Rain Woman

I was asked a curious question by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, one that intrigued me enough I thought it was worth devoting an entire post to.

Here's the relevant bit of the email (reproduced here with permission):

I know you're not superstitious, and you've written more than once about the necessity of looking for scientific (or at least logical) explanations for things that might seem paranormal.  What I'm more curious about, though, is how you actually feel.  You've probably heard about objects that are haunted or cursed or bring devastating bad luck to their owners.  Sure, your rational brain might be certain that the idea of a cursed object is stupid, but would your emotions agree? 

Let me put it this way; let's say there was something that had a wide reputation for carrying a dangerous curse with it.  Multiple people had reported scary stuff associated with it.  Would you be willing to have it in your house?  Late at night, when you were alone in the house, wouldn't you experience at least a little bit of doubt that maybe you'd put yourself in danger?

So put my money where my mouth is, eh?  No armchair skepticism allowed.  Head into the attic of the haunted house at night and see if I can still talk so blithely about rationalism.

It's an interesting question, because all my life I've felt like I had two brains -- an emotional one and a logical one -- and they are not on speaking terms.  I've sometimes wondered if I went into science as a way of dealing with the fact that my emotions are constantly picking me up by the tail and swinging me around.  And I'll admit he has a point.  All the rational skepticism in the world doesn't make it any less scary when you're in the house alone and you hear what sounds like the creak of a footstep upstairs.

I asked him if he had any particular cursed object in mind -- that it sounded like he was thinking of something specific.  He admitted that this was spot-on.  "Have you heard of Rain Woman?" he asked.

I hadn't, so he told me the story, which I checked out, and it appears to be true -- at least the non-paranormal bits.

As far as the paranormal bits, I'll leave you to decide.

In 1996, a Ukrainian painter named Svetlana Telets was sitting in front of a blank canvas, and an image appeared in her mind of a pale-faced woman wearing a broad-brimmed dark hat, eyes closed, standing in the rain.  Telets found the image strangely compelling, and she began to sketch it out -- later telling a friend, "I felt like someone was controlling my hand as I drew."  She spent the next month refining and adding color, and the result was Rain Woman.

Telets displayed the piece in a local gallery, and it attracted a lot of (positive) attention, garnering several offers of purchase.  She sold the painting to the highest bidder -- only to have the purchaser request a return and refund shortly afterward.  It had triggered waking nightmares, they said, of a figure following them around, always a little out of view, and far enough away that details weren't easily visible.  The figure, they said, never let itself get close.

Immediately put me in mind of the mysterious old woman who follows Ruby Sunday around, in one of the best and most atmospheric Doctor Who episodes ever -- the shiver-inducing "73 Yards."

Telets bought the painting back, and sold it again -- only to have the same thing happen.  It went through multiple purchasers over the next few years, always with the same result.  One terrified temporary owner even offered to pay Telets an additional half of the purchase price to take it back, saying that ever since buying the painting he'd seen white eyes suddenly opening in ordinary objects, eyes that watched his every move.

Eyes no one else was able to see.

In 2008 the painting was purchased by musician Sergei Skachkov, and he kept it, although he reported that his wife made him put the piece into storage after repeatedly seeing a ghostly figure walking around their house at night.

The Russian Orthodox priest Father Vitaly Goloskevich, who knows Telets and several of the temporary owners of the painting, said he is in no doubt that there's something supernatural going on here.  "A person has a spirit and a soul," Father Goloskevich said.  "There are truly spiritual works of art, and there are soulful ones.  And the painting you are talking about represents just such soulful art.  And it doesn't come from God...  The artist puts into the work the mood in which he was at the time of his creation.  And it is not known who led Svetlana Telets at the moment she created Rain Woman."

So, my correspondent asked; would I be willing to purchase Rain Woman and hang it on the wall in my house?

My initial reaction was, "Of course!"  First, I think the painting is kind of cool.  Second, having something with such a strange reputation would be a great conversation starter when my wife and I have guests (being diehard introverts, not a frequent occurrence, but still).  I have a nice collection of beautifully-illustrated Tarot decks, an avocation which comes from the same impulse.

