NASA visualization of arctic surface warming trends. NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, Larry Stock, Robert Gersten

As many skeptics know by now, legendary skeptical trailblazer James Randi set off a firestorm last week with two Swift blog posts about global warming. His first post carried his strong suspicion that consensus science on climate change is incorrect, while his followup post wondered “whether we can properly assign the cause to anthropogenic influences.”

Skeptical bloggers were swift to respond. Critics (including PZ Myers, Orac, Sean Carroll, and James Hrynyshyn) chastised Randi for speaking outside his domain expertise; for dissenting from current consensus science; and for lending his name to the disreputable “Oregon Petition Project.” Others, like Phil Plait, corrected Randi while sensibly reminding us that “anyone, everyone, is capable of making mistakes.” And, inevitably, global warming deniers seized upon the event. (One headline, at Britain’s Telegraph.co.uk, gleefully crowed “James Randi forced to recant by Warmist thugs for showing wrong kind of scepticism.”)

But, of the many posts to respond to Randi, two in particular caught my attention. SkeptiCamp pioneer Reed Esau asked,

So what happens now? That uneasy feeling you are now experiencing may be the implications of the situation setting in. … Most of us are laymen who don’t have the professional experience and analytical skills to properly evaluate the data and the methods. To pretend we do (or to reject it on a hunch) separates us from the very scientific enterprise we skeptics purport to value.

Similarly, according to Skeptical Inquirer columnist Massimo Pigliucci, “we need to pause and think carefully about the entire skeptical movement in light of episodes like this one.”

So, What Happens Now?

I’ve long argued that our patchy, lukewarm reluctance to accept mainstream climate science is skepticism’s greatest failure. I’ll return to that argument in future posts, but today I’d like to concentrate on the general question raised by Esau and Pigliucci: what is skepticism’s appropriate relationship to consensus science? What — if anything — may skeptics responsibly say on mainstream science subjects?

Organized skepticism has always talked about science. Certainly, we use science-informed arguments when critiquing paranormal claims. We use techniques from science (and from other investigatory disciplines, such as history and journalism) when digging into strange stuff. The promotion of scientific literacy is also a core part of our traditional mandate (as I argued in the essay “Where Do We Go From Here?”).

Nonetheless, it’s my opinion that there are severe limits on the kinds of scientific arguments into which skeptics may responsibly wade. If we’re serious about our science-based epistemology, we must be prepared to consistently defer to scientific consensus. As Esau puts it,

That consistency is essential, because without it people like myself will ask “So, what’s the point?” To waver from that consistency risks calling the entire enterprise into question.

Staying on Track

The simple truth is that many skeptics have limited scientific qualifications. Yes, of course, there are towering, world-class scientists in the skeptical camp. But most skeptics are not working scientists. Even skeptics who do have scientific qualifications are frequently called upon to comment outside of their area of domain expertise. (Think of astronomer Phil Plait commenting on vaccines, or neurologist Steve Novella commenting on evolution.)

At the same time, people turn to skeptical media to find out what’s really true about weird things — sometimes life and death things, as in alternative medicine. Skeptics solicit that trust. We make the implicit (and sometimes explicit) promise that we are able to provide the nuanced, objective, evidence-based facts.

That combination of stated commitment to science, limited qualifications, and weighty ethical responsibilities (as when we comment on medicine) place a very high due diligence burden upon skeptics.

So, with last week’s firestorm as a cautionary tale, I’d like to propose some rules of thumb for skeptical discussion of mainstream science:

1) Where both scientific domain expertise and expert consensus exist, skeptics are (at best) straight science journalists. We can report the consensus, communicate findings in their proper context — and that’s it.

Skeptical resources spent on mainstream science journalism are resources taken away from our core mandate (pseudoscience and the paranormal — a mandate no one else has), although science popularization is of course valuable in itself when done responsibly. (My upcoming book is a straightforward kids’ primer on evolution.) But skeptics who do delve into science reporting should consider themselves obligated to stay close to mainstream expert opinion — and, obligated to solicit fact-checking and criticism from actual scientific experts.

Unfortunately, some lay skeptics have the idea that general critical thinking skills qualify them to critique professional science even in the face of wide agreement among domain experts. I submit that this is hubris — and almost always a mistake. (It is also the exact argument that sustains anti-vaccine activism, creationism, and other fringe positions whose examples we might wish to avoid.)

Daniel Loxton with 2000 sheep (in night corral) on the BC side of the Alaska Panhandle

In my previous career as a shepherd, we had a term for a very similar (and almost inevitable) phenomenon: “Rookie Syndrome.” Raw trainee shepherds would arrive in camp, look at sheep for a couple days, and then start to argue with the experienced hands. Why they thought a cursory glance qualified them to challenge domain experts is anyone’s guess, but it happened all the time. With some basic, introductory experience (say, two or three years), they typically became embarrassed about the arrogance and naiveté of their first weeks — during which they had known too little to even realize what they did not know.

