The skulls speak

Given that everything in the news yesterday made me want to turn off the lights, curl up in a ball in the corner of my office, and whimper softly, today I'm taking a day off from more serious topics.  Ergo: we're going to look at: alien skeletons, and the DNA evidence thereof.

For years there has been buzz in the woo-woo world about the Nazca skulls -- a set of humanoid skulls with frontally-flattened foreheads and elongated craniums.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

To be sure, they're weird-looking, and demand an explanation.  The stick-in-the-mud, fuddy-duddy old scientists have claimed for years that they're humans that were practitioners of (or victims of) artificial cranial deformation, which is known to have been relatively common amongst the natives of Central and South America.

On the other hand, there are lots of people who think they're not human at all, that this is the best evidence we have for aliens.  An advanced extraterrestrial race, they tell us, visited the Nazca area centuries ago, leaving behind not only these skulls but the "Nazca lines," a set of elaborate and huge drawings, the designs of which are really only clearly visible from the air, that some woo-woos (for example Erich von Däniken) think are ancient landing strips for alien spacecraft, even though it's hard to see how you'd land a spacecraft on a landing strip shaped like a monkey.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But as far as the skulls go, scientists now have a way of settling these kinds of questions -- DNA analysis.  So last month they got samples from the Nazca skulls, and also from a mummified body from the same area, studied the DNA, and found out...

... it's human.

We skeptics are absolutely reeling with shock, let me tell you.  The woo-woos, on the other hand... well, let me put it this way: the link I posted, from Disclose.TV, gives you the impression that they were extremely reluctant to tell us the outcome of the tests.  Nigel Watson, a British UFO researcher, still thinks they're aliens, just "extremely closely related to humans."  Dr. Konstantin Korotkov, who made a name for himself a few years ago for claiming that he'd photographed a soul leaving the human body (he hadn't), also weighed in, said that "the DNA didn't come from a chimpanzee or a monkey, but it may not be human, only human-like."

Whatever that means.

The problem with taking that stance is that it fails the test of falsifiability.  A fundamental rule of science is to consider what it would take to prove your claim wrong.  If the answer is "there's nothing that could prove it one way or the other," or -- as in this case -- that any contrary evidence you get, you immediately brush aside as sorta kinda supporting your claim if you tilt your head and squint at it real hard, then you're not looking at a falsifiable claim.

In other words, it's not science, it's confirmation bias and hand-waving speculation.

In any case, for most of us, this conclusively settles the point -- the Nazca skulls, and other frontally-flattened skulls, are 100% certain to be humans whose skulls were squashed as infants, for some unknown reason.  The UFO and extraterrestrials cadre, including the devotees of wingnuts like von Däniken, are going to have to look elsewhere for evidence.

Although given their rather loose definition of the word "evidence," I'm sure they'll find something to fall back on.  They always do.

Lying to your face

My last post was about how reluctant I am to post about politics.  So, predictably, this post is about: politics.

I've been watching the unfolding humanitarian disaster in Puerto Rico with something akin to horror. Not just for the suffering of the people -- which is considerable -- but for the callous indifference with which Donald Trump is addressing the situation.  First responders have said that the extent of devastation is unknown at this time, but we do know that 95% of the island is still without power, almost 60% without potable water, and 72% without access to telephone service.  San Juan's mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz, appealed to the federal government for help, and what did Trump do?

Chide the Puerto Ricans for "wanting everything to be done for them."  Point out how far in debt they are.    Pat himself on the back for his "fantastic response" to the disaster.

Others -- most others, in fact -- were not nearly so complimentary.  General Russel Honoré, who headed up President Bush's response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, was scathing.  "The mayor's living on a cot, and I hope the President has a good day of golf," Honoré said.  "The President has shown again he don't give a damn about poor people.  He doesn't give a damn about people of color.  And that SOB that rides around in Air Force One is denying services needed by the people of Puerto Rico.  I hate to say it that way but there's no other way to say it."

