Skepticism

This is one of those pass-along things on Facebook, where you tell something about yourself to your friends. I liked doing this one so much I thought I’d post it here as well. The idea is to come up with the 10 books that have stuck with you the most—not necessarily the best, but the ones that had the most effect on your life. Here’s mine, with Amazon links:

1. How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Browne. Although it wasn’t written as a self-help book, it’s probably the best self-help book ever written! Browne gives you a practical, logical, no-nonsense approach for everything from relationships to taking on obligations. Read it and take charge of your own life!

2. Cosmos by Carl Sagan. The classic PBS series made such an impression on my 12-year-old mind when it first aired. This being the days before VCRs (or at least before we had a VCR), this book, written as a companion to the series, helped me not only relive the series but grow and develop my mental skills. Carl Sagan was truly a master at both astronomy and writing.

3. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein. A masterful work of science fiction with so much food for the mind that I’ve read it again and again, from teenage years into adulthood.

4. Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer. I must admit I had no idea who Dr. Shermer was when I first read this book, but I was so taken with it I just had to read more from him.

5. Healing Our World in an Age of Aggression by Mary J. Ruwart. Imagine being taken on a journey to a place so enlightening your life will never be the same. Now imagine that every single step of that journey is based on logic and rational inquiry. That is precisely what this book does as Dr. Ruwart shows, almost to a scientific certainty, that aggression in all its forms—even when unseen—causes the harm we see throughout society.

6. The Mask of Nostradamus: The Prophecies of the World’s Most Famous Seer by James Randi. By all rights, this should be his book Flim-Flam!, but the truth is I only read that after I was a confirmed skeptic. The Nostradamus book got me on my way. I’d never heard of James Randi, and I was researching Nostradamus for a paper I was writing in college. I came across this book, completely rewrote the paper as a result, and my approach to research and learning has never been the same since.

7. Whatever Happened to Penny Candy? by Richard Maybury. As one of the Uncle Eric books, it’s intended for children, but great for adults, too. Probably the best introduction to economics (at least, its most important aspects) that I know of.

8. The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin. Although his science books The Origin Of Species and The Descent of Man rightfully have their place as two of history’s most important books, this earlier book detailing his years on the HMS Beagle tells an inspiring story of Darwin’s love for all humanity and how he was truly a man ahead of his time.

9. Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. Written in the 1940s but still just as relevant today, this one simple lesson is not only a good lesson for economics, but for everyday life as well.

10. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie. Poirot rocks. That’s just all there is to it. Christie had a genuine talent for making improbable stories very real, with very real characters, and this masterpiece of hers has to be the best mystery novel ever written. Even if you’re not into mysteries, even if the identity of the murderer has been spoiled for you, this book is still a wonderful treat for the little grey cells.

My daughter came home today and, as usual, I checked her schoolwork. She had made a self-portrait, and above it, she had written, at the teacher’s direction, “Aleena has five senses.”

If you’re wondering what’s wrong with that, you’re probably not alone. You could probably even get this answer from any given skeptic: five senses, no more. What? A sixth sense? What kind of paranormal newage woo-woo is that?

But the truth is, our bodies are much more magnificent than that. Instead of being limited to seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching, we have a much greater experience in sensing both ourselves and the world around us.

What about when you go outside and feel how cold it is? And come back inside to the warmth? That’s not touch; you can’t touch heat. It’s thermoception.

What about when you get hurt, or in near danger of being damaged? That pain you feel isn’t touch; it’s pain, and it’s extremely useful. This is nociception.

There’s also equilibrioception, which helps us balance and gives us a sense of acceleration. If this sense is damaged (by, say, an ear infection) it can be as debilitating as losing a limb.

Proprioception, the kinesthetic sense, lets you know where the parts of your body are and what position they’re in. When you wake up, you haven’t been keeping track of how your body has moved in your sleep, but you still know exactly what position you’re in—where your arms and legs are, what side you’re lying on, what direction your fingers are going, etc. Again, people who lose this sense (generally through nerve damage of some kind) realize how much we rely on it.

Those make up our nine basic senses, but there are more besides:

Do you like spicy food? That’s due to special cell receptors which are completely different to taste. Although it activates the same nerves as for temperature, it is a different sense, and one can easily tell the difference between spicy food and food that has been heated.

You have sensors in your lungs telling you how much air is in them and how much you need to breathe.

You have sensors in your gut alerting you of gastrointestinal distress.

Your stomach has sensors that give you a feeling of hunger or fullness.

Ever felt tired or achey? That’s a response to the body dealing with some extra task such as fighting a disease.

