Monthly Archives: June 2010
TNQ | Today’s Noontide Query
Warning: The following post involves personal statements that may seem arrogant and dogmatic to those with nonscientific worldviews and those who value faith over reason. Discretion and thicker skins are highly recommended.
What is a belief? Is it a belief that a belief is a belief? Or is it a fact that some things we hold to be true are beliefs and some are things we can and do meaningfully know about the world and ourselves?
I define for my purposes that a belief is any sort of proposal, claim, or statement, that we hold as being true, regardless of its actual truth value.
It is entirely possible for something we do not definitively know but merely suppose, to be true, but merely holding it as true doesn’t make it so. The evidence of experience tells me that belief alone does not literally sculpt reality.
To be true, a belief has to relate to reality, whether of the world outside or inside our skulls. Even if a belief turns out to be true, unless we have a way of being made aware that it is, it is merely a highly probable guess that by chance happens to be fact.
As a skeptic, even more important than looking into strange claims and far more interesting, is understanding the psychology of belief — the entire range from feckless acceptance to dedicated denial — and understanding what gives rise to, motivates, and perpetuates beliefs from the mundane to the bizarre.
I’m not interested in ‘making people not believe,’ since what people believe is their own business when those beliefs are adopted of their own free will and understanding. I draw the line at those claims that are promoted using deceptive or coercive means, whether coercion by force of law, or coercion by fear or force. I want people to think for themselves, not to be told what to think or believe by command of an authority or blindly accept whatever happens to agree with their prejudices out of ignorance.
Unfortunately there’s a lot of that going on in the world, which isn’t a hopeless situation, it just means there’s more work to be done. As long as the human condition remains the way it is, skeptics will always have something with which to stay busy. Bring it.
Those who tell you not to think smartly are not to be trusted, and any claim that requires a suspension of disbelief to accept it should be doubly regarded with suspicion.
And so do I inquire of you, my wily readers:
How do you define a belief? How do you define a fact? Are you given to distinguish a belief from a fact? Do you consider the terms interchangeable? Why? Why not? If not, what do you consider facts and what to you are only beliefs? Why?
TNQ is a daily question that I pose to you, my readers, and please, do feel free to comment — I’m not an ogre. As per the title, TNQ is published each weekday at 12:00 PM
Don’t Be A Dick: the Party
This short film is one of four Public Service Announcements (PSAs) for skeptics, atheists, and others who need a bit of help when it comes to being social and friendly while still staying true to their (lack of) belief.
This episode stars Dan Turner and Louise Crane.
Scripted by Rebecca Watson
Filmed and edited by Charlotte Stoddart
Directed by Adam Rutherford
Title cards by DC Turner
Thanks to Tracy King & DC Turner for the filming location
(video courtesy of rkwatson’s YouTube Channel)
Don’t Be A Dick: The Will
This short film is one of four Public Service Announcements (PSAs) for skeptics, atheists, and others who need a bit of help when it comes to being social and friendly while still staying true to their (lack of) belief.
This episode stars Professor Chris French, Chris Blohm, and Mrs Cat.
Scripted by Rebecca Watson
Filmed and edited by Charlotte Stoddart
Directed by Adam Rutherford
Title cards by DC Turner
Thanks to Tracy King & DC Turner for the filming location
(video courtesy of rkwatson’s YouTube Channel)
TNQ | Today’s Noontide Query
I’ve been a skeptic for years, but only within the last three and a half have I identified myself as one.
I suspect my transition from a believer happened in my mid-twenties, when I started doubting all of the popular paranormal fads at the time and adopted as a common habit the liberal use of the phrase, “prove it.”
A lot of things went on at the time, enough to fill a couple of decades worth of journals, that all worked together to that result.
No doubt it was my doubt that annoyed a lot of people back then.
The difference between then and now is the fact that through the venue of this blog, I can annoy a whole lot more (*chortle*)!
Seriously, though, I enjoy life a whole lot more now that I’m not wasting it fretting over some superstition, a silly paranormal danger or paranoid conspiracy theory.
