Foot bath cure

A few months ago, I wrote a post about a guy who claimed that all you need to do to purge your home of "negative energies" (whatever those are) is to place a glass of vinegar and salt on your windowsill.  Vinegar, which clearly has magical properties, will then de-negativize you and your house.

The whole thing made me wonder why you couldn't achieve the same effect with, say, a jar of pickles.

Anyhow, a couple of days ago, a good friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link with the note, "Hey!  Here's something else you can do with vinegar!  I thought you'd want to know."

So I clicked the link, and was brought to the site Delishist, specifically to an article called "Soak Your Feet in Vinegar Once a Week, and You Will See How All of Your Diseases Disappear."

I am not, for the record, making the name of this article up.

My first thought, of course, was, "All your diseases?  Like, if you have a brain tumor and Parkinson's disease and narcolepsy simultaneously, you can get rid of all of them by soaking your feet in vinegar?  That can't possibly be what they mean."

But yes, that is in fact what they mean.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sander van der Wel from Netherlands, (391-365) Relaxing in bath (6427571119), CC BY-SA 2.0]

It will at this point be unsurprising to any of you that the whole thing revolves around "toxins."  What these specific toxins are, we're never told.  Maybe it's elemental mercury.  Maybe it's DDT.  Maybe it's battery acid.  Maybe it's all three at once.  In any case, we're led to believe that whatever they are, they're bad, and not only can't your body get rid of them by itself, there's no way to take them out except through your feet.

Which seems to me a little odd.  Why the feet?  Could I, if I wanted to, soak my ass in vinegar?  (Let me state for the record that I don't want to.  But my question stands.)  I mean, the human ass is much more directly connected to the process of getting rid of stuff we don't want in our body, although to be fair, the gluteus maximus muscle that makes up most of it has very little to do with it.

So I'm baffled as to why the feet are what we should be soaking.  Maybe it's because the feet are generally below the head, and toxins are heavy, or something.

In any case, here's how the authors explains the process:

You can also use ionic foot bath to detoxify your body from toxins.  This bath is based on electrolysis, which is a method that uses electrical current to make a chemical reaction.  You should use warm water to open your pores and salt is used as an anti-inflammatory astringent. Ions are absorbed through the feet and your body is getting a detox.  If the salt water becomes dark, that means you are eliminating toxins from your body.

Okay, so the basic principle is ions = good, and toxins = bad.  Got it.

But what about ions that are toxic?  Like the cyanide ion, for example?  I don't care what Delishist says, I'm not soaking my feet in cyanide.

And they're right about the definition of electrolysis, but the problem is, combining it with a vinegar foot bath would be a seriously bad idea.  Another thing I'm not going to do is stand in a tub of vinegar and then run an electric current through it and/or me.  Yes, it'd generate some serious ionage.  The downside, however, is called "electrocution."

The website also suggests soaking in a bath to which you've added ginger and hydrogen peroxide.  This is yet another thing I'm not going to do.  First of all, wouldn't that bleach your pubic hair?  I mean, it's fine if that's the look you're after, but I thought I'd mention it.  Another, and more serious, problem is that hydrogen peroxide works as an antiseptic because it kills nearly everything it touches, and given long enough, that would include your skin.  I know a guy who used peroxide on a cut, but it stayed open, and he decided it was infected, so he kept applying more and more peroxide.  Within a week he'd turned a minor cut into a gaping wound -- not from infection, but because he was putting something on it that was killing his own tissue.  So applying peroxide to my entire body, including my sensitive bits, sounds to me like a seriously bad idea.

So thanks anyhow, but I'll pass on soaking my feet in vinegar.  I find that washing them periodically keeps them relatively clean, and as for "getting rid of toxins," my liver and kidneys are perfectly capable of that.  My advice is to go back to using vinegar for making pickles, because a lot of the other stuff it's supposed to be good for is USDA Grade-A horseshit.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and especially for you pet owners: Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  In this short book, the famous Austrian behavioral scientist looks at how domestic dogs interact, both with each other and with their human owners.  Some of his conjectures about dog ancestry have been superseded by recent DNA studies, but his behavioral analyses are spot-on -- and will leaving you thinking more than once, "Wow.  I've seen Rex do that, and always wondered why."

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

The problem with tradition

It is a frequent source of bafflement to me that so many people don't change what they do when confronted with incontrovertible evidence that there's a better way.

