Tantrums over Kim Davis

I told myself that I wouldn't comment on the whole Kim Davis thing, that other and better voices had already said what needed to be said.  The Rowan County, Kentucky county clerk who refused to follow the law of the land and issue marriage licenses to LGBT couples on the grounds that it was inconsistent with her Christian beliefs has been jailed for contempt of court, and there you are.

But of course the whole kerfuffle has resulted in the Christian Persecution Party roaring back with a vengeance.  This movement was started a few years ago by evangelicals who think that (1) not getting your way is the same as being oppressed, (2) it's persecution if you're not allowed to visit your own beliefs on every other citizen in the United States, and (3) the 74% of Americans who self-identify as Christians represent an embattled minority.

Think I'm exaggerating?  Let's start with online loudmouth Joshua Feuerstein, who had the following to say:

I told you a long time ago, ladies and gentlemen, that the LGBT community has one agenda and that is to come after Christians.  That has been the agenda all along. They want to put the clamp on Christianity in America, and you either back them and support them or you’re going to jail… 

… I challenge you to get there, to Rowan County, and let’s make sure that Kim is let out of jail.  It’s not fair that a Christian is persecuted and thrown in jail simply for not endorsing gay marriage.

Sorry, Josh, but that's a lie.  Kim Davis isn't in jail because she is a Christian.  She's in jail because she is an elected official who refused to follow a federal law even after being ordered to do so by the court.

Then we had the ever-baffling Mike Huckabee weighing in:

Kim Davis in federal custody removes all doubts about the criminalization of Christianity in this country.  We must defend Religious Liberty!...  Look, you would have hated Lincoln, because he disregarded the Dred Scott 1857 decision that said black people aren’t fully human.  [Lincoln] disregarded [Dred Scott] because he knew it was not operative, that it was not logical.

Wait a moment.  You are... you are seriously saying that Kim Davis is like Lincoln because she's denying rights to a group of American citizens?  And then defending that comparison by showing how Lincoln did the exact opposite?

And finally, no BizarroFest would be complete without a contribution from Ted Cruz:

Those who are persecuting Kim Davis believe that Christians should not serve in public office. [...] Or, if Christians do serve in public office, they must disregard their religious faith–or be sent to jail. 

Today, judicial lawlessness crossed into judicial tyranny.  Today, for the first time ever, the government arrested a Christian woman for living according to her faith.  This is wrong.  This is not America. 

I stand with Kim Davis.  Unequivocally. I stand with every American that the Obama Administration is trying to force to chose [sic] between honoring his or her faith or complying with a lawless court opinion.

No, Ted, we think Kim Davis belongs in jail because she refused to do her fucking job.

But you know, the whole thing smacks of hypocrisy anyway.  What do you think these same braying wingnuts would say in the following situations?

• A Muslim food store checkout clerk who refused to ring up a customer because he was purchasing pork.
• A Quaker who worked for the sheriff's office and refused to issue an adult a handgun license.
• A vegan who worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service and refused to issue a hunter a deer hunting permit.
• A Christian Scientist clerk in a pharmacy who refused to sell customers any drugs at all.

Think they'd support any of those?

Yeah, right.

Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Martyrs' Last Prayer (1883) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

How about calling it like it is?  You are perfectly within your rights to refuse to do a job that interferes with your religious beliefs.  But in that case, you should not hold that job.  If Kim Davis had resigned because she wasn't comfortable issuing marriage licenses to LGBT individuals, that would have been intolerant of her, but at least the honorable way to follow her religious precepts.  That she expects to keep a job, while using her religion to get out of doing it, is ridiculous.

The Religious Right positively relishes the opportunity to cast themselves as this century's Christians being eaten by lions in the Colosseum, when exactly the opposite is true; they are the ones attempting to use their position to force their belief system on everyone else.  So instead of deriding Kim Davis as a shirker who is getting paid for a job she refuses to do, or a scofflaw who sticks up her middle finger at the law of the land, she's given shouts of acclamation for being a staunch True Believer in the face of dreadful persecution.

