O'Reilly to commit career suicide

Against all reason, Bill O'Reilly has agreed to appear on The Colbert Report this Thursday, and he's let Stephen Colbert appear on The O'Reilly Factor. What could he possibly be thinking?

Well, maybe he's thinking that The Colbert Report is serious again. I wouldn't put it past him.

On the other hand, judging by his past actions, O'Reilly does seem to have a tendency to make the worst possible publicity move. Maybe he just decided it's been long enough since he made a complete ass of himself.

This isn't to say I'm not gleeful that this is happening, I'm just slightly baffled. Ah well, not that it matters. Fare thee well, Bill O'Reilly's career.

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The Official Opening of the Night Museum

Alright, it's officially open for browsing! You can head to the lobby of the Night Museum at The Lobby, or you could simply browse it like a blog here.

And if you're interested in learning more about the behavior of Spherical Cows, there's an exhibit on them available (with more information than was given in the initial presentation).

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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

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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.

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