Standardized incompetence

Why is it that the people trying to "fix the education system" seem hell-bent on making it worse?

It's a mysterious phenomenon.  There is now a mountain of evidence that (for example) standardized test scores are unreliable measures of both student progress and teacher competence, and yet we are increasingly using exactly those metrics for gauging both.  In my home state of New York, 20% of my "final grade" as a teacher is mandated to come from high-stakes standardized tests (in my case, the Living Environment Regents Exam, which may be the most poorly-constructed exam I've ever seen).

So given that we've had incontrovertible evidence that it's a bad idea to put the futures of our students and the careers of our teachers in the hands of the corporations who are paid big bucks to write ineffective standardized tests, what do you think would make sense, as a next step?

1. Reduce the emphasis on those tests, and go with measures devised to assess growth, creativity, and critical thinking.
2. Make the standardized test scores have an even higher impact by giving them more weight in end-year assessments for both students and teachers.

If you went for option #2, all I can say is, you understand the system of educational oversight all too well.  This latest idiotic idea was proposed by New York Chancellor of Schools Merryl Tisch, who wants test scores to trump everything else, including the evaluations of teachers done by competent school administrators.

In Tisch's own words, she proposes to:

... (e)liminate the locally selected measures subcomponent, established through local collective bargaining. The data reveal that the locally-negotiated process for assigning points and setting targets in this subcomponent do not differentiate performance in terms of the composite ratings that teachers and principals receive. Instead, assign 40 percentage points to student growth on State assessments and other comparable measures of student growth – including performance-based assessments.

And what is her rationale for proposing this?  It is, she says, because too many teachers were rated as competent by the previous metric.  The number rated "ineffective," Tisch said, was simply too low.  In other words: if the metric says that most teachers are doing their jobs, then the metric has to be inaccurate.

She also proposes monetary incentives for "high-performing teachers" and "teachers taking leadership roles," thus pitting one teacher against another in terms of who gets the highest-performing classes.

Let me take my own situation as an example.  This year, I am teaching only one section of Regents Biology (which I steadfastly refuse to call "Living Environment," largely because the last "paradigm shift" we had in New York State was called "Raising the Bar," and they "raised the bar" in my course by renaming it, which was considered raising the bar because "Living Environment" has more letters than "Biology" does).  In our school, primarily because of staffing and financial issues, we have gone to a model of dealing with special-needs students called "co-teaching."  Co-teaching allows the district to put virtually all of the "classified" (i.e. special education) students together in one class, and then to assign a special education co-teacher to be in the classroom with the subject-area teacher.

This year, I got the "co-taught" class.  Half of my 24 students are "classified."  In this class, I have students who read on the fifth grade level.  I have students who have behavioral disabilities.  I have an autistic child who shuts down whenever things get stressful, which averages four days out of five.  I have ten students who have yet to pass a single quiz this year, despite extra help from myself and the co-teacher, and "modifications" (i.e., quizzes that have been adjusted to be easier to pass).

This is one of the classes on which I will be evaluated this year.  What do you think my chance of being rated "effective" is going to be?  If there was a monetary incentive this year, I'd be unwise to make advanced plans for spending it.

Don't get me wrong.  I love the kids in that class.  They are, by and large, sweet, cooperative, funny, and earnest.  My co-teacher is a wonderful educator, and we have a great working relationship.  But to call the two of us incompetent because we can't get this group of kids to pass the state assessment is to ignore the reality that we cannot treat teachers like factory workers, and kids like widgets that have to be made to a particular specification.

The ironic piece of all of this is how completely obvious this is to anyone who has spent any time in a public school, and how mysterious it all seems to the people in charge.  Merryl Tisch, for example, has in her career spent only seven years teaching children -- and these were years spent in wealthy private schools.  I would humbly suggest that perhaps, wild idea though it may be, we should have the people in charge of public education be individuals who have devoted their lives to teaching children, of all sorts of backgrounds, in public schools.

I would also humbly suggest that Ms. Tisch doesn't know what the hell she's doing.  Nor did our former Commissioner, John King, who oversaw both the APPR (Annual Professional Performance Review) and Common Core implementation disasters that have taken place in New York over the last couple of years.  But since in government, you can't screw something up badly enough to stop you from getting promoted, King is now going to work as a top assistant to U. S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

How have we gotten here, to treating teachers like untrustworthy assembly-line workers, and children like little cookie-cutter images?  It doesn't take being a teacher to see how absurd the latter is; anyone who has children of their own knows that they develop at different rates, excel at different things, have different problems, different stumbling blocks.  The idea that anyone could take a random group of tenth graders (for example), and get them to the same place at the same time, is moronic.

