Mass eviction notice

Buoyed by the success last month of Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, Archbishop Emeritus of Guadalajara, who conducted an exorcism of the entire country of Mexico, a Catholic priest in Scranton, Pennsylvania is now suggesting that we do the same thing for the United States.

Monsignor John Esseff, who has been a priest for 62 years and an exorcist for 35, says that "Such exorcisms … have helped bring awareness that there is such a thing as sin influenced by Satan...  The devil has much to do with [influencing people in] breaking the law of God."

William Blake, Satan Smiting Job (1826) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Right.  Because things in Mexico are ever so much better since Íñiguez and his intrepid team of Satan-fighters expelled all the demons from the country.  Notorious drug cartel leader Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera escaped from jail last week, almost certainly with help, and is now in hiding.  A "killing surge" in the city of Monterrey three weeks ago left 25 people dead. Ruben "El Menchito" Oseguera Gonzalez, son of the Jalisco Cartel's leader, was arrested for the third time last week after already being arrested and released twice for complicity in "two cases of forced disappearance."  Officials have said, basically, that everyone knows he's guilty, but he almost certainly won't be tried and found guilty because of the culture of corruption, coercion, and fear that exists in the Mexican judicial system.  A study just found that Mexico has a gun-seizure rate twice that of Iraq -- and yet the violent crime is on the increase, with 2015 looking to set a record, just as 2014 did.

So the exorcism really worked well.  It's no wonder that Monsignor Esseff wants the United States to follow suit.

And if we can't get our act together to have a country-wide expulsion of demons, local bishops could still do a piece-by-piece exorcism.  "Every bishop is the chief exorcist of his own diocese," Esseff said.  "Any time anyone with the authority uses his power against Satan, that is powerful.  Every priest and bishop has that power...  During the exorcism of a diocese, the bishop calls on the power of Jesus over every court, every single institution, every individual and every family.  The whole country would have such power if bishops would exorcise their dioceses."

What strikes me as most bizarre about all of this is the seemingly complete lack of awareness by people like Esseff and Íñiguez that their Get Thee Behind Me Satan routine has no effect whatsoever. I mean, this is a lack of connection to reality on a truly colossal scale.  You'd think that the first time you had a flat tire, and you prayed to god to expel the demons from your steel-belted radials, and nothing happened, you'd go, "Huh.  What a goober I am.  I guess this doesn't work."

But no.  They keep doing their rituals and prayers and so forth, and nothing continues to happen, and they are for some reason completely undaunted by this.

When it comes to true disconnect with reality, though, they've got a good precedent in the bible itself.  "Truly I tell you," Jesus says in Matthew 17:20, "if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you."

Either that's simply not true, or else mustard seeds are setting the bar for faith higher than they appear to be.  Because the faithful pray for stuff all the time -- ordinary stuff, not mountains moving around -- and a great deal of it doesn't happen.

But "god works in mysterious ways."  Which, I suppose, covers damn near every failure I can think of.

So we'll see, over the next few weeks, if American bishops take Monsignor Esseff's advice and exorcise the United States.  I suppose the whole thing falls into the "No Harm If It Amuses You" department.  Myself, I'm not expecting anything to change much.  Life will go on, crimes will still happen, Donald Trump will still be running for president.  Just showing that some demonic entities are harder to get rid of than others.

Postcards from Pluto

I spend a lot of time, here at Skeptophilia, railing at unscientific, irrational views of the world.  Today, I'd like to celebrate a major accomplishment of humanity: this morning, virtually as I'm writing this, the NASA spacecraft New Horizons is making the closest-ever pass of a spacecraft to Pluto.

The magnitude of this feat isn't obvious at first.  Pluto is a small target -- its radius is estimated at about 1,180 kilometers -- and it's so far away that it's hard to picture.  Pluto's average distance from the sun is about 6,000,000,000 kilometers, although its orbit is so eccentric that it varies from a perihelion of 4.4 billion to an aphelion of 7.3 billion kilometers.  So how amazing a feat is this?

Let me give you an analogy.  This is like hitting an object the size of a tennis ball with an object the size of a speck of dust -- from 175 kilometers away.

