What did I tell you?
Well, I was hacking browsing through the Library of Congress the other day, and look what I stumbled upon. I bet you feel pretty silly for thinking I was joking, now don't you?
(Found via JanieBelle. Make your own.)
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Exit Light
I promised you new features to be unveiled today, and the wait is over! If you're wondering what I'm talking about, check here.
So, today I present to you the grand opening of The Night Museum, and the emergence of my alter ego, Nate Black. The Night Museum will be used primarily to mirror modern society, putting them on exhibit within it. Through this method, I Nate will expose its flaws and teach you how to find and correct them in yourselves.
Plus, if I'm ever feeling particularly pissed off, Nate has carte blanche to take over and tear anyone he wishes a new one.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
De-Lurk, Lest the Terrorists Win
You heard me. It's de-lurking week, which means that if you've been lurking around here, now's your chance obligation to drop me a comment. I know there's at least one of you out there, and if you don't comment here, you will be nagged. You know who you are.
Saturday, January 06, 2007
More Random than Random
And here you are with the final sample article I wrote up:
Quick quiz: What do streak-shooting basketball players, Princeton’s Global Consciousness Project, and iTunes’ Smart Shuffle feature have in common. If you said, “They’re all the result of people misinterpreting random data,” then you’re reading this out loud and probably getting strange looks right about now (You’re also right).
The human mind doesn’t do well with the random, but, as with most flaws in human perception, there’s actually a good reason for this. In harsher times, when survival was less of a given than it is today, there was a distinct evolutionary advantage to finding patterns. A human who noticed many patterns was more likely to spot the pattern indicative of a predator, or realize that a seed dropped into the ground last year had turned into a sprout this year. A few extra patterns spotted may incur slight inconveniences, but it’s still a lot better than dying because you missed one.
The flip side to this is that now humans aren’t good judges of random data, and start to see patterns where there are none. For instance, take the following three strings of numbers, representing a random choice from 4 numbers:
12414412
23123441
21434231
One of them is completely random, the other two aren’t. Which one do you think is the random one? Human instincts lead most people towards the second or third choice, but it’s actually the first one—which deviates the most from the expected distribution and looks streakiest—which I generated randomly. It has too many 4’s and 1’s and absolutely no 3’s, but that was the way the dice rolled. In the long run, random data will indeed average out, but streaks are to be expected in the short term.
So let’s go back to the examples I listed at the beginning of this article. It’s a commonly-held belief that in basketball, players are prone to streak shooting, often referred to as the “hot hand.” After a few successful shots, a player is believed to “loosen up” or “get into a groove.” The reverse supposedly happen after a few misses. To determine whether or not this actually happens, Gilovich et al. examined the records of the Philadelphia 76ers during the ’80-’81 season. The results were surprising, to say the least: It turned out that after a series of baskets, players were less likely to score again. On the other hand, after a series of misses, players were more likely to land a basket. What was really going on is that people were noticing the streaks that inevitably arise in random data and believing them to be non-random.
A similar situation arose with the shuffle feature on iPods at one point. Apple received numerous complaints and inquiries from people who claimed that their iPods were playing favorites. Some artists or albums seemed to show up much too often, while others too rarely—if at all. Their software engineers went over the random number generator again and again, and they found nothing wrong with it. And yet people wouldn’t believe them. Eventually, they decided they had to address it somehow, so they came out with the “smart shuffle” feature. It allowed people to decrease the likelihood that multiple songs by the same artist would be heard within a small amount of time. As Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder described it, “We're making it less random to make it feel more random.”
My final example is the worst of the bunch: Princeton’s Global Consciousness Project. This project was inspired by work done in PEAR (The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research), and it essentially boils down to people watching random numbers and trying to judge if they see deviations during major world events. And, surprising as it may not be, they’re able to find deviations from a perfectly chance distribution around every major event (and plenty of deviations around absolutely nothing, but they don’t talk about them). They claim that these deviations are due to some “quantum energy field” in the world caused by human consciousness. In the eight years that the project has been active, all it's accomplished is spotting streaks in random data while wasting mass amounts of time and money, all of which could have been saved with just a little bit better understanding of what 'random' means, but no one's stepped in to put a stop to it, so far.
