Monthly Archives: February 2010
To Doubt, Perchance to Think…
As a skeptic, I doubt. But to what extent and under what circumstances does it remain reasonable to doubt? Does being a ‘true’ skeptic mean that I should doubt absolutely anything and everything, even my own skepticism? My view is that it is untenable to doubt literally everything, not logically possible to do so coherently.
To reject all claims to fact because one cannot confirm or know something absolutely, to practice epistemic nihilism, is, I hold, manifestly unreasonable. I hold further that it is rational to accept the statements of trained experts, not on the basis of authoritarian dogma, but upon the known reliability of those statements they have made and continue to make when speaking within their area of expertise, their area of competence, and so long as one is not given sound cause to doubt those statements.
This is not to say that someone can only be trusted within the confines of a series of letters before or after their names, within the restrictions of a piece of paper hanging from the wall behind their desk, or only within the limits of a narrow specialty, for some people have stellar competency in a number of areas by way of prior training and experience — true polymaths — though these are uncommon to say the least. Sadly, much to my chagrin (Cool! I actually have a chagrin!), I am not one of these.
It IS to say, however, that when any claimed expert makes a statement of fact, that the alleged expert in question be known as reliably trustworthy and to have sufficient ability or familiarity with the matter expounded upon. All it takes to verify someone’s claimed credentials is a simple mouse-click or phone call to the right person.
Do I claim academic or scientific expertise? Well, not yet — though I do have a number of interests that led me to familiarity with certain topics in addition to skeptical issues: for one, as a Cthulhu Mythos geek I can spout off the names, proper pronunciations of said names, the origins, habits, histories, home planets, and even biological details of a variety of Lovecraftian monsters and gods, though this is not much help outside of role-playing gaming circles. It has led, however, to my screen-name and the name of this blog. But I’ve rambled enough…
Knowledge exists, and some people have more than others. This is a fact of life. Those who have more we call ‘experts.’ The fact, the recognition, that some have more knowledge than others is not elitism. To reject this on the basis that it offends one’s beliefs or disagrees with one’s ideology, claims of an ‘establishment’ conspiracy, or simply on reflexive contrarianism, is not skeptical, and not rational. It is to deny, not to seek the truth, but to obstinately refuse it.
What this boils down to is my view that experts acting within their field should generally be trusted, though with the concession that no one is infallible, no one person is an expert in everything, and no one can see the whole picture all by himself or herself — believer or skeptic. That takes the work of a community of experts coming to a broad consensus, which unlike a political consensus is not groupthink, not a vote, and not a popularity contest.
A consensus is reached only after the differences, biases, and other individual quirks have been hammered out, and an overall view, that of the Big Picture is achieved within that community. A scientific consensus, even though still not completely infallible, is a recognition of reality at any given time. Unless there is good reason to do otherwise, a consensus by a community of experts can generally be trusted, more so than the claims of any single individual.
Those who a priori reject the conclusions obtained from a large body of carefully gathered evidence, and who claim that the process of science is somehow broken and that the entire scientific community is wrong, must be able to objectively demonstrate how and why all the experts are wrong and where and how the system is broken or their claims cannot be taken seriously. Sorry, but them’s the breaks…
Post 6716
To me, the investigation of dubious claims takes a back seat to increasing my understanding of the psychology of belief. I don’t want to prejudge people, I want to actually understand how, why, and in what way people, from believers to skeptics and everyone in between believe what they do. I want to know, not just suppose, how belief structures are formed, acquired and protected by those who hold them.
Most people are fairly decent as long as you leave them alone, and many of my friends, loved ones, and casual acquaintances are themselves prone to views and beliefs that I myself don’t harbor. They’re wonderful people, though some times there are a few that for the sake of my sanity, I can only take in small doses.
There’s a chap whose blog I sometimes frequent, a professed psychic whom I have reason to believe is sincere, and whom I can respect, though not without some criticism at times. Does he really have psychic abilities?
As a skeptic, I agree to disagree with him on the validity of psi-research, so as to avoid providing tinder for the common believer straw man of skeptics, I won’t argue from the impossibility of psi, only its implausibility given our current understanding of physical laws.
Will psi ever be reliably demonstrated no matter who is conducting the study protocol, regardless of their personal beliefs and attitudes? I don’t think that the history of psi-research paints a very pretty picture, and I don’t think it’s likely that this will happen, but it would be cool. All hail discordia!
Logical Fallacies — Special Pleading
Special Pleading, or ‘covering one’s ass,’ is a form of argumentation skeptics routinely encounter, and is the concoction of excuses, often called ‘reasons’ by those prone to use them, also known as the ad hoc (or ‘in this case only’) hypothesis, and post-hoc reasoning. This is most often used in the form of arguments that try to ‘explain’ special reasons or invoke a presumed special case in an attempt to rescue a particular claim despite any logic or evidence against it, to dismiss a question, argument, explanation, or lack of evidence as somehow and uniquely not applying to the claim to be salvaged from the jaws of death.
- I took the paranormal challenge, but I couldn’t pass it because I was overwhelmed by the doubt of the skeptics present, which scrambled my powers…
- I failed the test because the stars weren’t right…
- The spirits weren’t favorable to my winning the challenge…
- I was unable to pass the preliminary test because the guy conducting it was a magician who cheated to make me fail by using sleight of hand…
- I couldn’t get a ‘hit’ on my remote viewing test because the target images in the envelope didn’t have a single, distinct, easily visualized (read: easily guessed…) feature for me to to focus my powers on…(remote viewing is myopic?)
