tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8778506545780706793Sun, 04 Oct 2026 21:36:53 +0000cognitive biasconfirmation biasfallacy of relevanceaffect biasaffective biaspost hoc fallacysubjective validationForer effectcognitive illusioncommunal reinforcementexperimenter effectfalse implicationfalse memoryhalo effectillusion of controlmotivated reasoningplacebo effectrepresentativeness biasself-serving biasOccam's razorTexas sharpshooter fallacyactor-observer biasad hoc hypothesisad hominemaffirming the consequentanecdotal evidenceappeal to irrelevant authorityappeal to traditionargument to ignoranceassociative learningattribution biasavailability biasbackfire effectbegging the questionbetter-than-average biasbias blind spotbiasescausal fallacieschange blindnesschoice blindnesscitation biasclever Hans effectclustering illusioncognitive dissonancecoincidencecold readingconditioningconfabulationconjunction fallacycontinued influence effectcontrol group studycorrelationcorrespondence biascritical thinkingdenying the antecedentfallaciesfalse charge of suppressed evidencefile-drawer effectfundamental attribution errorfunnel plothindsight biashostile media effectideomotor effectignoranceillusion of causalityillusion of justiceillusion of knowledgeillusion of objectivityillusion of personal significanceillusion of skillillusion of understandingillusionsinattentional blindnessinformal fallaciesintentionality biasirrelevant appeal to authoritylaw of contagionlaw of similaritylaw of truly large numberslogical fallaciesloss aversionmagical thinkingnegative halo effectnegativity biasoptimistic biasperceptual illusionpositive-outcome biaspriming effectpublication biasrandomizationrecency biasregressive fallacyreverse halo effectselection biasselective thinkingself-deceptionshoehorningslippery slopestraw mansuppressed evidencesystematic reviewtestimonialswisdomwishful thinkingUnnatural Acts that can improve your thinkingA follow-up to the book "Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism and Science Exposed!" by Robert Todd Carroll, creator of The Skeptic's Dictionary. The blog will offer irregular postings about cognitive biases, logical fallacies, and illusions.noreply@blogger.com (Robert Todd Carroll)Blogger62125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8778506545780706793.post-5799365328141767303Fri, 15 Nov 2013 14:33:00 +00002013-11-26T18:13:02.220-08:00biasescritical thinkingfallaciesillusionsThe Critical Thinker's Dictionary<i>The Critical Thinker's Dictionary: Biases, Fallacies, and Illusions and what you can do about them</i> is now available from Amazon, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble as an e-book and from Lulu as a paperback. Click <a href="; target="_blank">here</a> for more information about ordering.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> </span></i><br />
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">The
Critical Thinker’s Dictionary</span></i><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> grew out of a suggestion made by Harriet Hall, M.D., in a review of
my book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Unnatural Acts: Critical
Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!</i> </span><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><i>Unnatural Acts</i>. That book concluded with a chapter that advised the reader to study 59 cognitive biases, fallacies, and illusions that I briefly described. This blog was set up with the goal of posting expansions on those descriptions. So, every Monday for 59 weeks I tackled one of the biases, illusions, or fallacies and posted them here. Those posts have been rewritten and a few more topics have been added to produce </span><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Critical Thinker’s Dictionary</i>. </span><br />
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<span style="mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">A guiding principle of <i>Unnatural Acts </i>and <i>The Critical Thinker's Dictionary </i> is that critical thinking does not come naturally. Not only must
we work at becoming critical thinkers, doing so goes against our nature.
Evolution has provided our species with a magnificent brain, capable of
extraordinary things like self-consciousness, memory, facial recognition, and
thousands of other “miracles.” But we evolved to think quickly, a necessity in
the environments our species found itself during most of its 100,000-year
history. There are times in our modern world where quick thinking is needed,
but there are also many times when we should slow things down. Sometimes we are
better off if, instead of relying on our instinctive, natural way of thinking
about things, we take some time to do some research, to reflect, and to discuss
before making a judgment. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> </span>'Know Thyself' advised the ancient Greek sages at a time when
philosophers defined us as rational animals. Rationality was thought of
as an ideal largely achievable by controlling the emotions and avoiding
logical fallacies. Today, we know better. Biology and neuroscience have
exposed the brain as a great deceiver. Unconscious biases drive us to
believe and do things that the conscious mind explains in self-serving
stories, making us appear more rational to ourselves than we really are.