But that wasn't what my correspondent asked.  How would I feel about having the painting in my house -- especially if I was alone with it on a stormy night?  Would my breezy rationalism be quite so staunch then?

If I'm being entirely honest, probably not.  It's not that I think anything real and paranormal is going on with Rain Woman; I suspect the odd occurrences reported by purchasers come from a combination of superstitiousness and suggestibility.  Once one person has claimed the painting is haunted, it makes it more likely that others will experience the same sort of thing (or at least, that they'll attribute anything odd to the painting's evil effects).

But honestly, deep down I'm as suggestible as the next guy.  It's part of being human.  Our distant ancestors' brains evolved to interpret anything out of the ordinary as being potentially dangerous; the well-worn example is that if you're a proto-hominid on the African savanna, it's better to freak out over a rustle in the grass when it's only the wind than not to freak out if it turns out to be a hungry lion.

We're all weird amalgams of logic and emotion, aren't we?  I'm reminded of the probably-apocryphal story about the brilliant physicist Niels Bohr.  Bohr was being interviewed by a reporter shortly after he won the Nobel Prize, and the reporter noticed that in Bohr's office, over the door, there was a horseshoe nailed -- with the points upward, of course, to "catch the good luck."  The reporter said, "Professor Bohr, you are not going to tell me that a scientist of your caliber believes that horseshoes bring you good luck."

"Of course not," Bohr deadpanned back.  "But I'm told that horseshoes bring you good luck whether you believe in them or not."

So yeah.  I say I'd be thrilled to own Rain Woman, but truthfully, I'd probably be just as likely to have scary dreams about her as the other owners.  But that's the benefit of having a basically rational mindset, isn't it?  Okay, I'd be scared in the moment, but skepticism is a kind of barrier that stops you from racing too far down that path.

Maybe I'd see ghosts at night just like the other owners did, I dunno.  But what I'm pretty sure of is that the next morning, when the sun was out and the skies were clear, I'd be able to laugh about it -- and leave the painting hanging on the wall.

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Letters from the home world

In choosing topics for this blog, I try not to have it simply devolve into taking random pot shots at crazies.  Loony ideas are a dime a dozen, and given the widespread access to computers that is now available, just about anyone who wants one can have a website.  Given these two facts, it's inevitable that wacky webpages grow like wildflowers on the fields of the internet.

When an alert reader brought this one to my attention, however, I just couldn't help myself.  Entitled "Did Humans Come From Another Planet?", it represents one of the best examples I've ever seen of adding up a bunch of facts and obtaining a wildly wrong answer.  The only ones who, in my experience, do this even better are the people who write for the Institute for Creation Research, and to be fair, they've had a lot longer to practice being completely batshit crazy, so it's only to be expected.

Anyhow, the contention of the "Did Humans Come From Another Planet?" people can be summed up by, "Yes. Duh."  We are clearly aliens, and I'm not just talking about such dubiously human individuals as Mitch McConnell.  All of us, the article claims, descend from an extraterrestrial race.  But how can we prove it?

Well, here's the argument, if I can dignify it with that term.

1. Human babies are born completely unable to take care of themselves, and remain that way for a long time.  By comparison, other primate babies, despite similar gestation periods, develop much more rapidly.
2. In a lower gravitational pull, humans could fall down without hurting themselves, "just like a cat or a dog."
3. Humans have biological clocks, and in the absence of exposure to the external day/night cycle, they come unlocked from "real time" and become free-running.  So, clearly we came from a planet that had a different rotational period.
4. Humans don't have much body hair.  At least most of us don't, although I do recall once going swimming and seeing a guy who had so much back hair that he could have singlehandedly given rise to 80% of the Bigfoot sightings in the eastern United States.
5. Geneticists have found that all of humanity descends from a common ancestor approximately 350,000 years ago; but the first modern humans didn't exist until 100,000 years ago.  So... and this is a direct quote, that I swear I am not making up: "In what part of the universe was he [Homo sapiens] wandering for the remaining 250 thousand years?"

