The Skeptic Canary

I’ve been experimenting with “in car” videos, where you record yourself speaking about something while driving. I’ve been inspired by Matt Dillahunty, so I thought I’d give it a go. The first video is about Internet comments, let me know what you think!

Today at the appropriate time of 10:23am, tickets for QED 2013 go on sale! QED is a two day convention of science and skepticism taking place at the Mercure hotel in central Manchester on the weekend of April 13th 2013. The last two QEDs were absolute blasts and I’m sure things will be no different in 2013. What’s more, full price tickets are just £99, and students can attend for £59, a total bargain!

I’ll be standing by with my credit card and finger over the F5 key at 10:23 today, as I don’t want to miss out on the dinner, which sold out within about a day last time. Hopefully many of you will be doing the same!

www.qedcon.org

I wanted to bring people’s attention to a worrying study on acupunture, in part by written by researchers from my old alma mater, the University of York. The study itself is a meta analysis of 29 randomised clinical trials of acupuncture in back pain, neck pain, headache, and osteoarthritis which comes to the conclusion that acupuncture is effective for chronic pain and is suitable as a referrel option. I think the study suffers from certain biases and the conclusion reached by the authors is simply not supported by the evidence presented, but rather than give a detailed examination of it myself I shall recommend Steve Novella’s article on Science Based Medicine. I’m just rather concerned that a university which I still have a great affinity for is promoting such controversial treatments.

The guys at the Merseyside Skeptics Society (MSS) have been busy with some world class skeptical activism! The people that brought the ludicrous nature of homeopathy to the world’s attention with the 10:23 campaign have cast their eyes on a wristband made by the company Shuzi. The band makes all sorts of claims, similar to Power Balance bracelets (and we all recall what nonsense they were).

Unimpressed by Shuzi’s claims of it’s “Nano Vibrational Technology” being able to “unclump” and “improve communication” in your blood, the MSS devised a simple but comprehensive protocol to test the Shuzi band. They enlisted the help of a rugby player, who was tested to see how many kicks he could make when we was wearing either a genuine Shuzi band, or a “sham band (a Shuzi band with the “chip” removed). He attempted 50 kicks with and 50 without the band, but what I found impressive about this test was the blinding. In this sort of test, it’s hugely important to remove as many biasses as possible. The bands were covered by a sweatband, so the rugby player did not know which was which, and the identity of each band was kept a secret from the experimenter. The results were unsurprising. When wearing the real band, the player scored 26 out of 50, and with the “sham” band he scored 22. Although he scored more with the real band, this difference is not statistically significant. I’ve taken the liberty to illustrate the results in a graph.

As you can see, the above graph is pretty dull, not really showing much of a difference between the two tests. However, imagine I am a marketeer for Shuzi and I want to make this graph look as good as possible. I could do something like this:

Look at how much better this is! It’s the same data, except it’s in 3D, the Shuzi bar is a gold colour, and most importantly I’ve changed the axis so that the Shuzi bar is so much bigger than the sham bar. See how a little creative presentation can make your data look so much better than it is?

Anyway, it has to be said that they’ve got a good deal of press coverage from this. It’s appeared in the local Liverpool Echo, and even made it onto the Daily Mail of all places, making a nice change from the pseudoscientific guff we are all used to. Job well done guys!

wisdomofchorpa.com, a site that generates Deepak Chopra style pseudo-profound meaningless quotes, has had a major facelift thanks to the generous guys at peltenberg.eu. It’s certainly a vast improvement on my own design! Thanks guys, much appreciated! Go and check it out:

• wisdomofchopra.com

A few days ago I announced on Facebook that I was vowing to stay out of what has been dubbed as “skeptidrama”. For those of you who read that status update, the purpose of this post is simply to reiterate what I said on Facebook on my blog, so there is no need to point out that I’m writing about skpetidrama, thanks! My vow went as follows:

Have decided for good to stay out of the “skeptidrama”. There is so much more to skepticism than a few bloggers bickering. I don’t want to be a part of that any more, so please, if you see me talking about it tell me to STFU.

