Is Science a Special Interest?

Is science fatally biased? Does it actually constitute a partisan special interest? Should we rightly ignore scientific claims or dismiss them as pseudoscience or a hoax when they or their implications disagree with our political views or religious beliefs?

Not unless reality itself is a partisan special interest, not as I understand it, and I have over the years taken great pains to do just that — To understand science as best a layman can, if nothing else as an educational pursuit.

Science is far from solely the purview of academics, though like any learned skill, it takes training and experience to do well. But anytime you methodically try out an idea in the real world using some reliable observational method, employing these to reach a more accurate view of the outcome, then you’re doing science, even if you do it in a kitchen while microwaving different popcorn brands to compare their kernel popping rates rather than experimenting with test-tubes of exotic chemicals in a lab while wearing a respirator.

But because it’s done by people, and people are flawed, science is messy, imperfect, sometimes prone to error, and with regard to the context of discovery, culturally dependent. But it’s the process of justifying discoveries, not just making them, that best reflects the virtues of science, its universality in the process of testing our hypotheses to see if they really make the cut.

Discovery is all well and good, but a new idea, no matter how revolutionary, must be put to the test, or it is of no use. Science uses methods designed from the bottom up, confidently established by the repeated testing over centuries of accumulated experience to do what it does — to tell us how the natural world works — and it does this better than anything else to date.

It’s the process of justification more so than initial discovery that makes science progressive in its findings, ever closer getting us to a clearer picture of the world.

Science is not itself an ideology, or a belief system, or a philosophical position on the way things are, but is a set of methods, though far from pristine and perfect, the system of values, assumptions and techniques of which work very well when not hobbled by external ideological interference.

Most ideologies by their very nature do not lend themselves well to an objective search for truth, especially those whose doctrines favor, promote, nurture, and exploit the biases of their adherents, especially those whose doctrines involve some form of fact denial, or which fail to acknowledge established facts of human behavior — including the realities of human greed and selfishness…and altruism.

I’ve heard from people I know a view which I think is mistaken, that double-blinding an experiment or study is irrelevant when the researchers involved have a bias or vested interest in the outcome, such as the political or financial implications, of a study they are conducting.

The problem I have with this view, the reason I think it’s mistaken, is that it ignores the whole purpose of blinding studies in the first place, showing an unfortunate lack of understanding of what blinding is and why it’s done.

For those unfamiliar, double-blinding in a nutshell:

Double-blinding is a procedure that involves keeping certain key pieces of information out of the hands of both subjects and experimenters in a study. For instance, it would be used in a medical study testing the safety and effectiveness of a new drug on human patients, in which neither those in the test group nor the control group know which one they are in, and whether they’re taking the real drug or a placebo…

…and most importantly, neither do those directly conducting the study while it’s being carried out.

Because experimenter expectation and bias can unconsciously influence the results of such a study, through the interaction of patients and experimenters and subtle behavioral cues given out and not consciously noticed by either, double-blinding is an essential tool for sidestepping this problem by effectively taking it out of the picture.

Best of all, it works.

Merely criticizing a such a protocol as ineffective by cynically accusing those using it of a suspected vested interest or bias, when this is not only irrelevant to the method used but also not even established, sounds suspiciously like an ad hominem attack or a fallacious appeal to motive.

Sure, you could argue that a given study wasn’t properly blinded, but how would you know?

Without proper grounds from credible experts in that field who’ve looked at the study in question, you’d need the data and the expertise to understand it, full knowledge of scientific methodology, and of access to records of or even direct observation of the conduct of the study yourself before you can rightly make that argument.

In short, you need to have a basis for knowing what you’re talking about. Failing all else, you’d need to be an expert in the field yourself — not a likely prospect without training, knowledge background, and experience.

Any valid argument to that effect requires much more than suspicion of ideological interests, more than just allegations of academic misconduct supported only by, for example, hacked and stolen emails, possibly doctored and posted anonymously online without any real context.

If you don’t like the facts, however politically or theologically inconvenient, it does little good to attack the fact-finders…

…for doing so shows that you can’t tell science from politics or religion.

References –

Tools of Thinking: Understanding the World Through Experience & Reason, by Professor James Hall, via the Teaching Company, 2005

Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills, by Steven Novella M.D. via the Teaching Company, 2012

That Mitchell and Webb Look – Moon Landing Sketch

This is brilliant!…It’s the perfect comedic rebuttal to Moon landing denialism, what would have to be the case if it were a hoax…not that I expect the deniers to be convinced — you can’t convince a denier of anything when their denial is based only on ideology, not evidence.

In a world of supernaturals, what would real psychics be like?

