Skepticism

My favorite part of the Token Skeptic podcast #76’s interview with Sara Mayhew and Jack Scanlan is 28:30-28:42, where Scanlan says “everyone hates pop songs.” That’s a self-annihilating sentence along the lines of “No one goes there anymore; it’s too crowded." That reminds me of Saul Gorn’s compendium, “Self-Annihilating Sentences: Saul Gorn’s Compendium of Rarely Used Cliches," which I have in the original hardcopy but is now available online for everyone’s enjoyment. ...

Chris Mooney has a very interesting interview with anthropologist Scott Atran on the Point of Inquiry podcast, in which Atran argues that terrorism is not the product of top-down, radical religious extremist organizations recruiting the poor and ignorant, but of groups of educated (and often educated in secular institutions) individuals who become disaffected, isolated, and radicalized. Much U.S. counterterrorism and “homeland security” activity assumes the former and thus is attacking the wrong problem. He also argues that reason and rationalism are the wrong tools for attacking religion, defends a view of religion as a natural by-product of the sorts of minds we’ve evolved to have (very similar to Pascal Boyer’s account, which I think is largely correct), and throws in a few digs at the new atheists for making claims about religion that are contrary to empirical evidence. Some of the commenters at the Point of Inquiry/Center for Inquiry forums site seem to be under the misapprehension that Atran is a post-modernist. I don’t see it–he’s not making the argument that reason doesn’t work to find out things about the world, he’s making the argument that the tools of science and reason are human constructions that work well at finding things out about the world, but not so much for persuading people of things, or as the basis for long-term institutions for the sort of creatures we are. Atran shows up in the comments to elaborate on his positions and respond to criticism. My compliments to Chris Mooney for having consistently high-quality, interesting guests who are not the same voices we always hear at skeptical conferences.

Jeff Hawkins was a Scientologist and member of the Sea Org from 1967 to 2005. He was responsible for 1980s marketing campaigns that brought L. Ron Hubbard’s book Dianetics back to the New York Times bestseller lists. Beginning in 2008, he wrote a book-length series of blog posts about his experiences which has led to many further defections from the Church of Scientology. The blog posts have been edited into a hardback book, one of several by long-time high-ranking recent defectors (others include Nancy Many’s My Billion-Year Contract, Marc Headley’s Blown For Good, and Amy Scobee’s Abuse at the Top). I’ve read the first few chapters at his blog–it’s quite well-written and the comments from others who have shared some of his experiences are fascinating.

A group of Tucson atheists and skeptics have started the Desert Air podcast, available via iTunes. Three episodes available so far. Anonymous (2011-07-12): I know it's unrelated, but I just wanted to compliment you as a great source of atheist resources. It's not easy finding any- the internet is dominated by apologists and theologians. It's easy to accidently run into sites. like, say, this one: http://akma.disseminary.org/?s=theology ...

Below these two videos is a post I made (perhaps to the Kate Bush fans’ “love-hounds” mailing list, I don’t recall) back in 1986 regarding a 1985 Christian “rock music seminar” about alleged Satanic backwards messages in rock music. I was familiar with the claims of supposed “backwards masking” where the sounds of ordinary lyrics were interpreted to have different messages when reversed, as well as actual examples of recordings that were put into songs in reverse. The former seemed to me to be examples of subjective validation, and I tested it myself by closing my eyes and covering my ears when the presenter gave their claims about what we were supposed to hear prior to playing the samples. Subsequently, this became one of the first tests the Phoenix Skeptics conducted as a student group at Arizona State University in October 1985. We invited the speaker to give his demonstrations before our group, but required him to play the samples first without explanation and have everyone write down what they heard. The result was that on the first pass, those unfamiliar with the samples had a wide variety of responses; on a second pass, once the expectation was set, everybody heard what they were supposed to hear. It’s interesting that this demonstration, the key example of which was a sample from Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” made a comeback two decades later–being used by skeptics to show the power of suggestion and expectation, as these two videos from Simon Singh and Michael Shermer demonstrate. Simon Singh, 2006: ...

