Six impossible things before breakfast

Yesterday's post, about the ridiculous aspects of conspiracy theories, prompted a regular reader of Skeptophilia to send me a link that indicated how deep the pools of craziness go.

The link was to a paper (you can download the entire thing here) by Michael Wood, Karen Douglas, and Robbie Sutton that appeared in the January 2012 issue of Social, Psychological, and Personality Science.  Called "Dead and Alive: Belief in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories," this paper describes an experiment supporting a fantastic conclusion -- that people who believe in conspiracy theories are likely to believe simultaneously in different versions of them, even if those versions are mutually exclusive.

The set-up, which is positively brilliant, is that the three researchers asked 137 participants to take a survey ranking a variety of scenarios from "extremely unlikely" to "extremely likely."  The scenarios included various tropes from conspiracy theories, including:

• 9/11 was an inside job by the US government
• The moon landing was faked
• The CIA was behind the JFK assassination
• Global warming is a hoax

Sprinkled amongst the questions were a variety of scenarios that involved the death of Princess Diana:

• Diana was killed by a rogue cell of the British Intelligence
• Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed were killed by Al-Fayed's relatives, who disapproved of their relationship
• Diana was killed by agents of the royal family to prevent her marrying an Arab
• Diana faked her own (and Al-Fayed's) deaths in order to escape from the notoriety

Now, you would think that even the most conspiratorial of conspiracy theorists would see that whatever you believe, no two of these could possibly be true simultaneously.  But, amazingly, that isn't what the results showed.  The study supported two eye-opening conclusions, to wit:

• If you believe in any conspiracy theories at all (e.g. 9/11 was an inside job), you are likely to believe in all of them; and
• The higher you rank a particular version of a conspiracy theory, the higher you rank others -- even if those alternate explanations are self-contradictory.

Yes, you read that right -- people who said that it was "highly likely" that Diana was killed by members of her own family also said it was "highly likely" that she had faked her own death and was still alive.

Thinking this couldn't possibly be a valid conclusion, the researchers tried the experiment again, with a different set of test subjects, and this time using Osama bin Laden as their example.  Again, the subjects had to rank such statements as "Osama's death was falsely reported by the Obama administration; he is still alive" and "Osama was already dead by the time of the raid" -- and the researchers found a strong correlation between belief in both statements.

Well.  I hardly know what to say that the study doesn't make abundantly clear on its own.  Mostly, I find myself wondering if belief in conspiracy theories should be considered a mental illness, given that it so obviously derails rational thought.  Here is the conclusion of Wood, Douglas, and Sutton's paper:

In any case, the evidence we have gathered in the present study supports the idea that conspiracism constitutes a monological belief system, drawing its coherence from central beliefs such as the conviction that authorities and officials engage in massive deception of the public to achieve their malevolent goals.  Connectivity with this central idea lends support to any individual conspiracy theory, even to the point that mutually contradictory theories fail to show a negative correlation in belief.  Believing that Osama bin Laden is still alive is apparently no obstacle to believing that he has been dead for years.

Conspiratorial conspiracies

I have once again been thinking about conspiracy theories.  This time, the culprit is "College Humor," the occasionally brilliant perpetrators of countless YouTube videos.  This particular one, called "Deceptive Deceptions," definitely falls into the "spot-on hilarious" range of the spectrum (see the clip here).  It makes wonderful fun of the Zeitgeist mindset, which is desperate to find clues and hints everywhere of a global conspiracy.  (And if you've never seen "Zeitgeist," my recommendation is "don't bother."  Just sit down, close your eyes, and spend five minutes contemplating the idea that the Illuminati are running the world and that a coalition between Monsanto and the Vatican is pulling the strings of everyone from Barack Obama to Quentin Tarantino, and try not to let the rational part of your mind interrupt with any busybody-comments about how unlikely it all is.  Then go sit on your couch and have a cold beer and give thanks for the forty-five minutes of your life that you didn't waste watching this ridiculous video.)

Unfortunately, though, there are a lot of people who believe this stuff.  We've discussed conspiracy theories in my Critical Thinking class, and the discussion has often centered around the idea of Ockham's Razor -- if there are two (or more) theories to explain something, and all of them account for the known facts, the simplest one is the most likely to be true.  Ockham's Razor is, of course, only a rule of thumb -- there have been times when some incredibly convoluted series of events turns out actually to have happened -- but in my experience, it works pretty damn well.