Sad to say, the educational establishment is one of the worst in this regard.  For example, it's been known (or at least, strongly supported) that a person's facility for learning a second language drops off significantly after puberty since 1967, when the research of linguist and neuroscientist Eric Lenneberg showed that the brain's plasticity with regard to language more or less goes away after age 12.  So for fifty years we've been pretty certain that the way to create bilinguals is by early immersion programs -- kindergarten or (better) preschool.

But how do we do it, fifty years later?  In my school district, which is forward-thinking in a lot of respects, we start teaching foreign language in grade seven.  I.e., we wait until the point that the human brain becomes really bad at it to start doing it.

When I tell my neuroscience students about this -- that if they had been put in an immersion program at age two, they could now speak whatever language they wanted, fluently, without once memorizing a conjugation table or vocabulary list -- they are pissed.

"Then why do we still do it this way?" they ask.

Good question.  "'Cuz it's the way we've always done it," is about the best I can do.  Which has got to be the crappiest justification for anything I can think of.

So my expectation is that the recent research done by Ethan Bernstein, Jesse Shore, and David Lazer, of (respectively) Harvard, Boston University, and Northeastern University, is going to impress a lot of people and have zero cumulative effect on how we approach anything.

Their paper, released last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is called "How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence," and it proposes a novel approach to problem-solving: giving people a chance to work together interspersed with solitary work periods enhances the quality of solutions generated.

It's kind of counter to how we've been taught to work, isn't it?  In school, we're mostly instructed to work alone, that working together is "cheating."  The emphasis is on solitary work... except for very controlled situations of "cooperative learning" that are all too often exercises in frustration for the best students, because the individuals who are the most concerned about learning the concepts or getting good grades (or, hopefully, both) are highly motivated to do the lion's share of the work, while the less-engaged students have no particular incentive to do more than the bare minimum.  If I can think of a single teaching strategy that I have heard more students rail against than any other, it's "cooperative learning."  I can't tell you how many times I've heard kids say, "I'd rather just do it myself and get my grade rather than doing it myself and then giving my grade to five other students who sat on their asses the entire time."

But if you want true creative problem-solving, the Bernstein et al. study suggests, having people work alone isn't the best way to do it.  Neither is the throw-them-together-for-hours, let's-beat-the-problem-to-death approach.  It works best to have them work together for a while, divide up the task -- then reconvene to compare notes and integrate what each of them has accomplished, evaluate it, see what else needs to be done... and repeat as many times as needed.  The researchers write:

People influence each other when they interact to solve problems.  Such social influence introduces both benefits (higher average solution quality due to exploitation of existing answers through social learning) and costs (lower maximum solution quality due to a reduction in individual exploration for novel answers) relative to independent problem solving.  In contrast to prior work, which has focused on how the presence and network structure of social influence affect performance, here we investigate the effects of time.  We show that when social influence is intermittent it provides the benefits of constant social influence without the costs...  Groups in the intermittent social-influence treatment found... optimum solution[s] frequently (like groups without influence) but had a high mean performance (like groups with constant influence); they learned from each other, while maintaining a high level of exploration.  Solutions improved most on rounds with social influence after a period of separation.

Even before reading this study, it's the approach I've recommended for years to my AP Biology students for writing up labs.  Each of the labs we do is focused around a single question, often one that is simple to ask but not so simple to answer.  For example, our first lab approaches the question of enzyme reaction rate.  In every introductory biology class, you learn that enzymes speed up chemical reactions.  Our first AP lab asks the question, "By what factor?"  Does a typical enzyme double the rate of a reaction?  Make it go ten times faster?  A hundred times?  A thousand?

The lab procedure is designed to give the students enough data to answer the question, but getting from the raw data to a defensible answer isn't simple.  So my students work in teams, and I recommend to them that they break the task up -- one member of the team does the calculations and graphs, one writes up the procedure, one organizes the data into tables or charts, and so on.  Then they should get together, and look at what they've got, and see if they can solve the problem -- use their work to come up with an answer as a team that they can then defend.

The problem is, there's no way I can mandate this approach, and I'm afraid that some groups still end up with one or two students doing pretty much all the work, and the others going along for the ride (and because of that, not really learning much from the experience).  I simply don't have the time to have them do the lab write-ups during class, so I can't supervise them and make sure they're working on it consistently and fairly.  But I know from experience -- and the Bernstein et al. paper supports this conclusion -- that they clearly learn the most if that's how they approach the task.

And the paper also has implications for the corporate world.  In problem-solving on the job, it would improve solution quality to use a hybrid approach of teamwork and solitary work.

