Fostering awesomeness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Jackson was half African, and other urban legends

Did you know that daddy-long-legs have an incredibly poisonous venom, so poisonous that they'd be the most deadly spider in the world, except their mandibles are so weak that they can't pierce human skin and inject it into you?

Did you know that you shouldn't throw rice at weddings, because birds will eat it, and then it will swell up in their stomachs and their stomachs will rupture and it will kill them?

Well, if you answered "No," good, because as it turns out, neither of these is true.  The first one still makes the rounds despite its being entirely false -- not only did Mythbusters debunk it, but technically, daddy-long-legs aren't even true spiders (they belong to an arachnid group called "harvestmen").  As far as the birds, if that were true, it would make it hard to explain why there are a number of bird species who are major pests in rice fields -- they are presumably not taking the rice they steal home and cooking it in tiny rice pots before serving.

These old-wives'-tales, or urban legends, or whatever you want to call them, are still out there, and I still periodically get asked about them by students.  But we have one advantage, these days, as compared to when I was young -- we now have the internet as a giant fact-checking device.

I've done a good bit of railing against the internet as being a conduit for bullshit, but used properly, it does have one truly wonderful function; if you have access to a computer, you can get nearly instantaneous access to information for the purpose of verifying claims.  For example, take a look at the following website, "The Seven Black Presidents Before Obama," which (despite being written in 2008) is still circulating today.  (In fact, I just saw it for the first time two days ago as a Facebook post.)

In case you don't feel like reading it, the gist is that there were seven earlier US Presidents -- Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Harding, Coolidge, Eisenhower, and a pre-George-Washington guy who was supposedly the first actual president, a gentleman named John Hanson -- who had significant amounts of African ancestry.  And we're not just talking about one African ancestor way back; the site claims that Andrew Jackson, for example, was the son of an Irish woman by an African American father.

Well, the whole thing set my skepti-senses ringing immediately.  For one thing, among the "evidence" given (if I can dignify it by that name) is that Coolidge's mother's maiden name was "Moor," and we all know that "Moor" is an old name for North Africans.  (If that's the way it worked, I suppose President Bush was descended from a hedgerow.)  Now, if this had been handed around thirty years ago, and you doubted it, your only recourse would have been a painstaking search through the encyclopedia, or, failing that, a trip to the library.  As for me, it took me a grand total of fifteen seconds to find this page -- wherein each of the claims is analyzed, to be summed up as follows:  "Historians' and biographers' studies of these presidents have not supported such claims, nor have the claims above been peer-reviewed.  They are generally ignored by scholars."  (They also note that Coolidge's mother's maiden name, Moor, can not only mean "dark or swarthy," but also refers to a geographical feature common in the British Isles, and that there are tens of thousands of people named Moor(e) who aren't of African descent.)

The whole John Hanson thing, by the way, seems to be an outright fabrication that conflates John Hanson of Maryland (a Caucasian who was the president of the Continental Congress during the American Revolution) with a John Hanson who was an African American who went to Liberia in the 1800s and served as a senator there.  The two were (obviously) different men.  [Source]

So, the bottom lines is that we have even less excuse these days for (1) not checking what we're told, and (2) believing bullshit.  Now, that's not to say that there isn't lots of bullshit out there on the internet.  For example, 95% of the nonsense I rail about daily on this blog comes from the 'web.  But there's an easy solution; the simplest way to find the good stuff is to append the word "skeptic" or "debunk" after what you're searching for on Google.  That's what I did with the "Black Presidents" thing -- I just Googled "Seven Black Presidents Before Obama Debunk" and it brought up the page I linked above (and also a Snopes.com page that had basically the same information).

Anyhow, that's my musings on critical thinking for today.  It looks like, in fact, Barack Obama really is the first African-American president, unless you count the fact that in reality we're all from Africa if you go back far enough.  It did get me thinking, though, that what'll be even more interesting is if the College of Cardinals selects an African pope, which is looking like a possibility.  Wouldn't it be cool to have the Catholic Church not run by an old, homophobic, bigoted white guy?  An old, homophobic, bigoted black guy would be at least a step in the right direction.

Science, rigor, and hostility

One of the things I find hard to understand about woo-woos is their hostility toward the people who want to test their beliefs.