This still hasn't stopped websites like "Conspiracy Planet" from cropping up.  This website, which once again I would caution you from spending too much time with lest your brain turn to cream-of-wheat, is a bit of a clearinghouse for wingnuts.  Some of the high points:

• The ultimate aim of the Illuminati is to have Arnold Schwarzenegger become president.  Evidently, the Illuminati are unfamiliar with the fact that you have to have been born a United States citizen in order to run for president, but hey, ultra-powerful black-robed secret world leaders need never let paltry things like facts stand in their way.  Another entry on the page for Ahnold states that he is the third Antichrist.  I didn't even know that we'd already had two, did you?
• A crop circle, shaped like a human with butterfly wings, is a sign that evolution is speeding up.  It has -- and this is a direct, word-for-word quote -- "accelerated evolution on a quantum level, sending out ripples of transformative energy."  Reading this made me have to decide between guffawing and doing a face-plant directly into my desk, and the whole thing is leaving me wondering about my choice of spending over two decades attempting to educate children in the principles of scientific induction.
• The whole, tired, "NASA faked the landing on the moon" malarkey, reworked and revisited and regurgitated.
• Chemotherapy actually causes cancer.  This will no doubt come as a great shock to my friend who is currently recovering from leukemia after intensive chemotherapy.
• Cold fusion actually is true.
• You don't need flu shots to prevent flu. There is a new therapy which uses "resonant frequencies" to "shake viruses to pieces." Flu shots, in fact, are completely ineffective and were developed in order to keep money flowing into the pharmaceuticals industry.

And so on.  I can only take so much of this.  Believing in this sort of stuff seems to take a combination of factual ignorance, a desire to believe, and a huge dose of confirmation bias.  It's amusing to read about, but I keep coming back to the fact that for these websites, magazines, and so on to exist, someone actually finds it plausible.  I really should stop thinking about it, because despair isn't a healthy state of mind.

I'll just finish up with a quote by H. L. Mencken, which seems fitting:

The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.  He ascribes all his failure to get on in the world, all of his congenital incapacity and damfoolishness, to the machinations of werewolves assembled in Wall Street, or some other such den of infamy.

Stonehenge and the sound of silence

Scientists understand the world through the use of models.  These models, most often mathematical systems, are an attempt to describe how the world works, and (with luck) make predictions that then can be supported (or not) by experimental data.

It is an all too common error, however, to then decide that the model is the reality.  We see this in the realm of simple analogy, where the analogy is substituted for the real phenomenon (as in my student who began one of her AP exam essays with the sentence, "Antibodies are trash tags.").  On a more sophisticated level, we have people like Stephen Wolfram, the iconoclastic mathematician and theorist whose book A New Kind of Science (2002) makes the claim that because some processes in the universe resemble a mathematical construct called a "cellular automaton," the universe is, in fact, just a bunch of interacting, interlocking cellular automata.  This conjecture led Nobel-prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg to state, "It's possible, but I can't see any motivation for these speculations, except that this is the sort of system that Wolfram and others have become used to in their work on computers.  So might a carpenter, looking at the moon, suppose that it is made of wood."

An interesting example of mistaking the model for the reality was just published recently, and was the subject of a talk at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  Archaeologist Steven Waller has proposed, apparently seriously, that Stonehenge was built to resemble the interference pattern that develops when two nearby instruments play the same note continuously.

He studied the phenomenon of acoustic interference by connecting two flutes to air pumps so that they played the same note, and then observing the areas of reinforcement (where the sound waves add together, resulting a louder tone) and interfere (where the waves cancel out, resulting in silence).  He took blindfolded volunteers, and had them walk around the room, and then draw what they experienced -- and came up with a pattern that looked a little like Stonehenge.

"If these people in the past were dancing in a circle around two pipers and were experiencing the loud and soft and loud and soft regions that happen when an interference pattern is set up, they would have felt there were these massive objects arranged in a ring," Waller stated.  "It would have been this completely baffling experience, and anything that was mysterious like that in the past was considered to be magic and supernatural.  I think that was what motivated them to build the actual structure that matched this virtual impression.  It was like a vision that they received from the other world.  The design of Stonehenge matches this interference pattern auditory illusion."

