Overlooking simplicity

In the Tao Te Ching, Chinese philosopher (and founder of Taoism) Lao Tse writes, "To attain knowledge, add things every day; to attain wisdom, remove things every day."

There are a couple of interesting pieces to this concept.  First, that knowledge does not necessarily confer wisdom.  The implication is that knowledge (by itself) is less desirable than understanding, and understanding less desirable than wisdom.  If so, this definitely has some bearing on how science is taught in public schools -- often as a list of vocabulary words and definitions that do little more than scratch the surface of what's out there to learn.

Second, that doing a mental decluttering is better than trying to figure things out by jamming more stuff in.  Here, I'm reminded of what happens in my fiction writing when I'm at an impasse.  Slamming my fists against the obstacle almost never works; what frequently does is doing something else entirely, especially something stress-clearing like going for a run or playing with my dogs.  As counterintuitive as it might be, it seems like ceasing to think about the problem at all frees my brain up to figure out a solution.

How exactly that works on a neurophysiological level, I have no idea.

Lao Tse by Nicholas Roerich (1943) [Image is in the Public Domain]

As more support for Lao Tse's observation, consider the paper in Nature this week called, "People Systematically Overlook Subtractive Changes," by Gabrielle Adams, Benjamin Converse, Andrew Hales, and Leidy Klotz of the University of Virginia, which looked at another facet of this same issue -- that when approaching a solution to a complex problem, people often fail to consider solutions that require removing pieces of it or ceasing to do certain actions.  The authors write:

Improving objects, ideas or situations—whether a designer seeks to advance technology, a writer seeks to strengthen an argument or a manager seeks to encourage desired behaviour—requires a mental search for possible changes.  We investigated whether people are as likely to consider changes that subtract components from an object, idea or situation as they are to consider changes that add new components.  People typically consider a limited number of promising ideas in order to manage the cognitive burden of searching through all possible ideas, but this can lead them to accept adequate solutions without considering potentially superior alternatives.  Here we show that people systematically default to searching for additive transformations, and consequently overlook subtractive transformations.  Across eight experiments, participants were less likely to identify advantageous subtractive changes when the task did not (versus did) cue them to consider subtraction, when they had only one opportunity (versus several) to recognize the shortcomings of an additive search strategy or when they were under a higher (versus lower) cognitive load.  Defaulting to searches for additive changes may be one reason that people struggle to mitigate overburdened schedules, institutional red tape, and damaging effects on the planet.

We're so well-trained by years and years of education that the way to find a solution to a problem is to throw more stuff at it that we don't even think of looking at solutions that require simplification.

"Additive ideas come to mind quickly and easily, but subtractive ideas require more cognitive effort," study co-author Benjamin Converse said, in an interview with Science Daily.  "Because people are often moving fast and working with the first ideas that come to mind, they end up accepting additive solutions without considering subtraction at all."

Now, there's a caveat here; not all problems have simple solutions.  When I was a teacher, I used to call this the "why don't we just...?" approach.  I remember students saying, "Why don't we just use chemical reactions that absorb carbon dioxide to fix climate change?" (it's completely unfeasible to do this on a large enough scale to help), and "why don't we just pass laws protecting wilderness areas and make mass deforestation illegal?" (not only does this run afoul of private ownership and eminent domain laws, it causes problems with resource acquisition, and ignores the fact that most of the threatened wilderness in the world is outside of the United States and therefore out of our jurisdiction -- not to mention the elephant in the room of global, societally locked-in wealth inequity as the root problem).  

Complex problems rarely have simple solutions.

But the basic idea here is that the answer doesn't always lie in fixing things by doing more stuff, and the human mind doesn't tend to see those kinds of solutions as easily as ones that require further or more intense action.

So give it a try.  When you're facing a difficult problem, give a shot to a Marie-Kondo-esque simplification approach.  What could you remove (or stop doing) that might help solve the problem?  Maybe a mental decluttering would help in a lot of realms other than overcoming writers' block.

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

If, like me, you love birds, I have a book for you.

It's about a bird I'd never heard of, which makes it even cooler.  Turns out that Charles Darwin, on his epic voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle, came across a species of predatory bird -- the Striated Caracara -- in the remote Falkland Islands, off the coast of Argentina.  They had some fascinating qualities; Darwin said they were "tame and inquisitive... quarrelsome and passionate," and so curious about the odd interlopers who'd showed up in their cold, windswept habitat that they kept stealing things from the ship and generally making fascinating nuisances of themselves.

