Monthly Archives: October 2010
John Shook debates William Lane Craig: Part 2 (67 mins, 24 secs)
Here’s the second half of the debate held at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada…
…”Does God Exist?”…
John Shook debates William Lane Craig: Part 1 (64 mins, 46 secs)
This is the first half of a debate at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada…
…”Does God Exist?”
…Once Again the Stats Have Spoken, and So Have the Readers…
Image via Wikipedia
Hey, guys. It’s update time again, and there have been a few changes on the site. I’ve recently looked at the page-views for the following posts that I kept on-site but discontinued a while ago — Troythulu’s Nu’z (old and ‘more recent’ formats), Skeptefinitions, the various incarnations of the old Fluxus Quo series, and This Week in the Real Universe, a space sciences news post, 4:00 AM Quote series, and the old Astronomy Picture of the Day — and noticed that they were all ranked as the least popular posts on this blog.
First, it’s obvious that most of the material, often extremely sparse text with little if any information, or one or more links with brief text accompanying it, and these consisted of very little original material of my own.
NOT a good thing for an ‘experiment in free-form writing…’
In any event I was not convinced that these really deserved the status of individual posts, for with the news item posts the material was often extremely dated, not garnering much interest even when it was fresh news.
I have since deleted them and made a few other changes to this blog in the mean time. I’ve cleaned up my Tag files, trimmed the Categories a bit, and have deleted old video posts that are no longer watchable. I also wasn’t happy with my tone in some of my older posts from earlier in 2009, which were sometimes a bit too inflammatory even for me, not to mention unfair, and they too have gone the way of the Late Cretaceous Era. *Bamf!*
I’m going to be updating my Commenting Policy page (I think it’s too strict), the About page, my Contact page. I’m also working on ideas for a Mission Statement page, but all in good time. I still haven’t finished that draft for the Banned Commenters page, and I’m currently leaning toward dropping the idea and just deleting the draft. Okay, I’m eldritch and evil, but why overdo it?
Later this evening, the pages I’ll update will be taken offline and saved as drafts until I’m satisfied with the results.
I’m open to suggestions from WordPress savvy readers as to what would be a good theme for this blog, since I’m planning to update the site’s look as well.
Guys, you’ve been great these fantastic two years I’ve posted on this blog, and both critical and supportive (yes, you can be both, for valid criticism is supportive…and keeps you honest with yourself), I thank you for the rewarding experience and experiment you’ve made it.
Thanks to guys like Aliman, Terry, Skeptic Cat, Pumpkin, That Fellow In Yellow, Kriss and Kat for watching my back and your advice on straightening out my attitude and improving my writing and argumentation style.
Even a snarky Eldritch Horror from Beyond™ needs a clue sometimes…
Also, I’ve been spending less time on this site, generally posting only twice a day, three times at most exceptional days like today and some Wednesdays, because I’ve been catching up on my media exposure.
I’ve been lax in listening to my podcasts, watching those few television programs that are actually interesting, listening to worthwhile radio programming like NPR, and I really need to catch up with all of the sources of information that I’ve been missing out on…
I really love you people, and I appreciate the feedback you’ve provided. It’s what makes working on this site so rewarding. I want this to be the best blog I can, and I think I’ve actually made a lot of progress ever since late 2008, with the awesome people I’ve met and the things I’ve learned and implemented.
Here’s to making it even better.
What is a Skeptic? What is Skepticism to Me?
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‘Skeptic’ is a powerful word, laden by our modern culture with many linguistic connotations both positive and negative, and it has a long history, going back to classical Greece. But skepticism in the sense of a approach to systematic doubt has been around for thousands of years.
It’s a nice, simple, short word, much better known than such obscure terms as Zetetic and Eupraxopher, and that at it’s modern complementary sense means simply a smart thinker, in the sense of ‘being skeptical’ about something.
Scientific skepticism, the sort I practice, is the most systematic modern incarnation of that idea, a form of intellectual Kevlar that borrows from scientific method, formal and informal reasoning, and derives its philosophical underpinnings from a number of different schools of thought, particularly those of scientific realism and surprise, surprise… scientific skepticism.