Friday, January 05, 2007
Psyched Out
Here you are with the next sample article I came up with:
This week I’m starting off with a puzzle for you. You’re presented with four cards, showing A, D, 4, and 7. Each card has a letter on one side and a number on the other. Which card(s) must you turn over in order to determine whether the following statement is false? “If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side.”
Got your answer? Well, statistically, 80-90% of you are going to be wrong. [Okay, now that this is on my blog, I predict that 80-90% of my regular readers will be right.] Most people will say A and 4, but the correct answer is actually A and 7. Think about it: When is the statement false? Only when a card has a vowel on one side and an odd number on the other. So, to determine whether it’s false, we have to test all cases where it might be, which is just the A and 7. Most people don’t think this way naturally, however. It’s human nature to look for cases that would confirm a given statement, rather than statements which would falsify it. This is known as the Confirmation Bias, and it’s one of the most pervasive flaws in critical thinking.
You see this bias taking hold all over the place, but I’m going to focus on just one case now: the psychic. The success of a psychic hinges almost completely on exploiting the confirmation bias. The typical psychic will make numerous “predictions” throughout his or her career. Most of these will be quite vague, allowing the audience to shoehorn them into events on their own. Once the prediction has been shoehorned to match some specific event, it counts as a “hit” for the psychic. If the prediction can’t easily be shoehorned into anything, it’s forgotten. So the predictions become a series of hits with no memorable misses.
When reading people, the same tactic of vague guesses can often be applied successfully, but this isn’t the sole tool at the psychic’s disposal. Most stage psychics, such as the infamous Sylvia Brown, use a technique known as “cold reading,” which relies on the subject’s inclination to try to sort out vague statements and find more meaning in them than there actually is. A statement that gets no reaction is slowly modified until it does garner a reaction, and as soon as the subject responds positively, the psychic immediately reinforces what the subject has said as if it were the original prediction.
For instance, the psychic may start out by saying s/he’s sensing something about December. If the subject or someone close to them was born in December, they’ll say so and the psychic can immediately reinforce this by saying something like, “Yes, I see that.” If it isn’t a birthday, it could be an anniversary, or even just the holidays that sticks out in the subject’s mind. Even if none of this works out, the psychic can expand it to “…maybe a nearby month, January or November?” Success is inevitable.
Not all psychics are this benign, though. Some, such as John Edwards of Crossing Over fame, have been known to use “hot reading.” Hot reading involves actions such as Googling the names of audience members, or hidden accomplices within the audience who chat people up before the show. It’s a lot more direct and successful than cold reading, but it’s also a lot more obviously fraudulent once it’s exposed.
Now, despite all these arguments against how psychics operate, we should still be open to the possibility that telepathy could indeed exist. The best way to determine this is, of course, a scientific trial. Not surprisingly, many such trials have been performed. Some of them actually claimed to show positive results, but they’ve never held up to scrutiny. The rest showed no evidence of telepathy existing. But surely, if a famous medium such as John Edwards wished to prove himself, he could pass such a test easily, couldn’t he? Yet he (and all other famous psychics) has completely refused to be tested by anyone who wasn’t already a believer in telepathy. How surprising.
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Skeptic's Circle #51
The 51st Skeptic's Circle is now up over at See you at Enceladus. Babbler has fortunately had the guts to be the first to step down from going overboard with creativity, so I don't have to worry about the bar being quite so high when it gets around to me. (Though I've already started making preparations, so I'm covered if I do have to be creative.)
Clashing HeadOn with the Evidence
Since I'm not sending them in to the paper, I'm free to publish the sample articles I came up with publically. The material isn't quite up my normal niche, but there's no reason not to post it anyways. Here's the first article, and you can expect to see the next two over the next couple of days.
HeadOn. Apply directly to the forehead.
HeadOn. Apply directly to the forehead.