Ah, here’s something different, for my 1,600th post! Earlier last evening, some friends of mine were over at my place doing some gaming with me, and of course tormenting Eccles with a laser light pen. Here are some pics from that evening of fun…

The gang’s at the gaming table, and yes, that’s my thumb in the pic (on purpose)!

Spoils of War! We sorted out pieces from my old gaming dice collection for my friends’ use — I’ve no further need for it!

Our almighty GM ponders our characters’ fates during the game!

Mister Eccles is on the prowl, looking to catch the point of red light from our GM’s laser pen!

Last evening, we were playing a 4th edition GURPS RPG campaign set in a world were supernatural beings and forces really exist, but seek to hide themselves from the much more numerous, clever, and fearful, ordinary folk…

…after all, Ceteri, as the supernatural beings are called, are powerful, but humans are many and inventive, and enough mundanes can take down even the mightiest wizard, so the Ceteri work together…or ELSE!

Anyhoo…

In the real world, a psychic is a normal person who plays the role of a psychic using conjuror or mentalist tricks — as far as anyone’s been able to prove, pending the unlikely scientific documentation of genuine psychics — but we speculated on the reverse, what real psychics would do in an otherwise supernatural world of dangerous normals.

An aside: Self-styled psychic Craig Weiler, (whose blog is here) has proposed an interesting mythology of what he calls “psychic people,” an embattled special subset of humanity of which he imagines himself a member, who suspiciously resemble the X-Men, a notion he understandably takes exception to, since I’m sure the comparison strikes a little close to home.

But what if there really were such special people with psychic abilities, and what if they really were wary of persecution by normals? Well, they’d hide in plain sight, and not by announcing themselves as psychics on shows by people like Montel Williams, or Oprah Winfrey, but by posing as skilled normals, and make a healthy, honest living in the process, quite unlike those doing the reverse in reality.

Here’s how that would work:

Psychics whose powers involved telepathic or psychokinetic effects would pose as mentalists or conjurors, in the manner of Banachek, James Randi, or Penn & Teller, but to make their act foolproof, would also have actual magician skills to conceal themselves in the presence of otherwise mundane magicians and supplement their powers with extra things to do on stage.

Such a performer could use genuine powers in the first part of an act, then like in a Penn & Teller “reveal” at the end of the act, avert suspicion by showing how the trick was “really” done to the audience.

Professional camouflage.

Those psychics given to abilities involving prediction could pose as astronomers, meteorologists, statisticians, and other researchers who ordinarily use mathematical models to make predictions in their fields, and these psychics would only have to know just enough math to make their imposture as normals plausible, while keeping their day-to-day predictions believable (to a mundane scientist) while doling out their more spectacular and unusual predictions to other supernatural beings covertly.

In the setting we play in, there is a Council of allied supernatural creatures that works to keep the normals “in the dark” to preserve it’s existence, keep the peace with the normals, and prevent the very sort of embattlement that Mr. Weiler imagines “his people” to be experiencing.

On pain of sounding incredibly arrogant, I’m sure we all like to feel that we’re somehow special and a cut above the rest, but Weiler has it the wrong way around — I think that the genuine psychics, if there were any, and with the situation he believes to be the case, would NOT show themselves to the world on television, in seminars, or giving readings in dark rooms to gullible marks — a blatant display of actual ability would be suicide — but would keep themselves perpetually hidden from a world of normals who would never fully know of their existence, those normals being, to paraphrase Tommy Lee Jones’ character in Men In Black, fearful, panicky animals…and who would definitely not suffer a (real) witch, or a psychic, to live free and unexploited if caught.

Three Postulates of Moonbat Conspiracy Theories

Awhile back, I had come up with a set of heuristics, or general rules of thumb to judge the relative plausibility of conspiracy theories, first only one, then two, and just recently completing them as a full set of three, in the spirit of Clarke’s three laws, as well as Isaac Asimov’s laws of Robotics and his semi-humorously intended laws of Humanics.

But these are postulates, not laws, though they have shown themselves remarkably consistent and useful predictive guides indeed.

The postulates are general observations on the characteristics of conspiracy theories ranging from the seemingly sound to the completely kooktastic ones, and of what things to look out for and sound the shenanigans alarm when dealing with the claims of those chaps wearing tinfoil hats.

The 1st:

• The likelihood of any given conspiracy theory being true is inversely proportional to the amount of bat-shit insane rationalization that goes into it.

The next involves what’s known as “cascade logic,” fallacious reasoning in which the conspiracy must be ever-widened with increasingly enormous numbers of people “in” on it to support its attendant theory.

