruled out by Tomás de Torquemada as a means for inducing the prisoners of the Spanish Inquisition to confess to heresy, on the basis of its being too unpleasant and humiliating.

Anyhow, yesterday morning at 7 AM I was finally done with "prep," and my wife drove me to the hospital for the procedure. I sat in the car watching the trees and houses zoom past, feeling more and more like a condemned prisoner being marched toward the gallows.  I knew I was going to be sedated for the procedure, which was something of a relief; but still, the knowledge of what they could potentially find was absolutely terrifying.

At last, I was on the examining table, an IV in my arm, wearing one of those stylish hospital gowns that seem specifically designed to make it impossible for you to cover up your naughty bits when you move, and trembling like I had hypothermia.  My wife kissed me goodbye ("really goodbye," I thought), the doctor/executioner came in, the nurse put some sedative in my IV...

... and I proceeded to sleep soundly through the entire procedure.  I woke up in the recovery room and was immediately told that the whole thing had gone swimmingly, and that I didn't have to come back for a retest for ten years because I had no sign whatsoever of abnormality.

Well, physical abnormality, anyhow.  Even in my groggy post-sedative state, I was lying there thinking, "What an incredible goober I am.  I spent the last three weeks working myself up into a lather over nothing."  Which is absolutely true, but (I can say from hard experience) will not change my behavior one iota next time.  My rational brain learns from experience; my irrational brain has exactly the opposite reaction.  "Uh-huh," it shouts, flecks of spittle forming in the corners of its mouth, "all this means is that it'll be more likely that you'll be dying next time!  Mark my words!"

So I suppose, given my split personality, it's no real wonder that when I discovered rationalism during my teenage years, I embraced it wholeheartedly.  It seemed like a good way to immunize myself against loopy magical thinking.  And it's worked -- at least most of the time.  But like some latent parasitic infection, the magical thinking is still there, and all it needs is the proper incentive to come roaring back and screaming my calm logic into stunned silence.

In any case, I'm glad my irrational brain was wrong, because not only is it irrational, it's also a dreadful pessimist.  Apparently I will live to write Skeptophilia another day.  Unless, of course, there's something else I'm dying of that the test didn't catch.  Always a possibility, that.

A reason to keep going

This week we are seeing the final installment of the wonderful Washington Post weekly column "What Was Fake On the Internet This Week?"  It's not that the writer, Caitlin Dewey, has run out of material, that a wave of logic and skepticism has swept across the interwebz, rendering her job pointless.

Actually, it's the opposite.  After doing the column for a year and a half, Dewey is feeling defeated.

I understand her despondency, and I won't say I don't feel something of the same myself at times.  Dewey not only feels up against a rising tide of credulous idiocy, but also the inevitable money motive of the clickbait sites -- Now8News, The World News Daily Report, Before It's News, Above Top Secret, Infowars.  These all straddle the line between honest attempts to peddle a viewpoint, however crazy, and a completely pragmatic desire to devise headlines that get people to click the links and activate the advertising revenue it brings.

Dewey writes:

Frankly, this column wasn’t designed to address the current environment.  This format doesn’t make sense.  I’ve spoken to several researchers and academics about this lately, because it’s started to feel a little pointless.  Walter Quattrociocchi, the head of the Laboratory of Computational Social Science at IMT Lucca in Italy, has spent several years studying how conspiracy theories and misinformation spread online, and he confirmed some of my fears: Essentially, he explained, institutional distrust is so high right now, and cognitive bias so strong always, that the people who fall for hoax news stories are frequently only interested in consuming information that conforms with their views — even when it’s demonstrably fake.

Pretty hard to argue that point.

I was talking to my son about the problem yesterday evening, and his initial response was to agree with Dewey.  What she -- and I -- are attempting to do largely amounts to what my dad used to call pissing in a rainstorm.  (Had a way with words, my dad.)  But on reconsideration, Nathan said, "Well, think of it this way.  Let's say that of the people who read your blog, 90% are already rationalists and skeptics, and are only reading it for the amusement value, or to validate their own opinions.  That's still 10% for whom the issues are still in play.  How many hits do you get a day?"

"About a thousand, give or take," I said.

"So, that's a hundred people you're reaching every day who still might be convinced.  It's like the swing states in an election.  They may be few in number, but they're the ones whose votes count the most."