Thus far, the information that has been coming back has been breathtaking.  Already we have seen that the surface of the planet is rusty-red in color and has a pattern on its surface shaped like a heart; that it seems to have ice caps of some sort; and that on its surface is a mysterious dark formation that's been nicknamed "The Whale," whose structure is as yet undetermined  We stand to learn more about Pluto's composition and history, and the characteristics of its moon Charon -- which, at a radius of about 630 km, is over half as big as the planet itself.  (In fact, astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted this weekend, "Pluto’s primary moon Charon is so large that their mutual center-of-mass lies not within Pluto but in empty space.")

Pluto, as seen from New Horizons on July 11, 2015 [image courtesy of NASA]

But even tiny Pluto -- one-sixth the mass of the Earth's Moon, and one-third its volume -- has four other moons.  They've been named Styx, Nix, Kerberos, Hydra, after other denizens of the Greek underworld (Charon, you'll remember, is the ferryman who brings dead souls across the River Styx).  Its surface seems to be made predominantly of various kinds of ice, including frozen nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide.  It's lightweight for its size -- its density is only about 2 grams per cubic centimeter, only twice the density of liquid water -- leading astronomers to conjecture that it has a rocky core, and a mantle composed primarily of liquid water and water ice.  If this is correct, Pluto may have the highest percentage composition of water of any object in the Solar System.

Pluto and Charon -- July 11, 2015 [image courtesy of NASA]

And the fun won't end with its closest pass this morning.  The probe is designed to keep sending back data for another sixteen months.  After that, it will continue sailing out of the Solar System, following Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977, and now zooming out into interstellar space, some 12 billion kilometers away.

Some naysayers -- and there are more than you'd think -- have asked why we put time, effort, and (lots of) money into such endeavors.  So we find out the composition of a celestial body five-some-odd billion kilometers away from us.  So what?  What good does it do us?

I think the reason is that knowledge, in and of itself, is a worthy goal.  Always looking at the profit motive -- what benefit will it bring? -- is ignoring the fact that the inspiration gained from reaching for, and achieving, a lofty goal has a worth that can't be measured in dollars.  How many young minds were inspired by previous successes in pure science -- the discovery of how DNA works, the first humans to reach the Moon, the uncovering of countless bizarre fossil animals by paleontologists, the first manned submarine to descend into the Marianas Trench?

And what did those minds go on to accomplish?

I look at the images coming back from New Horizons with nothing but a sense of wonder and curiosity.  Such missions represent one of humanity's most fundamental drives; the thirst for knowledge.  So when you see the images that are coming back from the furthest reaches of the Solar System, don't just think of them as pictures of a distant denizen of our Solar System.  Think of them as symbols of the highest aspirations of the human mind and spirit.

Sunspots and ice ages

If there's one feature of media that drives me the craziest, it's the practice of appending the words "scientists claim" to any damn thing they want to in order to give it unwarranted credibility.

Take, for example, the story that appeared over at RawStory (and also, in similar forms, at The Telegraph and The Daily Mail).  Entitled "'Mini Ice Age' On the Way In 15 Years, Say Scientists," this article takes a piece of legitimate and interesting scientific research and puts a sensationalized spin on it that, if I were one of the researchers, would impel me to write a rebuttal comprised of a single sentence: "I DIDN'T SAY THAT."

First, a little background.  The number of sunspots, which are electromagnetic storms on the surface of the Sun, has been observed to fluctuate on a cycle of about eleven years, but also to be subject to a second (much longer-period) cycle of 370-odd years.  This is the proximal cause of the Maunder Minimum, a time of low sunspot activity that lasted from 1645 to about 1715.

Sunspots in September 2001 [image courtesy of NASA]

Thus far, this probably would merit nothing more than a "So what?" from everyone but astronomy buffs.  Why would popular media even report on something like sunspots?  But the Maunder Minimum, at least in part, coincided with low temperatures in Europe -- the article in RawStory refers (correctly) to the Thames freezing over in winter during that period (although, as you'll see, even that is only one cherry-picked piece of the truth).

So to put it bluntly, the whole purpose of this story is intended to cast doubt on anthropogenic climate change.  "Damn scientists!" you're left thinking.  "Can't even decide if the temperature is rising or falling!"

The problem is, this is a flaw in the media's reporting, not in the science itself.  Let's take this claim apart at the seams, okay?

