I get back to the blogosphere, and the news, after keeping my head down for a few weeks, and what do I find? Insanity.

I don’t remember things, specifically talk about climate, being quite so lunar. But there you go. I guess it’s a sign of an un-prejudiced mind that this fevered conspiracism can still surprise me.

And it’s all about the ClimateGate emails. Over 60 meg worth of correspondence by climate scientists, stolen from a hacked server and put on the net for those worried about the darkest plans of Green International Socialism.

The out-of-context quote mining and gotchas will continue for some time, no doubt. It may effect some careers, perhaps. What I don’t think it will do is alter the conclusions of science – sneaking, criminal means and propagandising as a course to Kuhnian revolution tends not to work, at least not without considerable force behind it (e.g. Lysenkoism – and even then it leads to severe policy failures.)

In the 1990s, we had UFO nutters and other assorted “X-Files isn’t a documentary?” types clogging up the Internet. Now its climate change conspiracism, and its been accepted, along the lines of “teaching the controversy”/”equal time”, into the mainstream media. It’s broken out in the Liberal party in an explicit manner, from the far right of the party – Nick Minchin coming out and laying bare his deeply held belief that climate change was a fiction cooked up as a global left-wing conspiracy.

Someone call Fox Mulder.

If there is anything that ClimateGate achieves, and I think it very well may do, is to perform an outing. Just not the sort the conspiracists were hoping for.

Aside from the obviously desperate act of using and distributing hacked emails which don’t all pertain to the science in question anyway, the choice of gotchas is damning. Of the conspiracy theorists.

I won’t go into great detail about the quotes, not wanting to perpetuate, or enable the morbid search through private correspondence. I’ll try and exercise some restraint by using two, already widely circulated quotes pertaining to the science – and the conspiracist interpretation.

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Right-wing, libertarian conspiracist, James Delingpole would have you believe that this is evidence of “manipulation of evidence“. The decline that needs to be hidden is that implied by recent proxy data which is known to be unreliable beyond a certain date – not for the fact that it contradicts some socialist master plan, but because the proxy has been observed to have become less responsive to the variable it is being used to represent. So in lieu of lost data, “real temps” are being used.

Throwing out contaminated or otherwise compromised groups of data is nothing new to science and there is nothing untoward about it. It happens all the time across science, when a correlation drops between a proxy and a variable, the proxy can’t be used to draw inferences, perhaps in a regression analysis when outside of a certain reliable range, or with a change in a hidden cause rendering the entire regression analysis unusable.

It can be more mundane than that. Things like mass titrations (which if you’ve done them, you’ll agree are mundane) can be particularly vulnerable – all it takes is for a sample group to become contaminated, perhaps by laboratory conditions, or a bias in the technique of a lab staff member.

That doesn’t mean that the whole venture is lost – if for example, a group shows a skew with wild outliers, when it should be normally distributed, or if any other number of warning signs pop up (e.g. mean outside the confidence interval), with a little further analysis and justification the group can be removed from the analysis. All while it can still possible for research to continue, and for valid inferences to be made.

Errors happen. Steps are taken to deal with them. It happens in projects big and small. Big deal.

In light of this, the quote is unremarkable. It’s not evidence of manipulation of evidence at all, given that we know that “the Nature trick” is to replace data known to be unreliable.

For anyone vaguely interested in the topic, and with the slightest scientific acumen, all it takes is a little effort to research and these answers avail themselves. So the question then is, how interested are the conspiracy haunted Delingpoles and Andrew Bolts in the science of climate change, what is their scientific acumen and what effort did they put into their research, to let a no-brainer like this one get past?

Confirmation bias. I suspect it’s as simple as that. They had their pet theories apparently confirmed hence no need to look further, lest they come across something disconfirmatory.

If you’ve argued with a UFO conspiracy theorist, you know what I’m talking about. The modus operandi of both types of conspiracist is the same. This is not the modus operandi of a skeptic – so please, stop calling them that.

“Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.”

Delingpole calls this a fantasy of violence. But to what extent? How far can it really be taken seriously? It reads like ordinary office venting – which really it most probably is. If Delingpole things this should even be paid attention to, he’s either trying to milk this for all it’s worth, or he genuinely doesn’t understand.

I say worse things in emails about my best friends. And like the understanding pricks they are, they know I’m not really going to break their legs.

Such are the candid things social animals share when with those they can be candid with.

But then, conspiracy nuts usually aren’t the most social types either. Is this a failure to care about the truth of what is being said in the emails? Is this a failure to put effort into a little bit of reasonable imagination? Or like the lack of scientific acumen shown elsewhere, is this a failure to genuinely understand human beings doing human things?

It really must be very lonely to be so very paranoid.

That the choice cuts of the out-of-context gotcha quotes are so pathetic, is damning. Seriously, if you want leaked documentation that actually reveals something, see Watergate, or The Wedge Document.

I can’t help but think that outing themselves like this isn’t going to help the denialist cause one bit, but then that’s a silver lining on the very depressing little cloud that is their lot. A bit sad they’d probably interpret attempts to address their mental health needs as socialist brainwashing.

This kind of paranoia seems to have a kind of mainstream prevalence that I don’t think it once had. Will it catch on, or will we gain a learning experience – a cautionary tale – out of all this silliness?

~ Bruce

The link.

The story:

A Massachusetts woman says rust-colored residue on the bottom of her iron strikes a remarkable resemblance to Jesus Christ.

Mary Jo Coady, in Methuen, Mass., says she noticed the image on Sunday.

Coady says an image of Jesus Christ that she sees in the pattern on the bottom of the iron has reassured her that “life is going to be good.”

The question:

Will she iron her underpants with it? God probably wants her underwear to be wrinkle free, too…

(ht @vizhnet)

When we look at the whole of human history, there is no doubt that we can find a plethora of beliefs that were held by a majority which proved themselves to be false upon closer inspection.  I think here of some very obvious examples: that the Sun went round the Earth, that illnesses could be relieved by bloodletting, or that enslaving another human being was a moral action.  In recent history, claims of paranormal or supernatural experience, dubious claims of alternative medicine, or even simple things like a fear of going into the basement, should give us pause to wonder if the beliefs on which we are taking our actions are reasonably true.  I doubt very seriously that any reasonable person wants to take an action that is unjustified, and I am sure you are in agreement when I say that we want to believe things because we have our own reasons for believing them, rather than accepting those ideas that are passed on to us by our social environment without critical analysis.

The best way to accomplish these two goals is to apply critical thinking and skepticism to all claims put forth.  Here I think of the 17th Century French philosopher René Descartes, who brought about a revival in skepticism when he sought to establish truths in life that were indubitable; that is, ideas that could not be doubted.  Though I think in practice we need not subscribe to a form of radical skepticism that would leave us in a state of complete lack of knowledge (a state of epistemological darkness), I think the best way to ascertain truth is to withhold assenting to a claim until we have been presented with supporting arguments or evidence that we consider sufficient.

This question of sufficiency is a tough one to answer, as it relies on a subjective view of what constitutes as good evidence, and the grey area between certain knowledge and complete lack of knowledge leaves a lot of room for each of us to determine what is sufficient for us to believe.  Still, I think there are tools we can use to prevent ourselves from being deceived by other people and our own internal biases and psychological make-up.

Namely, I think understanding what constitutes good science and what constitutes good reason will allow us to separate the wheat from the chaff.  When assessing arguments, it is important to be able to identify logical fallacies and poor evidence.  If we can use these tools to determine what arguments are good and what arguments are poor, we can proportion our beliefs to the evidence and reason that warrants such a belief.  By doing so, we can be relatively confident that our beliefs are our own, that they are reasonably true, and that any action we take based on those beliefs is justified and rational.

Or specifically, why I am not an apatheist.

I’m not exactly sure how long the term’s been in common usage (and you know how I feel about doing research), but I’d guess it’s only really taken off since atheism started becoming mainstream. For anyone not quite caught up, “apatheism” is a portmanteau of “apathy” and “theism” (or “atheism”, I suppose), and refers to people who profess not to care whether or not God exists.