Well.  I have a variety of objections to this conjecture, and I have to hope that someone in at the AAAS meeting brought them up as well (the article describing Waller's findings doesn't mention any questions asked after Waller's talk).   The first one is that the position of the "nodes" (places where interference causes sound cancellation) depends on the pitch being played.  It's interesting that he chose an instrument in his experiment (the flute) and in his talk (the pipes) that are both instruments I play, because I happen to know a bit about those instruments and how they produce sound.  The flute was a convenient choice for his experiment, because it produces fairly pure tones, with few overtones, and therefore a pair of flutes playing the same note would create a simple, stable interference pattern.  The bagpipes, however -- being a double-reed instrument, it has lots of overtones (resulting in the, shall we say, distinctness of its sound).  This would make any perfect cancellation and resulting "areas of silence" a near impossibility, crushing any hopes you may have if you ever happen to be unfortunate enough to be trapped between two bagpipers.

There's also the problem that no musicians, either then or now, are going to simply stand there and play the same note for hours on end.  They were presumably playing an actual tune, which means that the pitches would be shifting all over the place -- shifting any nodes produced all over the place, as well.

But the fundamental problem is one of mistaking appearance for reality.  Stonehenge might very well look like the pattern of nodes in an acoustic interference pattern, but that doesn't mean that it is one, any more than antibodies are trash tags or the universe is a cellular automaton.  I find it interesting that this research even made it past the peer review stage, especially given Waller's seemingly incessant focus on sound as a motivator for prehistoric art and architecture (his website, for example, describes his conjecture that sound echoes were the motivators for cave paintings -- notwithstanding that most cave paintings are representational, depicting ordinary things like horses, cattle, bears, and people).  It's possible, of course, that the acoustic characteristics of a particular place may have led prehistoric people to attribute magical properties to the locale; but to go from there to the conjecture that Stonehenge was built to mimic an acoustic interference pattern is a stretch indeed.

Of course, given that the whole thing centers around Stonehenge, I'm sure there will be a lot of buzz surrounding this paper for some time to come.  If you want to get attention from the woo-woo crowd, Stonehenge is a sure-fire winner.  But as far as scientific validity goes -- I'm afraid I'm not convinced.

Linguadiversity

Yesterday I finished reading the amazing book The Last Speakers by K. David Harrison, which chronicles a Yale-educated linguist's travels to Siberia, Mongolia, Southeast Asia, and South America to study and try to record some of the world's most endangered languages.

The central theme of the book is the idea that language diversity is analogous to biodiversity -- that having a great many languages is a sign of a stable, healthy, rich "cultural ecosystem."  His claim is that language becomes the lens through which a person sees, describes, and understands the world, and therefore when a language dies, that cultural knowledge is gone forever, because other languages could never encode the same knowledge as deeply and thoroughly.

As a language nerd (my own MA is in linguistics), it's subject I think a lot about.  Current estimates are that there are 7,000 languages in daily use by native speakers (so excluding languages such as Latin, which are in daily use in schools but of which no one is a native speaker).  A great many of these are in danger of extinction -- they are only spoken by a handful of people, mostly the elderly, and the children aren't being raised fluent.  It is an eye-opening fact that 96% of the world's languages are spoken by 4% of the world's people, and the other 96% of the world's people speak the other 4% of the world's languages.

Run that one around in your head for a while.

Top of the list is Mandarin Chinese, the most widely-spoken language in the world.  English, predictably, follows.  Of the people who speak neither Mandarin nor English, a substantial fraction speak Spanish, Russian, Hindi, or some dialect of Arabic.  Most of the rest of the world's languages?  Inconsequential -- at least in numbers.

The open question is "should we care?"  Harrison clearly does; his passion for protecting the world's languages comes through with every word.  His view is echoed by Michael Krauss, professor emeritus of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, who has stated, "... it is catastrophic for the future of mankind.  It should be as scary as losing 90% of the biological species."