In A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey, by Jonathan Meiberg, we find out not only about Darwin's observations of them, but observations by British naturalist William Henry Hudson, who brought some caracaras back with him to England.  His inquiries into the birds' behavior showed that they were capable of stupendous feats of problem solving, putting them up there with crows and parrots in contention for the title of World's Most Intelligent Bird.

This book is thoroughly entertaining, and in its pages we're brought through remote areas in South America that most of us will never get to visit.  Along the way we learn about some fascinating creatures that will make you reconsider ever using the epithet of "birdbrain" again.

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

Algae aura

Can I just say that I am sick unto death of people misrepresenting science?

Some scientist somewhere makes a discovery, and it seems to take only milliseconds before every woo-woo with a favorite loony idea about how the world works is using it to support their claims.  These people have taken confirmation bias and raised it to the level of performance art.

A long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a particularly good (or bad, as the case may be) example of this yesterday, in the form of an article by Michael Forrester called "People Can Draw Energy From Other People The Same Way Plants Do," that is apparently getting passed all over social media.  So let me illustrate my point by telling you what some of Forrester's conclusions from this scientific research are, and afterwards I'll tell you about the actual research itself.

See if you can connect the two.

Forrester says that we absorb "energies" from our surroundings.  He never defines what he means by "energy," but I'm pretty sure it's not the standard physics definition, because he includes stuff about being around "negative people."  He cites "psychologist and energy healer" Olivia Bader-Lee, who says:

This is exactly why there are certain people who feel uncomfortable in specific group settings where there is a mix of energy and emotions...  The human organism is very much like a plant, it draws needed energy to feed emotional states and this can essentially energize cells or cause increases in cortisol and catabolize cells depending on the emotional trigger...  Humans can absorb and heal through other humans, animals, and any part of nature.  That's why being around nature is often uplifting and energizing for so many people.

We're then given specific recommendations for how to "absorb and heal" efficiently.  These include:

• Stay centered and grounded
• Be in a state of non-resistance
• Own your personal aura space
• Give yourself an energy cleanse
• Call back your energy

I was especially interested in the "energy cleanse" thing, and fortunately, Forrester tells us exactly how to accomplish this:

The color gold has a high vibration which is useful for clearing away foreign energy.  Imagine a gold shower nozzle at the top of your aura (a few feet above your head) and turn it on, allowing clear gold energy to flow through your aura and body space and release down your grounding.  You will immediately feel cleansed and refreshed.

So all I have to do is imagine it, eh?  Given that I spent 32 years working with teenagers, I wish I'd known that "owning your personal aura space" was something that would happen if I imagined it.  Teaching a room full of tenth graders is like trying to herd hyperactive puppies.  Since I found that yelling "BACK OFF" was seldom effective, it would have been nice if all I'd had to do was to picture my "aura space" (gold-colored, of course) and the teenagers would have been repelled backwards in a comical fashion, sort of like Yoda did to Count Dooku at the end of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.

But I digress.

Okay. So you're probably wondering what scientific research led Forrester and Bader-Lee to come to this conclusion.

Ready?

The discovery by a team of scientists in the Biotechnology Department of Bielefeld University (Germany) that a species of algae can digest cellulose.

If you're going, "Um, but wait... but... how... what?" you should realize that I had exactly the same response.  I spent several minutes thinking that I had clicked on the wrong link. But no. In fact, Forrester even mentions the gist of the research himself:

Members of Professor Dr. Olaf Kruse’s biological research team have confirmed for the first time that a plant, the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, not only engages in photosynthesis, but also has an alternative source of energy: it can draw it from other plants.

And from this he deduces that all you have to do to be happy is to picture yourself underneath a gold shower nozzle.

I've seen some misrepresentations and far-fetched deductions before, but this one has to take the grand prize.

I get that people are always casting about looking for support for their favorite theories.  So as wacky as Forrester's pronouncements are, at least I see why he made them.  But what baffles me is how other people can look at what he wrote, and say, "Yes!  That makes complete sense!  Algae that can digest cellulose!  Therefore aura spaces and energetic quantum vibrations of happiness!

Okay, I admit that I can be a hardass rationalist at times.  But seriously, what are these people thinking?

Not much, is my guess.

So anyhow, watch out for those negative energies.  Those can be a bummer.  But if you're feeling like your vibrations are low, don't despair.  I hear that getting into psychic communication with algae can help.

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

If, like me, you love birds, I have a book for you.

