Ignoring the collapse

One thing I will never understand, so long as I live, is why people can be induced in such great numbers to vote against their best interests.

Throughout 2016, people warned that Donald Trump et al. were planning on cutting Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, were going to increase the ranks of the uninsured (especially amongst the rural poor) by repealing the Affordable Care Act, and were not only rejecting the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change, but actively supported policy that would make it worse.

And yet not only was he elected president, but candidates who supported him and his ideology overwhelmingly won election into Congress and governorships.  And just today we have four news items of note:

• In a town hall-type meeting in Concord, New Hampshire, former presidential candidate and current Ohio governor John Kasich announced that he was supporting significant cuts to Social Security.  He asked audience members, "What if I told you that your initial benefit was gonna be somewhat lower in order to save the program?  Would that drive you crazy?"  When a couple of attendees said that yes, it would upset them, he responded, "Well, you'd get over it, and you're going to have to get over it."
• An announcement by the Congressional Budget Office two days ago estimated the number of people who would lose their health insurance under the current administration's proposal at 24 million.  This would nearly double the number of uninsured individuals in the United States.  The biggest hits would be to low-income people in the Southeast and Midwest.
• Add to this the revelation that despite repeated pledges not to touch Medicaid, the current health care proposal would slash $880 billion in federal funding for the program.  Ron Pollack, head of the health-care advocacy group Families USA, said that the cuts "would put us on a destructive path that would decimate the safety-net Medicaid program for over 72 million people; drastically reduce premium subsidies for working families; and cause out-of-pocket health costs to soar."
• A study released by Tulane University yesterday showed that sea level rise in coastal Louisiana is four times higher than previously estimated, and that "there is little chance that the coast will be able to withstand the accelerating rate of sea level rise."

What is most puzzling about this is that the people who voted in the current administration, and the conservative members of Congress who are currently rubber-stamping the president's proposals, are largely older Americans and the rural poor of the Southeast and Midwest.  Louisiana, currently experiencing the highest land loss from sea level rise in the world (16 square miles a year -- a football field's worth every hour) overwhelmingly voted Republican.

I know I'm not the most savvy person politically, but I can't even begin to comprehend this.  You would think that especially in fractious times, people would be more likely to vote for whatever candidate was more likely to insure their own personal security.  In a way, of course, the Trump cadre convinced people they were doing exactly that; they played into fear, misogyny, racism, and xenophobia, inducing people to accept the blatant lies that violent crime rates were increasing (they're not), that a large proportion of crimes are committed by immigrants (they're not), that acceptance of diversity in society leads to the collapse of a society's morals and culture (it doesn't), and that climate change isn't happening (it is).

But even though the current administration seems to run on the fuel of innuendo, lies, unfounded and unsourced accusations, and "alternative facts," you'd think that the bare truth of people losing their health care, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- hell, even watching their communities sink into the Gulf of Mexico -- would cause them to say, "Wait just a moment, now."  But that hasn't happened.  The most staunchly pro-Trump individuals are the ones who stand to get hurt the most, and amazingly, they are giving every appearance of remaining pro-Trump to the last gasp.

I find this utterly baffling.  I keep waiting for the Trump voters to realize that they elected a master con man who never had the slightest intention of protecting their interests, to acknowledge that they've been had, but it's showing no sign of happening.  

[image courtesy of K. C. Green]

It's probably naïve of me to expect people to behave rationally, not to mention for me to expect that there is a simple explanation of something complex like why people vote a particular way (and stick to a candidate through thick and thin).  But the juxtaposition of the four stories -- Kasich's blithe dismissal of people's concerns about cuts to Social Security, the CBO's announcement that Trumpcare will double the number of uninsured individuals in the United States, the announcement of staggering cuts to Medicaid, and the study showing that southern Louisiana is washing away -- highlights a completely perplexing feature of human behavior.

The fact that once committed to an ideology, people won't change their minds even if the walls are crashing down around them.