All of which brings up something I've mentioned before; Donald Trump lies every time he opens his mouth.  He has such a tenuous grasp on the truth that columnist Chris Cilizza has said that he's "living in an alternate universe."  Here are a few of the recent lies Trump has told, none of which he's backed down from:

• FEMA and the first responders in Puerto Rico engaged in a "massive food and water delivery."  The fact is -- and this has been confirmed by people there on site -- there's been no widespread distribution of food and water, because most of the roads are still impassable. 
• When Mayor Yulín Cruz said that what he'd said was flat out wrong, he lashed out at her, saying that evidently the "democrats had said you must be nasty to Trump."  Any contradictions between what he said and what's coming out of Puerto Rico are false, because the "press is treating him unfairly."
• His lies don't just center around the hurricane and Puerto Rico.  No, he's been lying for ages.  Another recent one centered around the proposed health care bill.  Trump said, more than once, that the Senate actually did have the votes to pass the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, but there was "one senator who is in the hospital."  They didn't, and there wasn't.
• And, of course, there's been no meddling in anything by the Russians.  At a rally for Luther Strange, who lost his primary bid to take Jeff Sessions's seat in the Senate to the spectacularly right-wing Roy Moore, Trump said it was "... the Russian hoax.  One of the great hoaxes.  Are there any Russians in the audience?  I don't see any Russians."  This, despite the fact that the heads of the FBI, CIA, and NSA, and the former Director of National Intelligence, all agree that there is overwhelming evidence of Russian interference in the election.
• This pathological lying is not just by Trump himself, but by members of his administration.  Apropos of the proposed tax reform bill, Gary Cohn, director of the White House Economic Council, said, "The wealthy are not getting a tax cut under our plan."  Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin concurred, adding that the bill, if passed, would reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars.  Not to be outdone, Trump himself weighed in, saying that he wouldn't benefit at all personally from the bill.  Howard Gleckman, of the Tax Policy Center, says that all three of these are blatant lies.  "There is no plausible way Congress can fully fund all of the tax cuts in this outline while complying with its constraints on revenue-raisers," Gleckman writes.  "Businesses would receive the biggest tax cuts, which would ultimately benefit the highest income households... Tax cuts for corporations and, especially, pass-through businesses, would mostly benefit the highest-income households."  Of the benefit to the economy, Gleckman was unequivocal:  "Despite the president’s promises, it is implausible that this plan would permanently boost the economy.  Trillions of dollars in lost revenue would add to the federal debt, raise interest rates, and make it more costly for businesses to invest.  Those costs would offset the benefits of lower corporate tax rates and expensing."
• He said at a rally in Charlottesville that the U.S. had become a "net energy exporter for the first time ever just recently" -- implying, of course, that it was his policies that had caused this.  The problem is, the claim is flat-out false.  Politifact analyzed this statement from every angle they could think of, and no matter how you interpret it, it's wrong.  

And so on and so forth.  And yet... and yet... there are still people defending him.  Today I saw someone post that the well-deserved backlash Trump is receiving because of his petty, nasty, vindictive response to the Puerto Rico disaster is because "they always want to find a way to criticize the United States of America."  No, "they" (whoever "they" are) aren't criticizing the U.S., they're criticizing the President, who has once again shown himself to be a narcissistic asshole who takes any questioning of his words or actions as a personal assault.

Oh, and Puerto Rico is part of the United States of America.  Awkward, that.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So this brings us back to a place we've been before; at this point, defending Donald Trump is to side with a man who has zero respect for the truth, and lies continuously, apparently without any twinge of guilt.  He's warped people's attitude toward the media to the point that all he has to do is shriek "fake news" or "lying reporters" and they believe every word that comes out of his mouth (and disbelieve anything contrary that they see, hear, or read).

In short: supporting this man at this point is unconscionable.  I don't care what your political affiliation is, what race, what religion, or anything else.  If you are still in support of Donald Trump, you are putting yourself behind one of the worst people ever elected to public office in the United States.  And I honestly don't know how you can sleep at night.

Fake news reflex

I have never been one to post political stuff on social media.

For one thing, I don't think it changes anyone's mind.  Besides the fact that most people simply rah-rah the stuff they already believed and ignore everything else, there's also the tendency of folks to read the headline only -- one study that compared clicks to shares found that 59% of the links shared to social media had not been opened by the person sharing them.

