Irreconcilable differences

The optimistic amongst us talk about a reconciliation between religion and science.  "You can believe in a higher power, and still accept science as valid," they say.  "There's no reason why religion and science have to be in opposition."  No less a thinker than evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould felt that the "two ways of knowing" could peacefully coexist, because they are designed to study different realms.  In his essay "Non-Overlapping Magisteria," he says:

The position that I have just outlined by personal stories and general statements represents the standard attitude of all major Western religions (and of Western science) today. (I cannot, through ignorance, speak of Eastern religions, although I suspect that the same position would prevail in most cases.) The lack of conflict between science and religion arises from a lack of overlap between their respective domains of professional expertise—science in the empirical constitution of the universe, and religion in the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives. The attainment of wisdom in a full life requires extensive attention to both domains—for a great book tells us that the truth can make us free and that we will live in optimal harmony with our fellows when we learn to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly...  I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving concordat between our magisteria—the NOMA [non-overlapping magisteria] solution. NOMA represents a principled position on moral and intellectual grounds, not a mere diplomatic stance.

Much as I would like to agree, I think Gould is wrong.   Religion and science are, at their bases, incompatible with each other.  For people that exclusively derive their ethics and morals from religion, and their understanding of nature from science, there may be no conflict; but this is not the situation for a great many people, including Christians who are biblical literalists (which includes most Baptists, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, various "Full Gospel" sects, and others, not to mention a significant minority of "mainstream Protestants" such as Methodists), fundamentalist Muslims, and orthodox Jews.  For them, the two "ways of knowing" do come into conflict, on a variety of grounds (natural and ethical), and however Gould might hope for a concordat between them, it is impossible.  Science and religion get at the truth in opposite ways, and if they are in conflict with each other, you have to choose one or the other.  There is no possible way to reconcile them.

Let me illustrate with a story that I read recently on Hemant Mehta's wonderful blog The Friendly Atheist.  In his post called "After Teacher Preaches in the Classroom, Superintendent Reveals Himself to be a Creationist," Mehta describes the controversy around Wynnewood (Oklahoma) Middle School social studies teacher Betty Carter, who taught her students that the bible was the sole source of proper morality, that the U. S. Constitution derives directly from the bible, and that evolution was false and evil.  She also had numerous posters with biblical verses in her classroom.  Clear case of violation of separation of church and state, right?  Well, when the Freedom From Religion Foundation brought the situation to the attention of the district superintendent, Raymond Cole, he responded with an email that said the situation had been "taken care of," but ended thusly:

A couple of questions I would ask you is;
If you believe in evolution, why did we stop evolving? I mean, people are generally larger today than 2000 years or millions of years ago, but we haven’t lost a toe or little finger, etc.
What happens when you die, if you”re wrong? If I’m wrong, when I die I just die, but if you’re wrong, when you die….
I have a degree in science and I’ll admit some things were very confusing, or hard to understand, but in the end my faith in God forms my belief. I have seen God work in my life and I truly feel his presence. There have been many times in my life where I have fallen short but I know in my heart that God loves me and forgives my short comings, or sins.
I dont want to jump to any conclusions, perhaps you and many of your group are Christians and are just trying to keep Church and State separate. I would submit that the single greatest reason for the violence in our schools today is this so called separation, and that the further we separate God from our schools the nearer we bring violence and evil.

Well, the FFRF weren't going to take that lying down, and their spokesperson, Andrew Seidel, responded with a blistering rebuke that took Cole and Carter to task for acting in an unconstitutional fashion and for discriminating against the children who were there, in Carter's captive audience, and who didn't believe the nonsense she was spouting.  Cole, probably sensing a losing battle should the issue go to court, backed down, and sent out a blanket email to all staff instructing them not to make religious statements in the classroom.

Now, so far, we simply have yet another in the long line of people trying to sneak religion into public schools; what of it?  I think this illustrates the impossibility of reconciling a naturalistic/scientific way of knowing with a religious one.  Because, given Cole's and Carter's belief in a religious worldview, how did you expect them to act?