HeadOn. Apply directly to the forehead. (Repeat ad nauseum)
The ad may be annoying, but it does succeed in getting your attention. It’s also succeeded in convincing thousands of consumers to buy the product, leading the producers to create spin-off products with their own annoying commercials.
What the ad doesn’t do, however, is tell you what Head On actually does. It implies that it treats headaches, and it tells people to apply it to their foreheads. Later commercials have included people coming onto the screen claiming the product is “great” or “amazing.” The manufacturers, Miralus Healthcare, state that “It can be used by anyone and as often as needed. There are no dosage restrictions or health risks associated with its use.” But not a single claim that it actually does anything, and in fact, HeadOn turns out to do exactly what they claim it does: nothing.
HeadOn, as well as its spin-off products, are what are known as “homeopathic” remedies. Homeopathic medicine works by the very counter-intuitive principle that “Like cures like, and the smaller the dose, the better.” For instance, if a certain plant causes a headache when consumed, then a homeopath would argue that consuming very little of the plant would cause less of a headache. So, if you have a headache and consume very little of this plant, then your headache should go away, by their logic.
What homeopaths generally do to prepare a product is to repeatedly dilute the active ingredient (generally some harmful substance) by factors of ten or a hundred. Supposedly, the more dilutions, the better. A typical minimum dilution of homeopathic products is 6X, which means it’s been diluted by a factor of ten six times (to one millionth the original strength). Many products are sold with even greater dilutions than this, and “Extra Strength” means there’s even less of the active ingredient. With the strongest dilutions, such as the 30X of Golden Seal Hydrastis in one of Miralus’ other products, there isn’t likely to be even a single molecule of active ingredient.
Despite the illogical nature of homeopathy, there are thousands of people out there who will claim that homeopathy does indeed work. Doesn’t this mean there’s something to it? Well, no. This is just what’s known as the Placebo Effect. What happens here is that when people take what they think is a cure for their ailment, they’re likely to claim it actually helped them, even if all they took was a simple sugar pill. These perceptions stem partly from the general cyclic nature of most ailments. Left untreated, most ailments steadily get worse, and then get better on their own. It is when they are at their worst that people go out and look for cures, so it’s no surprise if it gets better soon afterwards. Additionally, positive thinking after taking medicine can lead people to overestimate their recovery, also contributing to this effect.
The problem with homeopathy is that it flies in the face of both common medical practice and logic itself. One of the most important criteria a treatment must demonstrate to be accepted by the medical community is dose-response correlation. This means that the more of the treatment is used, the more effective it is (within some reasonable range). Homeopathy, on the other hand, claims that less is better. As for the logical problems with it, first consider the fact that homeopathic products are sold with multiple applications. By their arguments, wouldn’t multiple applications decrease the overall effectiveness? Now, consider the logical extreme of the dilution process: taking none of the active ingredient at all. Hey, we’re already doing that! Why bother buying it at all? We’re already at maximum effectiveness
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
The State of the Blog
Well, on the 11th it will be 6 months since I started this blog, so I thought I'd give you guys a general update on my plans and what I've learned about blogging at this time.
First of all, what I've found out: It took a couple months or so to find a niche I could best fill, but I think I've got it now. My most popular posts so far are the Distilled Wisdom series and other more philosophically-oriented posts. I fully intend to keep this up, and will have the next entry in Distilled Wisdom out in a few weeks, once work on my research paper has settled down. I also intend to do a follow-up to The First Lever (three guesses what it'll be called), on how self-interest leads people into wooish beliefs.
Now, I mentioned a few times in the past that I was planning to apply for a column in the school newspaper. I recently found out, however, from talking with people who have been involved with it, that it's not quite that simple. They won't let you have just a column, it seems, and you'll be roped in for tons of other duties as well. With this in mind, along with my overfull schedule and continuing research project, I've decided to forgo applying. Instead, I'll be using my time to concentrate on this blog, keeping up what I've done before, and adding new features. Also, there's one other side-project I have going on which I'll talk about in the future.