You have to wonder why people don't look at something like this and think, "Let's at least try this and see if it works."  But habit and laziness keep us doing the same thing over and over, even when it's been demonstrated (over and over) that what we're doing doesn't work, or at least isn't optimal.

Maybe after 31 years of teaching, I'm getting cynical.  I hope that's not true, but I have to admit my first thought on reading this was, "Wow!  Cool!  This won't change anything!"  I seriously hope I'm wrong about that.  Because there's a lot of truth to the old adage that if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and especially for you pet owners: Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  In this short book, the famous Austrian behavioral scientist looks at how domestic dogs interact, both with each other and with their human owners.  Some of his conjectures about dog ancestry have been superseded by recent DNA studies, but his behavioral analyses are spot-on -- and will leaving you thinking more than once, "Wow.  I've seen Rex do that, and always wondered why."

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

Truth and non-truth

If there's one thing that could be a microcosm of the current administration, it was a short exchange yesterday between Rudy Giuliani and Chuck Todd on NBC's Meet the Press.

Giuliani, who is acting as Donald Trump's lawyer, said, "When you tell me that, you know, [Trump] should testify because he’s going to tell the truth and he shouldn’t worry, well that’s so silly because it’s somebody’s version of the truth.  Not the truth."

Todd replied, "Truth is truth."

You'd think Giuliani at this point would say, "That's not what I meant," or some other deflection, but no.  Amazingly, he replied, "No, no, it isn’t truth.  Truth isn’t truth.  The President of the United States says, 'I didn’t …'"

Todd, obviously shocked, said, "Truth isn't truth?"

Giuliani said, "No, no, no."

Lest you think Giuliani had an unguarded moment, or got cornered into misspeaking, this isn't the first time he's ventured into this territory.  Last week on CNN he took exception to Chris Cuomo's comment that "facts are not in the eye of the beholder."

"Yes, they are," Giuliani replied.  "Nowadays they are."

And in May, when Giuliani was being interviewed by the Washington Post on the topic of the Mueller investigation, he said, "They may have a different version of the truth than we have."

People have made fun of Giuliani over this -- in fact, yesterday Chuck Todd said about the "truth isn't truth" comment, "This is going to become a bad meme" -- but honestly, it encapsulates the Trump administration's entire approach.  Don't believe what anyone is telling you -- except me.  Doubt the facts and the fact-checkers.  

Hell, doubt your own eyes.  Trump himself said, just last month, "Stick with us.  Don't believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news...  What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening."

And the most frightening thing of all is that it's worked.  Last November, a CNN reporter interviewed a Trump supporter and asked about the allegations of collusion with Russia.  The man, Mark Lee, replied, "Let me tell you, if Jesus Christ got down off the cross and told me Trump is with Russia, I would tell him hold on a second, I need to check with the president if it’s true...  I love the guy."

Scared enough yet?  Let's add a quote from George Orwell's 1984 to bring the point home:

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.  It was their final, most essential command...  And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.  'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'

To me, the buffoonery and sideshow circus over Trump and his alleged dalliances with porn stars and prostitutes is completely irrelevant.  I don't honestly care who he has had sex with, or is having sex with now; it's between Melania and him.  (Although I do notice a crashing silence from a lot of the people who were apoplectic with self-righteous rage over Bill Clinton getting a blowjob from Monica Lewinsky.  Funny thing, that.)

And a lot of what he's accused of -- colluding with the Russians to skew elections, pandering to dictators, doing whatever it takes to use his position to fill his personal bank accounts -- okay, that's some pretty awful stuff.  But we've been through this kind of thing before.  Corruption in government is hardly a new thing; Watergate, Teapot Dome, the Whiskey Ring, JFK's use of his position to avoid consequences for his many affairs, Eisenhower's turning a blind eye to McCarthyism, the acceptance by more than one administration of the atrocities of dictators as long as they were pro-US -- government is not a clean affair at the best of times.

But this is a qualitatively different thing.  This is a president who can stand there and say one thing one day, the opposite the next -- and his spokespeople say he was right both times.

And his followers believe them.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Paterm, Big Brother graffiti in France 2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The fallout from scandals can take a while to clean up.  I was only twelve when the Watergate coverup was revealed, and I remember how it completely dominated the news, almost to the exclusion of everything else, for what seemed like years afterward.