Not the actual charlatans, mind you.  I get why they're hostile; we skeptics are trying to ruin their con game.  But the true believers, the ones who honestly think they're in touch with Great and Powerful Other Ways of Knowing -- shouldn't they be thrilled that finally, there are scientists who will submit their claims to rigorous investigation?

Of course, they aren't, for the most part.  They hate skeptics.  Take, for example, the outright fury that James Randi's Million-Dollar Challenge evokes.  This site even goes so far as to call Randi a cheat, and states that he and prominent skeptic Michael Shermer (author of the wonderful book Why People Believe Weird Things) are "not real skeptics."  Then there's the piece "The Relentless Hypocrisy of James Randi," by Michael Goodspeed, which ends thusly:

I must again remark on the irony of self-described magicians trying so desperately to debunk paranormal phenomena. After all, Magic in its purest form is an embracing of the Unknown, and these people run from it every chance they get.

I must point out, in the sake of honesty, that the Goodspeed article appeared at Rense.com -- the website owned by Jeff Rense, who is a wingnut of fairly significant proportions.  RationalWiki says about Rense that he is an anti-Semite, Holocaust denier, conspiracy theorist, and alt-med peddler who is "the poor man's Alex Jones."

So.  Yeah.  Randi and Shermer make people angry, but most of their objections seem to be just whinging complaints about "not playing fair" and denying specific requests (Goodspeed, for example, takes Randi to task for not even considering the claim of Rico Kolodzey, who claimed to be a "breatharian" -- that he could live on nothing but air and water.  Me, I would not only have refused to consider Kolodzey's claim, I would have laughed right in his face.  Maybe I'm "not a real skeptic," either.)  You rarely hear anyone explain why the woo-woos think that the scientists' methods are wrong.  Most of the attacks are just that -- free-floating ad hominems.  Other than the occasional, Uri-Geller-style "your atmosphere of disbelief is interfering with the psychic energies," no one seems to have a very cogent explanation of why we shouldn't turn the hard, cold lens of science on these people's claims.

Except, of course, that none of them seem, under laboratory conditions, to be able to do what they claim to do.  When pressed, or even when subjected to a simple set of controls, all of the claims fall apart.  Of course, some of them even fall apart before that:

And it's not that we skeptics don't give them plenty of chances.  Take, for example, last week's challenge by an Australian skeptics' group, the Borderline Skeptics, to anyone who thinks they can successfully "dowse" for water.  Dowsing, for those of you unfamiliar with this claim, is the alleged ability to use vibrations in a forked stick to find water (or lost objects, or buried treasure, or a variety of other things).  Dowsing has failed all previous tests -- most of the vibrations and pulls allegedly felt by practitioners are almost certainly due to the ideomotor effect.  Still, dowsers are common, and vehement in their claims that their abilities are real.  So the Borderline Skeptics have organized a challenge in which supposed dowsers have to try to locate buried bottles of water.  The event is scheduled for March 10, and any winners will be candidates for a $100,000 cash prize.

And instead of being happy about this, dowsers are pissed.  They've already started to claim that the game is rigged, that the Borderline Skeptics are a bunch of cheats, and that they wouldn't stoop to the "carnival sideshow atmosphere" that such a test would inevitably generate.  "I will not debase myself," one alleged medium wrote about the James Randi challenge, "to have these cranks take pot shots at my God-given abilities."

Thou shalt not put thy woo-woos to the test, apparently.

You have to wonder, though, how anyone from the outside doesn't see this for what it is -- special pleading, with a nice dose of name calling and shifting of the ground whenever they're challenged.  So I suppose I do get why the woo-woos themselves don't want to play; at the best, it would require them to reevaluate their claims, and at the worst, admit that they've been defrauding the public.  But how anyone considering hiring these people, giving them good money, can't see what's going on -- that is beyond me.

Which brings me to my last news story -- just yesterday, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported that a Delray Beach psychic center was robbed by an armed man, who burst in brandishing a gun, made the three women and one child who were present at the time lie on the floor, and took all the money in the place.

You'd think they'd have seen this one coming, wouldn't you?

Battle rejoined: the Oklahoma "Academic Freedom" bill

One of the frustrating things about being a skeptic is that I feel like I fight the same battles over and over.  I know that there's a point to continuing the battle; new generations of kids keep coming, and they need people who are committed to teaching them to think rationally.  And there are hopeful signs, such as a recent poll that indicated that the number of people who identify themselves as atheists has increased to its highest level ever (1 in 5).

