The necessity of safety

I suppose it's a good sign when what I write grabs me by the emotions and swings me around, and it bodes well for the story having the same effect on my readers.  There are a few scenes that make me choke up every time I read them -- one of which boils down to a single line of dialogue.

In the story, one of the main characters wakes up in the middle of the night to find that his partner, who has gone through some terrible emotional trauma, is crying silently, obviously trying not to wake him up.  He pulls his lover into a hug and whispers, "Go ahead and cry if you need to.  I've got you.  You're safe in my arms."

What got me thinking about this scene is a conversation I had with some online writer friends, one of whom asked the provocative and fascinating question, "How could you tell someone 'I love you' without using those words?"  My immediate response was "You are safe."  Those words resonate with me for a great many reasons, not least because I virtually never felt safe as a child or young adult.  Everything around me always seemed precarious -- I spent the first half of my life feeling like I was a tightrope walker, always a single misstep from utter ruin, and because of that needed to be constantly vigilant and wary.

It was exhausting.

The pragmatists in the audience might point out that in reality none of us are safe, and technically they'd be right.  Bad stuff can happen any time, for any reason or no reason at all, and as the line from Fight Club says, "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."  But still, that feeling of safety and security, that there's someone looking out for you and that your friends have your back, is pretty critical for our emotional health.

These days, a sense of safety is hard to find.  We're still in the midst of a pandemic, trying to guard ourselves against an invisible enemy that can jump from one person to another with frightening speed.  Here in the United States almost a half a million people have died of COVID, and countless others have become desperately ill with complications lasting for months.  Everywhere people are losing their jobs, businesses closing down, schools going entirely virtual.  Health care workers are facing the awful double-whammy of dealing with incredible overwork and the fact that despite their best efforts, some of their patients aren't going to survive.  Add to all that the fact that in many parts of the world we've seen unprecedented social unrest, with deep-seated hatred and prejudice bubbling up nearly everywhere -- and its victims are often people who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Security is in very short supply lately.

Three separate studies conducted late last year track the outcome.  The United States Center for Disease Control, Boston University, and Johns Hopkins University independently found that the incidence of anxiety, severe depression, and serious psychological distress has tripled since the start of the pandemic.  Unsurprisingly, the effect was larger in vulnerable populations -- low-income individuals, minorities, people with prior mental health issues, people who have lost friends or family members to COVID.  Most alarming, young adults across the board showed skyrocketing incidence of emotional distress -- the CDC study found that almost two-thirds of the people from eighteen to twenty-four who participated in the study reported experiencing severe depression since the outbreak started, a quarter reported greater use of alcohol or drugs to cope with the stress, and a quarter said they'd seriously considered suicide in the last thirty days.

This is horrifying and alarming.  We already had a built-in mental health crisis ongoing because of the stigma of mental illness and our society's unwillingness to radically revamp the way it's monitored, treated, and covered by insurance.  COVID has taken a dreadful situation and made it much, much worse, and I fear the repercussions will far outlast the pandemic itself.

The worst part is that the nature of the pandemic has taken away the one thing that can make emotional distress bearable; comfort from our friends and loved ones.  I was talking with some friends (online, of course) a few days ago about what we miss most from the pre-pandemic days, and one that came up over and over was "long hugs from friends."  I'm terribly shy by nature, but that one was spot-on.  Even we introverts are struggling with the isolation.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Smellyavocado, Bromances, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Unfortunately, it looks like we are going to be going without long hugs from friends for quite some time, and that means we need to be especially assiduous about looking out for each other.  Check in with the people you care about, especially the ones who don't seem to need it, who are used to being the strong, secure, competent ones who put everyone else's needs in front their own.  Okay, we can't have the level of physical and emotional real-time contact we had before, but we can do things to compensate -- Zoom or Skype visits, phone calls, even something simple like a text message saying, "Hi, I was thinking about you.  How are you doing?"

In times like these we have to lean on our friends -- and let our friends lean on us.  Be honest about what you're feeling, and reassure yourself that right now we're pretty much all feeling that way.  If you're having a hard time coping, let the people you love know rather than suffering in silence.  If you are really at the end of your tether, get on the phone -- the suicide prevention hotline is 1-800-273-8255.  There's help to be had if you are willing to reach out for it.

We'll get through this, but if we're to come through as unscathed as possible, it will be because we've banded together and helped each other through.  Don't be afraid to show others you're hurting; it's how you'll get past this horrible low point.

And don't be afraid to tell your friends and loved ones, "Go ahead and cry if you need to.  I've got you."  It may be a while before we can back it up with a long hug, but for now, it's the best we can do.

************************************

Science fiction enthusiasts will undoubtedly know the classic 1973 novel by Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama.  In this book, Earth astronomers pick up a rapidly approaching object entering the Solar System, and quickly figure out that it's not a natural object but an alien spacecraft.  They put together a team to fly out to meet it as it zooms past -- and it turns out to be like nothing they've ever experienced.

Clarke was a master at creating alien, but completely consistent and believable, worlds, and here he also creates a mystery -- because just as if we really were to find an alien spacecraft, and had only a limited amount of time to study it as it crosses our path, we'd be left with as many questions as answers.  Rendezvous with Rama reads like a documentary -- in the middle of it, you could easily believe that Clarke was recounting a real rendezvous, not telling a story he'd made up.