But how do you fix this?  Orwell was right; once you convince people that everyone else is lying to them -- using state-controlled media (Fox News, anyone?) as the mouthpiece -- you can shortly thereafter have them believing that up is down and left is right.  They're effectively insulated from reality.  Much fun has been made of the whole "fake news" thing, but I'm not laughing; it's the scariest thing of all, and more so because the media themselves are complicit in it.  They played right into Trump's hands during the election, reporting every damnfool thing he said and every outrageous claim he made, because it got them viewers (and Trump, of course, ate it up; he lives for being in the spotlight, even if it's for saying something idiotic).  Skewed stories and biased reporting on both sides?  No problem as long as it kept people from changing the channel.

But the viewers weren't watching because they were laughing.  They were watching because they believed.  And so when Trump got elected, and then said that the media itself was lying, that the only ones who could be trusted were the ones who said Trump was the sole arbiter of truth, his followers turned against the media without a second thought.

Reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.  It is the final, most essential command.

The only possible response sane people can have is to demand the truth.  Not just from our leaders,  but from the media, from political spokespeople... and from each other.  People like Giuliani should be laughed out of the building for saying things like "truth isn't truth," and should thereafter be denied the opportunity for subsequent interviews.  He's destroyed his own credibility; why should we listen further?

Same goes for Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne "Alternative Facts" Conway.  They've established their propensity for lying without shame.  Done.  They've lost their spot on the stage.

Of course, I don't really think that's going to happen, any more than the media shut off the microphones once it was established early in the election season that Donald Trump is constitutionally incapable of telling the truth.  But maybe if we stop tolerating lies -- if we start turning off the media that supports these people, and demanding fair, fact-based reporting -- that will get their attention.

To end with another quote from Orwell: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and especially for you pet owners: Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  In this short book, the famous Austrian behavioral scientist looks at how domestic dogs interact, both with each other and with their human owners.  Some of his conjectures about dog ancestry have been superseded by recent DNA studies, but his behavioral analyses are spot-on -- and will leaving you thinking more than once, "Wow.  I've seen Rex do that, and always wondered why."

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

Waterworks

Thanks to a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, I now know that apparently there is a growing number of people who believe that water is not H2O.

Unsurprisingly, if you created a Venn diagram between these people and the people who believe the Earth is flat, there'd be a large overlap.  So not only have the scientists been lying to us about the shape of the Earth, they've been lying to us about the nature of water.  Who knows what else they've been telling us that's wrong?  Maybe DNA is actually made of tiny bendy-straws.  Maybe the stars are  fireflies that landed on the hemispherical glass sky-dome that covers the (flat) Earth.  Maybe our brains actually aren't neural tissue, but a couple of pounds of banana pudding with crushed vanilla wafers mixed in.

I know that's what my brain feels like at the moment.

Note for the record that I am not here addressing a philosophical argument that was in vogue a few years ago about the "nature of water," that contended (with some justification) that because an individual H2O molecule did not have the properties we associate with water -- clarity, wetness, ability to dissolve stuff, and so on -- that H2O was, in fact, not water.  And that some things we call water (e.g. ocean water) are not pure H2O.

That was a discussion about how we use words, which is an important enough topic, although sometimes it gets pushed far enough that it seems to me to be no different than arguing about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.  Which, I suppose, explains why I went into science and not philosophy.

Nor am I talking about hair-splitters who say that even pure water isn't pure H2O -- that in a glass of pure water, some of the molecules are dissociated into H+ (more correctly, H3O+) and OH- ions.  I call them "hair-splitters" because under ordinary conditions, out of every 10,000,000 molecules of water, 9,999,999 of them are in the form of H2O and 1 is in the form of H+/OH-.  (Which, for science-minded types, directly leads to why the pH of pure water is 7, something I could explain further if anyone's interested.)

But no, what I'm referring to here is the people who think that water molecules are not H2O.  In one example the loyal reader sent me -- and one is about all I can stand to look at in detail -- the person argues that water can't be H2O, it actually is O2.

Yes, diatomic oxygen, like the stuff that makes up 20% of the air we're breathing.  So if he was right, we could breathe underwater, which would be pretty fucking cool, but which I clearly refuted fifteen years ago when I nearly drowned in a scuba accident.  I can say from personal experience that what I was attempting to breathe was not oxygen.

Here's a small sample of the argument the person gives, if I can dignify it by that name.  Grammar and spelling has been left as-is, because you can only write [sic] so many times.