Then there's the fact that most of the time, I just don't want to get into it with people.  That may be surprising coming from someone who writes a blog that is sometimes controversial, occasionally downright incendiary.  But when I get on social media, I'm really not looking for a fight.  I'd much rather see funny memes and pictures of cute puppies than to get into a snarling match over, for example, how, where, and how much we should respect the American flag.

Which is why it was ill-advised of me to post a story from Vice that appeared three days ago, describing a move by Trump administration officials from the Department of Justice to argue in the 2nd Court of Appeals that employers should be able to fire employees for being gay.  The case in question, Zarda v. Altitude Express, originated from an incident in 2010 when skydiving instructor Donald Zarda sued his former employer, alleging that his firing had been based solely on his sexual orientation.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Predictably, I found this appalling, and in a moment of pique, I posted it to Twitter, which auto-posted it to my Facebook.  Most of the responses I got shared my anger at the situation, but one of them said, simply, "Fake news."

And no, she wasn't making a joke.  I know that she's fairly conservative, and this kind of heavy-handed federal government interference in the court system runs pretty counter to the Republican narrative of small government and a hands-off approach to local and state jurisprudence, so I'm guessing that she saw that if it were true, it'd be pretty hypocritical.  (More and more, it's become clear that the current administration wants small government until they want big government, and see no contradiction at all in demanding both, practically at the same time.)

So she just called it "fake news" and forthwith dismissed it. 

It's not, in fact, fake news at all.  I know Vice is pretty strongly left-leaning, so it's reasonable to view what they post through that lens; but a five-minute Google search brought me to the amicus curiae brief filed by attorneys for the Department of Justice, and it's exactly what the Vice article described.  Failing that, there were dozens of media sources -- left, center, and right -- that carried the story, and all said substantially the same thing.

(One hopeful note; given how badly DOJ attorney Hashim Mooppan's arguments crashed and burned in front of Appellate Court Judge Rosemary Pooler, it looks likely that the strategy may have backfired rather spectacularly, as an overview of the case in Slate describes.)

So it obviously wasn't "fake news," regardless of your political persuasion or your attitude toward LGBT individuals, discrimination cases, or Vice.  What on earth could prompt someone to say that?  I know the person who made the comment is quite intelligent, articulate, and well-spoken.  We don't agree on much politically, but we've always been pretty cordial to each other despite our differences.

It's a troubling impulse.  Confirmation bias, where you accept claims for which there is little to no evidence because it fits with what you already believed, is as illogical as rejecting claims because they run counter to the talking points from your political party.

In fact, the latter may well be worse, because that immediate, reflexive, knee-jerk rejection of what you want very much not to be true makes you ignore facts that could flag when you've made a mistake -- when you have a belief that, in fact, is not correct.  It insulates you from catching your own errors in judgment, logic, or simple fact.

Which might well be comforting, but it doesn't lead to better understanding.  Me, I prefer to admit I'm wrong and correct the mistake.  As Carl Sagan put it, "It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

And this extends to political arguments which, although they often involve emotions and competing interests, should still be based on actual factual information.  I'll end with another quote, this one from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts."

Thus sayeth the prophecy

I have written daily on this blog for years now, and I still run into crazies that I haven't heard of before.  I guess this isn't that surprising, given that humanity seems to produce an unending supply.  But given the amount of time I spend weekly perusing the world of woo-woo, it always comes as a little bit of a shock when I find a new one.

This week it was John Hogue, who a student of mine asked about, in the context of, "Wait till you see what this loony is saying."  Hogue is a big fan of "Nostradamus," noted 16th century wingnut and erstwhile prophet, who achieved fame for writing literally thousands of quatrains of bizarre predictions.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Hogue believes that just about everything you can think of was predicted by Nostradamus. Let's start with his claim that Nostradamus predicted Saddam Hussein's rise and fall, only (because being a prophet and all, you can't just say things straight out) he called Saddam "Mabus."  How does Hogue know that Saddam is Mabus?  Let's have it in his own words:

Here, for your review are the two core quatrain prophecies about Mabus, the Third Antichrist, indexed 2 Q62 and 8 Q77 in Nostradamus’ prophetic masterpiece Les Propheties, initially published in serialized form between the years 1555 and 1560: 

2 Q62

Mabus puis tost alors mourra, viendra,
De gens & bestes vne horrible defaite:
Puis tout à coup la vengeance on verra,
Cent, main, soif, faim, quand courra la comete. 

