Martin Gardner portrait by Konrad Jacobs. Courtesy Oberwolfach Photo Collection

By now you will most likely have heard the sad news of the death of Martin Gardner — the father of modern skepticism — at age 95. He was, as his friend James Randi wrote, “a very bright spot in my firmament.”

Many people feel the same way, and for good reason. Gardner’s impact cannot be overstated. It is fair to argue that Martin Gardner created the modern skeptical literature from whole cloth. His 1952 book In the Name of Science (retitled Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science for the second and subsequent editions; hereafter referred to as Fads & Fallacies) set the standard that later led to the creation of CSICOP — and to all that has followed since. Through his books and his “Notes of a Fringe-Watcher” column in the Skeptical Inquirer, Martin Gardner was a meticulous skeptical scholar for six decades. (Amazingly, his most recent Skeptical Inquirer articles appeared earlier this year.)

I’m writing this essay about this “good old man” in long-hand, sitting at the side of a neighbourhood swimming pool. I’m watching my own young son laughing and splashing, and thinking about life: its brevity, its preciousness, its cycles of wisdom and forgetfulness and rediscovery. How fleeting it can be — not only life, but memory and understanding as well. What will my son remember of the lessons I try to teach him? What will I remember of the things my own father taught me?

I wrote recently about the dawn of the organized skeptical movement with the formation of CSICOP in 1976. Today I’m looking back further — a whopping 24 years before the founding of CSICOP or any other skeptical organization. Gardner stepped onto the stage with Fads & Fallacies the year after Carl Sagan graduated high school. James Randi was, at age 24, making a name for himself as a bright young magician. It was the year that Paul Kurtz, a U.S. Army veteran of the liberation of Dachau, finished his PhD in philosophy. Legendary investigator Joe Nickell, whose historical overview essay style follows the Gardner model, was an eight-year old boy. Many of our most respected science advocates, like Michael Shermer and Steven Novella, had not yet even been born.

For my part, my own father was three years old when Gardner invented the modern skeptical literature — with the book I dug into again this morning.

A True Classic

I never met Martin Gardner, and it’s been years since I last re-read his books. Still, returning to Fads & Fallacies is like speaking to a close old friend I haven’t seen in years. (When we were shepherds, my brother Jason and I used to carry battered copies of skeptical masterpieces in our backpacks. Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World, Randi’s Flim-Flam! and Gardner’s Fads & Fallacies were among the most important of them.)

If you haven’t read Fads & Fallacies, you should. (I mean, really, head down to your local library today. What better way to honor Gardner’s life in skepticism?) Fads & Fallacies is a revered classic, of course, and yet completely modern in style as well as substance. Its crisp chapters each review the history and arguments of a specific pseudoscientific topic (such as creationist flood geology, Atlantis, or “orgone” energy), placing the development of that topic in context with its closest pseudoscientific relatives, and contrasting it with the relevant science. Gardner’s model is followed today by Joe Nickell, by Brian Dunning’s Skeptoid podcast, and of course by my own Junior Skeptic articles.

The scholarship of these articles is extremely impressive, and very certainly worth our effort to study. For years I’ve aggressively pursued primary sources for skeptical research, building a very respectable library on these obscure topics; and yet, a few minutes flipping through Fads & Fallacies just now informed me about a half dozen obviously important volumes I didn’t know anything about. And I should know about those books. Skeptics should know as much as we can of what Martin Gardner knew, because we’re the only people who can continue and build on his research.

One of the great lessons of skepticism is that weird ideas never go away. One of the functions of skeptics is the study of the history of claims and hoaxes, so that experts are available when those claims inevitably mutate or resurge. Readers of Fads & Fallacies will learn, for example, not only what is wrong with the concept of dowsing (relevant all over again, and lethal, in the wake of the Iraq bomb-detector scandal); about the key volumes and thinkers to develop the dowsing idea through the early 20th century (and before); and also about the related idea of radiesthesia (pendulum divining, which incidentally gave birth to pyramid power).