Never mind that it’s extremely illogical to claim that a conspiracy can involve thousands or millions of people, all of them comically evil and as obedient to their masters as Daleks, with not one of them ever blowing its cover even once for personal gain or ethical qualms, or any of the other reasons people often have for blowing big secrets wide open.

If the United States government can’t even keep the secret of the atomic bomb, or more recently, the scandals of even the secretive political administration of president Bush II, though conspiracies do happen, and secrets are often successfully kept, as well they sometimes should be, it’s the successful conspiracies that no one, and I mean no one uninvolved, ever hears about until said conspiracies become unsuccessful and thus no longer pose a threat.

The 2nd:

• The plausibility of any given conspiracy theory is inversely proportional to the number of people allegedly involved in it.

This last one is a variant of Godwin’s Law, dealing with the invective that flies when unsupported claims of conspiracy are challenged by those of us less inclined to be taken in by or promote them.

The 3rd:

• The probability of being accused of implication as a craven shill, stooge, or dupe in a conspiracy is directly proportional to the degree of implausibility a critic attributes to the alleged conspiracy’s attendant body of theory and to the level of self-righteous hostility of the theorist.

I find these useful for separating the absurd theories from the more likely ones, and best used together in looking for fallacious and baroque chains of argument, including cascade reasoning, special pleading and ad hominem arguments of motive and knowing or naive involvement in the conspiracy by proponents.

I hope you find these amusing if nothing else…but never forget that the most important thing is the evidence for a claim — these postulates are only intended to raise the proverbial red flags, to note when something sounds fishy, but are a good indicator of nonsense if evidence is not forthcoming from the claimant.

Related articles

• Believing the impossible and conspiracy theories (physorg.com)
• Believing the impossible and conspiracy theories (esciencenews.com)
• Is obsession with conspiracy theories a sign of schizophrenia? (gunnyg.wordpress.com)

The Paranormal is Boring.

Why, one may ask, do I commit the unseemly crassness of saying the above?

It’s simple.

Every single time the paranormal has been thoroughly investigated, every time a mystery has been solved, it has been shown to by decidedly something else, something mundane, but not boring, for the truth is hardly boring …NOT mystical, NOT supernatural, and NOT paranormal.

And every mystery not solved is simply not solved, due to a lack of sufficient explanatory data, hints and clues, and only that…

…not anything in support of paranormal claims at all, merely the unexplained, not the epistemically unexplainable.

“Paranormal,” like its synonym “supernatural,” is merely a placeholder for ignorance, and by itself explains nothing. It is just a label for what we don’t know, what we don’t understand, not a profound description of what we do.

If I may be so bold, I would even go so far as to say that, stealing a page from Michael Shermer, there probably isn’t anything supernatural or paranormal, only what’s normal, natural, and whatever things we haven’t explained just yet.

You cannot rightly declare anything unexplainable unless and until you make an honest, persistent, and systematic attempt to look first, before writing it off as an insoluble conundrum and a genuine mystery.

Even then, there may be an explanation for it that you or someone else are not resourceful enough to find, or imaginative enough to conceive.

There are limits on human abilities in the realm of knowledge-gathering and understanding, but those abilities still work with some reliability when used well — We do not and cannot know everything, but that does not mean we know nothing at all.

But aren’t I being a little harsh in saying that the paranormal just doesn’t meet the standards of coolness that it could?

Not at all.

Paranormal research hasn’t been completely useless, and I think it should be carried out so we can discover more about the human mind and how it works, such as mechanisms of self-deception and how we form and support our beliefs as personal truths, however misguided we may be.

Paranormal research has led to many new discoveries, especially those detailed in Richard Wiseman’s recent book, “Paranormality”… I recently finished, and highly recommend it to the genuinely curious.

But none of those discoveries support claims of the paranormal as they are offered by proponents and adopted by believers.

I’d put the paranormal into three groupings; Phenomena, Critters and Arcana.

Phenomena are those alleged forces, events, and places like UFOs, hauntings, out-of-body and Near Death experiences, poltergeists, spontaneous human combustion, Atlantis, the Bermuda Triangle, ESP, claims of ancient astronauts, and crop circles.

Critters get a bit more personal and concrete, but no less questionable, ranging from alien encounters, Loch Ness monster sightings, Bigfoot sightings, the Chupacabra, the Jersey Devil, and Springheel Jack, among many others.

Arcana are those “arts,” performed by humans claiming special knowledge and abilities, or animals claimed* by humans to have these, such as divination techniques including dowsing, astrology, automatic writing, and channeling human spirits, dead Martians or 35,000 year old Atlanteans, for starters.

*I’m looking at you, Punxutaney Phil, you little furry precognitive bastard…

What do all of these things have in common?