There are a lot of different and often mutually clashing definitions for a skeptic, but my current favorite (and I do vacillate from time to time…) could be summed up as “someone who advocates science, reason, and reality, and who in thought, word and/or deed engages in a seeking after truth, and where necessary and possible, the scrutiny and exposure of falsehoods.”
Note that last of the first items mentioned in that definition – reality – for reality is absolutely essential for science to work.
This is why I find it amusing when the more extreme woo-meisters claim that science shows that reality is an illusion and therefore doesn’t exist – science may indeed demonstrate that the nature of reality is not how it appears to be, the proper usage of the term ‘illusion,’ but that isn’t logically the same as saying that science shows it doesn’t exist.
I should point out that an illusion is a very real thing, else we could never experience one from time to time through (misleading but real) physical perception, and a perception of something that doesn’t exist is not an illusion, but an hallucination…
…in short…
No reality = No way for science to work = No way to coherently prove that reality doesn’t exist using science.
Why?
Because science is a means of objectively describing and explaining facts about reality by testing claims against that reality and discovering the best possible answer, and you can’t objectively discover or explain facts if no objective facts exist, and if everything in reality is totally subjective, then you cannot in any conceivable way objectively show this to be true.
Truth requires an underlying reality to exist, or nothing is true and therefore nothing can be false, for the very concept of falsehood requires truth in order to exist…
…and therefore if nothing is true, then it cannot possibly be true that anything is false. Does your head hurt yet? Mine does.
*sigh*
I am not a radical skeptic of all knowledge for I find it to be logically unjustified, such as the frequent claim by extreme postmodernists that nothing can be known unless it is certain and self-evident, and since nothing can be known with certainty, we cannot know anything, that knowledge is no more than mere opinion.
This is itself a factual claim to knowledge, about knowledge, and indeed, a double claim about knowledge that we have to know something absolutely in order to say we know it at all and that therefore nothing can ever be known.
So anybody’s views and beliefs are as good as any others’ and neither facts nor truth really exist…
Really? That raises my figurative hackles a wee bit, so I have a few pointed questions to ask about this assertion…
How do they know this? How can they claim to know this unless they know it absolutely? What universally acceptable, self-evident principle is this claim based on? And how can they make this claim if they don’t have any absolute grounding, their own paradoxical gold standard, to justify it?
Postmodernists don’t like science because of its use of reductionist methods, despite their evident usefulness and power in explaining components of nature before we integrate them into the whole. Fair enough, though I argue that to build a complex machine, you have the understand the parts and know how they fit together before you can assemble them into a working mechanism. That, and I find the views of postmodernists equally reductionist in their perception of science, looking only at it’s separate parts (fields and specializations) without seeing the whole enterprise as the communal and overall thoroughly holistic effort it is.
Any philosophy than denies the existence of facts cannot be used to evaluate or critique them, any more than religious ideologies can be used to legitimately critique evolutionary science. So while postmodernism is perhaps useful for literature and art, it is misapplied when this is attempted on any enterprise which is designed from the bottom up to find, describe, and explain facts.
I find the views of some classical Greek philosophies, particularly those of the Skeptikoi and Epicureans, interesting, but dealing with them in this post in enough detail would make it too long, and I’ve rambled enough. That’ll have to wait…
I find that there is value in suspending judgment on a matter until sufficient evidence is obtained, to hold things as uncertain when it is not or cannot be, and the peace of mind that that brings a definite plus. Even with the definition of modern skeptics I gave above, there is a wide leeway in the way that self-identified members of the skeptical community, which is far more than a monolithic movement, think as individuals. I think that this is a huge advantage since it fosters unity through freshness and diversity of thought among those who count themselves part of it.
Is there any such thing as a True Skeptic™ practicing True Skepticism©?
To me personally, those exist mostly in the minds of those ideologues who abuse the term to refer to themselves favorably and who also frequently append the prefix “pseudo-” to the word to describe their critics out of resentment. Fnord.