Gardner’s Blueprint

Among its many virtues, Fads & Fallacies stands out for its clarity as a blueprint for later skeptical research, organization, and activism. I’m somewhat known for a manifesto-type essay advocating for traditional skepticism. I could have saved myself 5000 words if I’d just written, “What Martin Gardner said.”

From the first page, Fads & Fallacies is explicit about the problem it wants to address: the influence and dangers of pseudoscience. Gardner was concerned about

the rise of the promoter of new and strange “scientific” theories. He is riding into prominence, so to speak, on the coat-tails of reputable investigators. The scientists themselves, of course, pay very little attention to him. They are too busy with more important matters. But the less informed general public, hungry for sensational discoveries and quick panaceas, often provides him with a noisy and enthusiastic following.

Gardner saw this volatile combination — poor public science literacy; the existence of cranks and con men; and, the fact that pseudoscientific claims are typically left unexamined by serious scientists — as a call to action. It is a call others took up in the decades that followed. Today we call that project “scientific skepticism.”

But why should anyone care about pseudoscience? Why is pseudoscience worth fighting? In every generation, skeptics ask themselves this question — a question Gardner anticipated.

Perhaps we are making a mountain out of a molehill. It is all very amusing, one might say, to titillate public fancy with books about bee people from Mars. The scientists are not fooled, nor are readers who are scientifically informed. If the public wants to shell out cash for such flummery, what difference does it make?

Gardner offered several answers to this question. To begin with, he noted, there is a human cost “when people are misled by scientific claptrap.” He offered the sad example of mentally ill people “desperately in need of trained psychiatric care” whose treatment is delayed by “dalliance in crank cults.” (Lest you doubt Gardner’s relevance today, he was talking about Dianetics, the basis of Scientology. Fads & Fallacies includes an in-depth chapter about Scientology’s history and claims.)

I think that rock bottom truth — people get hurt — is ample reason for people of conscience to care about pseudoscience (especially medical pseudoscience). Nonetheless, Gardner provided other answers as well. One is that unchallenged pseudoscientific beliefs (even when apparently harmless) can reenforce other (perhaps more dangerous) unfounded beliefs.

What about the long-run effects of non-medical books like Velikovsky’s, and the treatises on flying saucers? It is hard to see how the effects can be anything but harmful. Who can say how many orthodox Christians and Jews read Worlds in Collision and drifted back into a cruder Biblicism because they were told that science had reaffirmed the Old Testament miracles?

(To appreciate the prescience of this comment, consider that Answers In Genesis still finds it necessary to include on its list of “Arguments That Should Never Be Used” the Velikovskian notion that the Earth stopped rotating for a day during the life of the Old Testament figure Joshua. Check out their surprisingly good debunking article on the topic of Joshua’s missing day.)

Worse, Gardner argued, pseudoscience erodes scientific literacy in general — a process as unpredictable as it is dangerous.

An even more regrettable effect produced by the publication of scientific rubbish is the confusion they sow in the minds of gullible readers about what is and what isn’t scientific knowledge. And the more the public is confused, the easier it falls prey to doctrines of pseudo-science which may at some future date receive the backing of politically powerful groups. As we shall see in later chapters, a renaissance of German quasi-science paralleled the rise of Hitler. If the German people had been better trained to distinguish good from bad science, would they have swallowed so easily the insane racial theories of the Nazi anthropologists?

Gardner’s Solution, and Legacy

What was Martin Gardner’s solution to the problem of pseudoscience? The first step is implicit in his decades of painstaking work: scholarship. To tackle pseudoscience knowledgeably, skeptics take on (to greater or lesser extents) the task of becoming scholars of pseudoscience.

This is a colossal project. Skepticism’s traditional subject matter includes hundreds of pseudoscientific and paranormal topics — each with its own literature, history of development, major figures and major works, and collection of critical responses. Sometimes, as with homeopathy or astrology or dowsing, the history of a single topic stretches back centuries. Martin Gardner researched that vast field for decades, acquiring a depth of knowledge and understanding that is unparalleled among living skeptics. It is left to each of us to fill some small, specialized part of the gap he has left.

In 1952, Gardner showed us what skeptical scholarship looks like, setting the standard that skeptical researchers follow today. At the same time, he called for the now-traditional other half of the skeptical coin: working to advance scientific literacy.