Now, take all of this, and add:

1. Some nonsense about Sirius B and the Dogon tribe, including a bizarre contention that the Sun and Sirius once formed a double-star system, because this "doesn't contradict the laws of celestial mechanics;"
2. The tired old "we only use 3% of our brains" contention;
3. Adam and Eve; and
4. the ancient Egyptians.

Mix well, and bake for one hour at 350 degrees.

The result, of course, is a lovely hash contending that we must come from a planet with a mild climate where we could run around naked all the time, not to mention a lower gravitational pull so we could just sort of bounce when we fall down, plenty of natural food to eat, and "no geomagnetic storms."  I'm not sure why the last one is important, but it did remind me of all of the "cosmic storms" that the folks in Lost in Space used to run into.  And they also came across lots of weird, quasi-human aliens, while they were out there wandering around.  So there you are.

In any case, that's today's example of adding 2 + 2 and getting 439.  All of this just goes to show that even if you have access to a lot of factual information, not to mention the internet, you still need to know how to put that factual information together in order to get the right answer.  For that, you need science, not just a bunch of nutty beliefs, assumptions, and guesses.  So, as usual, science FTW.

Which, of course, applies to a good many more situations than just this one, but as I've already given a nod to the Institute for Creation Research, I'll just end here.

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Author and biochemist Camilla Pang was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at age eight, and spent most of her childhood baffled by the complexities and subtleties of human interactions.  She once asked her mother if there was an instruction manual on being human that she could read to make it easier.

Her mom said no, there was no instruction manual.

So years later, Pang recalled the incident and decided to write one.

The result, Explaining Humans: What Science Can Teach Us About Life, Love, and Relationships, is the best analysis of human behavior from a biological perspective since Desmond Morris's classic The Naked Ape.  If you're like me, you'll read Pang's book with a stunned smile on your face -- as she navigates through common, everyday behaviors we all engage in, but few of us stop to think about.

If you're interested in behavior or biology or simply agree with the Greek maxim "gnothi seauton" ("know yourself"), you need to put this book on your reading list.  It's absolutely outstanding.

[Note:  if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Motivated reasoning

Last week there was a paper released in the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences called, "Epistemic Rationality: Skepticism Toward Unfounded Beliefs Requires Sufficient Cognitive Ability and Motivation to be Rational."  Understandably enough, the title made me sit up and take notice, as this topic has been my bread and butter for years.  The authors, Tomas Ståhl (of the University of Illinois) and Jan-Willem van Prooijen (of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), describe their work thus:

Why does belief in the paranormal, conspiracy theories, and various other phenomena that are not backed up by evidence remain widespread in modern society?  In the present research we adopt an individual difference approach, as we seek to identify psychological precursors of skepticism toward unfounded beliefs.  We propose that part of the reason why unfounded beliefs are so widespread is because skepticism requires both sufficient analytic skills, and the motivation to form beliefs on rational grounds...  [W]e show that analytic thinking is associated with a lower inclination to believe various conspiracy theories, and paranormal phenomena, but only among individuals who strongly value epistemic rationality...  We also provide evidence suggesting that general cognitive ability, rather than analytic cognitive style, is the underlying facet of analytic thinking that is responsible for these effects.

The first bit is hardly a surprise, and is the entire raison d'être of my Critical Thinking class.  Skepticism is not only a way of looking at the world, it's a skill; and like any skill, it takes practice.  Adopting a rational approach to understanding the universe means learning some of the ways in which irrationality occurs, and figuring out how to avoid them.

The second part, though, is more interesting, but also more insidious: in order to be a skeptic, you have to be motivated toward rational thought -- and value it.

Aristotle Teaching Alexander the Great (Charles Laplante, 1866) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

This explains the interaction I had with one of my AP Biology students many years ago.  Young-Earth creationists don't, by and large, take my AP class.  My background is in evolutionary genetics, so most of them steer clear, sensing that they're in hostile territory.  (I will say in my own defense that I never treat students in a hostile manner; and the few times I have had a creationist take my class, it was a positive experience, and kept me on my toes to present my arguments as cogently as possible.)