And the idea that if the kids aren't all at the same place at the same time by the end of the year, it's the teacher's fault, is somewhere beyond moronic, in that ethereal realm that there really isn't a word in the English language to describe.

I think the answer about how we got here is twofold.  First, people want a uniform product.  That 1950s-mentality, construction-line model is sunk deep into the American psyche.  And if we can't achieve it, we naturally look around for scapegoats.  Teachers are convenient in that regard, aren't they?

The second reason, though, is more pernicious, and it is, to state it bluntly, the almighty dollar.  It's financially expedient to blame the teachers, turn everything into numbers, and act as if those numbers mean something real.  By doing so, you (1) pretend that the problem is fixable without actually changing anything substantive; (2) frustrate the absolute hell out of experienced teachers, who then get out of the profession, saving districts money; (3) avoid considering solutions that might truly work, like reducing class sizes, creating classrooms with differentiated instruction to better meet the needs of children with different abilities and challenges, and allowing schools to beef up programs that encourage creativity, such as music and art.

Nope.  That's not the way, say policy wonks like Tisch.  Test the little buggers to a fare-thee-well, because that somehow will tell you what is really going on, both with the kids and with the teachers who are trying their best to teach them, despite larger classes, less funding, and more absurd busy-work from state agencies.  Reduce funding via state taxes, and simultaneously put a cap on local levies, thus forcing school boards into the Hobson's choice of cutting virtually the only thing they have control over, which is staffing.  (And guess what goes first?  The aforementioned "non-core" subjects like art and music.)

But the wonks keep rising to the top, and the teachers keep saying this sort of thing, and keep getting ignored.  To pay attention to us would be to admit that we're on the wrong course, and have been on the wrong course for some time.  Which would mean that our educational leaders have achieved a score of...

... ineffective.  And we can't have that, right?

Of course, right.

Orange dwarf catastrophe

It's no great insight that the media likes sensationalized stories, and that a lot of them (including, sadly, some major news outlets) have the attitude that facts don't matter much as long as they can keep readers reading.

What is more frustrating is the way the readers themselves become complicit in this dissemination of bullshit.  Now that we have the interwebz, sending along ridiculous "news" stories takes only a click. And before you know it, you have people believing that humanity is going to be wiped out because the Solar System is going to be destroyed during a collision with an orange dwarf star.

The original study, by astronomer Coryn Bailer-Jones of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, is interesting enough.  Astronomers have long known that the stars move relative to each other; this means that the constellations aren't fixed, and that millions of years from now, a time traveler from today wouldn't recognize any of the current star patterns.  (I still remember my first encounter with this idea, on Carl Sagan's Cosmos, when I was a freshman in college.  Seeing the animation of the movements of the stars in the Big Dipper was one of those moments when I realized, "I really want to know more about science!")

So it's not too surprising that some stars will get closer to the Sun over time.  And Bailer-Jones found that two orange dwarf stars are predicted to make relatively close approaches -- HIP 85605 could get as close as 0.13 light years, and GL 710 could make a pass of 0.32 light years.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Cool stuff.  But the media, unfortunately, is not content simply to report the facts.  Because that, somehow, would be boring.  This research has been picked up by a number of different online news sources, and one and all, they focus on the fact that this "close pass" might wipe us all out by gravitationally dislodging comets from the Oort Cloud, resulting in a "rain of comets," some of which could, perhaps, collide with the Earth.

Notice how many times I said "could" and "might" in the previous two paragraphs?  Bailer-Jones is up front about her study being speculative; the upper bounds for the pass distance of the two stars are 0.65 light years and 1.44 light years, respectively.  To put things in perspective; the closest estimate of HIP 85605 to the Sun was 0.13 light years, right?  Well, Pluto is 13 light hours from the Sun.  So this means that even at its closest, HIP 85605 will be 9,000 times further away than Pluto.

Next, let's consider the likelihood of a disruption of comets leading to a "rain of comets" and the certainty of a devastating Earth strike.  Let's assume that we do have a bunch of comets swooping inwards from the near pass of these stars.  What kind of target does Earth represent?