Mabus will soon die, then will come,
A horrible unraveling of people and animals,
At once one will see vengeance,
One hundred powers, thirst, famine, when the comet will pass.

8 Q77

L’antechrist trois bien tost annichiliez,
Vingt & sept ans sang durera sa guerre:
Les heretiques morts, captifs, exilez,
Sang corps humain eau rogie gresler terre. 

The Third Antichrist very soon annihilated,
Twenty-seven years his bloody war will last.
The heretics [are] dead, captives exiled,
Blood-soaked human bodies, and a reddened, icy hail covering the earth.

Let us go through the milestones that [show] Saddam... to be candidate number one...
Being a dead candidate is the first and dubious milestone... Saddam was hanged at the 30 December 2006... 

[Saddam's name] can be found in the code name Mabus.  Saddam backwards spells maddas=mabbas=mabas.  Replace one redundant a and you get Mabus. 

Or if you don't like that solution, maybe Mabus is Osama bin Laden, whom Hogue refers to as "Usama" for reasons that become obvious pretty quickly:

Usama mixed around get [sic] us maaus.  Take the b from bin Laden. Replace the redundant a and you get Mabus.

If you take my first name, Gordon, and rearrange it, you get "drogon."  Replace the "o" with an "a," because after all there are two "o"s anyway, and you clearly don't need both of them.  You can get the "a" from the leftover one Hogue had by removing the redundant "a" in "maaus."  Then you get "dragon."  If you take my middle name (Paul) and my last name, and rearrange the letters, you get "a noble punt."

So this clearly means that a dragon is about to attack the United States, but I'm going to kick its ass.

Basically, if you take passages at random, and mess around with them, and there are no rules about how you do this, you can prove whatever you want.  Plus, all of the "prophecies" that Nostradamus wrote are vague and weird enough without any linguistic origami to help you out.  They make obscure historical and mythical allusions that, if you're a little creative, can be interpreted to mean damn near anything. Here's one I picked at random (Century X, Quatrain 71):

The earth and air will freeze a very great sea,
When they will come to venerate Thursday:
That which will be, never was it so fair,
From the four parts they will come to honor it.

What does that mean?  Beats the hell out of me.  I'm guessing that you could apply it to a variety of situations, as long as you were willing to interpret it loosely and let the images stand for whatever you want them to.  Me, I think it has to do with the upcoming apocalypse on October 21.  Oh, and that climate change is a lie, because the sea is going to freeze.  I'm sure that the Planet Nibiru and global conspiracies are somehow involved, too.

What I find amazing is that there are literally thousands of websites, books, and films out there that claim to give the correct interpretation of Nostradamus' wacky poetry.  Some of them take a religious bent, and try to tie them into scripture, especially the Book of Revelation; some try to link them to historical events, an especially popular one being World War II; others, even further off the deep end, try to use them to predict future catastrophes.  These last at least put the writers on safer ground, because you can't accuse someone being wrong if they're using arcane poetry to make guesses about things that haven't happened yet.

In any case, I'm doubtful that Nostradamus knew anything about Saddam Hussein, any more than he predicted World War II, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the assassination of JFK, or any of the hundreds of other things he's alleged to have forecast.  All we have here is once again, people taking vague language and jamming it into the mold of their own preconceived notions of what it means.  About John Hogue himself, I'm reminded of the words of the Roman writer Cicero, who said, "I don't know how two augurs can look each other in the face while passing in the street without laughing out loud."

Writing out your feelings

A paper in the journal Psychophysiology last week immediately caught my attention, as it linked a reduction in anxiety in chronic worriers with expressive writing.

The reason it piqued my interest is obvious to anyone who knows me; I'm a writer and a chronic worrier.  I always knew I felt good after meeting my writing goals, but I associated it with simple pleasure of accomplishment -- I never thought that the writing itself might be smoothing out some of my anxiety.