Now, I don’t generally have many complaints with apatheists. I’ve been living with one for the better part of a year, and it’s a position which doesn’t naturally give rise to any sort of fundamentalist fervour, so generally we’re cool, apatheists and me. But I’ve decided lately that it’s not a position that I personally identify with.

It’s simple enough to sum up why.

A substantial number of the most popular conceptions of God throughout history and around the world – including probably the all-time numero uno himself – possess, we’re told, both the power and the authority to condemn each of us to eternal suffering, should he will it.

I’m a heroically lazy individual, but even I can’t muster up much apathy on the subject of my being condemned to eternal suffering.

Anyone who’s ever really believed in it can probably back me up on this: Hell is really fucking scary if you actually take it seriously. If I thought there was any remote possibility that I might be screwing things up the way I’m going at the moment, and risking sending myself there by worshipping the wrong god or rejecting the one true path to salvation, I’d want to seriously look into that. I don’t think I’d be able to simply shrug the problem off, or dismiss it as something not really relevant to my life. I’m pretty sure you’d have to be insane not to care about God’s possible existence, or the exact nature of his whims, if you thought that unending torture was genuinely on the cards.

But in general – my flatmate notwithstanding – those apatheists aren’t crazy. And so I don’t think it’s overly presumptuous to suggest that most apatheists do actually maintain some significant religious positions. They’d probably agree, if pushed, that they count their odds of being sent to Hell for eternal punishment after they die to be about as negligible as I do. And that’s not a trivial or careless conclusion; Hell is a culturally ubiquitous concept, described in the holy text of the predominant religion on the planet, held sacred by billions of people. It’s not an obvious nonsense to someone who’s never given the subject a moment’s thought.

So I think it makes sense to suggest that an actual disregard for the subject isn’t what most people mean when they call themselves apatheists. They may not have expended much effort in forming the opinions they have, but they’ve considered the matter far enough that it doesn’t need to trouble them any further. They’ve decided that the dire consequences often heralded by God’s self-appointed spokesmen are so unlikely that they can be ignored. Beyond that, who cares?

Well… still me, actually.

Obviously a great deal of the first bit does apply to me, too. I’ve rejected the possibility of God in any form that I might need to worry about, and don’t generally let the fiddly philosophical details bother me beyond that. But I still undoubtedly take an interest in much of the related discussion (my recent inactivity on this blog notwithstanding). I emphatically do give a shit, not so much about what can or can’t be conclusively disproved or vaguely hypothesised about some supreme being, but about the implications of people’s responses to the question “Is there a God?”

Clearly, there are battles here that I think are worth fighting, even if God himself isn’t my opponent. Religious fanaticism is one of the most damaging forces in today’s world, and I really think that a broader understanding of science, and skepticism, and humanism, and the kind of reality-based thinking that leads people to disbelieve in God, would be more beneficial to our species than just about anything else. While there are still people stoning witches to death, rationalising their own hate and prejudice as being that of an almighty creator, and telling millions of their followers that condoms are making the African AIDS crisis worse, I can’t be apathetic on this.

For those who can, it may be largely a case of picking your battles. Of the people in Africa not dying of AIDS, for instance, there are plenty of them busy starving to death instead. If you’re directly trying to combat famine by helping to feed people, then your faith or that of your colleagues probably isn’t much of an issue, and whether or not someone’s wearing a crucifix in a hospital in Kansas might not seem all that pertinent.

I can’t possibly tell what’s the most useful thing for me to be doing, on those fleeting occasions when I give some thought to the notion of doing something good. But this is something I can do. It feels like my fight. It ain’t nothin’. So there’s really not much about the question of God’s existence that I truly don’t care about.

I just wanted to share in this quick post with everyone a video I saw this last summer at The Amazing Meeting 7 in Las Vegas.  During the convention, our pals at the Skeptics Guide to the Universe shared their first effort at skeptical movie-making, a spoof of “ghost-hunting” shows which have become so popular these days.  For a more detailed analysis of why ghost-hunting is a load of woo-woo, click here. I hope you enjoy the show!

The G Hunters: Episode 1, Part 1

The G Hunters: Episode 1, Part 2

Canada Free Press has the story. (H/T Gateway Pundit via ECM)

Excerpt:

Lift up a rock and another snake comes slithering out from the ongoing University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) scandal, now riding as “Climategate”.

Obama Science Czar John Holdren is directly involved in CRU’s unfolding Climategate scandal. In fact, according to files released by a CEU hacker or whistleblower, Holdren is involved in what Canada Free Press (CFP) columnist Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball terms “a truculent and nasty manner that provides a brief demonstration of his lack of understanding, commitment on faith and willingness to ridicule and bully people”.

“The files contain so much material that it is going to take some time t o put it all in context,” says Ball.  “However, enough is already known to underscore their explosive nature.  It is already clear the entire claims and positions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are based on falsified manipulated material and is therefore completely compromised.

“The fallout will be extensive as material continues to emerge.  Reputations of the scientists involved are already destroyed, however fringe players will continue to be identified and their reputations destroyed or sullied.”

Dr. Tim Ball is a renowned environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg.

I think it’s interesting that John Holdren is implicated in the global warming e-mails, because In 1971, Holdren thought that a new ice age was imminent. Ice age alarmism is pretty much the polar opposite of the global warming alarmism he now espouses.

Excerpt:

In 1971, John Holdren edited and contributed an essay to a book entitled Global Ecology: Readings Toward a Rational Strategy for Man. He wrote (along with colleague Paul Ehrlich) the book’s sixth chapter, called “Overpopulation and the Potential for Ecocide.” (Click here to view a photograph of the table of contents, showing Holdren’s essay on pages 64-78; click on the image to the left to view the cover.) In their chapter, Holdren and Ehrlich speculate about various environmental catastrophes, and on pages 76 and 77 Holdren the climate scientist speaks about the probable likelihood of a “new ice age” caused by human activity (air pollution, dust from farming, jet exhaust, desertification, etc.).

Don’t forget his previous comments on mass sterilizations, forced abortions and a world police force. He’s also a socialist.

I think it’s fair to say that when a mad man like Holdren sways from ice ages to global warming within a few seconds that climate funcdamentalism has nothing to do with science and everything to do with religious fervor and the desire to control other people. Why does the left hate reason and science so much? And why did Obama appoint mad men to high positions in his administration?

What are my issues with pseudoscience? With antiscience? Why bother with promoting science and skepticism? What’s the harm in believing what just feels good? Who cares whether or not it’s true?

We live in a world where science and its applications have given us amazing abilities, in the process making us the most powerful species on Earth, the only one at this moment of history that can potentially preserve or destroy it, or at least ourselves.

The problem is this: Not only do we have incredible potential as a result of science and technology, more than we’ve had in over 99% of our history as humans, not only does the vast majority of the population have easy access to this potential, but we’ve put real understanding of the relevant science and its implications into the hands of a comparative tiny handful of people.

This is a hazardous combination of often willful ignorance and power that is very likely to get us all killed in the next hundred years or so if not abated.

Even if not, especially when promoted for ideological reasons or those of personal gain, the spread of pseudoscience, because real science is sometimes difficult and pseudoscience is superficially more appealing, causes the bad science to crowd out the good.

Because many pseudoscientists and antiscientists promote their agendas using force or deception, since they do not have evidence or logic on their side–if they did, they’d be scientists–and often have a need to control others using dishonest tactics, ‘lying for the Greater Truth™’ rather than letting others come to their way of thinking by way of full understanding and freewill, aside from any apocalyptic considereations, the unchecked spread of irrational beliefs results in the spread of fear and confusion in a society, which potential dictators and theocrats delight in, for this keeps the people from thinking, and allows easy control over the masses.

Tyrants don’t like it when people can think for themselves, and people who try to keep you from doing so are never your friends.