It's about a bird I'd never heard of, which makes it even cooler.  Turns out that Charles Darwin, on his epic voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle, came across a species of predatory bird -- the Striated Caracara -- in the remote Falkland Islands, off the coast of Argentina.  They had some fascinating qualities; Darwin said they were "tame and inquisitive... quarrelsome and passionate," and so curious about the odd interlopers who'd showed up in their cold, windswept habitat that they kept stealing things from the ship and generally making fascinating nuisances of themselves.

In A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey, by Jonathan Meiberg, we find out not only about Darwin's observations of them, but observations by British naturalist William Henry Hudson, who brought some caracaras back with him to England.  His inquiries into the birds' behavior showed that they were capable of stupendous feats of problem solving, putting them up there with crows and parrots in contention for the title of World's Most Intelligent Bird.

This book is thoroughly entertaining, and in its pages we're brought through remote areas in South America that most of us will never get to visit.  Along the way we learn about some fascinating creatures that will make you reconsider ever using the epithet of "birdbrain" again.

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

The mental delete key

About ten years ago, some students in my AP Biology class decided to do an experiment on false memory as their final project.

The setup was simple and elegant.  One of the students sat behind a small card table on which there were two dozen objects of various types and sizes, initially covered by a cloth.  The test subject came in, sat down, and was told (s)he would be given a memory test at the end of three minutes' time to study the objects on the table.  The cloth was removed, the timer started.

At a minute and a half in, the other student running the study -- who until then had been offstage -- came in, picked up one of the objects, and walked off with it.  Naturally enough, the test subjects focused on which object she'd picked up.

When the three minutes were up, the test subject was read aloud a series of twelve questions about the experience.  The answers to only three of them mattered -- the first one and the last two:

• Question 1: What object did the girl in the blue shirt remove from the table?
• Question 11: The girl who came in and removed an object -- what color was her shirt?
• Question 12: How do you know what color her shirt was?

You've probably already guessed that her shirt wasn't blue; in fact, it was brilliant red.  But 95% of the fairly sizable number of test subjects answered "blue."  Only two test subjects said "red;" several of them said "I don't remember."

But where it got seriously interesting was how the subjects who said "blue" answered question #12.  Because the vast majority of them said, "I remember seeing it."  Once again, there were only a couple of outliers who said "Because you told me it was blue in question #1," and one or two who said, "I'm not sure."  The remainder were convinced they remembered seeing it.  When informed that the other member of the scientific team had been wearing a red shirt, several people flat-out didn't believe it and asked that she come back and prove it to them.  One of them even accused her of having changed her shirt!

This has always been one of my favorite examples of how plastic and unreliable human memory is.  "I know it happened that way, I remember it" is remarkably thin ice.  My students' clever experiment is innocuous enough, but think of the role false memories could play in a court of law -- where someone's freedom, perhaps their life, depends on the people on the witness stand remembering what actually happened.

So that's kind of sobering.  But a study this week which appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences gives us some encouraging news; false memories are easier to eradicate than real memories -- indicating they may be stored differently in the brain, and don't get the same weight as memories of events that we really witnessed.

[Image "Brain/Memory" licensed under the Creative Commons © Michel Royon / Wikimedia Commons]

In "Rich False Memories of Autobiographical Events Can Be Reversed," Aileen Oeberst (University of Hagen), Merle Madita Wachendörfer (Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien), Roland Imhoff (Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz), and Hartmut Blank (University of Portsmouth) show us a simple protocol by which people can be induced to purge their brains of false or implanted memories.  They took a test group of 52 individuals whose parents had also agreed to participate.  Without being told what exactly was going on, the test subjects were given a period during which their parents recalled with them a series of childhood memories -- but in each case, two of the "memories" were false and the rest were not.  (Examples of false memories implanted were incidents like running away from home, getting lost, or being in a car accident -- more serious and emotion-laden than what shirt someone was wearing!)

As with previous experiments, the test subjects afterward were unable to tell apart the real memories from the false ones; both seemed to exist in their minds with equal intensity.  Then the researchers tried two approaches to eradicate the false memories: (1) alerting the test subjects to the possibility that their memories were false, and were due to other sources, such as family narratives; and (2) asking test subjects to describe how they know their memories were true (a little like the "How did you know her shirt was blue?" question my students asked).

Both of them worked, and more interesting still, memories of real events were unaffected when the researchers tried the same strategy on them.  Put differently, asking people to slow down and consider their brain's fallibility, and the sources of what they think they recall, had the effect of deleting false memories but not real ones.

Even more interesting was how persistent the effect was.  A one-year followup on the test subjects found that the implanted memories were virtually all gone -- asked whether an unreal event had happened in their childhood, almost all the volunteers rejected it.