Here's what I mean.  Suppose you really, honestly, and sincerely believed that there was one source of Truth out there; and the way the universe was set up, if you don't believe that Truth, you are going to be doomed to an eternity of horrible torture.  Furthermore, there is an evil agency that is capable of acting through humans, many of whom do not realize that they are not acting under their own power -- that this evil agency is using them as unwitting pawns.  So wherever the dictates of this Truth conflict with any other understanding, however it is derived, the Truth is going to win; the risk of making a mistake, of being fooled, is just too high.

Now, let's say that you were a teacher or school administrator.  You presumably got into the field because you care deeply about children.  And because of your beliefs, you see before you, every day, dozens of kids who are in danger of falling into the trap of disbelief.  You look at their innocent faces, and picture them being subjected to torment, not just for a little while, but forever.  What would you do?  Wouldn't you do anything in your power to try to prevent this from happening?

And that said, do you really believe that the victory scored by the FFRF will be any more than a temporary advance?  If I were a betting man, I'd bet a significant amount of money that within a couple of months, Carter will be back at it -- perhaps in a more subtle way, but still pushing her beliefs on her students.  Given how she sees the world, it really is the only moral choice open to her.

This sort of thing is why there never will be a reconciliation between religion and science.  It's why mountains of proof will never sway the True Believer.  Religion teaches that you arrive at knowledge through faith; science that you arrive at knowledge through evidence and logic.  If they give different answers, you are forced to decide between them.  It's also why once you've bought that the theistic worldview is literally true, that trumps everything; since evidence is no longer the touchstone, anything contrary to what your faith tells you is immediately suspect.  So Gould was correct -- but only for those religious individuals (I would suspect that they are the minority) who derive nothing from their religion but their ethics and morals, and who let "science be science."  For the vast numbers of humans who see religion as the foundation of their understanding of the entire universe, there is no middle road.  Science and religion are fighting for the same territory.  It's either keep your feet planted where they are -- or abandon ship entirely. 

Two views of the world

A couple of days ago, I got an email from a reader that was long enough that I won't include the whole thing here, but the gist of it was that I was a narrow-minded stick-in-the-mud old git who was willfully blinding himself to the majesty of the universe because I was determined to hang on to my dusty, provincial scientific view of things.  Here's the end of the email:

You think you have everything explained, but here's the funny thing: you're wearing blinders and you don't even know it.  You see the little bit that's right in front of you, what's under your microscope, and you believe you know it all.  But you're missing out on most of what our awesome universe has to say.  I've read some of your writing and I have to say that I'm probably not going to convince you, but I felt moved to write to you and maybe my words will create a tiny crack in your armor - and through that crack, some light might leak through.

Well, first, I don't think I have everything explained.  You seem to be confusing me with religious people.  The scientific view is constantly expanding, constantly breaking new ground -- and constantly revising what we thought we understood, when new data is uncovered.  In other words: science both grows and self-corrects.  So, in one sense, you're right; there is a lot of stuff out there that science hasn't reached yet.  If there weren't, scientists would be out of a job.

But then, to cap it off, the writer ends with:

I am sending along some websites that may help you in your journey, as they helped me.  I would encourage you to read them open-minded, and not immediately dismiss what these Teachers have to say.  You may be surprised at what you learn.

And the first website was an article by none other than our friend, Skeptophilia frequent flyer...

... Diane Tessman.

Yes, Diane Tessman, the woman who believes that clouds aren't big old piles of water droplets -- they're camouflage deliberately created by UFOs.   The woman who believes that quantum entanglement explains love and the Higgs boson proves the existence of god.  The woman who believes that we should stop hydrofracking because it's pissing off a super-intelligent being called the "God Cloud," and instead just work on developing anti-gravity devices.  The woman who thinks she is being guided by an extraterrestrial agency called "Tibus."

So.  Yeah.  To be fair, I had to read the article the email writer recommended, and it's a doozie.  Called "Is There A Place Called Other-Earth Composed of Dark Matter and Dark Plasma?", this pinnacle of scientific research includes passages such as the following:

There are growing alarm bells and/or utter wonderment in theoretical physics that dark matter could have nurtured and evolved life, just as visible matter on Earth has done. No one knows at this point if beings of Other-Earth might be able to perceive us. Have they always been aware of us visible folk? Do they even have eyes? I am getting ahead of myself.

