Skepticism

I appeared on KTVK-TV 3 News last night, as the token skeptic for a story about a photograph of the painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe that supposedly weeps. It was FedEx’d to St. Anthony’s Church in downtown Phoenix. I didn’t have all the details when they interviewed me (they reported it as a weeping statue), so I had fairly generic answers and they used only part of one of my sentences. I was filmed in front of our own copy of the Virgin of Guadalupe–ours is cooler than the original, since it’s an Octavio Ocampo metamorphic print (“Los Dones de La Virgen”). I also put a copy of Joe Nickell’s Looking for a Miracle in the background. In the parts they didn’t use, I pointed out that weeping icons tend to create large crowds for a church, and then be followed by copycats at other churches, and they tend to exhibit weeping behavior associated with particular individuals (like Rev. James Bruse in Virginia, who had multiple weeping statues). I also said, drawing from Nickell’s book, that the usual explanations are condensation, deliberate hoax, illusion, or imagination (the latter referring to cases of pareidolia, a word I knew would be pointless to use in a TV news interview). ...

P.Z. Myers has written an open letter in response to Sam Harris’ address to the Atheist Alliance, in which Harris said this: So, let me make my somewhat seditious proposal explicit: We should not call ourselves “atheists.” We should not call ourselves “secularists.” We should not call ourselves “humanists,” or “secular humanists,” or “naturalists,” or “skeptics,” or “anti-theists,” or “rationalists,” or “freethinkers,” or “brights.” We should not call ourselves anything. We should go under the radar—for the rest of our lives. And while there, we should be decent, responsible people who destroy bad ideas wherever we find them.Myers rightly takes issue with this proposal. This quotation was the first thing I read from Harris’ address on the SKEPTIC mailing list, and I wrote this in response before I read his entire talk: I disagree with everybody who says there’s only one way we should all be. I have no problem with there being atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, naturalists, skeptics, brights, humanists (secular or otherwise), rationalists, and people in the closet or under the radar.But then, after reading Harris’ entire speech, I amended this as follows: Now that I’ve actually read his essay, I do strongly agree with him that “atheism is not a worldview.” It is a small but significant component of a large set of possible worldviews. I went to my first atheist meetup group meeting a couple of weeks ago, curious to see what it would be like. It was the first meeting of a group of people who have different ideas about what they want to do–some want to be political activists against the religious right. Some want to picket churches. Some want social events with like-minded people. I gave my endorsement for the last of these, and further suggested that they be as inclusive as possible to bring together people from other existing groups in the Phoenix area–skeptics, humanists, atheists, etc., as an informal network to have events and let people know of what other groups are doing. The megachurches succeed by creating a framework in which there are lots of little subgroups catering to a wide variety of interests, and a secular community should offer the same. Harris’ point that “Atheism is not a thing” is the same point I made to this group–it may be that the only thing we have in common is a lack of belief in God. If the group focuses on that, the meetings will be as entertaining as a meeting of people whose only commonality is disinterest in watching spectator sports, who get together to discuss their disinterest in watching spectator sports (or worse yet, watching spectator sports to comment on how stupid it is).I should add to this that in my opinion, the term “freethinker” includes a subset of theists (I am in agreement with Jeff Lowder on this point, though, unlike Jeff, I believe I have met such people, though perhaps I have confused some kinds of fideists with freethinkers), and I welcome association with them. I have a preference for the term “skeptic” over “atheist” because I like the way it focuses the attention on method–doubt–rather than on doctrine–lack of belief in gods. If I were to find sufficient evidence for the existence of God, I would become a theist, but I would remain a skeptic. One of the most inspiring books I’ve read in the last couple of years was Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Doubt: A History, because she shows that there is a very long tradition of doubters of the dominant religious views, and that even in cases where doubters are driven underground, doubt resurfaces again. UPDATE (October 8, 2007): Sam Harris has responded to criticism here, and P.Z. Myers responds to that here. I agree with Myers. UPDATE (October 9, 2007): P.Z. Myers comments on Sam Harris’ references to an atheist “cult." Again, I agree with Myers here–the attributes of a cult are something like this or this. There can be atheist cults, but they need to exhibit those characteristics to deserve the name. UPDATE (October 16, 2007): Chris Hallquist weighs in on the subject at the Internet Infidels website. ...