This young lady, however, stood out.  She was absolutely brilliant, acing damn near every quiz I gave.  She had a knack for understanding science that was nothing short of extraordinary.  So we went through the unit on genetics, and I presented the introduction to the unit on evolution, in which I laid out the argument supporting the theory of evolution, explaining how it fits every bit of hard evidence we've got.

That day, she asked if she could talk to me after class.  I said, "Sure," and had no guess about what she might have wanted to talk to me about.

I was absolutely flabbergasted when she said, "I just want you to know that I'm a creationist."

I must have goggled at her for a moment -- after (at that point) two decades as a teacher, I had pretty good control over my facial expressions, but not that good.  She hastily added, "I'm not saying I'm going to argue with you, or that I'm refusing to learn the material, or anything.  I just wanted you to know where I was coming from."

I said, "Okay.  That's fine, and thanks for being up front with me.  But do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions?"

She said, "Not at all."

So I asked her where the argument I'd presented in class fell apart for her.  What part of the evidence or logical chain didn't work?

She said, "None of it.  It's all logical and makes perfect sense."

I must have goggled again, because she continued, "I understand your argument, and it's logically sound.  I don't disbelieve in the evidence you told us about.  But I still don't believe in evolution."

The upshot of it was that for her, belief and rationality did not intersect.  She believed what she believed, and if rational argument contradicted it, that was that.  She didn't argue, she didn't look for counterevidence; she simply dismissed it.  Done.

The research by Ståhl and van Prooijen suggests that the issue with her is that she had no motivation to apply rationality to this situation.  She certainly wasn't short of cognitive ability; she outperformed most of the students in the class (including, I might add, on the test on evolutionary theory).  But there was no motive for her to apply logic to a situation that for her, was beyond the reach of logic.  You got there by faith, or not at all.

To this day, and of all the students I've taught, this young lady remains one of the abiding puzzles.  Her ability to compartmentalize her brain that way -- I'll apply logic here, and it gives me the right answers, but not here, because it'll give me the wrong answers -- is so foreign to my way of thinking that it borders on the incomprehensible.  For me, if science, logic, and rationality work as a way of teasing out fact from falsehood, then -- they work.  You can't use the same basic principles and have them alternate between giving you true and false conclusions, unless the method itself is invalid.

Which, interestingly, is not what she was claiming.

And this is a difficulty that I have a hard time seeing any way to surmount.  Anyone can be taught some basic critical thinking skills; but if they have no motivation to apply them, or (worse) if pre-existing religious or political beliefs actually give them a motivation not to apply them, the argument is already lost.

So that's a little depressing.  Sorry.  I'm still all for teaching cognitive skills (hell, if I wasn't, I'm seriously in the wrong profession).  But what to do about motivation is a puzzle.  It once again seems to me that like my student's attitude toward faith-based belief, being motivated to use logic to understand your world is something about which you have to make a deliberate choice.

You get there because you choose to accept rational argument, or you don't get there at all.

Right in the gut

I know I've said it before, but it bears saying again: the strength of science lies in its reliance on hard evidence as the sine qua non of understanding.

I've tried to embrace this outlook myself, insofar as a fallible and biased human can do so.  Okay, so every day I poke fun at all sorts of odd beliefs, sometimes pissing people off.  But you know what?  You want to convince me, show me some reliable evidence.  For any of the claims I've scoffed at.  Bigfoot.  Ghosts.  ESP.  Astrology.  Tarot divination.  Homeopathy.

Even the existence of god.

I'm convinceable.  All you have to do is show me one piece of irrefutable, incontrovertible evidence, and I'm sold.

The problem is, to my unending frustration and complete bafflement, most people don't approach the world that way.  Instead, they rely on their gut -- which seems to me to be a really good way to get fooled.  I'm a pretty emotional guy, and I know my gut is unreliable.