For that matter, getting sleepy is the result of a sense, too.

We have a mild (in comparison to other animals) electroception. We can feel electric charges of a certain voltage (like static-electric shocks), and strong electrical fields (just ask anyone who’s played an electric guitar outside in the rain). We can’t use it to navigate like birds can, but it is there.

Humans have been found to have a form of echolocation, although we can’t produce any sounds other than verbally. But verbal noises, as well as attached devices that send out an audible ping, have been used in tests of blindfolded subjects to help them navigate around a dark room. It isn’t yet known how much we use this in real life.

We have pressure-detection senses, which helps us when we move from a low to a high altitude (or vice-versa).

The list goes on. There is universal agreement among scientists for the nine basic senses; whether the rest should be included, and as how many senses, is a matter of debate. By some counts, there are as many as twenty-three senses.

Why make such a big deal about this? Because the five basic senses come from Aristotle, who also said there are four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. What if we taught our children there were only four elements? Would you feel good about that? So why teach them only five senses?

What, is it because it’s easier to teach? Well, why not teach that the Sun goes around the Earth, since that’s easier for kids to understand? You shouldn’t be giving kids misinformation just because it’s easier.

I think the answer is, because the teachers just don’t know any better—and that’s a shame.

But now you do.

I’ve seen this a lot in the past couple of months from my fellow skeptics, mostly from the liberal side (the libertarian skeptics don’t seem to have this problem). They make a big deal out of the First Amendment, particularly the establishment clause, and rightly so; but when it comes to other parts of the Constitution, it seems to be okay to ignore it if it goes against what they want.

The Tenth Amendment completely forbids Congress from doing anything not mentioned in Article I Section 8, and that includes forcing schools to teach evolution, setting a religious education policy for the schools (as Dennett wants to do), as well as many provisions of the Civil Rights Act (and just about everything else done by Congress, for that matter). Sorry, guys, but that’s a state/local battle, not a Federal one.

Article III Section 2 completely forbids the Supreme Court from deciding matters internal to a state and its citizens. It lists everywhere the Supreme Court and the lower Federal courts created by Congress has both original and appellate jurisdiction, and that’s not one of them. The only exception is if it’s a direct controversy under the Constitution. Shooting down Intelligent Design in the Dover trial is therefore 100% Constitutional; setting the abortion policy for the states based on the stages of pregnancy as Roe v. Wade did is not.

The Constitution only specifies three Federal crimes: treason, piracy, and counterfeiting. You might be able to use the Necessary and Proper Clause to add certain other crimes related to the powers in Article I Section 8 such as tax evasion or stealing the mail, but not any kind of fraud, even if it is committed by psychics. If murder is a state crime, then so is fraud.

No matter how much you feel religious stuff should be taxed, Article I Section 9 specifically prohibits the Federal government from taxing goods and services that cross state lines (Section 10 likewise prohibits the states, with some very specific exceptions). That would include religious communication.

For that matter, Sections 9 and 10 prohibit both the states and the Congress from passing Bills of Attainder. This means you can’t pass any laws that target any person or group of people. And that includes religious groups.

Just as the Constitution does not allow Congress to ban gay marriage, neither does it allow Congress or any other Federal entity to require citizens, companies, or groups to recognize gay marriage. Deal with it.

There are lots of other examples, but this should give you the idea. The Constitution either means something, or it doesn’t. And if you agree with even one of the above actions, or any action that is repugnant to the Constitution, then you have no cause—either legally or morally—to speak out against anyone else violating the First Amendment or anything else.

As I always say: if you want to be free to do what you want, you have to set others free to do what you don’t want. Otherwise, you just want a tyranny that agrees with you.

This is something I’ve been wondering about for years, and it’s really begun to seriously bother me lately: what do you actually have to do to win the Nobel Peace Prize?

The science prizes I can understand. Make a discovery, something that either adds greatly to what we know, or overturn something we thought we knew that ends up being bogus.

But the Peace Prize? Peace isn’t exactly a term you can define scientifically or objectively—which is really the crux of the problem. Nonetheless, I think it can be demonstrated that the Peace Prize just isn’t reliable as an award.

Certainly there have been worthy recipients—Albert Schweitzer and Norman Borlaug being among the greatest. But what about the fact that Mohandas Gandhi never received one? Could there have been a greater man of peace in all of history?

And what about the numerous unworthy recipients? How did they give it to Cordell Hull, when his actions helped deny the saving of over 900 Jewish refugees, many of whom went on to die in concentration camps? How did they give it to Henry Kissinger, because he gave “peace” to Vietnam after the Cambodia bombings, the kidnappings and murders of Operation Condor, and the invasion of Cyprus?