Modern science has taught us that rationality involves much more than
just controlling the emotions and avoiding fallacies. Today’s rational
animal—what we call the critical thinker—must understand the unconscious
biases that are directing many of our most important judgments and
decisions. <i>The Critical Thinker’s Dictionary</i> explores the insights of
ancient and modern philosophers along with the latest findings in such
fields as neuroscience and behavioral economics to lay out the many
obstacles and snares that await anyone committed to a rational life. <i>The
Critical Thinker’s Dictionary</i> isn’t a collection of dry definitions,
but a colorful, three-dimensional portrait of the major obstacles to
critical thinking and what we can do to overcome them.</div>
2013/11/the-critical-thinkers-dictionary.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Robert Todd Carroll)120tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8778506545780706793.post-6795507190245217491Mon, 04 Feb 2013 14:00:00 +00002013-02-04T19:07:21.226-08:00conjunction fallacywisdomthe wisdom of not thinking too muchThis will be last blog post for <i>Unnatural Acts that can improve your thinking</i>. Instead of introducing another cognitive bias or logical fallacy, this final post will be devoted to considering when wisdom requires that we stop thinking altogether or that we stop gathering data to reflect on.<br />
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We know that we have evolved to make quick decisions and that following our instincts has served the species pretty well, at least in terms of survival. The other entries in this blog have focused on the cognitive short cuts and logical fallacies that often accompany thinking that comes naturally. The focus has been on the importance of reflective thinking for making good judgments and coming to decisions that we won't regret. But there are times when a person will do better to stop thinking, stop reflecting, and to simply act. Not everyone arrives at this stage where the wise thing to do is to put critical thinking aside. Those who do have spent many years gaining knowledge, expertise, or performing ability. Their training, practice, and the skillful development of their talents have eliminated the need for reflection in order to do the right thing or make the right call. When it comes time to sing that aria before an adoring audience or swing at a 98 mph fastball in front of 50,000 baseball fanatics, thinking about what you are doing will hinder rather than help you succeed. When you have analyzed a problem to death in chemistry or physics, sometimes the best thing to do is to stop thinking about the problem and divert your attention to something else. There is no guarantee, but sometimes unconscious processes will provide you with the solution out of the blue. When an unexpected situation arises for which none of your years of training or experience has prepared you, following your instincts may be your best policy. All of these situations presuppose that you are extremely knowledgeable, have many years of experience, or have reached a performance level recognized as the highest level in your field. <a href=" Simon</a>, Nobel Prize winner in economics, put it this way: for the true expert, "intuition is nothing more than recognition." For the true expert, the situation provides cues and the cues give "the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer" (quoted in Daniel Kahneman, <a href=", Fast and Slow</i></a>, p. 11).<br />
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Experts in fields where reliable predictions occur with some regularity--such as physics, math, and chemistry--should be looked at differently than experts who make predictions in low-validity fields where long-term predictions are just guesswork because of the complexity of the system they are trying to master. Political and economic experts, for example, actually do worse than dart-throwing monkeys when it comes to making long-term predictions. (See <a href=" Tetlock</a>, <a href=" Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?</i></a> [2005]. Tetlock is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who studied expert predictions over a twenty-year period.) The intuition of such experts is about as reliable as the intuition of the "average citizen" when asked to make long-term predictions about politics or the economy. It should go without saying that having high subjective confidence in one's knowledge or intuition is not a good sign of being accurate or wise.<br />
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People who are ignorant and have no experience and little talent but who follow their instincts are as likely to make bad decisions as stumble upon a good decision. But people who have vast amounts of knowledge, experience, or performing history should do little or no thinking while acting and should trust their instincts when working in their field of expertise. Outside their fields of expertise, of course, experts and talented artists are as vulnerable to the snares and lures of uncritical thinking as the rest of us.<br />