A ghost in the machine

A couple of days ago I wrote a piece on a couple of studies that some people (unwarrantedly, in my opinion) are using as support of the claim that our consciousness will persist into an afterlife.  While the desire for death not to be final is completely understandable, the evidence we have of soul survival is at present equivocal at best.

But apparently there is another way people are trying to cheat the Grim Reaper: by creating a digital version of themselves, based upon their social media posts, texts, emails, and so on, that could then chat with their friends after their demise.

Lest you think this is just some bizarre speculation by a fiction author who has, I must admit, a rather febrile imagination at times, it's already been done.  An artificial intelligence researcher named Eugenia Kuyda created a chatbot based upon the tweets, texts, and Facebook posts of her friend Roman after he died in November of 2015, and she regularly has conversations with it.

CNN writer Laurie Segall spoke with Kuyda -- and also with Roman:

I had several long conversations with Roman -- or I should say his bot.  And while the technology wasn't perfect, it certainly captured what I imagine to be his ethos -- his humor, his fears, how hopeless he felt at work sometimes.  He had angst about doing something meaningful.  I learned he was lonely but was glad that he'd left Moscow for the West Coast. I learned we had similar tastes in music.  He seemed to like deep conversations, he was a bit sad, and you know he would've been fun on a night out.

As for Kuyda, she's gone even further down the rabbit hole.  She was at a party several weeks after creating the RomanBot, and had the surreal experience of texting with... it? him?... for thirty minutes before she remembered that Roman was dead, and this was a simulation.

So Segall asked Kuyda to create one for her.  A LaurieBot.  So she did, and Segall got to speak with Segall 2.0.  The experience, she said, was a little unnerving:

I was warm ... or at least my bot was. It responded like me -- quick, rapid fire texts. It loved Hamilton and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.  It was trying to get healthy. My bot made sexual comments and spoke about happiness. 

My bot was also brash, a bit combative.  It worried about being alone, had some trust issues.  It was crude.  A bit funny, thoughtful -- it was me on my best days ... and my worst. 

Then things got uncomfortable.  My bot started pushing back against Kuyda questioning. My trust issues were casually texted back to me...  It was unsettling how flippant my bot was with my emotions.

Although I have had a fascination with AI for years, I have some serious issues with this.  Mostly it revolves around the effects this could have on the grieving family and friends of the deceased.  We already, as a culture, have a hard enough time dealing with death, with letting go of someone we love.  This, to me, gives the bereaved nothing but the false sense that their friend or relative is still with them, prolonging the difficult journey toward acceptance, not only of death in the specific case but of mortality in general.

But does this mean that we've finally, quietly, crossed the line into having a piece of code that can pass the Turing test?  The fact that Kuyda herself, who wrote the damn thing, could forget for a half-hour that she was talking to a simulation, is pretty remarkable.  And if so, does that mean that there really is something there, some pared-down piece of the person's personality?  Are we reaching the point where there really will be a ghost in the machine?

[image courtesy of Alejandro Zorrilal Cruz and the Wikimedia Commons]

Segall clearly wasn't particularly sanguine about her own digital alter ego:

I have mixed feelings about it.  When I die, I don't know if I'd want to give people access to those parts of me -- unfiltered, without context, pulling from conversations meant only for one person. 

I'm not ready to let this digital version of myself into the world.  These are parts of me I didn't realize tech could capture.  The most human aspects of me, spoken back through Laurie bot, felt too strange, too real, too uncontrollable and perhaps too dangerous as we enter an age where tech has the incredible ability to evoke such raw emotion.

To which I can only say: amen.  While it might be intriguing, in a purely intellectual sense, for me to talk to a GordonBot, the idea that something like it could still be around after I die, talking to my friends and family, is a profoundly disturbing concept.  I hope that when it's my turn, my loved ones will be strong enough simply to say goodbye in some appropriate manner.