The issue here is scale, of course, and the amount of the Solar System that is (virtually) empty space. The best analogy I have run across is that if you shrank the entire Solar System down to a circle with a radius of 1,000 meters, with the orbit of Pluto as its perimeter, then the Earth would be about 7 meters from the center.

And it would be the size of a peppercorn.

So it's not exactly a huge target.  Yes, a comet or two could strike the Earth, as they have repeatedly during Earth's history.  No, it would not cause a rain of death.

But those aren't the only misrepresentations in the "news" story.  Not only has Bailer-Jones's research been sensationalized, it's had information added to it that is outright false.  In the above-linked story, which is no worse than the various other versions I've seen (i.e., I didn't pick this one because it was especially bad; they were all bad), here are some direct quotes, with commentary:

Apparently, the comets are made of rocks, dust and organic materials.

Actually, comets are mostly ice, a fact which has been known for decades and would have been immediately apparent had the author bothered to consult Wikipedia.

(T)he gravity [of the stars] can attract comets into the inner solar system and the passing comets might harshly affect Earth's atmosphere due to the powerful ultraviolet radiation that the comets might cause.

Ultraviolet radiation from what source, pray?  Comets aren't giant orbiting tanning lamps, for fuck's sake.

(A) small number of the alleged stars might explode like supernova while passing through the Oort Cloud.

Oh noes!  Not alleged stars explode like supernova!  That sound bad!

The Hip 85605 might reach the solar system in 0.13 to 0.65 light years away, while the GL 710 might take around 0.32 to 1.44 light years.

Ninth graders in Earth Science learn that a light year is a measure of distance, not time, a point that seems to have escaped the author, making me wonder how he ever got chosen to write a science story.  To be fair, unit confusion also plagued the writers of Star Wars, wherein we famously had Han Solo boasting that the Millennium Falcon had done the Kessel Run in "less than twelve parsecs," which would be like saying that your car was so fast that you went to the grocery store in less than five miles.  (Of course, there are Star Wars apologists who have talked themselves into thinking that the scriptwriters had some kind of fancy time-travel space-warp relativity thing in mind when they wrote it.  Myself, I think they just didn't know what a parsec is.)

And of course, it's only midway through the article that we find out when this catastrophe is predicted to happen:

1.3 million years from now.

So, to boil it all down:

Two small stars might, or might not, pass 9,000 times further away from the Sun than Pluto is, some millions of years in the future.  This could increase the number of comets entering the inner Solar System, generating a somewhat higher likelihood of a comet striking Earth.

But that version of the story wouldn't have induced so many people to read it and pass it along, would it?  Nope.  So they add sensationalized nonsense to it, so as to make it better clickbait.

At least it's still better than the post I saw on social media yesterday, wherein someone asked for help for a school project their child is doing regarding why the stars were created.  The responses included that god had made them "to rule the night with the moon," "to be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years," and "to declare god's glory."  The scholarly references given were the Book of Genesis and Psalm 19.

But hey, if you're going to buy into non-science, I guess you should go all the way, right?

Geopolitical let's-pretend

When secular types think of instances of the religious demanding that we treat counterfactual beliefs as if they were real, the first thing that comes to mind is usually the ongoing non-debate over creationism being taught in public schools.

I call it a "non-debate" because there really is no basis for argument.  Either you accept the scientific method -- in which case the evidence for the evolutionary model is overwhelming -- or you don't.  If you don't, then debate is fruitless, because the two sides aren't even accepting the same basic ground rules for how we know something is true.

But this is hardly the only example.  We just got another striking case of the religious claiming that the world is other than it is, and demanding that everyone else simply play along, in the decision by Collins Bartholomew, a subsidiary of Harper-Collins, to publish maps of the Middle East without including Israel.

I'm not making this up, although I wish I were.  A representative for Collins Bartholomew said that if they included Israel on maps in atlases destined for classrooms in the Middle East, it would be "unacceptable to Muslim customers" and "not in line with local preferences."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

In other words: because the majority of Muslims in the Middle East would like it if Israel didn't exist, they not only get to pretend it doesn't exist, they have a major book publisher playing along in the charade.

Apparently, Collins Bartholomew's defense for the decision was that if they'd included Israel, no one in the Middle East would have bought the atlases.  Or else, they would only have allowed them in the country if each one of them had the name "Israel" crossed out with a black marker, a practice that apparently really happens.