So it's time to say it to their faces: throwing a tantrum because you'd like to force everyone to dance to your music, and no one's cooperating, is what toddlers do.

Grow up.

Allahu akbar!... or maybe not.

Once again, the fervently religious of our world have shown themselves capable of following the Red Queen's dictum of holding several contradictory thoughts in their heads at once.  In this case, it's Egyptian Muslims, who have jailed yet another person for "blasphemy" and "criticizing Islam."

The radical Muslim element in Egypt has been quick to speak out against the sentence.  It was too lenient, they say -- the man should have been executed.

It's a little perplexing how these folks, and their spiritual brethren the Fundamentalist Christians, can't see the contradiction implicit in their stance.  On the one hand, they are continuously chanting, singing, and shouting from the rooftops about how God is Great and All-Powerful and Omnipotent and Omniscient and Omnipresent and Omni-Various-Other-Stuff, and on the other hand they are so terrified that a brief passage written by a guy on Facebook will destroy Allah's kingdom on earth that they are ready to hang him from the nearest flagpole.

[image courtesy of photographer David Lisbona and the Wikimedia Commons]

The same was true of the witch-hunters in the 17th century, who seemed to believe that the unshakable, self-evident, rock-solid truth of god's word was under serious threat from illiterate, eccentric little old ladies.

Come on, people.  You can't have it both ways.  Either god is powerful, or he's not.  If he's powerful, you have no reason to persecute people for bad-mouthing him; presumably god is capable of handling his own battles, and doesn't need patriarchal, humorless, puritanical bastards like the Shari'a judges to deal with his enemies.  If he's not so powerful -- if, in fact, his revealed truth could be demolished by a couple of paragraphs of mild criticism -- then I have to wonder why you think he's worthy of worship.  Either way, both can't be true simultaneously.

Oh, wait, perhaps there's a third option?  Maybe all of this stuff was made up by power-hungry patriarchs to keep the power structure intact, the money flowing in, and the women in line, and in actuality there is no god!  Gotta wonder.

In any case, you also have to wonder why so few people are willing to stand up and say this. Lots of folks are willing to address the human rights aspects (torturing and executing people isn't nice) but very few people are willing to deal with the larger issue, which is that these people are morally bankrupt.  A religion or a system of ethics which is based upon coercion (mental or physical), is simply an excuse for the powerful to remain powerful.  It isn't true, it isn't worthy of respect, and it isn't a reflection of the divine.  It is simply an embodiment of all that is bad about human nature -- the desire to dominate solely because we're in a position where we can.

It's the same with a lot of the issues between the Christians and politicians these days, isn't it?  You hear from people who aren't happy that the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage that heterosexual marriage is "under attack".  The ranting you hear from the pulpits seems to claim that now that gay marriage is legal, all of these straight people are going to run right out and tie the knot with someone of the same sex, and that will open the door for heaven knows what.  In a year or two we'll probably have people marrying various marine invertebrates.  You know, if you think that sexual preference is really that fluid, you have to question why your god would have made it that way.  Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that if your worldview is based upon fear, then any amount of rationality won't get in the way of your adopting moronic stances to shore up your beliefs.

Of course, some people believe that there's god's evil twin, Satan or Lucifer or whatever, who is actively trying to corrupt people by using others to spread wrong belief.  Even if you think that's true, however, isn't it still supposedly the case that god is stronger than Satan, and correct beliefs are inherently more attractive and virtuous than incorrect ones?  If so, then once again, what the hell are you so worried about?

So once more, we have the devoutly religious of the world adopting a stance which is so patently ridiculous that if it were fiction, no one would believe it was plausible; and most of the world's political leaders doing nothing but tsk-tsking in their direction for "not being nice."  It would be wonderful if one, just one, of them would stand up and say, "You know what, Egyptian leaders?  We are no longer in the Middle Ages.  We stopped burning witches three hundred years ago.  That's because doing that sort of thing was based upon stupid, backward superstition.  Grow up, you idiotic bastards, and join the 21st century.  If criticism is really such a threat to your beliefs, it probably means that your beliefs are simply wrong."

