Skepticblog

This week saw four celebrity deaths – well, at least four that were prominent enough in the news that I heard about them: Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, Billy Mays, and Michael Jackson. We pay attention to celebrity deaths because we pay attention to celebrities, and we pay attention to celebrities because they are celebrities. This is a trite answer, but essentially there is something in our culture and hard wiring that makes us fascinated with fame. Most of us will get a little weird when we are in the presence of a famous person.

Multiple celebrity deaths in such a short period of time often provokes the superstitious to engage their pattern recognition and hyperactive agency detection. This usually results in the notion that “celebrity deaths always occur in threes.” This is a classic example of open-ended criteria leading to confirmation bias.

What this skeptical jargon means is that the notion that celebrity deaths happens in sets of three is not bound by any specific criteria – who counts as a celebrity, and over what period of time do the deaths need to occur to count as happening together? If after one celebrity death you simply wait however long it takes for two more to occur, you will have confirmed the belief that the grim reaper does indeed kill celebs in spurts of three.

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I will be away this week, so I am dusting off some of my oldest skeptical writings and updating them. Below is a piece I wrote 12 years ago on ghost hunters, Ed and Lorraine Warren. The article is still relevant, and I enhanced it with some updated info. I also employed the wayback machine to provide links to old websites that are no longer active. I will be mostly out of touch, and only rarely monitoring the comments, so forgive me if I don’t respond quickly or at all.

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Belief in the supernatural seems to be a nearly universal part of the human condition, but the details of specific paranormal belief systems depend on culture and location. In New England we have ghosts – or at least ghost hunters. So it is not surprising that in our younger days as activist skeptics, Perry DeAngelis, Evan Bernstein, my brother, Bob, and I (the investigative team of the New England Skeptical Society) cut our skeptical teeth investigating ghost hunters.

Taking on the New England ghost-busting industry led us inevitably to Ed and Lorraine Warren, the patriarch and matriarch of ghost hunting in New England. Ed and Lorraine hunted ghosts (Ed has since passed) – ghosts, apparitions, demons, possessed people, places and things. They did so for decades, and claim to have looked at nearly 4000 cases. They were made famous by books and movies, and as luck would have it lived only a couple towns over in Monroe Connecticut.

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According to the British Homeopathic Association (does that mean the fewer members they have the more powerful the group?) June 14-21 is Homeopathy Awareness Week. I would like to do my part to increase awareness of homeopathy.

I would like people to be aware of the fact that homeopathy is a pre-scientific philosophy, that it is based entirely on magical thinking and is out of step with the last 200 years of science. People should know that typical homeopathic remedies are diluted to the point that no active ingredient remains, and that homeopaths invoke mysterious vibrations or implausible and highly fanciful water chemistry.  I would further like people to know that clinical research with homeopathic remedies, when taken as a whole, show no effect for any such remedy.

In short, homeopathy is bunk. But here is a somewhat longer description of its history. (continue reading…)

A Taiwanese man, after losing 2 million dollars to a Vegas casino, is demanding his money back because, he claims, the casino deliberately gave him bad feng shui. Yes, that is the kind of world we are living in.

Yuan was happy with his Feng Shui when we was winning $400,000, but then his luck turned and eventually he lost his winnings plus 2 million more. Now it is reported:

…the Venetian dug a one-metre (40-inch) square hole on the wall of the presidential suite he was staying in April last year and covered it with a black cloth, said Apple Daily.

The casino also put two white towels in front of Yuan’s suite and turned on two large fans facing his room without notifying him, it said.

Those bastards!

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As much as unscientific medicine is a problem in relatively wealthy Western nations, it is even more so in developing and third world countries. In the US so-called CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) is largely consumed by the “worried well” – people with disposable income who use it to treat common everyday ailments or symptoms. CAM does also infiltrate the treatment of serious diseases, but to a much smaller degree.

In the third world, however, unscientific treatments for serious public health threats is a real problem. Malaria, HIV, TB, influenza, and childhood diarrhea are all epidemic in Africa and other locations, all exacerbated by the lack of adequate health care resources. The impact of this lack of resources is worsened by reliance on ineffective pseudoscience treatments, and sometimes (as with HIV) the denial of scientific treatments.

The World Health Organization (WHO) whose very purpose is to serve the public health worldwide, especially in developing and struggling nations, has failed to adequately address the problem of unscientific medicine. The WHO, unfortunately, is an imperfect political organization and as such is vulnerable to sectarian interests. It has a poor record on combating unscientific medicine, and in fact promotes it.