For that matter, why was it given to Yasser Arafat, whose crimes are well-documented? What, you can get the Nobel Peace Prize if you simply stop killing people? A serial killer could get it by not killing anyone else? And that argument doesn’t even apply to Arafat—he deliberately violated, continuously, the very peace agreement that supposedly merited him this award.

And now, this year, it was given to Al Gore. This, in my opinion, makes the Nobel Peace Prize nothing more than an irrelevant joke.

Let’s not get into the controversies around Global Warming here. For the sake of the argument, let’s assume that every single thing in An Inconvenient Truth is absolutely 100% factually correct. How, by any possible definition of the word, has it achieved even an iota of peace? How many people has it saved from the horrors of war, famine, and hatred? How many people, fearfully huddling under makeshift shelters, now get to step blinking into the sun once again because of this movie? How can the same goodness and peace brought to billions of people (yes, billions) by Norman Borlaug in any way be appropriately applied to a cheesy movie based on a bad PowerPoint presentation?

Can anyone explain to me how this isn’t just a bunch of people, who happen to be on the Nobel committee, trying to prop up their political hero? How is this in any way anything other than politics?

I say that this sullies once again the name of the Nobel Peace Prize, damages the good name of Alfred Nobel, and denigrates the work done by the real peacemakers of the world and the legacies they have left behind.

There’s just no way around it. Kent Hovind, of Creation Science Evangelism (one wonders how it can be science when it’s evangelism), is evil. If the fact that he pretends to have a doctorate degree that he didn’t earn isn’t enough, and if the fact that he’s currently spending ten years in Federal prison on multiple charges isn’t enough, this certainly should be:

He’s silencing his critics by having their YouTube videos critical of him taken down. He’s also had entire accounts pulled, including that of the Rational Response Squad. How has he done this? He’s claiming copyright infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This, after years of saying his videos aren’t copyrighted. See for yourself:

Why is Kent Hovind now claiming copyright infringement? For no other reason to silence his critics. That, and he’s a liar.

Don’t blame YouTube for this. Once the complaint is made, they by law have to take down the videos until the controversy is solved (can anyone say, “guilty until proven innocent?”). The blame rests squarely on Hovind and the people running CSE. They’re a bunch of liars. I would say they’re a bunch of creationist liars, but that would appear to be redundant—I’ve never met a creationist yet who wasn’t a liar. Really, it’s the only way they can pretend their insane ideas have any legitimacy.

And while you’re at it, you might also blame the politicians who passed the disgusting piece of corporate protectionist trash known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I and many others said at the time that the DMCA would be used for exactly this purpose—to abuse the law and virtually eliminate Fair Use.

See, the thing is, even if Hovind’s videos were copyrighted, what these users have done would still be legal as Fair Use under Title 17 Section 107 of the United States Code. The DMCA gives corporations, not to mention liars like Hovind and the rest of the CSE, a legal battleaxe to wield against the legitimate rights of others.

Fight evil Hovind, fight the evil CSE, fight the evil creationists (at the very least, send them a copy of the Ninth Commandment; it’s obviously missing from their Bible), and fight the evil DMCA.

And to everyone at the Rational Response Squad, as well as RabidApe and the other users who have had videos removed or accounts suspended, stay strong. You are in the right.

Of course, we all know that cell phones used when driving are causing crashes to skyrocket, right? It’s such an epidemic that many states have started to make cell phone use behind the wheel a traffic offense, so it must be a problem, right? I mean, our government wouldn’t go creating problems that don’t exist just to pass more legislation, would they?

Initially, all indications were that the use of cell phones while driving had no real effect on accidents, injuries, or fatalities. In fact, it was shown that other more mundane activities such as changing the radio station were more dangerous. Well, now, finally, at long last, we have a comprehensive study of cell phone use and crash data (PDF) that, once and for all, shows…that there still isn’t any increased danger.

We investigate the causal link between cellular usage and crash rates by exploiting a natural experiment induced by a popular feature of cell phone plans in recent years—the discontinuity in marginal pricing at 9 pm on weekdays when plans transition from “peakâ€� to “off-peakâ€� pricing. We first document a jump in call volume of about 20-30% at “peakâ€� to “off-peakâ€� switching times for two large samples of callers from 2000-2001 and 2005. Using a double difference estimator which uses the era prior to price switching as a control (as well as weekends as a second control), we find no evidence for a rise in crashes after 9 pm on weekdays from 2002-2005. The 95% CI of the estimates rules out any increase in all crashes larger than .9% and any increase larger than 2.4% for fatal crashes…We confirm our results with three additional empirical approaches—we compare trends in cell phone ownership and crashes across areas of contiguous economic activity over time, investigate whether differences in urban versus rural crash rates mirror identified gaps in urban-rural cellular ownership, and finally estimate the impact of legislation banning driver cell phone use on crash rates. None of the additional analyses produces evidence for a positive link between cellular use and vehicle crashes.