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There are also times when each of us should stop gathering more information to help us make a decision or judgment. Information overload can hinder our ability to make good judgments at times. Often we are better off making a decision by considering only a few obviously
important factors rather than by introducing as many pertinent items as we can come up with. The more variables we bring into play, the greater our chances of giving more weight to minor items and less weight to important items. This point was made clear by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in experiments that showed giving people more information about a subject led them to poorer decisions. One example has become a classic. Subjects are told that Linda is "thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations." Then they are asked which of several statements they thought would be true of Linda. In test after test, subjects thought it more likely that Linda was a feminist bank teller than that she was a bank teller. There is a fundamental logical error here, which Kahneman and Tversy called the <i>conjunction fallacy</i>. (A conjunction is the joining of two statements with words like 'and' or 'but'.) It should be obvious that there is a greater probability of a single conjunct being true than there is of both conjuncts being true (Daniel Kahneman, <a href=", Fast and Slow</i></a>, p. 156). These conjunction error studies have been replicated by Christopher Hsee and John List with different scenarios presented to test subjects but with identical results to Kahneman and Tversky.<br />
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Gathering more and more information can give one the <a href="search/label/illusion%20of%20understanding">illusion of understanding</a>. American psychologist and philosopher <a href=" Meehl</a> compared the predictions of trained counselors versus a simple algorithm that used just two or three variables and found that the simple programs were significantly more accurate in their predictions than the more complex programs of the experts. A typical test might involve trying to predict the grade point average for various freshmen at the end of the school year. A simple formula that looked only at high school GPA and the results of one standardized college entrance test were compared with the predictions of counselors who had interviewed each student for 45 minutes and also had access to the results of several standardized tests and a four-page personal statement from each student. In that study, the simple algorithm outperformed 79 percent of the experts. American economist <a href=" Ashenfelter</a> did a similar experiment involving predicting prices for fine Bordeaux wines. He pitted the experts against a simple formula that considered only weather, average temperature over the summer growing season, the amount of rain at harvest-time, and the total rainfall during the previous winter. Ashenfelter's formula outperformed the world-renowned experts. (Ashenfelter's work is discussed in Daniel Kahneman, <a href=", Fast and Slow</i></a>, p. 224ff.)<br />
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In matters of personal taste, the less information the better. Just drink the wine, taste the jam, let your feelings tell you which print you prefer. Don't be influenced by how much the wine costs. Don't get hung up on the various qualities one might list to distinguish different jams. Don't get too many details about the various prints you have to choose from. If the one you like is affordable to you, buy it no matter what your friends or the critics say.<br />
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In decisions that are more or less trivial in the big picture--this would include everything from buying a new pen to deciding where to go on vacation or what new couch to buy--the less information the better. We've all heard the expression "paralysis by analysis." When a decision is a minor one, the wisest path is often to focus on two or three important points, rather than drum up a list of every pro and con you can think of and then apply your list to dozens of possible choices.<br />
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In decisions that are monumental, such as the decision to send troops to fight in a foreign country or to take a loved one off life support, one should get as much information as possible from trustworthy sources who aren't likely to be biased. In such cases, we should consult with both those who are likely to think in ways we are likely to agree with and with those who are likely to disagree with us. Important decisions require diversity of input. In the end, the evidence may seem to weigh equally for going to war and not going to war or for taking a loved off life support and keeping a loved one on life support. You may have no choice but to rely on your gut feeling at that point. (Cf. William James's "<a href=" Will to Believe</a>"). The only other alternative I can see is to take a vote among one's advisers or family members (or whatever group is relevant to the decision-making process) and go with whatever the majority thinks.<br />