Actually, no, Ms. Tessman, no theoretical physicist I've ever heard of has any such "wonderment."  Dark matter has still yet to be detected, and whatever it is, it seems not to interact much with anything.  So an entire freakin' planet made of it, with living things and eyes and everything, is kind of beyond the scope of science at the moment.

She ends the article with a few questions:

Might parallel Dark Earth be the world of the after-life?

Do dark plasma beings form symbiotic, even spiritual relationships with counterpart humans? Might they guide the consciousness of a human after death? Might they be our elusive angels?

Are some Other-Earth beings evil or at least cold scientists who might abduct and capture a “dense being” for an hour?

Is this the source of Jinns? These illusive life-forms have always been thought to be from “ultra-terrestrial Earth.” Jinns and ghosts are thought to pass through walls, being less-dense molecularly than we are. UFOs blink out of existence; do they return simply to Other-Earth?

Is Other-Earth the source of space and atmospheric critters and bright colored orbs which sometimes have a translucent quality?

Do our dark cousins read our thought vibrations as they come closer, and thus become what we can understand? In other words, do they “arrive” as a ball of plasma and become an angel, ghost, or UFO for our perception and benefit? 

So, let me get this straight: you postulate a planet that no one has ever seen, made of a type of matter no one has yet detected, and you're using it to explain phenomena for which there is no scientific evidence?  That's like my claiming that there are no ghosts in my house because they were all chased off by a magic invisible unicorn, and expecting people not to come after me with horse tranquilizers.

Okay, maybe I'm being closed-minded, as the individual who emailed me said, but it seems to me that to swallow this stuff you'd have to be open-minded to the extent that your brains fell out.

So, anyway.  Sorry to say, Writer-of-the-Anonymous-Email, but you're right; I'm not shifting my stance.  Science remains our best way of knowing the universe -- maybe the only way.  My evidence: it works.  As far as Diane Tessman and others like her, what it seems to me is that they're just really good at making shit up, and peppering it here and there with science-y words to give it some legitimacy in the eyes of people who can't be bothered to learn the actual science.  Let me just end with a recommendation to any of you who are swayed by such fuzzy, non-scientific views of the world, who think that these views are somehow grander and more beautiful than what science has to offer; do yourself a favor, and sign up for a college-level class in real science.  Find out how dazzling, how awe-inspiring, the world actually is.  Then, and only then, compare the two views, and see which is more appealing -- to invent pleasant-sounding falsehoods and convince yourself that they are true, or to learn the rules by which the universe actually operates.  I'll just end with a quote from Sagan:

Bad math, overweight electrons, and zombie cats

Over the 26 years that I've been a public school teacher, I've noticed an interesting (and worrisome) phenomenon: some people seem to have no understanding of numbers.

I'm not saying they're bad in math classes.  In my experience, it's not the same thing at all.  These people often can learn to manipulate mathematical expressions by memorizing the rules, similar to the way you might memorize a noun declension pattern if you were learning Latin.  And they can usually use calculators quite well.  But once the calculator spits out a number, they have no idea if it's right, or even sensible.

I saw this more often in my first five years of teaching, when I taught physics in addition to my current subject, biology.  Physics requires a great deal of sometimes abstruse mathematics, and also dealing with quantitative concepts for which most people don't have a good numerical referent (e.g. charge, torque, frequency).  But you would think things like mass and velocity would be easier, right?  I distinctly recall assigning my students a problem in electromagnetic forces, the ultimate aim of which was to have them calculate the mass of an electron.  One young lady came out with 36 kilograms, and called me over to "check to see if it was right."

I looked at her in some disbelief.  I saw what she'd done, and it was a simple goof, the kind any of us could have done; she'd pressed the "divide" key instead of the "multiply" key on her calculator for one of the terms.  What amazed me was that she didn't look at the answer and immediately recognize that it was wrong.  I said to her, "Doesn't that seem a little... massive, for an electron?"

She shrugged and said, "Is it?"

I said, "36 kilograms is about 80 pounds or so."

She said, "Oh."

I hasten to add that this was an intelligent, articulate young lady, who actually was trying to understand.  She just seemed unable to look at a number, and recognize if it was in the ballpark based on an understanding of what numbers mean.  There was some quantitative common sense that she apparently lacked.