Whether it’s sheep, law, stage magic, aircraft maintenance, Shakespeare scholarship, or a scientific discipline, every field has its specialized literature, skills, and knowledge base that take years of work to acquire. In any complex field, such domain expertise is essential to form a qualified opinion. And in most such fields, Rookie Syndrome — armchair quarterbacking — is common.

2) Where scientific domain expertise exists, but not consensus, we can report that a controversy exists — but we cannot resolve it. As Bertrand Russell put it,

when the experts are…not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and… when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.

Skeptics sometimes stumble badly here: we cannot, as laypeople, responsibly wade into an area in which we are not expert and expect to settle expert controversies.

If we’re not qualified, we should not promote our opinions. If we are qualified, we should attempt to convince our fellow experts in the relevant peer-reviewed literature — not skip peer review to make popular appeals in the popular (skeptical) press.

3) Where scientific domain expertise and consensus exist, but also a denier movement or pseudoscientific fringe, skeptics can finally roll up their sleeves and get to work.

This is traditional ground for us, our bread and butter, as when we combat creationism or vaccine paranoia or AIDS denial. But note that there are two distinct components to critiquing fringe movements: knowledge of pseudoscience (our own area of domain expertise); and knowledge of the contrasting body of actual scientific literature — a literature on which we are not typically expert.

On the straight science component, we are obligated to defer to the current state of the science. On the pseudoscience component, we are often able to make a contribution in our capacity as the best available experts.

Consider the example of debating creationism. In the past, creationists typically ran rings around biologists. This was not because scientists lacked knowledge of science, but because scientists lacked specialized knowledge of nonsense. That’s where we came in. The history and rhetoric of nonsense is a specialized niche arena — our arena. Skeptics perform an essential public service when we concentrate on that.

This is our primary realm:

4) Where a paranormal or pseudoscientific topic has enthusiasts but no legitimate experts, skeptics may perform original research, advance new theories, and publish in the skeptical press.

This practically endless assortment of traditional skeptical topics (from Nessie to pyramid power to astrology to iridology to UFO crashes to psychic surgery) is where we should focus our energy. In these areas, our contribution is unique, valuable — and, I have argued, an ethical obligation. There are hundreds of topics under this vast umbrella, so it’s not like this “narrow” mandate for skepticism doesn’t offer us enough to do!

In this shadowy, fringe realm, skeptics can indeed critique working scientists. There is no mainstream of consensus science on, say, ghosts; skeptics are the relevant domain experts. And, just as we stumble when we venture outside of our expertise, so too will scientists who charge blindly into our own speciality.

And what are the most powerful, most illuminating, most enduring examples of skeptics schooling credentialed scientists and prestigious mainstream media? Exactly those demonstrations — such as the epic Project Alpha and Carlos hoaxes — brought to us by James “The Amazing” Randi.

The title, “Religion, Evolution can Live Side by Side,” was written by the CNN editors, but it does capture the thrust of the piece which I concluded by noting that if you are a believer in an eternal god, what difference does six zeros make on when the creation happened — 10,000 or 10,000,000,000 years ago — or by what method of creation was used: spoken word or big bang?

Well, this set off a mild firestorm among some observers of the science-and-religion debate, most prominently the estimable Jerry Coyne, the author of one of the best books ever written on the subject, Why Evolution is True, in his website of the same title called me an “accommodationist” and even a “faitheist” (“faith atheist”?)

I responded to Jerry on my TRUE/SLANT blog, and had a good horselaugh (which according to Martin Gardner trumps 10,000 syllogisms) at the comment by Lewis Grossberger (who also blogs at True/Slant): “As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one thing worse than a faitheist — and that’s a fundagnostical. I hope you’re not one of those.”

Continuing in the neologistic theme, “Furcas” says that my writing is “faitheistic accommodationism in its purest and most disgusting form.”

Another good horselaugh was provided by a physicist at his own blog: “Michael Freakin’ Shermer’s heart is not pure enough for Jerry Coyne. If Jerry Falwell’s circle of orthodoxy was, say, 1 meter in radius, then His Worshipfulness The Right Reverend Jerry Coyne’s circle of orthodoxy has a radius of, roughly, a Planck Length.”

This comment well captured my position and needs no further comment:

What Shermer is trying to make peace with are sensible moderate theists, not fundamentalists. It is the people in the middle, not those on the fringes, who will, ultimately, determine the virulence of religion and irreligion. Shermer is trying to reduce religion’s virulence, not embracing fundamentalist ownership of the Bible, and it’s ridiculous interpretations of it. Shermer is right to reclaim the Bible as part of the Western cultural patrimony, and not leave it to fundamentalists to tell us what it means, and the implications to be drawn from it.