In an interesting example of life imitating art, in 2017 astronomers at an observatory in Hawaii discovered an object heading our way fast enough that it has to have originated outside of our Solar System.  Called 'Oumuamua -- Hawaiian for "scout" -- it had an uncanny, if probably only superficial, resemblance to Clarke's Rama.  It is long and cylindrical, left no gas or dust plume (as a comet would), and appeared to be solid rather than a collection of rubble.  The weirdest thing to me was that backtracking its trajectory, it seems to have originated near the star Vega in the constellation Lyra -- the home of the superintelligent race that sent us a message in the fantastic movie Contact.

The strangeness of the object led some to speculate that it was the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence -- although in fairness, a team in 2019 gave their considered opinion that it wasn't, mostly because there was no sign of any kind of internal energy source or radio transmission coming from it.  A noted dissenter, though, is Harvard University Avi Loeb, who has laid out his case for 'Oumuamua's alien technological origin in his new book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

His credentials are certainly unimpeachable, but his book is sure to create more controversy surrounding this odd visitor to the Solar System.  I won't say he convinced me -- I still tend to side with the 2019 team's conclusions, if for no other reason Carl Sagan's "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence" rule-of-thumb -- but he makes a fascinating case for the defense.  If you are interested in astronomy, and especially in the question of whether we're alone in the universe, check out Loeb's book -- and let me know what you think.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds go to support Skeptophilia!]

No wands for you!

In today's contribution from the "So Weird I Couldn't Possibly Make It Up" department, the owner of a magical tools store in England is refusing to sell wands to Harry Potter fans because he says the wands he sells are real magic wands.  Like, that can cast spells and everything.

Richard Carter, owner of Mystical Moments in Slaithwaite, West Yorkshire, is miffed that he is being approached by customers who want one of his hand-made wooden wands not because they plan on using it for witchcraft, but because they fancy themselves candidates for Gryffindor. 

"J.K. Rowling has obviously done her research but Harry Potter is for children," Carter told a reporter for The Telegraph.  "It has done nothing for business."

Well, obviously not, if you refuse to sell them your wands.  But it's kind of hard to imagine turning away customers throwing cash in your general direction as being a sound business strategy.

"You wouldn't believe how many real witches and wizards there are knocking about," Carter went on.  "You would be amazed.  They know they can come here in reveal themselves without people thinking they're mental...  I don't have customers who have been Harry Potterfied.  If I had someone come in wanting a wand just because they liked Harry Potter I would not sell them one, not matter how much money they were offering."

Which brings up how Carter could tell the Harry Potterfied people from the Potterless variety, since I'm guessing that once the word got out that he wasn't serving the Potterfied folks they wouldn't just walk in and announce what House they got sorted into.  But Carter is way ahead of any people who are thinking of sneaking:

He can tell the Potterfied customers by their aura.

Apparently he can also recognize the ones who intend to use the wand for evil purposes.  No Harry Potter fans or dark witches and wizards, that's Carter's motto.

So that goes double for you, Bellatrix Lestrange.

He seems like he's got a knack for making some pretty cool items, however.  He picks different woods for different uses -- oak for strength, chestnut for love, elm for balance, mahogany for spiritual growth.  Oh, and yew for immortality, because that's always a possibility, even considering that the Sorcerer's Stone is kind of out of the question.

He makes the wands on a lathe, but claims he has no background in wand-making at all.  "I have no training in woodwork.  I use spiritual guidance and don't know how any of the wands will turn out.  All you need for them to work is faith."

It bears mention that my son works on a lathe as part of his job every day -- a glass lathe, not a woodworking one, but same principle.  And he says, "Working on a lathe and expecting the spirits to tell you what to do sounds like a good way to lose a hand."

Carter's been lucky so far, apparently, because as of the time of this post he has both limbs attached and is still doing his thing.  And after making the wands, he anoints them with oil, and then puts them into a locked cabinet until the right witch or wizard comes along.

Predictably, local Hogwarts fans are a bit ticked off.  Slaithwaite Harry Potter enthusiast Mariella May said that Carter's refusal to sell wands to J. K. Rowling fans is like "McDonald's refusing to sell Happy Meals to sad people."  Which is an apt, and strangely hilarious, comparison.

Not everyone has had such a shoulder shrug of a reaction, though.  Fantasy author G. P. Taylor suggested that the shunned fans should take Carter to court.  Which opens up the possibility of Carter defending himself to a judge against a charge of discrimination based on how customers' auras tell him what variety of fiction they believe in.

See what I mean about this being way weirder than anything I could have made up?

So that's our dip in the deep end for today.  Me, I kind of admire Carter for his purity of purpose.  Isn't that supposed to be one of the guiding principles of good magic, or something?  Everything in balance, don't try to take advantage for your own gain.  So however weird it sounds to a doubter like myself, I hope that the publicity he's getting helps his sales -- only to bonafide witches and wizards, of course.

************************************

Science fiction enthusiasts will undoubtedly know the classic 1973 novel by Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama.  In this book, Earth astronomers pick up a rapidly approaching object entering the Solar System, and quickly figure out that it's not a natural object but an alien spacecraft.  They put together a team to fly out to meet it as it zooms past -- and it turns out to be like nothing they've ever experienced.