I've seen many other example of this sort of innumeracy.  The young man in introductory biology class who measured the diameter of an amoeba under a microscope, and came up with "114.7 meters."  A very earnest physics student who calculated the speed of revolution of the Moon around the Earth as 9.6 x 10^7 meters/sec -- just shy of the speed of light.  (And it gives me some cause for concern that this last-mentioned young man was bent on becoming an architect.)

I bring this up because having a sense of quantity is absolutely critical to everyday life.  Even if the majority of us don't need to worry about such things as the mass of an electron, having a general concept of what numbers mean -- not just how to manipulate them -- is pretty important.  But because a lot of people lack this skill, they become much more easily persuadable by bad thinking.  If you throw a statistic, graph, or data set at an innumerate person, they often will accept it without question -- and, worse, they won't recognize it if you're lying to them.

I ran into a particularly egregious example of this in this week's edition of our village's newspaper, The Trumansburg Free Press.  The Trumansburg Free Press costs 75 cents, but I guess the name The Trumansburg Three-Quarters-Of-A-Buck Press does sound a little clunky.  Be that as it may, this week there was an article that caught my eye, because it was about a subject that is near and dear to my heart; the problem of cats, both pet and feral, killing native songbirds.

The author of the article, Glynis Hart, went out of her way to be even-handed and "journalistic," presenting arguments from scientists at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology (who, understandably, would like to see pet cats never let outside, and feral cats eliminated as a noxious exotic predator) set against those of groups like Alley Cat Allies, who are supportive of outdoor cats in all forms.  Now, myself, I tend to agree with the former -- and I'm not only a birder but a cat owner.  I just see no earthly reason why cats, which are, after all, an introduced species, should have to go outside.  The toll on native bird species is undeniable -- even if we can quibble about exactly how many birds are killed yearly, and unnecessarily, no one denies that the number is large.

So, anyway, I was reading along, and then I got to the following line:  "Alarmists like to cite cat's [sic] amazing fertility to tell you that one pair of cats can produce another 400,000 in two years."

I had to pick the newspaper up off the floor after reading that.  Now, to her credit, Hart goes on to tell us that this statistic "isn't true," but what she doesn't give you is (1) any idea of how not true this is, and (2) the correct sense, that even the most virulently anti-cat, pro-bird person in the world would never claim such an obviously idiotic statistic.

So, anyhow, I decided to find out how fast cats would have to reproduce in order for two cats to generate a total of 400,000 in two years.

After a bit of number crunching and use of logarithms and scientific calculators, I came up with an answer.  If you assume that every cat mating produces a litter, and each litter is made up of five kittens all of whom survive to adulthood and reproduce themselves, it would take a little less than twelve generations to generate 400,000 cats from one pair.  Cram that into two years, and you're talking about one generation every two months.

Yup.  This would require kittens to go from birth to sexual maturity in a little over eight weeks, which makes me wonder if Ms. Hart has ever actually seen an eight-week-old kitten.  But the problem runs deeper than this, because we're not starting from just two cats in the world.  There are millions of cats already, all apparently reproducing at a rate we more commonly associate with fruit flies.  So if this was true, we would be hip deep in felines, and LOLCats would not be a laughing matter.  It would be viewed more like people now view zombie movies.

"Bolt the front door, and lock up the cabinet with the canned salmon, Edith!  I just looked down Maple Street, and the cats is coming!!!"

As with my long-ago physics student whose electrons needed to join Weight Watchers, I'm sure Ms. Hart's rapidly reproducing kitties was just due to a simple mistake -- a miscalculation, miscopied number, or the like.  What bothers me is not that she made the error, something any of us can do, but that no one -- not her, not an editor or a proofreader -- caught it, recognized that it was impossible.