How one responds to theists all depends on the context and goals of the response. I think we nonbelievers have fallen into black-and-white thinking on the question of “what is the ‘right way’ to respond?” The answer is that there is more than one way. There are multiple ways, all of which work, depending on the context. Sometimes a head-on, take-no-prisoners, full-frontal assault á la Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, or Jerry Coyne is the way to go. Sometimes a more conciliatory approach á la Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, or your humble servant is best. It all depends on the context and what you are trying to accomplish.

By the way, agreeing with my alleged critics for a moment, I do not actually think that Dawkins and Hitchens are rude or disrespectful. If you read their works or listen to them in public lectures and debates, they are forceful, clear, and unwaivering, but they are not disrespectful. Watch, for example, the recent body slam Hitchens and Stephen Fry gave the Catholic Church for its stance on women’s rights, birth control, and 3rd-world poverty. It was focused and direct, but not disrespectful.

It is my goal, and the goal of the Skeptics Society, to educate as many people as possible about the power and wonders of science and to employ science to solve social, political, economic, medical and environmental problems. As such, we need as many people as we can get on board with a common goal, whatever it may be (starvation in Africa, disease in India, poverty in South America, global warming everywhere … pick your battle). My concern is that if we insist that people of faith renounce every last ounce of their beliefs before they are allowed to join the common fight against these scourges of humanity, we have just alienated the vast majority of the world’s population from our project.

Sometimes religion is the problem — and when it is let’s not hesitate to call it out. I did so myself on the day before Thanksgiving on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show in a debate with Dinesh D’Souza when Hewitt insisted that we thank God for our abundance and that believing in God leads to a prosperous nation like America. I pointed out — without accommodationism, faitheism, or fundagnosticalism — that 99% of everyone in Peru is Christian and yet they are dirt poor. Why? Because of warring political factions, governmental corruption, lack of education, resource depletion, currency debasement, inflation, and especially the lack of property rights and the rule of law.

So let’s not accommodate or pander in those areas where religion is clearly a problem or unmistakably mistaken. But not all (or even very many) social problems are caused by religion, so let’s pick our battles carefully and choose our strategies wisely.

On Friday, October 24, 2009, a California Court of Appeals vindicated Dr. Bruce Flamm, an OBGYN physician and professor at the University of California, Riverside, and member of the Skeptics Society, by throwing out a defamation lawsuit filed against him by a man who claimed to have proven that prayer can increase pregnancy rates in women trying to conceive.

Back in 2001, the Journal of Reproductive Medicine published a study by three Columbia University researchers claiming that prayer for women undergoing in-vitro fertilization resulted in a pregnancy rate of 50 percent, double that of women who did not receive prayer (i.e., a 100% increase in pregnancy rates!). Media coverage was extensive. ABC News medical correspondent Dr. Timothy Johnson, for example, reported, “A new study on the power of prayer over pregnancy reports surprising results; but many physicians remain skeptical.” One of those skeptics was a University of California Clinical Professor of Gynecology and Obstetrics named Bruce Flamm, who not only found numerous methodological errors in the experiment, but also discovered that one of the study’s authors, Daniel Wirth (AKA “John Wayne Truelove”), is not an M.D., but an M.S. in parapsychology who has since been indicted on felony charges for mail fraud and theft, for which he pled guilty. The other two authors have refused comment, and after three years of inquires from Flamm the journal removed the study from its website and Columbia University launched an investigation.

What they discovered, thanks to the vigilance of Dr. Flamm, was that Cha’s other co-author, Columbia University’s Rogerio Lobo, later revealed that he had not participated in the research and withdrew his name from the published findings. Even with one of his co-authors in federal prison and the other disgraced, Korean fertility specialist Kwang Yul Cha stood by the results of was is essentially a supernatural claim in that the presumption is that the deity intervened on behalf of infertile women to help them conceive. One wonders why the prayers do not seem to work in the other direction; that is, all those women who, due to alcohol or other external influences, engaged in sexual activity with no intention of conceiving and thus, over the course of the next several days, prayed like mad for pregnancy prevention, to no avail. But I digress…

Angered by Dr. Flamm’s skeptical persistence, Cha eventually filed a defamation lawsuit against Flamm, especially after he published several articles questioning the validity of the original pregnancy study. The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court in August 2007, was thrown out of court in April, 2008. However, in June, 2008 Cha took the case to the California Appellate Court. Finally, on October 24, 2009, the Court of Appeals, “affirmed in full” the Superior Court decision and thus ruled that Superior Court Judge James Dunn had acted appropriately in tossing out the lawsuit.