Are they right? I will admit that their argument has its points; but it also is specious in the sense that most languages can encode the same knowledge somehow, and therefore when the last native speaker of Eyak dies, we won't have necessarily lost that culture's knowledge.  We may have lost the ability to figure out how that knowledge was encoded -- as we have with the Linear A writing of Crete -- but that's not the same as losing the knowledge itself.

The comparison to biodiversity is also a bit of a false analogy.  Languages don't form some kind of synergistic whole, as the species in an ecosystem do, where the loss of any one thread can cause the whole thing to come unraveled.  In fact, you might argue the opposite -- that having lots of unique languages in an area (such as the hundreds of native languages in Australia) can actually prevent cultural communication and understanding.  Species loss can destroy an ecosystem -- witness what's happening in the Amazonian rain forest.  It's a little hard to imagine language loss as having those same kinds of effects on the cultural landscape of the world.

Still, I can't help wishing for the extinction to stop.  It's just sad -- the fact that the numbers of native speakers of the beautiful Irish Gaelic and Breton languages are steadily decreasing, that there are languages (primarily in Australia and amongst the native languages of North and South America) for whom the last native speakers will die in the next five to ten years without ever having a linguist study, or even record, what it sounded like.  I don't have a cogent argument from a utilitarian standpoint about why this is a bad thing.  It's aesthetics, pure and simple -- languages are cool.  The idea that English and Mandarin can swamp Twi and Yanomami is probably unavoidable, and it even follows the purely Dawkinsian concept of the competition between memes.  But I don't have to like it, any more than I like the fact that my bird feeders are visited more often by starlings and house sparrows than by indigo buntings.

Enough miracles

I'm sure most of you are aware of the current fight in the US between a group of Catholic bishops and the Obama administration regarding a proposed requirement that contraception programs be part of medical coverage for employees -- even if the employer's institution has a religious issue with using birth control.

This group of bishops has presented the president with a letter demanding that the mandate be rescinded, in the name of protecting "religious liberty and freedom of conscience for all."  The result is that Obama appears to be backpedaling, working on a compromise that would give religious institutions with objections to providing contraception coverage an out.  The bishops are mollified but not yet willing to withdraw their objection; contraception coverage, they say, should be removed completely, and any talk of compromise is doomed to fail.  Anthony Picarello, general counsel for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, says, "It's the unstoppable force meets the immovable object."

This stance, of course, has the complete support of Pope Benedict XVI, who has himself been something of an immovable object on the subject.  Three years ago, a group of fifty "dissident" bishops presented the pope with a letter entreating him to lift the Catholic church's ban on contraception.  Interestingly, the letter made it clear that they were not promoting contraception because they were somehow in favor of promiscuity, a charge that has been levied against pro-contraception groups in the past.  They simply stated that the ban on contraception, which was passed into church law forty years ago by Pope Paul VI in his encyclical Humanae Vitae ("Of Human Life") had, according to the letter, "had a catastrophic impact on the poor and powerless around the world."

Well, yeah.  In fact: duh.  It doesn't take a Ph.D. to notice the worldwide correlation between several different demographics -- lack of access to contraception, poor access for women to higher education, large families, poor access to modern medicine, and high infant mortality.  (Note that I am not claiming that lack of contraception causes the others; as I harp on continuously in my environmental science class, correlation does not imply causation.  But the fact that these demographics all cluster this way is certainly suggestive of some sort of connection.)

It seems clear that when women have choices to limit the number of children they have, they will do so.  It becomes easier to provide for the children they do have, and it affords the mothers a better chance of doing something else with their lives besides bearing and raising children.

Despite this, the receipt of the 2008 letter served only to prompt the talking heads at the Vatican to dismiss the letter as the "insignificant attempts of the pro-contraception lobby" to influence church policy, and suggested that the letter was "paid for" by dissident groups attempting to undermine the authority of the pope.  The recent kerfuffle regarding contraception in the US is indicative that things haven't changed much.

Note that I'm not especially interested in the question of whether the president overstepped his bounds in trying to induce religious groups to change their ways.  That is a question for a constitutional lawyer, which I am clearly not.  I'm more interested in the moral stance of the Catholic leadership in maintaining their resistance to contraception.