And lest you think that such errors have no long-lasting consequences, allow me to point out that the whole idiotic "chemtrails conspiracy" was launched when a reporter at KSLA News (Shreveport, Louisiana) reported that dew collected in bowls after an unusually persistent jet contrail had 6.8 parts per million concentrations of barium -- well into the dangerous zone -- when the actual amount was 68 parts per billion.  Even though they retracted the claim, and publicly stated that the correct figure was a hundred times smaller than their original number, the first value given still is quoted as the real one in conspiracy theory websites.  KSLA was "pressured to change the value" by Evil Government Agents.  And that little numerical slip-up continues to haunt us, lo unto this very day.  [Source]

So, anyway.  I'm not sure what, if anything, we can do about this one.  As I mentioned earlier, the solution isn't in taking more math classes, because taking math -- or even physics -- is no guarantee against trusting whatever comes out of your calculator, whether or not it makes sense or is even in the realm of possibility.  But it does generate one cautionary note: be careful when you're reading anything that uses statistics.  Don't assume that the numbers are telling you what they seem to be -- or that the numbers are even right.  As usual, the watchword around here is to keep your brains engaged.  At least until the Zombie Cats arrive and want to eat them.  After that, you're on your own.

The lure of the exotic

One of the first things we do in my Critical Thinking classes is to learn some of the basic logical fallacies, and afterwards, students are assigned to peruse current print media and find examples.  One of my students this semester, a highly intelligent and perceptive young lady, came up to me a few days ago with a frown on her face.

"I think there's a fallacy you didn't tell us about," she said.

"I'm sure there is," I responded. "We just hit some of the common ones.  What did you find?"

"Well, it's like... the 'exotic fallacy.'  Sort of the opposite of the naturalistic fallacy.  If something sounds exotic, and especially if it comes from some place distant and mysterious like Japan or Tibet, it must be real, or useful, or beneficial."

And she's right, of course.  Attributing anything -- especially some sort of health-related item -- to the Wisdom of the Ancients gives it immediate credibility.  And you'll notice that those Ancients never seem to come from, for example, Omaha:

The exotic fallacy is especially common in the area of "alternative medicine," where nearly all of the "alternatives" are herbs, extracts, and minerals from Asia and Africa.  Now, note that I'm not implying here that all of these treatments are useless; assuming that a traditional cure is useless because it comes from some faraway place is just as illogical as assuming that it must be useful because it does.  I'm more commenting on the immediate appeal -- especially, the selling appeal -- of the exotic:

Of course, this also applies to religion and philosophy, doesn't it?  Wicca wouldn't have nearly the esoteric air it has without the constant mention of the Druids -- who, if not exactly from an exotic place (sorry, British readers), still have that same air of the mysterious.  A quick Google search turned up literally hundreds of books, videos, and websites that purport to teach you about Ancient Wisdom from (these were just the first few I saw):

• the Bolivian Andes
• Tibet
• various Native American tribes (especially those in the Southwest)
• Japan (usually connected to Zen practices)
• India
• the Yucatán

As far as the last one goes, think about why the whole Mayan Apocalypse thing caught on like it did.  I'm sure that it was, in some part, because it was a Mayan Apocalypse.  As Harold Camping found out, apocalypses don't go nearly so well when they're managed by old white guys from Oakland.

It's a little mystifying why some places have a lot of exotic cachet, and others don't.  Polynesia has always seemed to me to be the ultimate in exotic destinations, but you don't hear much about Ancient Polynesian Vitamin Supplements or the Teachings of the Mystical Polynesian Elders.  (One exception is that the cult of Cthulhu comes from there, but I'm not sure that it would qualify in most people's books as "appealing.")  Likewise, Peru and Bolivia have appeal; Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia, right next door, don't.  Exotic stuff from Africa is seldom attributed to a particular country, because most of the governments of African countries are in such a disastrous state that any gain in exotic appeal a product might garner by being from, say, Cameroon would be canceled out if the potential customer knew what it was like to actually live in Cameroon.  So stuff from Africa is often attached to tribes rather than countries:

So, anyway, there you are.  A new fallacy to look out for.  I've traveled a lot, and if there's one thing I've learned from being in other countries, it's that no place, and no group of people, has cornered the market on wisdom, ethics, intelligence, rationality, or morality.  All cultures, including my own, have come up with good ideas and bad ones, smart practices and completely moronic ones.  Myself, I'd rather use my brain to figure out whether an idea or a product is worth anything, rather than just deciding that it must be good just because it supposedly comes from somewhere exotic. 

On the other hand, I have to say that I'd pass up a nice juicy hamburger if I could get some Trinidadian curried goat roti.  So I suppose, like most things, it's all a matter of what you find appealing.