In fact, they found that the crash rates fell over this period, by quite a lot. They also found that legislative bans on cell phone use reduced neither crashes nor fatalities.

But don’t go just casually blabbing because of this:

It should be noted, however, that our result is not inconsistent with the claim that cell phones are a source of attentional distraction. One possible explanation is that drivers compensate for the dangers of cell phone use by driving more carefully.

This a corollary to the Peltzman Effect, which deals with the effects of safety measures such as road signs and speed limits that I’ve blogged about in the past. Also, they found that, in general, people who talk on cell phones while driving are substituting the cell phone use for other distractions, and might even improve one’s driving by alleviating boredom.

As usual, don’t just go blindly accepting what politicians and pundits tell you. They’re more interested in taking your money and your liberty than they are in your safety.

USA Today has an article on the Iraq War, relating to the Sunk Cost Fallacy. This fallacy, often described as “throwing good money after bad,” is usually described as when an investor keeps investing in an unprofitable venture, merely because he has put so much money into it already. He figures if he doesn’t keep investing then all the money he has put in was wasted, but by staying in all he does is waste more money. The phrase “sunk cost” refers to the fact that the money is gone, and there’s no way to retrieve it, and therefore the decision to invest further should be made on the basis of future costs alone.

The article does a good job of explaining the trap this fallacy leads to, as it is with the Iraq war:

Here’s the problem: As our involvement continues, X gets bigger and bigger, making withdrawal increasingly costly, pressing on easier to justify, and the decision itself less sensitive to the potential and rewards of victory. Incorporating sunk costs into our war decision-making does wrong to those called upon to make future sacrifices as we strive to make lost lives count.

Why do our leaders consider X in their decision-making over the war?

Probably because we feel a strong emotional response toward X, unlike, say, the merely financial sunk costs incurred by firms. It is hard to bear the idea that the sacrifice of these American lives would be devoid of existential meaning. Moreover, the more we have invested in the war, the worse we look by withdrawing.

In the rhetoric of the difficult decisions over whether to extend our involvement in the war, including X as a cost of withdrawing inappropriately inflates the cost of a withdrawal. Just as it is harder to quit Silver Falls after wasting $10 worth of quarters, it is harder to quit a war after incurring 3,600 dead and tens of thousands wounded, and spending the better part of a trillion dollars in a failed effort.

Although it may seem callous, we need to forget about X in our decision-making about the war. The correct way to think about whether or not to proceed is to weigh the costs and benefits from pressing on from this point forward. What value do we place on victory? What are the chances that we will prevail if we do press on? And what will be the costs of pressing on in terms of lives and resources? Our country may be divided on this issue, but we owe it to those who may yet be called to make the ultimate sacrifice to properly count our costs.

Wise words, but good luck getting Bush & Co., or even most of the current crop of Presidential candidates (Ron Paul excepted), to understand it.

So now there’s an article in The New York Times about Facebook.com being the new haven for “sexual predators” (there’s a weasel word if ever there was one!). From the article:

Facebook, the online social network, has stolen some of MySpace’s momentum with users and the news media. Now, it is being subjected to the same accusations that it does not do enough to keep sexual predators off its site.

Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut’s attorney general, said that investigators in his state were looking into “three or more” cases of convicted sex offenders who had registered on Facebook and had “also found inappropriate images and content” on the service. The inquiry continues, he said, and state officials have contacted Facebook and asked it to remove the profiles.

“There is no question that Facebook is encountering some of the same problems that MySpace has posed,� Mr. Blumenthal said. “They should be held accountable, and we intend to do so.�

Folks, these dangerous criminals hang around churches, schools, parks, lots of places. We don’t hold those places accountable for the actions of others; why is cyberspace any different? No, this is just more excuse-mongering to fan the flames of fear in order to regulate the internet. Facebook does everything possible to make sure adults just can’t automatically talk to youngsters. But what is the source of this fear? Read it for yourself (emphases mine):

But in some cases, Facebook’s younger users are vulnerable to sexual solicitations from older users, as was demonstrated last week to The New York Times by an anonymous person who described himself or herself in an e-mail message as “a concerned parent.� The evidence of this person’s activities on Facebook may give state investigators further cause for concern.