Population growth is reaching a critical state. You'd think that the hierarchy of the Catholic church, which is composed as a rule of extremely well-educated people, would not be unaware of this fact.  Some ecologists think that the human population has already passed the point of sustainability, and that a "correction" is inevitable.  (And you know what "correction" is a euphemism for.)  How can it possibly be a moral stance to tell a poverty-stricken woman that if she or her husband uses birth control, they are committing a sin, and taking the chance of damning their immortal souls to hell?

So, I must ask: which is more sinful, a poor couple being provided the pill to prevent the them from having children they can't adequately care for, or the wealthy, privileged autocrats in the Catholic church sanctioning women remaining trapped in the cycle of bearing children because they truly have no other choices available to them?

Pope Benedict apparently has, like the other Catholic leaders before him, championed Humanae Vitae, stating that it was "all too often misunderstood and misrepresented."  Okay, your holy popehood: why don't you explain it to us?  Why do you think it's a mandate from god that you sit in your air-conditioned office in the Vatican, with your robes and golden ring and all that other nonsense, and command that some poverty-stricken unfortunate who believes every word you say has to continue to have more children, and more, and after that, more again?  Tell us, clearly, why that is a moral and ethical thing to do.

I'm waiting.

Yeah. I thought so.

The Humanae Vitae told the Catholic world that it was god's wish that any sexually active couple (although presumably only doing so beneath the blessing of the church through marriage) "be open to the miracle of life."  Whether life itself is a miracle depends, I suppose, on your definition of a miracle; but even given that as a premise, one thing seems pretty clear.

7 billion miracles are enough.

Beauty, ugliness, and god's plan for Aunt Gertrude

Once again, I've been involved in arguments in online forums over belief.

Yes, I know it's pointless.  No, I don't seem to be able to stop myself.  The problem is, while (as I mentioned yesterday) I don't really care what people believe personally, it does bother me when someone trumpets a counterfactual or illogical statement in a public fashion, and the only responses are a sort of Greek chorus of "Right on!" and "You tell 'em, brother!" and "Bless you, sister!"  I feel like I am honor-bound to step in, even if it never seems to make a difference.

This particular iteration of that pointless pastime was launched by a woman who asked how anyone who was a biologist could look around at all of the wonderful things in the natural world and not be absolutely convinced that a deity, not evolution, brought them about.  "Look at how pretty everything is," she was basically saying. "God musta done that."

Well, that leaves us with one teensy little problem, which I pointed out, not that it did any good.  There are a lot of parts of the natural world that, well, aren't all that pretty.  Each December the Hallmark stores are full of next year's inspirational calendars featuring bible verses set against photographs of rainbows, birds in flight, waterfalls, sunsets, brilliant fields of flowers.  Okay, fine; if those are god's creations, and are supposed to inspire us with divine awe, then give equal time to the aphids, dung beetles, slugs, the Ebola virus, and the charred remains of trees following a forest fire, which are presumably the work of the same creator.  I wonder how many calendars of bible verses set against photographs of athlete's foot fungus and naked mole-rats Hallmark could sell.  One, is my guess, because I'd buy one, but I'm guessing not many others.

Funny how we're quick to attribute the Lilies of the Field to god's hand, but not the Pinworms of the Pig's Intestines.  They, too, toil not, and neither do they spin, but Jesus conveniently didn't mention that.  And if you claim that all of the nasty little parasites and so on were created by Satan, now you're just making stuff up, because I've never heard of a bible verse that says anything remotely like, "And then the Evil One didst fashion ticks from the dust of the earth, and he did sayeth unto the ticks, 'Go, thou ticks, and tormentest man and beast, for that shalt serveth them all right, ha ha ha.'  And it was so, and the Evil One was well pleased thereof."

It reminds me of the wonderful song by Eric Idle (of Monty Python fame), set to the tune of "All Things Bright and Beautiful:"

All things dull and ugly,
All creatures short and squat,
All things rude and nasty,
The Lord God made the lot.

Each little snake that poisons,
Each little wasp that stings,
He made their brutish venom.
He made their horrid wings.

All things sick and cancerous,
All evil great and small,
All things foul and dangerous,
The Lord God made them all.

Each nasty little hornet,
Each beastly little squid--
Who made the spikey urchin?
Who made the sharks? He did!

All things scabbed and ulcerous,
All pox both great and small,
Putrid, foul and gangrenous,
The Lord God made them all.