The case of the telepathic mice

One area in which a lot of people could use some work is in how to draw logical connections.

It's not that it's necessarily that simple.  Given a lot of facts, the question, "Now what does this all mean?" can be decidedly non-trivial.  After all, if it were trivial, there would be only one political party, and the only job we skeptics would have would be uncovering what the facts actually are.  The deductive work, the drawing of a conclusion, would be quick and unanimous, and Washington DC would be a decidedly more congenial place.

To take a rather simpler example, let's look at the following picture, that's been making the rounds of the social network lately:

Even ignoring the rather dubious religious aspect, this seems to me to be a rather ridiculous conclusion.  Just because these foods vaguely resemble a human organ (really vaguely, in the case of the tomato and the heart), is their supposed beneficial effect on that organ why they look that way?  It doesn't take a rocket scientist, nor a botanist, to find a dozen counter-examples, of plants that look like a human organ, but which have no beneficial effects on that organ whatsoever.  (This whole idea goes back to medieval times, when it was known as the "Doctrine of Similars."  It's why so many plants' names end in "-wort" -- wyrt was Old English for "plant," and the doctors of that time, whom we must hope had their malpractice insurance paid up, used lungwort, liverwort, spleenwort, and the rest to try to cure their patients.  No wonder the life expectancy back then was so low.)

On the other hand, Amanita mushrooms look a little like a penis, and if you eat one, you're fucked.  So maybe there's something to this after all.

In any case, let's move on to something a little trickier -- last week's story of the telepathic mice.

Miguel Nicolelis, of Duke University, announced last week that he'd been able to accomplish something that no one had done -- to create a device that allowed the electrical firings in one brain (in this case, a mouse) to be beamed to another brain, influencing that brain's firing.  In his paper, released in Nature, Nicolelis and his team describe engineering microelectrodes that were then implanted in the primary motor cortex of mouse #1.  These electrodes are capable of detecting the neural firing pattern in the mouse's brain -- specifically, to determine which of a pair of levers the mouse selected to pull.  A second mouse has a different set of implants -- one which stimulate neurons.  If mouse #1 pulls the right hand lever, and mouse #2 does, too, they both get a treat.  They can't see each other -- but the electrodes in the brain of mouse #1 sends a signal, via the electrode array, to the electrodes in the brain of mouse #2, stimulating it to choose the correct lever.

Direct, brain-to-brain communication.  Obvious application to medicine... and the military.  But my problem is how it's been described in popular media.  Everyone's calling it "telepathy" -- making a number of psychic websites erupt in excited backslapping, claiming that this "scientifically proves telepathy to be real."  "They just showed what we've been claiming for decades," one thrilled woo-woo stated.

The problem is -- is this actually telepathy?  Well, in one limited sense, yes; the word, after all, comes from the Greek tele (distant) + pathéia (feeling).  So, yes, the mice were able to feel, or at least communicate, at a distance.  But remember that the only reason it worked was that both the encoder and the decoder mouse had electrode arrays stuck into their brains.  There's an understood mechanism at work here; Nicolelis knows exactly how the signal from mouse #1 got to mouse #2 and stimulated its brain to perform the task correctly.  This is in exact opposition to the usual claims of telepathy -- that somehow (no mechanism specified) one human brain can pick up information from another, sometimes over great distances.  Complex information, too; not just enough to know which lever to choose, but whole conversations, visual images, sounds, and emotions.

Oh, and some people think they can get into telepathic contact with their pets.  Which adds a whole new level of craziness to the claim.

So, actually, what Nicolelis got his mice to do isn't telepathy at all, at least not in the usual sense of the word.  But on a surface read, it would be easy to miss the difference, to see why (in fact) his experiment makes the claims of the telepaths less likely, not more.  If it takes fancy arrays of electrodes to allow the transmission of even the simplest of information, how on earth could two brains communicate far more complex information, without any help at all?  Add that to the fact that there has not been a single experiment that has conclusively demonstrated that telepathy, as advertised, actually exists (for an excellent, and unbiased, overview of the history of telepathy experiments, go here).  It seems very likely, just based on the evidence, that telepathy doesn't exist -- not between Nicolelis' mice, and certainly not between humans.