I live in a country where the current Adminstration, after eight years of incompetence with often failed attempts at secrecy and suppression of civil liberties by the previous one, has once again permitted debate and dissent to be patriotic, as should be the case in a free nation.

I think that these are more than adequate reasons for the existence and purpose of this blog, and I challenge anyone to show me otherwise…hello?…hello?

I thought not.

(Last Updated 21:58, 11/27/2009, Grammar Correction)

Every year after my birthday, I try to reassess my life. I write down this reassessment so I can read it. I’ve found my memory slants things in my favor and only by writing down my thoughts can I later be sure of exactly what I was thinking at the time. So this post is primarily for me, put out publicly for anyone who might be interested. In essence, I’m reintroducing myself to myself. If you want to get to know me again, this would be a good thing for you to read, if you don’t there won’t be much you haven’t heard already.

I spent most of my life with what you might call a divided self. To some people, I was a good and serious Christian, to others I was a very liberal Christian, to myself I could be either of those two, but there was also a private life hidden from both my serious Christian friends and my nominally Christian friends. There were two parts to this private life as well: there was young man that desired nothing but the satiation of the flesh, and finally caught in the tension of all of this and man who truly hated his very life, and struggled constantly to avoid physical self harm and deep feelings of worthlessness. I was deeply ashamed that I, a Christian felt that way and struggled as much to keep people from finding out how I felt like trash as I did to overcome those feelings.

It made for a complicated life. I thought my parents were the greatest parents on earth and I loved them. At the same time, sometimes I hated them so much it was purely my fear of the punishment of God for disobeying them that kept me at home much past my 16^th birthday. If I was going to choose one word to describe my young adult and adult years it would “confused”. I was never sure who was the real me: the serious Christian, the liberal Christian, the sex freak, or person who was prevented from suicide purely because whenever he put a gun to his head he saw his family around his hospital bed as he was in a vegetative state, clucking their tongues and saying “Couldn’t even get that right, could you?”

I was always on the look out for someone who had the answer of how to live the Christian life. I wanted to truly be a Christian more than anything on earth. Adolescent angst turned into adult depression. Frequently, I would wake up before my alarm went off and stare at the ceiling trying to will myself into facing another day of failing to be the man I was supposed to be. Usually I could. Sometimes I could not, and it cost me more then one job.

This would lead me to join a radical Pentecostal group who claimed to have a corner on knowing God. Some would call the group cult-like, and perhaps it was but, in the end it was good for me. For the first time in my life I was honest with people about the feelings I had about myself and others. There was an enormous rush to being that intimate with people emotionally. The feeling, though sexless, is not entirely unlike the feeling of being courted. (I’ve talked to a few cult survivors who say this remains a feature of their live that they now miss.) When the novelty of those wonderful feeling wore off however, I was largely the same person. This became an increasing source of frustration. Further, the church talked a very radical, revolutionary game, but when I started to ask hard questions about when this so called revolution would start, I was ostracized.

A pivotal moment in all of this, was falling in love with my wife’s best friend. Of course, being 24 and her being 22, part of these love feelings including an intense and acute desire to make love to her. Which at first, made me hate myself more then I knew was possible. It would hardly seem that this could work for good? But it did. Through long conversations with my wife about my feelings, we came to the conclusion that it wasn’t feelings that were wrong but the actions you took with them. That being the case, I just ignored the sex drive and enjoyed loving someone. Always I had seen my desire for sex with a woman I was not married to as sick and twisted, and myself as perverse for having such feelings. Now, I accepted those feelings and enjoyed them but chose not to act on them. This was the beginning of a life of much less self hatred.

This new life of believing that I was worthy of love changed what I expected from a church. I now wanted to be treated as a peer. This didn’t sit well with the somewhat cult-like church we went to. The last straw was when I quit my job (to avoid temptation, long story) and no one would help us. Further, I was reading the Bible as a whole document looking for the whole story rather then reading individual passages to see what I could make it say. Our church wasn’t even close.

We had moved to the inner city to be closer to the people we were supposed to be saving. I sat on the stoop listening to the gun fire and the sirens. I realized that every stupid thing I had ever done was because I thought someone besides me would take care of me, yet here I was unemployed in the projects of Kansas City. I had a high enough ACT score to get into MIT and I was waiting tables and living three doors down from a crack house.

I decided I would start taking care of myself, and that such a thing would glorify God. I also still wanted to help people in the inner city, and it looked to me (after 2 years of hearing about transformation that I never saw) that hard working people getting money into the crappy schools would go a lot farther then prayer meetings.

I joined the Air Force (same pay as the other branches but least chance of getting shot and most time at home). I joined a very sincere Christian who had reached one simple conclusion: If one was going to consistent with ALL of scripture instead of just the parts they liked, then God was a radically different person then most people thought.

It’s unfortunate in many ways that I deconverted after joining, because I think a lot of people have the idea the military experience is what made me an atheist. Not at all. I joined, as I said, primarily to make enough money to make a difference. I came into the military a Christian. It was not the Air Force life that deconverted me but careful study of Scripture and the history of the early church.

That study lead me to believe that one of three things must be true (1.) There is no God. (2.) There is a God but he actively hides from those who seek him (3.) There is a God and I personally can see no evidence because he doesn’t want me to. In any of those three cases, this life on earth is the highpoint of my existence as I am either bound toward nothing or hell.

Logic says to believe the idea which requires the least invention to work. I could invent a God that cannot be found with the scientific method, or say there is no God. I chose no God. I prayed a final prayer, “Lord if you are real, I came to this conclusion with the brain you gave me and the best facts I could get. If you are real and I am wrong, then please keep my daughter and don’t hold my sin against her. I’m going to be true to myself and admit I don’t see you.”

After this, everything got better. (A subject I have blogged on extensively.) I didn’t ache inside because I wasn’t failing anymore. I stopped pretending I was a Christian, so now I had one kind of friends: the kind that liked me for me. Three months later, I woke up and was getting ready for work. I felt strange and it took me some reflection to realize why: I couldn’t remember the last time I woke up so depressed that I couldn’t go to work.

I didn’t immediately “come out” as an atheist. In my life I have been many things and what I am really excited about today is not something that will necessarily have great meaning to me in 6 months or a year or 5 years. I quietly worked out things. One of the things I really struggled with was the meaning of life in the absence of God. Christianity is a pre-packaged world view, the paradigm equivalent of a Lunchable. Atheism is merely a theology. Eventually, two things would move me. The first was existentialism. Sadly, since most existentialists are big philosophy geeks, existentialism has a huge image problem. Existentialism does not say that life is meaningless (that would be nihilism), on the contrary existentialism says life can have great purpose: the purpose you give to it.

This helped me understand some of the great confusions of my life. What meaning did my relationships have? The meaning I chose to give them. Guilt I had carried over an ex-fiance for years melted away. But what of the indifferent universe that I now believed I lived in? Well, when I spoke of this to the very wise Doctor Karen Stollznow, she said, Israel, rocks and trees may be indifferent, but we as humans are generally surrounded by human beings who are as authentic parts of this universe as the sun or the earth. Because people can make the choice to care, the universe is not indifferent.

During this period (around this time last year) I began to really hate my parents. I was profoundly bitter with Christianity and I blamed my parents for raising me in it. That was stupid. We’ve talked since and worked it out largely. Though not bitter, I remain slightly miffed at Christianity. I’m 29 years old and it has only been the last few years that I have had a normal sexual relationship. I’ve been in a sexual relationship since I was 22, however it wasn’t normal or healthy until fairly recently as atheism and existentialism helped me come to healthy view about myself. Sex is not very important to some people and incredibly important to others. I am the latter, and it irritates me that I spent the first 25 years of my life when unhealthy, ineffective thoughts and actions regarding sex because of Christianity.