"By raising participants' awareness of the possibility of false memories, urging them to critically reflect on their recollections and strengthening their trust in their own perspective, we were able to significantly reduce their false memories. Moreover, and importantly, this did not affect their ability to remember true events," said study senior author Hartmut Blank, in an interview with Science Daily.  "We designed our techniques so that they can principally be applied in real-world situations.  By empowering people to stay closer to their own truth, rather than rely on other sources, we showed we could help them realize what might be false or misremembered -- something that could be very beneficial in forensic settings."

Very encouraging indeed.  Nice to hear that our brains aren't quite as easily duped as we'd thought.  It does make me wonder, though, how these more-easily-eradicated false memories are encoded in the brain.  Is there a neurological reason why the false memories are susceptible to a mental delete key, and the real ones aren't?  What I'd love to see is a comparison of fMRI results of people recalling real and implanted memories.

Maybe a direction for a subsequent experiment.  But at least now we have some hope of sifting out the wheat from the chaff in our brains -- and remembering more accurately what really happened, even if it's just what color shirt someone was wearing.

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

If, like me, you love birds, I have a book for you.

It's about a bird I'd never heard of, which makes it even cooler.  Turns out that Charles Darwin, on his epic voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle, came across a species of predatory bird -- the Striated Caracara -- in the remote Falkland Islands, off the coast of Argentina.  They had some fascinating qualities; Darwin said they were "tame and inquisitive... quarrelsome and passionate," and so curious about the odd interlopers who'd showed up in their cold, windswept habitat that they kept stealing things from the ship and generally making fascinating nuisances of themselves.

In A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey, by Jonathan Meiberg, we find out not only about Darwin's observations of them, but observations by British naturalist William Henry Hudson, who brought some caracaras back with him to England.  His inquiries into the birds' behavior showed that they were capable of stupendous feats of problem solving, putting them up there with crows and parrots in contention for the title of World's Most Intelligent Bird.

This book is thoroughly entertaining, and in its pages we're brought through remote areas in South America that most of us will never get to visit.  Along the way we learn about some fascinating creatures that will make you reconsider ever using the epithet of "birdbrain" again.

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

Thus sayeth Rick Wiles

I have a question: how completely batshit insane does someone have to be before the far-right evangelical Christians will stop listening to them?

It probably will come as no shock that I'm referring here to Rick Wiles, who runs TruNews and his mouth with equal fervor.  Wiles has appeared here in Skeptophilia before, for such pinnacles of rationality as claiming the COVID-19 pandemic was a punishment sent by God because of the United States's support for LGBTQ people, and that if Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, she'd have rounded up conservatives and put them in concentration camps.

Rick Wiles on one of his frequent insane rants

So expecting any kind of reasonable statement from Wiles is probably a forlorn hope, but even by his standards this week's contribution is way out there.  On this week's TruNews broadcast, he said that Dr. Anthony Fauci should be tortured until he admits that he conspired with the Chinese to create the COVID-19 virus and release it into an unsuspecting populace.

If you're thinking, "Wait... how can it be a punishment sent by God and a deliberate creation of Fauci and his cronies at the same time?", believe me, that's only the beginning of the questions you could ask.

First, lest you think I'm making this up, here are Wiles's exact words:

You’re a liar! You know what you did, Fauci.  You worked with the Chinese Communist Party for years, and you used our own taxpayer money to work on a coronavirus with bats.  And you did it behind our back, deceiving the American people, and you participated in the creation of this virus.  And I’ll say it again, Fauci.  You should be taken to Guantanamo Bay and waterboarded until you cough up the truth, including the names of the other traitors who have helped China damage the United States of America with this virus.

The next day, in case anyone thought he might have come to his senses upon reflection overnight, he basically said the same thing again.

Now, I'll admit up-front that I don't get the evangelical mentality.  To start out with, to buy it, you have to have a completely different standard for reliable evidence than I do.  But all the same... isn't there some point where even the holiest of holy rollers will sit back and say, "Hang on a moment.  This makes no sense whatsoever."?

Because if "jumping the shark" exists in the evangelical world, Wiles has just done a double backward somersault with an aerial cartwheel over the shark.  He's claiming that the guy who has been instrumental in directing our fight against this lethal virus is some kind of mad scientist who created the thing in the first place, and that the American government needs to torture him until he 'fesses up.  Why a virologist with a lifelong career of managing epidemics and saving lives would suddenly go off the rails and create a pandemic, Wiles hasn't told us.

What possible motivation would Fauci have to do this?  Job security?  Seems like there are better ways to keep yourself in business.