While listening to a recent Token Skeptic podcast of a Dragon*Con panel on Skepticism and Education moderated by D.J. Grothe of the James Randi Educational Foundation, I was struck by his repeated references to Skepticism as a worldview (which I put in uppercase to distinguish it from skepticism as a set of methods of inquiry, an attitude or approach). I wrote the following email to the podcast: I am sufficiently irritated by D.J. Grothe's repeated reference to skepticism as a "worldview" that I will probably be motivated to write a blog post about it.There is a growing ambiguity caused by overloading of the term "skepticism" on different things--attitudes, methods and processes, accumulated bodies of knowledge, a movement.  To date, there hasn't really been a capital-S Skepticism as a worldview since the Pyrrhonean philosophical variety.  A worldview is an all-encompassing view of the world which addresses how one should believe, how one should act, what kinds of things exist, and so forth.  It includes presuppositions not only about factual matters, but about values. The skepticisms worth promoting are attitudes, methods and processes, and accumulated bodies of knowledge that are consistent with a wide variety of world views.  The methods are contextual, applied against a background of social institutions and relationships that are based on trust.  There is room in the broader skeptical movement for pluralism, a diversity of approaches that set the skepticisms in different contexts for different purposes--educational, political, philosophical, religious.  An unrestricted skepticism is corrosive and undermines all knowledge, for there is no good epistemological response to philosophical skepticism that doesn't make some assumptions.Trying to turn skepticism into a capital-S Skeptical worldview strikes me as misguided.To my mind, what's most important and useful about skepticism is that it drives the adoption of the best available tools for answering questions, providing more guidance on how to think than on what to think, and on how to recognize trustworthy sources and people to rely upon.  There's not a completely sharp line between these--knowledge about methods and their accuracy is dependent upon factual knowledge, of course. I think the recent exchanges about the Missouri Skepticon conference really being an atheist conference may partly have this issue behind them, though I think there are further issues there as well about the traditional scope of "scientific skepticism" being restricted to "testable claims" and the notion of methodological naturalism that I don't entirely agree with.  Skepticism is about critical thinking, inquiry, investigation, and using the best methods available to find reliable answers to questions (and promoting broader use of those tools), while atheism is about holding a particular position on a particular issue, that no gods exist.  The broader skeptical movement produces greater social benefits by promoting more critical thinking in the general public than does the narrower group of skeptical atheists who primarily argue against religion and especially the smaller subset who are so obsessed that they are immediately dismissed by the broader public as monomaniacal cranks.  The organized skeptical groups with decades of history have mainly taken pains to avoid being represented by or identified with the latter, and as a result have been represented by skeptics of a variety of religious views in events of lasting consequence. Think, for example, of the audience for Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" and his subsequent works, or of the outcome of the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial. In my opinion, the distinction between skepticism and atheism is an important one, and I think Skepticon does blur and confuse that distinction by using the "skeptic" name and having a single focus on religion. This doesn't mean that most of the atheists participating in that conference don't qualify as skeptics, or even that atheist groups promoting rationality on religious subjects don't count as part of the broader skeptical movement.  It just means that there is a genuine distinction to be drawn. (BTW, I don't think atheism is a worldview, either--it's a single feature of a worldview, and one that is less important to my mind than skepticism.) Previous posts on related subjects: "A few comments on the nature and scope of skepticism" "Skepticism, belief revision, and science" "Massimo Pigliucci on the scope of skeptical inquiry" Also related, a 1999 letter to the editor of Skeptical Inquirer from the leaders of many local skeptical groups (Daniel Barnett, North Texas Skeptics, Dallas, TX; David Bloomberg, Rational Examination Association of Lincoln Land, Springfield, IL; Tim Holmes, Taiwan Skeptics, Tanzu, Taiwan; Peter Huston, Inquiring Skeptics of Upper New York, Schenectady, NY; Paul Jaffe, National Capitol Area Skeptics, Washington, D.C.; Eric Krieg, Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking, Philadelphia, PA; Scott Lilienfeld, Georgia Skeptics, Atlanta, GA; Jim Lippard, Phoenix Skeptics and Tucson Skeptical Society, Tucson, AZ; Rebecca Long, Georgia Skeptics, Atlanta, GA; Lori Marino, Georgia Skeptics, Atlanta, GA; Rick Moen, Bay Area Skeptics, Menlo Park, CA; Steven Novella, New England Skeptical Society, New Haven, CT; Bela Scheiber, Rocky Mountain Skeptics, Denver, CO; and Michael Sofka, Inquiring Skeptics of Upper New York, Troy, NY). UPDATE (December 1, 2010): D.J. Grothe states in the most recent (Nov. 26) Point of Inquiry podcast (Karen Stollznow interviews James Randi and D.J. Grothe), at about 36:50, that he has been misunderstood in his references to skepticism as a "worldview."  This suggests to me that he has in mind a narrower meaning, as Barbara Drescher has interpreted him in the comments below.  My apologies to D.J. for misconstruing his meaning. Michael C. Rush (2010-11-20): You make some good points, but ultimately I am unconvinced, I think. It seems to me perfectly reasonable to use "skeptic" in a manner analogous to how we would use "cynic," "idealist," or "epicure" in the modern sense, as general categories expressing one's dominant tendencies in approaching and assessing the world without requiring absolute fidelity to some ancient philosophy or formulation. Being open to questioning everything does not, it seems to me, imply rejection of everything. As for the skepticism/atheism issue, I think a person could be an atheist without being a skeptic, but I think it would be pretty silly. A "faith-based" atheism isn't of much interest or use. Can a person, conversely, be a skeptic without being an atheist? Clearly, but not, I would argue, a very good one. ...