But no one will, of course.

Psychic police policy

In a move that is raising hackles amongst rationalists and skeptics, the UK College of Policing has stated in its official policy guidelines statement that police "should not rule out" using advice from psychics in solving crimes.

"High-profile missing person investigations nearly always attract the interest of psychics and others, such as witches and clairvoyants, stating that they possess extrasensory perception," the document states.  "Any information received from psychics should be evaluated in the context of the case, and should never become a distraction to the overall investigation and search strategy unless it can be verified...  The person's methods should be asked for, including the circumstances in which they received the information and any accredited successes."

When asked to clarify what that last bit meant, a spokesperson said, "Our guidance says that all information received in the course of a missing person investigation should be recorded and assessed to see whether it can yield any valid lines of enquiry, including information that comes from people identifying themselves as psychic.  In this context, 'accredited success' means previous cases where they have given police information that turns out to be correct."

Which at least provides some kind of an out.  Because the track record for psychics providing correct information to police is pretty damn close to zero.

Ever heard of the Yorkshire Ripper, who in the late 1970s committed thirteen gruesome murders?  Doris Stokes, who preceded Sally Morgan as Britain's most famous psychic, provided critical clues to police about the identity of the Ripper.  His first name was Johnny or Ronnie, she said.  His surname began with an M, and he came from the Northeast of England, in Wearside or Tyneside.  He was clean-shaven, and had thinning hair with a bald spot.

Unfortunately for Stokes, the murderer was named Peter Sutcliffe, he was from Bingley in West Yorkshire, and this is what he looked like:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

At least she correctly identified him as male.

This case isn't unique, not by a long shot.  The investigators working on the 2007 disappearance of three-year-old Madeleine McCann in Portugal have folders full of "information" from psychics, including:

• the declaration by John Warne that she was kidnapped on the behalf of an American and is now alive and well and studying at a college in Minnesota;
• Mike Baker's statement that she was taken across the Mediterranean and is now living in Africa;
• a vision by Angela McGhee that indicates that the girl was captured by pedophiles, but has escaped and is now living in the city of Monchique in Portugal;
• and Derek Acorah's pronouncement that she's dead.

My guess is that even the people who believe wholeheartedly in psychic bullshit could see that all of these couldn't be true at the same time.

I am appalled that any investigative agency would even consider using information provided by self-styled psychics.  There is no evidence whatsoever that psychic ability exists, much less that any of their Messages From The Other Realms have ever been the least use in solving crimes.

But it goes beyond just being well-meaning but ultimately fruitless help.  Police investigators have limited time and resources; expecting them to "evaluate information from psychics in the context of the case" is a colossal waste.  Phone calls should go as follows:

Caller:  Hello, I have information to provide to you on the Fernwhistle murder case. 

Police:  Can you tell me how you obtained this information? 

Caller:  Well, I'm a psychic, and... 

Police:  *click*

No credence should be given to these people at all, who are delusional at best and hucksters at worst. And the idea that police guidelines should make it official policy to listen to the useless information they provide is tantamount to saying, "We'll consider all information, even if we know from the get-go that it's wrong."

Pondering Project Serpo

In today's episode of You've Got Mail, I recently got an email that poses an interesting question.  Here's the relevant bit:

Dear Mr. Skepticism: 

You talk a lot about how the only way to know something is evidence.  What if the only evidence you have is someone else's word?  Yes I know you can't believe everything people say, but your position is more that we have to start out thinking everyone's a liar.  Guilty until proved innocent... 

I've been interested for a long time in Project Serpo.  I don't know if you've heard of it.  It's probably something that a person like you would dismiss immediately.  But that's not skepticism, because you can't prove it's not real, even if I can't prove it is.  You should look at the link I'm sending with an open mind. 