But nowhere do I get that "oh, hell, here we go again" feeling like I do with the ongoing efforts by fundamentalist Christians to insinuate religion into public school science curricula.  This time it's the state of Oklahoma, where state bill HB1674 -- the so-called "Academic Freedom Bill" -- will allow students to submit work without penalty, even if it contradicts the understanding of evidence-based science.  [Source]

"I proposed this bill because there are teachers and students who may be afraid of going against what they see in their textbooks," said Gus Blackwell, a state representative and evangelical Christian who spent twenty years on the Baptist General Convention.  "A student has the freedom to write a paper that points out that highly complex life may not be explained by chance mutations."

They're getting craftier, I have to say.  Being that intelligent design and "irreducible complexity" didn't work (given that they are no more scientific than a theory that Christmas presents must be made by Santa Claus, given that there's no way that presents just show up by themselves on Christmas), they've had to turn to a different tactic -- branding disbelief in evolution as "critical thinking."  And if it wasn't obvious that they were talking about evolution, and not, for example, the periodic table, the bill itself explicitly states that its purpose is to encourage teachers to point out "scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses" of topics that "cause controversy," including "biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning."

Yeah.  And that has no political and religious agenda.  Right.

A heartening point, though, is that of the eight "academic freedom" bills proposed since 2004, none have passed.  So one can only hope that even in a relatively conservative, religious state like Oklahoma, wiser heads will prevail.

 
Isn't it interesting, too, that they call these bills "Academic Freedom" bills?  They follow a long succession of pieces of legislation that are given names that are far more positive than their content -- No Child Left Behind, the Clear Skies Initiative, the Patriot Act.  You have to wonder if legislators actually read the content of the bills they're voting on, or if they just look at the title, and think, "Whoa, I can't have it go on record that I voted against that."  I suspect that some of them would probably vote for the Happy Bunnies and Rainbows Act even if the act itself legalized using tasers on kittens.

So, just to set things straight: "academic freedom" and "critical thinking" do not mean some brainwashed 9th grader writing a paper in biology class claiming that Adam and Eve rode triceratopses, and that his teacher then has to give him an A.  Doubting mountains of evidence-based, peer-reviewed science because your pastor says different is not "thinking independently."  And there are enough vocal rationalists in this country that every time you ultra-religious try this, we will fight you.  No matter how tired of the battle we get.

Every damn time.

******************
Update, 22 February 2013:  House Bill 1674 passed in committee, 9-8.  [Source]  I can only hope this generates a challenge in the courts.

The archangel video hoax

I really, really dislike hoaxers.

I've made the point more than once in this blog that we skeptics have a hard enough time counteracting the built-in errors -- things like confirmation bias, dart-thrower's bias, and the inherent inaccuracies of our brains and perceptual apparatus.  The last thing we need are people out there, callously and deliberately creating convincing fakes.

The latest in this long string of liars came to my attention because of a video link that popped up on Facebook.  The individual who posted it headed it with the caption, "And you think angels aren't real!"  Underneath, another poster had responded, "I don't see how this could possibly have been faked."  So, naturally, I had to take a look... and so do you.  So take two minutes and watch the whole thing.  [Link:  Is he SUPERMAN or an ARCHANGEL?]

Pretty wild, eh?  If you watched it till the end, you might have noticed that they even got the angle of the shadows right -- as the truck bears down on the cyclist, the shadow turns and lengthens at just about the angle I'd expect.

Now that's what I call attention to detail.

So, why, then, don't I believe it's real?

Let's leave aside my usual objections that "there is no evidence that the world works this way."  Let's just take what information we have from the video.

First, there is no reason to claim that this would be "impossible to fake."  All you have to do is go to any recent action/adventure movie and consider how easy (albeit not cheap) it is to create completely convincing special effects.  This one -- with shadowy figures disappearing and rematerializing -- would not be difficult at all to a sufficiently skilled video technician.

Second, did you notice the little spinning logo in the lower left?  This is the logo for the owner of the YouTube channel that posted it -- a fellow who goes by the name Cybert9.  So I took a moment to check out other videos he'd posted, and they included:

Chemtrails over Central America
Shape-shifting Reptilian on TV
HAARP Activity again
Female masseuse hybrid
and... UFO Clouds

So I think we have a little problem with source credibility, here.