A note here, when I say “Christianity” I am not referring to a code of ethics based on the Gospels, but the unique expression of American, politically conservative protestantism as I understood it. I have talked to many people since deconverting that managed to believe psychologically healthy things as well as Christianity. They managed to believe everything I do, yet do so with a paradoxical belief largely at odds with scripture. More power to them, I’m not mad at them anymore either. (For awhile I was jealous of their ability to keep all the pleasant trapping of Christianity without the madness, but I’ve come to accept that they can do it and I can’t)

This is largely the complete story of how I got to where I am. Next post I will tell you myself (and you all) where here is.

- In this video, an Episcopal bishop describes religion as being “in the guilt-producing, control business”, and says that Hell is not real. I guess Jesus was pretty inconsistent on that point. I love the look on the interviewer’s face the first couple of times the camera cuts to him. (via Derren Brown)

- A great interview about scientific skepticism with Steve Novella.

- Some new celebrities have been bringing the crazy lately, which is always fun. Adam Baldwin isn’t as wacked-out as all that, but there’s been some fun right-wing nuttiness on his feed lately, and some good links about how global warming’s a total crock. Nothing spectacularly Jayne-worthy, though. (Edit 27/11/09: There’s hints of anti-evolutionism cropping up. It’s minor so far, but could get very funny.)

But Jim Corr is really something else. I’ve owned a couple of this guy’s albums for years. Well, a couple of albums by a band his young hot sisters were in and where he was occasionally seen hanging around hoping to be noticed as well. And he’s got all the conspiracy crazy you could hope for. The New World Order, 9/11, more global warming denial, swine flu vaccines, chemtrails… Oh, and he also has a link to another site called “What Really Happened”. Given my blog’s usual hit rate, I can statistically expect about 0.03 of the people who read this to react in the same way as me: by hearing Richard Herring’s voice in their head saying “What reeeaaaaaalllly happened” and being greatly amused.

- And now the meaty part. The New Humanist provide a round-up of a recent parliamentary investigation into the evidence behind homeopathy, which heard evidence from people like Ben Goldacre and Edzard Ernst. Attention has been drawn lately to UK pharmacy chain Boots, with regard to their cavalier approach to marketing homeopathic remedies. And by “cavalier” I mean they admit to caring more about whether they can make money off something than whether it actually works as medicine.

There is certainly a consumer demand for these products… I have no evidence to suggest they are efficacious.

That’ll be Paul Bennett, their professional standards director. This all kinda sucks. Their defence seems to be that all they’re doing is selling customers the things they want to buy. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard drug dealers on street corners defending what they do in much the same way. It’s not really a comparable situation, of course – it’s much, much harder to overdose on a homeopathic solution than, say, heroin – but it may help highlight why this doesn’t really work as a defence.

Boots are the major pharmacy chain in this country. They sell a lot of medicines and similar products. Whenever I’m running low on toothpaste or painkillers, they’re generally where I go. I’m sure most of the stuff on their shelves is perfectly legit, but this means that there’s an implicit endorsement when they start flogging homeopathic crap as well. It gives these remedies and the claims they make significant credibility, to a degree really not merited by the scientific evidence of their efficacy.

The New Humanist article closes with a quote from the chairman of the British Association of Homeopathic Manufacturers, who asks:

If these products don’t work beyond the placebo effect, why do people keep buying them?

They don’t give an answer, but I assume this was because it’s too stupid a question to be worth bothering with. Here’s my answer anyway:

If these products don’t work beyond the placebo effect, then people keep buying them because of the damn placebo effect.

People aren’t doing clinical trials on this stuff in their own homes, they’re just drinking the water and noticing that they sometimes get better.

I have a follow-up question too: If these products do work beyond the placebo effect, why do large, well controlled clinical trials keep failing to detect any such effect?

For more detailed information on homeopathy being shite, click here.

That’ll do, except to wish a very happy contrived and regimented gratitude day, to all my trans-Atlantic turkey-munching friends.

Very succinctly put…

Does provoking a widespread response automatically equate to success?

The British Humanist Association (BHA) and the Atheist Bus Campaign latest billboard posters against the take over of community schools by faith groups has certainly, once again, brought their campaign to media and public attention.

Billboard campaign against faith schools

The adverts have drawn a positive response from the significant, possibly the majority, proportion of the British public who feel uneasy about schools being subverted to the wider strategic aims of religious organisations, and their fears that children will be coerced and our communities segregated.

Likewise the posters have also provoked a small flurry of negative media commentary that the campaign has had to try and rebut this week.

Media and online responses to the poster are clearly divided, but does this imply success or failure for the poster? This will depend on the strategic aims of the initiative.

On one side the poster is clearly helping a fundraising drive, has energised supporters and helped to keep the issue in the public eye. On the other the poster has equally energised its opponents who, as is life in campaigns, won’t accept the desired framing of the issues at hand and will seek to re-frame the debate.

However, one indicator of relative success is how the campaign seemS to have become synonymous with billboard advertising, in so far as that a search of the term “billboard campaign” on Google brings up BHA and Atheist Bus web pages as the first and third results and a BBC report on the campaign comes in second.

Being a skeptic is not a glamorous job in today’s woo-promoting infotainment-suffused world, and I have at times been asked what the whole point of it is. After all, there’s no money in it, and little appreciation by the general public for ‘debunkers,’ ‘destroyers of hope,’ ‘cynics,’ ‘pseudoskeptics,’ and ‘naysayers.’

But even so, it pays to be skeptical…

I remember listening to the very first episode of the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe almost three years ago, when the host of the show splendidly stated the very reason that drew me into the skeptical movement, and has kept me there ever since–I’ll paraphrase:

To stand for the truth, though not absolute metaphysical certitude. That the truth is out there, and that the way to the truth is through logic and evidence–real evidence, not just anecdotes and the unverified, struck a chord with me and has stuck with me from then on.

So I decided to start simple, learning the difference between science and pseudoscience, about the psychology of belief, about human fallacies and biases and how to better recognize those in my own thinking and arguments as well as those of others. I began to learn about how science works, it’s purpose, what it is, how it can go wrong, that scientists are no more and no less given to human failings than the rest of us.

I learned how and why science, and its protection, are so valuable, so precious despite its infantile and forever incomplete nature in our increasingly technological and uncertain world.

I read books by skeptics who have been at this for years, even decades, and I still do. After all, the best way to learn is from those whom I have good reason to think that they know what they are talking about, even when there are points of disagreement on matters great and small. To disagree without merely being contrary is skeptical.

I found out that the world was amazingly more complicated than I had been led to believe by paranormal advocates, and far more interesting than the simple and magic easy answers to the big questions that the paranormal and supernatural tried, and failed, to answer to my Troythuluness’s satisfaction. We humans have a tendency to seek easy answers, often favoring what we wish were true to the detriment of finding out what really is.

Did I find this complexity disturbing at first? Of course…then I got used to it. Welcome to reality, Troythulu.

I found out about all the things I was missing out on while wasting my time pursuing paranormal piffle and pixie-dust, when I could instead be not just a student, but a student of the Universe as it truly is, even with the knowledge that no matter how much I learn, I cannot ever attain final Truth™, like a spacecraft flying at nearly the speed of light, getting ever closer as it accelerates, but never actually reaching it.

Does understanding science and scientific reasoning, and finding out the truth behind certain non-scientific concepts and doctrines mean that skeptics have a monopoly on said truth? Do skeptics claim that understanding logical fallacies and heuristics makes us perfectly rational, logical, and objective?

Absolutely not–and as one, neither do I.

But speaking for myself only, I am a wee bit closer in my asymptotic approach to how things really are than I was as a believer.

To me, the whole point to skepticism is my endless search for the way the world truly is, not what I would merely prefer it be in accordance with my hopes and fears, my all too human need for simplicity (seek it, but mistrust it…), for gratification, for comfort, for morality and meaning.