Consistently, each time these claims have been examined, when they have, an alternate, a more plausible explanation has been forthcoming, brushing aside the cobwebs of mystery to reveal what’s really going on, or looking closer into the origin of the claim to show there’s nothing deep or ineffable to groove over.

More often than not, at least to me, the truth turned out to be more interesting than the original claim, and it was the claim, not what’s really happening, that seems uninteresting and dull.

This is especially so when reading good fiction, when, even if the phenomena in the story aren’t spectacular in their effects, they are often unambiguous, perhaps even self-evident in their genuineness, not the result of hoaxing, illusion, delusion, sensory misinterpretation, flawed reasoning, or any one or more of a number of other confounding factors.

Even when such phenomena in a well-written fictional setting aren’t flamboyant, much less ridiculous in their obviousness, they are extremely difficult, even impossible at times, for a conjurer or mentalist to replicate in a performance and successfully pass such trickery as the real thing.

In the realm of the paranormal, there are few genuinely original and new claims, just the same old thing regurgitated over and over, recycled from generation after generation, and maybe it’s that fact that makes claims of the paranormal, at least at face value, hardly interesting in the long term to those without a rigid fascination for them.

For my part, the findings of science are much more interesting, elegantly parsimonious, intellectually challenging, and better, more evidentially supported than the claims of proponents by far.

Related articles

• Americans’ Beliefs in Paranormal Phenomena (Infographic) (livescience.com)
• Common Brain Mechanisms Underlie Supernatural Perceptions – Richard Wiseman – Scientific American (richarddawkins.net)
• Richard Wiseman discusses Paranormality on For Good Reason (randi.org)

Peanut Butter, The Atheist’s Nightmare! Really??

I’m aghast at the abject stupidity apparently being promoted as serious truth by these people.

“Evolution teaches that…”

Evolution teaches nothing. It is those who understand it who teach, and those who do not who mislead.

Nice fractals, but you’ve got my baloney detector on red alert!

Image via Wikipedia

Hat Tip to @emilyhasbooks on Twitter.

This was pointed out to me last night, and I chilled my evil fractalicious heart with thoughts of Benoit Mandelbrot spinning in his grave in agony:

It’s a blog page [Here] on a New Agey site called Human Angels, with some nice fractals, but very little in the way of valid factual substance, allegedly using religious lore from Hindu, Mayan, Hopi and Jewish scripture, the long-since debunked Bible Code, the Mayan calendar 2012 nonsense, with a a bit of the appeal to quantum physics fallacy and the silly invocation of the geological record to make claims of predicting the future, presumably in ways impossible for mainstream science.

The first sentence of the page I have no issues with:

A fractal is “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole,” a property called self-similarity.

Okay, there’s nothing off about that, but after that, the text goes down the proverbial rabbit-hole and into the land of meaningless word-salad immediately following:

All of the manifested universe can be described as fractions of dimensions, or fractalic, while the whole dimensions themselves are of infinite measure. From the whole dimensions are derived the finite dimensional parameters which define what we know of as space/time.

I’m tempted to say WTF??, though I’m aware that the universe is NOT fractal, but is largely relativistic on the macro-level and quantum on the micro-level (Individual bosons, like photons, are discrete packets of energy as shown by experiment, not infinitely divisible into self-similar parts.) as far as anyone can show at present.

Never mind that New Age claims, like those of Old Time religion, lean heavily into bald assertions of knowledge that is not and cannot possibly be actually known given the fact that wishful thinking to the contrary, believers don’t really have any special powers the rest of us don’t.

This one really did it for me…

Part of the make-up for a fractal, is the idea of a pattern repeating within a pattern. This is how Gregg Braden explains the cyclic patterns of time experienced on the earth. Basing it on two major cycles; the 5,125 year cycle that it takes the earth to once again cross the galactic equator of the Milky Way, and the 25,625 year cycle that represents the progression of the equinoxes, Braden paints a picture of the possible changes life on this planet faces.

Sorry, nice metaphor, but it means nothing. The claim of passing through the galactic “equator” every 5,125 years is based on a false premise, two actually: The Earth will not be passing through the plane of the galaxy’s disk in 2012, though as far as the sun is concerned, it does cross the equator twice each year, and there’s nothing at all special about it, and no evidence that space-time is fractal – See Planck length and Planck time for the reasons why…

…These are not the droids you’re looking for…

Second, and finally, this idea that ancient civilizations knew more than we is literally old and illogical, an appeal to antiquity fallacy:

The Mayans didn’t have nearly the knowledge we do of the age, nature, and shape of the galaxy, and even we don’t know it precisely, so any claim that their calendar took into account Earth’s passage through the mid-plane of the galaxy’s rotation is simply silly. No credible archaeologist would make such an assumption of facts not in evidence. We know now far more than they, and their ancient writings and monuments have value as historical records and artifacts only.