Smart kid.  And as he put it, "Having a hundred swing voters a day read your posts isn't too damn bad, when you think about it."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Couple that with an email I got yesterday from a loyal reader, who had the following to say:

Merry Christmas to you and yours, Gordon.  I want to take this opportunity to tell you how much I appreciate the time you put into being a voice of reason in the whirlwind of craziness.  I can't imagine how you keep plugging away at this, but dammit, someone needs to be saying these things.  Kudos to you, and I hope Skeptophilia is around for many more years.

It's not only the personal validation of Fighting The Good Fight that keeps me going; it's knowing that there are people who are still reading, thinking, and talking, and who might in some small way be inspired to keep it up by reading what I write.  Yes, the internet is full of sensationalist trash and clickbait sites; it's an awfully good conduit for bullshit.  But it also links minds from across the world, and I can't help but feel optimistic about that.  As ZestFinance CEO Douglas Merrill put it, "All of us is smarter than any of us."

So if you're reading this, thank you, whether you've come here because you're undecided, come to have your opinions validated, or come to scoff at someone you disagree with.  If you're still reading and thinking, you're doing what you need to do.  Even if there will always be people in the world who renounce logic and reason, there is nothing to be gained by the logical and reasonable amongst us staying silent.

Deconstructing Wah!

Yesterday, I received a mailing from The Omega Institute, of Rhinebeck, New York, suggesting that I might be interested in taking some of their classes.

Frankly, I suspect that I'd last six hours there before security guards escorted me off the premises for guffawing at the staff.  I first started receiving mailings from them because I was interested in their writing intensives, but (as I found out on my first perusal of their catalog) at least half of their offerings are seriously woo-woo.  One I particularly enjoyed reading about is the use of music in healing, taught by a woman named Wah! (The exclamation point is not me being emphatic; it's part of her name.)  What would possess someone to change her name to Wah! is a mystery in and of itself, but I did go to her website and listen to some of her music, and what I heard seemed to fall into the Overwrought, Therapy-Session-Gone-Horribly-Wrong School of Music.  I didn't find it particularly healing, myself, but maybe the point was that it was healing to her -- I don't honestly know.

A more interesting example, however, are the workshops offered by a fellow named John Perkins that claim to teach you how to shape-shift.  From the description of one of these workshops:

We have entered a time prophesied by many cultures for shapeshifting into higher consciousness.  Polynesian shamans shapeshift through oceans, Amazon warriors transform into anacondas, and Andean birdpeople and Tibetan monks bilocate across mountains.  These shamans have taught John Perkins that shapeshifting - the ability to alter form at will - can be used to create positive change.

Well, okay. I'm willing to accept that some Amazonian shamans believed that they could become anacondas.  I'm also all too willing to accept that certain other, fairly gullible, Amazonian natives believed that the shamans were becoming anacondas.  

But this demands the question, doesn't it, of whether they actually are becoming anacondas.  Some of the disciples of the woo-woo will respond with something like, "reality is what you think it is."  Which works just fine until reality in the form of a baseball bat wallops you in the forehead, at which point you can think it doesn't exist, you can in fact think that you're an Andean birdperson, but what you really will be is a confused, non-Andean, ordinary person with a concussion and a big old dent in your head.

It is amazing the lengths to which the woo-woos of the world will go to support their beliefs.  My wife Carol, in her nursing program, had to take a course in "alternatives to traditional medicine."  Her own take on this was that if it had been about the role of belief in the efficacy of medicine, that would have been fine; but they didn't stop there.  They started out with therapies for which there is at least some experimental support (such as acupuncture) and from there took a flying leap out into the void, landing amongst such ridiculous and discredited ideas as homeopathy, chakras, and healing through crystal energies.  This last one led to a spectacle that was (according to Carol) acutely embarrassing to watch, wherein the teacher held a crystal hanging from a string over a volunteer's head, to show that the crystal could pick up the volunteer's "life energy" and begin to swing of its own volition.  There was no response from the crystal (surprise!!!) for some minutes, while the volunteer (who was probably seriously regretting raising his hand) and the students in the audience sat fidgeting and looking at each other.  Then, after about ten minutes, the crystal moved.  Hallelujah!  The theory is vindicated!

All of which once again brings up the subject of confirmation bias, a cognitive bias that we here at Skeptophilia have seen all too often.  Basically, if you've already decided on your conclusion, you only pay attention to any evidence (however minuscule) that confirms your idea, and everything else is ignored.  Any movement of the crystal had to be due to the subject's "energy field" -- other hypotheses (such as that the teacher's arm was getting a bit tired after holding the crystal up there for ten minutes, and he moved his hand a little, causing the crystal to swing) are not even acknowledged.