Of course, this leads to a really annoying Catch 22 situation where saying “I’m not going to talk about skeptidrama” is itself talking about skeptidrama. You can’t win!

If you don’t know what “skeptidrama” is, then good, you don’t want to know. Trust me, you really, really, don’t want to know. At first I thought getting involved would be a good idea. I mean, everyone involved is supposed to be a skeptic, so what harm could be done by pointing out the error of people’s ways? Quite a lot as it happens. You end up becoming a target yourself, and the more you try and resist it, the more you make yourself a target and you just go down in certain people’s opinions. I think it works in a very similar way to trolling, as it happens.

So, for me, there will be no more! I won’t be reading certain blogs, I won’t be engaging with certain people, I will just leave them to it. This is not something that comes natually to me, as I’m used to engaging with people, especially if they call themselves skeptics. So, if you see me engaging in “skeptidrama” after you’ve read this, then please, tell me to SHUT THE FUCK UP! Cheers!

I thought I’d made a video about myself so that everyone can see what I look and sound like. In it, I explain how I got into skepticism, and how I operate in regards to criticism. Cheers!

There is still much talk in the skeptical community about “trolls” and what to do with them, most notably from Sam Harris. For those of you not familiar with the concept of trolling allow me to give a short introduction. On the Internet, a “troll” is someone who makes comments on forums/blog posts etc with the intent on disrupting discussion, usually winding people up. The “trolling” phenomena has been around since the early days of the Internet and persists until this day.

Trolling varies hugely in nature. It can be rather innocent and frivellous. For example, someone might read this blog, see that I support Norwich City, and leave a comment saying that Ipswich Town are a much better team in an attempt to rile me (of course that wouldn’t work right now as Norwich are in the Premier League and Ipswich have been linked with Emile Heskey). However, all too often it is completely vicious and repugnent, with people issuing rape threats and encouraging people to commit suicide. It’s serious stuff.

So, how to deal with trolls? It’s kind of hard to find any data on them (if it exists, please let me know). I’ve had an idea for a randomised double blinded controlled trial to test methods of combating trolls, but that’s another story. In the meantime, I’d like to illustrate exactly how I feel you should NOT deal with trolls through the medium of Rage comics:

Although it can be very tempting to engage with trolls, doing so will only cause you hassle. You are not going to teach them the error of their ways, and by giving them any sort of publicity you are giving them what they want, and this only encourages more trolls. The best thing to do is not engage with them at all.

Depending on the medium, you will have ways to report them. Although trolls can hide behind the anonymity provided by the Internet, there are ways of tracing them. If you are on a forum or blog, report them to an admin if you can. Users’ IP addresses can be tracked, and if the troll is stupid enough to not use a proxy then they can get banned.

I do speak from a small amount of personal experience on this issue. If you’ve been following my blog you may remember I went to Leeds Skeptics in the wake of them cancelling a talk by known misogynist Steve Moxon. We had a very interesting, thorough and open debate, which I decided to write up. Ophelia Benson at FreeThought Blogs picked up on it, and linked to my blog. A few commenters flew in, and left some comments which were largely unconstructive dismissive statements or just plain insults. Rather than feeding these people who I considered to be trolls, I simply didn’t publish the comments. None of them came back screaming “WHY DIDN’T YOU PUBLISH MY COMMENT?!?” and no-one aimed accusations of censorship at me. This is my blog, and I will moderate the comments as I see fit. The Heresy Club have spelled out their policy, and for future reference mine is pretty much the same.

To sum up, I’ve come up with another Rage comic which shows how I deal with trolls, I suggest you do the same.

On Twitter, JREF President DJ Grothe made me aware of a blog post written by John Horgan at Scientific American entitled “Brilliant Scientists Are Open-Minded about Paranormal Stuff, So Why Not You?”. You won’t be surprised to hear that I have a few problems with that article. The title alone set my skeptic senses tingling. The “Brilliant scientists…” bit smacked of an appeal to authority, and the “open-minded” part immediately got Tim Minchin singing in my head.