Some people's stories are going to be true.  Not everyone's a liar...  We should be taking claims like Project Serpo seriously unless they get proved to be hoaxes. 

sincerely, 

Greg T.

First, I'm kind of honored that Greg T. calls me "Mr. Skepticism."  It's a title I wouldn't mind adopting, and certainly is better than some of the other salutations I've seen in my fan mail, which have included "Dear Asshole" and "You Worthless Wanker."  So we're off to a good start.

But he does ask an interesting question.  Are we really stuck with either dismissing all anecdote out of hand, or else accepting it all with equal abandon?  Is there a way to winnow out fact from fiction when all we have is someone's word -- or are we left with Neil deGrasse Tyson's pronouncement, "If you tell me, 'You gotta believe it, I saw it,' I'm gonna tell you to go home.  In science, we need more than 'I saw it.'"

So I looked at the Project Serpo link that was kindly provided, and it does turn out to be an interesting case in the sense that we have zero hard evidence for a pretty wild, and quite detailed, claim.  The site turns out to have the Wall O' Words format, so it's a lot to sift through; the gist, if you don't feel like spending an hour scrolling through text, is that in the Roswell UFO incident, one of the aliens survived.  The government sent in specialists who eventually were able to communicate with him, and it turns out that he and his less-fortunate shipmates came from a planet they call "Serpo" that orbits the star that terrestrial astronomers know as Zeta Reticuli.

UFO enthusiasts undoubtedly will recognize this name.  It's the star that figures prominently in the wild tales of Zecharia Sitchin, who said that it was home to the Grays, the bald, big-eyed aliens of the type made famous in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  But since Greg's question was about determining the truth value of a single claim, and not all of the other stuff that gets appended to it, let's stick to only what was in the Project Serpo site itself.

Because the Project Serpo goes beyond the usual Roswell crash stuff; this claims that the surviving alien told scientists on Earth how to go to Serpo... and we sent a successful manned mission to the planet to study it, staying there for ten Earth years and afterwards bringing home a load of information on another planet's civilization.

A denizen of Serpo

What I look for, in evaluating such material, is anything I can hook onto that seems either (1) well-supported by evidence outside the claim itself, or (2) contradicted by known science.  And in this case, we have a lot of material to test by those standards.  The more we find that fails this test -- the more bits we run into that are contradicted by what is known to be true -- the less plausible the entire claim is.

And right away, we have a few pieces that raised my eyebrows.  Let's start with a bit about "pentagen," supposedly used as a fuel on Serpo:

Pentagen is the fifth isotope of Hydrogen. It is radioactive with a half life of .34222 seconds.  However, with a complex containment and storage system, Pentagen can be collected for an extended period of time...  This storage vessel is where the Pentagen is finally collected and stored.  The interior of the Vessel is lined with an alloy of Beryllium.  The Vessel contains several complex "collection" tubes that collects, cools and stores the Pentagen during the final production process.  The final product is collected in liquid helium, which is charged with gamma radiation.

There are two problems here.  First is that there is not even a fourth isotope of hydrogen, much less a fifth one.  Ordinary hydrogen (hydrogen-1), deuterium (hydrogen-2), and tritium (hydrogen-3) -- and that's it.  But maybe, you might be saying, the Serpons (or whatever they call themselves) have found something outside the realm of our own discoveries?  That's possible, yes?

Yes, but take a look at two other statements -- that cooling the "pentagen" increases its stability and thus its half-life, and that it's collected in liquid helium that has been "charged with gamma radiation."  Both are obvious falsehoods.  Temperature has no effect on radioactive decay rate; this claim has been tested extensively.  In fact, there is no known physical process that has any effect at all on half-life.  And there is no way to "charge something with gamma radiation."  Gamma radiation is high-frequency electromagnetic radiation -- i.e., light.  You can't charge something with light, because photons move.

At the speed of light, in fact.

Then, we have statements like this:

It was determined that Kepler's Laws did not apply to that solar system [Zeta Reticuli]. So, one of the things our Earth-based scientists learned was not to apply Earth's laws of physics in a universal way.