As tempting as it is to cut loose with the snark, I’ll have to refrain from indulging myself this time to file this one away in my collection of amusing and possibly unsinkable misunderstandings of reality.

Related articles

• Fractal Friday it is… (buddhakat.wordpress.com)
• Fractal Friday… (buddhakat.wordpress.com)
• The Fractal Dimension of ZIP Codes (wired.com)
• Inside The Incredible World Of Fractals, The Beautiful Patterns That Investors Use To Understand Charts (businessinsider.com)

A planet-sized starship chillin’ next to Mercury? I suspect not.

Image via Wikipedia

This is cute. It’s a composite video taken of a Coronal Mass Ejection, or CME, washing over Mercury and appearing to reveal something previously unseen. According to the narrator, it must be an alien spacecraft, no less one the size of the planet nearby, and cloaked for good measure (Obviously! No other explanation possible, no sirree!).

Never mind the complete dismissal of any plausible alternatives in favor of the preferred explanation, and never mind the statements here that say that the more likely hypothesis is the effect of digital artifacts in the image.

Simply put, the ‘cloaked’ spot was were Mercury itself was at during the previous day, with no need to invoke Klingon birds of prey, Borg cubes, or for that matter, Zentraedi fleet command vessels at all!

Related articles

• Mysterious Planet-Size Object Spotted Near Mercury (space.com)
• “Mysterious Planet-Sized Object” Is… A Planet! (skepticalteacher.wordpress.com)
• Mysterious Planet-Size Object Spotted Near Mercury (livescience.com)

Why Don’t Mainstream Industries Use the Paranormal?

Image via Wikipedia

I think that with some exceptions, like wealthy heads of state who employ handsomely paid astrologers, and the worldwide Alt-Med industry that rakes in billions of dollars in profits annually, among others, the practical world of for-profit industry has little use for non-scientific claims of fact.

Now, I’m well aware that there are people who believe these claims, but the point is that if any of these phenomena really worked, there would be a much wider use of them in mainstream industries than just a few rogue executives and employees bleeding funds on oil and mineral dowsing scams, or hiring mystics to enhance their mojo in anticipation of the next fiscal year’s budget plans.

Woo itself is big business, not because it works, but because people are gullible, and there are enough people who believe it works, who often literally buy into it for it to turn a healthy profit for those who style themselves merchants of openness, trust and goodwill.

Trust is a good thing, but real trust is based upon evidence, that of knowledge concerning those to be trusted, and it’s often unfortunately equated with credulity.

Uncritical acceptance of claims that causes one to ignore doubt, dismiss evidence, and the possibility of being mistaken is more than just harmless idle fancy, it’s dangerous to both one’s wealth and health.

Credulity is not trust, but a parody of it, benefiting the one having it not a bit, and the one exploiting it a lot. Anyone who tells you to just trust them and never think for yourself is not your friend, but someone with an agenda in mind that does not involve your physical or financial well-being.

If the claims of psychics, New Age gurus, free energy proponents and alternative medical practitioners really worked — if a treatment really did what it was claimed to and not just ride the coattails of the placebo effect and statistical regression to the mean, for example, — these ideas would be in much wider use by mainstream industries, not just by believers, because all things being equal, ideas that work have a tendency over time to see broader application than those that don’t.

I’m aware that not all things are equal though, because it’s entirely possible for a false idea to persist for hundreds or thousands of years and remain in use — The human tendency for belief in ineffective practices is without peer — bloodletting, trepaning, patent medicines, exorcisms, and infant sacrifices to petition the gods for an end to drought all come to mind.

The persistence of bad ideas over long historical periods is something endemic to our species, and it may one day kill us off if we aren’t wary.

That’s why the mere fact that a practice is ancient, or widely accepted, does not imply that it’s true. If it becomes widely used over a long time because it works, so much the better, but that is not necessarily the case.

You can fool employees, executives, and depending on demographics, potential customers, but you can’t fool the limits of the technology and labor that go into an industry’s goods and services.

This is why the military, despite that embarrassing waste of 20 million dollars known as Project Stargate does not use psychics as an effective means of intelligence gathering — note that I said ‘effective,’ that is, successfully gathering intelligence data more accurately than chance guessing.

To the best of my knowledge, and you may try to prove me wrong if you like, no energy utility company makes use of crystal or pyramid power to supply its customers, potentially inexhaustible sources of energy that would reap immense profits if they were used, and would certainly be a well-guarded secret to those who owned them…if they really worked.