Did I say new features? Well, you'll have to wait until the actual half-anniversary to see what I mean. I'm not giving you any hints, either. You'll have to sit there in torture wondering about it. Or you could get a life.
As far as templating goes, I'm also planning to expand the blogroll a bit. I'm going to split it up into a few categories, including an "Anti-Blogroll," which will list blogs which express views disagreeing with me, but which I feel are still well-written enough to be worth reading.
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Commercial Skepticism
Getting new people into skepticism is one of the hardest problems we face. Skepticism isn't magical, it doesn't seem to let you in on secret knowledge (though in some cases, we are the very few sane ones), and it doesn't offer miracles. All we really offer is reality, and that isn't enough for many people. So, we need a hook, and here's what I've come up with:
Skepticism will save you money.
Skepticism will prevent you from spending your money on useless products and services. Intrigued yet? Hopefully with this tact, people will be more likely to give it a shot, find that it works, and then start applying it to other things.
(Note to medical skeptics: Yes, I know it can also save your life, but the problem is that woo will also claim to be able to save your life, so we don't come out ahead here in the view of the layman.)
So, I'm going to do a post today on an advertisement I found dumped in the backseat of my mother's car, presumably found plastered to her windshield. Conveniently, it's for a psychic. Here's basically what it looked like (sans graphics, some formatting, and contact information):
PSYCHIC SOLUTIONS
World Renowned Master Psychic
OPEN A DOOR TO THE FUTURE
I will tell you enough of your past to convince you of your future without you speaking a single word. One does not live without problems such as: love, marriage, health, business, etc., yet why endure them when a gifted PSYCHIC can and will help you with WHATEVER THE PROBLEMS MAY BE.You May Have Seen Her
- Ora Analysis
- Aroma Therapy
- Past Life Readings
- Dream Interpretations
- Tarot Cards
- Crystal Readings
On TV or Read About Her! Now You
Can See a "True" Psychic For Positive Results
[Phone number and pricing cut]
ONE VISIT WILL BE OF IMMENSE VALUE TO YOU!
Normally, I typically go after spelling, grammar, and formatting first. However, this is an advertisement, so note that a lot of my guidelines for formatting don't apply here. Spelling and grammar still do, of course. So, let's get nit-picky!
- "World Renowned" should be "World-Renowned." Multiple-word adjectives should be hyphenated, just like "multiple-word" in this sentence.
- "Ora" is most likely a horrible misspelling of "aura." This one's really amateurish.
- Again, "Past Life" should be "Past-Life."
- For the last block of text, don't switch overall formatting in the middle of a sentence. Particularly in advertisement, where periods aren't always required, people are going to mistake this as being a break between sentences at first glance.
- Keep consistent with your capitalization scheme. You can capitalize every word, or you could do every word except "small" words (articles, conjunctions, and prepositions of 4-letters or less), but don't switch around.
- The viewpoint changes throughout the advertisement. Sometimes it's the psychic talking in first-person, sometimes it's third-person.
Now, we go on to three tasks you should always perform when dissecting an advertisement. The first of these is to look for loaded terms. These are terms that carry emotional weight, but may not mean anything in the real world (you can't falsify a claim that uses them). A brief look through the advertisement gets the following:
- "World Renowned" - Makes it sound like she's known all over the world. But could you bring a court case against her with this term? Nope, she could just claim she has a cousin in Italy or whatever, so she's known by someone over there. This term is essentially meaningless.
- "Master" - This generally means one of two things. In trade skills, it means you've taken on apprentices. In other cases, it means you're perfect at your profession. People are going to assume the latter, but again this is unfalsifiable. She could simply claim that being a psychic by nature has uncertainties, so even someone who's mastered the art will sometimes be wrong. She could also claim she was using the first definition, and she has an apprentice.
- "Gifted" - Someone with an ability beyond most other people is called "gifted," but ask yourself this: How many people are there in the world who don't excel in some area enough to be considered "gifted" in it? Very few. It might be quantum physics they're gifted in, or it might be trivia about The Beatles, but claiming you're gifted is almost always safe. In this case, I'm guessing she thinks she's gifted at fraud - though I don't think this is a particularly good attempt at it.