Like a Viking funeral.  Go to the beach, stick my body in a boat, set it on fire, and send it out to sea.  Followed by lots of music, dance, drinking, and debauchery.  That's the way I want to have my life celebrated. not by having some anemic version of me still hanging around that people can text to.  I hate texting in real life, I sure as hell don't want to do it once I'm dead.

DNA, health, and privacy

The movie Gattaca envisions a near future in which our entire destiny is ruled by our genes.  Not only are we subject to genetic tests as a preliminary to everything -- school admission, job offers, applications for insurance -- the vast majority of births result from genetically screened in vitro fertilizations.  This creates a society stratified in a new way -- made up of "valids" (people who were screened at conception and therefore are free of major genetic defects) and "invalids" (people conceived the old-fashioned way, and subject to all of the flaws that a random patchwork of genes brings).

The result is that invalids can't get any but the most menial jobs.  What employer would take a chance on giving a high-paying technical job to someone with a predisposition to early death from heart disease when there is an equally skilled candidate who is certified disease-free, and who will cost the company (and their insurers) far less in medical bills and retraining costs over the long haul?

The ethical issues that this film brings up are deeply poignant.  But one of the lines that goes by so quickly that it can pass your notice occurs fairly close to the beginning of the movie, when the main character is narrating what life is like in this society.  "Of course, discrimination based on genes is technically illegal," he says, "but there's always a way around that."

He utters this line as a potential employer hands him a plastic jar for a urine test -- ostensibly for drug testing, but which will also give the company anything they want to know about the candidate's genetic makeup.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

We just took a step toward the world of Gattaca a few days ago, and it, like the line about the de facto acceptance of a genetic criterion for employment in the movie, slipped by without many people taking notice.  A proposed change to current privacy law called House Bill HR 1313 passed easily in committee, the vote split exactly on party lines.  Given the current fracas over the repeal/replace drive for the Affordable Care Act, not too many people gave HR 1313 much thought.  But this bill, should it become law, will provide a loophole you could drive a Mack truck through in GINA (the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act), the 2008 law that made genetic information private and explicitly prohibited employers from discrimination based upon it.

If HR 1313 passes, it will allow employers to circumvent GINA -- as long as such genetic tests are part of a "workplace wellness" program.

Before you blame the Republicans, however, realize that we were well on the way to ceding all the power over a person's private genetic data to employers during the Obama presidency.  "Workplace Wellness" laws passed during the previous administration allowed employers to levy a 30% surcharge on employees' health insurance costs if they refused to participate in "voluntary" workplace wellness programs, many of which require screenings for cholesterol, blood pressure, and other health factors. At least with GINA, there was explicit language to stop employers from doing what they did in Gattaca -- collecting private health information from people under the guise of doing screenings for risk factors, and extracting a hell of a lot more from a blood sample or urine sample than the employee bargained for.

If HR 1313 passes, that protection will disappear.  Labeling mandatory screening part of a "Workplace Wellness" program will allow employers to have access to any information on your health that they want -- including a list of the markers you carry showing your predisposition to genetic health conditions.

One more way in which we are headed, as a nation, toward giving far more clout to corporations than we do to individuals.

When Gattaca premiered twenty years ago, it seemed pretty far-fetched.  People were identified when they entered a government building using a finger-prick test.  Criminals could be caught from the DNA on a single eyelash, because everyone's DNA was on record with the government.  If you were stopped on the road and refused a finger prick, the police could still identify you by an iris scan.  In one memorable scene, a woman goes to a genetic screening company to get the low-down on her boyfriend -- after she gives him a nice long French kiss, and thus mixing enough of his saliva with hers to sequence his DNA and find out if he's a good candidate for a long-term relationship.

Now, it's looking like the world of Gattaca is, as it says in the opening sequence, in the "not-so-distant future."

In fact, if HR 1313 passes, it might be right around the corner.

