today's flim-flam links

1. Was Steinbeck's Travels with Charley a whole lotta hooey? And, if so, why don't more scholars care? [via Jesse Walker]

2. Does every continent have its own James Randi?

3. Gandhi demythologized. [via ALDaily, although Orwell got there decades earlier.]

4. In which a con artist gets 20 to life.

5. Jackie Chan is alive and kicking.

Martin Gardner, RIP

Martin Gardner has passed away at the age of 95. I can still remember the first time I read Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, one of the books that kick-started my critical thinking skills and made me wish I had double majored in English and biology rather than English and history.

Out of all the book's trenchant dissections of all sorts of pseudoscience, my favorite is the bit on hollow earth theories, including Cyrus Reed Teed's unbelievable notion that we live inside a sphere.

The entire cosmos, Teed argued, is like an egg. We live on the inner surface of the shell, and inside the hollow are the sun, moon, stars, planets, and comets. What is outside? Absolutely nothing! The inside is all there is. You can't see across it because the atmosphere is too dense....

One of the Gardner's key insights, in his analysis of crankish patterns of behavior, was to point out the crank's fondness for language games.

Like most psuedo-scientists, who wish to impress the reader with their vast scientific knowledge, Teed has a tendency to let his words carry him into obscurities sometimes hard to follow. Planets, for example, are "spheres of substance aggregated through the impact of afferent and efferent fluxions of essence...." And comets are nothing less than "composed of cruosic 'force,' caused by condensation of substance through the dissipation of the coloric substance at the opening of the electro-magnetic circuits, which closes the conduits of solar and lunar 'energy.'"

It seems hard to believe that at one point Teed--who began calling himself "Koresh"--had roughly 4,000 followers. But then, one skim through Fads and Fallacies proves that it's not so hard to believe after all. It takes the Martin Gardners of the world to puncture our propensity to be drawn to the cruosic force of the absurd.

observations

1. Most of what you know is wrong.

2. Even what's right is only mostly right.

3. Part of the problem is the residue of half-facts and pseudofacts, the detritus of actual memory that becomes indistinguishable from truth in the cluttered mind.

4. Or, to use a different metaphor, from a grab-bag of anecdotes and factoids, you are likely to pluck something stale or half-eaten.

5. It's not whether you're wrong--because you probably are--but whether you are willing to intellectually clean house, or, again switching metaphors, pick that stale factoid out of your teeth.



For what it's worth, a slew of articles--this one in particular--punctured a myth I'd believed true, and prompted this post. As a teacher who loves an impromptu lecture, I've assembled a vast mental trivia collection, always ready to deploy a fact that might amplify a point I'm making. It hurts to be wrong, but it hurts more to be confidently, persuasively wrong in front of a class full of eager learners.

So I become my own Snopes.com, constantly fact-checking myself. And although the folks who run Snopes worry that extreme skepticism is harmful to knowledge, in my experience, in the grand scheme it's dwarfed by gullibility, intellectual laziness, and false confidence in fake facts.

Skeptics Circle reaches 100

And the guy who took it over from Saint Nate hosts, appropriately.

enlightenment wins!

JZ Knight won her lawsuit. Hokum by any other name is still intellectual property.

enlightenment is copyrighted

No, really:

Trial is starting in Olympia in the lawsuit brought by the Ramtha School founder JZ Knight against another spiritual teacher called WhiteWind Weaver.

In the trial on today's calendar in Thurston County Superior Court, the Ramtha school in Yelm school accuses Weaver of using some of its teachings in her classes at Rainier.

Knight says she channels the spirit of an ancient warrior named Ramtha. Weaver attended a Ramtha seminar and signed a contract agreeing not to use the teachings for her own commercial purposes.

Weaver's defense: the teachings are either original to her, or in the "public domain."

I am looking forward to learning which principles of enlightenment are fully monetizable.

aim your prayers higher next time

A little while ago, there was a mild flurry over the Focus on the Family goof who half-jokingly suggested that folks pray for rain during the Democratic National Convention. You know, to dampen enthusiasm for a certain prominent candidate.

Turns out it worked. Sort of.

[via Crooks and Liars via PZ]

skepticism'll clear that up

The 85th edition of The Skeptics' Circle includes much linky goodness, including the expected bashing on Expelled, as well as a persistent debunking of the illusory connection between autism and mercury-based vaccines that has somehow slithered into this year's presidential race. (And no, no major candidate comes out looking good on this one.)

Check it.

[Today's tie found here.]

laugh track

As I'm plowing through 134-page papers outlining the nuances of retributivism, Melissa is in a stupor on the couch, watching Season 3 of Friends. I just realized that lacking cable TV means we have a lot less laughter in our home, due to the distinct deficit of laugh tracks.