Funny thing about that though: I have always liked ‘Scooby-Doo’ more than I did ‘the X-files’ (hmmm…shades of things to come?).
Being more skeptical doesn’t make me smarter than anybody (I don’t think any skeptic I’ve read says it does…). It doesn’t give me the urge to sneer or guffaw at people as idiots who believe all those stupid doctrines, when what they are are just humans being human, not drooling morons.
“Remember,” I tell myself, “I used to believe those things too.”
Though I’m no more than anyone else, I’ve definitely surpassed myself, and life is just so much more satisfying now that I allow my self to doubt, perchance to dream, combining my old ability to wonder and imagine with my new ability for a little healthy scrutiny now and then. Taking a closer look at what I once took for granted never hurts me.
Even if I don’t like what I find out.
So now I’ll ask you this question:
How do you define a skeptic? What do you mean when you say ‘being skeptical?’ What is your concept of a skeptic? Do you think being skeptical is a good, bad, or indifferent thing? Do you think that more or fewer people should be skeptical?
TNQ is a daily question that I pose to you, my readers, and please, do feel free to comment — I’m not an ogre. As per the title, TNQ is published each weekday at 12:00 PM
Ethics and the NDE AWARE Experiment….A way out? (by virginianopinions)
At times my reading runs way behind due to work and other scheduling issues, but I keep my magazines and try to finish them eventually. Today, I was reading about the ethical concerns over the NDE experiment called AWARE being carried out in some hospitals around the world. For the complete story please see the article in the Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 33 # 5. Or you can read it here:http://www.csicop.org/si/show/nde_experiment_ethical_concerns
The question here today is a bit cloudy, it is not one of those simple black and white issues. There are serious problems with asking somebody to participate in a study, and give their consent for the same, after the event has already been completed. This is the problem being attacked in the article. What if, there were special circumstances though? Can you ask somebody to volunteer to die? …and then to report? Two special cases come to mind.
The first is somewhat obvious. Condemned criminals. Afterall, they are going to die anyway. It could even be an either/or win for the participant. That would have to be decided by the state legislature of the locale where the participant is incarcerated I am sure. First scenario. We want to kill you, and then bring you back to life in a controlled test to find out if there are NDEs. If everything goes well, you will die, and we will bring you back to life four minutes or so later and take your report. Then, we will acknowledge your contribution to science, before you are executed. If things don’t go well, you will simply die and not have to attend your execution.
Click Here to Read the Complete Original Post
Baloney Detection 101 — Self-Deception
Self-Deception is extremely common, and it can often lead us to believe that something is true when it’s not and valid when it’s actually fallacious. It’s extremely difficult for most people to avoid in everyday experience, and sometimes no matter how evidently false or rationally unsound a belief is to others, it’s a primary means of vindicating it to ourselves.
It’s far easier to fool ourselves than it is to fool others, because most people aren’t as introspective as they give themselves credit for. Thinking that one is infallibly self-honest and in general immune to gulling oneself is itself the result of self-deception and a time-tested and reliable way of letting down one’s guard and opening the floodgates for more of the same.
Although self-deception can make us feel better when we are overly critical of ourselves, most psychologists and mental health professionals agree that self-deception is generally a Bad Thing™.
One consequence of it is that the actions that we commit based on it are derived from a fallacious, flawed, incomplete, or outright false view of ourselves or the world, and such actions are consistently unsuccessful.
There are a host of personality elements involved with self-deception, including personal or ideological bias, self-interest of varying degrees, anything we really want to be true, any petty personal insecurities we may have, all of which, often together can powerfully and sometimes irrevocably influence our will, our very need to believe, and not in a way beneficial to us, especially when the insidious effects of personal experience play an important part in the process.
Deceitfulness, irrationality, or simple personal circumstance can motivate the beliefs that result, since not all of us come equipped with, or take the opportunity to acquire, the mental toolkit for critical thinking needed to make valid or correct conclusions based on our sense data, past experience, and personal knowledge-base.