Amen. 

None of this, of course, is any kind of proof or disproof of the existence of a creator; it's more an interesting feature of how our psyches work.  It's just the Dart-Thrower's Bias again, isn't it?  We're quick to attribute beauty, happiness, and good fortune to god, but seldom if ever do the converse.  If you're crossing a street, and a Mack truck screeches to a halt within an inch of your torso, you might say, "Wow, god really had his Mighty Hand protecting me that time!  He must have some grand plan for me."  Whereas, if Aunt Gertrude falls down the stairs and breaks her neck, we almost certainly wouldn't say, "Man, god really creamed Aunt Gertrude, didn't he? Guess he was done with her."

My own attitude is, take your understanding, and follow where it leads.  If you believe that god really does create beauty, then he created ugliness and horror, too.  If he saves some people miraculously, he allows others to die in freak accidents.  Use one as an explanation, and it requires you to explain the other.

In for a penny, in for a pound.

Beware of mermaids

It is an open question how much respect should be accorded to someone's beliefs and actions based simply on whether those form part of his/her religion.

"It's my religion" is, in many ways, a "Get Out Of Jail Free" card.  It stops conversation, it stops questioning.  Somehow, we're supposed to tiptoe around the subject, and not view beliefs labeled "religion" through the same critical lens as we would (for example) scientific or medical claims.  According to many, religious statements do not need to rise to the same standard of evidence as anything else; they are by nature personal, impossible to analyze, beyond the realm of logic. 

This is one of the major beefs that Richard Dawkins has with religion, and he goes into it in some detail in his book The God Delusion.  It is also, I think, why he rubs so many people the wrong way.  I remember a student telling me, "It's not even that I necessarily disagree with what Dawkins is saying.  It's just that he's kind of an asshole about it."  I think this view has a lot to do with the pervasive multiculturalism that is now the Flavor Of The Day in the media and in schools; we're supposed to unquestioningly respect, not respectfully question, the beliefs of others.  And that respect is supposed to be given regardless of whether the belief has the remotest connection with reality.

Because this is serious thin ice for a lot of people, and because I really would rather not get any more hate mail and death threats than usual, let me take just one recent example in the news that takes it out of the realm of what most of us come into contact with. 

This particular story (source here) comes from Zimbabwe, where some workers on a new reservoir were scared off the site by "mermaids."  The Minister of Water Resources, Samuel Sipepa Nkomo, told a parliamentary committee that the workers were refusing to go back to work because of their encounters.

The belief in spirits, including water spirits, is common in Zimbabwe, where many nominally Christian people combine their Christian beliefs with traditional animism.  So the mermaid encounters were definitely within the realm of what I'd call a religious belief, not a simple paranormal claim (such as if an American said he'd seen a UFO).  And Mr. Nkomo's suggestion in response to the workers' claims makes that point even clearer; he recommended to the committee that shamans be hired to brew traditional beer and carry out rituals to appease the mermaids.

My question is, why on earth wasn't the response, "Dear Workers:  There's no such thing as 'mermaids.'  Get a grip on reality.  Also get another job.  You're fired."  It may well be that Mr. Nkomo shares those beliefs -- it certainly seems likely, given his response -- but everyone seems to be going out of their way to respect the beliefs of the workmen, instead of saying, "Those are fairy tales."  And lest you think that this sort of thing only happens in deepest, darkest Africa -- just last year, a factory worker in Georgia was fired because he refused to wear for one day a badge that said, "666 days without an accident," because 666 is the mark of the devil.  He sued for damages and back pay -- and won.

Just to make it clear, I have no issue whatsoever with people believing whatever they want, as long as they don't mandate that I go along with them.  If you'd like, you can believe that the world is a flat, triangular plate resting on the back of a giant flying wombat.  (Go ahead, try to tell me this is more ridiculous than mermaids in reservoirs.)  But why does labeling this belief a "religious statement" immediately accord it respect?  By demanding that we hold religious statements to the same standard of critical thinking as we do anything else, does this make Dawkins "an asshole?"  (He may be an asshole in other regards, I don't know him personally and am unqualified to make that judgment.)

Anyhow, that's the question of the day.  I know that even asking it makes a lot of people wince -- and I do wonder why that is.