Unlimited energy generated at almost no cost to producer = A powerful & profitable resource!

If prayer and faith could heal the sick and injured, if homeopathy or reiki worked, if quantum healing wasn’t just flapdoodle, they wouldn’t be alternatives to medicine, they wouldn’t even replace the practice of medicine — they would BE medicine, like every other treatment that has proven its worth by actually working.

We’ve been praying, worshiping, waving our hands, giving people the hairy eyeball, and making magic potions for thousands of years…If they really worked as claimed, we wouldn’t need modern medicine!

Ever.

These things would be supported by both reliable data and valid logic, though perhaps a logic different from those we know, and would not need specious argumentation and bad data to support them.

If the paranormal existed in fact — working, like science, no matter what anyone believed — then the world would be a very different place.

The paranormal would be normal…because it would be a testable, demonstrable part of reality.

…and that is why despite the ubiquity of belief in the paranormal, it remains at the fringes, not the mainstream, of science and technology-driven goods and service industries…

…because in most industries, you can certainly fool people, but not the facts of labor and resources that profitable business requires to turn a profit in selling a product more substantial than wishful thinking and false hope.

Related articles

• An Interview with Red Tani of the Filipino Freethinkers (randi.org)
• Indian Paranormal Beliefs (prophet666.com)
• Americans’ Beliefs in Paranormal Phenomena (Infographic) (livescience.com)
• Richard Wiseman discusses Paranormality on For Good Reason (randi.org)

C0nc0rdance – The Global Consciousness Project

In posting this, I hereby cheerfully affirm my lack of sophistication with the New Age intricacies of Noetic Science™

Seriously, though, this is a good take on what to many looks deceptively like valid science, but not so valid when you pull back the curtain to see what’s going on in peoples’ heads concerning misjudgments of probability, and the use of occult statistics, to support those errors.

…Science said X was Impossible!!!

Image via Wikipedia

The above claim is part of an argument I’ve heard many times, with such examples of it’s truth offered frequently being the impossibility of heavier than air flight claimed by Lord Kelvin and the mistaken but popular notion, and never seriously entertained by the scientific community itself, that the flight of bumblebees was scientifically impossible.

It was not that bumblebee flight was thought to be literally impossible, but that it was not fully understood exactly how exactly it worked prior to research on the aerodynamics of bumblebee flight in the 1990s.

Note: Science has never claimed that any known phenomenon commonly observed and fully documented at the time is impossible.

This line of argument is often used as an example of how scientists have been proven wrong before in stating something to be impossible, to support the claim that therefore nothing is impossible, and that it necessarily follows that all such statements of impossibility have been or will inevitably be shown wrong.

It implies that whatever we want to be possible, whatever we imagine, merely in the imagining of it, trumps any and all past, present and future limits imposed by science on the possible and the plausible. It implies we can be godlike merely by wishing hard enough, or that even if the wishing doesn’t literally make it so, that it means it’s so.

Perhaps a better formulation of this entry’s title would be “(A) scientist (s) said X was impossible!” and it would probably be a better context to argue from than condemning the whole of science on whatever claim is being advocated.

Lord Kelvin was right about quite a bit, and made invaluable contributions to physics, but he was fatally incorrect in his calculations that to him showed the impossibility of heavier-than-air flight (birds, bats, insects, (and long ago, pterosaurs,) do (and did) it all the time), and his ignorance of radioactivity (then undiscovered) led him to conclude that the Earth could only be millions of years old, not the billions that it is.

This is why the authority of any given scientist must be always open to fair questioning and open criticism by others in the field, why a community of researchers are more likely to be correct than any one individual no matter how imminent, and why even then, science as a whole must always be scrupulously self-critical and open to correction.

No one researcher speaks for science as a whole with unquestioned authority despite any significance of their contributions.

The cold, hard truth is that scientists are human, and are permitted the right to be wrong by any reasonable person because of this. Being wrong, and being shown wrong by other scientists is simply how science moves forward, getting closer than before to the truth.

Because you cannot find out what is true unless you can also tell what is not…

…and in this, having inbuilt mechanisms for error-detection, science is unlike any other human social enterprise ever invented, which is why I find it among the very greatest of our ideas, the best of our various claims to ways of knowing.

Science can be and has been wrong, often grossly wrong, but step by step it leads us further toward what is more true than less, to a better understanding of what really is when it is allowed to work properly and unshackled by ideology.

Science does not discard findings that are useful, that repeatedly continue to be verified, that consistently withstand attempts to falsify them, findings that are enhanced, deepened, elaborated on by new knowledge, and which continue to make valid predictions of the world in their domain of operation.