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So, while wisdom requires devotion to critical thinking, it also requires knowing when to turn off critical thinking and rely on intuition, gut feeling, instinct, or whatever you choose to call that non-reflective preference percolating in our ever-fascinating brains.2013/02/the-wisdom-of-not-thinking-too-much.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Robert Todd Carroll)310tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8778506545780706793.post-3269248112842733133Mon, 28 Jan 2013 14:00:00 +00002013-01-29T08:03:47.010-08:00change blindnesschange blindnessChange blindness is the failure to detect non-trivial changes in the visual field. The failure to see things changing right before your eyes may seem like a design fault, but it is actually a sign of evolutionary efficiency.<br />
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Examples may be seen by clicking <a href=";,
<a href=" href="; here,</a> <a href=";, and
<a href=" />
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The term 'change blindness' was introduced by <a href=" Rensink</a> in 1997, although research in this area had been going on for many years. Experiments have shown that dramatic changes in the visual field often go unnoticed whether they are brought in gradually, flickered in and out, or abruptly brought in and out at various time intervals. The implication seems to be that the brain requires few details for our visual representations; the brain doesn't store dozens of details to which it can compare changes (Simons and Levin: 1998). The brain is not a video recorder and it is not constantly processing all the sense data available to it but is inattentive to much of that data, at least on a conscious level.<br />
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Change detection in films is notoriously poor when the change occurs during a cut or pan, as demonstrated by the <a href=" card trick video </a>and a number of other videos where a different actor appears after a cut, without the change being noticed by most viewers. Some experiments have shown that a person may be talking to someone (behind a counter, for example) who leaves (bends down behind the counter or exits the room) and is replaced by a different person, without the change being noticed. <br />
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Apparently, change blindness is due to the efficient nature of our evolved visual processing system, but it also opens the door to being deceived, much to the delight of magicians and sleight-of-hand con artists.<br />
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<b>sources</b><br />
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<a href=", Christopher and Daniel Simons. 2010. <i>The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us</i>. Crown.</a>See also <a href=" review</a> of this book.<br />
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<a href=" Deborah et. al. 2007. ‘Unconscious Transference’ Can Be an Instance of ‘Change Blindness’</a><br />
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<a href=", Ronald A., J. Kevin O'Regan, and James J. Clark. (1997). To see or not to see: the need for attention to perceive changes in scenes, <i>Psychological Science</i> 8 (5): 368-373.</a><br />
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<a href=", Daniel J. & Daniel T. Levin. (1998). Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction, <i>Psychonomic Bulletin and Review</i> 5: 644-649.</a><br />
<br />2013/01/change-blindness.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Robert Todd Carroll)78tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8778506545780706793.post-2899556413024664063Mon, 21 Jan 2013 14:00:00 +00002013-01-21T17:14:01.358-08:00better-than-average biasbias blind spotbias blind spotThe <i>bias blind spot</i> was described by Princeton University psychologist Emily Pronin and her colleagues (2002) as the tendency to perceive cognitive and motivational biases much more in others than in oneself. The bias blind spot is a <i>metabias</i> since it refers to a pattern of inaccurate judgment in reasoning <i>about </i>cognitive biases. <br />
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In one study, Pronin et al. (2002) found that people tend to rate themselves as less subject to biases than others. In another study, “participants … who showed better-than-average bias” were instructed in how biases operate at the unconscious level. Nevertheless, 63% insisted that their self-assessments were accurate and objective. <i>Better-than-average bias</i> is the <a href=" of individuals to rank themselves as better than average on just about anything you ask them</a>.