First, let's look at the basis of the claim -- that the Maunder Minimum predicts extremely cold temperatures.  All it takes is a quick trip to Wikipedia to find out that it's not that simple:

Note that the term "Little Ice Age" applied to the Maunder minimum is something of a misnomer as it implies a period of unremitting cold (and on a global scale), which is not the case.  For example, the coldest winter in the Central England Temperature record is 1683-4, but the winter just 2 years later (both in the middle of the Maunder minimum) was the fifth warmest in the whole 350-year CET record.  Furthermore, summers during the Maunder minimum were not significantly different to those seen in subsequent years.  The drop in global average temperatures in paleoclimate reconstructions at the start of the Little Ice Age was between about 1560 and 1600, whereas the Maunder minimum began almost 50 years later.

If you want to go a little deeper than Wikipedia -- and you should -- check out this cogent and well-written summary of the problem with correlating sunspots and ice ages by Mike Lockwood, professor of space environment physics and a director of research at the University of Reading.  Lockwood writes:

There is very little evidence that the lower global mean temperatures between 1400 and 1800 were caused by solar activity - there's more evidence it was associated with volcanic activity and/or internal oscillations in the climate system...  Much of what has been written in the media and on the internet fails to appreciate the difference between regional and global climates.  My research looks at a potential link between low solar activity and cold European winters. That's a regional and seasonal effect and not a global effect.

If that wasn't unequivocal enough for you, Lockwood goes on to say, "What's more, there's no evidence that summers in the Maunder minimum were any colder than usual.  This is not a 'Little Ice Age' - it is not an ice age of any shape or form."

Second, let's check and see if the scientists cited in the RawStory article actually said anything about an ice age starting in fifteen years.  The lead researcher, Valentina Zharkova of Northumbria University, presented her findings at the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno, Wales last week, and a summary appeared in Phys.org.  Here are a few relevant paragraphs:

It is 172 years since a scientist first spotted that the Sun's activity varies over a cycle lasting around 10 to 12 years.  But every cycle is a little different and none of the models of causes to date have fully explained fluctuations.  Many solar physicists have put the cause of the solar cycle down to a dynamo caused by convecting fluid deep within the Sun. Now, Zharkova and her colleagues have found that adding a second dynamo, close to the surface, completes the picture with surprising accuracy. 

"We found magnetic wave components appearing in pairs, originating in two different layers in the Sun's interior.  They both have a frequency of approximately 11 years, although this frequency is slightly different, and they are offset in time.  Over the cycle, the waves fluctuate between the northern and southern hemispheres of the Sun.  Combining both waves together and comparing to real data for the current solar cycle, we found that our predictions showed an accuracy of 97%," said Zharkova... 

Looking ahead to the next solar cycles, the model predicts that the pair of waves become increasingly offset during Cycle 25, which peaks in 2022.  During Cycle 26, which covers the decade from 2030-2040, the two waves will become exactly out of synch and this will cause a significant reduction in solar activity. 

"In cycle 26, the two waves exactly mirror each other – peaking at the same time but in opposite hemispheres of the Sun.  Their interaction will be disruptive, or they will nearly cancel each other.  We predict that this will lead to the properties of a 'Maunder minimum'," said Zharkova.  "Effectively, when the waves are approximately in phase, they can show strong interaction, or resonance, and we have strong solar activity.  When they are out of phase, we have solar minimums.  When there is full phase separation, we have the conditions last seen during the Maunder minimum, 370 years ago."

Is it just me, or did she say nothing about "ice ages?"

But the Maunder Minimum was cold, right?  Couldn't we still see a drop in temperatures if the predicted minimum occurs?  To answer that question, let's go back to Lockwood:

Statistically, we found a significant link between the occurrence of cold winters in the long CET record and solar activity.  By "significant" we mean that there was only a five per cent chance that we were being fooled by a coincidence...  In a paper with scientists from the Met Office's Hadley Centre, we used an energy balance model to show the slowing in anthropogenic global warming associated with decline in solar irradiance to Maunder minimum levels.  We found the likely reduction in warming by 2100 would be between 0.06 and 0.1 degrees Celsius, a very small fraction of the warming we're due to experience as a result of human activity.

Which hits on the central point.  My suspicion is that the hype surrounding the Maunder Minimum and sunspots has one purpose: to reassure us that our activity isn't going to warm the Earth further, and push the climate more out of whack than it already is.  "Don't worry," the media tells us.  "Keep burning your fossil fuels.  The Earth is going to be just fine.  In fact, we might be heading into an ice age!"

And because few people read any deeper than what appears in popular media, they're left with the further impression that the scientists don't know what the hell they're talking about.  We hear about global warming, and then there's an article where "scientists claim" that everything is cooling off.  Is it any wonder that laypeople throw their hands in the air and stop listening?