But honestly, it's probably not even worth my time to try to put a rational spin on this.  Wiles and his ilk -- such exemplars of sound thinking as Greg Locke, Jim Bakker, Kat Kerr, Dave Daubenmire, and Paula White -- seem to spew out whatever their own particular biases and opinions of the moment are, then add "thus sayeth the Lord" at the end.  Doesn't matter if it makes sense; the only things that matter is keeping their place in the public eye and keeping the donations rolling in.

But you do have to wonder how people can listen to this and nod and say "Right on!"  Isn't there a point, even for bible-thumping literalists, that they will hear something and say, "Okay, that guy is a complete lunatic"?  Or does the fact that they all hate the same people -- LGBTQ folks, minorities, atheists, refugees, liberals -- mean that the listeners will just accept everything else the preachers say as if it was a pronouncement from on high?

So I'm back to where I started: I don't get it.  I know, there's free speech and all, so I know Rick Wiles et al. have the right to air their opinions.  What baffles me is that there's anyone left to listen.

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

If, like me, you love birds, I have a book for you.

It's about a bird I'd never heard of, which makes it even cooler.  Turns out that Charles Darwin, on his epic voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle, came across a species of predatory bird -- the Striated Caracara -- in the remote Falkland Islands, off the coast of Argentina.  They had some fascinating qualities; Darwin said they were "tame and inquisitive... quarrelsome and passionate," and so curious about the odd interlopers who'd showed up in their cold, windswept habitat that they kept stealing things from the ship and generally making fascinating nuisances of themselves.

In A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey, by Jonathan Meiberg, we find out not only about Darwin's observations of them, but observations by British naturalist William Henry Hudson, who brought some caracaras back with him to England.  His inquiries into the birds' behavior showed that they were capable of stupendous feats of problem solving, putting them up there with crows and parrots in contention for the title of World's Most Intelligent Bird.

This book is thoroughly entertaining, and in its pages we're brought through remote areas in South America that most of us will never get to visit.  Along the way we learn about some fascinating creatures that will make you reconsider ever using the epithet of "birdbrain" again.

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

Views of the block universe

In the beginning of my as-yet unpublished novel In the Midst of Lions, the character of Mary Hansard realizes one day that she can no longer tell apart the past and the future.

She has memories of both -- if you can call a mental picture of something from the future a memory -- and they both carry equal weight in her brain.  She can determine which is which only in the rare cases where she can verify if an event has occurred yet, such as her "memory" that a building in her neighborhood had burned down, when the (intact) building itself is right in front of her.  But in other cases, such as a conversation between her and a friend, she has no way to know whether it has already happened, or will happen in the future.

For Mary, there aren't three classes of events -- past, present, and future.  There are only two: present and not-present.  A good chunk of the first part of the book is an exploration of how that would affect someone psychologically.  (A summary: "not well.")

The funny thing is that there's nothing in this situation that specifically breaks the laws of physics.  (It's not accidental that I made the character of Mary a high school physics teacher.)  In 2019 I wrote about the peculiar and unresolved problem of "the arrow of time" -- that virtually all physical processes are time-reversible, meaning that they work equally well backwards and forwards.  A simple example is if you watched a video of a pool ball bouncing off the bumper of a billiards table, then ran it backward, there would be no obvious way to tell which was which.  (If you had a longer video, you might be able to tell, because friction with the table would bleed away energy from the ball, causing it to slow down -- so the forward version is the one that shows the ball slowing down, and the backward version is the one in which it speeds up.  This is the approach of the arrow of time problem from the angle of the Second Law of Thermodynamics; if you want to know more, you can check out my post linked above.)

So in terms of physics, it's mystifying why we perceive an arrow of time, when it seems like there's no reason we shouldn't have equal access to both past and future.  "Time is an illusion," Albert Einstein said, "but it is a remarkably persistent one."

Things get even weirder when you start looking into physicist Hermann Minkowski's idea of a block universe, where the three dimensions of space and one of time are mapped onto a three-dimensional solid.  Picture it as a loaf of bread that you can slice at any angle.  The angle of the slice is determined by the relative speed of your reference frame in comparison to the reference frame of what you're looking at, but what it leads us to is that the present loses its simultaneity -- two events that are simultaneous in one reference frame might occur sequentially in another.  Pushed to its ultimate conclusion -- and it must be interjected at this point that once again, there is nothing about Minkowski's ideas that breaks any known law of physics -- this means that an event that is in the past for me might be in the future for you, and therefore all of temporal sequencing is relative.  Minkowski showed that you can model the universe as a block within which exists not only everything in space, but everything in time.  The fact that we haven't gotten to events in the future is no more remarkable than the fact that we haven't gotten to some locations in space yet.  They're still out there, they still exist, even if we haven't seen them.