Clarke was a master at creating alien, but completely consistent and believable, worlds, and here he also creates a mystery -- because just as if we really were to find an alien spacecraft, and had only a limited amount of time to study it as it crosses our path, we'd be left with as many questions as answers.  Rendezvous with Rama reads like a documentary -- in the middle of it, you could easily believe that Clarke was recounting a real rendezvous, not telling a story he'd made up.

In an interesting example of life imitating art, in 2017 astronomers at an observatory in Hawaii discovered an object heading our way fast enough that it has to have originated outside of our Solar System.  Called 'Oumuamua -- Hawaiian for "scout" -- it had an uncanny, if probably only superficial, resemblance to Clarke's Rama.  It is long and cylindrical, left no gas or dust plume (as a comet would), and appeared to be solid rather than a collection of rubble.  The weirdest thing to me was that backtracking its trajectory, it seems to have originated near the star Vega in the constellation Lyra -- the home of the superintelligent race that sent us a message in the fantastic movie Contact.

The strangeness of the object led some to speculate that it was the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence -- although in fairness, a team in 2019 gave their considered opinion that it wasn't, mostly because there was no sign of any kind of internal energy source or radio transmission coming from it.  A noted dissenter, though, is Harvard University Avi Loeb, who has laid out his case for 'Oumuamua's alien technological origin in his new book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

His credentials are certainly unimpeachable, but his book is sure to create more controversy surrounding this odd visitor to the Solar System.  I won't say he convinced me -- I still tend to side with the 2019 team's conclusions, if for no other reason Carl Sagan's "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence" rule-of-thumb -- but he makes a fascinating case for the defense.  If you are interested in astronomy, and especially in the question of whether we're alone in the universe, check out Loeb's book -- and let me know what you think.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds go to support Skeptophilia!]

The celestial dance

It's interesting how the approach to science has changed in the last four centuries.

It's easy to have the (mistaken) impression that as long as we humans have been doing anything scientific, we've always done it the same way -- looked at the evidence and data, then tried to come up with an explanation.  But science in Europe before the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was largely done the other way around; you constructed your model from pure thought, based on a system of how you believed things should act, and once you had the model, you cast about for information supporting it.

It's why Aristotle's statement that the rate of speed of a falling object is directly proportional to its mass stood essentially unchallenged for over a millennium and a half despite the fact that it's something any second grader could figure out was wrong simply by dropping two different-sized rocks from the same height and observing they hit the ground at exactly the same time.  As odd as it is to our twenty-first century scientific mindset, the idea of figuring out if your claim is correct by testing it really didn't catch on until the 1700s.  Which is why the church fathers got so hugely pissed off at Galileo; using a simple experiment he showed that Aristotle got it wrong, and then followed that up by figuring out how things up in the sky moved (such as the moons of Jupiter, first observed by Galileo through the telescope he made).  And this didn't result in the church fathers saying, "Whoa, okay, I guess we need to rethink this," but their putting Galileo on trial and ultimately under permanent house arrest.

That "think first, observe later" approach to science plagued our attempts to understand the universe for a long time after Galileo; people first came up with how they thought things should work, often based on completely non-scientific reasons, then looked for data to support their guess.  That we've come as far as we have is a tribute to scientists who were able to break out of the straitjacket of what the Fourth Doctor in Doctor Who called "not altering their views to fit the facts, but altering the facts to fit their views."

One of the best examples of this was the seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler.  He was a deeply religious man, and lived in a time when superstition ruled pretty much everything -- in fact, Kepler's mother, Katharina (Guldenmann) Kepler, narrowly escaped being hanged for witchcraft.  Kepler, and most other European astronomers from his time and earlier, were as much astrologers as scientists; they expected the heavens to operate by some kind of law of divine celestial perfection, where objects moved in circles (anything else was viewed as imperfect) and their movements had a direct effect on life down here on Earth.

At the beginning, Kepler tried to extend his conviction of the mathematical perfection of the cosmos to the distances at which the planets revolved around the Sun.  He became convinced that the spacing of the planets' orbits was determined by conforming to the five Platonic solids -- cube, dodecahedron, tetrahedron, icosahedron, and octahedron -- convex polyhedra whose sides are made up only of identical equal-sided polygons.  He tried nesting them one inside the other to see if the ratios of their spacing could be made to match the estimated spacing of the planets, and got close, but not close enough.  One thing Kepler had going for him was he was firmly committed to the truth, and self-aware enough to know when he was fudging things to make them fit.  So he gave up on the Platonic solids, and went back to "we don't know why they're spaced as they are, but they still travel in perfect circles" -- until careful analysis of planetary position data by the Danish observational astronomer Tycho Brahe showed him again that he was close, but not quite close enough.

This was the moment that set Kepler apart from his contemporaries; because instead of shrugging off the discrepancy and sticking to his model that the heavens had to move in perfect circles, he jettisoned the whole thing and went back to the data to figure out what sort of orbits did make sense of the observations.  After considerable work, he came up with what we now call Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion, including that planets move in "imperfect" elliptical, not circular, orbits, with the Sun at one focus.