Related Articles
- What it Means to be a Skeptic (randi.org)
- Who are these Skeptics? And do they matter? (newstatesman.com)
Mathematics: The Language of Science (by W.T. “Tom” Bridgman)
I have occasional e-mails, usually from supporters of some pseudoscience I have challenged on these pages, claiming that presenting the mathematical details on my web sites makes them “too complex” and that I should express the science in ‘simpler terms’ without the mathematics.The language of science is mathematics.
This is a concept that links back to Galileo (QuoteDB) and is the reason why technology works, because the physical world obeys regular mathematical rules independent of any human belief system. Scientific concepts are interconnected by the rules of mathematics. Much has been written about why nature seems to work so well with these techniques (one of the most famous papers on this topic being “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” by Eugene Wigner. But all mathematics does not make valid science…
Click Here to Read the Complete Original Entry on Dealing With Creationism in Astronomy
Sebastian Seung: I am my connectome
Here’s something on a hot new trend in neuroscience, connectomics. I think that this is much more interesting than the last video. Forced to delete that one since It wouldn’t play. Anyhoo, this is good food for thought, and much better suited to this blog’s theme.
Keith Barry does brain magic
This is an awesome display of mentalism at its best, and not pretending to be anything paranormal, but just good psychology.
The Economic Argument Against Woo
Image via XKCD.com
I thought that this would rather nicely sum up why purveyors of nonsense only make scads of money off people who believe in what they peddle, and not mainstream science or business. Note that only two of the wacky ideas above see any use apart from just paranormal believers, and for very good reasons; They’re actually science, not wishful thinking…
Some Things I’m NOT Overly Skeptical About: Part III
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I’m going to both finish this up from last Thursday and shift gears just a bit, and discuss some of my thoughts on the nature of doubt — when it’s reasonable, when it’s not, what it is, and why. While it is true that many skeptics do not doubt the very things believers require them to, or at least in the same way, skeptical doubt has a couple of features that set it apart from that of dedicated belief or abject denial.
[A] skeptical doubt, when applied correctly, is based upon a need for compelling evidence defined as appropriate and proportionate to a given claim, and is exercised when this is scant or lacking. Only claims of reality that are testable can be consistently accepted.
Claims or statements about objective reality ≠ Claims or statements of subjective personal opinion…
[B] Skeptical doubt is provisional, amenable to acceptance of claims by way of, above all, justification, not absolute proof (after all, this is scientific skepticism we’re talking about here) for that acceptance like sufficient evidence and sound argumentation.
My experience is such that most of the time you can actually argue with skeptics because by and large their approach to discussion is based upon reason and facts and not anti-rationalism and wishful thinking.
Not all the time, but often enough as a general rule, True Believers and Deniers have taken the opposite tack in discussions I’ve attempted with them, and beyond count are the instances of moving goalposts, red herrings, knee-jerk dismissals, straw-persons, logically incoherent statements, non-sequitur arguments, fallacious appeals to authority, factual misconceptions and sometimes outright intentional falsehoods, that I’ve encountered in dealing with them.
The professed doubt and intellectual strategies of those with an intolerance of skepticism is based, in large part, on a poor understanding of sound critical thinking, supported by rationalizations, poor scientific literacy and a liberal application of cognitive and logical fallacies, as per those who are ‘critical’ of things like evolution or climate science without being willing or skilled (or both) in truly assessing the evidence for that which they claim to be ‘critical’ of.
Scientific literacy is more than merely being able to spit out the facts and figures, though facts do have some importance (since you can’t think on an empty mind…), but an understanding of what a fact actually is in science – outside of pure mathematics and formal logic – and the nature of scientific theories and thinking, and that of scientific proof . That last is somewhat of an oxymoron, since facts of science and therefore those about reality can never be absolutely proven, for nobody is omniscient and it is simply not possible to ensure absolutely that all of the relevant evidence has been examined.
Further, my experience has been that anti-science types are primarily ‘skeptical’ of those things, and persons, that do not agree with their views, and both tend to attribute more worth than they have reason to for such things as biases, vested interests, and other suspect motivations, especially when these are neither true nor relevant and are merely projected onto one’s critics out of distaste.