The first group to object to the expectation that everyone pretend that the world is other than it is was the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, which should make it an odds-on contender for the Irony Award 2015.  "The publication of this atlas will confirm Israel’s belief that there exists a hostility towards their country from parts of the Arab world,” said Bishop Declan Lang, chairman of the Bishops' Conference Department of International Affairs.  "It will not help to build up a spirit of trust leading to peaceful co-existence."

Which could be a direct quote from the writings of St. Obvious of Duh.  I think the Israelis already know that, Bishop Lang.

The question, of course, is whether people in other countries are willing to play along.  Yes, we get that a lot of you people in the Middle East don't like Israel.  Yes, you can put your hands over your eyes and play let's-pretend.  But the rest of the world doesn't have to pat you on the back and say, "Of course, dear, of course bad nasty Israel doesn't exist.  I checked under the bed and in the closet, and I didn't see it anywhere.  Don't pay attention to the big black mark on the map.  It doesn't mean anything."

Now, understand me; I'm not making a statement one way or the other about who is right and who is wrong in the perpetual state of conflict in the Middle East.  My general feeling, non-political-type that I am, is that the situation is so complex that assigning blame would be a fruitless task.  The whole area is so rife with issues of poverty, territorial claims, religious frictions, ethnic frictions, militarism, and arguments based on hereditary rights, that any attempt to divide the players into Good Guys and Bad Guys is doomed to failure right from the outset.

But the Catholic Bishops' Conference is right about one thing; the situation isn't going to be helped by publishing companies pandering to people's desperation that a counterfactual worldview be reality.  The proper response -- both to the Muslims who object to Israel being in atlases, and to the creationists who object to evolution being taught in public school science classes -- is "suck it up and deal."

Jesus in Japan

Every once in a while, I'll run into an off-the-wall claim that admits of no particularly obvious explanation.  For example: have you heard about the town of Shingō, Japan, in Aomori Prefecture on the northern tip of the island of Honshu?  If you have, I'll bet it's for one reason:

It's where Jesus was buried.

There's a sign there that identifies the burial site:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

According to the claim, Jesus skipped town on the eve of the crucifixion, leaving his brother Isukiri to be tortured and executed in his place.  Isukiri makes no appearance in the bible, the people of Shingō admit; that's because he was intended to take Jesus's place right from the get-go, and needed to keep his identity secret.  The claim also helpfully explains the years of Jesus's life before his public ministry started, at age 30 or so.

He was in Japan, of course.

How he got to Japan from Israel is never really explained.  Last I looked, they're not all that close together, and in between lie such special attractions as the Himalayas, the Gobi Desert, and Siberia.  But despite all this, Jesus made the trip three times -- on the way out when he was a twenty-something, then back to Jerusalem when he started preaching, and then a final time to get out of what Pontius Pilate et al. had planned for him.

So while things didn't end so well for Isukiri, Jesus made out pretty well.  He married a local girl, became a rice farmer, fathered three children, and lived to the ripe old age of either 106 or 114, depending on who you believe.

And because he had progeny, some of his descendants still live there in Shingō.  The Sawaguchi family, specifically, claims descent from Jesus, something that they don't seem to think is all that amazing.  Jesus, they say, didn't perform any miracles once he arrived in Shingō.  He just settled down to be a nice guy and a solid citizen of the village.  Which takes some of the gravitas out of being a direct lineal descendant of the Son of God.

I find all of this pretty peculiar.  What could possibly be the origin of this story?  It seems to have started with Kyomaro Takenouchi, who in 1935 announced that he had found some ancient manuscripts that tell the whole story.  (They also, apparently, tell about Atlantis and the fact that humans are descended from aliens.  But another time for that, perhaps.)  There's an Association for the Study of the Takenouchi Documents, which explains them thusly:

More than 2,000 years ago, the Takenouchi Documents were rewritten by Takenouchino Matori (Hegurimo Matori) into modern Japanese characters Kana mixed with Chinese characters. The original documents were believed to have been written in Divine characters. 

The historical facts recorded in the Takenouchi Documents are extraordinary. Among them are the Sumera-Mikoto came to Earth from a higher world on Ameno-ukifune, the world government was located in Japan and the Sumera-Mikoto unified the world. The great holy masters of the world, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Shakyamuni Buddha, Confucius and Lao-Tsu were born from the five-colored races which branched off from the Japanese race and all went to Japan for study and training. These facts may seem absurd and contrary to our prevailing understanding of world history. However, the archaeological research of recent years has gradually revealed the true existence of ultra ancient civilizations which are all mentioned in the Takenouchi Documents.