Kind of casts a harsh light on the concept of free will, doesn't it?

In any case, the topic comes up not because of physics, but because of an article by science writer Eric Wargo over at the site Inner Traditions called "The Amazing Reality of Dream Precognition."  It's an unfortunate choice of titles, because the article is well written and way less woo-woo than it sounds.  Wargo is seriously trying to figure out if people have access to the future, specifically through dreams, and has a project going to do some citizen science and have a large number of people record their dreams, then sift through them to see if there are examples of actual precognition.

It's an interesting idea, although there are some difficulties.  One is that Wargo claims that a lot of dream precognition is symbolic in nature; for example, you might dream of seeing a photograph of a friend shattered into pieces, and soon after she is injured in a terrible automobile accident.  But this requires that we rely on our own interpretation of the symbols after the fact.  And if there's one thing I've learned from ten years of writing here at Skeptophilia, it's that humans are really good at remodeling what actually happened to fit with what they think happened.

That said, Wargo is going about things the right way.  One of the things that has plagued serious research into precognition is that you only know a dream (or thought) is precognitive after the event has occurred, at which point there's always the possibility that your memory of the allegedly precognitive event has been contaminated by your knowledge of what really happened.  Also, there's the unfortunate fact that there are lots of cases of outright falsification.  If the records are made beforehand, this reduces the likelihood of this sort of thing, although it still requires that there be some kind of rigorous standard for keeping track of when the records were written down relative to the event they allegedly predicted.

So the idea is interesting, to say the least, and I need to keep in mind that my inclination to say "this is impossible" is itself a bias.  Even the lack of a mechanism for precognition -- something about which I've written before -- sort of evaporates if Minkowski was right about the block universe.  It still might not explain how you and I, both on the same planet moving at the same speed in the same reference frame, have access to different slices of the spacetime loaf, but at least it takes away one of the most consistent objections, which is that the future is fluid and therefore precognition would constitute looking at something that has no physical reality.

Reminds me of the "fixed points in time" in Doctor Who.  Maybe the truth is that everything is a fixed point in time, not just big events like the eruption of Pompeii.

So I'll be interested to see what Wargo comes up with.  Me, I'm keeping an open mind about the whole thing, as counterintuitive as it may seem to me.  If he can come up with actual evidence of precognition, dream or otherwise, it'll force me to re-evaluate a good chunk of how I think the world works.  And my character of Mary Hansard in In the Midst of Lions may turn out to be a rather alarming case of Plato's belief that "art mimics life."

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

If, like me, you love birds, I have a book for you.

It's about a bird I'd never heard of, which makes it even cooler.  Turns out that Charles Darwin, on his epic voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle, came across a species of predatory bird -- the Striated Caracara -- in the remote Falkland Islands, off the coast of Argentina.  They had some fascinating qualities; Darwin said they were "tame and inquisitive... quarrelsome and passionate," and so curious about the odd interlopers who'd showed up in their cold, windswept habitat that they kept stealing things from the ship and generally making fascinating nuisances of themselves.

In A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey, by Jonathan Meiberg, we find out not only about Darwin's observations of them, but observations by British naturalist William Henry Hudson, who brought some caracaras back with him to England.  His inquiries into the birds' behavior showed that they were capable of stupendous feats of problem solving, putting them up there with crows and parrots in contention for the title of World's Most Intelligent Bird.

This book is thoroughly entertaining, and in its pages we're brought through remote areas in South America that most of us will never get to visit.  Along the way we learn about some fascinating creatures that will make you reconsider ever using the epithet of "birdbrain" again.

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

The language of morality

If we needed any more indication that our moral judgments aren't as solid as we'd like to think, take a look at some research by Janet Geipel and Constantinos Hadjichristidis of the University of Trento (Italy), working with Luca Surian of Leeds University (UK).

The study, entitled "How Foreign Language Shapes Moral Judgment," appeared in the Journal of Social Psychology.  What Geipel et al. did was to present multilingual individuals with situations which most people consider morally reprehensible, but where no one (not even an animal) was deliberately hurt -- such as two siblings engaging in consensual and safe sex, and a man cooking and eating his dog after it was struck by a car and killed.  These types of situations make the vast majority of us go "Ewwwww" -- but it's sometimes hard to pinpoint exactly why that is.