Eastern Michigan University sociology professor Marcello Truzzi was a co-founder and co-chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP, now just CSI) and the editor of its original magazine, The Zetetic (later renamed Skeptical Inquirer). After he broke with the group over what he perceived as dogmatism and a desire for a more academic than popular approach, he published his own journal on paranormal and fringe science subjects, the Zetetic Scholar. George Hansen has now put the first five issues of the Zetetic Scholar online at his website as PDFs, along with the tables of contents of issues six through eleven. (Only one other issue, a larger one identified as a double issue, twelve and thirteen, was published.) Issues 9, 10, and 11 are noteworthy for publishing debate about CSICOP’s “Mars Effect” controversy. My personal collection includes only issues 9 through 12/13, so I’m happy to see the older issues made available. Truzzi died of cancer on February 2, 2003. He was a meticulous researcher who was very generous with his time and sources. I corresponded with him on a number of occasions, and had several telephone conversations with him about skepticism and the Mars Effect controversy, about which I’ve assembled a very lengthy chronology and bibliography (large RTF file). When I wrote a chapter on “Veteran Psychic Detective Bill Ward” for Joe Nickell’s book Psychic Sleuths, Truzzi provided me with a few newspaper clippings on Ward that he had obtained while researching his own book on psychic detectives, The Blue Sense. Truzzi was agnostic to a fault–he would refrain from coming to conclusions even when evidence was overwhelming.

Barry Beyerstein, professor of psychology and member of the Brain Behavior Laboratory at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, a Fellow and member of the Committee of Skeptical Inquiry’s executive council, author of numerous skeptical articles and books, a contributing editor of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, member of the advisory board of the Drug Policy Foundation and advocate for decriminalization of drugs, brother of philosopher and skeptic Dale Beyerstein, and father of prominent blogger Lindsey Beyerstein, died on Tuesday at the age of 60. His daughter describes him as “among the most ethical people I have ever known” and “also one of the most fulfilled people I’ve had occasion to meet." I had the pleasure of meeting him on multiple occasions at CSICOP conferences and found him to be very friendly and generous with his time; he was the only member of the CSICOP executive council who took me seriously regarding an ethical issue I brought up regarding a prominent skeptic who regularly published in the Skeptical Inquirer. His death is a significant loss to skepticism and advocates for sensible drug policies. He is remembered on the front page of the CSI website. CSI Executive Director Barry Karr sent out the following: ...

Reed Esau, the originator of the celebrity atheists list, has put together a video introducing SkeptiCamp, an “un-conference” where all of the attendees provide the content, based on BarCamp. There will be a SkeptiCamp on August 3-4, 2007 in Denver, Colorado.

“Oprah’s ugly secret” at Salon.com. “There Is No ‘Secret’" at The Simple Dollar. “The Secret Behind The Secret" at eSKEPTIC. “Shame on Oprah” at Pharyngula. Here’s a quote from the Salon story, which pulls no punches on this nonsense: Worse than “The Secret’s” blame-the-victim idiocy is its baldfaced bullshitting. The titular “secret” of the book is something the authors call the Law of Attraction. They maintain that the universe is governed by the principle that “like attracts like” and that our thoughts are like magnets: Positive thoughts attract positive events and negative thoughts attract negative events. Of course, magnets do exactly the opposite – positively charged magnets attract negatively charged particles – and the rest of “The Secret” has a similar relationship to the truth.Unfortunately, the author made somewhat of a hash of his statement about magnets. He should have said either that like magnetic poles repel and opposite magnetic poles attract or that like-charged particles repel each other and oppositely-charged particles attract. The effect of magnets on charged particles is the same regardless of charge (and it’s not attraction or repulsion–remember the mnemonic device of making a fist with your right hand, with your thumb pointing up, representing the direction of the current from positive to negative and the other fingers showing the direction of the magnetic field?).