Which, of course, is what a lot of the powers-that-be want.  Altering the status quo is expensive, and requires unhooking our government from the influence of the fossil fuel industry.  No way can we have that happen.

No way.

Easier to slip into the media misleading stories that subtly cast doubt on the research itself, along with those nasty little words -- "scientists claim."  After that, they can sit back and let natural cynicism and distrust do the rest.

The illusion of understanding

I've written before about the Dunning-Kruger effect, the cognitive bias that gives rise to the perception that everyone you ask will verify being an above-average driver.  We all have the sense of being competent -- and as studies of Dunning-Kruger have shown, we generally think we're more competent than we really are.

I just ran into a paper from about thirteen years ago that I'd never seen before, and that seems to put an even finer lens on this whole phenomenon.  It explains, I think, why people settle for simplistic explanations for phenomena -- and promptly cease to question their understanding at all.  So even though this is hardly a new study, it was new to me, and (I hope) will be new to my readers.

Called "The Misunderstood Limits of Folk Science: An Illusion of Explanatory Depth," the paper was written by Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil of Yale University and appeared in the journal Cognitive Science.  Its results illustrate, I believe, why trying to disabuse people of poor understanding of science can be such an intensely frustrating occupation.

The idea of the paper is a simple one -- to test the degree to which people trust and rely on what the authors call "lay theories:"

Intuitive or lay theories are thought to influence almost every facet of everyday cognition.  People appeal to explanatory relations to guide their inferences in categorization, diagnosis, induction, and many other cognitive tasks, and across such diverse areas as biology, physical mechanics, and psychology.  Individuals will, for example, discount high correlations that do not conform to an intuitive causal model but overemphasize weak correlations that do.  Theories seem to tell us what features to emphasize in learning new concepts as well as highlighting the relevant dimensions of similarity...   

The incompleteness of everyday theories should not surprise most scientists.  We frequently discover that a theory that seems crystal clear and complete in our head suddenly develops gaping holes and inconsistencies when we try to set it down on paper. 

Folk theories, we claim, are even more fragmentary and skeletal, but laypeople, unlike some scientists, usually remain unaware of the incompleteness of their theories.  Laypeople rarely have to offer full explanations for most of the phenomena that they think they understand.  Unlike many teachers, writers, and other professional “explainers,” laypeople rarely have cause to doubt their naïve intuitions.  They believe that they can explain the world they live in fairly well.

Rozenblit and Keil proceeded to test this phenomenon, and they did so in a clever way.  They were able to demonstrate this illusory sense that we know what's going on around us by (for example) asking volunteers to rate their understanding of how common everyday objects work -- things like zippers, piano keys, speedometers, flush toilets, cylinder locks, and helicopters.  They were then (1) asked to write out explanations of how the objects worked; (2) given explanations of how they actually do work; and (3) asked to re-rate their understanding.

Just about everyone ranked their understanding as lower after they saw the correct explanation.

You read that right.  People, across the board, think they understand things better before they actually learn about them.  On one level, that makes sense; all of us are prone to thinking things are simpler than they actually are, and can relate to being surprised at how complicated some common objects turn out to be.  (Ever seen the inside of a wind-up clock, for example?)  But what is amazing about this is how confident we are in our shallow, incomplete knowledge -- until someone sets out to knock that perception askew.

It was such a robust result that Rozenblit and Keil decided to push it a little, and see if they could make the illusion of explanatory depth go away.  They tried it with a less-educated test group (the initial test group had been Yale students.)  Nope -- even people with less education still think they understand everything just fine.  They tried it with younger subjects.  Still no change.  They even told the test subjects ahead of time that they were going to be asked to explain how the objects worked -- thinking, perhaps, that people might be ashamed to admit to some smart-guy Yale researchers that they didn't know how their own zippers worked, and were bullshitting to save face.

The drop was less when such explicit instructions were given, but it was still there.  As Rozenblit and Keil write, "Offering an explicit warning about future testing reduced the drop from initial to subsequent ratings. Importantly, the drop was still significant—the illusion held."

So does the drop in self-rating occur with purely factual knowledge?  They tested this by doing the same protocol, but instead of asking people for explanations of mechanisms, they asked them to do a task that required nothing but pure recall -- such as naming the capitals of various countries.  Here, the drop in self-rating still occurred, but it was far smaller than with explanatory or process-based knowledge.  We are, it seems, much more likely to admit we don't know facts than to admit we don't understand processes.