Brain waves in the afterlife

It's understandable how much we cling to the hope that there's life after death.  Ceasing to exist is certainly not a comforting prospect.  Heaven knows (pun intended) I'm not looking forward to death myself, although I have to say that I'm more worried about the potential for debility and pain leading up to it than I am to death itself.  Being an atheist, I'm figuring that afterwards, I won't experience much of anything at all, which isn't scary so much as it is inconceivable.

Of course, if the orthodox view of Christianity is correct, I'll have other things to worry about than simple oblivion.

It's this tendency toward wishful thinking that pushes us in the direction of confirmation bias on the subject of survival of the soul.  Take, for example, a paper that came out just this week in PubMed called "Electroencephalographic Recordings During Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Therapy Until 30 Minutes After Declaration of Death."  The paper was based upon studies of four patients who had died after being removed from life support, in which electroencephalogram (EEG) readings were taken as their life signs faded away.  In one case, a particular type of brain waveform -- delta waves, which are associated with deep sleep -- continued for five minutes after cardiac arrest and drop in arterial blood pressure to zero.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The authors were cautious not to over-conclude; they simply reported their findings without making any kind of inference about what the person was experiencing, much less saying that this had any implications about his/her immortal soul.  In fact, it is significant that only one of the four patients showed any sort of brain wave activity following cardiac arrest; if there really was some sort of spirit-related phenomenon going on here, you'd think all four would have shown it.

That hasn't stopped the life-after-death crowd from jumping on this as if it were unequivocal proof of soul survival.  "One more piece of scientific evidence for an afterlife," one person appended to a link to the article.  "This can't be explained by ordinary brain science," said another.

The whole thing reminds me of the furor that erupted when the paper "Electrocortical Activity Associated With Subjective Communication With the Deceased," by Arnaud Delorme et al., showed up in Frontiers in Psychology four years ago.  The paper had some serious issues -- confirmation bias among the researchers, all of whom were connected in one way or another to groups more or less desperate to prove an afterlife, being only one.  The gist is that the researchers did brain scans of alleged mediums while they were attempting to access information about the dead.

To call the results equivocal is a compliment.  There were brain scans done of six mediums; of them, three scored above what you'd expect by chance.  In other words, half scored above what chance would predict, and half below -- pretty much the spread you'd expect if chance was all that was involved.  The sample size is tiny, and if you look at the questions the mediums were asked about the deceased people, you find that they include questions such as:

• Was the discarnate more shy or more outgoing?
• Was the discarnate more serious or more playful?
• Was the discarnate more rational or more emotional?
• Did death occur quickly or slowly?

Not only are these either/or questions -- meaning that even someone who was guessing would have fifty-fifty odds at getting an answer correct -- they're pretty subjective.  I wonder, for example, whether people would say I was "more rational" or "more emotional."  Being a science teacher and skeptic blogger, people who didn't know me well would probably say "rational;" my closest friends know that I'm a highly emotional, anxious bundle of nerves who is simply adept at covering it up most of the time.

Then there's this sort of thing:

• Provide dates and times of year that were important to the discarnate.

Not to mention:

• Does the discarnate have any messages specifically for the sitter?

Which is impossible to verify one way or the other.

Add that to the small sample size, and you have a study that is (to put it mildly) somewhat suspect.  But that didn't stop the wishful thinkers from leaping on this as if it was airtight proof of an afterlife.

Like I said, it's not that I don't understand the desire to establish the survival of the spirit.  No one would be happier than me if it turned out to be true (as long as the aforementioned hellfire and damnation isn't what is awaiting me).  But as far as the 2013 paper that was setting out to demonstrate the existence of an afterlife, and this week's paper that some folks are (unfairly) using for the same purpose -- it's just not doing it for me.

Be that as it may, I still have an open mind about the whole thing.  When there's good hard evidence available -- I'm listening.  Unless it happens after I have personally kicked the bucket, at which point I'll know one way or the other regardless.