I want to get as close as I possibly can to understanding the world and what’s real, and my skepticism is not an ultimate goal, a final destination. It is a tool, a method to implement my intellectual growth to make me not just a better skeptic, but a better person. I find it much to my benefit to have a worldview grounded in reality, not fantasy–to keep what I like to imagine and what I believe in two separate realms, and nary the two shall meet.

That is why I am a skeptic.

It’s been a beef of mine for some time, that the gospels don’t have enough information about Jesus’ early years. This is not quite the fault of the writers, as none of them ever met the man. All they could write about was what people decided to tell them about the man. If it was covered in any other writings back then, they never made it past the cut when it came time to assemble the New Testament as it stands today. Whether or not he had siblings, or a wife or children, and where he might have gone to school, weren’t as as important as creating a mythology around his birth and death that was similar to other gods and therefore an easy tale to pass along as truth of divinity (because all the others were a total sham, you know that right? We’ve got the only true one…).

I’ve heard suggestions that Jesus may have spent time away learning the tenets of Buddhism to bring home to his people, but education via Glastonbury druids is a new one on me. A new film has come out suggesting it’s possible Jesus made it all the way to what is now England. The title of the picture comes from William Blake’s poem Jerusalem.

And Did Those Feet explores the idea that Jesus accompanied his supposed uncle, Joseph of Arimathaea, on a business trip to the tin mines of the South-West.

Whilst there, it is claimed he took the opportunity to further his maths by studying under druids.

Unsurprisingly, the documentary stops short of concluding the visit did take place, noting ‘Jesus’s shoe has not turned up’. However, the makers insist that while the visit is unproven, it is possible.

The theory is that he arrived by sea, following established trading routes, before visiting several places in the West Country.

In the film, Dr Gordon Strachan, a Church of Scotland minister, says it is plausible Jesus came to further his education. The country is thought to have been at the forefront of learning 2,000 years ago, with mathematics particularly strong.

Ted Harrison, the film’s director, said: ‘If somebody was wanting to learn about the spirituality and thinking not just of the Jews but also the classical and Greek world he would have to come to Britain, which was the centre of learning at the time.

And how would a young man, a carpenter’s son, discover that and have the means to seek it out? It’s a nice story, but can’t be proven any more than his rising can, no matter how much money gets thrown toward filmmakers.

But anyway, this is a good reason to put in an Arrogant Worms video – Jesus’ Brother Bob (because you can’t prove there wasn’t one)!

Purdue University is practically littered with cylindrical wooden signboards on which people post everything from political protests to student group event notifications. One popular object to tack up to these boards is the “business opportunity:” direct marketing companies, online survey scams, and so forth. The other day I saw a number of business cards tacked to one advertising a way to “SAVE MONEY,” “MAKE MONEY,” and “HAVE A BLAST,” in that order. As an amateur connoisseur of financial scams, I couldn’t just walk on by. I had to pull it off and have a look.

“Are you ready to Blastoff?” the other side inquired, excitement fairly rippling from the laser-printed card stock. It directed me to a URL ending in a member’s name; a network member was attempting to recruit others on behalf of the network. I knew I had some gold on my hands here. What I found digging into Blastoff Network is at once both ridiculous and ridiculously brilliant.

Let’s begin by having a look at the full text of the card itself, after which we’ll look at the Blastoff Network Website. The three enticements I saw from afar turned out to be merely titles for smaller text, the first being:

SAVE MONEY

Receive up to 15% cash back on every online purchase from over 400 popular retailers.

Ooh, thanks to your partnerships with online retailers, I can actually buy things at a reduced price? Sign me up!

MAKE MONEY
Invite your friends & get paid everytime they shop.

Sweet! I can get my bros involved and send an invite to everyone I know on Facebook and MySpace! I’ll be raking in the dough and so will they!

HAVE A BLAST
with your customized homepage featuring the best music, videos, games, news, and more!

Oh, man! They give me my own website for free? And I get to customize it? Why doesn’t anybody else ever do that? That’s totally sweet!

Wait a minute. The “network” has “partnerships” with retailers, through which I ostensibly save money by being a member. I “invite” people, who also invite people, to build a downline through which I earn money every time they buy through Blastoff. And they try to excite me by offering a veneer of individuality as a part of a larger network. That doesn’t sound like Amway/Quixtar at all!

Except, of course, for the fact that it totally does. Blastoff differs from Amway in that there isn’t a massive signup fee (it is ostensibly free, but I’m not going to dig through the signup process to find out whether or not that’s true) and you’re not selling anything. You’re just buying and recruiting. Other than that, it’s essentially a revamped version of the same old MLM tropes.

The money here, like in any good pyramid scheme, flows from the bottom up: as the downline builds, those above make a fraction more cash per transaction with the Blastoff Network founders at the top making the most. The “customized homepage” seems like Amway’s “Own your own business” ploy modified for the internet generation: an attempt to make you, the member, feel like something special for signing up to fill the coffers of those at the top. The whole thing is so obviously targeted to the social networking crowd that it comes off as almost crass; I almost want to call it Scambook, or MyScam, or something lame like that. This is where the ridiculousness comes in.

I mean, just look at their homepage. At the top is a designed-to-death graphicthat screams “Web 2.0! Web 2.0!” It’s got shout-outs to all the modern web fads and touchstones: iTunes, YouTube, Hulu…There’s even a little bubble-blaster flash game image in there. Anyone not savvy enough to see through this ridiculous attempt to repackage the MLM for the MySpace generation almost deserves to be taken.

Let’s go back to the member page advertised on the card I picked up. The top of that page has a photo of a gang of ethnically diverse twentysomethings looking excited while doing jazz hands and wearing lame modern fashion. That girl on the right is wearing 80s boots and a skirt! That guy in the back is wearing a tweed jacket! And look at the chick on the far left, with her sassy giant fucking scarf over her long-sleeved t-shirt.

They’re just like you, other twentysomethings of America, and you can be as happy and as jazz-handsy as they are by joining our awesome network for young people who love money and have never heard of pyramid schemes!

The entire design of the website is worked to make it feel as modern and web-savvy as possible. Almost everything you click takes you to an embedded video that tells you want you want to know, presumably because text is so 2008. Most links manifest as a flash popup rather than a new URL or a standard new window popup. The “customized homepage” is little more than a series of panels where you can place newsfeeds, YouTube videos, free flash games, or uploaded photos; it is, in essence, nothing but a content aggregator that allows users to feel hip and individual, just like everyone else.

Hmm…A customized homepage that can link to my e-mail, or CNN, or YouTube…Where have I seen that before?

There’s a great irony here that lies in the complete unoriginality of the endeavor. They’re marketing the entire thing to the generation of kids who grew up on the web and it’s clearly intended to make the user feel slick and net-savvy, but only the least net-savvy among us will not be able to see through the lameness of Blastoff’s “customized homepage.” It’s old hat. it’s a sad ripoff of similar (and better) services, and it offers nothing new to anyone who’s actually been around the block a time or two.

And, boy, do they play up the social networking angle. No longer are you “recruiting,” you’re “inviting.” Just like Facebook! You like Facebook, right? Gone is the “downline;” instead, you have a “network!” It’s digital, folks! That makes it new and different!

And almost every single sentence on the Blastoff homepage mentions “friends,” “networks,” or both.

Blastoff Network is your launch pad to the internet which can be customized with your favorite news, music, videos, blogs, social networks and shopping, all in one place!

Sweet! Except I thought that my web browser was my launchpad to the internet. Blastoff Network, then, is just a middleman and kind of just gets in the way, actually.

And when you launch your Network by inviting your friends, you’ll really get paid!

Yeah! Invite your friends and make money off of them! Then go dance to Lady Gaga!

When you invite your friends to join the Blastoff Network, you will get paid every time they make a purchase within the Blastoff Network.

You can use that money to buy a new iPod nano or an Xbox Live gold membership or an ironic t-shirt from Threadless.com!

Just think about getting paid every time your friends buy a song on iTunes, books at Barnes & Noble or a new TV at Target.

You’re totally a member of that demographic!