Some serious ethnocentrism, here.  All the cool holy people came from Japan, or at least studied there.  Got it.

Of course, it's not like we can study the documents themselves.  The originals were confiscated by government officials during World War II, and subsequently destroyed in an air raid.  Which, of course, is simultaneously unfortunate for the skeptics and convenient for the true believers.  And it leaves the Association for the Study of the Takenouchi Documents free to say any damn thing they want to about them.

But there's more to it than just some probably spurious documents, and the tale seems to predate Takenouchi's "discovery."  What's more interesting is that not only do the people in Shingō mostly seem to accept the story as true, they participate in some curious rituals -- such as marking newborns' foreheads with black crosses, and sewing "Star of David-like patterns onto babies' clothing."  All, if you believe the tale, a cultural memory from 2,000 years ago.

Even so, I'm not buying it.  Cultural contamination, whether deliberate or unwitting, is simply too easy to do (consider two examples I've looked at here at Skeptophilia -- the cult of John Frum and the Sirius B story from the Dogon).  Which is more likely -- that Jesus Christ made three trips to and from Japan, on foot, or that in the late 19th or early 20th century some Christian guy from the West ended up in Shingō and got the whole crazy tale started?

In any case, it's made for a considerable tourist attraction.

[image courtesy of photographer Jason Hill and the Creative Commons]

So that's our weird claim for the day.  Jesus in Japan, and the crucifixion of Isukiri, Jesus's less-known, and extremely unlucky, brother.  If I'm ever in Japan, I'll make a point of checking it out.  At least it's safer for tourists than visiting Jerusalem, these days.

2014 retrospective

2014 was a thrilling year, here at Skeptophilia headquarters (a.k.a. my office).  In fact, my able assistants, my dogs Lena ("Her Royal Derpitude") and Grendel ("Frankendog"), found it so thrilling that they're all pooped out and have decided to take a nap.

I thought it might be fun, on New Year's Eve, to take a look at the top stories from Skeptophilia, month-by-month.  Just in case anyone needed reminding about what a weird world we live in.

In January, we were visited repeatedly by the dreaded "Polar Vortex," dropping not only temperatures but a crapload of snow on the eastern half of the United States.  And of course, what is a weather phenomenon without a crazy conspiracy theory as an explanation?  The Polar Vortex, it was claimed, (1) was not a natural occurrence, and (2) therefore didn't produce real snow.  Who was responsible, you might ask?  Well, the Large Hadron Collider, of course.  And what was the white stuff, if not snow?  Well, non-melting chemtrail residue, of course.  Which made it a bit awkward when temperatures warmed up, and the non-melting chemtrail-residue snow melted, forming water, exactly as regular snow does, leaving the aforementioned conspiracy theorists to go back to their previous occupation, which was picking at their straitjacket straps with their teeth.

In February, we revisited conspiracies with a claim that the game app "Flappy Bird," which features a deformed-looking bird that the player has to maneuver around a series of pipes, contained a coded message from the Illuminati.  And was trying to steal your personal information, your mind, and your soul, not necessarily in that order.  And that its creator, Dong Nguyen, was murdered by the Illuminati for revealing the secret.  Which made it a bit awkward when Nguyen proved himself to be unmurdered by releasing a revised version of "Flappy Bird" called "Flappy Bird's Family" in August, or right around the time the snow from the Polar Vortex finished melting here in Upstate New York.

In March, we said goodbye to a long-time target of disgust for the secular humanist community, the Extremely Reverend Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church.  Who, unlike Dong Nguyen, actually did die.  There were calls for picketing his funeral, but most of us atheists chose the wiser course, which was to let Phelps pass silently into obscurity.  Unfortunately, his followers have been reluctant to do the same thing, and they are still plaguing us, lo unto this very day.

April saw a wacko claim making the rounds of social media, namely, that Easter has its origins in the worship of the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, and that by hoppin' down the bunny trail and participating in Easter egg hunts and so on, you are actually worshiping Satan and promising to sacrifice your children to Moloch.  This roused my linguistics-geek ire, and resulted in a rant wherein I concluded that if you are going to make insane claims, at least get the details right.