In early July, this person opened a fake account on the site, posing as a 15-year-old girl named Jerri Gelson from North Carolina. The photograph on the fake profile page is of an under-age girl whose hair conceals her face. On the profile page, Ms. Gelson — whom the “concerned parent� said was not a real person — is described as looking for “random play� and “whatever I can get.�

This person then signed up for three dozen sexually themed groups—forums of users organized around a particular topic.

Yes, that’s right. This person didn’t make the fake account and then passively start getting sexual advances—he went looking for it! It’s the same thing that TheRegister.com and others have found whenever they’ve tried the same thing. They get nothing, until they go to sexually-explicit groups or chat rooms. And then they get sexual advances! Gee, who’da thought?

No one’s blaming the victims here, but geez, is it really that hard for parents to monitor their childrens’ internet activities and teach them to avoid the dangerous places, just like they have to do in the real world?

Nooooo, that would mean they would actually have to be responsible. Far better to let the government run a scare of everyone, be lazy enough to want the government to do their jobs for them, and have them coming in on a white horse to save us from these evil internet predators. Bye-bye, the one and only bastion of free speech left to us by the power-hungry fear mongers. Hey, after all, it’s for the good of the children.

Well, everything but their (and everyone else’s) liberty, that is.

Today, I happened to glance at the top of the horoscopes in the Charlotte Observer and I read this:

…[Y]ou’ll encounter confusion. You’ll also become acquainted with delusion and misunderstanding.

Of course, if they’re reading their horoscope for anything but yuks, they already are acquainted with delusion and misunderstanding—for that’s all astrology is!

So, I’m going through all of last week’s papers doing the Sudoku puzzles, and while doing one my eyes just happened to glance over to the next column where the Horoscopes are, and I see this:

Today’s Birthday: You will make mistakes this year.

Wow, those amazing astrologers—How do they do it?

Awhile back, I posted a blog entry showing why Syliva Browne is no psychic, with an audio file of one call from her appearance on Larry King Live on 7 December 03. Here, she tries to convince a caller that her mother has died when she is clearly alive. It’s embarrassing for Sylvia, and really funny. It’s also funny how she keeps evading James Randi’s Million Dollar Challenge. It’s been over five years since she agreed to the test and agreed to the protocol it would use. And ever since then she’s used every excuse in the book—and maybe written one or two new ones—to avoid it. You can see all of that, and also all of what I talk about below, on Randi’s special Sylvia Browne page. All of that’s funny, but other “predictions” of Sylvia’s are downright serious and even sad. The attention of the media has been drawn to the case where Shawn Hornbeck has been finally returned to his parents after being abducted for more than four years. Most of the attention has been drawn towards Sylvia Browne. That must be because her psychic powers helped police find the abductor and return Shawn home, as she claims to have done with “tens of thousands” of people, right? Uh, no. The attention is on Sylvia because she was wrong, wrong, wrong. She got the most fundamental fact wrong: She said that Shawn was dead, causing the parents much grief. Many might have given up the search after that. She may have even led the police the wrong way with her wrong guesses, saying that the perpetrator was dark-skinned (he wasn’t) with long hair and dreadlocks (he had short hair). She told them Shawn’s (dead) body was between two boulders, when he was very much alive in the abductor’s apartment, no boulders in sight. But at least here there’s a happy ending, no thanks to Sylvia. You can see all of that at Randi’s Sylvia page, as well as a link to Sylvia videos on YouTube, a couple of which I’ll talk about below.

So I’m watching one of those Lifetime movies with my wife and a commercial comes on for this woman, Lisa Williams, doing the whole Talking-to-the-Dead scam (no, no link—I just can’t bring myself to bring a scam artist’s site up in the Google ranks). After the Sci-Fi Channel finally stopped showing that hack con man John Edward, and it seemed like the whole cold reading phenomenon was at least going out of vogue, now up pops another head in this game of psychic Whack-A-Mole.

Billed as a "reality" series, it looks more like watching one of David Blaine’s lame specials as the cameras follow her around from one mark to the next. At one point in the commercial, she asks one man who David is, and his jaw drops. Of course, you know he’s going to end up saying, "Oh, she knew my father/uncle/whoever’s name was David!" No, she didn’t—she asked you who David was! (Does anyone really think they’re going to show the times where she gave out names that were wrong? Can anyone say "confirmation bias"?)

Unfortunately, Lifetime’s audience seems to be much less intelligent and sophisticated than that of the Sci-Fi Channel, and John Edward ran for years. Time to call in Penn & Teller, James Randi, Michael Shermer, the Center for Inquiry, etc. One more target on the range.

Ah, well. The skeptic’s work is never done…