You see what you want to see.  And, if you're lucky, you get to make a bunch of poor college students sit there while you're doing it.

So far, I am sounding awfully self-confident, as I have a tendency to do.  But if I'm being totally honest, I have to look at my own ideas in the same light.  One of the great myths of the last hundred years is, I think, that somehow everyone is biased except for the scientists -- that the scientists have this blinding clarity of vision, that they are objective and unbiased and therefore have cornered the market on truth.  

While there are probably scientists who believe this, the truth of the matter is that most scientists are well aware of their biases.  We skeptics, too, see what we want to see.  

First, we have to believe that the scientific way of knowing leads us closer to the truth -- which statement, of course, you can't prove.  Furthermore, if you're a researcher, you're not approaching a question with a completely open mind; you already have (at least to some extent) figured out what you think is going on, and so when you design your measurement equipment and your experimental protocol, you do so in a way to find what you think it is that you're going to find.  If there's something else going on, you might not even see it unless you're extraordinarily lucky.  Perhaps that's why serious paradigm shifts have so often happened because of some random piece of evidence, from an unexpected source, that someone (often by accident) notices.  It's how Kepler found out that planetary orbits are elliptical; it's how plate tectonics was discovered; it's how penicillin was discovered.

Science doesn't proceed by clear, logical little steps, by people adding brick after brick to an edifice whose plan is already well known and laid out on the table.  Like most of the other things in this world, it proceeds by jerky fits and starts, false turns, and backtracking.  The "scientific method" no more explains how we've accrued the knowledge we have than "life energies" explain the movement of a crystal hanging from a string.

So then, why am I a skeptic?  Why don't I just go and join Wah! and John Perkins?  (Just think, I could come up with a pretentious single syllable name with a punctuation mark, too!  I think I'd be "Huh?")  For me, the single strength of science as a world view is its ability to self-correct.  You claim that plate tectonics exists?  Okay -- anyone with the equipment, time, and inclination can go out there and verify the evidence themselves.  If an experiment is not found to be repeatable (such as the "cold fusion" debacle), it's not explained away with some foolishness like "the energy fields were being interfered with by the chakras of your aura" -- the whole idea is simply abandoned.  The procedures, equipment, and outcomes are out there for peer review, and if they are found wanting, the theory is modified, altered, or scrapped entirely.

Try that with the healing energy of music.  I bet if several of you were sick, and I played some of Wah!'s music for you, some of you would get better.  Some of you might get sicker.  (I suspect I'd be in the latter category.)  And for those of you who got well, how could we be certain that it was the music that was responsible?  Because Wah! says so?  Because the idea that music could have a healing energy appeals to you?  If I've learned anything in my fifty-five years on this planet, it's that there seems to be no connection between ideas I find appealing and ideas that are true.

If anything, the opposite seems to be the case.  I know I'd love it if Bigfoot and aliens were real, faster-than-light travel was not only possible but easy, and I could do magic à la Harry Potter.  Unfortunately, thus far I'm batting zero on all that stuff.

Anyhow, as usual, I've probably pissed off large quantities of people who are into homeopathy, crystal energies, numerology, astrology, faith healing, and so on.  But I'm reminded of a quote from (of all people) C. S. Lewis, whose wonderful character Mr. MacPhee said in That Hideous Strength, "If anything wants Andrew MacPhee to believe in its existence, I'll be obliged if it will present itself in full daylight, with a sufficient number of witnesses present, and not get shy if you hold up a camera or a thermometer."

To which I say, "hear, hear."  On the other hand, if I get visited tonight by an anaconda, I suppose it will serve me right.

Wrongness

I get a lot of negative comments.

It comes with the territory, I suppose, and I knew when I started writing this blog four 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.  (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 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 (e.g. politics), 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.)

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 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 ten 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 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 own up 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.

Dogma vs. science vs. history

I don't, for the most part, frequent religious blogs and websites.  As I've mentioned before, the majority of religious writers are starting from a stance so completely opposite from mine that there is barely any common ground on which even to have a productive argument.  So I generally only address religious issues when they either stray into the realm of science (as with the conflict over evolution), or when they begin to intrude on social or political realms (such as Dana Perino's claim earlier this year that atheists should leave the United States).  Otherwise, the religious folks can entertain themselves all they like about the meaning of scripture and the nature of god, and I'll happily entertain myself with the equally reality-based discussions about Bigfoot and aliens.