Uncritical acceptance or rejection are not based upon facts or reason, but upon ideology and unfounded suspicion, the latter lending itself well to conspiracy theorizing…
It is not easy to change one’s mind or apportion belief to evidence when these are at play. Some people cannot face being wrong, or that they have or can be fooled by themselves or others.
None of us ‘likes’ being taken or admitting it when we have been…
The mental strategies of True Belief and Denialism are common to both — the use of logical fallacies, anecdotes as proof and spuriously perceived anomalies — only the focus and application differs, and they are not necessarily exclusive to each other, even in the same person…
To sum this up, I do not think that skepticism means the same thing for everyone who says that they are ‘skeptical’ of something, nor how it is done and even what it is by those who say it. That is a subject for discussion in an upcoming post, and I’ll explore it in more detail then. Fnord.
Related Articles
- The skeptical community (blogs.discovermagazine.com)
- On the difference between religion and woo (atheistexperience.blogspot.com)
- What type of Theistic Skeptic are you? (atheistexperience.blogspot.com)
- What it Means to be a Skeptic (randi.org)
- Wisco on Religious Fanaticism Disguised as Skepticism (grantlawrence.blogspot.com)
Telepath – Mind-reading magic app for your iPhone
Ever wanted to read someone’s mind? Use this astonishing magic trick to convince almost anyone that you’re a mind reader. Available in the iPhone app store!
THE TRICK
Show your friend four pictures on the iPhone screen. Ask them to select a picture and focus their mind on it, without revealing their choice to you.
Shake the iPhone, place it face down on the table and say you won’t touch it again until the trick is over.
Now ask your friend to tell you which picture she’s chosen. When you ask your friend to flip the iPhone over, they will find their chosen picture has magically appeared on the screen.
Using Telepath, you can predict numbers, playing cards, cute animals – and even figure out where someone would like to go on a date. It’s the perfect way to entertain friends, break the ice in business meetings and improve your love life!
Telepath also works on the iPod Touch.
EASY TO DO
Telepath includes links to secret training videos, tips on performance and everything else you’ll need to learn its secret in minutes. There’s no need for any special gadgets or sleight or hand. This is instant magic for everyone.
REQUIREMENTS
Compatible with iPhone or iPod Touch
Requires OS 3.0 or later
Copyright Sarah Angliss and Richard Wiseman, 2009. All rights reserved. Thanks to Pete Firman, Peter Lamont and Mike Skutt for their advice on the trick and Jenny Mirani for her help with the video shoot.
The Great Explainer Discusses Coincidence
Image via Wikipedia
This is something I run into a lot with paranormal believers: the reflexive tendency to attribute anything, any odd event that they can’t make immediate sense of, with supernatural meaning, as something inexplicable…”beyond science” as it were.
But you know…Somehow I think not…
Ike Asimov was keenly aware of this in his dealings with people in general – and not just kooks – but perfectly sane, otherwise reasonable people unaware of the laws of probability, which, let’s face it, are pretty hard for even the smartest of us without the hands-on training to understand them.
Humans suck at intuitively judging probability, particularly such things as the Monty Hall problem, the Birthday Paradox and the Law of large numbers for starters.
It’s why humans had to invent statistics, to allow us to overcome that natural handicap through education. It’s one reason we have education, such as that sometimes is…
Knowledge is power, and not just knowledge we can use for practical purposes, but knowledge for its own sake, contrary to instrumentalist ideology.
People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. They are far too ready to dismiss it and to build arcane structures of extremely rickety substance in order to avoid it. I, on the other hand, see coincidence everywhere as an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability, according to which having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.
Dr. Asimov, you’ve hit the nail right on the head, and I doubt at this point that I could have put it better myself. Peace out…
Lennart Green does close-up card magic
This is one of the reasons I’m more impressed with up-front conjurors than alleged psychics – conjurors don’t need to try and convince you that what they do is real – they will tell you they are going to fool you, and then still do it, even though you know they will. This is a pretty good display of close-up magical acumen, without claims of woo.