Once I started reading the article, it didn’t fail to disappoint on the logical fallacies front. Straight away it mentions that Alan Turing believed in telepathy, and goes on to state that Carl Jung was a proponent of synchronicity (coincidences). I’ve already written about this, but it’s worth repeating: having an excellent scientific mind does not make you immune to irrational beliefs. In science, ideas are judged on their own merits, not by the individual who proposes them. For example, the double Nobel prize winning scientist Linus Pauling believed that taking copious amounts of Vitamin C (overwise known as megadosing) could ward off colds and even be used as a cancer therapy. But today, modern medicine does not recommend such a use of Vitamin C. Why? Because it was tested and found not to work.

That’s an absolutely key part of science: the ability to test. The “paranormal” on the other hand, is by it’s very nature not testable. If it was, it wouldn’t be paranormal, it would just be normal. We would be able to test it as a part of science. I’m very much of the opinion that declaring something to be “outside of the limits of science”, as Freeman Dyson does, is nothing but a cop out, reminiscent of the creationist cry of “God did it”. The article also quotes Brian Josephson:

Yes, I think telepathy exists, and I think quantum physics will help us understand its basic properties.

This is another example of the fact that having a Nobel prize doesn’t stop you from getting science wrong, as Josephson has done here. In short, you need to demonstrate something before you can start explaining it. Calling on quantum physics to explain telepathy is a pointless endeavour if you can’t demonstrate telepathy in the first place!

So, onto “open-mindedness”. A particular problem I have with the article is that Horgan says the following about psychologist William James:

I love James, who throughout his career achieved a rare balance between skepticism and open-mindedness.

I find the idea that skepticism and open-mindedness are contradictory  to be rather bizarre. It seems as if Horgan is making the classic mistake of confusing skepticism with cynicism. To be skeptical of something is to question it. If your questions are answered and you accept what is being presented, your are still skeptical! On the other hand, being open-minded should not mean that you just blindly swallow everything anyone says. When it comes to the paranormal, I am open minded. I’m open minded to good quality, repeatable, peer-reviewed evidence.

Hogan finishes with a position which I always rather irritating:

Unlike the boring, foregone conclusion of the Higgs boson, the discovery of telepathy or telekinesis would blow centuries of accumulated scientific dogma sky high. What could be more thrilling!

For a start, I’m pretty sure the discovery of the Higgs boson was never a “foregone conclusion” and it certainly wasn’t boring (not to me anyway), but it’s the wishful thinking that really annoys me. In science, you have to have a precedence to do something. You wouldn’t say “I dreamed that jelly beans cure cancer, so I’m going to set up a multi-million dollar trial to see if they do”. In the case of the Higgs boson, the mathematics behind it provided a very elegant hypothesis which was tested at CERN. Things like telekinesis are tested, but are repeatedly found to fail such tests. Whether or not it would be thrilling if such phenomena exists is irrelevant. It would be thrilling for me if an enormous diamond was buried under my house, but that doesn’t mean I’m planning to have my house leveled and a diamond mind built now does it?

So, in conclusion: yes, brilliant scientists believe in the paranormal. Yes, you should be open minded about it. Are either of these facts enough for you to believe in the paranormal? I would say no.

Day one of the London 2012 Olympics. A chance for the UK to show itself off to the world. All eyes watching. You’d hope that for the games these three words would be the mantra of everyone involved:

Don’t screw up.

So, what happens on the first day? In the women’s football, North Korea play Columbia at Hampden Park, Glasgow. The North Korean players are shown one by one on the big screen, complete with the full name of the country, Korea DPR (Democratic People’s Republic). There is just one embarrassing, glaringly obvious problem. There is a flag on the screen. The flag of SOUTH Korea.

This is a big deal. The two Koreas went to war in 1950, and to this day North and South Korea are divided between communist and capitalist ideals. To confuse the two flags is just really stupid, as you can see they look nothing like each other.

If this sort of blunder is going to happen on the very first day, I worry for the rest of the Olmypics.