But just a couple of days ago, Catholic blogger Stacy Trascanos came out with a claim that is so bizarre that I felt like I had to respond to it.  In her piece entitled, "Without Dogma, Science is Lost," Trascanos makes the rather mindboggling claim that not only does science owe its origins to religion, science needs religion today -- as a fact-checker:

People also wrongly assume that dogma restricts science too much.  On the contrary, divine revelation nurtured and guarded a realistic outlook in Old Testament cultures, in early Christianity, and in the Middle Ages.  This Trinitarian and Incarnational worldview was, and still is, different from any pantheism or other monotheism, and it provided the “cultural womb” needed to nurture the “birth” of science...

To do science well, a working knowledge of Catholic dogma is necessary.  To know what directly contradicts the dogmas of revealed religion and to make such distinctions guides the scientist.  The accomplishments of the medieval Catholic scholars demonstrate this abundantly. You’ve heard the axiom, “Truth cannot contradict truth.” The Scientific Revolution is evidence of it...  (S)cience needs to be guided by faith, and that the Catholic Church has a legitimate right and authority to veto scientific conclusions that directly contradict her dogma.  This is not about the Church being against science, but about the Church being a guardian of truth.

I probably wouldn't have been as shocked as I was by all of this if I hadn't read Trascanos's bio at the bottom of the page, in which she says she has a Ph.D. in chemistry.  So these aren't the rantings of someone who has never studied science; Trascanos herself is a trained scientist, who gave up a career as a research chemist to pursue an M.A. in theology.

But a deeper problem with all of this is that she's simply factually incorrect.  Rationalism, and the scientific method it gave birth to, started with people like Anaxagoras and Democritus and Thales, long before Christianity began.  The idea that we could find out about the laws of nature by studying lowly matter was profoundly repulsive to early church fathers, who by and large took the mystical approach -- also, interestingly, launched prior to Christianity, by people like Pythagoras -- that the road to knowledge came from simply thinking, not experimentation.  (The desperation of medieval astronomers to make planetary orbits conform to perfect circles and the "five Platonic solids" comes largely from this approach.)

And as far as Christianity's acceptance of, and nurturing of, science, you only have to look at the story of Hypatia to realize what a crock that is.  Hypatia was a philosopher, teacher, mathematician, and astronomer in 4th century Egypt, who ran afoul of Bishop Cyril of Alexandria for her "ungodly teachings."  On his orders, she was kidnapped on the way home from the Library of Alexandria, and was cut to pieces with sharpened roof tiles.  Her body was burned.

Cyril went on to be canonized.

The problem, of course, is one we've encountered before; science and religion approach knowledge two completely incompatible ways.  Science bases its understanding on evidence; if new evidence arises, the understanding must change.  Religion, by and large (although there are some exceptions), bases its knowledge on revelation and inward reflection, not to mention authority.  Change in scientific understand can occur at lightning speed; change in religious understanding is slow, and frequently met with much resistance from adherents.  As Trascanos said, "...divine revelation nurtured and guarded a realistic outlook in Old Testament cultures, in early Christianity, and in the Middle Ages."  I would argue that because of this, self-correction seldom occurs in religion, because any alteration in belief is much more likely to be looked upon by the powers-that-be as an error of faith.

But the bottom line is, Trascanos is right about one thing; if science and religion come into conflict, there is no reconciliation possible.  You have to choose one or the other, because their decision-making protocols are inherently incompatible.  Trascanos, despite her scientific training, has chosen religion -- a decision I find frankly baffling, given the fact that science's track record in uncovering the truth is pretty unbeatable.

Still, I'm left with feeling like I still don't quite get how an obviously well-educated person as Trascanos can make claims that are so clearly counterfactual.  The thesis she so passionately defends is contradicted not only by history, but by science itself -- given the number of unscientific stances that were once considered "revealed truth" by the church, and which have since been abandoned.  (The whole heliocentric/geocentric argument is so well-known as to be a cliché; but check out this article, which attributes much of Galileo's troubles with the Vatican as coming from his stance on the existence of atoms [they exist] and his explanation of why things float in water [low density].) 

