Skepticblog

[webmaster broke last week's post into two parts and added new photos to this part]

Day 2. November 8, 2008

“Memo to all American speakers: At some point during your talk please apologize for George W. Bush and make a joke about his stupidity, then thank God for Obama (even you atheists) and mention that you voted for him.” Although no such paper memo was distributed to the speakers, by the second day I began to wonder if it was a tacit agreement nonetheless, since nearly everyone did it. Except me.

On this day the German ethologist and evolutionary psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, author of the excellent book, Gut Feelings, began with a funny story about an economics professor who was struggling to decide if he should take a new job position at another university, when a colleague told him to just compute the value and diminishing marginal utility of each option and then calculate the decision, “just like you teach your economics students to do.” The professor’s response: “Oh, come on, you don’t understand, this is serious!” His point was that when it comes to real life most of us make most of our decisions under great uncertainty. We use our gut feelings instead, and more often than not that works just as well as complex models. Gigerenzer’s most notable example was an economist (I believe it was Harry Markowitz) who received the Nobel Prize for his complex model of how best to make investments, but when it came to his own portfolio Markowitz reverted to a simple 1/n formula of the equal distribution of funds over a large number of investment tools.

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OK – we all know that the name “skeptic” is sub-optimal. Probably, if someone paid a great deal of money to a top-notch marketing team they would come up with something better. But we don’t always get to choose such things. Names take root and have cultural inertia. Attempts at imposing a new name on the modern skeptical movement have failed (cough…”brights”…cough!).

Rather than fight history, inertia, and etymology most of us have just decided to embrace it and make the best out of it. Michael took the plunge with the Skeptic Society, I signed on with the New England Skeptical Society, then the Skeptics’ Guide. Brian came to acceptance with Skeptoid. (Of course, the Skeptical Inquirer blazed the trail for all of us.)

And then, of course, Ryan and Brian chose the name The Skeptologists for the first skeptical reality TV show (hopefully).

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I’ve watched over the past year as a drink called Kombucha has become more and more popular within my group of friends. Most of them drink it because the bottle tells a story that all but promises freedom from sickness of any kind. They also say that it makes them feel better.

From the GTS Kombucha website:

“In 1995, founder GT Dave’s mom, Laraine Dave, had been diagnosed with a rare form of breast cancer with a trajectory of illness known to move quickly to the lymph and bones. When she was diagnosed, doctors held out little hope for her given the aggressive type of cancer and its advanced stage. But to the surprise of everyone, her cancerous cells were found to be dormant with no metastasis. Her physicians were baffled and asked what she was doing that others in her situation were perhaps not doing. The only thing she could think of was that she had been drinking homemade Kombucha every day for the last couple of years.”

Anecdotal evidence is never convincing to a skeptic, so I’ve remained skeptical about Kombucha’s health providing properties even though several of them profess its wonders.

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Hambo Lama Itigelov

Occasionally, when researching a new episode of my Skeptoid podcast, I get one of those rare “A-ha!” moments. This has happened on those rare few occasions where, as far as I can tell, my own research finds a connection that nobody else ever has before.

I had one such moment while reading up on my recent episode about incorruptibles, people whose bodies do not deteriorate after death. At a glance, the world is full of such examples. Upon deeper research, there are no such examples. (continue reading…)

I have always been fascinated with superstitions. As a kid I wanted to open up a superstition collection agency, but I became a magician instead. It could be argued that the two interests are similarly related. Perhaps this blog or a Skeptologists program could take a closer look at superstitions? By that I don’t mean all the walk-under-a-ladder and throw-salt-over-your-shoulder superstitions we already know about and probably practice even though we think we know better, being skeptics and all that. I mean the really brain hard-wired day to day things we do without thinking because something intangible might have been handed down to us through generations of just doing it and we went ahead and tacitly accepted it for some unknown reason. Particular interest to me are the newer things that may have come around to being accpeted and believed in today’s “more enlightened” society. I remember there was once an agency like this for collecting and verifying predictions that someone in New York City kept for some odd reason, but I think they eventually went out of business. I doubt they predicted that.

There’s probably a million websites that handle the standard run of black cat type superstitions, but what’s new in the world or woo when it comes to modern fear and dread? What do we avoid saying or doing that has absolutely no rational reason to exist? All the countless urban legends out there certainly must have sprouted a few tentacles that reach into this area of the mass subconscious, but which are the beliefs that have managed to trickle down to our semi-conscious minds and how exactly did they get there? Forget about religion or spirituality, that’s just too big an issue for one program or blog. It’s those little crazy twitchy things like knocking on wood – but contemporary non-grammatical physical idioms (from the root word idiot?) that I’m after.

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With apologies to Frankie Goes to Hollywood. And maybe Confucius.