- Psychics are real, despite what skeptics claim, but parapsychology has been unable to prove it for over 150 years because researchers have all along been looking in the wrong places and using the wrong methods…
That last one was actually suggested by someone I spoke with a couple of years back. However, even if this is a valid reason for the persistent failure to independently replicate positive results from earlier studies in later studies using the same testing paradigm, unless the claimant can suggest what those correct methods and places might possibly be, it is not very helpful, and brings us no closer to establishing the Psi hypothesis than before. And if the claimant can suggest the correct ways and places, then please, they should kindly inform the parapsychologists of what those are so that they can finally end this (not so) Great Debate once and for all!
This fallacy is prevalent in parapsychology with the so-called Experimenter Effect, recently dubbed by disgruntled parapsychologists the Wiseman Effect (after psychologist Richard Wiseman… Wow! I wish I was notorious enough to believers to have a logical fallacy named after me!) where skeptical disbelief, even accusations of repressed skeptical disbelief in those who sincerely hold themselves to believe, is said to produce an effect that literally in and of its magical self cancels psi-ability in a laboratory demonstration. How can the proponents of psi lose? After all, if you get a positive effect-size, it’s due to a psychic effect, and if you don’t it’s still due to a psychic effect! Really… how do you test that by itself to know if there’s anything really going on? –You can’t. However, here is the non-paranormal form of the experimenter effect that can be tested apart from psi with any area of science.
…and stealing from myself, there’s this one from one of my older posts…
- There really are pixies playing in my garden, but you can’t see them because they’re shy and don’t want you to see them, magically invisible to both optical and infrared light, and can’t be made visible by sprinkling stuff on them because they’re also intangible at will, and oh, did I also mention that you can’t hear them because they’re supernaturally silent whenever they feel like it?
Special pleading can be and often is carried to ridiculous lengths in gross disregard of the skeptics’ rule of thumb known as Occam’s razor, a tool of reason in which smaller leaps of logic are considered preferable to great ones, and in which “elements should not be multiplied unnecessarily,” or more to the point, beyond the plausible ability of the available evidence to support them.
Any argument using this fallacy is thus rendered both unfalsifiable and unprovable, and any idea in science should be framed in testable form, or it is not science. It does no good to say, “you can’t judge my claim because of special reasons X, Y, and Z,” or to provide any other arbitrary excuses that something won’t work, or can’t be tested.
Science is messy, and there are times when a theory must be refined so that it better conforms to the data, but this is not the use of post hoc reasoning: the amendments made to a set of ideas in science are those hypotheses that can be tested independently of the theory, and are those factors which are known to separately exist and have been observed in some fashion.
It’s bad form to have to come up with not only untestable, but irrelevant reasons to prop up an idea that not only fails the test of observation, the test of explanation, and the test of prediction, especially when it has no proverbial leg to stand on as with any flawed idea that forever remains such.
(Last Update 2010/04/02, Text, Image and Link Added)
Contrasts: SETI & UFOlogy
UFO believers who wish to claim an air of scientific legitimacy, or on the other hand perhaps as a sort of tu-quoque argument, will often compare UFOlogy with the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program. It seems to me that they are vastly different, and hardly comparable. Any attempt to compare them is a false analogy.
First, the questions they ask are logically distinct, for where SETI basically asks “Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe?,” and answers this with “Perhaps,” UFO ‘experts’ ask “Are we being visited by intelligent life from elsewhere in the universe?,” and answer this with an unequivocal “Yes!” The tentative thinking of the one, and the certitude of thought of the other alone is enough to set them apart.
SETI doesn’t presume the existence of aliens, it merely concedes that they are possible, and probable, unlike UFOlogists who presuppose the existence, and in a further logical leap, the visitation of Earth, of and by intelligent beings from other worlds as a given by definition.
SETI, unlike most UFO organizations, employs a rigorous approach to evidence, and upon the reception of any seemingly anomalous signals from space, first attempt to eliminate and isolate as many conventional sources of random noise and signal aberrations as are then conceivable, before accounting for all and even then, do not rush to declare to the media the announcement of alien contact, employing multiple independent confirmations and cross-checking before making a statement.
After all, if alien intelligence were a certainty, why look? A good example of the process is described in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, which describes it in more detail than I can go into here.
This is in stark contrast with many UFOlogists, who not only express a certainty of the existence of ETIs, but declare that they are already here, and that impending evidence to reveal the Truth™ of the alien presence by the governments of the world is ‘just around the corner.’ They’ve been saying that for decades now, conspiratorial claims and all.
This, in spite of what we have good reason to think we know at present of the size and age of the universe, the evolution of life on Earth, and the limits on interstellar, much less intergalactic, travel imposed by distance and currently understood physical laws, even near-light velocity travel.
SETI is science, using probabilistic thinking, scientific methodology, and logic, employing an extremely high bar for evidence, for the stakes of the discovery of alien intelligence would be high, and would have a monumental impact on human society. If they are to confirm such contact, they must make sure that no mistakes are made, because the world is watching.
UFO mythology, on the other hand, is pseudoscience, declaring as a proven fact alien visitation and employing at times near-nonexistent standards of evidence, conspiracy theories, logical fallacies, and otherwise unscientific reasoning. It is also a pronounced failure of the human imagination. And this is supplemented by a naive, sometimes callous, disregard for the human fallibilities of even the most dependable eyewitnesses and the anecdotal testimony they relate, not realizing that a mountain of crappy evidence is still crap.
Mind you, I’m not anti-alien, and as a science-fiction fan I would be delighted if we made such contact. But if it comes down to either declaring alien visitation every time there’s an odd light in the sky, or using science and reason to confirm genuine extraterrestrial contact beyond a reasonable doubt, I’ll opt for the latter, thank you very much.