We need better science education in our schools. We need more and better popularizers of science. We need better channels of communication between working scientists and the public. And so on.

And so on. The road always continues — and eventually, the travelers do not. Martin Gardner lived to see his personal call to arms grow into a lively research field, an activism movement, and even (through skepticism’s digital renaissance) a flourishing global subculture. It’s a wonderful legacy. For a time, it is ours to preserve. And so, tonight I’ll be raising a glass to the memory of Martin Gardner — and thinking hard about the things he had to teach.

I wrote to the producers of the show in advance to offer my assistance, and to remind them, “When The Hour interviews Adam, there will no doubt be thousands of viewers who are either suffering from cancer or watching a loved one suffer from cancer — all potential customers” of Adam’s lucrative books and healing workshops. (According to ABC News, then-19 year old Adam was already making over a million dollars a year in 2006.)

Watch the CBC interview on YouTube

This, I cautioned the producers, “places a heavy due diligence responsibility on the CBC” to cover these life-or-death medical claims “with exquisitely careful critical scrutiny.”

I never heard back from them. However, I learned later that a more insistent skeptical activist took the matter as far as the CBC Ombudsman. Upon review, the Ombudsman’s decision was that the show’s host bore a lower due diligence burden because

George Stroumboulopoulos is not a front-line, hard news interviewer; he approaches sometimes difficult subjects in a less confrontational manner than investigative journalists might.  But his task is different on what is, at base, an entertainment program.

This “entertainment” argument often shields paranormal claimants from critical scrutiny in newspaper “lifestyle” sections and “unsolved mystery” TV segments, but let’s set that aside for the moment. Today I want to dig into a different, though related matter:

Entertainment or Education?

The skeptical community has its factions and schisms. Some of these reflect the growing pains of an academic project trying to come to terms with its new life as a popular movement (what is sometimes called “skepticism 2.0″). Other disputes amount to border clashes between skepticism and parallel rationalist movements (humanism, atheism, Objectivism, and so on).

One of skepticism’s earliest splits occurred right at the birth of the pioneering Skeptical Inquirer magazine, back before it was even called by that name. The Zetetic, as it was then known, was a small journal whose first editor Marcello Truzzi left the magazine almost immediately. At issue was a question that still preoccupies skeptics today:

Is the primary job of the skeptical literature to provide a forum for debate? Or, is skepticism supposed to educate the public about science, pseudoscience, and hoaxes?

Now, this is something of a false dichotomy. Nearly all skeptics agree that the answer is “a little of both.” But skeptics do tend to split along these lines, leaning in one direction more than the other. Some prefer debate and “challenge everything” novelty, which is undoubtedly the most entertaining. Others emphasize a mandate for science literacy outreach and consumer awareness regarding fringe science claims.

I am firmly a member of this latter, more conservative group, as I laid out in the essay “Where Do We Go From Here?”:

In particular, we should renew our focus on the investigation and criticism of paranormal claims. Here’s why:

1. People get hurt.
2. No one else does anything about it.

In my view, consumer protection is the most foundational function of the skeptics movement: we investigate, report on, and promote awareness about products which are generally ineffective, sometimes dangerous, and occasionally deadly — and which no other watchdog group bothers to research.

Due Diligence for Skeptics

The skeptical literature sometimes presents arguments of the form, “Is consensus view X all it’s cracked up to be?” These heterodox articles (sometimes written by unqualified outsiders) offer novel food for thought, challenging widely held views on global warming, second-hand smoke, the validity of psychiatric diagnoses or animal testing, and other such material. Long-time skeptics may enjoy a little frisson when encountering these arguments for the first time: “Ooh, that’s new! I never thought to wonder about that before. Wouldn’t it be interesting if X really were a load of hooey?”

This is fun stuff, but I suggest that the skeptical literature should try to avoid this temptation. It’s not impossible for contrarian articles to be correct, but it’s all too easy for them to be wildly wrong (or badly uninformed). To the degree that contrarian arguments are out of step with the prevailing current of opinion among relevant domain experts, “wrong” is the way to bet.