The conclusion that Rozenblit and Keil reach is a troubling one:

Since it is impossible in most cases to fully grasp the causal chains that are responsible for, and exhaustively explain, the world around us, we have to learn to use much sparser representations of causal relations that are good enough to give us the necessary insights: insights that go beyond associative similarity but which at the same time are not overwhelming in terms of cognitive load.  It may therefore be quite adaptive to have the illusion that we know more than we do so that we settle for what is enough.  The illusion might be an essential governor on our drive to search for explanatory underpinnings; it terminates potentially inexhaustible searches for ever-deeper understanding by satiating the drive for more knowledge once some skeletal level of causal comprehension is reached.

Put simply, when we get to "I understand this well enough," we stop thinking.  And for most of us, that point is reached far, far too soon.

And while it really isn't that critical to understand how zippers work as long as it doesn't stop you from zipping up your pants, the illusion of explanatory depth in other areas can come back to bite us pretty hard when we start making decisions on how to vote.  If most of us truly understand far less than we think we do about such issues as the safety of GMOs and vaccines, the processes involved in climate and climate change, the scientific and ethical issues surrounding embryonic stem cells, and even issues like air and water pollution, how can we possibly make informed decisions regarding the regulations governing them?

All the more reason, I think, that we should be putting more time, money, effort, and support into education.  While education doesn't make the illusion of explanatory depth go away, at least the educated are starting from a higher baseline.  We still might overestimate our own understanding, but I'd still bet that the understanding itself is higher -- and that's bound to make us make better decisions.

I'll end with a quote by John Green that I think is particularly apt, here:

A conspiracy of denial

I find it interesting how reluctant rational people are to saying to the irrational, unscientific ones, "You're wrong."

You'd think it'd be clear, right?  Science provides us with a straightforward protocol for establishing whether a particular model works.  There is hard evidence -- the theory is supported.  No evidence, or worse still, evidence against -- the theory must be revised or abandoned.  In practice, producing and interpreting the evidence might be difficult, time consuming, costly, or all three, but in principle, the idea is simple enough.

So why do even skeptics have such a hard time coming out and making an unequivocal statement that people like climate change deniers and creationists and anti-vaxxers are not just wrong, but wildly, dangerously wrong?

Some do, of course.  There have been some scathing papers written on the subject.  But the further you get from the science journals themselves, the more people tend to waffle, and say things like, "Well, that's your opinion" or "More research needs to be done."

My sense is that it's to avoid accusations of bias, of being controlled by special interests.  Tolerance of a variety of viewpoints has morphed, somehow, into the toxic attitude that we can't come right out and say that a blatantly incorrect claim is, simply, wrong.  Add into the mix the tendency of politicians to pander to the most vocal of their supporters, and you might have an explanation for why we have a 97% consensus (or higher) amongst scientists that climate change is real and anthropogenic in origin, but 56% of the majority party in the United States Senate are climate change deniers -- and a significant percentage of the minority party has chosen to remain silent on the matter.

[image courtesy of Victor Komyenko and the Wikimedia Commons]

But a recent study by Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, Klaus Oberauer, and several other social psychology researchers at the University of Western Australia has shown that there is another reason that even skeptics are reluctant to speak up.  Their paper, "Recurrent fury: Conspiratorial discourse in the blogosphere triggered by research on the role of conspiracist ideation in climate denial," was published in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology, and it makes an interesting claim: unscientific claims, such as the denial of climate change or humanity's role in it, go hand in hand with conspiratorial thinking.

In other words, the rejection of science because of ideology is often coupled with a strong belief that the opposition is in cahoots with, perhaps even in the pay of, the unscrupulous, greedy, or outright evil.  We see it with the anti-vaxxers -- the countless scientific studies showing that vaccines are safe and effective were sponsored by, and therefore biased by, "Big Pharma."  The scientists who can demonstrate hard data supporting anthropogenic climate change are either falsifying the numbers so they can scare people and thus get grants from funding agencies, or are (in the words of Ted Cruz) "driven by politicians who have always supported more government control."

And of course, those who accept evolution are the worst of all, because they're just being controlled by Satan himself.