As your friends begin to invite their friends, you will see your network and your income begin to virally grow.

It’s like you’re making money and new friends and it’s all viral like those cool videos! It’s like a marketing meme! LOL!

And lest you doubt my assessment of Blastoff as a crass, faux-social appeal to young 21st century web addicts, let’s visit their “About Us” page. The text at the top almost spells it out explicitly. The social:

If you’re known by the company you keep, then our reputation is stellar because we’re right there with you!

We’re all friends here in our network! The lame web-centric bullshit:

We enjoy the cyberspace phenomenon as much as you do and constantly scour the system to harness the niftiest applications, the hottest music and video, the greatest games, the most up-to-date news, and the best savings on shopping anywhere.

Yeah! You like the web and so do we! Let’s scour the system together! W00t!

Where else can you customize a personal launch pad that lets you have a blast and get paid while doing what you already do?

Any fucking blog service that uses Google AdSense, you stupid fuckers.

Blastoff is an evolving online experience that takes its cues from users like you. So drop us a line, and let us know what would warp your Blastoff experience to the next level.

It’s all about you, you tech-savvy modern consumer, you. Drop us a line and we can leverage our synergy into a strategic, interdependent mass culture paradigm shift!

Under that, we find a bank of cute little caricatures of their staff. Click them, and a Flash popup jumps out at you with their exciting personal information! Let’s look at their founder/CEO:

He doesn’t know the meaning of “quit”, believes that anything can be done, and oh yeah, bleeds ‘blue and silver’. How ’bout them Cowboys?

See, he likes football, and he mentions that in his official company bio! He’s hip and cool and down-to-earth, just like you!

The retarded fake hipness of this nonsense is really starting to get to me, and I think I’ve made my point. The entire market strategy is fucking ridiculous. I also said, however, that it’s ridiculously brilliant. For that, we have to turn to the actual mechanics of the pyramid.

Basically, it goes like this (at least according to Blastoff itself, which may not be the most reliable source): you sign up, which is free, and Blastoff membership allows you to benefit from their “partnerships” with over 400 online merchants (“The Mall”) as well as buy wireless service, cable TV, and travel packages through Blastoff. Each purchase from a vendor will net you between 0% and 15% cash back (or 10%; the details aren’t clear). Purchases of wireless service, cable, and travel won’t get you cash back, but you will get a small fraction of money back when anyone on your downline uses those services. Likewise, when anyone in your downline buys something through the mall, you get a tiny fraction of a percent of the purchase price of their transaction, which, of course, is enticement to recruit even more downline, which, of course, benefits the Cowboys-loving founder because it’s more money in his pocket.

There are, according to Blastoff, no financial obligations whatsoever. Not only is membership free, but, they say, there is no obligation to make a certain number of purchases to maintain membership. You can, it appears, sign up free and never go to the website again without losing your membership.

If you do your legwork, though, and recruit downline, then you’ll make bank out to 20 levels of your “network.” There’s even a graphic illustrating this right here. Inside the shiny, iTunes-style concentric circles we see the kind of bad math and obfuscation for which pyramid schemes are famous. On the left, we see the growth of a network with a recruitment rate of three people per level. It starts with three people, your “first level,” since they’re the three you recruited. The next number is nine, because your first level recruited three apiece. The next is twenty-seven, and so on. The text says:

If you personally sign up 3 people and your Network grows at that same 3x multiple out 10 degrees, you will have over 80,000 in your Network.

That’s huge! Think of all the cash, even if it’s just fractions of a percent apiece! You’ll be rich!

Except not. Remember how you collect from your downline up to twenty levels deep? What they don’t tell you is that, at the twentieth level, you’d have 5,230,176,600 people in your network, i.e. about 75% of the entire population of the planet Earth. And that doesn’t even take into account the fact that you’re not at the first level yourself. The first level is the founders of the company. Assuming that the person whose card you found was at the second level (right under the founders themselves), that puts you at on the third level at the very highest. Going with the same multiple of three just for simplicity’s sake, for you to even have a twentieth level to your network, you’d need 47,071,589,412, i.e. about 7 times more people than currently exist. And that’s only if you’re on the third level and only with a growth factor of three. The other side of the picture plots a starting pool of twenty with a growth factor of three; I don’t think I have to do the math to show you how ridiculous those numbers are.

Oh, what the hell, I will anyway. That model exceeds the population of the planet at level nineteen with 7,748,409,780 people. By the time we get down to you at lowly level twenty-two, your twentieth level will require 2,092,070,000,000 people.

Sounds like a sustainable business model.

When you take into account the fact that most people joining up won’t be anywhere near the top of the pyramid, and that most people won’t be able to maintain a constant rate of network growth, it becomes even more absurd. They also ignore the considerable crossover of acquaintances that friends have; unless you can get someone to sign up who knows a whole hell of a lot of people that you don’t, your network will never get too big because it won’t be able to break its own borders.

So, in summary, their info on “growing your network” leaves out a lot of pertinent information and obfuscates with bad math that doesn’t show how unfeasible the whole thing is. But I said it was ridiculously brilliant because of the design of the pyramid. Right now it sounds like just any old lame pyramid scheme: all smoke and mirrors and consumer fantasies. It doesn’t really become brilliant until you figure out how the founders of the company can maintain their pyramid scheme without direct cash injections from the downline.

That one threw me for a loop. I couldn’t figure out how the model would work unless the downline were required to pay into the company (because it’s not like they’ll actually be able to see shit to people) to keep the money flowing upwards. The answer is sheer genius.

Take a quick look at the “Blastoff Mall.” This is where they link to their “partners,” at which you are a “preferred customer,” which allows you to get your small percent cash back of anything you buy through them. I thought, going in, that I’d find a similar situation to Amway, which partners up with companies like Pepsi to sell Pepsi products to its members. It’s a good deal for Amway; they need it to exist, and it makes them look legit. It’s a good deal for Pepsi, too; Amway members become a captive audience that, as long as they’re members, won’t ever buy a Coke because then they won’t reap the “benefits” of buying stuff through Amway. That kind of model, offered free to members with no monthly purchasing requirements, won’t work, because no money will be flowing. So what’s the deal with Blastoff?

I urge you to click on, oh, say Starbucks, and watch where it takes you.

Does it take you to a special, hip section of the Starbucks website that’s just for ultra-cool cybershopping Blastoff members?

No. It takes you to the Starbucks store’s homepage, same as ever. But the URL is a bit different, now, isn’t it? It’s not “http://www.starbucksstore.com.” No, now it’s “http://www.starbucksstore.com/?CCAID=SBAFFL1&CJID=3120575.” Again, with the relevant part bolded: “http://www.starbucksstore.com/?CCAID=SBAFFL1&CJIDM=3120575.”

AFFL = “Affiliate.” Blastoff Network has not “partnered” with any of these “premium merchants.” They’ve done nothing more than set up an affiliate relationship with them! That’s the same thing that anyone with a website can do through Amazon.com. The Skeptics Dictionary does it. I’m pretty sure Les Jenkins did at some point, too, and he may still. All it means is you toss a link to Amazon on your site, and anyone who follows it and makes a purchase earns you 10-15% of their purchase price as a commission for sending the sale Amazon’s way.

Like I said, literally anyone can do it. Here’s how you do it with Target. It’s easy as pie.

So every time you buy a $100 item at Target.com, Blastoff Network makes ten bucks. They then send two of those bucks to you and keep the other eight. If you have, say, three levels between you and the company itself, they send you two bucks and give each of your upline a nickel apiece, and then they pocket $7.85. Hell, let’s say you’re at the twentieth level from Blastoff itself with eighteen people in your upline between you and them. They still just made $7.10 with no fucking labor because all it took was you buying something.

So of course they can afford to give you a tiny bit of your purchase and all of your downline’s. Each individual purchase nets them far more than they’ll ever have to pay out to you, especially since there are built-in fudge factors; there’s never a flat percentage of cash back for any particular purchase.