In either event, such articles are typically misleading in that they give fringe positions undue weight — and lend them the credibility of the wider skeptical movement. (Paired “for and against” pieces imply that both positions are equally plausible, which is rarely true; but most contrarian articles are run without any immediate rebuttal.) This can seriously mislead readers about the actual state of the science — an inversion of the stated goals of all skeptical organizations. In my opinion, that violates a public trust I described recently in the Skeptical Inquirer:

At the core of the skeptical literature is a promise: “If you read this, you will find out what’s really true about weird claim X.” Skeptical magazines can aspire to keep this promise, to accurately deliver the best available science and scholarship, only when they’re able to identify mysteries, set experts to work solving them, and set other experts to work fact-checking the answers.

That is to say: skeptics bear a heavy due diligence burden. The more we present skepticism as “the scientific perspective,” the heavier that burden becomes. People turn to us for reliable information and science-based analysis. That is exactly what they should get.

Nor is it only skeptical magazines who bear this burden. All public skeptics — TV celebrities, podcasters, and bloggers included — have an unrelenting ethical responsibility to do their homework, stay close to their expertise, and get the facts right.

To deal with that burden, here’s the simple rule I propose: No skeptic should ever say anything that isn’t correct.

The Utility of a Preposterous Standard

Is this a reachable goal? No, of course it isn’t. It’s ridiculous. Perfect objectivity and accuracy are forever as far away as the end of the rainbow. But I would argue that there is value in the dogged, doomed pursuit of this aspiration. After all, every step we take toward that goal is a step in the right direction.

What sorts of steps? I’ll tackle that in a more substantial way in future posts, but I think we all know the general outline. I try to consider questions like these:

• Do I have the expertise to express an opinion about this?
• Have my facts been reviewed by anyone who knows what they’re talking about?
• Would those I’m critiquing agree that I’ve described their position accurately?
• Have I given undue weight to fringe positions?
• Have I given enough weight to criticisms of my own position?
• Have I accurately described the uncertainties and assumptions of my position?
• Am I using arguments that science has already considered and debunked?
• Have I sought out the primary sources?
• Can I prove what I’m saying? (Really? Am I sure?)

…and so on. Not exactly rocket science, so to speak, but exactly the sort of good practice that rocket scientists (and all evidence-based researchers) rely upon to advance knowledge.

You wouldn't believe how many letters I got telling me I put the pips on the wrong sides of these dice I made for Junior Skeptic

Do I get things wrong in my own work? Bloody right I do, and it chews me up to know how easily that happens. (I virtually guarantee that there are mistakes in this post, even if only typos. Blogs are especially vulnerable to error: they are published almost as soon as they are written, and rarely vetted by proofers or editors.)

My own mistakes are why I recite that impossible rule to myself so often: “Never say anything that isn’t correct.” It’s a mental exercise (think of the “fear is the mind killer” bit in Dune), a way to at least partially restrain my own temptation to reach beyond the evidence — or speak beyond my expertise.

And I fail, of course. But how can we reach for anything less? Make no mistake: there is a human cost when skeptics get things wrong. It doesn’t matter if your soapbox is as large as CNN or as small as your Twitter feed: if anyone is listening to what you say, then you bear the burden of Spider-Man’s Law: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

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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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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The flyer was for the ‘Vital Orbit™’ Personal Human Force Field.

Personal Human Force Field - note that all the contact tags have been removed

At first, I dismissed the picture, and wondered why my friends pick me to send things like this. But, then I started thinking about it a bit more, and I’ll admit my curiosity got the best of me. You can’t see it in this image, but there was a weblink on the flyer for the Jejune Institute and the Vital Orbit product. I checked it out.

Phrases like:

Channels users own Hydrodynamic activities to project a spherical charge armament against all material bodies and organic compounds. Unintended matter undergoes total magnetic reversal (a process called “negativism”).

and:

The Vital-Orbit reduces these basic tenets to a demonstrable formula by harboring hydro-dynamics multiplied by intention (aquatic/thought). It is proven, time tested, bonafide.

had me rolling on the floor.

But, there was more, I noticed. There was a whole website to explore. The products offered are all fabulously imagined devices to make life better, and the Founder… well, his “meet the founder” video is a piece of work.