[W]ater, as oxygen molecule, is only formed by two oxygen atoms. We think the difference between water and oxygen molecules must be found at the different phase of variation of the intersected gravitational fields that creates their different electrical configurations and spatial symmetries. 

For us each material mass has its own gravitational field that vary – expands and contracts – with a specific frequency. When two gravitational fields – from two oxygen masses, by example – intersect, they create in their mutual intersection some new fields with different motions and pressures that are currently known as “chemical bonds”. 

I used above the term “mass” and non “atom” because here we are thinking about a different model of “atom”. For us material masses do not have electrical charges inside of them. Electrical charges for us are consequences of intersections of at least two gravitational fields that vary with the same or opposite phase. So, we think about electrical charges like fields that moves and create different pressures inside them... 

In our perspective water molecules do not have Hydrogen atoms. They only have 2 Oxygens. So we think that for transforming water molecules into Oxygen molecules and oxygen molecules into water molecules it is only necessary to change the phase of variation of one of their intersected gravitational fields to make equal or opposite.

Right!  Sure!  What?

To go through the scientific inaccuracies here would take me all day, but let me start out with the most egregious: nothing about the interaction between two molecules, or the atoms within a molecule, has the least thing to do with gravity.  Gravity is (by far) the weakest of the four fundamental forces.  If you compare gravity to electromagnetism -- which is the force that holds molecules together -- electromagnetism is 10 ^36 times stronger.

That's 1 followed by 36 zeroes, folks.

The only reason gravity seems so strong to us is that we're comparing things to the gravitational pull of the Earth, and the Earth is freakin' huge.  On the scale of molecules, gravitational interaction is so small that it is, for all practical purposes, zero.

The other thing that bears mention is that you can demonstrate that water is proportionally composed of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen by the simple experiment performed back in 1976 by me and my lab partner John in high school chemistry, namely running an electric current through water to break it up and collecting the gases in two separate test tubes.  You can show they're not the same by inserting a lighted wooden splint into the two tubes -- the one with the hydrogen will give a musical little "pop" as the hydrogen around the mouth of the tube ignites with the oxygen in the air; the one with the oxygen will begin to burn merrily.

Or, you can do what John did, which was to bubble the hydrogen gas into the oxygen tube, and then insert the lighted splint.  The result was:

BANG

... as the two gases, in exactly the right proportions, combusted back into water.  This left John holding the remains of a broken test tube, wearing a terrified expression, with his eyebrows singed off and his hair blown back in the fashion of a Looney Tunes character who has just had a gun fired directly into his face.

It also bears mention that this is the same reaction that did this:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

So the weight of the evidence is very much in favor of water being dihydrogen monoxide.  Just as well; rewriting all those textbooks would be a serious pain in the ass.

It's unsurprising, as I mentioned, that many of the Water-Is-Actually-Oxygen people are also The-Earth-Is-Flat people.  Once you've decided that (1) evidence and logic are inadmissible for determining the truth, and (2) all the experts are lying to you for their own nefarious purposes, the jig is up.

Now, I need to go have another cup of coffee, and see if I can reconfigure the banana pudding in my head back into neural tissue.  The vanilla wafer crumbs are making the inside of my skull itch.

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I picked this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation because of the devastating, and record-breaking, fires currently sweeping across the American west.  Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers is one of the most cogent arguments I've ever seen for the reality of climate change and what it might ultimately mean for the long-term habitability of planet Earth.  Flannery analyzes all the evidence available, building what would be an airtight case -- if it weren't for the fact that the economic implications have mobilized the corporate world to mount a disinformation campaign that, so far, seems to be working.  It's an eye-opening -- and essential -- read.

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

Defending the indefensible

I'm a pretty forgiving guy.  I recognize we all have failings, and heaven knows I've led a far from blameless life myself.  But there are two things that I find it hard to fathom, and nearly impossible to forgive.

Those two things are rape and pedophilia.

Victimizing the less powerful turns my stomach.  I can barely stand even reading news stories that involve those two acts, which is why I felt actual nausea at a trio of disgusting articles about the recent revelation of a massive coverup by the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania involving the rape of 1,200 (possibly more) children by priests.