Just as well, really.  I'd really rather people not read my mind.  For one thing, my brain can be a little... distractible:

Most days, reading my mind would be the telepathic equivalent of riding the Tilt-o-Whirl.  So probably better that my thoughts remain where they are, bouncing randomly off the inside of my skull as usual.

Smilin' Bob's Psychic Warehouse

Yiddish, as always, has a word for it, and the word is "chutzpah."

"Chutzpah" means brashness, cheekiness, being unrepentantly bold; but those words don't capture the full nuance.  Better than any dictionary definition is the definition-by-example I remember hearing years ago: "Chutzpah is a kid who kills both of his parents, and then appeals to the court for clemency because he's an orphan."

I ran into an excellent, if not quite so violent, alternate example of chutzpah yesterday.  It's a website that has a page with the following cautionary advice:

HOW TO AVOID PSYCHIC SCAMS!
Untrustworthy Psychics
The top states for internet crimes are California, Florida and Texas.  Remember that psychic scams occur across the country, and are not relegated [sic] to these three states... the World Wide Web is often a go-to place for psychic scammers to make their money.

Sounds pretty reasonable, doesn't it?  The problem is that the source of this advice is "PsychicSource.com." 

Yup.  The whole message here is to avoid fake psychics; let us put you in touch with a real psychic.  And of course, my question is:  there's a difference?

Oh, but yes there is, according to PsychicSource.com.  Real psychics have "well-established psychic companies that use several rounds of interviews to identify authentic psychics from frauds."  They are up-front about customer reviews.  "Psychic Source," they write, "has over 300 authentic psychic advisors you can speak to by phone or chat online with, who have been verified through rigorous screenings and interviews."

In other words, don't go out there and get ripped off by charlatans; come here and get ripped off by our charlatans.

Because, of course, what they're claiming is the same thing that every other psychic in the world claims:

Why get a live psychic reading?  To know yourself better and face your future empowered.  Knowledge is power, and live psychic readings from our gifted psychics give you the insights, self-knowledge, and forecasts you need to plan for success and achieve happiness.

And these people have amped up the chutzpah even more, by actively discouraging clients to come face-to-face with the "psychic" they've hired:

You do not have to be physically present for the best psychic readings - When we ask our Advisors about this issue, they invariably tell us that their intuitive response to a person does not depend on that person’s physical presence in the same room. In fact, sometimes a person sitting in front of a live psychic feels apprehensive and is not easily readable, while a person getting a live psychic reading by phone or online chat may be much more open and in tune with the experience.

Nope.  Just give us your credit card number, and we can rip you off in the privacy of your own home.

Sleazy.  Clever... but sleazy.

I've been asked by readers why I care so much if people go to psychics, astrologers, Tarot card readers, and other such snake-oil salesmen.  Most of these questions revolve around two general contentions: (1) if the clients come away feeling happier, then there's no real harm done and it might be money well-spent; or (2) if the clients fall for such unscientific nonsense, they're just stupid and deserve whatever they get.  I can't really argue with (2), but I still do object to (1).  I think it is always better to face reality, however harsh it is, than to soothe oneself with a view of the world that is, at its basis, false.  Or, as Carl Sagan put it, "It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

Media, hype, and the Bermuda Triangle

Why does popular media have such a love affair with woo-woo nonsense?

Isn't science cool enough?  Can't the History Channel just be about history, and the Discovery Channel about discoveries?  Is it really necessary to boost the ratings with idiocy about the prophecies of Nostradamus, hunting the Loch Ness Monster, and searching for Noah's Ark?  What, you couldn't find any real stuff from science and history to tell us about?

Of course, the problem doesn't just apply to television.  Newspapers and magazines, especially the online versions, are just as bad.  Take the article I just ran across last week, from Huffington Post, entitled, "Vittorio Missoni's Disappearance Gives Rise to New Fears of Bermuda Triangles Worldwide."  In this stunning piece of investigative journalism by Lee Speigel, we hear first about the mysterious disappearance of fashion designer Missoni and five others, who were on a small airplane from an island in the Los Roques chain, bound for Caracas.  The plane vanished on January 4, and no remains of the airplane or its passengers has thus far been found.