We are bound principally by the laws of physics, and limited by our understanding of them, so those who understand them professionally have a good deal to justifiably say on what we can know to be impossible — pending further and better knowledge.

Expert critics of paranormal and fringe claims are expert critics, not because of a lack of understanding, or unfamiliarity with the subject they critique, but precisely because they understand their subject so well that they know exactly how and where proponents of these ideas go wrong in making their claims, knowing full well how they go astray in both data and theory.

One does not have to have a string of PhD.s in nonsense after one’s name to know why and how it is nonsense, but knowing the subject is essential to fair and objective criticism.

Science shows us our limits, our limits as human beings, and the limits of nature itself. It shows us our horizons, but it also opens up new and fantastic worlds to explore — fantastic all the more, because what it shows us is real — not merely the product of our imaginings and wishful impositions upon the universe. Knowing our limits and the limits of the world is good, not restrictive, because only by admitting these exist and addressing them may we overcome them.

Related articles

• Faster-than-light travel discovered? Slow down, folks (blogs.discovermagazine.com)
• Uncle Karl disses the evangelicals at last! (whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com)

Skeptefinitions: Pseudoscience & Antiscience

Image via Wikipedia

This is the first in what I find to be increasingly needed on this site: a compilation of working definitions of the terms I use on the Call to refer to, well, just about anything I post on with even a vaguely technical nature that requires a more precise meaning than those same terms often used in common parlance.

I’ve found that most words are notoriously difficult to agree upon concerning how to define them, especially if used informally, drastically increasing the chances of misinterpretation and straw-persons, most of it avoidable if a specific set of meanings and usage are stipulated beforehand.

It’s not enough to rely on most published dictionaries to provide these, as even published sources can vary substantially in their wording, potentially distorting interpretations of that wording, and the cultural and historical context of the period and date they are published.

They are also ripe for quote-mining.

Many such words, even when the sources agree in the wording of their descriptions, have multiple ambiguous and even conflicting meanings, further muddying the waters of discussion, encouraging fallacies of equivocation and presumption.

In this series of posts, which I shall link back to periodically, are the operative meanings of those terms in the sense, or set of senses, that I use them on this blog, sometimes prefaced by…Let’s assume for the sake of argument…

Note that I may in this series repeat those stipulated definitions posted separately in previous articles, for ease of immediate reference and to avoid the hassle of opening browser tabs ad nauseam.

These are the meanings I use. Period. I’ll warn you: I may be a bit pedantic with this, but it’s important to be thorough:

• First, there is the specified meaning of the ever-so popular word, sometimes loaded, though not always, Pseudoscience:

n. Any tenet, doctrine, claim, or belief-system that attempts to present itself as science, but which does not abide by its benchmarks or criteria and makes often demonstrably false claims or in principle untestable or unfalsifiable ones, in rejecting scientific reasoning, method, or its process, and which because its claims are not in accord with compelling evidence must promote and perpetuate itself by way of a mix of fabricated propaganda, logical fallacies, conspiracy theory, and/or anecdotal reasoning.

If there’s any question, I don’t use this word for ideas with that have nothing to do with claims about physical reality, nor for unorthodox ideas that are genuinely scientific. If an idea makes no claim to be scientific, implicitly or explicitly, or it abides by the rules of science in the methods used to discover and test it, it ain’t pseudoscience. The term does have derogatory connotations, so I won’t be using it that much regarding specific doctrines.

• And then there is another that gets abused a lot, Antiscience:

n. Similar in some respects to pseudoscience, sometimes a sub-set of it, but focusing on denying and/or hindering scientific research for political, religious, economic, or other ideological ends and/or for financial gain by way of personal attacks, legislative bans and funding cuts, physical, psychological, or legal coercion, propaganda, logical fallacies, conspiratorial reasoning, out-of-context *gotcha!* anecdotal soundbites, and in extreme cases (look up Lysenkoism under Josef Stalin’s rule), the imprisonment, exile or capital punishment of the offending researcher. Primarily characterized by a rejection, implied, denied, or explicit, of the core scientific values of curiosity, empiricism, and progress through the advancement of objective knowledge.

I try to base my beliefs on objective reality, and it doesn’t matter whether that reality sits well with me, so I don’t use that last term on ideas that don’t meet the above criteria just because they make me uncomfortable.

But (with a big hat-tip to fellow blogger Lousy Canuck…)while I’m just as susceptible to bias and fallacies, and to accusations of these, as anyone else, I’m potentially just as susceptible to accusations of being a 500-foot tall Tyrannosaurus rex in a holographic human disguise with a bad habit of indulging in late night snacks of unrefined plutonium to fuel my atomic death-ray breath…

*Rawr!*

Such is life.