Start with the data, and see where it drives you.  It's the basis of all good science.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gonfer, Kepler-second-law, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What got me thinking about Kepler and his abandonment of the Platonic-solid-spacing idea was a paper this week in Astronomy & Astrophysics showing that even though Kepler initially was on the wrong track, there are sometimes odd mathematical regularities that pop up in the natural world.  (A well-known one is how often the Fibonacci series shows up in the organization of things like flower petals and the scales of pine cones.)  The paper, entitled "Six Transiting Planets and a Chain of Laplace Resonances in TOI-178," by a team led by Adrien Leleu of the Université de Genève, showed that even though hard data dashed Kepler's hope of the motion of the heavens being driven by some concept of mathematical perfection, there is a weird pattern to the spacing of planets in certain situations.  The patterns, though, are driven not by some abstract philosophy, but by physics.

In physics, resonance occurs when the physical constraints of a system make them oscillate at a rate called the "natural frequency."  A simple example is the swing of a pendulum; a pendulum of a given length and mass distribution only will swing back and forth at one fixed rate, which is why they can be used in timekeeping.  The motion of planets (or moons) is also an oscillating system, and a given set of objects of particular masses and distances from their center of gravity will tend to fall into resonance, the same as if you try to swing a pendulum at a different rate than the rate at which it "wants to go," then let it be, it'll pretty much immediately revert to swinging at its natural frequency.

The three largest moons of Jupiter exhibit resonance; they've locked into orbits that are the most stable for the system, which turns out to be a 4:2:1 resonance, meaning that the innermost (Io) makes two full orbits in the time the next one (Europa) makes a single orbit, and four full orbits in the time it takes for the farthest (Ganymede).

This week's paper found a more complex resonance pattern in five of the planets around TOI-178, a star two hundred light years away in the constellation Sculptor.  It's a 18:9:6:4:3 resonance chain -- the nearest planet orbits eighteen times as the farthest orbits once, the next farthest nine times as the farthest orbits once, and so on.  This pattern was locked in despite the fact that the planets are all quite different from each other; some are small, rocky planets like Earth, others low-density gaseous planets like Neptune.

"This contrast between the rhythmic harmony of the orbital motion and the disorderly densities certainly challenges our understanding of the formation and evolution of planetary systems," said study lead author Adrien Leleu, in an interview with Science Daily.

So the dance of the celestial bodies is orderly, and shows some really peculiar regularities that you wouldn't have guessed.  But unlike Kepler's favored (but ultimately abandoned) idea that the perfect heavens had to be arranged by perfect mathematics, the Leleu et al. paper shows us that those patterns only emerge by analysis of the data itself, rather than the faulty top-down attempt to force the data to conform to the way you think things should be.  Once you open your mind up to going where the hard evidence leads, that's when the true wonders of the universe begin to emerge.

****************************************

Just last week, I wrote about the internal voice most of us live with, babbling at us constantly -- sometimes with novel or creative ideas, but most of the time (at least in my experience) with inane nonsense.  The fact that this internal voice is nearly ubiquitous, and what purpose it may serve, is the subject of psychologist Ethan Kross's wonderful book Chatter: The Voice in our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It, released this month and already winning accolades from all over.

Chatter not only analyzes the inner voice in general terms, but looks at specific case studies where the internal chatter brought spectacular insight -- or short-circuited the individual's ability to function entirely.  It's a brilliant analysis of something we all experience, and gives some guidance not only into how to quiet it when it gets out of hand, but to harness it for boosting our creativity and mental agility.

If you're a student of your own inner mental workings, Chatter is a must-read!

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The postman always rings twice

When I started this blog ten years ago, I knew that I was gonna get hate mail.  It was inevitable, given my own strong opinions and the nature of the topics I write on.  I try to be as fair as I can, but I have no particular problem with identifying bullshit as such, and that has the effect of pissing a lot of people off.

 The thing that never fails to amaze me, though, is which posts get people stirred up.  I wrote a post comparing Donald Trump to Hitler, and nary a peep.  And yesterday I get two -- count 'em, two -- vitriolic screeds, both from posts I did ages ago -- one from the post I did in 2013 about the claim that hair is basically extended nerve endings, and the other about the claim I looked at a year earlier that there are giant glass pyramids on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean that collect and focus cosmic ray energy.

The first one lambasted me for not going out and doing a study on the topic myself before criticizing it, despite the fact that the story I was responding to had no evidence presented whatsoever except for an alleged study by someone whose name was changed to protect privacy.  Because, presumably, studying hair is frowned upon by the scientific community and could result in death threats, or something.  The original article was also laced with claims that were demonstrably false (such as that hair "emits electromagnetic energy"). But I guess my pointing this out pasted a target on my chest:

Humans have predators in the natural world...you're trying to say that our primitive ancestors were as lazy and non-attentive as some random douche canoe 'skeptic' on his computer, shovelling Bugles into his mouth in his Family Guy jammie pants?  HA!  No.  They slept in fucking trees to stay alive (hence the hypnic jerk) and had to intuit and be aware of their surroundings.

No, what I'm saying is that hair, being dead strands of keratin, are not nerves.  Keep your eye on the ball, here.  Also, being that I spent years teaching a neuroscience class, I'm well aware that we have sense organs, and the evolutionary origins thereof.

You honestly believe that there is NO WAY somebody with longer hair might be able to sense changes in the wind, movements from other animals around them, foreign predatory energy (as in E=MC squared) approaching?  REALLY?  It makes SO much sense, that it warrants a study, and it should be done.