For example, 74% of all managers think they are better than average at
managing. (As Dilbert’s boss noted: this means that 26% of managers
don’t know that they’re better than average. To which Dilbert replied: <i>you’re all in the top 110%</i>. See <a href=" Adams's cartoon for January 18, 2013</a>.)<br />
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Participants in another study “reported their peer’s self-serving attributions regarding test performance to be biased but their own similarly self-serving attributions to be free of bias.”<br />
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In another study, Pronin and Matthew Kugler (2006) argue that the bias blind spot “involves the value that people place, and believe they should place, on introspective information (relative to behavioral information) when assessing bias in themselves versus others. Participants considered introspective information more than behavioral information for assessing bias in themselves, but not others.” A consequence of the bias blind spot is that people tend to think their own beliefs are accurate and their sources trustworthy, but those who hold different views are biased and their sources are not trustworthy (Ehrlinger et al. 2005). <br />
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Finally, a study by Richard West et al. (2012) found that “being free of the bias blind spot does not help a person avoid the actual classic cognitive biases.” They also found that higher cognitive ability did not correlate with a smaller bias blind spot. (Note: West et al. did <i>not </i>find that “smarter people are more vulnerable to these thinking errors,” as Jonah Lehrer claimed in a <i>New Yorker</i> article [“Why Smart People Are Stupid,” June 12, 2012]. In fact, the opposite is true: Most cognitive biases are negatively correlated with cognitive sophistication, as West et al. note in their article.) <br />
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<b>Sources </b><br />
<br />
Ehrlinger, Joyce, Thomas Gilovich and Lee Ross. 2005. Peering Into the Bias Blind Spot: People’s Assessments of Bias in Themselves and Others. <i>Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin</i>. Vol. 31, No. 5, 680-692.<br />
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<a href=", E. & Matthew B. Kugler. 2006. Valuing thoughts, ignoring behavior: The introspection illusion as a source of the bias blind spot. <i>Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.</i> Vol 43, Issue 4, 565-578. </a><br />
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Pronin, E., Gilovich, T., & Ross, L. 2004. Objectivity in the eye of the beholder: divergent perceptions of bias in self versus others. <i>Psychological Review</i>. 111, 781–799. <br />
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Pronin, E., Lin, D. Y., & Ross, L. 2002. The bias blind spot: Perceptions of bias in self versus others. <i>Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin</i>. 28, 369-381. <br />
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<a href=", Michael. 2011. <i>The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths</i>. Times Books.</a> <br />
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West, Richard, Russell Meserve and Keith Stanovich. 2012. Cognitive sophistication does not attenuate the bias blind spot. <i>Journal of Personality and Social Psychology</i>. September; 103(3): 506-19. <br />
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Wilson, T. D., Centerbar, D. B., & Brekke, N. 2002. Mental contamination and the debiasing problem. In<a href="; D. Griffin & T. Gilovich (Eds.), <i>Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment</i> </a>(pp. 185–200). New York: Cambridge. 2013/01/bias-blind-spot.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Robert Todd Carroll)126tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8778506545780706793.post-7050205037807326259Mon, 14 Jan 2013 16:03:00 +00002013-01-15T18:45:10.966-08:00false charge of suppressed evidencesuppressed evidenceTexas sharpshooter fallacysuppressed evidenceA cogent argument presents <i>all</i> the relevant evidence. An argument that omits relevant evidence appears stronger and more cogent than it is.<br />
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The <i>fallacy of suppressed evidence</i> occurs when an arguer intentionally omits relevant data. This is a difficult fallacy to detect because we often have no way of knowing that we haven't been told the whole truth. <br />
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Many advertisements commit this fallacy. Ads inform us of a product's dangers only if required to do so by law. Ads never state that a competitor's product is equally good. The <a href="; [</sup><a href=";, <a href="; [</sup><a href=";, <a href="; [</sup><a href=";, and <a href="; <sup>[</sup><a href="; industries have knowingly suppressed evidence regarding the health of their employees or the health hazards of their industries and products.<br />