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The origins of life on earth remains a daunting scientific challenge. The difficulty is in trying to find evidence to infer what chemical reactions took place billions of years ago. There may ultimately be no way to settle the issue, but that does not mean the question cannot be addressed scientifically.

Of course, the enemies of science (creationists and their ilk) exploit this fact to argue that science cannot understand life origins, and therefore we must invoke supernatural explanations. They often further confuse the question of life origins with evolution – the subsequent change in life over time.

Despite the claims of creationists, there actually is a rigorous scientific discipline exploring questions surrounding the first stirrings of life on earth. Recently researchers took an important, if incremental, step in understanding how non-life became life.

Powner, Gerland, and Sutherland published a paper in which they explore how RNA (ribonucleic acid) could have arisen on the early Earth.

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Daniel Hauser is a 13 year old boy suffering from a form of blood cancer called Hodgkins lymphoma. His oncologist is recommending a standard course of chemotherapy. I do not know the clinical details of this case, but overall, with current treatments, the 5 year survival for childhood Hodgkins lymphoma is 78%.  Without treatment, Daniel’s chance of survival drops to 5%.

Despite this Daniel is refusing chemotherapy, and his family is supporting his decision. If Daniel were an adult that would be the end of the story – competent adults have the right to refuse any intervention for whatever reason they choose. But Daniel is a minor, so the state has a duty to protect him, even from his own parents and himself.

Daniel’s family are members of the Nemenhah religion, a Native American religious tradition that preaches that the journey from sick to healthy is a spiritual journey. They only use “natural” remedies and refuse modern medical intervention.  Dan Zwakman, a member of the Nemenhah religious group, is arguing that this is a case of religious freedom, saying that “our religion is our medicine.”

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Britain has insane libel laws – that is, if you care at all about freedom of speech. In Britain the person accused of libel or slander bears the burden of proof that their statements are true. In the US the person bringing the suit has the burden of proof that the statements are false, that the accused kn0wingly lied and their lie resulted in demonstrable harm. Therefore in Britain it is far easier to use the threat of suit to silence critiques, because they are put immediately on the defensive (the concept of innocent until proven guilty does not apply).

Simon Singh is learning the harsh truth of British libel laws first hand. He is the co-author, with Edzard Ernst, of  Trick or Treatment – a devastating criticism of so-called complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). He, like the authors of this blog, is an activist skeptic who takes it upon himself to shine the harsh light of science and reason onto bogus and harmful claims. We all put ourselves at risk in doing this, but far more so those doing so in Britain.

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In 1918 the Spanish Flu (named after the country of origin of the first identified case) swept the globe, killing 20-40 million people – more than the First World War (which killed 15 million) which was just ending. When an epidemic spreads to multiple regions, especially multiple countries or continents, it becomes a pandemic. Flu pandemics happen every 40 years or so, and we are due for one now.

This is probably partly why there has been so much news attention, even some mild hysteria, surrounding recent outbreaks of swine flu, beginning in Mexico. It is hard to say how many cases and how many deaths there have been so far, because information from Mexico is spotty. Specifically it is difficult to say if people who have died with flu-like symptoms really had the swine flu or something else. Estimates are that about 150 people have died in Mexico with the swine flu. It is clear that we are dealing with a new strain.

Some Background on Influenza

But first, a little background. The influenza or flu virus is an RNA virus that comes in three genera – A, B, and C. Influenza A is the most common type. It can infect mammals and birds, with aquatic birds being its natural endemic host. Each year there is a seasonal epidemic of Influenza A, infecting millions of people and killing 100-200,000 – mostly the very old, the very young, and the sick.

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There are numerous ways in which thought processes go astray, leading us to false conclusions, even persistent delusions. Skepticism, as an intellectual endeavor, is the study of these mental pitfalls, for a thorough understanding of them is the best way to avoid them.

Science itself is a set of methods for avoiding or minimizing errors in observation, memory, and analysis. Our instincts cannot be trusted, so we need to keep them in check with objective outcome measures, systematic observation, and rigid control of variables. In fact bias has a way of creeping into any observation and exerting powerful if subtle effects, leading to the need to completely blind scientific experiments. Good scientists have learned not to trust even themselves.

One of the most common and insidious bits of cognitive self-deception is the process of anomaly hunting. A true anomaly is something that cannot be explained by our current model of nature – it doesn’t fit into existing theories. Anomalies are therefore very useful to scientific inquiry because they point to new knowledge, the potential to deepen or extend existing theories.

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