Veteran software tester Abe Heward has started up a blog on software testing, which I’m sure will also include many items of epistemological, economic, and skeptical interest. He’s already got posts on how the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy is relevant to software testing, why good testers aren’t robots (and the flaws in one company’s attempt to treat them as if they were), and on opportunity cost and testing automation. Check it out at www.abeheward.com.

The prominent skeptic Martin Gardner, mathematician, philosopher, magician, and writer, died today at the age of 95 (b. October 21, 1914, d. May 22, 2010). He was one of the founders of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (now Committee for Skeptical Inquiry), and had been part of the earlier Resources for the Scientific Evaluation of the Paranormal along with CSICOP founding members Ray Hyman, James Randi, and Marcello Truzzi. Long before that, he wrote one of the classic texts debunking pseudoscience, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (the Dover 2nd edition was published in 1957). For many years (1956-1981) he was the author of the Scientific American column, “Mathematical Games” (taken over by Douglas Hofstadter and retitled “Metamagical Themas”), and he wrote a regular “Notes of a Psi-Watcher” column for the Skeptical Inquirer right up to the present. His 70+ books included a semi-autobiographical novel, The Flight of Peter Fromm, a book explaining his philosophical positions including why he wasn’t an atheist, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, and an annotated version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland works, The Annotated Alice. He had been scheduled to appear by video link at the upcoming The Amazing Meeting 8 in Las Vegas, where a number of other skeptical old timers will be appearing on discussion panels. His death is a great loss. I never met Gardner, but was first introduced to his work reading his “Mathematical Games” column in the late 70’s, and then his Fads and Fallacies and Skeptical Inquirer columns. Gardner, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, and James Randi were the first major figures I identified as skeptical role models. One of the great honors of my life was receiving the Martin Gardner Award for Best Skeptical Critic from the Skeptics Society in 1996. A Martin Gardner documentary that is part of “The Nature of Things” may be found online, and Scientific American has republished online its December 1995 profile of Gardner. Here’s a transcript of a February 1979 telephone interview between Martin Gardner and five mathematicians (thanks to Anthony Barcellos for transcribing it and bringing it to my attention in the comments below). Various tributes: ...

Earlier today on Twitter, Adam Bourque (@A_Damn_Bourque) asked if anyone knew the origin of the term “woo” as applied to the paranormal. I know I’ve heard the term used for at least a decade (or two or three?), but after seeing that neither the Skeptics Dictionary entry on “woo woo” nor threads at the JREF Forums had an etymology, I decided to take a look at Google Books. “Woo” wasn’t a good search due to the homonym, and “woo woo” led to lots of matches in stories of children imitating fire engine sirens, but adding “astrology” and “occult” as additional terms led to some useful matches. On my first pass, the oldest reference I found was in Nicholas Evans’ novel The Loop (1999), p. 244: ...