And speaking of Satan, in May we found out that not only can your child fall under His Evil Influence by receiving an Easter basket, (s)he can be damned eternally by watching My Little Pony.  Which, contrary to popular opinion, does not feature animated characters who speak in nasal, grating whines, and for whom any resemblance to an actual horse is purely accidental.  The Ponies are actually stand-ins for evil spirits, and are rife with demonic symbolism, which explains the phenomenon of "Bronies," wherein otherwise normal adult males become obsessed with characters like "Pinkie Pie," even to the extent of dressing up in bizarre costumes and attending conventions.

In June we turned to a new development in "alternative medicine," because apparently practices like homeopathy aren't ridiculous enough.  In China, it is becoming all the rage for guys to boost their sex drive and their performance in the sack by setting their junk on fire.  This post was accompanied by an actual photograph of a guy lying there on his back, a blissful expression on his face, while flames erupt from his reproductive area.  A photograph, I might add, that even now makes me go into a protective crouch every time I look at it.

July took us to Florida, and a cryptozoological report from near the city of Tampa.  A man walking his dog at night, the story went, saw a floating naked ghoul that smelled really bad.  Confronted with such an apparition, the man came to the conclusion that most of us would, provided we had recently been squirting controlled substances down our throats using a turkey baster: it must be a teenage mime.  Which apparently are common in that area of Florida.

August brought us back to conspiracy theories, specifically, to a claim that many prominent people have cloned doubles.  Or are cloned doubles themselves.  You can see how it would be hard to tell which.  Some of the individuals who are actually not individuals include Brad Pitt, Jimmy Carter, Beyoncé, and David Icke.  Including the last-mentioned is a little on the ironic side, since Icke has made a career out of convincing people that the powers-that-be are Evil Reptilian Illuminati, so I suppose it's strangely fitting now that he's being included in the fun.

By September, the election was fast approaching, meaning that the politicians were warming up their dodge-and-weave to avoid answering hard questions.  This year, it took the form of damn near all of them prefacing comments about climate change and/or evolution with the phrase, "Well, I'm not a scientist."  Which made the people who actually know something about science shout at them, "Yes, we know you're not.  You're a politician.  And this is why you should listen to the fucking scientists, instead of discounting everything they say on the basis of political expediency, you moron."  But given the fact that political expediency is how you get elected, the not-a-scientist cadre experienced resounding success in the polls two months later, which means we're in for another long period of people saying "la-la-la-la-la, not listening" to the facts.

In October we found out that all sorts of world events were revealed, in coded form, well ahead of time in movies featuring none other than Adam "Nostradamus" Sandler.  These events include the Waco Siege, Princess Diana's death, the BP Gulf oil spill, and the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. This at least gives some reason that Adam Sandler keeps making movies, given that any justification for his output based on claims of quality entertainment has long ago gone by the wayside.

November brought us a claim from Pastor James David Manning, of the Atlah World Missionary Church of Harlem, New York, to wit:  Starbucks is adding semen from gay guys to their lattés.  This prompted me to try to figure out how many guys Starbucks would have to pay simply to sit around in the back room masturbating, given the current demand for lattés, which might be the most mentally disturbing thing I've ever done for a Skeptophilia post.

Speaking of LGBT issues, in December, a group promoting such completely discredited ideas as "ex-gay therapy" put up a billboard in Virginia claiming that there were cases of identical twins, one of whom was straight and the other gay, demonstrating that homosexuality couldn't be genetic.  And they showed a photograph of two guys, who were such a pair of identical twins, as advertised.  The billboard turned out to be 100% correct except for two small details: the guys pictured were actually not identical twins, but two different shots of the same guy; and that particular guy is, in fact, gay.  Oh, and he had no idea that his photograph(s) were being used on an anti-gay billboard.  Proving, once again, that being a righteous über-Christian doesn't mean you necessarily have to follow the Ninth Commandment.

Which brings us to today, the last day of December, 2014.  New Year's Eve, the threshold of a whole new year.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And I will end with a deep and heartfelt "Thank you" to my Loyal Readers, and my hope that you will be guided in the coming year by rationality and logic, but will also have ample opportunity for such completely illogical activities as love, fun, play, and general unbridled happiness.

May 2015 be a good year for us all.

Dream weavers

Hard-nosed science types like myself are often criticized by the paranormal enthusiasts for setting too high a bar for what we'll accept as evidence.  The supernatural world, they say, doesn't come when called, is highly sensitive to the mental states of people who are nearby, and isn't necessarily going to be detectable to scientific measurement devices.  Also, since a lot of the skeptics come into the discussion with a bias toward disbelief, they'll be likely to discount any hard evidence that does arise as a hoax or misinterpretation of natural phenomena.