The study by Lewandowsky et al. studied blogs that had mentioned an earlier paper by the same researchers entitled "NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science" that had appeared three years ago in the journal Psychological Science.  This paper tried to show that people who exhibited conspiratorial thinking were more likely to hold unscientific views on other topics.  Considering the subject matter, the paper got a lot of mentions in blogs (both positive and negative).  So Lewandowsky et al. realized that this was, in itself, an excellent data set to study.

They sorted the commentary into two groups; comments that had come from climate-denial sites, and criticisms that had been made of the paper in legitimate science journals.  Conspiratorial thinking was broken down into the following subcategories:

• Survey responses were scammed by "warmists"
• “Skeptic” blogs were not contacted
• There was no presentation of intermediate data
• Different versions of the survey were used, thereby biasing the results
• Control data was suppressed
• Access to authors' websites was blocked
• Global activism and government censorship has suppressed dissenting views

These were differentiated from criticisms that had to do with methodology, data analysis, and research protocols.

The comments were given (without sources) to undergraduates, who were asked to distinguish which criticisms had come from scientists, and which from climate change deniers.

The results were unequivocal.  Not only did the test subjects correctly identify which were which, but they recognized even subtle differences between a legitimate critique and accusations of conspiracy.  Climate change denial, it turns out, correlates across the board not with legitimate scientific criticism, but with conspiratorial thinking.  "I do not recall ever having seen such a strong effect in thirty years of behavioral research, and I have certainly never encountered ratings that favored the extreme end of the scale to the extent observed here," Lewandowsky said.  "Conspiracism, by definition, is not skepticism. Hence it is important to show that self-anointed 'skeptics' are not skeptical...  The [climate change denying] blog content was identified not only as conspiracist, but also as lacking in scholarly incisiveness.  This is very important because it shows that conspiracism isn’t 'a price you pay for skepticism'—on the contrary, conspiracism detracts from scholarly critique."

Me, I find this an unsurprising result.  And it explains why the politicians, even the ones who are reasonable and rational, have been unwilling to stand up and say "bullshit" to the likes of Ted Cruz and James Inhofe.  In politics, the ideal is to be unbiased, to listen to all sides, and not to be beholden to special interests.  It's risky to take a stand -- especially when powerful and vocal people are likely to accuse you of being a shill, a part of the evil conspiracy to fool the honest citizenry.  Easier to stay silent, to pretend that there still is a debate on the topic, than to come right out and say, "You're wrong."

Of course, the climate itself will eventually force our hand.  Neil deGrasse Tyson said, "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."  Here, we have a darker twist on this aphorism -- the climate will continue to change, the world to warm, regardless of how many snowballs idiots like Senator Inhofe throw onto the floor of the Senate.  2015 is already shaping up to break the temperature record -- set, by the way, in 2014.  Just in the first six months of the year we've had unprecedented droughts in California, floods in Texas and the Midwest, deadly heat waves in Pakistan -- and in March, three months past the solstice, Antarctica had its warmest day since records have been kept -- 63.5 degrees Fahrenheit, recorded at Esperanza Base on the Antarctic Peninsula.

Reality, it seems, has no particular problem with being part of the conspiracy.

Crayons, asbestos, and risk

Let's have a little chat about the topic of risk.

It's something that a lot of people don't understand, but in principle, it's a simple concept.  Actuaries, and other folks who get paid to think about such things, define risk as the product of two probabilities: the probability of exposure and the probability of harm.

The problem is that misassessment of one or both of these two probabilities leads people to (in some cases) wildly overestimate the risk of certain behaviors, and (in others) to wildly underestimate it.  Often, these misassessments have to do with the familiarity of something -- familiar, everyday things are usually considered safer than they really are, and unfamiliar ones more dangerous, regardless of whether those perceptions are at all rooted in reality.

Dan Gilbert, in his wonderful TED talk "Why We Make Bad Decisions," illustrated this perfectly with a photograph of a burning skyscraper, a plane crash, a terrorist bombing site, and a swimming pool.  He then asked the audience to play the Sesame Street game of "Which Of These Things Is Not Like The Other?"  "If you chose the swimming pool, you're correct," Gilbert said.  "Because of the four, it's the one that is by far the most likely to kill you."

This becomes even worse when we start looking at the risk of "chemicals."  I put the word "chemicals" in quotation marks, because of course, everything is made up of chemicals.  (I once saw a sign for "U-Pick Organic Chemical-Free Strawberries."  Ponder that one for a while.)  The problem is, lots of people don't understand chemistry, and so anything with a fancy-sounding name immediately gets put in the "unfamiliar/dangerous" column, even if it's a perfectly innocuous compound, or even one that is essential for life.