In response to the ruling, Dr. Flamm issued the following statement:

Today’s ruling is a victory for science and evidence-based medicine. Scientists must be allowed to question bizarre claims. Cha’s mysterious study was designed and allegedly conducted by a man who turned out to be a criminal with a 20-year history of fraud. A criminal who steals the identities of dead children to obtain bank loans and passports is not a trustworthy source of research data. Cha could have simply admitted this obvious fact but instead he hired a team of lawyers to punish me for voicing my opinions. Physicians should debate their opinions in medical journals, not in courts of law. Judges have better things to do with their time and taxpayers have better things to do with their money.

Amen, brother! And congratulations Dr. Flamm, on a cause well chosen and a battle well fought. Your stamina, persistence, and skeptical vigilance are to be commended. We honor you.

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Dear Bill,

Years ago you invited me to appear as a fellow skeptic several times on your ABC show Politically Incorrect, and I have ever since shared your skepticism on so many matters important to both of us: creationism and intelligent design, religious supernaturalism and New Age paranormal piffle, 9/11 “truthers”, Obama “birthers”, and all manner of conspiratorial codswallop. On these matters, and many others, you rightly deserved the Richard Dawkins Award from Richard’s foundation, which promotes reason and science.

However, I believe that when it comes to alternative medicine in general and vaccinations in particular you have fallen prey to the same cognitive biases and conspiratorial thinking that you have so astutely identified in others. In fact, the very principle of how vaccinations work is additional proof (as if we needed more) against the creationists that evolution happened and that natural selection is real: vaccinations work by tricking the body’s immune system into thinking that it has already had the disease for which the vaccination was given. Our immune system “adapts” to the invading pathogens and “evolves” to fight them, such that when it encounters a biologically similar pathogen (which itself may have evolved) it has in its armory the weapons needed to fight it. This is why many of us born in the 1950s and before may already have some immunity against the H1N1 flu because of its genetic similarity to earlier influenza viruses, and why many of those born after really should get vaccinated.

Vaccinations are not 100% effective, nor are they risk free. But the benefits far outweigh the risks, and when communities in the U.S. and the U.K. in recent years have foregone vaccinations in large numbers, herd immunity is lost and communicable diseases have come roaring back. This is yet another example of evolution at work, but in this case it is working against us. (See ScienceBasedMedicine.org for numerous articles answering every one of the objections to vaccinations.)

Vaccination is one of science’s greatest discoveries. It is with considerable irony, then, that as a full-throated opponent of the nonsense that calls itself Intelligent Design, your anti-vaccination stance makes you something of an anti-evolutionist. Since you have been so vocal in your defense of the theory of evolution, I implore you to be consistent in your support of the theory across all domains and to please reconsider your position on vaccinations. It was not unreasonable to be a vaccination skeptic in the 1880s, which the co-discovered of natural selection — Alfred Russel Wallace — was, but we’ve learned a lot over the past century. Evolution explains why vaccinations work. Please stop denying evolution in this special case.

As well, Bill, your comments about not wanting to “trust the government” to inject us with a potentially deadly virus, along with many comments you have made about “big pharma” being in cahoots with the AMA and the CDC to keep us sick in the name of corporate profits is, in every way that matters, indistinguishable from 9/11 conspiracy mongering. Your brilliant line about how we know that the Bush administration did not orchestrate 9/11 (“because it worked”), applies here: the idea that dozens or hundreds pharmaceutical executives, AMA directors, CDC doctors, and corporate CEOs could pull off a conspiracy to keep us all sick in the name of money and power makes about as much sense as believing that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their bureaucratic apparatchiks planted explosive devices in the World Trade Center and flew remote controlled planes into the buildings.

Finally, Bill, please consider the odd juxtaposition of your enthusiastic support for health care reform and government intervention into this aspect of our medical lives, with your skepticism that these same people — when it comes to vaccinations and disease prevention — suddenly lose their sense of morality along with their medical training. You excoriate the political right for not trusting the government with our health, and then in the next breath you inadvertently join their chorus when you denounce vaccinations, thereby adding fodder for their ideological cannons. Please remember that it’s the same people administrating both health care and vaccination programs.

One of the most remarkable features of science is that it often leads its practitioners to change their minds and to say “I was wrong.” Perhaps we don’t do it enough, as our own blinders and egos can get in the way, but it does happen, and it certainly happens a lot more in science than it does in religion or politics. I’ve done it. I used to be a global warming skeptic, but I reconsidered the evidence and announced in Scientific American that I was wrong. Please reconsider both the evidence for vaccinations, as well as the inconsistencies in your position, and think about doing one of the bravest and most honorable things any critical thinker can do, and that is to publicly state, “I changed my mind. I was wrong.”