Science removal

The downward spiral in the United States's commitment to environmental stewardship isn't all big, attention-getting moves like Donald Trump's appointment of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who made a name for himself taking the fossil fuel industry's side in battles over environmental safety, to the post of head of the Environmental Protection Agency -- a man who just yesterday stated that carbon dioxide is not "a primary contributor to the global warming we see."  Sometimes it's the small, seemingly inconsequential changes that are the most chilling, partly because those small changes can so easily slip under the radar.

Take, for example, the change announced this week in the EPA's mission statement.  There was one alteration that jumped out at me, that would only be obvious if you compared the new statement word-by-word with the old one.  There is one word that now appears nowhere in the online description of what the EPA's Office of Science and Technology does.  Any guesses as to what that is?

The word "science."

You read that right.  The Office of Science and Technology now has as its directive evaluating standards for (for example) water quality not on whether the analysis is "science-based" (the old language), but whether it is "economically and technologically achievable."  This may seem like a minor change -- after all, why would we bother trying to address a problem whose solution was not "technologically achievable?" -- but in fact, this is a symbolic shot across the bow to members of the scientific community.  It's a sign that we no longer will hold our environmental policy to the standard of what is scientifically supported; we will instead make decisions based upon what is financially expedient for corporate interests.

Take, for example, the revocation of the Obama-era Stream Protection Rule, which prevents coal companies from dumping mining debris into streams.  The House and Senate both voted to kill the rule, despite copious evidence that so-called "mountaintop removal" methods of coal mining foul streams, leading to contamination of drinking water by heavy metals and other toxins, and all the horrible health effects that come with it.  The death of the Stream Protection Rule was ostensibly to give a boost to the ailing coal industry, but the truth is that a move like this isn't going to improve their odds.  "Coal jobs are not coming back," said James van Nostrand, director of the Center for Energy and Sustainable Development at West Virginia University College of Law.  "The coal industry is being pounded by market forces.  It's not regulation."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So the revocation of the Stream Protection Rule, and the elimination of the words "science-based" from the EPA mission statement, are purely symbolic gestures -- but no less powerful for being so.  They're a clear message to anyone who is listening: "When evidence-based science or a cost in human health or human lives come up against the interests of corporate profit, corporate profit is going to win.  Period."

Given that pro-corporate Republicans now control both houses of Congress and the Executive Branch, and anti-science types like Scott Pruitt, Dana Rohrabacher, Lamar Smith, and Rex Tillerson are now running committees or whole departments, this is only the beginning.  Also on the chopping block are the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Clean Power Acts; the Endangered Species Act; the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability (Superfund) Act; and, of course, any involvement in policy that addresses, or even acknowledges, anthropogenic climate change.  And with the power these people now wield, this kind of a change to our nation's environmental policy isn't just a what if, it's increasingly seeming inevitable.

I recognize that there has to be a balance between smart environmental management and corporate interests.  I'm no tree hugger that goes along with the motto of the ecoterrorist group Earth First -- "No compromise in the defense of Mother Earth."  The human species needs food, living space, a reliable source of energy, clean water, clean air, and clean soil -- and therefore a thoughtful equilibrium between protecting nature and protecting our economy and national interest.  But what we have here is a government that is ceding all control to the corporations, damn the consequences, full speed ahead.

Which is a recipe for disaster.  Because whatever the monetary gains of policy that ignores science, eventually reality catches up with you -- in the form of ruined ecosystems, loss of biodiversity, fouled water and air, and a climate gone haywire.

I can only hope that wiser heads prevail before the tipping point is reached.

Gem water sales pitch

Yesterday a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link with the note, "Now I've heard everything."

The link was to the home page of a company called VitaJuwel.  The sales pitch is headed with the line, "Create Your Own Fresh and Pure Gemstone Water!"

Evidently the idea here is that we're going one step beyond "crystal healing;" now what you do is take crystals and put them in your water, and it somehow makes the water...