Whenever we're told that the laws of physics are different somewhere else, it always brings up lots of red flags.  From Earth-based observation of the motions of stars and galaxies, we are driven to the conclusion that the mathematical rules governing forces and motion are universal across the cosmos -- so the idea of Zeta Reticuli being some kind of Kepler's-Laws-free zone sounds pretty sketchy.  In the immortal words of Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, "Ye canna change the laws o' physics."

Also suspicious is the fact that although we're told that the Away Team eventually was able to understand and speak 30% of the Serpon language, we're not told anything about it except that it's "tonal."  Why would the returning researchers not share what they developed in the way of a Serpon-English dictionary?  Surely that would be easy enough to do.  The fact that we're not given any information about this rather easy-to-relate bit of information is curious, isn't it?

But why is this suspicious?  Because it's really hard to fake an authentic language -- if we were given even 10% of the Serpon language to study, linguists could tell if it was real or made up.  This looks, unfortunately, like they're withholding information for the very good reason that it would give away the game.

And on and on.  These are only a couple of points, selected for the sake of brevity from dozens of sub-claims that were implausible enough to call the entire thing into question.  And even the study of the site that I've done is only skimming the surface.  There's lots more there, and I invite anyone who's interested to delve into the site and find other bits and pieces that shoot holes in the claim.  But my point is, to return to the original question; we're not obliged either to accept anecdotes without question, or reject them without question.  There's a third way, which is to engage our logic centers and knowledge of science, and see if what's being claimed makes sense.

And in the case of "Project Serpo" -- I'm afraid the answer is no.

Family matters

New from the "You're Kidding, Right?" department, we find out that it's significant that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are distant cousins.

Genealogists have apparently figured out that Trump and Clinton both descend from English King Edward III, making them 19th cousins, give or take a once-removed.  Trump traces his descent through his mother's family (the MacLeods), and Clinton through her father's (the Rodhams).

Author A. J. Jacobs, who worked with genealogical research website Geni.com to figure all this out, waxed rhapsodic about what it all meant.

"Their 18th great grandfather is King Edward III, so there is precedent for ruling a country," Jacobs said.  "It’s in their genes."

Turns out, according to the article, that not only do Clinton and Trump have British royal blood -- so does every one of the United States presidents except for Martin van Buren (mostly because van Buren was of Dutch ancestry).  All of the others, apparently, descend from King John of England, not that that's any great claim to fame, as John was so notorious for losing territory through military ineptitude that he was nicknamed John "Lackland," and has been described by historians as "petty, spiteful, and cruel."

Be that as it may, there are a couple of problems with this whole contention.

The first one is the idea that being 19th cousins would confer upon a pair of people any related traits at all.  Let's suppose that such characteristics as "fitness to rule a country" are actually inheritable -- a supposition, by the way, which is almost certainly wrong, but which for the sake of argument we'll bear with for the time being.  How many of Edward III's kingliness genes would Clinton and Trump share?

Assuming that Clinton and Trump have no other common ancestry -- another lousy assumption, as you'll see in a moment -- to figure out the proportion of their shared heritage, you'd use something like the following calculation.  Siblings have the same parents; first cousins share one set of grandparents, and therefore half of their lineage; second cousins, one set of great-grandparents, and thus a fourth of their lineage, and so on.  So the shared heritage of a set of nth-degree cousins is 1 over 2 to the nth power.  Which in the case of 19th cousins, means that...

One-524,288th of their ancestry is the same.  In other words: not much.

But what about that assumption of no other shared ancestry?  The number of ancestors in your family tree doubles every generation; so it's the inverse of the previous calculation.  If there have been 19 generations between Edward III's time and now, then Trump and Clinton would each have something over five hundred thousand ancestors.  Each.

Given that current estimates of England's population in the mid-14th century average at around four million individuals, what's the likelihood that they don't descend from damn near every medieval British person who left descendants -- kings, commoners, peasants, all of them?  Everyone with English ancestry is related, and the chances are good that they all descend from royalty.