But all other considerations aside, we're back to the condition of agree-to-disagree.  However Trascanos wants to try to reconcile science with religion, she has arrived at the appropriate conclusion of falling on one side of the fence or the other.  It's just that she's chosen a different side than I have (actually, I tend to think that the other side of the fence doesn't exist, but that's an argument for a different day).  And now, I really will leave behind the shaky ground of religion and philosophy, and return to my happy place, populated by Bigfoot and aliens.

To each his own, I suppose.

Spinning statues and rational explanations

Sometimes I run into the objection that my acceptance of rationalism is as much of a faith-based statement as anyone's declaration of belief in a religion.

In one sense, this is true.  I have concluded that the world is explainable through rational means not by any rational argument.  The only way that would work is if you've already accepted that rational arguments lead to the truth, tying you up in a neat little bit of circular reasoning.  On the other hand, we rationalists do have one thing going for us; scientific rationalism has a pretty good track record of making accurate predictions about how the world works.  Say whatever else you like about it, science certainly does provide consistent explanations that line up well with whatever evidence we have.  As Tim Minchin put it, "Out of all of the great mysteries ever solved, none of them have ever turned out to be magic."

It's telling, I think, that even the most diehard religious folks accept most of science's conclusions and technology's innovations -- except the specific few that happen to contradict their religious convictions.  Interesting, isn't it, that the scientific method can lead to right answers in the case of airplanes, computers, and modern medicine, and wildly wrong ones when it comes to, for example, evolution?

In any case, my main argument for rationalism is: it seems to work.  This is why, when I am presented with a mystery, I immediately jump to one conclusion -- there has to be a rational explanation.  I may not know what it is; I might never figure it out.  But I am certain that there is a reasonable, scientific explanation for what we're seeing.

Take, for instance, the case of the spinning Egyptian relic.  

Here's how the story was reported in the Manchester Evening News:

An ancient Egyptian statue has spooked museum bosses – after it mysteriously started to spin round in a display case.

The 10-inch tall relic, which dates back to 1800 BC, was found in a mummy’s tomb and has been at the Manchester Museum for 80 years.

But in recent weeks, curators have been left scratching their heads after they kept finding it facing the wrong way.  Experts decided to monitor the room on time-lapse video and were astonished to see it clearly show the statuette spinning 180 degrees – with nobody going near it.

The statue of a man named Neb-Senu is seen to remain still at night but slowly rotate round during the day.

Now scientists are trying to explain the phenomenon, with TV boffin Brian Cox among the experts being consulted.

Scientists who explored the Egyptian tombs in the 1920s were popularly believed to be struck by a ‘curse of the Pharaohs’ – and Campbell Price, a curator at the museum on Oxford Road, said he believes there may be a spiritual explanation to the spinning statue.

Egyptologist Mr Price, 29, said: “I noticed one day that it had turned around. I thought it was strange because it is in a case and I am the only one who has a key.

“I put it back but then the next day it had moved again. We set up a time-lapse video and, although the naked eye can’t see it, you can clearly see it rotate on the film. The statuette is something that used to go in the tomb along with the mummy.

“Mourners would lay offerings at its feet. The hieroglyphics on the back ask for ‘bread, beer and beef’.

“In Ancient Egypt they believed that if the mummy is destroyed then the statuette can act as an alternative vessel for the spirit. Maybe that is what is causing the movement.”

Oh, come on.

First of all, if this is a curse, it's a pretty pathetic one.  Can't you see Neb-Senu, back almost 4,000 years ago, saying as he's on his deathbed, "If my statue ends up on a museum shelf in England, and no one brings me bread, beer, and beef, I hereby pronounce the following curse: my spirit will go there, and make the statue slowly turn round and round!  Ha!  That will sure show them!"

I mean, come on.  If this is some sort of "Mummy's Curse" kind of thing, you'd think he could do better than that.

Second, there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for the statue's movement, which was outlined in some detail on the site Metabunk.  Here's a brief quote that sums up what's going on:

The statue is hard uneven stone, and the glass shelf is very hard and perfectly flat. When two hard substances are in contact with each other, then there's not much friction because there are limited points of contact. I suspect that the base of the statue is uneven, which allows it to tilt and pivot very slightly from the vertical vibration from people walking by. The shelf is very slightly tilted towards the front, so the statue rotates until the center of gravity is at the lowest point, and then it stops.

This, by the way, also explains why the statue only rotates during the day, and not at night -- when the museum is empty.