Even dangerous chemicals, of course, don't necessarily act straightforwardly.  It's not enough to say that a compound is toxic -- you also have to ask how likely it is to get inside you and cause trouble, and whether the dosage you're being exposed to is, in fact, dangerous.  It's why all of the panic earlier this year about "radioactive water from Fukushima" being detected on the shores of western Canada was unfounded -- the radioactive isotope detected, cesium 134, was only discovered because it's unlikely to get into seawater any other way.  Jay Cullen, oceanographer at the University of Victoria, said, "We're more than a thousand-fold below even the drinking water standard in the coastal waters being sampled at this point.  Those levels are much much much lower than what's allowable in our drinking water."

So the dosage was far smaller than our daily exposure to naturally-occurring sources of radiation, and would be entirely harmless even if we were drinking seawater, which most of us don't.  But it didn't stop people from freaking out completely about how we were being poisoned, irradiated, and (of course) all gonna die.

A more recent goofy claim that has the interwebz in a tizzy lately is the claim that asbestos has been discovered in crayons.  Asbestos, of course, is one of those words like "radioactivity" -- all you have to do is say it and people start thinking they're being killed.  In fact, the danger of asbestos for most people is minimal -- the majority of the asbestos that's still around is safely locked up in wall board and ceiling tiles.  It's only when asbestos-containing materials get broken up, and the dust produced that way is deeply inhaled, that it increases one's likelihood of getting certain lung cancers, such as mesothelioma.

So what about the asbestos in crayons?  First of all, there's the difficulty in telling apart asbestos fibers from talc.  Talc, a chemically related mineral, is used in all sorts of things, up to and including baby powder.  You also don't want to inhale talc -- but the same could be said for any finely-powdered mineral.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Second, even if there was asbestos in crayons, could it hurt you?  The answer is "almost certainly not."  All the way back in 2000, the Consumer Product Safety Commission was prompted to do an analysis of crayons, and found "a trace amount of asbestos in two Crayola crayons made by Binney and Smith and one Prang crayon made by Dixon Ticonderoga" but stated that "the amount of asbestos is so small it is scientifically insignificant."  Add that to the fact that this "scientifically insignificant" quantity of asbestos is bound up in the colored wax that makes up the rest of the crayon, so the likelihood of inhaling it is nil, and you have what is commonly called a "tempest in a teapot."

Snopes put it succinctly: "In other words, if trace amounts of asbestos were encased in a waxy substance such as crayons, those fibers would not be friable and would pose no risk of becoming airborne."

It'd be nice if more people would learn about risk and toxicity -- not only would it get them to calm down about the stuff they're exposed to on a daily basis, most of which their bodies handle just fine, it would also stop people from forwarding ridiculous claims on Facebook and Twitter, which is getting to be annoying.  In any case: don't worry about letting your kids use crayons.  Coloring in a coloring book is not going to give them lung cancer.  All you have to do is make sure that they aren't grinding up their crayons and snorting the powder.

But I'm hoping you'd do that in any case.

Crazy claim pop quiz

Here at Skeptophilia we've talked about "Poe's Law" -- the general rule that a sufficiently well-done satire is indistinguishable from the real thing.  Usually, this happens because of the cleverness with which the satire is written -- matching in tone, style, and verbiage the particular slice of crazy that the writer is satirizing.

There's another force at work here, too, however.  And that is that the range of nutty things that people actually believe is frightening.  Every time I run into something that seems too completely batshit insane for anyone to take seriously, it always turns out that there is a whole cadre of folks who believe it fervently.  Sometimes there are schools where it's taught as fact.  Sometimes it's been turned into a religion.

I'm not sure where such irrational credulity comes from -- yet another question I've asked here more than once.  But to illustrate this capacity for people to buy into ideas no matter how completely ridiculous they are, I decided to have a little fun today.

Below are ten claims I dug up this morning.  Five of them are from satirical websites, and five are serious -- i.e., there are actually people who think these views are true.  See if you can figure out which are which.