Richard Wiseman at TAM 5

Richard Wiseman is a professor of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK. He is many things, in fact: a friend, a trickster, and, of course, my evil twin. He also runs the website Quirkology, where he dissects, well, quirks; weird things people do, think, and believe. He wrote a whole book on it called, duh, Quirkology.

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So to start off this week, I’d like to address a few questions received from our readers before I jump into the continuation of our story.

Many have asked where can I see this show? Well, at the moment, we don’t have the show in active production. We have finished a pilot episode and demo, and that is being used right now to pitch to agents and TV networks. We are working with some very esteemed individuals and companies that are representing the show for us. We are all making great progress.

As we begin to get solid deals put together, we’ll be sure to let you all know. Don’t worry, when the show is picked up, the entire Skeptical Community and hopefully many other people will know that it’s coming! For our international viewers, we’re not certain who will carry it, but rest assured, we’re working hard to give the show the largest audience possible. If we don’t air it outside of US, you can bet we’ll be working on online and home video options as well.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to share our exploits into producing the pilot with the Dream Team of skeptics: The Skeptologists!

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I have never kept a diary — the narrative recounting of daily events — mainly because most of my daily routine is uneventful and uninteresting. Like everyone else, I’m a creature of habit. If it is Tuesday or Thursday morning, I’m doing the “Barry Ride” with my cycling buddies (so christened because it was started in the 1980s by Barry Wolfe, a National Champion cyclist who passed away a couple of years ago), a two-hour loop through the hills of Glendale and La Canada. (I may someday write a book entitled Tuesdays with Barry, recounting the conversations we have had during the ride over the past 20 years on all manner of topics from the sublime to the superficial.) After the ride I pick up a 20-oz. Latte at the Coffee Gallery in Altadena, stop by the P.O. Box to pick up the Skeptics Society mail, then go into the office for the rest of the day. If it is Wednesday we ride our bikes to Mt. Wilson, a 20-mile climb (followed by a 20-mile descent), then I hang out at the Starbucks in La Canada for a couple of hours, writing and editing without phone interruptions, then to the office. If it is Monday I work all day in the office. If it is Friday I write at home for a couple of hours, then take my step-dad out to lunch, trying out different burger joints around Southern California (and, when needed, drive him to his various doctor appointments, which have grown more common now that he is in his 80s). If it is Saturday morning I’m with the boys again, hammering through a 4-hour ride in the mountains, rotating weeks through four different routes, one flat and the other three monstrous leg-breaking climbs. Sundays are my secular Sabbath, just hanging out at home and doing my best to be unproductive. Best of all, every weekday morning I drive my daughter to school — the best 20 minutes of my day — as we get uninterrupted time to talk and/or listen to audio books (latest one — The Year of Living Biblically by A. J. Jacobs, an hilarious account of trying to literally follow the hundreds of commandments in the good book). As I said, nothing to write home about.

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Commercial television is a business, and that business is entertainment. Shows that capture and retain viewers prosper, regardless of any other aspect of their quality. Those that fail to, die, regardless of their value to society.

That is a simple, if inconvenient, truth.

Therefore, while I feel very positively about the crew that Brian and Ryan have assembled, and I believe we can create top-notch skeptical content – none of that matters if we cannot compete to keep viewers glued to their TV screens (or convince no-nonsense executives that we can).

Science and skepticism have been fairing a bit better on commercial television of late, giving me some hope that the timing might be right. Everyone thinks immediately of Mythbusters and Bullshit – both highly successful shows built around a format of debunking. Recently, though, there has been a growing lineup of science-based entertainment programming. Some of it good, some of it not so much.

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Rewind the tape 50 years – I awoke one morning with a bit of extra sleep on my eyes and complained to my mom about canker sore in my mouth. That afternoon when I came home from school, a tall glass of cooling barley water awaits me to offset the extra heat due to too much activity in my liver. In the folklore of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), our bodies can be too heaty, or too cool, or damp or dry. Our bodies can also, according to that tradition have a combination of these undesirable conditions such as dry heat or damp heat which must be treated accordingly.  By Western (and modern) standard of behavior, as an eight-year old kid with a ten-year old brother, it would not be considered the least bit unhealthy to engage in some sibling rivalry scuffles and quarrels. But whenever we bickered or had some spat in front of older relatives we could count on them to admonish my mother to brew us some chrysanthemum tea (and make it extra sweet!) Childish verbal or physical jousting between us brothers must be due to overly vinegary or acidic disposition and can be neutralized by sweet chrysanthemum tea. Arthritis is damp wind in the joints so the cure is to take herbs that will remove the wind and dry up the joints. For every condition, physical or mental where external manifestations can be observed, there are corresponding herbs, animal parts/by-products or even toxic minerals to help neutralize and restore harmony to the body. This is TCM in its most rudimentary form and is still practiced today. (continue reading…)