Plus, science just doesn't seem to obey common sense at times.  As an example, consider the Theory of Relativity.  Among its predictions:

• The speed of light is the ultimate universal speed limit.
• Light moves at the same speed in every reference frame (i.e., your own speed relative to the beam of light doesn't matter; you'll still measure it as traveling at 300,000,000 meters per second).
• When you move, time slows down.  The faster you move, the slower time goes.  So if you took off in a rocket ship to Alpha Centauri at 95% of the speed of light, when you came back from your trip you'd find that while twelve years or so would have passed for you, hundreds of years would have passed on Earth.
• When you move, to a stationary person your mass increases and your length in the direction of motion contracts.  The faster you move, the more pronounced this effect becomes.

And so on.  But the kicker: all of these predictions of the Theory of Relativity have been experimentally verified.  As counterintuitive as this might be, that's how the world is.  (In fact, relativistic effects have to be taken into account to have accurate GPS.)

None of which we would know now if people relied solely on their gut to tell them how things work.

Despite all this, there are people who still rely on impulse and intuition to tell them what's true and what's not.  And now a study jointly conducted by researchers at Ohio State University and the University of Michigan has shown conclusively that if you do this, you are more prone to being wrong.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Kelly Garrett and Brian Weeks decided to look into the connection between how people view evidence, and their likelihood of falling for incorrect information.  They looked at survey data from almost 3,000 people, in particular focusing on whether or not the respondents agreed with the following statements:

• I trust my gut to tell me what’s true and what’s not. 
• Evidence is more important than whether something feels true.
• Facts are dictated by those in power.

They then correlated the responses with the participants' likelihood of believing a variety of conspiracy theories.  Unsurprisingly, they found that the people who relied on gut feelings and emotions to determine the truth were far more likely to fall for conspiracies and outright untruths.

"Misperceptions don’t always arise because people are blinded by what their party or favorite news outlet is telling them," Weeks said.  "While trusting your gut may be beneficial in some situations, it turns out that putting faith in intuition over evidence leaves us susceptible to misinformation."

"People sometimes say that it’s too hard to know what’s true anymore," Garrett said.  "That’s just not true.  These results suggest that if you pay attention to evidence you’re less likely to hold beliefs that aren’t correct...  This isn’t a panacea – there will always be people who believe conspiracies and unsubstantiated claims – but it can make a difference."

I'd say it makes all the difference.  And in the current political environment -- where accusations of "fake news" are thrown around right and left, and what people consider to be the truth depends more on political affiliation than it does on rational fact -- it's more than ever absolutely essential.

Ridicule to the rescue

Well, if you needed any good news, a study released last week in Frontiers in Psychology found that both rational argument and ridicule can reduce people's belief in conspiracy theories.

The research, done at the Eötvös Loránt University of Sciences in Budapest, was conducted by psychologists Gábor Orosz, Benedek Paskuj, István Tóth-Király, Beáta Bőthe and Christine Roland-Lévy.  The authors write:

Conspiracy theory (CT) beliefs can be harmful.  How is it possible to reduce them effectively?  Three reduction strategies were tested in an online experiment using general and well-known CT beliefs on a comprehensive randomly assigned Hungarian sample (N = 813): exposing rational counter CT arguments, ridiculing those who hold CT beliefs, and empathizing with the targets of CT beliefs.  Several relevant individual differences were measured. Rational and ridiculing arguments were effective in reducing CT, whereas empathizing with the targets of CTs had no effect.  Individual differences played no role in CT reduction, but the perceived intelligence and competence of the individual who conveyed the CT belief-reduction information contributed to the success of the CT belief reduction.  Rational arguments targeting the link between the object of belief and its characteristics appear to be an effective tool in fighting conspiracy theory beliefs.

Well, I don't know about you, but that cheers me up immensely, especially given that here at Skeptophilia I seem to split my time evenly between arguing rationally and lobbing ridicule bombs at people who hold wacky beliefs.  Some days it feels like I'm shouting in a windstorm, and that nothing I'm doing is having the least difference.  It's heartening to find that this may not be true.

Peter Kreko, visiting professor from Indiana University and co-author of the study, was interviewed over at PsyPost and had some interesting perspectives on the study.  An important distinction, he said, is that the research supports ridiculing the conspiracy theories themselves and/or the sources of such theories, but that ridiculing the person you're talking to is not likely to work.  In fact, it can generate the backfire effect -- being attacked because of beliefs people feel strongly about can result in the True Believers doubling down on their certainty.