1. The movie Despicable Me is rife with satanic messages.  In particular, the "minions" were designed to trick children into accepting their role as the mindless slaves of Lucifer.
2. The Israeli town of Petah Tivka is a model made out of cardboard.  Baron Edmond de Rothschild conspired with the Israeli government to make a beautiful-appearing town at the site to intimidate the Palestinians.
3. There is an attempted coup going on, right now, amongst the Illuminati.  A cabal of radical atheists have infiltrated the Illuminati and are trying to overthrow the leaders, and institute laws forcing atheism to be mandatory worldwide, and religious belief (of any kind) punishable by death.
4. The US has declared war on a coalition comprised of China and Russia, because the Chinese and Russians were trying to block the dominance of the American corporate world, headed by David Rothschild and the Jews.  There have already been nuclear detonations, but the US media is covering it up.
5. Ellen Pao, chairperson of Reddit, is a puppet of the New World Order and rules the site with an iron fist.  Her employees seed the site with disinformation, deleting or downvoting posts that don't toe the party line (or that might threaten to reveal what's going on).  The site also has links to satanism.
6. The mayor of Vancouver, British Columbia is paying pilots to chemtrail the city with chemicals that will turn the citizens into mindless zombies.  One guy found out about the plan, so the mayor sent cyborg sea otters up the Powell River to attack the guy's house.  They broke through a wall, but the guy got away.
7. The German city of Bielefeld does not exist.  The town that existed at the site was damaged during World War I and razed completely during World War II, and never rebuilt.  The German government has kept up the façade of Bielefeld's existence to save face.
8. The Charleston church shooting was a hoax, masterminded by President Obama and overseen by Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg.  Reverend Clementa Pinkney is still alive and is in hiding.  Dylan Roof isn't a real person, and film footage showing him is faked.
9. Vladimir Putin is in cahoots with some secessionists in Texas to get Texas to break away from the United States, in hopes of triggering a domino effect of secessions similar to the collapse of the former Soviet Union, and the resultant destruction of the United States as a world power.
10. The Tour de France is a hoax.  Every year it is filmed in the same studio, out at Area 51, where the Moon landing films and photographs were made.

Ready for some answers?

1. Real.  This site claims that the whole game is given away by Despicable Me's tag line which is "When the world needed a hero... they called a villain."
2. Satire.  Petah Tivka is real, and the idea that it's only a lot of false fronts has become something of a running joke in Israel.
3. Satire.  As much as I'd love to see this happen, because the whole idea of a "cabal of radical atheists" cracks me up.  The site where this article appears, HardDawn, has tricked thousands of people.  The fact that it's a satire site becomes clearer when you say the website name out loud.  (Get it? Hur hur hur.)
4. Real.  This one is from the notorious site Before It's News, which should be all you need to know.
5. Satire.  Although to hear some Redditors talk, you'd think it was true.  Note that the website name is NaturalNewd -- one letter off from another notorious site.  The article further claims that the site Digg went down the tubes after its owner sacrificed a baby to Baphomet to boost their hit rate, and Jesus objected.
6. Real.  This site, owned by one Callum Houston, has a whole series called "Things I've Seen in the Powell River," which you should definitely check out  But the cyborg sea otters by far are my favorite.
7. Satire.  The "Bielefeld Conspiracy" started as an online joke amongst some German college students, after they kept receiving three "no" answers in a row from everyone they asked the following questions: (1) Have you ever been to Bielefeld? (2) Do you know anyone from Bielefeld? (3) Do you know anyone who has ever been to Bielefeld?  Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel had a little fun with it after she mentioned a town meeting she'd attended in Bielefeld, ending with, "... if it exists at all."  She then looked puzzled and added, "I had the impression I was there."
8. Real.  The whole "crisis actor" thing just makes me nauseated, but seems to crop up every time there's a well-publicized shooting.  I'm only surprised it took them this long to jump on the Charleston massacre.
9. Real.  That Putin is a pretty tricky guy.  Although I must say that it doesn't take much to get the secessionist wackos in Texas yammering.
10. Satire.  The Danish satirical news program De Uaktuelle Nyheder did a story a few years ago that the Tour de France was a hoax, and in subsequent followups went on to say first that the French language was gibberish, and finally that France itself didn't exist.

How'd you do?

You know, there's a problem with this whole thing, which is that once something appears in print, there will be people who will believe it.  Look at the fact that HardDawn (the same site that claims that radical atheists are taking over the Illuminati, #3 above) had an article back in 2013 that chemtrails were killing the angels in heaven, and I am still seeing that one posted as real on conspiracy sites.

So the line between satire and belief just keeps getting blurrier and blurrier.  Which should not surprise regular readers of this blog, but is a conclusion that makes me want to take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.