"It's just horrible," is the usual fallback answer.

So did the test subjects in the study find such behavior immoral or unethical?  The unsettling answer is: it depends on what language the situation was presented in.

Across the board, if the situation was presented in the subject's first language, the judgments regarding the situation were harsher and more negative.  Presented in languages learned later in life, the subjects were much more forgiving.

The researchers controlled for which languages were being spoken; they tested (for example) native speakers of Italian who had learned English, and native speakers of English who had learned Italian.  It didn't matter what the language was; what mattered was when you learned it.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The explanation they offer is that the effort of speaking a non-native language "ties up" the cognitive centers, making us focus more on the acts of speaking and understanding and less on the act of passing moral judgment.  I wonder, however, if it's more that we expect better behavior in the way of obeying social mores from our own tribe -- we subconsciously expect people speaking other languages to act differently than we do, and therefore are more likely to give a pass to them if they break the rules that we consider proper behavior.

A related study by Catherine L. Harris, Ayşe Ayçiçeĝi, and Jean Berko Gleason appeared in Applied Psycholinguistics.  Entitled "Taboo Words and Reprimands Elicit a Greater Autonomic Reactivity in a First Language Than in a Second Language," the study showed that our emotional reaction (as measured by skin conductivity) to swear words and harsh judgments (such as "Shame on you!") is much stronger if we hear them in our native tongue.  Even if we're fluent in the second language, we just don't take its taboo expressions and reprimands as seriously.  (Which explains why my mother, whose first language was French, smacked me in the head when I was five years old and asked her -- on my uncle's prompting -- what "va t'faire foutre" meant.)

All of which, as both a linguistics geek and someone who is interested in ethics and morality, I find fascinating.  Our moral judgments aren't as rock-solid as we think they are, and how we communicate alters our brain, sometimes in completely subconscious ways.  Once again, the neurological underpinnings of our morality turns out to be strongly dependent on context -- which is simultaneously cool and a little disturbing.

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If, like me, you love birds, I have a book for you.

It's about a bird I'd never heard of, which makes it even cooler.  Turns out that Charles Darwin, on his epic voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle, came across a species of predatory bird -- the Striated Caracara -- in the remote Falkland Islands, off the coast of Argentina.  They had some fascinating qualities; Darwin said they were "tame and inquisitive... quarrelsome and passionate," and so curious about the odd interlopers who'd showed up in their cold, windswept habitat that they kept stealing things from the ship and generally making fascinating nuisances of themselves.

In A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey, by Jonathan Meiberg, we find out not only about Darwin's observations of them, but observations by British naturalist William Henry Hudson, who brought some caracaras back with him to England.  His inquiries into the birds' behavior showed that they were capable of stupendous feats of problem solving, putting them up there with crows and parrots in contention for the title of World's Most Intelligent Bird.

This book is thoroughly entertaining, and in its pages we're brought through remote areas in South America that most of us will never get to visit.  Along the way we learn about some fascinating creatures that will make you reconsider ever using the epithet of "birdbrain" again.

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

Bullshitometry

Having spent 32 years as a high school teacher, I developed a pretty sensitive bullshit detector.

It was a necessary skill.  Kids who have not taken the time to understand the topic being studied are notorious for bullshitting answers on essay questions, often padding their writing with vague but sciency-sounding words.  An example is the following, which is verbatim (near as I can recall) from an essay on how photosynthesis is, and is not, the reverse of aerobic cellular respiration:

From analyzing photosynthesis and the process of aerobic cellular respiration, you can see that certain features are reversed between the two reactions and certain things are not.  Aerobic respiration has the Krebs Cycle and photosynthesis has the Calvin Cycle, which are also opposites in some senses and not in others.  Therefore, the steps are not the same.  So if you ran them in reverse, those would not be the same, either.

I returned this essay with one comment: "What does this even mean?"  The student in question at least had the gumption to admit he'd gotten caught.  He grinned sheepishly and said, "You figured out that I had no idea what I was talking about, then?"  I said, "Yup."  He said, "Guess I better study next time."

I said, "Yup."

Developing a sensitive nose for bullshit is critical not only for teachers, because there's a lot of it out there, and not just in academic circles.  Writer Scott Berkun addressed this in his wonderful piece, "How to Detect Bullshit," which gives some concrete suggestions about how to figure out what is USDA grade-A prime beef, and what is the cow's other, less pleasant output.  One of the best is simply to ask the questions, "How do you know that?", "Who else has this opinion?", and "What is the counter-argument?"

You say your research will revolutionize the field?