This is why it’s fucking brilliant. Blastoff networks never lose money because the percentage of the purchase that they pay out as cash back will never be 100% of its price. They’ve created, with their “Mall,” a hub that links to every retailer with whom they have an affiliate relationship, and they’ve spun the scheme to make the members feel like they’re part of an exclusive group of web-savvy consumers just looking to make a bargain by joining up. Those not-so-web-savvy people then begin routing all of the purchases they would have made anyway (and probably a few more on top) through Blastoff, and Blastoff laughs all the way to the bank.

And all they needed to start it was some server space, some slick web-design, and some crass, thoroughly transparent demographic targeting.

And yet, I’m not entirely sure about Blastoff Network. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t intend to join. I want to be able to tell my kids “No, kids, dad never fell for pyramid scheme. He’s smart like that.” But, at least on paper, Blastoff seems to offer no risk to the individual member. If we take them at their word, there’s no money up front and no continued obligation. Given Blastoff’s ingenious model of affiliate aggregation, there wouldn’t have to be. If you join and simply make your normal purchases through Blastoff instead of without them, you’ll make a few bucks back as they disseminate their affiliate commission. Or you might not. But at least you won’t lose money and time, like you almost certainly would with Amway.

But the key here is that we have no reason to believe we can take them at their word. They might not be discreet with your personal and financial information. There might be hidden obligations in the fine print that only show up once you’ve registered. Like any other scam, they might not be exactly up-front and honest about everything.

And then there’s the big-picture issue. Even if each individual member of Blastoff is at no risk to himself, this kind of large-scale operation serves, like stock market manipulation, to create wealth without creating value. The guys at the top are getting rich off the rubes beneath them, but they didn’t do a damn thing to earn it. They just came up with a rather brilliant model that allows them to sit on their laurels and do nothing while raking in the dough, assuming there are enough morons to bite on a fairly obvious pyramid scheme (there probably are).

And legally, I’m not sure where Blastoff stands. Amway is only legal because they are technically, on paper focused on moving product outside the company. The fact that in practice, they focus far more on recruiting downline is irrelevant. Well, on paper, Blastoff is nothing but recruitment. There’s no actual work going on, no sales, no nothing. You recruit and you buy. This might put them into a bit of a legal pickle, since they have no technical fallback like Amway.

Then again, as an MLM for Generation Y, they represent an entirely new take on the genre. Because their model of an affiliate link-sharing pyramid scheme is so new and different from the traditional “Recruit people but pretend you’re really worried about sales” model of most other MLMs, they might be in a category all their own.

What does everyone else think?

Can’t wait to see some of that footage.

We all do it. There is a knock at the door. You open the door to find an unkempt eighteen year old with a baseball cap worn backwards and three silver rings in his nose. He looks at you sideways, watching the street, and says, “Yo, Mr. Mabaker, you won big in the lottery, dude.” Chances are, unless you have multiple piercings yourself, you are not inclined to believe him. Wait till the official letter comes, you say.

But if you find on your doorstep a professional looking twenty five year old wearing an Italian suit and carrying a briefcase, and he hands you his card and says, “Mr. Sharif Mubakkar? I am Andras Kettering, with the Lottery Commission. I have some good news for you. May I come in?” Ah, THEN you will start trying to remember where you put those brochures for the Caribbean cruise.

What if the messenger on your doorstep is a bald guy with a fierce moustache and a heavy accent?

However even-handed we may try to be, it is true that presentation makes a difference, that the truth from the wrong lips will be received as falsehood and vice versa. I do not like it, of course. When Lynda told me an astonishing thing she had heard from her mother – the same thing I had been trying in vain to tell her for months – it bothered me. Was it less true when I said it? No – but my voice was at the wrong pitch to be heard. Surely this should not be. A truth is a truth, whether we hear it from a professor or a panhandler, whether we read it in the New England Journal of Medicine or the National Enquirer.

But I have to admit – I do it too. I will believe things that would usually have me sneering and jeering in disbelief – if I am told them by a fellow 5. I may still test them – I constantly test even things I know from personal experience. But I am much less likely to hoot incredulously.

This comes up because I want, I need to talk in these mini-lectures about the Enneagram. That should be easy – a robust system of personality classification that is in use in some segments of the psychological community, that has a growing body of sound research behind it and that has any number of very practical real life applications – not easily rejected, you might think.

But the problem is the source. The problem is Gurdjieff. That is George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, it says on his card, with the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. If, having read his card and gazed upon his physiognomy, you are predisposed to believe what he says, fine. We can proceed. But neither his credentials nor his character would incline me toward a less probing Skepticism.

Whatever the source of the Enneagram before Gurdjieff may have been, it is no more accessible to us than the week before the Big Bang. Yes, Gurdjieff tells us some things about where he found the Enneagram and what it was doing there and how he got hold of it. But – well, let me say only that Gurdjieff was no 5, and I do not find anything he says about the Enneagram’s sources all that convincing.

Of course, many people did. Mubakkar’s Law applies: every statement incredible to a 5, and derived from a non-5 source, will accumulate a body of believers drawn from other types that will outnumber the skeptical 5s. Gurdjieff had a large number of followers, some of whom took on the Enneagram and developed it beyond Gurdjieff’s version. Some of these moved in the direction of scientific credibility, and refined the system to where it was when I found it and found it useful. [Disclaimer – I am not an early adopter or any kind of adopter at all. I did not find it. In point of fact, Lulu found it, I looked over her shoulder and was positively impressed, eventually getting in on the act.]

Others, however, stayed outside the boundaries of credibility, kicking the Enneagram soccer ball around the field of New Age paradigms. Some are further out in left field [I know, it is a metaphor from a different game, so sue me] than others. A few are really very close to the practitioners playing in the scientific school yard; if you added a few concepts and subtracted a few pieces of terminology they could pass.

But I am afraid that if I say, “You need to take the Enneagram seriously”, you will take a long look at Gurdjieff, check out some of his more way out successors, and wind up ignoring everything that I and the scientific Enneagram proponents have to say.

That would be a shame. There is a folk tale well known in parts of Africa. God decided that people should not have to die, so he sent a messenger to tell them to live indefinitely. But the hyena, who saw that a dearth of corpses would be bad for business, rushed off and told the human race, “God says you are to die and stay dead.” The people believed the hyena because he arrived first and delivered his message with authority. They did not even listen to the real message. So because of the wrong choice of messenger, we are all doomed to die and feed the hyenas.

Well, so some of you will not listen. I could get some of you to listen if I could speak with the authority of my brother Abdurrahman. I could get some others of you to listen if I could speak as persuasively as my sister Leila. Still others would be convinced if I could speak as forcefully as my colleague Gary Farquhar. But I cannot walk their walk nor talk their talk. I gotta be me.

Well, 5s and 4s will probably listen, and experience shows that some others can hear, though for some the volume is low and there is a lot of static when I talk. And just maybe some of you will consider the source in the scientific community, and not get tripped by Gurdjieff.

So I will do it. I will, as we go, run you through the major thoroughfares and some of the alleys of the Enneagram. Believe it or not.

Hey, guys. This installment in my series of top 20 errors of reasoning deals with the False Dichotomy, also referred to as the False Dilemma, the Fallacy of Negation, the Bifurcation Fallacy, and the Either-Or Fallacy. A variation of this, the False Choice, will also be briefly dealt with in this post.

This form of specious reasoning involves an argument in which the number of options in any set of choices is falsely constrained, only two in the usual form, three or a similarly restricted number of choices in the False Choice fallacy, when the actual selection of options possible is realistically much greater.