Oh, and while we're on the subject: my wife also descends from King Edward III.  I don't seem to, although on the Scottish side of my family I descend from King Duncan (of Macbeth fame) through my ancestor Alexander Lindsay, the evil "Red Earl" who lost his soul to the devil in a dice game and now haunts Glamis Castle, swearing loudly and scaring small children.

So maybe there's something to this genetic predisposition thing, after all.

It's kind of funny that this sort of claim gets circulated at all, given the fact that with a little bit of logic and a few simple calculations, you can easily see how ridiculous it is.  Maybe it's because the whole concept of royal blood and nobility has been so drilled into our cultural consciousness by fairy tales that we think it must mean something if you can trace your ancestry back to King Angus the Demented.  Or maybe it's because a lot of people can't be bothered to question what they read.

Myself, I'm just as happy that the majority of my heritage (with the exception of the aforementioned evil Earl) is solid peasant stock.  Some of those kings and queens were loons.

Privilege blindness

It is a mystery to me why some people think that any curtailment of their choice to be as offensive as they want is an infringement of their fundamental rights.

It's this kind of attitude that led to the following, which has been widely posted (often to shouts of acclamation):

The level of "I don't get it" that is embodied in this one image is staggering, even if (as one poster said), "It's satire."  Are you really trying to equate the gay pride flag, a symbol of solidarity in the face of oppression, with the Confederate flag, which to many people represents slavery, prejudice, bigotry, and persecution?  And further, are you actually claiming that Vester Flanagan, the gay African American man who gunned down two reporters while they were on the air, was motivated to do so by his homosexuality to the same extent that Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof was motivated by his race hatred and espousal of white supremacy?

Satire, my ass.  This isn't satire.  This is redneck rah-rah willful ignorance.

And need I add that every person I've seen post this is a heterosexual white man?  Nah, probably didn't need to mention it.  The enculturation of privilege has blinded these people to the possibility that not everyone has the same access to security, acceptance, and safety that they do.  So let me do a little wake-up call for y'all.

You don't know what it's like to be in danger when you walk down the street because of your gender.  You don't know what it's like to be jeered at because of your skin color, and to wonder if those jeers could progress to violence, to consider whether your decision to be in this place at this time might be the last bad decision you'll ever make.  You can hold hands with and kiss the person you love in public without having to worry that you'll (at best) be told you're going to burn for eternity, or (at worst) be the victims of assault.

You don't know what it is to be in a position of powerlessness, every day of every year, because of something you have absolutely no control over.

And if you're saying, "You don't either.  You're a heterosexual white man, too," you're absolutely right.  The difference is, I know I don't know these things.  I am aware that my privileged status in this culture has put me in the position of never being obliged to think about any of this.  You, apparently, are not.

It's the same business as the outcry against Caitlyn Jenner when she won the ESPY Courage Award.  "That's not courage!" people snarled.  "It's not courage to claim you're female when you're not!"

Really?  Are you transgender?  Have you fought with the knowledge that your biological gender, your mind, and your sexual desires simply don't line up the same way they do for the majority?  Do you have any idea what it's like to live with the social stigma of non-cisgender identification?  Have you had to deal with the repercussions from family, friends, the public?

No?

Then shut the fuck up.

I have studiously avoided issues of race, privilege, and prejudice in this blog, for the very good reason that as a member of the most privileged class in the United States, my perspective on those issues would be worthless.  But if I am not knowledgeable about something, I stay silent on the topic, and avoid posting inflammatory rhetoric that demonstrates my ignorance and shallowness to the world.

Which is a reservation that some people evidently lack.

The illusion of causality

Fighting bad thinking is an uphill battle, sometimes.  Not only, or even primarily, because there's so much of it out there; the real problem is that our brains are hard-wired to make poor connections, and once those connections are made, to hang on to them like grim death.