So far, makes for kind of a blah story.  I mean, it's tragic enough for the family and friends of the missing six, but as far as evidence of any kind to show what happened, there isn't much.  One piece of luggage that was on the plane turned up in Curaçao, and two of Missoni's bags on Bonaire, leading to speculation that the plane might have been diverted (or hijacked) to the Netherlands Antilles.  Authorities are still looking into the case.

But Speigel couldn't let it sit there, because that makes for kind of a short article, not nearly enough to make his required word count.  "This guy and five others disappeared, and some luggage turned up elsewhere, and we don't know why."  No, can't just say that.  We have to take the slim facts we have, and leap right off the cliff with them.

The plane vanished "into thin air."  (I'll bet you my next year's salary it didn't.  The Law of Conservation of Mass is strictly enforced, even in Venezuela.)  Speigel points out that the plane was near the Bermuda Triangle, where "people, planes, and ships have vanished for decades."  (No, they haven't.  Hundreds of airplanes and ships, carrying tens of thousands of people, cross the Bermuda Triangle daily, and damn near all of them make it.  A thorough statistical analysis of the records -- i.e., actual facts -- show that there is no higher rate of planes or ships going down in the Bermuda Triangle than any other place on Earth.  In fact, Lawrence Kusche, who authored the study, said, "...The Legend of the Bermuda Triangle is a manufactured mystery. It began because of careless research and was elaborated upon and perpetuated by writers who either purposely or unknowingly made use of misconceptions, faulty reasoning, and sensationalism. It was repeated so many times that it began to take on the aura of truth.")

Then, Speigel goes even further out into hyperspace.  The Bermuda Triangle isn't the only Mysterious Triangle of Death, he tells us.  We have the "Michigan Triangle."  We have the Pacific version, the "Devil's Sea."  Then he starts blathering on about "time portals" and "mysterious vortexes."

And I'm thinking: this is journalism?

It's only near the end that Speigel gives a reluctant nod to some skeptics.  He quotes prominent science writers Benjamin Radford and Brian Dunning, and includes a statement from the United States Coast Guard:

The Coast Guard does not recognize the existence of the so-called Bermuda Triangle as a geographic area of specific hazard to ships or planes.  In a review of many aircraft and vessel losses in the area over the years there has been nothing discovered that would indicate that casualties were the result of anything other than physical causes.  No extraordinary factors have ever been identified.

Sounds pretty unequivocal, doesn't it?  But take a look at how Speigel introduces the quotes from the token skeptics and the Coast Guard; he has a lot of vague, woo-woo hand-waving, and then says that the doubters still aren't convinced.  He introduces the bits of science and rationality with the phrase, "And yet..."  In other words, "Despite the highly convincing argument I've just given you, some willfully blind so-called scientists still don't believe."

And he ends the article with a clip from a documentary about the "Devil's Sea..."

... from a documentary on The Learning Channel.

How did we get here?  I mean, I know it's about money; the television stations who prefer showing Monster Quest over Cosmos are doing so because it gets sponsors.  But it's a self-feeding thing, you know?  By putting this foolishness on the public airwaves and into what we would hope are legitimate news sources, we not only give it undeserved credibility, we create interest.  After that, when you've (1) generated curiosity in a subject, and (2) placed a seed in people's minds that it could be real, you've given them a thirst to find out more.  Which makes it more lucrative to do it again, only bigger and better this time.  And pretty soon you're in positive feedback mode, a woo-woo snowball effect that creates a big old avalanche of bullshit.

Explaining, I think, what has happened to the History Channel, Learning Channel, Discovery Channel, and others... and also why Huffington Post has a regular "Weird News" feature in which writers like Lee Speigel regularly treat this nonsense as if it were real.

The whole thing is especially maddening, because let's face it: the world as it is is pretty freakin' amazing.  There are so many things in science and history that are drop-dead fascinating -- you could make a documentary a week and not run out in your lifetime.  After all, there are people who devote their lives to studying this stuff, and virtually all of them do it for one reason -- it's cool.  So, to Speigel and the others who are fostering this hunger for the supernatural in place of reality, I'd like to make a request:  stop making shit up.  Learn some actual science.  Find a way to make that interesting to your readers and viewers.  And if you can't figure out how to do it, find a new job.