Says who?  Based on what evidence?

He also says to be very careful whenever anyone says, "Studies show," because usually if studies did show what the writer claims, (s)he'd be specific about what those studies were.  Vague statements like "studies show" are often a red flag that the claim doesn't have much in its favor.

Remember Donald Trump's "People are telling me" and "I've heard from reliable sources" and "A person came up to me at my last rally and said"?

Those mean, "I just now pulled this claim out of my ass."

Using ten-dollar buzzwords is also a good way to cover up the fact that you're sailing close to the wind.  Berkun recommends asking, "Can you explain this in simpler terms?"  If the speaker can't give you a good idea of what (s)he's talking about without resorting to jargon, the fancy verbiage is fairly likely to be there to mislead.

This is the idea behind BlaBlaMeter, a website I discovered a while back, into which you can cut-and-paste text and get a score (from 0 to 1.0) for how much bullshit it contains.  I'm not sure what the algorithm does besides detecting vague filler words, but it's a clever idea.  It'd certainly be nice to have a rigorous way to detect it when you're being bamboozled with words.

The importance of being able to detect fancy-sounding nonsense was highlighted by the acceptance of a paper for the International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics -- when it turned out that the paper had been created by hitting iOS Autocomplete over and over.  The paper, written (sort of) by Christoph Bartneck, associate professor at the Human Interface Technology laboratory at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, was titled "Atomic Energy Will Have Been Made Available to a Single Source" (the title was also generated by autocomplete), and contained passages such as:

The atoms of a better universe will have the right for the same as you are the way we shall have to be a great place for a great time to enjoy the day you are a wonderful person to your great time to take the fun and take a great time and enjoy the great day you will be a wonderful time for your parents and kids.

Which, of course, makes no sense at all.  In this case, I wonder if the reviewers simply didn't bother to read the paper -- or read a few sample sentences and found that they (unlike the above) made reasonable sense, and said, "Looks fine to me."

Although I'd like to think that even considering my lack of expert status on atomic and nuclear physics, I'd have figured out that what I was looking at was ridiculous.

On a more serious note, there's a much more pressing reason that we all need to arm ourselves against bullshit, because so much of what's on the internet is outright false.  A team of political fact-checkers was hired by Buzzfeed News to sift through claims on politically partisan Facebook pages, and found that on average, a third of the claims made by partisan sites were outright false.  And lest you think one side was better than the other, the study found that both right and left were making a great many unsubstantiated, misleading, or wrong claims.  And we're not talking about fringe-y wingnut sites here; these were sites that if you're on Facebook you see reposts from on a daily basis -- Occupy Democrats, Breitbart, AlterNet, Fox News, The Blaze, The Other 98%, NewsMax, Addicting Info, Right Wing News, and U.S. Uncut.

What this means is that when you see posts from these sites, there is (overall) about a 2/3 chance that what you're seeing is true.  So if you frequent those pages -- or, more importantly, if you're in the habit of clicking "share" on every story that you find mildly appealing -- you damn well better be able to figure out which third is wrong.

The upshot of it is, we all need better bullshit filters.  Given that we are bombarded daily by hundreds of claims from the well-substantiated to the outrageous, it behooves us to find a way to determine which is which.

And, if you're curious, a 275-word passage from this Skeotphilia post was rated by BlaBlaMeter as having a bullshit rating of 0.13.  Which I find reassuring.  Not bad, considering the topic I was discussing.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is a bit of a departure from the usual science fare: podcaster and author Rose Eveleth's amazing Flash Forward: An Illustrated Guide to the Possibly (and Not-So-Possible) Tomorrows.

Eveleth looks at what might happen if twelve things that are currently in the realm of science fiction became real -- a pill becoming available that obviates the need for sleep, for example, or the development of a robot that can make art.  She then extrapolates from those, to look at how they might change our world, to consider ramifications (good and bad) from our suddenly having access to science or technology we currently only dream about.

Eveleth's book is highly entertaining not only from its content, but because it's in graphic novel format -- a number of extremely talented artists, including Matt Lubchansky, Sophie Goldstein, Ben Passmore, and Julia Gförer, illustrate her twelve new worlds, literally drawing what we might be facing in the future.  Her conclusions, and their illustrations of them, are brilliant, funny, shocking, and most of all, memorable.

I love her visions even if I'm not sure I'd want to live in some of them.  The book certainly brings home the old adage of "Be careful what you wish for, you may get it."  But as long as they're in the realm of speculative fiction, they're great fun... especially in the hands of Eveleth and her wonderful illustrators.

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