Actually, if you'll read what I wrote, you'll see that I did say that hair increases skin sensitivity, and that whiskers in many animals function as tactile sensors.  And did you really just say that Einstein's mass/energy equivalence has something to do with picking up "foreign predatory energy?"

And as far as this warranting a study, I'll simply quote Christopher Hitchens: "What is asserted without proof may be dismissed without proof."

You clearly have no fucking CLUE what you're talking about, and that's coming from somebody who actually comes from the scientific community.  Stop trying to play scientist; you're bad at it.  So many of you Atheist/skeptics/whatever say the things you BELIEVE a scientist would say, when they would NEVER say it; you don't have the knowledge to back a claim, and just go around saying something is bullshit because you think it makes you appear intelligent...but something you clearly don't know is that an actual researcher or scientist would know WITHOUT A DOUBT that something was correct or incorrect before saying so. 

Cf. my earlier comment about my teaching neuroscience. Your move.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The second one, about the ocean floor pyramids, was, if possible, even snarkier.  It began as follows:

The thing that makes me fucking angry about idiots like yourself is that you dismiss stuff you've never seen.

Another quote comes to mind, this one from Delos McKown, to wit: "The invisible and the nonexistent look very much alike."  But point made. I've never been to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.  Do continue.

If something doesn't fit the way you think the world is, you say it doesn't exist, piss on it, and walk away. 

It's hard to see how I'd piss on something that doesn't exist.  Even worse, how I'd piss on a nonexistent object that's not at the bottom of the Atlantic.  But all purely mechanical problems aside, I guess I was a little dismissive.

How do you know what the effects of cosmic rays are on the energy of the planet?  You talk like you have proof that pyramids couldn't be channelers of energy, but you can't prove it because you never leave your fucking armchair long enough to do anything but scoff.

I get out of my armchair pretty frequently, actually.  As far as how I know what cosmic rays can and cannot do, I once again feel obliged to point out that I have a degree in physics, teaching certificates in physics, biology, chemistry, and mathematics, and the ability to read.  Those put together give me at least a reasonably good ability to understand actual science.

And another thing: there's this fallacy called "shifting the burden of proof."  If you make an outrageous statement -- such as there being giant glass pyramids in the ocean that focus quantum energy frequency vibrations -- it is not the responsibility of those who say "bullshit" to prove they don't exist.

The pyramid guy ended by saying:

I bet you don't even have the balls to post this comment on your blog.  People like you hate it when you're challenged, because you want to be right without doing any work.  Anyhow, fuck you.

You're right that I'm not posting it, because it is, as you point out, my blog.  (Although I am writing an entire post about it instead, the irony of which does not escape me.)  Let me be plain about this: commenting is a privilege, not a right.  I'm happy to post contrary points-of-view -- not that I enjoy being wrong, mind you, but having new information brought to light is how we learn.  I've more than once printed retractions when I have been dead wrong, an experience which is profoundly humbling but is necessary for honesty's sake.

But it's a little frustrating to be accused of being a shallow-minded scoffer by people who retort with shallow-minded scoffing.  If someone has legitimate science -- not just a screaming post of "it could be so, and you can't prove it isn't, so fuck you!" -- I'm happy to listen.

Until then, I'm sticking with my original stance, and don't expect me to rise to the bait and argue with you.   Or even post your comment.  Call me a douche canoe skeptic, but there you are.

In any case: keep those cards and letters coming.  I'm not fond of hate mail, but as Brendan Behan put it, "There's no such thing as bad publicity."  

So I tend to agree with Captain Jack Sparrow.  If people are sending me hate mail, at least they're reading what I write, and there's nothing wrong with that.

****************************************

Just last week, I wrote about the internal voice most of us live with, babbling at us constantly -- sometimes with novel or creative ideas, but most of the time (at least in my experience) with inane nonsense.  The fact that this internal voice is nearly ubiquitous, and what purpose it may serve, is the subject of psychologist Ethan Kross's wonderful book Chatter: The Voice in our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It, released this month and already winning accolades from all over.

Chatter not only analyzes the inner voice in general terms, but looks at specific case studies where the internal chatter brought spectacular insight -- or short-circuited the individual's ability to function entirely.  It's a brilliant analysis of something we all experience, and gives some guidance not only into how to quiet it when it gets out of hand, but to harness it for boosting our creativity and mental agility.

If you're a student of your own inner mental workings, Chatter is a must-read!

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Sighting a survivor

I think if I had to choose one extinct species to bring back, it would be the thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus).  Second place would be a harder choice; I've always wished we could resurrect some of the dozens of extinct endemic Hawaiian birds, including the three species of 'o'o and the various Hawaiian honeycreepers -- all of which were wiped out in the past 150 years from a combination of habitat destruction, hunting for decorative feathers, and the introduction of mosquitoes and avian malaria.

But there's something about the thylacine that has always fascinated me.  Also called the "Tasmanian wolf" -- a complete misnomer, as its range was not restricted to Tasmania, and it's not a wolf but a marsupial -- the last wild thylacine was shot by a farmer in 1931, and the last captive individual of the species died in a zoo in Hobart in 1936.  They certainly look canine, but it's a case of convergent evolution.  Adults were on the size of a large German shepherd, something on the order of a meter and a half tip-to-tail and sixty centimeters at the shoulder, with a distinctive pattern of stripes on the back (giving them their other misnomer of "Tasmanian tiger").  Their jaws were odd -- long and narrow and capable of almost a ninety-degree gape, giving it a powerful "scissor bite" that allowed them to take down prey far larger than themselves.