Which, as I've mentioned before, is mighty convenient.  It seems to boil down to, "It exists, and you have to believe because I know it exists."  And I'm sorry, this simply isn't good enough.  If there are real paranormal phenomena out there, they should be accessible to the scientific method.  Such claims should stand or fall on the basis of evidence, just like any other proposed model of how things work.

The problem becomes more difficult with the specific claim of precognition/clairvoyance -- the idea that some of us (perhaps all of us) are capable of predicting the future, either through visions or dreams.  The special difficulty with this realm of the paranormal world is that a dream can't be proven to be precognitive until after the event it predicts actually happens; before that, it's just a weird dream, and you would have no particular reason to record it for posterity.  And given the human propensity for hoaxing, not to mention the general plasticity of memory, a claim that a specific dream was precognitive is inadmissible as evidence after the event in question has occurred.  It always reminds me of the quote from the 19th century Danish philosopher and writer, Søren Kierkegaard: "The tragedy of life is that it can only be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forwards."

This double-bind has foiled any attempts to study precognition... until now.  According to an article in Vice, a man named Hunter Lee Soik is attempting to create the world's largest database of dreams, in the hopes that the evidence from it will establish once and for all that clairvoyance exists.

Soik is the man behind Shadow, an app for recording your dreams.  You enter them into the app upon waking, and they are timestamped and placed in a worldwide dream database.  The database software is able to identify keywords; what Soik is hoping is that prior to major world events, there will be a spike in keywords relating to those events.  And given that the transcripts are timestamped, such spikes (should they occur) would be incontrovertible evidence that precognition, or at the very least some kind of collective consciousness, is occurring while people are asleep.

[image courtesy of photographer Rachel Calamusa and the Wikimedia Commons]

"(W)hat happens if we can start looking at precognitive dreams, and say, 'Oh, there are actually correlations that are happening in real time?'" Soik asks.  "If we had this data back during 9/11, we could point to a time-stamped audio file describing the dream that predates the actual event. So, how could you then refute that kind of hard data?"

Which certainly is approaching the question the right way.  My only concern is that the keywords would be specific enough, and the spikes analyzed for statistical significance.  Even if you accept particular accounts of dreams as true, the difficulty is that humans have dreams about a rather narrow range of things -- some of the more common ones reported are dreams of being chased, of falling, of death (either our own or of someone we know), of sex, of being naked, of being lost.  To represent an actual signal -- evidence of precognition -- you would have to establish (for example) that a statistically-significant spike in dreams about death had a direct relationship to a particular violent occurrence in the world, and wasn't just representing an upsurge in anxiety over the state of things.

But like I said: Shadow, and its creator Soik, seem to be taking the correct approach.  I do wish, however, that Soik wouldn't sail off into the ether so regularly, because it doesn't do anything for his credibility.  In his Vice interview, he states that precognition is like Schrödinger's Cat (a comparison that escapes me completely) and goes on to say, "Who else is dreaming what you're dreaming, for example?  I really believe a lot in quantum field mechanics.  And I believe that a lot of the science jargon [means] simply: If you're happy, and you hang out with someone, you make them happy, and they make someone else happy."

To which I respond:  (1) No, that is not what the science says.  (2) What the fuck does this even mean?

Be that as it may, I encourage any of my readers who are interested in contributing to get the Shadow app (you can download it from the link I included above).  The bigger the database, the easier it will be to establish whether any data generated is statistically significant.  And it would be nice to have a wide variety of people involved with contributing dream data, not just the woo crowd that usually gravitates toward such endeavors.

I'm thinking of doing it myself.  I could include last night's dream, which was about a state senator from Alaska who accidentally chopped my dog's tail off, and whom I was trying to talk into paying me $10,000 in damages for the mental anguish she was experiencing, because she could no longer wag to express "I'm happy" and "Oh, look, a squirrel," which seem to be the two most sophisticated concepts her lone functioning brain cell is capable of processing.

I wonder what world event that might be predicting?

Single causes and simplistic thinking

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia called me out a couple of days ago for a statement I made in the post "Tribal mentality," regarding the tendency some people have to romanticize (or at least, to avoid criticizing) beliefs of other cultures.  Here's the passage he objected to:

At its extreme, this tendency to take a kid-gloves attitude toward culture is what results in charges of Islamophobia or (worse) racism any time someone criticizes the latest depravity perpetrated by Muslim extremists. Yes, it is their right to adhere to their religion. No, that does not make it right for them to behead non-Muslims, hang gays, subjugate women, and sell children into slavery. And the fact that most of their leaders have refused to take a stand against this horrifying inhumanity makes them, and the ideology they use to justify it, complicit in it.