- "You May Have Seen Her On TV or Read About Her!" - Was she on TV as a psychic, or was she on TV because Penn and Teller were debunking her on Bullshit!? Was she in a book about famous psychics, or was she mentioned in The Demon-Haunted World? It makes a difference, but the advert never says.
And finally, the third task: Look for what isn't said. Often, advertisements will leave out information that seems like it would be important. That they left it out can be really telling. This case is no exception. Go up and see if you can spot it for yourself.
Found it? The big ingredient that's missing is the name of the psychic. She's world-renowned, we may have seen her on TV or read about her, but you won't tell us who she is!? Now that's suspicious. My guess is that they're doing this as they don't have just one psychic at this agency, so they can get away with multiple people giving readings without the customers knowing, much like the Miss Cleo scam.
Now, there's something else I'd like to point out in this particular advert:
I will tell you enough of your past to convince you of your future without you speaking a single word. One does not live without problems such as: love, marriage, health, business, etc....
Is it just me, or is she completely giving away the scam here? She'll tell you things about your past that happen to everyone on earth, and use this to convince you that she's also right about your future. Also, I doubt that the "without you speaking a single word" part is true. Psychics often engage in Cold Reading to draw information out of their
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Daybreak
With a flicker, the lights come back on. Infophile is still standing behind the podium, alive and well, and he continues his presentation.
Again, I must sincerely apologize for the difficulty, but with no further delay, on with the skepticism!
Medicine
Looking back through history, it seems that every age has its own "plagues." As soon as one is cured, people start living a bit longer and run into other plagues at older ages. In North American society, we rarely see deaths from the bubonic plague or tuberculosis thanks to improvements in hygiene and the development of vaccines. Instead, people end up dying from heart disease or the plague of our modern era: Cancer.
We've made immense progress in the battle against cancer, but we haven't beaten all forms of it quite yet. This latter fact has led some people to be dissatisfied with the state of cancer research, and they try to find people to blame for it. In his post, Bloviations and pontifications on the state of cancer research, part 2 (of 2), Orac replies to one such critic. He explains that things really aren't as bad as the critics would have you believe. Most of the time, they're just cherry-picking the evidence that makes progress in the fight against cancer look bad, while ignoring evidence of progress.
From Denialism.com, we learn of another organization making this same mistake: The Family Research Council, or FRC. As part of their attack on the morning-after pill, they pointed out the datum that women who received the pill ahead of time were just as likely to conceive as those who relied on going out to purchase it when needed, and somehow stretched this into saying it doesn't work at all. The fact that women who actually use it tend to conceive much less than those who do apparently slipped their minds.
One much more minor "plague" that humans have faced throughout all of their history is allergies. In a few cases, allergies can lead to death, but in most cases they're simply an inconvenience. Given the vast number of people who have some sort of allergies, however (and I count myself in this number), a cure for allergies would be quite a boon. One person who's tried to find such a cure is Patrick Holford, his particular cure being nutritional supplements. You can also see the paltry evidence for another of his claims - that "[t]he evidence for IgG antibody reactions as a basis for food intolerances continues to grow" - at Holford Watch.
Junkfood Science discusses two other health issues that worry many in modern society. The first is obesity, in a discussion of a claim that's been circulating the media recently that apparently overweight people cost their employers more money (as an altie might claim, it's just one symptom of overall poor "wellness," but I digress). The original research paper on the subject shows that reality is much more complicated. Rather than explain it all here, I'll just recommend you go and read it yourself.
The other issue highlighted here is that of autism, a developmental disorder that seems to be afflicting more and more people (or just more and more people getting diagnosed because of increasing awareness). We don't know what actually causes autism, but one small but vocal sect claims that it's exposure to mercury in vaccines at an early age which is to blame. To remedy this, they recommend using EDTA chelation therapy, a very risky proceedure which has shown no signs of benefiting anyone with autism. Whenever some altie asks you "What's the harm?" in buying into their claims, you might want to point them to all the deaths chelation therapy for autism has caused.