Let's start with the response to the scandal by Dr. Taylor Marshall, Catholic theologian, who at least acknowledged the problem -- more than a lot of church leaders have done -- but then proceeded to deflect the blame in a way that is as maddening as it is baffling.  Here's what Marshall had to say:

Three reasons for sexual scandals:

1. Denial of Christian faith. These clerics are secretly atheists, agnostics, or Satanists who see the Church as a social justice network that pays well and provides a lifestyle of insurance, income, retirement and unquestioned access to compromised men and vulnerable children.
2. Homosexuality. The 2004 John Jay Report publicized that 80% of priest abuse victims are male.  The orientation of abuse was overwhelming homosexual According to James Martin and Larry Stammer, 15–58% of American Catholic priests are homosexual in orientation.  Father Dariusz Oko of Poland has suggested that 50% of the bishops in the United States are homosexual.
3. Evolution of the mega-diocese. Since 1900, the concept of the Catholic diocese has morphed into something that would not be recognized by Christians of the medieval period, and certainly not by the Church Fathers.

So the reason priests have molested children is not because they're sick, predatory, and in a position of power, and are being overseen by men more concerned about the church's image than they are about protecting children.

No, the reasons are atheists, gays, and big churches.

[Image courtesy of the Creative Commons license Samuli Lintula, Altar of Helsinki Catholic Cathedral, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Then there's Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, who said that Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro is "anti-Catholic" and "salacious" for going after pedophile priests.  Donohue, who is known for his vitriolic, combative Catholicism-Is-Never-Wrong stance, had the following to say:

Shapiro said that "Church officials routinely and purposely described the abuse as horseplay and wrestling and inappropriate contact. It was none of those things."  He said it was "rape." 

Similarly, the New York Times quoted from the report saying that Church officials used such terms as "horseplay" and "inappropriate contact" as part of their "playbook for concealing the truth." 

Fact: This is an obscene lie.  Most of the alleged victims were not raped: they were groped or otherwise abused, but not penetrated, which is what the word "rape" means.  This is not a defense — it is meant to set the record straight and debunk the worst case scenarios attributed to the offenders.

First of all, how does Donohue know that "most of the alleged victims were not raped?"  That certainly contradicts a lot of the information that's been released (see the next article for more information about that).  And instead of defending the church and the priests, how about a little compassion for the children that were hurt?

Worst of all, there's the piece by Hemant Mehta that I would not recommend you read unless you have a far stronger stomach than I have, that gives details about a number of the cases being investigated.  I read it with an increasing sense of horror, not only because of the disgusting nature of the crimes committed, but because of the sheer number.  Mehta's list goes on and on -- but it bears mention that these are only cases that are being prosecuted in one state in one country.  Multiply that by the size of the Catholic community worldwide, and the imagination boggles.

And besides the scale, the other thing that will jump out at you is the lengths to which church leaders will go to protect not the victims, but the priests and the church.  Consider, for example, a letter from the bishop to Father Thomas Skotek, after it was revealed that he'd raped an underage girl, who became pregnant, and then paid for her to have an abortion.

"This is a very difficult time in your life, and I realize how upset you are," the bishop's letter said.  "I too share your grief."

This letter was written to Father Skotek, not to his victim.

The whole thing leaves me reeling.  It bears mention that I knew one of the first pedophile priests to be prosecuted and jailed for his crimes -- Father Gilbert Gauthé, who in the late 1960s and 1970s raped over a hundred boys in southern Louisiana.  At first, instead of turning Gauthé in for his crimes, the two bishops who supervised him, first Bishop Maurice Schexnayder and then Bishop Gerald Frey, moved him from one parish to another an effort to hide the scandal.  All that did, of course, was simply to give Gauthé a new batch of children to molest, and the crimes themselves didn't come to light until 1983.  (Despite my being a child when I knew him, Gauthé never acted inappropriately toward me, probably because he knew my grandmother, with whom I was living at the time, would have strangled him with her bare hands if he had.)

The most horrifying thing of all is that these kinds of crimes are not, as they have often been characterized, the sole provenance of the Catholic Church.  They can occur any time you have two ingredients -- a power structure that puts the leaders in a position of absolute authority over their followers, and people running the whole thing who are more bent on protecting themselves and their institution than they are on protecting innocent victims.  (If you want to read a novel that shows a similar thing in a different setting, read Ava Norwood's book If I Make My Bed In Hell, which is simultaneously one of the most beautifully written, and most disturbing, works of fiction I've ever read.)

As horrifying as it is, I hope the cases in Pennsylvania will uncover the similar instances of pedophilia that must exist in equal numbers in other places.  The victims have a right to have their voices heard, and their wrongs redressed, insofar as that is possible.  The perpetrators need to face justice for what they have done.

And the people like Taylor Marshall and Bill Donohue who are still making excuses and defending the church leaders rather than showing the slightest compassion to the victims need to shut the fuck up.