He responded, in part, as follows:

ISIS is engaged in civil wars, and 99% of their victims are also Muslim.  Surely, Muslims on the whole are not in favor of slaughtering other Muslims...  (P)ointing at Islamic ideology as the culprit, rather than a complex set of political forces, just seems way too "Fox-Newsish" for a sophisticated blog like yours.  If Islam was inherently incompatible with pluralistic democratic values, then countries like Turkey couldn't exist.  The Islamic masses in Egypt rose up in a mass exercise of democratic revolution in 2012... only to be slapped down by a US-backed secular dictatorship.  There's just so much going on, with so many different factors...  I look at the 6 million Muslims living in the US and peacefully contributing... to blame it all on "their ideology," to say their beliefs are to blame for, among other things, the US-backed Saudi regime.... it just seems unfair.

Which certainly made me give some serious thought to what I'd written, and even more so, to what I think about ideology vis-à-vis responsibility for immoral actions.

Of course, in (at the very least) one sense, he is right; by attributing to "Islamic ideology" the atrocities of ISIS, and the lack of human rights in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and many other Muslim countries, I avoided one fallacy by leaping headlong into another.  To wit: the single-cause fallacy, which is considering complex events to have a simple cause.  (Commonly-cited examples are "The American Civil War was caused by slavery" and "World War I was caused by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.")

There's a lot more to the chaos in the Middle East than Islamic ideology; there's tribal factionalism, the history of exploitation and colonialism by western Europe and the United States, and the have/have not distribution of oil wealth, to name three.  It is facile to say, simply, "Those evil Muslims!" and be done with it.

The Islamic recitation of faith [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But still, I have to ask the question: to what extent does ideology bear the blame for some of the evil done in its name?  And by extension, do the peaceful adherents of a religion -- for example, the six million Muslims in the United States that my friend referenced -- also share some of the responsibility?

And it's not Islam alone, of course.  Christianity has much to answer for, as well, and I'm not just talking about events in the distant past such as the Inquisition and the Crusades.  The current upsurge of anti-gay legislation in several countries in Africa, some of which calls for the death penalty, is largely the result of American fundamentalists encouraging and financing such measures.  Do the stay-at-home members of the Christian churches from which these "missionaries" come bear some of the blame, if for no other reason because of their silence?

Does Christian ideology as a whole?

Now, I know that because of the huge variety of beliefs within Christianity (and Islam as well), to talk about a "Christian ideology" is a little ridiculous.  You have to wonder whether, for example, a Pentecostal and a Unitarian Universalist would agree on anything beyond "God exists."  But as my friend also pointed out, there are passages in the Christian Bible that are as horrific as anything the Qu'ran has to offer; stoning to death for minor offenses, men being struck dead right and left for damn near every reason you can think of, not to mention a prophet who called in bears to tear apart 42 children who had teased him about being bald and a man who offered his daughters to be raped by a mob rather than inconvenience a couple of angels (who, presumably, could have taken care of themselves).  It's why I find it wryly amusing when I hear people say that they believe that every biblical passage is word-for-word true, and that they live their lives according to a literal interpretation of the biblical commands.  If they did so, they'd be in jail.

But to return to my original question; does an ideology, or its law-abiding followers, bear some of the blame for what the true believers do?  At the very least, for not speaking out more fervently against the deeds done in the name of their religion?

It's not a question that admits of easy answers.  I'm torn between feeling certain that the most basic truth is that you are only responsible for what you yourself do, and having the nagging thought that remaining silent in the face of depravity is itself an immoral act.  After all, one of the criticisms leveled against Americans by many Muslims in the Middle East is that we stand by silently and allow our leaders to continue pursuing exploitative and unjust actions.  How is their holding America, and all Americans, responsible for what some Americans have done in the Middle East any different from our holding Islam, and all Muslims, responsible for the actions of ISIS and the shari'a judges in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere?

I don't know.  But the moral ambiguity inherent in these sorts of situations should push us all to consider not only our acts, but our refusal to act, as carefully as we know how.  And we should all be less hesitant to repudiate the individuals who would use our religions, ethnicities, and nationalities to perpetrate evil in the world.