This, in fact, was largely their undoing.  They often went after domestic animals, especially sheep, earning them the enmity of farmers and other residents.  They were hunted as nuisances, and in the early twentieth century the Tasmanian government offered a £1 a head bounty on thylacines, something that was taken advantage of over two thousand times.  The scheme worked.  Within two decades the thylacine was functionally extinct, and a few years after that, extinct in reality.

Captive thylacines, ca. 1903 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Since its official extinction in the 1930s, however, there have been regular sightings of thylacines.  At least alleged sightings, because none of them have resulted in anything a scientist would accept as hard evidence -- a photograph, a clump of hair, a bone, even a footprint.  But the claims that the thylacine still exists refuse to die down as they have with other animals.  (No one, for example, claims to have seen a dodo recently on Mauritius Island.)

The problem, besides the lack of evidence, is that there are a lot of ways to misidentify this animal, similar to how an untrained observer might mistake the probably-extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker for the relatively common Pileated Woodpecker.  A quick glance could well make someone identify an Australian wild dog (or dingo) for a thylacine -- or even a large feral domestic dog.  Plus, most of the sightings have been in poor light or from a distance.  (To be fair, even if some of these have been actual sightings, that wouldn't be unusual; thylacines were notoriously shy of contact with humans.)

The reason this comes up is because just a few days ago, there was an alleged thylacine sighting, not in Tasmania but in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia.  Once again, there was no photograph or other hard evidence, but this sighting does have some features that make me hopeful it could be the real deal.

According to the Thylacine Awareness Group of Australia, a gentleman who lives in the Adelaide Hills -- a relatively wild forested area, where you can easily picture an animal living and going unnoticed -- was up at six AM and saw what he unequivocally thinks was a mother thylacine with several pups.  What sets his account apart is that he claims he heard the animal vocalizing, and what he describes is very similar to how the howling of thylacines was described in accounts from the nineteenth century.

TAGOA explains the sighting as follows:

Last night, however, when we spoke and I interviewed them both, it was clear he now has 100% belief in what his wife had witnessed as he too has now seen the unbelievable.  A podcast of our discussion will be released soon on our YouTube channel, as well as Mark Taylor's report when he heads out there in the next day or so to set up trail cameras and get a handle on the area….more to come soon...

The witnesses both claim that they have heard weird noises of a screaming nature several times and just fobbed it off.  The beauty of this sighting is that the husband saw the mother (animal) make the weird screechy noise…that part is rare as rocking horse shit.

Which is a wonderful simile that I will be sure to incorporate in my conversations from now on.

Okay, I know, claims like this are a dime a dozen, and I've been unhesitating in dismissing that sort of thing vis-à-vis bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.  But at least this claim has going for it that we know thylacines did exist at some point in the past, which is more than I can say for most other cryptids.

And wouldn't it be wonderful if the claim was borne out?  It would mean there was a breeding population of thylacines not just in Tasmania but in mainland Australia that has persisted since the last wild sighting occurred in 1931.  And hell, the coelacanth was supposedly extinct for sixty-odd-million years until someone caught one off the coast of Madagascar, so stranger things have happened.

Anyhow, keep your eye on Australia.  It'll be interesting to see how the ongoing search progresses.  How encouraging would it be to find out that at least one of us humans' attempts to wipe out an entire species actually failed?

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Just last week, I wrote about the internal voice most of us live with, babbling at us constantly -- sometimes with novel or creative ideas, but most of the time (at least in my experience) with inane nonsense.  The fact that this internal voice is nearly ubiquitous, and what purpose it may serve, is the subject of psychologist Ethan Kross's wonderful book Chatter: The Voice in our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It, released this month and already winning accolades from all over.

Chatter not only analyzes the inner voice in general terms, but looks at specific case studies where the internal chatter brought spectacular insight -- or short-circuited the individual's ability to function entirely.  It's a brilliant analysis of something we all experience, and gives some guidance not only into how to quiet it when it gets out of hand, but to harness it for boosting our creativity and mental agility.

If you're a student of your own inner mental workings, Chatter is a must-read!

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Overcoming the snap

One of the most frustrating thing about conspiracy theorists is how resistant they are to changing their minds, even when presented with incontrovertible evidence.

Look, for example, at the whole "Stop the Steal" thing.  There are a significant number of Republicans who still won't acknowledge that Biden won the election fair and square, despite the fact that the opposite claim -- that there was widespread voter fraud that favored the Democrats, and an organized effort by the Left to make it seem like Trump lost an election he actually "won in a landslide" -- has gone to court in one form or another over sixty times, and in all but one case the lawsuit was thrown out because of a complete lack of evidence.  The judges who made these decisions include both Republicans and Democrats; the legal response to "Stop the Steal" has been remarkably bipartisan.

Which, you'd think, would be enough, but apparently it isn't.  An amazingly small number of Republicans have said publicly that they were wrong, there was little to no fraud, certainly not enough to sway the election, and that Biden clearly was the victor.  Mostly, the lack of evidence and losses in court has caused the True Believers double down, has made them even surer that a vast conspiracy robbed Trump of his win, and the lack of any kind of factual credibility is because there's an even vaster conspiracy to cover it all up.