As the names of this form of reasoning suggest, as a rhetorical tool and as a form of black-and-white thinking, it attempts to present too few options, and show that one must be true by discrediting the other(s). The error lies not only in this, but in the fact that the real world is not so conveniently simple as we would like, and such dichotomous thinking can be simplistic to the point of falsity. A few examples of the fallacy are given below:

• If you are not with me, you’re against me…
  

• Either young-Earth creationism is true or Darwinist evolution is true. Since evolution is false, creationism must be true…

• You either have to be pro-choice or pro-life. There’s no middle ground…
  

• You either worship my peculiar notion of God, or you worship the Devil…
  

• You’re either a believer and a theist, or you’re a skeptic and an atheist…

• Anyone who doesn’t support the Patriot Act supports terrorists…

• Either the girl broke her ex-boyfriend’s jaw with that slugger, or it started flying around and fractured his jaw by itself…

• Either your cat stole my burrito or maybe a psychic just teleported in and grabbed it?..suuure…

Note that realistically, not all imaginable options in a set of alternatives need to be considered, only those options that are somehow falsifiable, in accordance with the rule of thumb known as Occam’s razor.

(Last Update 23:13, 11/25/2009, Grammar Correction)

Here are links to several articles, the first on the Skeptical teacher Blog..

Global warming Deniers Get a Double-Dose of Pwnage

The Second on NeuroLogica Blog…

Evidence in Medicine: Correlation and Causation

…and Third, on Massimo Pigliucci’s Blog…

The Logic of Skepticism

I’m not trying to convert anyone. What, I wonder, would that be? There is no skeptic’s religion. Being skeptical is a stance, a way of thinking critically about the world, a method of engaging with information. After all, you can’t believe everything. It is not a religion. Skeptics may be Jews, Christians, atheists or agnostics. Skeptics have no commandments, no sacred texts, no sectarian law. They don’t discriminate on the basis of sex, ethnicity or sexual preference. Most importantly, they have no idols – so even monotheists can feel comfortable as skeptics. After all, skeptics aren’t pagans (rural folk, as it were) venerating little carved figurines by an open fire.

Anyone can be a skeptic, and all of us are already skeptics in a certain sense. For example, it has been pointed out that as far as Greek mythology goes most of us are skeptics. Not many people alive today believe in the gods of Olympus or the Delphic oracle. Ditto a whole slew of ancient gods and divinities which we group together as myths, or rather stuff other peple believed in long ago. It goes without saying that, for an atheist, יהוה is a mythical god. So is Jesus, for that matter. This is not to disparage them, however. Many skeptics are devoted readers of the bible. They just don’t believe in it.

Though even skeptics recognize that many people do indeed beleive in Jesus, יהוה, and many other gods (“all of us worship the same god” is a politically expedient myth ; we don’t) and goddesses, angels, devils and heavenly intermediaries of all types: the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, Gabriel, Metatron etc… the list is long and tedious. Jews are necessarily skeptical of Christian claims, as are Christians of Muslim claims. I mean, either Jesus will return or he won’t. Either moshiah will come or he won’t. So far, so bad. They can’t all be right.

A skeptic makes no such claims about the nature of the universe, but limits himself (or herself) to interpreting facts and making educated guesses. A skeptic has no trouble saying, “I don’t know (right now).” The religious mind, on the other hand, often seeks utter certainty on one hand and fathomless mystery on the other. Needless to say, this is incompatible with a skeptical worldview.

A student writes, noting that the Thanksgiving holiday officially commences on Wednesday at 5 pm… so naturally he wonders if we’ll be meeting for our regular noon class. (!)

Not a good omen, class attendance-wise. People apparently just can’t wait to start giving thanks for all they’ve been given.

But as their content provider it’s my job to show up and give them some more, so I will. Topics to be covered:

1. Gratitude (naturally!)

2. Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), humanist, essayist, earthy philosopher of everything corporeally human… just because he was bumped from the syllabus earlier this semester and I’m grateful for the opportunity to re-instate him just as we arrive at his fifteen seconds of fame in our text. He was “heir to the Skeptics of old,”  the anti-Descartes who knew better than to lodge too much confidence in our ability to know anything for certain. “Que sçais-je?” (“What do I know?”)

And he owned the coolest library/study ever (much moreso than Descartes’ methodologically hypothetical “meditation” zone).

His greatest virtue may have been tolerance. His most refreshing attitude, though, may have been his candor about bodily matters. “For it is indeed reasonable, as they say, that the body should not follow its appetites to the disadvantage of the mind; but why is it not also reasonable that the mind should not pursue its appetites to the disadvantage of the body?” So he philosophized a lot about his own body parts, one member in particular. (NOTE to Plato and other transcendentalists: philosophers who rise too far above our natural state make themselves ridiculous, remote, and irrelevant in their transcendent detachment. Montaigne’s parts were all immanent, and attached, and so are yours and mine. )

“There is a plague on Man, the opinion that he knows something.” Like Socrates, and like science, not presuming to know is what drove Montaigne to study and learn and stay humble. Not a bad example for us all.

And now, scholars study and publish on Montaigne (while non-scholars quote him without attribution). He’d be amused.

Alain de Botton comes by his interest in Montaigne naturally: his late father Gilbert (1935-2000) collected Montaigne-iana. His impressive collection is now an exhibit at Cambridge University Library.

If you read the print version of the NZ Herald today you would have seen featured on the front page a miraculous case of a man [Rom Houben] recovering from a persistent vegetative state and communicating with the world through a touch screen with the help of a carer. The topic of persistent vegetative state (PVS) is an interesting one and has received increasing attention in recent years. It would seem that this man was incorrectly diagnosed after an accident as being in a PVS while at the time of the accident it is more likely that he was in a minimally conscious state (MCS). A fine distinction sometimes and an excellent summary of the differences between the two diagnoses and the difficultly of accurately deciding between them can be found at the Science Based Medicine site.

Essentially a PVS is defined as the patient exhibiting no signs of consciousness, as with everything, whether you find something is dependent on how hard you look, simply opening a couple of drawers and glancing in the cupboard may not turn it up. In determining a case of PVS a more thorough search will reveal fewer legitimate cases as you may find extremely subtle signs of intermittent consciousness that will then flip the designation to a MCS. This process is also dependent on the sensitivity of the equipment used to perform the examination, the sophisticated scanning technology we have today simply did not exist 20 years ago. This equipment is the equivalent of rummaging around in the back of the couch and looking behind the fridge.

That this man was unfortunately diagnosed incorrectly is not in dispute, we have made significant advances in brain imaging technology that allows us to determine activity quite well. The issue here is the man’s ability to communicate so coherently and poetically. After so long without mental stimulation it seems bordering on the fantastic that this could be the case. When watching the video of the touch screen being used to bring this man’s thoughts to the world it seems very close to a practice known as Facilitated Communication, (this is actually confirmed in the TimesOnline article) this consists of a facilitator supporting the arm or hand of a subject ostensibly to allow them to then choose letters and words themselves which otherwise they would not have the strength or the focus to do.

The difficulty here is that this technique is very susceptible to the unconscious influence of the facilitator. In this way it can seem as though it is the patient communicating when in reality it is the thoughts of the facilitator that we are hearing. It is difficult to say for sure in this case, the video is ambiguous as to how much control the patient has over his movements so it is possible that we are indeed being exposed the inner world of a man with a very unique perspective but from the evidence shown it is equally plausible that the facilitator is the true originator of these words.

I would be interested in if any simple tests to determine the true origin of this material have been carried out, some of the suggestions I have seen elsewhere include swapping the facilitator for someone who does not speak the patient’s language, asking the patient questions that presumably only he would know, or asking the facilitator to leave the room while the patient is shown an object or told specific information and then seeing if this can be reliably produced after the facilitator returns. Any of these would help determine whether this man is truely communicating.

The print version of the Herald is mostly credulous in it’s coverage of this story but it appears that enough scepticism has filtered through the journalistic world that the online version has incorporated some of it. Better late than never.

[EDIT: The incomparable Dr Novella of the SGU and SBM has posted his take on this news item, as I hoped he would. Get the thoughts of a neurologist. Also had to add a link to this video from Dr.N's site that shows the patient typing with his eyes closed, simply not possible. Added Patient's name]