Which brings me to an idea: in these days of innovative "shaming" punishments, what could be more appropriate, for, say, a convicted quack to be forced to carry around some kind of automatic laugh-generating device that'd set itself to howling at the end of every sentence the woo-meister uttered? Then we wouldn't need the tireless efforts of the skeptics. We'd all know exactly when to chortle in appropriate derision.

Bonus: No deficit of carnivals. PZ has a surfeit of links.

ride that skeptical wave

Over at The Skeptical Surfer, it's the 78th installment of the Skeptics' Circle. The bogus wipes out every time.

"blue ghost" spooks the stupid

I'm sorry, but this is just dumb.

It's a friggin' bug, crawling across a lens, out-of-focus and off-color. It moves like a bug, looks like a bug, and is bug-sized, at least relative to its distance from the camera. (Notice how the camera turns the red "news" "reporter's" jacket blue, too.) I don't have a whole lotta faith in the (anonymous? unknown?) witnesses who "saw" the blue glow outside the station, either. The guy walking by the car, when the ghost "lands" on the window, doesn't even bat an eye. You'd think he'd be freaking out.

If attendant Abuzahrieh had torn himself away from his monitor for even thirty seconds, and looked outside to see the bug on the camera, no story.

Is it just that time of year again?

Skeptics' Circle: a bevy of choices

Over at Holford Watch, the 73rd incarnation.

more dubious vampire math

You'd think the editors of Skeptical Inquirer would've seen through this one:

If we factor in the human birthrate into our discussion, we find that, after a few months, the human birthrate is very small compared to the number of deaths due to vampires. This means that ignoring this factor has a negligibly small impact on our conclusion. In our example, the death of humanity would be prolonged by only one month.

Sadly, this argument deserves to be called the Vampire Math Fallacy.

Two words: vampire hunters.

young scientists bring the skepticism

Via NewScientist:

On 9 October, Sense about Science, a charitable trust based in London that works with 3000 young UK-based researchers, published a pamphlet detailing how its irked members had telephoned numerous companies to ask how their products actually worked. Some of the answers are simply amusing, but others - for example, herbal products that claim to clear the body of 100 parasite species - shocked those making the calls.

"The saddest part is that a lot of people who buy these things are desperately ill, perhaps with cancer or multiple sclerosis," says pamphlet author Frank Swain. Yet the firms "seemed completely unprepared for anyone to take issue with their products," says co-author Alice Tuff.

Read the full report here [pdf]. In one of the funnier (sadder?) exchanges, a company rep for a parasite-removing potion sends one of the skeptics a link to a Wikipedia page listing both real and fictitious parasites.

refresh yourself with healthy skepticism

Bad news: Peter Popoff, inexplicably, is back.

On his web site Popoff tells the audience, "I'm going to tell you about the miracle spring water." He says that while holding a very small plastic tube that holds a small amount of clear liquid.

Most infomercials promise amazing results, but Popoff promises outright miracles. Popoff says the little packet of water he advertises says can cure anything from cancer to bankruptcy. And he promises the audience, "You're going to see restoration - you're going to see miracles in your life."

Good news: so is the Skeptics' Circle.

skepticism: always in style

This week's Skeptics' Circle (#68) is neatly laid out and clearly organized. For some reason, though, this photo sits at the top, and is never explained.

I've done a little digging: there's more where it came from. Click through only if you possess a cast-iron stomach.

have your own out-of-body experience

Daniel Wegner's The Illusion of Conscious Will describes subjects in an experiment who, by a little trickery with mirrors, became convinced that someone else's arm was their own--and described how it felt to "control" the other hand.

Now, in a similar vein, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences with a clever setup:

To trick his subjects, Ehrsson gave had them wear a head-mounted display that showed them footage of themselves filmed from behind, while preventing them from seeing anything else. He then used a plastic rod to prod the subject in the chest and simultaneously held a second rod in front of the camera behind them, to make it seem that the illusory "person" viewed from behind was being prodded in the chest too.

Subjects physically felt themselves being prodded, but also had the weird sensation that it was their alter ego in the film footage being prodded. "It gives you a very strong sensation you're sitting somewhere else," Ehrsson said at a press conference held in London.

The video above shows a similar experiment performed by Olaf Blanke.

Skeptics' Circle goes gamer

Did you know you can weaponize a fallacy? (Did you know that "weaponize" is a verb?)

Skeptics' Circle abstracts posted

It should be a lively conference. I'm especially looking forward to Lorne Ipsum's talk on the overblown menace of diet soda.

Skeptics' Circle #65 posted

Steven Novella presents Skeptics' Circle #65, a trip through a Museum of Skepticism.

"If you really pay attention in this part of the tour then maybe one day you can learn to be a skeptic and you'll have your own display in the museum." He wasn't sure if the skeptical looks he was getting from the kids was a good thing or a bad thing. Well, best just to press on.

We could certainly use a Museum of Skepticism in the real world--a counterpart to the digital collection at the Skeptiseum.