The paper was "The Effect of Expressive Writing on the Error-related Negativity Among Individuals with Chronic Worry," and was authored by Hans S. Schroder, Jason S. Moser, and Tim P. Moran, the first two part of the Department of Psychology at Michigan State University, and the last from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.  They write:

The relationship between anxiety and enlarged ERN [error-related negativity] has spurred interest in understanding potential therapeutic benefits of decreasing its amplitude within anxious individuals.  The current study used a tailored intervention—expressive writing—in an attempt to reduce the ERN among a sample of individuals with chronic worry.  Consistent with hypotheses, the ERN was reduced in the expressive writing group compared to an unrelated writing control group.  Findings provide experimental support that the ERN can be reduced among anxious individuals with tailored interventions.  Expressive writing may serve to “offload” worries from working memory, therefore relieving the distracting effects of worry on cognition as reflected in a decreased ERN.

"Expressive writing," the authors explain, "involves writing down one's deepest thoughts and feelings about a particular event," so it is expository writing and not storytelling; but it does make me wonder if writing fiction might serve the same purpose.  Of course, Hemingway would probably have disagreed:

As would Dorothy Parker:

Be that as it may, the results were striking.  The authors write:

Our findings also build upon previous studies demonstrating the positive impacts of expressive writing by showing for the first time that this intervention can also reduce neural processing of mistakes in those who typically show exaggerated error monitoring.  That the expressive writing group had reduced error monitoring but similar behavioral performance compared to the control group further suggests that it improved neural efficiency.  We therefore conclude that expressive writing shows promise for alleviating the interfering impact of worries on cognition—as reflected in reduced error monitoring and intact performance—for those who need it most.

I would be interested to see if the effect occurred in fiction writers, and (even more interestingly) if it held consistent across genres.  There are authors who write generally optimistic, upbeat stories, that leave you with a sigh of contentment and a warm feeling in your heart.  I, however, am not one of them.  In my current work-in-progress, I just finished a scene yesterday in which (1) a child is an accidental victim of a shootout, (2) the child's father was wounded, and (3) the father's wound becomes infected in a situation where there is almost no access to medical care, with the result that he begs his friends to shoot him as a mercy killing.  This leaves his three friends in the horrific situation of whether to kill the man to put him out of his misery, as per his wishes, or to let him continue in intense pain, with a condition that will almost certainly kill him anyhow.

Not cheerful stuff.  And yet... when I was done yesterday, I felt a real sense that I'd written a powerful scene, that (while not uplifting) would grab readers by the emotions and swing them around a little, all the while inducing them to empathize with all four of the characters in the scene.  Cathartic to the reader -- and to me as well.

So anyhow, that's an interesting step that Schroder et al. could take, apropos of the therapeutic value of emotional writing.  As for me, I'm going to wrap this up, because I've got more scenes to write, not to mention more characters to do really horrible things to.  Oh, well, it was their fault, after all.  They should have known what they were getting into, wandering into one of my novels.

The goop returneth

Last week, I described a new product being offered by Gwyneth Paltrow's "alternative health" (i.e. snake oil) company "Goop," namely a "psychic vampire repellent," the advantage of which is you could never be certain if it was effective or not because it's repelling something that doesn't, technically, exist.

Much to my bafflement, instead of laughing directly in Paltrow's face, a significant portion the public is apparently thrilled by her products, so much so that she just announced that she's launching a magazine, also called "goop" (note the e. e. cummings-esque lower case, presumably meant to give the magazine some kind of frisson of daring and insouciance, an impression that is significantly diminished by the fact that it's the word "goop" we're talking about here).

In the first issue, there is a Q-and-A with (surprise!) Paltrow herself, in which she makes some statements that are so ridiculous that I felt impelled to respond to her point-by-point.  It was also to save you the pain of going to her website, which trust me, is a significant favor.

She starts out with a bang.  When asked how she thought to found the company, she said:

[W]hen my dad got sick, I was twenty-six-years-old, and it was the first time that I contemplated that somebody could have autonomy over their health.  So while he was having radiation and the surgery and everything, and eating through a feeding tube, I thought, “Well, I’m pushing this can of processed protein directly into his stomach,” and I remember thinking, “Is this really healing?  This seems weird.  There’s a bunch of chemicals in this shit.”