As someone who skews heavily Extropian, I tend to be very optimistic about the future. This, in spite of being brought up by a paranoid (though otherwise intelligent) guy who always seemed convinced that a catastrophic economic collapse was imminent. In the '80s it was hyperinflation and thermonuclear war. In the '90s it was Bankruptcy 1995, followed by Y2k. Nowadays it's global warming (somehow we've managed to skirt around the issue of Peak Oil). All the parental paranoia helped to cultivate in me a healthy skepticism (though it got to me just enough to unfortunately keep me out of the stock market for far longer than I should have been). So, my optimistic/skeptical attitude has been keeping me up-beat about the real estate market in Phoenix - at least until recently. Given the way things have been going - neatly summarized by the two graphs on the right - a combination of factors now have me a little worried about the next year or so, at least. As I have argued elsewhere, Phoenix housing prices are too high. There's no reason to buy houses when you can rent them for a lot cheaper (and you thus can't make any money with them as investment properties, either). As you can see from the Appreciation graph above, even though houses are overpriced, as of the last data point on the graph we were still seeing a 10% appreciation over last year. Even the quarter-over-quarter line is still in the positive. I have to believe that we're going to be seeing a strong reversal of that trend in the coming months--or else we'll see whatever drove that crazy spike (in the second graph above) manifesting itself in some other area of the economy. Then there are those pesky notices of foreclosure [in the graph below, the blue line is monthly notices, while the orange line is the yearly moving average]. In spite of the fact that, according to some analysts, we haven't seen most of the interest-only ARMs kick into their higher payments, yet, we're already seeing an alarming uptick in notices of foreclosure (an indicator of people who've already been in serious financial difficulty for at least 5-6 months). February saw a total of 1577 trustee sale notices filed. That's off a bit from January's 1623, but when you consider that January had 21 business days for recording documents, against only 19 for February, there really was no slow down at all. In fact, as you can see from this graph, February 2007 had the highest average daily recordings (83/day) of all months for which I have data. It beat out January of '03 by 0.24 recordings/day. If the trend continues then this month should see over 1900! This may be good news for all the mythical short sale foreclosure investors, but it's bad news for pretty much everybody else. Historical Comments Einzige (2007-03-15): We're at the halfway point of the month and our current tally is 794.It would seem that 1588 trustee sale notices for March would be a safe bet. Not a record, but certainly an outlier. ...

I’ve got a couple of websites of hierarchically organized links that I’ve maintained for quite some time, though I haven’t really worked on them much lately. I currently get more spam link submissions than genuine link submissions to each, so I’d like to request contributions of legitimate entries. One is my skeptical links site, which is fairly extensive, especially on a few topics such as Scientology, creationism, the websites of skeptical groups, and critiques of organized skepticism. The other is my security links site, which is much less extensive, but still has some useful links, mostly on security and hacking tools and security standards. Contributions are welcome–just go to the appropriate area and click the “add a site” link at the top of the page. ...

I figured as much from his performance at this year’s Skeptics Society conference, where he refused to defend the scientific claims in his book State of Fear, but here’s how he’s responded to Washington journalist Michael Crowley’s critique in The New Republic–by putting Crowley as a character into his most recent novel, as a child rapist with a small penis: Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. … It turned out Crowley’s taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]–as was his custom–tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child’s mother as “fantasizing feminist fundamentalists” who had made up the whole thing from “their sick, twisted imaginations.” This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley’s penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler’s rectum.) ...

Denyse O’Leary (an appallingly bad journalist who blogs in favor of Intelligent Design) wrote that she won’t become an internal critic of ID because she opposes the “academic fascism” of ID critics. I find that an appallingly weak justification for being a propagandist. Internal criticism tends to strengthen the quality of arguments and evidence, not weaken them–unless, of course, what you’re advocating is false. Einzige (2006-12-09): Are there any pro-IDers who are critical of other pro-IDers? ...