No skeptical discussion of medicine would be complete without some reference to "Traditional Chinese Medicine," a big buzz word among many alties. This time however, I don't bring you a reference to it, but rather an entire history of it brought to you by Wandering Primate. Of course, given the lengthy history of it, it's been split up into two parts for ease of digestion: Part 1, Part 2. You might also note that many people who currently follow TCM ignore much that it actually said, such as recommending you imbibe "cinnabar and gold."
Myths and Hoaxes
Myths arise in every culture. A few strange sights get connected together, a hoaxer makes a giant footprint, some blurry film, and all of a sudden you have millions of people believing in a giant ape-like creature living in the Pacific Northwest. One man, Mike Lake, is now trying to get this mythical creature officially recognized as being endagered. After all, he argues, its hold on existence itself in tenuous.
One other hoax that has been fooling many amateur scholars is the Kensington Runestone. The stone was a 19th century hoax which attempted to make it look like a 16th century artifact. Recently, the stone underwent scientific analysis in Sweden in an attempt to add further evidence to its actual date. Sadly, however, nothing much of use was obtained beyond what was already known.
Another famous stone hoax was the "Ica Stones" discovered in Peru. The stones show humans interacting with almost every type of dinosaur imaginable, and have been touted by creationists as evidence that humans lived alongside dinosaurs. Unfortunately, the stones were later revealed to have been carved by the very people who claimed to have found them. And yet, creationists still try to use them as evidence...
If the above hoaxes seem a bit tame to you, how about a woman giving birth to rabbits? Providentia brings us the story of this hoax, and I won't spoil it any further here.
Miscellenia
Not everything worthy can be easily pigeonholed, so my last section details the best of the rest. First up is an anecdote about anecdotes from Cospiracy factory, which serves to illustrate the problems with anecdotes in determining physical causes, and how people often assume more from them than is warranted.
News from Hawkhill Acres brings us a story about a man who claimed to have temporarily died and spent some time in heaven. His evidence? Oh look, it's another anecdote. Nothing to say the vision of heaven he saw wasn't just a fevered hallucination created by his admittedly injured mind.
Blake Stacey of Science after Sunset brings us three posts discussing recent publications. He takes on a Newsweek article on sexual education, Michael Behe's new book, The Edge of Evolution, and Time's poor choice of an author for Richard Dawkin's profile.
Matt the Pooflinger shows us how some really far-out people can actually be quite humorous. Case in point, LDS splinter cult leader Art Bulla, who saw something supernatural in 1969 (rearrange the letters of LDS for my guess as to what it might have been).
I managed to sneak in a couple of links to his posts earlier, but Bronze Dog's contributions this week do deserve their own note. In addition to the Doggerel linked previously (Wellness and "What's the harm?"), he also brings you the popular altie doggerel of Vibration, the popular creationist (and others) doggerel of "[Evil Guy] believed in [Theory]," and a debate of fundamental reasoning in Why versus Why.
Critical thinking skills are important to a skeptic, but if you don't use them they'll rot. To counter this, Bob from Hot Dogs, Pretzels, and Perplexing Questions brings us the Paradox of the Question to challenge your mental faculties. Ponder this for yourself: If you could ask any question whatsoever and get a truthful answer to it, what would be the best question to ask?
Whatever question you come up with there, be careful you don't get too certain it's the right one. As Steven Novella cautions us, "The certainty that one is correct is the most reliable predictor of error, for knowledge stems from scientific methodology and certainty is anathema to such inquiry." Read his entire post on the subject of certainty at I'm Certain You're Going to Love This One.
And that's it for the Skeptic's Circle! It's certainly been some night, hasn't it? The next edition of the circle with be on May 24th, hosted by Memoirs of a Skepchick. You can send your submissions in to skepchick [at] skepchick [dot] org. Hope to see you there!
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