A particularly difficult one to overcome is our tendency to fall for the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy -- "after this, therefore because of this."  We assume that if two events are in close proximity in time and space, the first one must have caused the second one.  Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, likes to tell a story about his wife, who is a pediatrician, preparing to give a child a vaccination.  The child had a seizure as she was drawing the vaccine into the syringe.  If the seizure had occurred only a minute later, right after the vaccine was administered, the parents would undoubtedly have thought that the vaccination caused the seizure -- and after that, no power on earth would have likely convinced them otherwise.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Why do we do this?  The most reasonable explanation is that in our evolutionary history, forming such connections had significant survival value.  Since it's usual that causes and effects are close together in time and space, wiring in a tendency to decide that all such correspondences are causal is still going to be right more often than not.  But it does lead us onto some thin ice, logic-wise.

Which is bad enough.  But now three researchers -- Ion Yarritu (Deusto University), Helena Matute (University of Bilbao), and David Luque (University of New South Wales) -- have published research that shows that our falling for what they call the "causal illusion" is so powerful that even evidence to the contrary can't fix the error.

In a paper called "The dark side of cognitive illusions: When an illusory belief interferes with the acquisition of evidence-based knowledge," published earlier this year in the British Journal of Psychology, Yarritu et al. have demonstrated that once we've decided on an explanation for something, it becomes damn near impossible to change.

Their experimental protocol was simple and elegant.  Yarritu writes:

During the first phase of the experiment, one group of participants was induced to develop a strong illusion that a placebo medicine was effective to treat a fictitious disease, whereas another group was induced to develop a weak illusion.  Then, in Phase 2, both groups observed fictitious patients who always took the bogus treatment simultaneously with a second treatment which was effective.  Our results showed that the group who developed the strong illusion about the effectiveness of the bogus treatment during Phase 1 had more difficulties in learning during Phase 2 that the added treatment was effective.

The strength of this illusion explains why bogus "alternative medicine" therapies gain such traction.  All it takes is a handful of cases where people use "deer antler spray" and find they have more energy (and no, I'm not making this up) to get the ball rolling.  Homeopathy owes a lot to this flaw in our reasoning ability; any symptom abatement that occurs after taking a homeopathic "remedy" clearly would have happened even if the patient had taken nothing -- which is, after all, what (s)he did.

And that's not even considering the placebo effect as a further complicating factor.

Helena Matute, one of the researchers in the recent study, has written extensively about the difficulty of battling causal illusions.  In an article she wrote for the online journal Mapping Ignorance, Matute writes:

Alternative medicine is often promoted on the argument that it can do no harm.  Even though its advocates are aware that its effectiveness has not been scientifically demonstrated, they do believe that it is harmless and therefore it should be used.  "If not alone, you should at least use it in combination with evidence-based treatments," they say, "just in case." 

But this strategy is not without risk... even treatments which are physically innocuous may have serious consequences in our belief system, sometimes with fatal consequences.  When people believe that a bogus treatment works, they may not be able to learn that another treatment, which is really effective, is the cause of their recovery.  This finding is important because it shows one of the mechanisms by which people might decide to quit an efficient treatment in favor of a bogus one.

I think this same effect is contributory to errors in thinking in a great many other areas.  Consider, for instance, the fact that belief in anthropogenic climate change rises in the summer and falls in the winter.  After being told that human activity is causing the global average temperature to rise, our brains are primed to look out of the window at the snow falling, and say, "Nah.  Can't be."

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.  To quote Stephen Colbert, "Global warming isn't real, because I was cold today.  Also great news: world hunger is over because I just ate."

The study by Yarritu et al. highlights not only the difficulty of fighting incorrect causal connections, but why it is so essential that we do so.  The decision that two things are causally connected is powerful and difficult to reverse; so it's critical that we be aware of this bias in thinking, and watch our own tendency to leap to conclusions.  But even more critical is that we are given reliable evidence to correct our own errors in causality, and that we listen to it.  Like any cognitive bias, we can combat it -- but only if we're willing to admit that we might get it wrong sometimes.

Or as Michael Shermer put it, "Don't believe everything you think."