Essentially, people have gone from "believe this because there's evidence" to "believe this despite the fact there's no evidence" to "believe this because there's no evidence."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons SkepticalScience, Conspiracy Theories Fallacy Icon, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Once you've landed in the last-mentioned category, it's hard to see what possible way there'd be to reach you.  But there may be hope, to judge by a study that came out last week in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

In "Jumping to Conclusions: Implications for Reasoning Errors, False Belief, Knowledge Corruption, and Impeded Learning," by Carmen Sanchez of the University of Illinois - Urbana/Champaign and David Dunning of the University of Michigan (of Dunning-Kruger fame), we find out that there is a strong (and fascinating) correlation between four features of the human psyche:

• Jumping to conclusions -- participants were given a task in which a computerized character was fishing in a lake.  The lake had mostly red fish and a few gray fish, and the researchers looked at how quickly the test subject was confident about predicting the color of the next fish pulled from the lake.
• Certainty about false beliefs -- volunteers were given a test of their knowledge of American history, and for each four-answer multiple choice question they were asked how confident they were in their answer.  The researchers looked at people who got things wrong -- while simultaneously being certain they were right.
• Understanding of basic logic -- participants were given a variety of logic puzzles, such as simple syllogisms (All fish can swim; sharks are fish; therefore sharks can swim), and asked to pick out which ones were sound logic and which were faulty.
• Belief in conspiracy theories -- test subjects were given a variety of common conspiracy theories, such as the belief that cellphones cause cancer but it's being covered up by big corporations, and asked to rank how likely they thought the beliefs were to be true.

They found that the faster you are to jump to conclusions on the fish test, the worse you are at logic, and the more certain you are about your beliefs even if they are wrong -- and, most critically, the more likely you are to believe spurious, zero-evidence claims.

So far, nothing too earth-shattering, and I think most of us could have predicted the outcome.  But what makes this study fascinating is that Sanchez and Dunning looked at interventions that could slow people down and make them less likely to jump to false conclusions -- and therefore, less likely to feel certain about their own false or counterfactual beliefs.

The intervention had four parts:

• An explanation of the "jumping to conclusions" phenomenon, including an explanation of why it happens in the brain and the fact that we are all prone to this kind of thing.
• An acknowledgement of the difficulty of making a correct decision based on incomplete information.  Test subjects were shown a zoomed-in photo, and then it was zoomed out a little bit at a time, and the test subjects had to decide when they were sure of what they were looking at. 
• An exercise in studying optical illusions.  Here, the point was to illustrate the inherent flaws of our own sensory-integrative mechanisms, and how focusing on one thing can make you miss details elsewhere that might give you more useful information.
• A short video of a male jogger who compliments a female street artist, and gets no response.  He repeats himself, finally becoming agitated and shouting at her, but when she reacts with alarm he turns and runs away.  Later, he finds she has left him a picture she drew, along with a note explaining that she's deaf -- leaving the guy feeling pretty idiotic and ashamed of himself.  This was followed up by asking participants to write down snap judgments they'd made that later proved incorrect, and what additional information they'd have needed in order to get it right.

This is where I got a surprise, because I've always thought of believers in the counterfactual as being essentially unreachable.  And the intervention seems like pretty rudimentary stuff, something that wouldn't affect you unless you were already primed to question your own beliefs.  But what Sanchez and Dunning found is that the individuals who received the intervention did much better on subsequent tasks than the control group did -- they were more accurate in assessing their own knowledge, slower to make snap judgments, and less confident about crediting conspiracy theories.

I don't know about you, but I find this pretty hopeful.  It once again reinforces my contention that one of the most important things we can do in public schools is to teach basic critical thinking.  (And in case you didn't know -- I have an online critical thinking course through Udemy that is available for purchase, and which has gotten pretty good reviews.)

So taking the time to reason with people who believe in conspiracies can actually be productive, and not the exercise in frustration and futility I thought it was.  Maybe we can reach the "Stop the Steal" people -- with an intervention that is remarkably simple.  It's not going to fix them all, nor eradicate such beliefs entirely, but you have to admit that at this point, any movement in the direction of rationality is worth pursuing.

****************************************

Just last week, I wrote about the internal voice most of us live with, babbling at us constantly -- sometimes with novel or creative ideas, but most of the time (at least in my experience) with inane nonsense.  The fact that this internal voice is nearly ubiquitous, and what purpose it may serve, is the subject of psychologist Ethan Kross's wonderful book Chatter: The Voice in our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It, released this month and already winning accolades from all over.

Chatter not only analyzes the inner voice in general terms, but looks at specific case studies where the internal chatter brought spectacular insight -- or short-circuited the individual's ability to function entirely.  It's a brilliant analysis of something we all experience, and gives some guidance not only into how to quiet it when it gets out of hand, but to harness it for boosting our creativity and mental agility.

If you're a student of your own inner mental workings, Chatter is a must-read!

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The cost of regret

"But what would have been the good?"

Aslan said nothing.

"You mean," said Lucy rather faintly, "that it would have turned out all right – somehow?  But how?  Please, Aslan!  Am I not to know?"

"To know what would have happened, child?" said Aslan.  "No.  Nobody is ever told that."

"Oh dear," said Lucy.

"But anyone can find out what will happen," said Aslan.  "If you go back to the others now, and wake them up; and tell them you have seen me again; and that you must all get up at once and follow me – what will happen?  There is only one way of finding out."