With respect,
Michael Shermer

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My keynote talk was Why People Believe Weird Things, a shortened version of which you can see on Ted.com, where I originally delivered this lecture. It includes much discussion about how east it is to fool the brain, perceptual illusions, cognitive missteps such as the confirmation bias, priming effects (where you prime the brain to see or hear the world in a certain way), and especially the power of expectation.

Surprisingly, everyone there was most friendly toward me, even though what I was basically telling them is that pretty much everything they believe about the paranormal is wrong. Many came up after to tell me that they too are skeptical of many of the phony baloney scam artists there are out there who are ripping people off with various flim flams, but of course they added the proviso that not all paranormal phenom are perpetrated hoaxes and that they like science because it can help them to discriminate between the true and false paranormal patterns. Okay, whatever it takes to get people interested in science, however, I did make it clear that to date science has yet to find any conclusive evidence for ESP and the like, so that instead of turning to the paranormal as an explanation for presently unsolved mysteries, why not just leave it as a mystery until science can explain it? In science, I noted, it’s okay to say “I don’t know.”

Here’s some iPhone pics I snapped while waiting for my talk to begin. Included is a pic of Frank Sumption and I. Frank is the inventor of “Frank’s Box,” which I wrote about in the January, 2009 issue of Scientific American. Frank’s Box is also called the “Telephone to the Dead,” and consists of a simplified radio receiver that cycles through the stations at breakneck speed such that one only hears snippets of words and sentence fragments, and it is here where the dead allegedly sneak in their messages to us living (or, where in my explanation, the “patternicity” happens, or the natural tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise. I also snapped some pics of Bruce Goldberg, with whom I once appeared in the mid 1990s on a television show about past lives. Bruce is still churning out the self-published books, now on how he communicates with time travelers from the future. Finally, I will admit that New Agers have the coolest crystals.

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I don’t know why the God question is so interdigitated with political and economic issues, but it is. It shouldn’t be. It’s okay to be a liberal Christian or a conservative atheist. I am a fiscal conservative and a social liberal. I don’t think there is a God, or any sort of anthropomorphic being who needs to be worshipped, who listens to prayers, who keeps a moral scoreboard that will be settled in the end, or who cares one iota about who wins the Super Bowl.

This is why what we do in this life matters so much — and why how we treat others in the here and now is more important than how they might be treated in some hereafter that may or may not exist. If we knew for certain that there is an afterlife, we wouldn’t have great debates about it, and philosophers wouldn’t have spilled all that ink over the millennia wrangling over it. Since we don’t know, it makes more sense to assume there is no God and no afterlife, and act accordingly. That is, act as if what we do matters now. That way, we’ll think about the consequences of what we are doing.

I am sick and tired of politicians, and just about everyone else, kowtowing to the religious right’s hypersensitivities and politically correct “tolerance” for diversities of belief — as long as one believes in God — any God will do, except the God who promises virgins in the next life to pilots who fly planes into buildings. Those of us who do not believe in god have had enough of this rhetoric. This is America. We are supposed to be good and do the right thing, not because it will make us rich, get us saved, or reward us in the next life, but because people have value in and of themselves, and because it will make us all better off, individually and collectively. It says so, right there in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights — products of a secular eighteenth-century Enlightenment movement.

Religion and politics should be treated as separate entities. Religion is private and politics is public. If you want more religion, go to church. If you want more politics, go to the capitol. Don’t go to church to politic, and don’t go to the capitol to preach. That’s a non-overlapping magisterium I can live with.

• FOLLOW MICHAEL SHERMER ON TWITTER •

The Thoughtful House agreed to the interviews because they figured they would get fair treatment from the likes of Matt. I’m interested to see what kind of a program NBC has put together on this very sensitive subject.

Depending on how this major media outlet writes the script, it could either be a major affirmation of what many within the science community already know, or it could increase the divide between anti-vax’ers and science.

Please, Matt… don’t go Jenny McCarthy on us. Don’t do the usual journalistic job of being “fair-and-balanced”. This is not a “he said, she said” issue. This is science. Do tell the world what the science supports.

In a recent study of cognition involving rooks, a type of corvid related to crows and ravens, scientists (one of whom I worked with once upon a time) succeeded in recreating one of Aesop’s fables. From the abstract:

In Aesop’s fable The Crow and the Pitcher, a thirsty crow uses stones to raise the level of water in a pitcher and quench its thirst. A number of corvids have been found to use tools in the wild [1,2,3,4], and New Caledonian crows appear to understand the functional properties of tools and solve complex physical problems via causal and analogical reasoning [5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. The rook, another member of the corvid family that does not appear to use tools in the wild, also appears able to solve non-tool-related problems via similar reasoning [12]. Here, we present evidence that captive rooks are also able to solve a complex problem by using tools. We presented four captive rooks with a problem analogous to Aesop’s fable: raising the level of water so that a floating worm moved into reach. All four subjects solved the problem with an appreciation of precisely how many stones were needed. Three subjects also rapidly learned to use large stones over small ones, and that sawdust cannot be manipulated in the same manner as water. This behavior demonstrates a flexible ability to use tools, a finding with implications for the evolution of tool use and cognition in animals.

