Skeptics and Dogmatists 22 comments

1 Nov 2002 @ 03:17, by Flemming Funch One of the types of deception that personally makes me the most angry is that carried out by socalled Skeptics. Not that there's anything at all wrong with being skeptical of outlandish claims. I'm skeptical too when I'm presented with new information that doesn't match my previous experience. And I'm skeptical about my own beliefs, and I'll often look for reasons to revise them towards something better. But there are very influential Skeptics who aren't really skeptics at all, but rather people who use deceit to protect and perpetuate a certain, very conservative, worldview. I was about to write a lengthy article about that. But there are others who've said roughly what I'd like to say. See Debunking the Debunkers for example. The foundation of truth that the Skeptic movement is built on is the empirical usefulness of the scientific method. In brief, the scientific method is that one makes a hypothesis about how things are, and then one goes and tests the hypothesis in experiments. One tries to do a variety of different experiments under different circumstances, and one tries to verify them as much as possible, and one tries to rule out unrelated factors and errors, etc. And one evaluates whether the practical experiences and experiments back up the hypothesis or not. If not, one looks for a better hypothesis. If you find a good hypothesis that checks out well with experiments, you might start calling it a theory rather than a hypothesis. It is a continous refinement and search for better theories about how things work, that might be able to better predict things. No theory ever will be absolutely proven. But bad theories get weeded out because they just don't check out against actual experience. So, skepticism is supposedly based on the sound principle of science - that if you're presented with a claim or a theory, you go and check it out. Which is certainly a universally good idea. I'm sitting looking in "The Baloney Detection Kit", which is a pamphlet published by the Skeptic Society. It starts off with Carl Sagan's list of "10 tools for skeptical thinking". Which is great stuff. Sagan has excellent advice for how to evaluate things, and how to be on guard against deception. But then the pamphlet segues into a series of scathing attacks against a wide range of different beliefs and practices, mixed in with further good advice on recognizing deception. Hmmm. It is a good old trick to first present something that people can easily agree with, and then sneak in some questionable information right afterwards. If done well, the reader will think that the second fact is logically based on the first fact. Or, since he is already in an accepting mood from the initial fact, the second fact sinks in without evaluation. Another good old trick is one of positioning. Once you've established that science is a solid and stringent and useful thing, you just need to suggest that various things are 'pseudo-scientific', and the casual reader will immediately get a whole bunch of negative associations in their mind. It is like describing proper religious practice to the true believers of some fundamentalist religion, and then casually suggesting that some people are heretics, because they do it wrong, and they've sold out to the devil or something. Just by a slight twist of words, you've banished somebody to hell in the minds of your conforming listeners. Anyway, the point is that what initially is presented as well-meaning Skepticism, critical thinking, search for good answers, often very quickly degenerates into Dogmatism. And usually it is a Dogmatism that says that only materialistic things exist, and the universe is random and meaningless and disconnected. Thus crazy stuff like astrology or healing or telepathy or remote viewing or extra-terrestrials are all "nonsense" and "superstition". Now, remember that science is the search for better theories that better explain and predict things we can observe. So, be on guard if somebody insists that you drop a theory which explains and predicts a lot of things, and tries to get you to replace it either with no theory, or with a theory that explains and predicts much less. Take astrology, for example. It is a model that explains and predicts certain things about people. If it is a good one, we should be able to verify it, and the results through using astrology should be better than random results. That's not very hard to experiment with. Just gather lots of data for some thousands of people, including their birth data. Astrology will predict that certain people will be more accident prone than others, more likely to get married, more likely to have certain professions, etc. That can all be examined statistically. But a Skeptic will usually not do any of those things. He'll be more likely to claim that astrology pre-supposes that mysterious rays are being emitted by the planets of the solar system, which are controlling people. And he will point out that science has found no such rays that control people. And thus astrology must be a fraud. There's sort of a reverse evidence trick that is often being used to 'debunk' things that don't fit the allowed world view. It is similar to how a criminal court case works. If the prosecution