... well, I dunno.  Waterier or something.  They're never completely clear on that point.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What's funniest about this is that the gems they sell you are encased in glass vials, so they don't even come into physical content with the water.  You just immerse the vial with the gems into the water, and somehow the jewel-ness of the gems seeps right through the glass and into the water.  Oh, but all of this is highly scientific:

Seven years ago, we revolutionized the way to prepare vital and fresh water at home.  Following age-old traditions, we created gemstone vials to hygienically inspirit drinking water.  Our vision now and then is to provide you with homemade, natural gemwater like fresh from the spring! 

VitaJuwel gem vials are made from lead-free glass and hand-picked gems.  We offer several different gem blends, tested by naturopaths and based on the insights of modern crystal healing.  Their scientifically proven efficiency make them an essential accessory in health-seeking households worldwide.

So naturally I wanted to find out what this "scientifically proven efficiency" was based on, so I went to their "methods" page, and I'm happy to say it did not disappoint:

The use of gems to vitalize water is a traditional art which was already known to the ancient Greek and wise men and women during medieval times.  Recently, this old tradition has been rediscovered.  Gemstones have the ability to store energy. That effect makes quartz watches work, for example.

What they're referring to here is the piezoelectric effect, which is the property of certain crystalline substances to alter in their electric charge in response to mechanical stress.  This property is used in dozens of applications -- in everything from guitar pickups to inkjet printers to electric lighters.  In quartz clocks, a disk of quartz is used to generate an oscillating change in electrical voltage that then can regulate the ticking of the second hand.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with immersing jewels in water and then drinking it.

And of course, the gemstone water people aren't talking about anything nearly that concrete and demonstrable in any case.  Here's how they say it works:

Each type of gem, by nature, has its unique kind of energetic information.  The gems inside the VitaJuwel vials transfer their information to the water that surrounds the vial and, thus, improve the waters' vitalization level.  An effect which regular water drinkers might even be able to taste!

What exact "information" they're talking about is unclear, as is the means by which a gem could transfer this information into water through the sides of a glass bottle.  The skeptics, though, they dismiss with the following inadvertently hilarious statement: "Infusing water with the power of gems is an age-old tradition and – comparable to homeopathy – hard to grasp by conventional 'scientific' means."

Yup.  In fact, gemstone water works precisely like homeopathy does.

Oh, and by the way: they say it also works for a glass of wine.  Which, after reading the shtick on this website, I feel like I could use one or two of.

Did you notice that in the last quote, they put the word scientific in quotation marks?  I have to admit that it torques me a little, because the implication is that a claim being supported by "conventional scientific means" is a bad thing.  Oh, those silly scientists -- always demanding proof and evidence and so on.  Never just accepting an "age old tradition" about "unique energetic information" without expecting it to generate results that stand up to analysis -- and that have some kind of understandable mechanism by which they could work.

And that's not even looking at the fact that these "VitaJuwel" vials, as far as I could see from their website, start at $78.  That's just for the economy model, if you want cheap, tabloid-magazine-level information being imparted to your water.  For the truly Shakespeare-quality information, you have to go for the ViA Crystal Edition Golden Moments vial, for a cool $340.

My advice: keep your money.  Putting a glass bottle with some shiny rocks into your drinking water (or wine) is going to generate nothing more than a lighter pocketbook and the placebo effect.  As far as the rest of the pseudo-scientific stuff on the site -- I'm calling bullshit.

Contradicting the narrative

In her marvelous TED Talk "On Being Wrong," writer and journalist Kathryn Schulz describes a "series of unfortunate assumptions" that we tend to make when we find out that there are people who disagree with us.

First, we tend to assume that the dissenters are simply ignorant -- that they don't have access to the same facts as we do, and that if we graciously enlighten them, they'll say, "Oh, of course!" and join our side.  If that doesn't work, if the people who disagree with us turn out to have access to (and understand) the same facts as we have, then we turn to a second assumption -- that they're stupid.  They're taking all of the evidence, putting it together, and are too dumb to do it right.