Well, the reason they were feeding him "processed protein" is that it would be pretty difficult to give someone, say, a tuna sandwich through a feeding tube.  And her final statement, "there's a bunch of chemicals in this shit," is just face-palmingly stupid.  There's a bunch of chemicals in everything.  Because that's what the universe is made of.  Chemicals.  Some of 'em have scary names and are perfectly safe.  Some are natural, 100% organic, and have short, friendly-sounding names, and can kill you.

Like strychnine, for example.  Tell you what: you consume a teaspoon of all-natural strychnine, and I'll consume a teaspoon of highly processed (2R,3S,4S,5R,6R)-2-(hydroxymethyl)-6-[(2R,3S,4R,5R,6S)-4,5,6-trihydroxy-2-(hydroxymethyl)oxan-3-yl]oxy-oxane-3,4,5-triol, and we'll see who's happier in a half-hour.

For you non-chemistry-types, the latter is the chemical name for starch.

Another appalling thing about her statement is that she apparently thinks that her highly scientific analysis of the situation ("there's chemicals in this shit") outweighs the knowledge of all the medical specialists who were, at the time, attempting to save her dad's life.  To me that speaks to a colossal ego issue, on top of simple ignorance.

Then she waxes rhapsodic about a "colon cleanse" she did that made her realize that alt-nutrition stuff was real:

So I was very amped up on the idea of seeing it through to completion.  My best friend did it with me and she ate a banana on the second day, and I was like, “You f%$ked it up.  All results are off.”  I felt very toxic and sluggish and nauseous on the second day, and by the third day I started to feel really good.  And in the book, some people do it for seven days, ten days, thirty days. I was like, “I’m good with the three-day introductory cleanse.”  And I remember the next day, I was like, “Oh wow, I just did this cleanse and I feel so much better, so I can have a beer and a cigarette now, right?”  It was the nineties...  But I do remember feeling that that’s where I caught the bug.  And then the Alejandro Junger cleanse was really instrumental in terms of explaining to me that, especially as detox goes, our bodies are designed to detoxify us, but they were built and designed before fire retardants and PCBs and plastic, so we have a much, much more difficult time, and the body needs some support, which is why cleanses can help.

Which fails to explain why our life expectancy and quality of health is higher now than at any time in recorded history, including back when we were living in a non-fire-retardant world for which our bodies were "built and designed," and had yet to hear about things like "colon cleanses."  Life back then was, as Thomas Hobbes put it, "nasty, poor, brutish, and short," and a significant fraction of people never made it past childhood because of what are now completely preventable diseases.

Oh, wait, many of those diseases are prevented with vaccines, and vaccines contain chemicals.  My bad.

She then goes on to rail a bit against people like me who demand pesky stuff like evidence before I buy into something.  This, Paltrow says, is just thinly-disguised sexism:

I really do think that the most dangerous piece of the pushback is that somewhere the inherent message is, women shouldn’t be asking questions.  So that really bothers me.  I feel it’s part of my mission to say, “We are allowed to ask any question we want to ask.  You might not like the answer, or the answer might be triggering for you.  But we are allowed to ask the question and we are allowed to decide for ourselves what works and what doesn’t work...  They don’t want women asking too many questions. It’s a very misogynistic response.

Funny thing is, we do have a way of asking questions and finding answers, which turn out to be true whether we like them or not: it's called "science."  It gives the same answers whether you're male or female, young or old, and is equally irrespective of race, religion, and ethnic origin.  A great many of we scientist-types would love it if there were more women and minorities in science, and have repeated and loudly decried both the barriers that have kept them out for years, and the terrible waste of talent that represents.

Oh, and "Goop's" anti-vampire sprays and supplements designed to use gem stone energies to realign the frequency of your chakras are not science, because there is not a single shred of evidence that they work, or are even describing anything real.

Sorry, Gwyneth, if that was "triggering for you."

She ends by talking about her vision for what her company is accomplishing:

Our mission is to have a space where curious women can come.  We are creating an opportunity for curiosity and conversation to live...  So, we know that the world follows the consciousness of women.  So we’re just trying to create this environment where, really, women again, can just feel okay about getting close to themselves and working from that place.