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I picked this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation because of the devastating, and record-breaking, fires currently sweeping across the American west.  Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers is one of the most cogent arguments I've ever seen for the reality of climate change and what it might ultimately mean for the long-term habitability of planet Earth.  Flannery analyzes all the evidence available, building what would be an airtight case -- if it weren't for the fact that the economic implications have mobilized the corporate world to mount a disinformation campaign that, so far, seems to be working.  It's an eye-opening -- and essential -- read.

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

Selflessness, sociality, and bullshit

About two and a half years ago, a team of researchers released a landmark paper entitled "On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit."  The gist of the paper, which I wrote about in Skeptophilia, is that people with lower cognitive ability and vocabulary are more prone to getting taken in by meaningless intellecto-babble -- statements that sound profound but actually don't mean anything.

This is the sort of thing that Deepak Chopra has become famous for, which led to the creation of the Random Deepak Chopra Quote Generator.  (My latest visit to it produced "The unexplainable embraces new life, and our consciousness constructs an expression of balance."  I've read some real Chopra, and I can say with certainty that it's damned hard to tell the difference.)

Now, a followup paper, authored by Arvid Erlandsson, Artur Nilsson, Gustav Tinghög, and Daniel Västfjäll of the University of Linköping (Sweden) -- interestingly, none of whom were involved in the earlier study -- has shown that not only does poor bullshit detection correlate with low cognition (which is hardly surprising), it correlates with high selfishness and low capacity for compassion.

In "Bullshit-Sensitivity Predicts Prosocial Behavior," which came out in the online journal PLoS One two weeks ago, the authors write:

Although bullshit-sensitivity has been linked to other individual difference measures, it has not yet been shown to predict any actual behavior.  We therefore conducted a survey study with over a thousand participants from a general sample of the Swedish population and assessed participants’ bullshit-receptivity (i.e. their perceived meaningfulness of seven bullshit sentences) and profoundness-receptivity (i.e. their perceived meaningfulness of seven genuinely profound sentences), and used these variables to predict two types of prosocial behavior (self-reported donations and a decision to volunteer for charity)...  [L]ogistic regression analyses showed that... bullshit-receptivity had a negative association with both types of prosocial behavior.  These relations held up for the most part when controlling for potentially intermediating factors such as cognitive ability, time spent completing the survey, sex, age, level of education, and religiosity.  The results suggest that people who are better at distinguishing the pseudo-profound from the actually profound are more prosocial.

"To our knowledge, we are the first study that links reactions to bullshit to an actual behavior rather than to self-reported measures. We also measure prosociality in two different ways, which makes the findings more robust and generalizable," said Arvid Erlandsson, who co-authored the study, in an interview in PsyPost.  "We see this finding as a small but interesting contribution to a fun and quickly emerging field of research rather than something groundbreaking or conclusive.  We are open with the fact that the results were found in exploratory analyses, and we cannot currently say much about the underlying mechanisms...  Future studies could potentially test causality (e.g. see whether courses in critical thinking could make people better at distinguishing the actually profound from the pseudo-profound and whether this also influences their prosociality compared to a control group)."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons -- This vector image was created with Inkscape by Anynobody, composing work: Mabdul., Bullshit, CC BY-SA 3.0]

As you might expect, I find all of this fascinating.  I'm not sure it's all that encouraging, however; what this implies is that bullshit will tend to sucker stupid mean people (sorry, I'm not a researcher in psychology, and I just can't keep writing "low-cognition, low-prosocial individuals" without rolling my eyes).  And if you add that to the Dunning-Kruger effect -- the well-studied tendency of people with low ability to overestimate how good they are at something -- you've got a perfect storm of unpleasant behavior.

Stupid mean people who think they're better than the rest of us, and who will not only fall for nonsense, but will be unwilling to budge thereafter regardless of the facts.

Sound like some people in red hats we keep seeing on the news?

So my chortles of delight over the Erlandsson et al. paper were tempered by my knowledge that we here in the United States are currently watching the results play out for real, and it's scaring the hell out of a good many of us.

I'm not sure what, if anything, can be done about this.  Promote critical thinking in schools is a good place to start, but education budgets are being slashed pretty much everywhere, which certainly isn't conducive to adding new and innovative programs.  Other than that, we just have to keep coming back to facts, evidence, and logic, and hoping that someone -- anyone -- will listen.