If that doesn't work -- if our intellectual opponents have the same facts as we do, and turn out to be smart enough, but they still disagree with us -- we move on to a third, and worse, assumption; that they're actually malevolent.  They have the facts, know how to put them together, and are suppressing the right conclusion (i.e. ours) for their own evil purposes.

This, Schulz says, is a catastrophe.  "This attachment to our own sense of rightness keeps us from preventing mistakes when we absolutely need to," she says, "and it causes us to treat each other terribly."

I got a nice, and scientific, object lesson in support of Schulz's claim yesterday, when I stumbled across a paper in PLoS One by Clinton Sanchez, Brian Sundermeier, Kenneth Gray, and Robert J. Calin-Jagemann called "Direct Replication of Gervais & Norenzayan (2012): No Evidence That Analytic Thinking Decreases Religious Belief."  Apparently five years ago, a pair of psychological researchers, Will Gervais of the University of Kentucky and Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia, had published a study showing that there was an inverse correlation between religious belief and analytical thinking, and further, stimulating analytical thinking in the religious has the effect of weakening their beliefs.

[image courtesy of Lucien leGray and the Wikimedia Commons]

Well, all of that fits nicely into the narrative we atheists would like to believe, doesn't it?  Oh, those religious folks -- if we could just teach 'em how to think, the scales would fall from their eyes, and (in Schulz's words) they'd "come on over to our team."  The problem is, when Sanchez et al. tried to replicate Gervais and Norenzayan's findings, they were unable to do so -- despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Sanchez et al. used a much larger sample size and tighter controls.  The authors write:

What might explain the notable difference between our results and those reported by G&N?  We can rule out substantive differences in materials and procedures, as these were essentially identical.  We can also rule out idiosyncrasies in participant pools, as we collected diverse samples and used extensive quality controls.  Finally, we can also rule out researcher incompetence, as we were able to detect an expected effect of similar size using a positive control. 

One possibility is that Study 2 of G&N substantially over-estimated the effect of the manipulation on religious belief.  This seems likely, not only because of the data presented here but also because evidence published while this project was in progress suggests that the experimental manipulation may not actually influence analytic thinking...

Based on our results and the notable issues of construct validity that have emerged we conclude that the experiments reported by G&N do not provide strong evidence that analytic thinking causes a reduction in religious belief.  This conclusion is further supported by results from an independent set of conceptual replications that was recently published which also found little to no effect of analytic thinking manipulations on religious belief.

To their credit, Gervais and Norenzayan not only cooperated with the research of Sanchez et al., they admitted afterwards that their original experiments had led to a faulty conclusion.  In fact, in his blog, Gervais gives a wryly humorous take on their comeuppance, by presenting the criticisms of Sanchez et al. and only at the end revealing that it was his own paper that had been, more or less, cut to ribbons.  He says of Sanchez's team, "I congratulate them on their fine work."

He also included the following in his postscript:

FFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!

Understandably.  As Schulz points out, it's often devastating and embarrassing to find out that we screwed up.  Doubly so when you're a scientist, since your reputation and your livelihood depend on getting things right.  So kudos to Gervais and Norenzayan for admitting their paper hadn't shown what they said it did.

So not only is this a great example of science done right, in the larger analysis, it tells us atheists that we can't get away with dismissing religious folks as simply not being as smart and analytical as we are.  Which, honestly, is just as well, because it would leave me trying to explain friends of mine who are honest, smart, well-read, logical... and highly religious.  It supports the kinder (and more accurate) conclusion that we're all trying to figure things out as best we can with what information we have at hand, and the fact that we come to radically different answers is testimony to the difficulty of understanding a complex and fascinatingly weird universe with our limited perceptions and fallible minds.

Or, as Schulz concludes, "I want to convince you that it is possible to step outside [the feeling of being right about everything], and that if you do so it is the greatest moral, intellectual, and creative leap you can take...  If you really want to rediscover wonder, you need to step out of that tiny, terrified space of rightness, and look around at each other, and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe, and be able to say, 'Wow.  I don't know.  Maybe I'm wrong.'"