When it comes to the possible uncritical acceptance of unusual or otherwise questionable claims, there are a few things that need to be carefully considered:
- Confirmation Bias — the tendency to seek out and give more notice to whatever confirms our prior beliefs, and avoid or downplay that which doesn’t…
- Selective Thinking — the tendency to pay attention to and remember events we consider significant and meaningful to our beliefs, and to ignore and forget that which doesn’t. This is sometimes oversimplified as ‘counting the hits and forgetting the misses,’ though it can involve paying attention to and remembering significant negative events as well, as long as they are personally meaningful…
- Apophenia — the tendency to see significance and patterns that do not exist in random noise and incomplete data…
For these reasons, science places a heavy but appropriate emphasis on controlled studies, especially randomized ones, requires reliable replication of reported phenomena by unaffiliated researchers, employs double-blinded — even triple-blinded — testing procedures, makes use of evidential criteria that are clearly defined beforehand, and finally, fully and openly accessible data and whenever possible, detailed procedural records.
There are a lot of people who are convinced, wrongly of course, that having a string of letters before or after their names and world-class intellectual brilliance in general instantly gives them complete immunity to fooling themselves, when in fact this just lets them be better at making up convincing rationalizations for themselves.
So, being a genius doesn’t by any means provide protection from gullibility. In fact, it can make it worse, especially when combined with an unhealthy amount of arrogance. There are a lot of amazingly intelligent people who are nevertheless quite easy to fool — though they’re incredible when it comes to skill with technobabble handwaving. Fnord.
Logical Fallacies — the Moving Goalpost
(This post has been rewritten and reposted with corrections since its original publishing date)
Hey, guys. This post deals with that favorite specious rhetorical tactic of science-deniers and middle-school debating clubs everywhere, the Moving Goalpost.
This fallacy is analogous, hence the name, with a American football game in which the fellow carrying the pigskin is faced with the predicament that the goalposts are continuously receding, so that no matter how fast he runs with or how far he throws the ball, they are always out of reach.
This tactic is one in which ever-receding criteria for evidence in support of a claim are used: the more difficult to fulfill, the better, and should the requirement for evidence somehow be met, the criteria are then arbitrarily revised to be even more stringent, difficult to fulfill and unreasonable than before, rather than acknowledge that the originally stated criteria have been met, and accept the statement they apply to.
This fallacy involves the arbitrary redefinition of one’s claims to put them conveniently out of reach of any possible falsification.
It’s simply a time consuming and extremely roundabout way of answering the question, “What evidence would change your mind about X?” with “No evidence you could present would ever be enough to convince me!”
This tactic is a favorite of creationists, electric universe proponents, anti-vaccinationists, HIV-deniers, global climate-change contrarians, and Alt-Med advocates, as well as any of the other forms of ideologically-motivated denial of uncomfortable or inconvenient scientific or historical facts.
Below are a couple of examples of this in use:
- Show me just one experiment conducted in a lab on Earth that has ever produced dark matter, directly measured the effect of gravity, created a black hole, a working example of stellar fusion, or replicated the effects of dark energy at laboratory scales!
The above is an excellent example of moving the goalposts out of reach from the very beginning, and there’s another version, such as the following, in which the requirements for evidence recede each time the argument is used:
- I want to see just one example of a transitional species between fish and tetrapods before I can accept evolution!
- Tiktaalik? Now you have two more gaps in the fossil record to fill between Tiktaalik and whatever existed before and after it!
- What? You’ve filled in those two gaps? Now you have four more gaps to fill! You still haven’t met my requirements! This proves evolution is a sham!
In any constructive, honest discussion, it’s important to state up front just what evidence you will accept for a claim of fact, and to stick with it throughout the discussion rather than making it ever more difficult to the point of impossibility to achieve and to finally, admit when the criteria of acceptance have been met.
It should be apparent from these examples that many fringe-proponents can never admit that they are wrong, when demanding ‘just one proof’ and then demanding ‘just one more proof’ and so on, by way of conceding that their initial demand for evidence has actually been met, for Champions of Revealed Truth™, it simply wouldn’t do to do something that unbecoming.
Cranks often like to claim that they are open to evidence that they could be mistaken, but when it comes right down to it they show themselves to be as closed-minded as they like to project onto their critics.