Now, am I certain that this is what is going on?  No, but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than Campbell Price's conjecture that Neb-Senu's wandering ghost is slowly turning his statue around.  And the nifty thing about a scientific explanation is that it's testable.  The whole thing could be settled once and for all by putting a rubber mat between the statue and the shelf.  If the vibration theory is correct, the statue should stop moving -- whereas there's no reason to suspect that a rubber mat would foil a sufficiently determined ancient Egyptian ghost.  ("Dammit!  They brought out the rubber mat!  My curse is useless!  Useless, I tell you!  Now what will I do?")

So, my general feeling is: rationalism wins again.  But, of course, you knew I'd say that.

The stories we tell ourselves

Often, when I respond to a piece of art work, it's because of the stories that it evokes in my brain.

When I was in college, and took an art appreciation class, I fell in love with Édouard Manet's painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.  And it wasn't because of any knowledge of French Impressionism, and how Manet's work fit into the artistic movements of the time; nor was it really about the style, or the skill of the painter, although those certainly played a role in the capacity of the painting to touch me.  The whole thing was about emotion, and how it brought stories bubbling up from the depths of my brain.

Who is this girl with the despairing expression?  I imagined her as a country girl who'd come to the city, allured by its lights and excitement, and is having to support herself as a barmaid -- and now she's there, trapped and disillusioned, her mind and her heart a million miles away.  The painting struck me then as terribly sad.  And it still does.

All of this comes up because of a conversation I had with a friend who is working toward his Ph.D. in philosophy.  His dissertation is on the subject of phenomenological idealism, which is (as far as I understand it) the idea that the universe is a construct of the mind -- that reality is solely experiential, and may or may not have any external existence.  (Kant said that we "cannot approach the thing in itself" -- all we know is our experience of it, so that's what reality is.)

Anyhow, my friend told me a bit about what he's studying.  I did try my best to understand it, although I don't know how successful I was -- and it must be admitted that I am not entirely certain I have the brains required for such an esoteric subject.  But insofar as I understood him, I found myself disagreeing with him almost completely.

That said, I'm not going to try to craft an argument against idealism.  For one thing, I am wildly unqualified to do so.  My background in philosophy is thin at best, and my attempts at understanding classical philosophy in college were, on the whole, failures.  What interests me more is the immediate reaction I had to my friend's description of his philosophical stance.  It wasn't an argument; it was purely an emotional reaction that, if I put it into words, was simply, "Oh, now, come on.  That can't be right."

So I started thinking about why people respond the way they do to belief systems.  Why, apart from "I was taught that way growing up," does anyone believe in a particular view of the universe?  Why does a theistic model appeal to some, and others find it repellent?  Why do I find materialism "self-evident" (which it clearly is not -- from what my philosopher friend has told me, it's no more self-evident than any other view of the world)?  Why, within a particular religious worldview, do some of us gravitate toward viewing the deity as harsh and legalistic, and others as gentle, kind, and forgiving?

I suspect that it all comes down to the emotional reactions we have.  I'd bet that very few of us ever do the kind of analysis of our concept of the universe that my friend has done; for the vast bulk of humanity, "it feels right" is about as far as we get.

And I can lump myself in with that unthinking majority.  I'm drawn to the mechanistic, predictable, external reality of materialism, but not because I have any cogent arguments that that worldview is correct and the others are false.  I accept it because it's a solution to understanding the world that I can live with (and that's even considering the bizarre, non-intuitive bits, like quantum mechanics).  But for all that, I can't prove that this view is the right one.  Being locked inside my own skull, even the solipsist's answer -- that he, alone, in the world exists, and everything else is the product of his mind -- is irrefutable.  Why don't I believe that, then?  Because it doesn't "seem right."  Hardly a rigorous argument.

Now, I still think you can make mistakes; once you've accepted a rationalist view of the world (for example), you can still commit errors of logic, misevaluate evidence, come to erroneous conclusions.  But why is the rationalist worldview itself right?  You can't argue that it is, using logic -- because to accept that logic is valid, you already have to accept that rationalism works.  It's pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.   The only reason to accept rationalism is because it somehow, on a gut level, makes sense to you that this is the way the world works.

It's a little like my experience with art.  A Bar at the Folies-Bergère appeals to me because of the emotions that it evokes, and the tales I tell myself about it.  I wonder if the same is true in the larger sense -- that we are drawn to a worldview not because it is logically defensible, but simply because it allows us to sleep at night.  Beyond that, all we do is tell each other stories, and hope like hell that no one asks us too many questions.