Then, we have the Chinese characters in the upper right.  Notice those?  I don't read or speak Chinese, so I'm going on second-hand information, but I found that the characters read "Zhu Xian."

Which is the name of a Chinese video production company that specializes in video games.

So, apparently, what we have here is a clip from a promotional video that was taken out of the original context, and launched into the repost network by someone who claimed that it was real.  I'm not saying that Cybert9 was the one who perpetrated the original hoax; it may well be that he was somewhere further down the line, and was taken in like all of the other millions of people who have watched this video.  (There are three versions of the "archangel video" that I found on YouTube, and together they have gotten well over two million total hits.  And while a few commenters seemed to be of the opinion that it was fake, a good many posted comments like, "Wow!  How can this not have been on the news?" and "It looks real to me.  I believe it.")

The whole thing just pisses me off, because, as I said, it's not like there aren't a hundred natural reasons that people believe crazy stuff.  My job as a skeptical writer and critical thinking teacher is hard enough, thanks.  So, to the person who started this hoax, I have only one further thing to say:

Breaking news: Russian meteor explosion causes major eruption of nonsense

Why oh why can't people just accept the scientific explanation for something?  Why must they come up with wacky woo-woo bullshit every damn time?

I am, of course, referring to the news story that I'm sure all of you have heard of by now; the meteor explosion that injured over 1,000 people yesterday near Chelyabinsk in the Urals region of Russia. 

It was, to be sure, quite an event.  The shock wave from the explosion shattered windows and damaged buildings, and because it occurred near a populated area, it was captured more than once on cameras.

But the first problem with the public understanding of what had occurred was that it happened on the same day as a near pass by a different piece of rock, asteroid 2012 DA14.  Eminent astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson went on record as saying that the two events were unrelated, and the fact that they occurred on the same day was nothing more than a coincidence.

But no.  It couldn't be just a coincidence.  Start with a post in the blog Twilight Language, wherein we find the following quote from "astrologer Philip Levine:"

In other times and places, these would be a sign, a very big sign, saying something (what depends on which prophet or psychic you listen to). If you think the Universe is intelligent and an embodiment of some kind of Being, then you would want to know what It is saying.
If, like most, you believe the Universe is just a random collection of debris with no meaning other than chaos, then Statistics is your God. And the statistical chance of ONE of these things happening is immensely small, but TWO on the SAME DAY, within hours, in this infinitely vast Universe, is something to give one pause.
If you aren't sticking your head in the sand, how does this coincidence/synchronicity strike you?

It strikes me as a damn coincidence.  That's what you call it when two events coincide.

Then we had Russian parliament member Vladimir Zhirinovsky blathering on that the meteor wasn't actually a meteor, it was an American weapons test:

Those were not meteorites, it was Americans testing their new weapons... (Secretary of State John Kerry) was looking for (Russian Foreign Minister) Lavrov, and Lavrov was on a trip.  He meant to warn Lavrov about a provocation against Russia.

Right.  Because that's plausible.  The US Secretary of State calls up, and says, "Um... just so you know, we're about to blow up a weapon over one of your cities today.  Hope you don't mind.  Give my regards to the wife and kids."

Things only got worse from there.  A "senior clergyman" in Yekaterinburg said the meteor was a Sign from God:

From the Scriptures, we know that the Lord often sends people signs and warnings via natural forces.  I think that not only for the Ural [regions] residents, but for the whole of humanity, the meteorite is a reminder that we live in fragile and unpredictable world.  It is the Lord's message to humanity, and we need to pray to understand it.

Or, maybe, just consult an astronomer.  They seem to understand it pretty well.

Which is more than I can say for major league baseball player José Canseco, who weighed in on the event with the following series of tweets:

No way was that a meteor in russia today
Governments think truth is a poison that will kill them
we have lots of enemies dont underestimate them
long range test deal with russia operation meteor
north korea do the math

The media is now calling Canseco a "meteor truther."  Which makes me want to weep softly and bang my head against my desk.

NASA, of course, had the straight scoop, and said that the Russian explosion was, in fact, a meteor, and that this meteor and the flyby asteroid were unrelated:

According to NASA scientists, the trajectory of the Russian meteorite was significantly different than the trajectory of the asteroid 2012 DA14, making it a completely unrelated object. Information is still being collected about the Russian meteorite and analysis is preliminary at this point. In videos of the meteor, it is seen to pass from left to right in front of the rising sun, which means it was traveling from north to south. Asteroid DA14′s trajectory is in the opposite direction, from south to north.