It’s a bad misconception about evolution that it proceeds in a linear progression of one successfully evolving species after another displacing its immediate ancestors. Such a conception of human history is equally mistaken, and is often criticized with terms such as “Whiggish history” or “determinism” with a variety of adjectives (technological, social, cultural, historical). That includes the history of science, where the first version we often hear is one that has been rationally reconstructed by looking back at the successes and putting them into a linear narrative. Oh, there are usually a few errors thrown in, but they’re usually fit into the linear narrative as challenges that are overcome by the improvement of theories. The reality is a lot messier, and getting into the details makes it clear that not only is a Whiggish history of science mistaken, but that science doesn’t proceed through the algorithmic application of “the scientific method,” and in fact that there is no such thing as “the scientific method." Rather, there is a diverse set of methods that are themselves evolving in various ways, and sometimes not only do methods which are fully endorsed as rational and scientific produce erroneous results, sometimes methods which have no such endorsement and are even demonstrably irrational fortuitously produce correct results. For example, Johannes Kepler was a neo-pythagorean number mystic who correctly produced his second law of planetary motion by taking an incorrect version of the law based on his intuitions and deriving the correct version from it by way of a mathematical argument that contained an error. Although he fortuitously got the right answer and receives credit for devising it, he was not justified in believing it to be true on the basis of his erroneous proof. With his first law, by contrast, he followed an almost perfectly textbook version of the hypothetico-deductive model of scientific method of formulating hypotheses and testing them against Tycho Brahe’s data. The history of the scientific revolution includes numerous instances of new developments occurring piecemeal, with many prior erroneous notions being retained. Copernicus retained not only perfectly circular orbits and celestial spheres, but still needed to add epicycles to get his theory any where close to the predictive accuracy of the Ptolemaic models in use. Galileo insisted on retaining perfect circles and insisting that circular motion was natural motion, refusing to consider Kepler’s elliptical orbits. There seems to be a good case for “path dependence” in science. Even the most revolutionary changes are actually building on bits and pieces that have come before–and sometimes rediscovering work that had already been done before, like Galileo’s derivation of the uniform acceleration of falling bodies that had already been done by Nicole Oresme and the Oxford calculators. And the social and cultural environment–not just the scientific history–has an effect on what kinds of hypotheses are considered and accepted. This conservativity of scientific change is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it suggests that we’re not likely to see claims that purport to radically overthrow existing theory (that “everything we know is wrong”) succeed–even if they happen to be correct. And given that there are many more ways to go wrong than to go right, such radical revisions are very likely not to be correct. Even where new theories are correct in some of their more radical claims (e.g., like Copernicus’ heliocentric model, or Wegener’s continental drift), it often requires other pieces to fall into place before they become accepted (and before it becomes rational to accept them). On the other hand, this also means that we’re likely to be blinded to new possibilities by what we already accept that seems to work well enough, even though it may be an inaccurate description of the world that is merely predictively successful. “Consensus science” at any given time probably includes lots of claims that aren’t true. My inference from this is that we need both visionaries and skeptics, and a division of cognitive labor that’s largely conservative, but with tolerance for diversity and a few radicals generating the crazy hypotheses that may turn out to be true. The critique of evidence-based medicine made by Kimball Atwood and Steven Novella–that it fails to consider prior plausibility of hypotheses to be tested–is a good one that recognizes the unlikelihood of radical hypotheses to be correct, and thus that huge amounts of money shouldn’t be spent to generate and test them. (Their point is actually stronger than that, since most of the “radical hypotheses” in question are not really radical or novel, but are based on already discredited views of how the world works.) But that critique shouldn’t be taken to exclude anyone from engaging in the generation and test of hypotheses that don’t appear to have a plausible mechanism, because there is ample precedent for new phenomena being discovered before the mechanisms that explain them. I think there’s a tendency among skeptics to talk about science as though it’s a unified discipline, with a singular methodology, that makes continuous progress, and where the consensus at any moment is the most appropriate thing to believe. The history of science suggests, on the other hand, that it’s composed of multiple disciplines, with multiple methods, that proceeds in fits and starts, that has dead-ends, that sometimes rediscovers correct-but-ignored past discoveries, and is both fallible and influenced by cultural context. At any given time, some theories are not only well-established but unified well with others across disciplines, while others don’t fit comfortably well with others, or may be idealized models that have predictive efficacy but seem unlikely to be accurate descriptions of reality in their details. To insist on an overly rationalistic and ahistorical model is not just out-of-date history and philosophy of science, it’s a “coloring book” oversimplification. While that may be useful for introducing ideas about science to children, it’s not something we should continue to hold to as adults.