So, the rooks used rocks to raise the level of water in a container in order to grab a yummy worm. They learned that rocks work better than wood dust, and they figured out that different sized rocks displace different amounts of water. That’s some fairly complicated tool use, which according to scientific concensus should take a fair amount of cognitive power.

How can these birds do these amazing things? Their brains are so small!

I have a reaction more like, “how did it take so long for someone to try this test?” If our brains are so big and wonderful, allowing us so much processing prowess, why is it so hard for us to devise ways to delve into the minds of other animals (nevermind our own). To me, this is a perfect example of scientists finally finding an appropriate test with which to peer into an animal’s abilities.

Many times when an experiment isn’t working, getting it to work is a matter of changing the way the question is posed, or being creative with the experimental design. This is especially true when working with animals. In my own experience, I have been outsmarted by many a magpie and scrub jay who just didn’t want to do the experiment the way I did. Not seeing eye to eye with the birds forced me to rethink the way I was doing the experiment.

For goodness sake, for years it was thought that birds had little to no sense of smell simply because the olfactory bulb would come unattached from the rest of the brain, and get lost in the processing!

Really, the point of this is that we can never jump to conclusions about the way things work in the world because we have probably failed in some way to come up with just the right test because we haven’t looked at the problem from all perspectives.

Watch a cool video of a bird performing the task in question here.

“For 23 years, my show has presented thousands of topics that reflect the human experience, including doctors’ medical advice and personal health stories that have prompted conversations between our audience members and their health care providers. I trust the viewers, and I know that they are smart and discerning enough to seek out medical opinions to determine what may be best for them.”

Sorry, Oprah – wrong. She may indeed trust her viewers to be smart but her celebrity status, amplified by her frequent celebrity guests,  blinds many of them from making rational decisions about their health and well-being.  Our celebrity-obsessed culture influences many to accept all the medical quackery she promotes on her show, aided and abetted by way-past-their-prime celebrities and New Age cultist physicians. From ex-Playboy Centerfold Jenny McCarthy and her anti-vaccination campaign to 1970′s blonde bombshell Suzanne Somer’s promotion of “bioidenticals hormone” therapy and the regular appearance of “quantum fantasist” Deepak Chopra, Oprah has done more to misinform our fellow citizens about science, damage respect for science and science-based knowledge than all the Young Earth Creationist propagandists combined. Does Oprah not know how much damage she can do and hurt she can bring when she let someone so completely ignorant of chemistry and physiology as Suzanne Somers to come on to her show to promote her nonsense and exploit the scientific ignorance of her viewers. Ms Somers claims that in addition to taking over 60 vitamin pills a day she also injects her vagina herself with “natural” estrogen synthesized from plants. Ms Somers harped on the claim that estrogen synthesized from plants is natural (because it’s sold by “alternative” medicine websites?) but estrogen prescribed by board certified M.D.’s are not (because it’s sold by Big-Pharma?) So, female readers, – please do not inject anything into your vagina unless it’s done by a board certified gynecologist! And more importantly, please, please do not take medical advice about your reproductive system from anyone (including Oprah) who cannot even use the correct terminology to describe one of your most important reproductive organs. (It’s called the vagina – it’s not a bad word and it’s not V-jayjay!  Pul-leeeez!  Adult women sitting around giggling about their reproductive organs using made-up baby-talk or middle-school slang is not funny and promotes and celebrates ignorance.)

After Newsweek’s take down of the woo-mistress, who did you expect would come to her defense? No other lesser woo-miester than Dr Deepak Chopra who is a frequent guest on Oprah’s show. In a Huffingpost column, Dr. Chopra wrote in her defense: “And the fact that she has celebrity guests who have causes and crusades in the area of health, such as Jenny McCarthy or Suzanne Somers, is not the same as Oprah herself endorsing what they say.” No sh*t Sherlock! What kind of logic is that? For an audience of science-phobic and scientifically ignorant but celebrity-obsessed TV addicts who don’t know their vagina from their vulva; who think that “chi” is real; and who take Jenny McCarthy’s “keep toxins away from my child, don’t vaccinate” mantra to heart, (but ignore the fact that she injects herself at frequent intervals with botulism toxin!) having celebrity guests on her show to push ignorant superstitious nonsense is dangerous and detrimental to the general health and well-being of our population. Is it a wonder at all that areas with the lowest childhood vaccination rates are in suburbs where upper middle-class stay-at-home moms have the luxury to spend time watching the Oprah Show and have their minds poisoned by Ms McCarthy’s anti-vaccination message? (The most recent California Department of Health statistics listed Marin County – one of the richest counties in the country – with kindergartners non-medical immunization exemption rate at 6.3% while neighboring Solano county with blue-collar towns like Vallejo has an exemption rate of only 0.9%)