Everything about this Jejune Institute was simply too good to be true (what is with the 1972 – 2036 copyright? And, seriously… Jejune? The word means dull or insipid, or lacking in knowledge.). I wanted to know more, so I went to Google and YouTube.

In Google, I found an interesting article describing the Jejune Institute as the doorway to an ARG, or alternate reality game, which use the real world as their platform. So, by following the clues laid out before you, you can head quite willingly down the rabbithole of surreal life.

It turns out the game was launched last October (2008), and from the looks of it has gone through a couple of iterations and gathered quite a cult following. There is one flickr photostream dated April 30, 2009 chronicling a fairly large gathering for some scavenger hunt aspect of the game. The institute even has a Yelp page.

Following links, it all appears to be a well thought-out, intricate game. I guess the only way to determine the truth is to take the final step, and actually start playing.

Are you in?

When that belief is questioned by someone else it can be perceived as an attack not only on their intelligence, but also on the people from whom they first learned the information in question. Questioning beliefs picks away at the mentors and heroes from a person’s upbringing.It’s easier for most to leave well enough alone than to face the possibility that their heroes might have had faults.

I ran across this blind-belief in the kitchen last week, when I was told by someone that it’s bad for your health to allow something from the freezer to thaw and then be refrozen. “It will make you sick,” I was told.

“Where did you learn this?” I asked.

“Oh, I learned it growing up,” was the reply. “And, my son, he got sick after eating refrozen food.”

I told her that the refreezing isn’t necessarily good for the quality of the food as it damages whatever is being frozen, but it doesn’t affect your health.

She said that the bacteria would make me sick.

I told her the bacteria don’t multiply while they’re frozen. It’s how long the food is left out while not frozen that makes the difference. If you froze spoiled food, thawed, and ate it; or froze perfectly fine food, thawed it, left it out for too long, refroze and re-thawed it, then you might have a problem.

She sighed dramatically, rolled her eyes, told me I was wrong, and left the room. Conversation over.

She had personally experienced trouble with refreezing food, which reinforced her belief about not refreezing. She learned this rule from someone who she looked up to as a child, and who helped shape her world view.

Her rules, her belief system, keep her healthy and safe. She and her family never get sick from refrozen food.

She wasn’t about to give me anymore time to put a chink in her belief system.

The concept was a musical version of a secret meeting of the Illuminati, ruing the fact that the population has discovered alternative and faith-based everything, and thus profits are down.

It’s all well and good to make a plan like that, but how does one accomplish such a feat when one has no musical background or ability? One opens one’s rolodex. If you’ve seen my short film Here Be Dragons, you’ve heard the work of my friend, film composer Lee Sanders (visit him on Facebook or check out his web site). Lee recently won his second BMI Music Award for reality television with his work on The Amazing Race. He knows how to turn an idea into music, so I sprang my proposition on him at one of our OC Skeptics in the Pub nights a few months ago.

What followed was primarily weeks and weeks of minimal progress, mostly me waiting for Lee to give me a melody so I could write lyrics that match it, and Lee waiting for me to give him lyrics so he could write a melody to match them. Lavish broadway musicals require casts of hundreds, so I put out a few calls on Twitter and Facebook for any skeptical friends who can sing and who wanted to donate their time and talents to a fun project. Three replied: Peter Zachos (also a talented film composer), Gus Dunn, and Chris Humphreys. But three does not a cast of hundreds make, so Lee called up his friend Eric Santiestevan (yet another film composer, these guys are like weeds), and Eric managed to wrangle in a bunch of hired hands, bringing our total vocal strength to 19. And then, to put it over the top, Lee also hired a Votox programmer. It’s a synthesized symphonic choir which, properly mixed in the background, made our 19 sound like the Mormon Tabernacle.

Pieces all in place, recording began. I recorded my part separately at Lee’s studio, aptly named The Gulag. (People have complimented me on my singing, but it wasn’t really singing. It was really just a lot of shouting and whining, not unlike my normal daily routine.) The choir was recorded at a studio in Los Angeles, with Lee conducting, which was pretty damn fun to watch.