Hmm.  Seems to me her mission is to sell completely worthless "alt-med" crap to gullible people in order to make money.

You know, it really doesn't matter to me whether she actually believes what she's saying, or if she is coldly and calculatedly ripping off people who don't understand science.  Her company is selling useless health aids and nutritional supplements wrapped in cosmic-sounding pseudoscience, and in the process hoodwinking people with actual treatable medical conditions into thinking that they can fix their problem by drinking Water Activated With Essence of Sapphire.  So I keep hoping that people will recognize "Goop" for what it is -- yet another in the long, long line of Patent Cure Peddlers.

And that it will, in short order, pass into well-deserved oblivion.

Right in the gut

I know I've said it before, but it bears saying again: the strength of science lies in its reliance on hard evidence as the sine qua non of understanding.

I've tried to embrace this outlook myself, insofar as a fallible and biased human can do so.  Okay, so every day I poke fun at all sorts of odd beliefs, sometimes pissing people off.  But you know what?  You want to convince me, show me some reliable evidence.  For any of the claims I've scoffed at.  Bigfoot.  Ghosts.  ESP.  Astrology.  Tarot divination.  Homeopathy.

Even the existence of god.

I'm convinceable.  All you have to do is show me one piece of irrefutable, incontrovertible evidence, and I'm sold.

The problem is, to my unending frustration and complete bafflement, most people don't approach the world that way.  Instead, they rely on their gut -- which seems to me to be a really good way to get fooled.  I'm a pretty emotional guy, and I know my gut is unreliable.

Plus, science just doesn't seem to obey common sense at times.  As an example, consider the Theory of Relativity.  Among its predictions:

• The speed of light is the ultimate universal speed limit.
• Light moves at the same speed in every reference frame (i.e., your own speed relative to the beam of light doesn't matter; you'll still measure it as traveling at 300,000,000 meters per second).
• When you move, time slows down.  The faster you move, the slower time goes.  So if you took off in a rocket ship to Alpha Centauri at 95% of the speed of light, when you came back from your trip you'd find that while twelve years or so would have passed for you, hundreds of years would have passed on Earth.
• When you move, to a stationary person your mass increases and your length in the direction of motion contracts.  The faster you move, the more pronounced this effect becomes.

And so on.  But the kicker: all of these predictions of the Theory of Relativity have been experimentally verified.  As counterintuitive as this might be, that's how the world is.  (In fact, relativistic effects have to be taken into account to have accurate GPS.)

None of which we would know now if people relied solely on their gut to tell them how things work.

Despite all this, there are people who still rely on impulse and intuition to tell them what's true and what's not.  And now a study jointly conducted by researchers at Ohio State University and the University of Michigan has shown conclusively that if you do this, you are more prone to being wrong.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Kelly Garrett and Brian Weeks decided to look into the connection between how people view evidence, and their likelihood of falling for incorrect information.  They looked at survey data from almost 3,000 people, in particular focusing on whether or not the respondents agreed with the following statements:

• I trust my gut to tell me what’s true and what’s not. 
• Evidence is more important than whether something feels true.
• Facts are dictated by those in power.

They then correlated the responses with the participants' likelihood of believing a variety of conspiracy theories.  Unsurprisingly, they found that the people who relied on gut feelings and emotions to determine the truth were far more likely to fall for conspiracies and outright untruths.

"Misperceptions don’t always arise because people are blinded by what their party or favorite news outlet is telling them," Weeks said.  "While trusting your gut may be beneficial in some situations, it turns out that putting faith in intuition over evidence leaves us susceptible to misinformation."

"People sometimes say that it’s too hard to know what’s true anymore," Garrett said.  "That’s just not true.  These results suggest that if you pay attention to evidence you’re less likely to hold beliefs that aren’t correct...  This isn’t a panacea – there will always be people who believe conspiracies and unsubstantiated claims – but it can make a difference."

I'd say it makes all the difference.  And in the current political environment -- where accusations of "fake news" are thrown around right and left, and what people consider to be the truth depends more on political affiliation than it does on rational fact -- it's more than ever absolutely essential.