"Our findings go against the mainstream of the communication literature and 'common wisdom,' as well as the current affective wave of social psychology emphasizing that emotions constitute the most important factor behind shaping beliefs and attitudes," Kreko said.  "Despite the general assessment that we are in a 'post-truth' world, truth and facts do matter when it comes to refuting conspiracy theories.  Uncovering arguments regarding the logical inconsistencies of conspiracy beliefs can be an effective way to discredit them."

And working to discredit them is important, Kreko says. "Conspiracy theories can be extremely harmful, they can lead to the persecution of groups. For examples, the Protocols of Elders of Zion, a conspiracy theory fabricated in the early 20th century on the Jewish leaders’ plot to rule the World, played an important role in the ideological justification of the murders of the Holocaust.  Anti-science conspiracy theories are often similarly dangerous – the anti-vaccination movement is a good example.  Several hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to die each year as a consequence of non-vaccination.  Given all of these negative impacts of conspiracy theories, it is essential to have evidence-based studies on how to reduce the popularity of such theories."

To which I can only say, "Amen."  Also that I'm really happy this study was published when it was, because heaven knows most of the news lately has been bad.  Gives me incentive for continuing to write what I do six times a week.

Fostering awesomeness

I spend a lot of time in this blog being negative.  On some level, it's inevitable, given my subject matter.  I've chosen to seek out bad thinking, stupid ideas, bizarre beliefs, and random illogic, and hope (by bringing that stuff to light) to sharpen awareness of the dangers of irrationality.

The personal danger, of course, both to myself and my readers, is becoming cynical.  One of the first points I make in my Critical Thinking class is that credulity and cynicism are equal and opposite errors; trusting no one is as lazy, and as wrong, as trusting everyone.  But still, it's hard not to be a little critical of humanity at times.  Like George Carlin said:

Yesterday, one of my coworkers (for reasons I'll describe in a moment) challenged me to write something positive, to (for once) not write about failures of human reason, rationality, and compassion, but about its successes.  It's easy enough to poke fun at the woo-woos; my teacher friend set me the task instead to celebrate the ways that the human mind have made things better.

It was an important reminder for me, honestly, because as a teacher, I can't afford to become cynical.  If I ever give up hope that my students can grow up to make the world a better place, that they are capable and smart and moral and worthy of the best I can offer them, I should retire and get a job as a WalMart greeter.  And sadly, I do hear teachers say those sorts of things; any number of negative statements preceded by the words "Kids these days..."  Usually insinuating that when we were children, all of us were hard working, diligent, ethical, honest, and respectful.  Not only do I feel like asking people who make these sorts of statements, "Do you really not remember anything about being a teenager?", I think that attitude is profoundly unfair to kids today.  Admittedly, there are some differences; the ubiquity of electronic media, access to information, changes in attitudes toward relationships and sexuality -- all make today's cultural milieu a different place to grow up than it was the four-odd decades ago that I was a teenager.  But kids are kids, people are people, and they have the same hopes, dreams, and desires that we do.  If you want an outlook that I like better, watch the following:

*brief pause to blow my nose*  Sorry, that one makes me cry every damn time.

And of course, there's the video that's the reason all of this came up.  Yesterday, we had an assembly, run by our principal (who, as an aside, is far and away the best administrator I have ever worked for).  The whole gist of it was that we each need to find our voices -- a message that resonated especially strongly with me, because when I started this blog four years ago it was in an effort to find my own voice, to have a way to express myself about the things I thought were important.  And he ended with this video:

It was as we were leaving that my coworker, the physics teacher, said to me, "You need to work this into your blog."  I told him I'd rise to the challenge if I could.  So I'll end with issuing the same challenge to you; go out and speak up.  Take on the issues you think are critical.  Encourage the people around you to make your community a better place.  People do, you know.  Yes, there are bigots, lazy thinkers, and irrational individuals, but there are also plenty of smart, kind, self-sacrificing, compassionate people, and I live in the hope that the latter are more numerous:

So, in the words of Kid President: "Now go out, and create something that will make the world awesome."