I didn’t want to be only one to have fun watching them, so I brought along my camcorder to tape as much of it as I could. And I now present for you as much of the footage as I was able to cobble together: The Making of “Screwed!”, Skeptoid Episode #150. Click the HD button if you have good bandwidth:

One night we were out for drinks and were discussing a few Skeptoid episodes where I’d discussed various non-scientific alternatives to healthcare. Soon, he’d had enough. And he told a story that went about like this:

“In my village there is an old man who cures people. He’s well known throughout the region, and people come from all over just to see him. And they do it because it works. All day, every day, he has a long line of people waiting outside his door. They bring their elderly, their children, their sick. No matter what their problem is, he heals them by the laying on of his hands. He’s poor and doesn’t do it for money. He doesn’t want fame or thanks. He only wants to help people. What do you say about that, Mr. Skeptic?”

And, I should mention, my friend was quite passionate about it. He’s also 6’5″ and had a couple beers in him. Not someone you want to contradict when his blood is up.

But I had no desire to contradict him or argue with him anyway. However, nothing would please me more than to see his loyalties move away from folk medicine and toward modern medicine. In his profession he gets injured sometimes, and avoids treating his injuries; thus they persist, to the detriment of his career. His other friends and I have urged him to see a doctor, but one characteristic of many immigrants is that they often have a large circle of fellow countrymen; so he always has as much, or more, support from his folk medicine friends as he’ll ever hear from us.

Now it’s one thing to sit in the comfort of your office, research materials close at hand, and contemplatively write a well-framed argument to make a point. It’s quite another to have something sprung on you by surprise in a social situation. Everyone was expecting me to take him on, but I didn’t have my ducks in a row, and I really didn’t want to offend my buddy. I was concerned about coming off as a blabbering, hateful, closed-minded skeptic. Frankly, my usual preference would have been to change the subject and move on. I think that’s usually best in such a situation.

But he wouldn’t have it. He really wanted to know what my problem was with the old man. (He rightly assumed that I’d be skeptical of the old man, in fact I hadn’t even said anything yet.) So I was dragged into battle. There are a number of ways I could have gone:

1. Be the nice, positive skeptic. Say that the prospect of such a thing is very exciting, and that I eagerly await its being tested and proven and certified and made available to the rest of the world.
2. A more cynical and confrontational approach. If he can do these miracles, why hasn’t he won Randi’s million dollars? Why has he jealously kept this power to himself and not given it to the rest of the world; is he an asshole?
3. Apply the scientific method. I can’t comment on this guy specifically because I don’t know anything about him; but many other claimants to such powers have come forward and failed to perform once controls were applied. So despite your personal experience with the old man, I would need to see him perform under controlled conditions in order to be convinced.

#1 is probably the best choice in such a situation where friendships are on the line. It shows open mindedness, it expresses a positive attitude about the old man, and it even hints at the need for testing. But it doesn’t encourage my friend to think more critically in a way that’s likely to lead him to seek useful treatment for his own injuries.

#2 is rarely successful. It’s like the dark side of The Force. It’s easy and seductive. Anyone can be confrontational. While it’s intended to raise alarm about the old man’s motives, it doesn’t have that effect. Instead it builds barricades, it draws lines in the sand. It encourages disagreement and fighting. And that’s the wrong path to take when the goal is enlightenment and knowledge.

#3 is kind of a compromise. It lacks the argumentative edge of #2, but it also lacks the positive tone of #1. It’s a good way to put the debate to rest quickly, because it’s not really something that can be argued against. It’s intended to plant the seeds of skepticism, and help my friend to conclude “Hey, maybe I should also demand a higher standard of evidence.” In this case, I doubt that it would have that result. My friend knew friends of friends who had been cured by the old man, and that’s a profound experience in his mind. In his mind, the old man has already passed all the tests he needs, with flying colors. A great way to follow up #3 is to cite other examples of controlled tests from other sciences. Most people love to hear about exciting science, and if it’s clear that it’s going to be hard to plant the seed you want, you can always make some progress planting a similar seed.