This passage, from C. S. Lewis's novel Prince Caspian, has always struck me with particular poignancy, because one of the most consistent themes of my life has been regret at not having made different decisions.  People I dearly wish I had not hurt.  Opportunities I passed up because of my shyness and risk-aversion.  More specific ones, like my (all things considered) terrible decision to live at home while going to college.  My (at the time) barely-acknowledged choice to keep my bisexuality hidden for decades.

It's not, mind you, that I'm unhappy with my life as it is.  I have a wonderful wife, two sons I'm proud of, and spent 32 years in a rewarding career that I discovered quite by accident,  as a consequence of other seemingly unrelated decisions I made.  I have seventeen books in print, something I have dreamed about since elementary school.  I live in a wonderful part of the world, and have had the good fortune to travel and see dozens of other wonderful places.

And I'm aware of the fact that things could have turned out far worse.  Whatever else you can say about the decision, my choice to live at home during college, with conservative, strait-laced parents who kept close tabs on me, kept me out of all sorts of trouble I might otherwise have gotten into.  If I'd come out as bisexual in college, it would have been in around 1980 -- and this was right at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when the disease was still poorly understood, and a diagnosis was tantamount to a death sentence.

There's any number of ways the course of my life could have been deflected into an alternate path, and led me to somewhere very different.  Big decisions -- where to go to college, who to marry, what career to pursue.  Tiny actions with big effects, such as Donna Noble's choice of which direction to turn at an intersection in the mind-blowing Doctor Who episode "Turn Left" -- and of which in my own case I'm almost certainly unaware because looking back, they seem entirely insignificant.  

As I said, I like my life just fine.  Even so, I've never been able to shuck the regret, and more than that the fact that like Lucy Pevensie in Prince Caspian, I'll never know what would have happened had I done otherwise.

The topic comes up because of a fascinating paper in the journal Psychological Science called "The Lure of Counterfactual Curiosity: People Incur a Cost to Experience Regret," by Lily FitzGibbon and Kou Muryama (of the University of Reading), and Asuka Komiya (of Hiroshima University).  They did a risk/choice/reward assessment task with 150 adults, and after the task was completed, the volunteers are allowed to pay for information about how they would have fared had they chosen differently.

It turns out, people are willing to pay a lot, even when they find out that they chose poorly (i.e. they would have had a greater reward had they made a different choice), and even though knowledge of their poor decision causes regret, self-doubt, and worse performance on subsequent tasks.  The authors write:

After one makes a decision, it is common to reflect not only on the outcome that was achieved but also on what might have been.  For example, one might consider whether going to a party would have been more fun than staying home to work on a manuscript.  These counterfactual comparisons can have negative emotional consequences; they can lead to the experience of regret.  In the current study, we examined a commonly observed yet understudied aspect of counterfactual comparisons: the motivational lure of counterfactual information—counterfactual curiosity.  Specifically, we found that people are so strongly seduced to know counterfactual information that they are willing to incur costs for information about how much they could have won, even if the information is likely to trigger negative emotions (regret) and is noninstrumental to obtaining rewards.

Why would people seek out information when they know ahead of time it is likely to make them feel bad?  The authors write:

One explanation for seeking negative information is that people may also find it interesting to test their emotional responses—a mechanism that might also underlie so-called morbid curiosity.  Counterfactual information of the kind sought in the current experiments may be desirable because it has high personal relevance—it relates to decisions that one has made in the recent past.  People’s desire for information about their own performance is known to be strong enough to overcome cognitive biases such as inequality aversion.  Thus, opportunities to learn about oneself and the actual and counterfactual consequences of one’s decisions may have powerful motivational status.

Chances are, if I was able to do what Donna did in "Turn Left" and see the outcome had I chosen differently, I'd find the results for my life's path would be better in some aspects and worse in others.  Like everything, it's a mixed bag.  Given the opportunity to go back in time and actually change something -- well, tempting as it would be, I would be mighty hesitant to take that step and risk everything I currently have and have accomplished.

But still -- I'd like to know.  Even if in some cases, I'd have done far better making a different choice, and then would add the certainty of having made a bad decision on top of the more diffuse regret I already have.  The temptation to find out would be almost irresistible.

Maybe it's better, honestly, that we don't see the long-term consequences of our actions.  Fortunate, to put it in Aslan's words, that "Nobody is ever told that."  It's hard enough living with knowing you fell short or behaved badly; how much worse it would be if we saw that things could have been far better if we'd only chosen differently.

****************************************

Just last week, I wrote about the internal voice most of us live with, babbling at us constantly -- sometimes with novel or creative ideas, but most of the time (at least in my experience) with inane nonsense.  The fact that this internal voice is nearly ubiquitous, and what purpose it may serve, is the subject of psychologist Ethan Kross's wonderful book Chatter: The Voice in our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It, released this month and already winning accolades from all over.

Chatter not only analyzes the inner voice in general terms, but looks at specific case studies where the internal chatter brought spectacular insight -- or short-circuited the individual's ability to function entirely.  It's a brilliant analysis of something we all experience, and gives some guidance not only into how to quiet it when it gets out of hand, but to harness it for boosting our creativity and mental agility.

If you're a student of your own inner mental workings, Chatter is a must-read!

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]