While the likes of Suzanne Somers and Jenny McCarthy, due to their lack of formal science education may be just ignorant blabber mouths, Dr. Deepak Chopra does not have that excuse. He has a real medical degree from a highly respectable university but yet he chose to ignore everything he learned in medical school and instead makes his millions giving medical advice conspicuous by the absence of science. Dr Chopra endorses, promotes and defends every form of alternative medicine as long as it is based on some ancient Eastern-Mystical tradition. (When he writes or talks, he sprinkles words like “quantum” and “energy field” liberally in meaningless context just to add an air of scientific authority.)  Consider this defense of acupuncture where Dr. Chopra writes in Huffington Post citing this latest study of acupuncture as “evidence” that the modality works: “In Seattle a recent study of 638 patients with chronic lower back pain were given either some sort of acupuncture or standard treatment with anti-inflammatory drugs and massage. On average, the acupuncture patients received twice as much benefit as those on standard treatment. The kicker is that some of the patients received fake acupuncture — they were pricked superficially with toothpicks — and received the same relief.” No, Deepak, are you really so dense as to not understand what the study showed about acupuncture? The study clearly demonstrated that “fake” or “sham” acupuncture, done with toothpicks or needles poked randomly without regards to locations of the mystical “chi” meridian lines works just as well as “real” acupuncture. Goofy charade with sharp objects (toothpicks?) poked randomly at body parts is not acupuncture by even the most lax definition of what acupuncture is and if it works just as well as acupuncture with real needles inserted at proper “chi” meridian line locations, can we not learn something – that perhaps “real” and “sham” acupuncture are the same thing? If there is no difference between “real” acupuncture and sham/fake acupuncture, where is the evidence that there is anything to support acupuncture other than the fact that it’s just a placebo? The awful truth about this acupuncture study is that it’s either the first nor the only, but one of many such studies done, which confirmed the same placebo effect outcome. There is no shame, and it’s not a crime to be ignorant, but it is stupid to continue to be ignorant when information and knowledge is handed to you or shoved in your face. It is highly irresponsible for someone with credentialed authority (like an M.D. and with license to practice medicine) to knowingly and deliberately disseminate wrong information about proven ineffective treatments and to actively promote ignorance and stupidity. Dr. Deepak Chopra seem to have an endless supply of drivel and never miss an opportunity to preach his nonsense when given an audience – which lately seem to be provided by Oprah and PBS pledge weeks.

First of all, why is it okay to mix science and religion (with atheists eagerly do in debunking religious claims) but not okay to mix science and politics/economics? Why is it okay for liberal atheists to stick it to religious believers and twist the knife slowly, but when it comes to getting your own (political/economic) beliefs challenged, that’s off limits — NOMA (nonoverlapping magisterial) for science and politics? I don’t see how they are different in principle. Skeptic is a science magazine, not an “atheist” magazine; nevertheless, we routinely deal with religious claims and no one ever complains about that. The closest we have come to political/economic issues is environmentalism (Vol. 9, No. 2 — sold out), overpopulation (Vol. 5, No. 1), and global warming Vol. 14, No. 1). For all three we published several articles; in Vol. 14, No. 1, for example, we published articles both skeptical of global warming and accepting of global warming. So I don’t see what would be wrong with publishing articles pro, con, and neutral on political and economic claims.

One person wrote me a private email that said he thought of me as the next Carl Sagan, but now that I’ve gone to the dark side (turning Right, although I’m as critical of the Right as I am the Left), because Carl was “apolitical.” Carl Sagan was many things, but apolitical was not one of them. Carl was a Liberal and proudly wore his politics on his sleeve, such as when he marched in protest at nuclear sites or testified before Congress about the dangers of nuclear winter. I admire him for having the courage of his convictions, which intimately blended his science and (Left) politics. If you think Sagan was apolitical it is because you happen to agree with his politics and so those ideas seem simply correct, not political. If you don’t share his politics (I share about half of them), then it’s obvious that Sagan was not apolitical.