Richard Kent and his theory about the Brontosaurus

This is a new one courtesy of Potholer54.

Disclaimer: The air friction caused by laughing so hard from this may cause your mouth, nostrils and lungs to catch fire.

There. You’ve been warned.

Racism in Pseudoscience

Image via Wikipedia

One of the ugliest traits shown by all too many of our species is ethnic and racial intolerance, and while distrust and dislike of genetic out-groups may have served a competitive survival function during our early history as a species, and even before we were human, it serves us today only as a means of instigating bigotry, ‘ethnic cleansing,’ and even today in some places, slavery is alive and well.

While it is trivially true that “illegal immigrant” is not a race, much of the furor and discrimination against illegal immigrants in the ‘States is ethnically motivated, and directed specifically at those of Hispanic/Latino descent, particularly immigrants from South and Central America.

Nor is “Muslim” a race, though there is a great deal of bigotry toward those of African and Middle-Eastern descent, those ethnicities commonly and traditionally associated in the U.S. with Islamic religious affiliation.

After all, this is the 21st century, and “Muslim” is in vogue as a veiled racial epithet, for the N-word is currently unfashionable, and would much too obviously peg the one using it for what they are.

There are some pseudosciences where racism is evident, as in pseudo-history doctrines that claim that our non-Caucasian predecessors, like the Maya, Egyptians, Inca, and the great sub-Saharan African civilizations were too stupid and backward to build their own monuments and otherwise achieve greatness on their own, but just HAD to have the help of alien space-gods, Atlanteans, or Atlantean space-gods (often from the Pleiades, no less!) to help them out.

Sometimes, it works the other way as well, when directed against those of European descent by those not so melanin-challenged.

To this on all sides I say, ‘utter nonsense’: our ancestors, ALL of them, were brilliant and fully capable of figuring things out on their own, or we wouldn’t be here today, building upon that foundation of their previous accomplishments.

This is, needless to say, just ugly, regardless of the skin-tones of those making the claims, for our global civilization rests upon the foundation of all those who came came before, whether those before were white, black or brown, and as interconnected as today’s world is, as a species, we stand or fall together.

Genius has existed in all eras, and knows no skin-tones.

Racism is even found in some claims of differences in intelligence between genetic sub-groups of humanity, and recently, with an enormous furor, fully justified in my view, about absurd claims that some racial groups are, and I quote, “less objectively attractive” than others.

WTF?? That’s ridiculous.

Frankly, I find those ladies of other ethnic groups to be generally more attractive than my own, but I’m under no illusion, or delusion, that the attractiveness or unattractiveness of any individual is at all objective, just a matter of taste and personal preference on my part.

Yes, if you must know, I support interracial marriage, because in my opinion, mixing the gene-pool tends to produce good-looking offspring.

There’s some evidence that the ethnic-religious-racial tribalism that leads to this sort of often dangerous nonsense is part of our innate psychological makeup, a carry-over from our ancient history as roving hominin bands on the plains of Africa for millions of years, but it’s something that we can, and I think should, outgrow, unlearn, and dispense with as hazardous psychological baggage, not something that is in any way unavoidable or necessary.

That’s my view at any rate.

* * *

Carl correctly notes in his response that Racism and Bigotry are not synonymous. But taking the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th paragraphs in context with the 1st, as I intended the entire post to be considered as a whole, it clearly denotes ethnic bigotry as something that racism leads to, not as one and the same thing. I am quite aware that there are forms of bigotry besides just the racial/ethnic, but those are not the subject of this post.

Also, he quite accurately notes that Hispanic/Latino ethnicity is quite varied from locale to locale, and although considered as a “race” on many application forms, and thought of in racial/ethnic terms by many, there is no such thing as a single, ethnically unified “Hispanic” population, as each region in Latin America has it’s own mix of indigenous and European-descended populations, that do not necessarily regard those of other locales as a ‘band of brothers.’ I did not intend to imply that they did, though I did not make this clear in the post above. My Bad.

How They Staged the Morristown UFO Hoax, Part 1-3

This is just way too awesome: A test of peoples’ responses to atypical but mundane phenomena and it’s effects on their beliefs. This is how good skepticism should be done – not mere debunking – by studying the nature of belief in unusual situations, in this case, using balloons and road flares as faux UFOs…While documenting it on video.

Courtesy of MichaelShermer’s YouTube channel & Joe Rudy and Chris Russo
producer: Joe Rudy
producer: Chris Russo