can't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Joe Thug killed Victor Victim, the court has to let him go. In reality, he either killed him or he didn't. Whether the court has enough information to reach a definitive conclusion or not - it doesn't change what actually happened. If something unusual happened to me, it happened, whether or not I can prove it or not. What exactly it means might be a different matter, but the event doesn't suddenly change, just because I might not have proof of it. The Dogmatic Skeptic approach is to reject anything that can't be proven in a repeatable manner and accepted by the established Authorities. Where the Skeptic approach is different from just normal scientific inquiry is in how the Skeptic will actually reject events, and will re-categorize them as 'frauds', if they don't fit with the prevalent theories. That kind of Skepticism is very akin to a fundamentalist religion. I.e. it protects a certain belief system, a certain world view, and it uses circular arguments, rather than verification through experience. "We all know that nothing can move faster than light, so I'm not going to bother checking out your claim". James Randi, aka Amazing Randi, is probably the de facto leader of the Skeptic religion. He is a veteran stage magician. He has no scientific background, but he has somehow managed to capture a large following of people who think that they're standing up for rational thinking by following his party line. A typical way that Randi will 'debunk' some feat is to duplicate it with stage magic tricks. And if he succeeds in doing that, he declares that the original feat was a fraudulent deception. So, if I claim that I can bend spoons with the power of my mind, and James Randi afterwards can make spoons bend using a chemical which softens the metal, he has thus 'debunked' me. That's like saying that if I can make a film that shows the world trade center collapsing, using special effects in a studio, and it looks convincing, it didn't actually happen in real life. That's very bad logic, and of course doesn't have anything to do with science. Whether a stage magician can saw people in half or not says absolutely nothing about whether one can do that for real or not. James Randi has a long-standing 1 million dollar award for anybody who proves any paranormal phenomenon to his satisfaction. Sounds fair and square at first glance. But read here. The problem is for one thing that Randi sets the conditions for any experiment all by himself, and he's a master of deception. And, secondly, he only seems to accept the more ridiculous entries, which have little chance of going anywhere in the first place. See a good example here of an actual letter Randi wrote to somebody applying for the million dollar reward. I would rather like to have seen whether that guy could last for months without eating anything. Instead Randi is accepting applications from tabloid astrologers and people who say they can control what people on TV are going to say. Anyway, critical thinking skills are vital. I very much suggest that everybody should gather their own baloney detection kit. Watch out for Authorities who tell you stuff that disempowers you, particularly when it is without evidence. Watch out for people who ask you to drop your current world view in favor of a world view that works less well for you, but which empowers them. Watch out for people who brush off comprehensive and carefully developed models of the world with derogatory labels such as "nonsense", "pseudoscience", "superstition", etc., and who don't offer you anything better in their place. Watch out for people who have a need for consistently using scorn and ridicule and personality attacks against people who disagree with them. It covers something up. Is an amateur tarot card reader on the average better at predicting human behavior than a highly educated psychiatrist? That would probably be my bet. And yet tarot cards aren't developed in any scientific way that I'm aware of. But psychiatry claims to be. Anyway, the way to find out would be to do the experiment. There are a lot of experiments that aren't being done, because the results would rock the boat of the establishment too much. Lots of things about medicine, psychology, psychiatry and pharmaceuticals would be 'debunked' if they were methodically compared with the alternatives. But lets do it. Lets study whether western or eastern medicine produces more healthy people. Lets study whether people are more happy with industrial drugs or with natural herbs. Lets study whether remote viewers or FBI analysts are better at predicting the future. That would all be fun. I personally am very skeptical about outlandish claims such as that we humans are alone in the universe, or that we already have discovered everything important about nature, or that nothing exists beyond our senses, or that it isn't possible to do extraordinary things without cheating. Anybody who would like to convince me of such things would need to gather extraordinary proof. People who lie to you are trying to control you. And if they are - think about why. What are they trying to get from you? Scientific Skepticism, Debunking the Debunkers: Lessons to be Learned, Skeptic Society, Skeptical Inquirer

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