The liberal bias in the skeptical community was identified by many people in the comments section of my blog, for example by “DR,” “James,” and “Devil’s Advocate”:

… Sadly, there is a lot of hatred toward libertarianism at JREF [he means TAM]. I can be an atheist, believe gay marriage is ok, think nothing of smoking pot, and I won’t get half as much grief from a conservative that I do from an American liberal who reels and squirms when I say that the welfare state is immoral or that free trade and voluntary transactions in capitalism promote fair and just outcomes. It’s like the only reason why I have rationalized this set of morality is because I’m a supremely evil person and must be wrong… —DR

… I’m disappointed, but not surprised by the large group of liberal skeptics. I’ve talked to too many Democrat-card-carrying skeptics that spout the same unoriginal, canned rhetoric and continual spewing hatred of Republicans. For a group that supposedly supports tolerance, they’re anything but tolerant …
—James

I’ve three times over twenty years joined local skeptic groups and all three times there was a presumption that if I was a skeptic, then of course I’m also liberal in my politics. Two times I tried to be what I am but was marginalized, treated like a Goldwater (or Reagan, or Bush) mole. The third time I tried to avoid political discussion, but it was not possible, so, unwilling to lie, I left. My refusal to come over to pure liberalism clearly wasn’t going to be tolerated. All I wanted to do was examine UFO claims and crop circles, but… —Devil’s Advocate

Another critic named John D. Draeger makes a good point that I wish to acknowledge: “He [me] does NOT believe that political persuasions and different economic models for how societies should be run are moral value judgements…. Social services can be paid for in different ways, and in a democratic society it’s up to the majority to define how that is done. Social services can be paid for in different ways, and in a democratic society it’s up to the majority to define how that is done.” That’s true, in a democracy the majority rules how to divvy up public funds for social services, and that tends to be more of a value judgment than a science. But as someone else wrote just below that, quite cleverly I think…

First of all, democratic societies can still be evil, as the famous saying goes: “democracy is two wolves and one lamb voting on what to have for lunch.” And then in another famous quote (attributed to several), “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. Thus our founding fathers gave us a republic … if we can keep it.

Even this is a value judgment, I agree, but surely we can apply some forms of social science to inform our value judgments. For example, we may as a society make the value judgment that it would be good if every child received a basic K–12 education. I agree with this value judgment, and would add to it the value judgment that it would be equally important for every child to have a computer and Internet access because that is the future of education. So we share that value judgment. However, the next question is a pragmatic one: who is going to pay for this education (and computers/Internet)? Parents? Churches? NGOs? Charities? Government? If the latter — the value judgment we have made — then do parents get to choose among the various government schools of where to send their children? (No.) Do parents who choose to send their children to private schools have to also pay for government schools? (Yes.) Is that fair? You make that value judgment. I don’t think that it is fair. To be consistent, if you are pro-choice on abortion you should also be pro-choice on education. The deeper value judgment here is being pro-choice about everything. Choice = freedom.

Some correspondents hated the political diagram because it seems to elevate libertarianism above the traditional left-right spectrum. Okay, then you come up with something other than the left-right linear spectrum to visualize where someone would fall on that line who is socially liberal and fiscally conservative. You draw it and I’ll publish it in a future blog.

Some people hate the word “libertarian.” I’m not crazy about it either, but haven’t thought of a better label. Labels are useful because they enable people to take cognitive shortcuts, but they also lead to shortcuts to nuanced thinking about what someone believes. “Oh, you’re one of those…” full stop. We all do this, of course, but I call myself a libertarian for the same reason I call myself a feminist, an atheist, and a pro-choicer — because it is the accepted language and we have to communicate ideas with language. But I much prefer to be assessed on specific issues.

Several of you said that I am a victim of one of my own central tenets of baloney detection: the confirmation bias, where we look for and find confirmatory evidence for what we already believe and ignore the disconfirmatory evidence. Yes, I will admit, I do this. Everyone does, and we must guard against it, especially when it comes to religion, politics, and economics. To combat this problem, I read the conservative Wall Street Journal and the liberal Los Angeles Times. I listen to such conservative talk radio hosts as Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Praeger as well as the very liberal Bill Maher. I have read Karl Marx’s books as deeply and carefully as I have read Adam Smith’s books. I have read a host of books from liberal and conservative and libertarian authors on the current economic meltdown. And although I have a few libertarian and conservative friends, because I work in the sciences and in publishing, the vast majority of my friends, acquaintances, staff, co-workers, and colleagues are liberals who I can assure you are never shy about letting me know where they think I’ve gone off the political or economic rails.

Finally, let me add that one of the appealing things to me about the libertarian worldview is that it is optimistic, uplifting, and most importantly (to me) anti-elitist. I’m in favor of doing whatever we can to allow the little guy to succeed and to break up power blocs that prevent the average Joe or Jane from reaching their full potential. The Constitutional divisions of power in our Democracy — emulated by many others around the world — are a huge improvement from centuries past that allowed or enabled some to succeed at the expense of others. That was a zero-sum world. Over the past 200 years the spread of democracy and capitalism has done more toward achieving a Nonzero world than anything else — more people in more places more of the time have more power and liberty and wealth than any time in the previous four millennium. Therefore, the more we can spread democracy and capitalism the better off more of us will be more of the time.

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