*****************************

I picked this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation because of the devastating, and record-breaking, fires currently sweeping across the American west.  Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers is one of the most cogent arguments I've ever seen for the reality of climate change and what it might ultimately mean for the long-term habitability of planet Earth.  Flannery analyzes all the evidence available, building what would be an airtight case -- if it weren't for the fact that the economic implications have mobilized the corporate world to mount a disinformation campaign that, so far, seems to be working.  It's an eye-opening -- and essential -- read.

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

The true self

I don't know about you, but I'm confronted on a nearly daily basis with finding out that people have done things that seem entirely baffling.  I frequently find myself saying, "Who would do something like that?"  Or, more directly and simply, "What the fuck?"  Sometimes explaining human behavior seems like a losing proposition.

New research by Princeton University cognitive psychologist Simon Cullen has given us an interesting window into these moments, and a guardedly heartening view of how we see each other; humans in general tend to attribute good behavior to a person's "inner self" and true identity, and bad behavior to circumstance.

In other words, when we're good, it's agency, a reflection of who we are.  When we're bad... well, anyone in that situation might have responded that way.

Giacinto Gimignani, An Angel and a Devil Fighting for the Soul of a Child (ca. 1640) [Image is in the Public Domain]

In his paper, "When Do Circumstances Excuse?  Moral Prejudices and Beliefs about the True Self Drive Preferences for Agency-Minimizing Explanation," which was published last week in the journal Cognition, Cullen writes:

When explaining human actions, people usually focus on a small subset of potential causes.  What leads us to prefer certain explanations for valenced actions over others?  The present studies indicate that our moral attitudes often predict our explanatory preferences far better than our beliefs about how causally sensitive actions are to features of the actor’s environment...  Taken together, these studies indicate that our explanatory preferences often reflect a powerful tendency to represent agents as possessing virtuous true selves.  Consequently, situation-focused explanations often appear salient because people resist attributing negatively valenced actions to the true self.  There is a person/situation distinction, but it is normative.

He demonstrated this using five studies that took a variety of angles on the question:

• Study 1 looked at the attitudes of "high-prejudice" individuals toward a man having a single erotic same-sex encounter -- and tended to accept situational explanations (such as that he had just had a stressful experience earlier and was "not himself").
• Study 2 asked participants to evaluate a number of fictional events, varying what they were told about the character's environment and situation.  In this one, Cullen found that pre-existing beliefs about the effect of environment on behavior had little effect -- most people still attributed good behavior to the core self and bad behavior (or at least, behavior that the participant considered bad) to circumstance. 
• Study 3 found the same pattern existed regarding a woman's decision to have an abortion and a person's decision to convert to Islam.
• Study 4 showed that people are more inclined to attribute bad outcomes to luck than good ones, once again suggesting that good decisions are because of who we are and bad ones because of where we find ourselves.
• Study 5 found that both liberals and conservatives explain the beliefs of people in the opposite party using arguments of circumstance ("Of course he's liberal, he was raised by California Democrats!") and beliefs of the people in their own party to agency ("He's a liberal because he's thought everything out clearly and understands the facts.").

These results are both encouraging and discouraging.  Encouraging because we're not nearly as cynical about humanity as we often appear to be -- we honestly expect most humans to be good most of the time, when they are acting out of their core identity.  Discouraging, though, because it means that we're once again not evaluating behavior rationally, but making assumptions that everyone would act like we do if only they were in better circumstances.  (What Kathryn Schulz calls the tendency to believe that people we disagree with "don't have access to the same information that we do, and when we generously share that information with them, they're going to see the light and come on over to our team.")

"It’s a way to confuse how you believe the world should be with how the world is," Cullen said about this sort of assumption.  "That’s usually a bad thing to do.  It’s much better to figure out how the world is."

Which is it exactly, and not just in the realm of psychology.  It'd be nice if we could set aside our preconceived notions and evaluate the facts, both about each other and about the world.

But since Cullen's study shows that's what we already think we're doing, I'm not sure how we could begin to fix this.

*****************************

I picked this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation because of the devastating, and record-breaking, fires currently sweeping across the American west.  Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers is one of the most cogent arguments I've ever seen for the reality of climate change and what it might ultimately mean for the long-term habitability of planet Earth.  Flannery analyzes all the evidence available, building what would be an airtight case -- if it weren't for the fact that the economic implications have mobilized the corporate world to mount a disinformation campaign that, so far, seems to be working.  It's an eye-opening -- and essential -- read.

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