But why listen to a bunch of silly old scientists when you can get your information from an astrologer, a clergyman, a batshit crazy politician, or a washed-up baseball player?

To sum up: AAAARRRRGGHHH.

Oh, and one last thing; if you see people post a photograph that they claim is the crater from yesterday's meteor, and it looks like this:

Please do me a favor and set them straight.  This is the Derweze Gas Crater in Turkmenistan, a place where a combination of natural gas seeps and soil that's high in flammable organic matter resulted in a giant burning hole in the ground.  It has nothing to do with the meteor.

Thanks.  I'll just go take my high blood pressure medication, now.

Money, bias, and climate science

I've often wished that politics was more frequently informed by good science, but the pessimistic side of me (never very deeply buried) wonders if that is even possible.  There are politicians who understand science, but given the complexity of the situations that lawmakers deal with -- combining the hard facts uncovered by scientific research with the economic and business impacts, considering how any proposed changes would affect the average citizen, and keeping in mind what it takes to get reelected -- it's no wonder that governmental policy often makes a hash out of it.

You need no conspiracies in effect to have that result.  Our government is built in such a way that this is the inevitable outcome.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the current battle over climate change.  You would think that people would see the simple dichotomy between whether climate change is actually happening (something about which climatologists are hardly in doubt) and what, if anything, should be done about it.  It's amazing how few people understand that these two questions aren't the same thing.  I have more than once seen people arguing, with no apparent awareness of a break in the logical chain, that climate change isn't happening because decreasing fossil fuel use would have devastating effects on our economy.

Oh, that it were that simple.  If the world worked that way, I could just state that I didn't believe in my home and car needing expensive maintenance because it's having "devastating effects on my bank account," and they would magically take care of themselves.

Still, the politicization of the climate issue is having tremendous effects on the public perception of what is, at its base, a scientific question.  Interesting, isn't it, that by and large liberals accept that anthropogenic climate change is happening, and conservatives deny it?  You'd think that a scientific conclusion would be based upon the evidence, not on your political party.  And the research is clear; as I mentioned in a recent post, the number of peer-reviewed studies that support climate change outnumber the ones that question it by over 500:1.

A study that was just reviewed in The Guardian points up why that may be.  Over the past ten years, conservative billionaires have funneled over $120 million dollars into think tanks that have only one purpose; to cast doubt in the minds of voters and lawmakers regarding climate change.  [Source]  The two umbrella organizations that oversaw the handling of the funds -- Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund -- spent the money on strategic planning, public disinformation campaigns, and beefing up the coffers of the handful of scientists left who deny that climate change is real.

And the conservatives, with straight faces, accuse the climatologists of being in the pay of environmental organizations.  I wonder who has deeper pockets, Donors Trust or the Sierra Club?

Lest you think that I'm just showing my bias here, take a look at "Plutocracy, Pure and Simple," by George Monbiot.  Starting in 2002, the Republicans recognized that climate change could be used as a wedge issue, and that acknowledging the science was tantamount to political suicide.  Conservative consultant Frank Luntz actually said, "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly.  Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate."  And this script has been followed to the letter.  The think tanks that were funded by Donors Trust, Donors Capital Fund, and the likes of the Koch brothers have generated not only campaigns to raise doubt in the minds of voters, but public school curricula that include explicit statements that whether climate change is happening is "a major scientific controversy."

By my definition, a "controversy" is "something people disagree about."  500:1 in favor hardly qualifies as a "controversy."

But of course, that's not how they want the layperson, the average citizen, to see the situation.  They want the voters to think that the science is uncertain, because if the scientists can't even figure out what's going on, then we sure as hell don't want to give up our gas-guzzling cars and coal-fired power stations. 

I find the whole thing infuriating.  It's not that I don't realize that the profit motive can lead to abuses; money corrupts, and all that sort of thing.  It's more that these wealthy donors and giant money-handling machines are sowing confusion in the minds of the average man and woman -- the people who, above all, need correct information in order to make informed decisions.  And that confusion is leading to all of us, lawmaker and citizen alike, doing nothing, as the world continues to warm, the ice continues to melt, the seas continue to rise.

The result: let's stay with the status quo, even if it marches us right off a cliff.