The best thing to do would have been to start with #1 to set the right tone, and to let my friend see that I’m on his side, and that our goals are the same: To bring better treatments to the world. This establishment of shared motivations is essential. And then, in discussion, gradually move into #3. I’d probably avoid saying something as specific as this old man has not passed any controlled tests. That would be too confrontational, and anyway my friend has not tried to argue that the man has passed any controlled tests. Move the conversation away from the sore point, and talk about other exciting areas of science where tests have been applied. What could have become a debate turns into a shared adventure through science, and it instills proper appreciation for good science.

What I ended up doing, however, was not the right thing. I tried to open with #3, but I did so as a preamble to a great, raging tirade on #2. Essentially, I made the worst argument possible. I did offend my friend; I did not in the slightest encourage him to reconsider his own mistrust of evidence based medicine; and I made myself look like a jackass whose opinion is not likely to be sought again. Such failures are how we gain experience. The important point is to be able to learn from such experience, and to do a better job next time. I’ve done that to some degree, but there is always room for improvement. Helping people to understand the way the world works, and to be able to make good life decisions based on good information, is important work; and we can all do a better job of it.

You know, It continually amazes how much utter garbage is on TV. The work to getting something like The Skeptologists that is not only entertaining, but is thought provoking and dare I even say it aloud: “educational” on TV is stupendously difficult.

The problem that we (And I mean we as Skeptics) really have is that we’re not cool. Ah ah ah, don’t even start… Nope, we’re not. Granted, there’s a few that tip the scales towards coolness, and heck most of you all are some of my biggest heros! I am humbled by the intellect, provoking discourse and ability to wrangle science like a frontier cowboy. BUT! Compared to the stars of the entertainment world, sports, politics and just pure celebrity, we don’t got it. Well, not yet anyway.

I’m not worried though. That’s not what it’s all about. The issue however is convincing the TV execs that in this case, the star power is truth and science! They want celebrity-star-power and a sure fire hit. One reality that is very evident by the response that we get as we work through the process of selling the show, and other projects that I’m working on is that no exec will put his or her individual neck on the line and go to bat for a show anymore. They want consensus, unanimous opinion and a way to point both their fingers in opposite directions and say “it was their fault” when the ratings start to fall, as they eventually will, no matter how good a show you have. All the TV executives want a clear and unobstructed way out. If you watch a few hours of network prime-time, you’ll quickly understand why everything pretty much looks and feels the same within a few major genre’s… They all can point to another show and say “But American Idol was a hit! So America’s Got Talent has GOT to work!” Everyone around the big mahogany table nods appropriately, and bang-o you got a network deal.

A very wise TV man told me recently, “They are all looking for a reason to say no.”

It’s so true, and if you let it, that’ll tear you up into little pieces and make you want to go drive one of the little caged lawnmower things that pick up the driving range golf balls for a living, cause well, you feel about that small. But I can’t. I won’t. I refuse! (Bang!)

The Skeptologists is a risk. For all of us, creatively, financially, emotionally. A big one if your a TV exec. We’ve created a show that was calculated to be a marketable show, and we now have that. Our presentation is getting very high marks, thanks to our awesome team both in front of and behind the camera. And I’m happy to say that we’re still in the running for the opportunity to get the show on my #1 network pick. We’ve got a long way to go, and mostly we’re waiting for decisions to be made behind closed doors. And man, If you thought waiting for the toast to pop-up sucked, try waiting for the next big moment in your career to pop up!

How would you do it? How would you convince a 20-something exec that you just brought them the newest 7 stars of TV. To stick their neck out, to go to bat, to make that call?

I love this show, and I really want to watch this show. It’s what I would break out the popcorn and Pepsi and wrap up with a blanket for. Hell, I might even turn off my cell phone, well, OK no, I wouldn’t do that, I have TiVo. But the almost 3000 emails of support for the show, and the constant comments and support from everyone that I talk to about this show ought to count for something, because I think that not only are the Skeptics ready for a show like this, but a good portion of the nation is ready for this. I feel the Winds of Science and Reason beginning to howl and you’d better hold onto your hat! This one is gonna be Big Baby! We got Star Power! (Call me. Mean it.)