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Occasionally scientists will suppress evidence, making a study seem more significant than it is. In the December 1998 issue of <i>The Western Journal of Medicine</i> scientists Fred Sicher, Elisabeth Targ, Dan Moore II, and Helene S. Smith published "A Randomized Double-Blind Study of the Effect of Distant Healing [DH] in a Population With Advanced AIDS--Report of a Small Scale Study." (See my article on the <a href=" distance healing report</a> for more details.) The authors do not mention, <a href=" has <i>The Western Journal of Medicine</i> ever acknowledged, that the study was originally designed and funded to determine one specific effect: <i>death</i>. </a>The 1998 study was designed to be a follow-up to a 1995 study of 20 patients with AIDS, ten of whom were prayed for by psychic healers. Four of the patients died, a result consistent with chance, but all four were in the control group, a stat that appeared anomalous enough to these scientists to do further study. I don't know whether evidence was suppressed or whether the scientists doing the study were simply incompetent, but the four patients who died were the four oldest in the study. The 1995 study did not control for age when it assigned the patients to either the control or the healing prayer group. Any controlled study on mortality that does not control for age is by definition not a properly designed study.<br />
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The follow-up study, however, did suppress evidence, yet it is "widely acknowledged as the most scientifically rigorous attempt ever to discover if prayer can heal" (Bronson, <a href="
Prayer Before Dying</a>," 2002). The standard format for scientific reports is to begin with an abstract that summarizes the contents of the report. The abstract for the Sicher report notes that controls were done for age, number of AIDS-defining illnesses, and cell count. Patients were randomly assigned to the control or healing prayer groups. The study followed the patients for six months. "At 6 months, a blind medical chart review found that treatment subjects acquired significantly fewer new AIDS-defining illnesses (0.1 versus 0.6 per patient, P = 0.04), had lower illness severity (severity score 0.8 versus 2.65, P = 0.03), and required significantly fewer doctor visits (9.2 versus 13.0, P = 0.01), fewer hospitalizations (0.15 versus 0.6, P = 0.04), and fewer days of hospitalization (0.5 versus 3.4, P = 0.04)." These numbers are very impressive. They indicate that the measured differences were not likely due to chance. Whether they were due to healing prayer (HP) is another matter, but the scientists concluded their abstract with the claim: "These data support the possibility of a DH effect in AIDS and suggest the value of further research." Two years later the team, led by Elisabeth Targ, was granted $1.5 million of our tax dollars from the <a href=" Institutes of Health Center for Complementary Medicine</a> to do further research on the healing effects of prayer.<br />
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What the Sicher study didn't reveal was that the original study had not been designed to do any of these measurements they report as significant. Of course, any researcher who didn't report significant findings just because the original study hadn't set out to investigate them would be remiss. The standard format of a scientific report allows such findings to be noted in the abstract or in the Discussion section of the report. It would have been appropriate for the Sicher report to have noted in the Discussion section that since only one patient died during their study, it appears that the new drugs being given AIDS patients as part of their standard therapy (triple-drug anti-retroviral therapy) were having a significant effect on longevity. They might even have suggested that their finding warranted further research into the effectiveness of the new drug therapy. However, the Sicher report abstract doesn't even mention that only one of their subjects died during the study, indicating that they didn't recognize a truly significant research finding. It may also indicate that <i>the scientists didn't want to call attention to the fact that their original study was designed to study the effect of healing prayer on the mortality rate of AIDS patients</i>. Since only one patient died, perhaps they felt that they had nothing to report.<br />
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It was only after they mined the data once the study was completed that they came up with the suggestive and impressive statistics that they present in their published report. The <a href=" sharpshooter fallacy</a> seems to have been committed here. Under certain conditions, mining the data would be perfectly acceptable. For example, if your original study was designed to study the effectiveness of a drug on blood pressure but you find after the data is in that the experimental group had no significant decrease in blood pressure but did have a significant increase in HDL (the "good" cholesterol), you would be remiss not to mention this. You would be guilty of deception, however, if you wrote your paper as if your original design was to study the effects of the drug on cholesterol and made no mention of blood pressure. <br />
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It would have been entirely appropriate for the Sicher group to have noted in the Discussion section of their report that they had discovered something interesting in their statistics: <i>Hospital stays and doctor visits were lower for the HP group</i>. It was inappropriate to write the report as if that was one of the effects the study was designed to measure when this effect was neither looked for nor discovered until Moore, the statistician for the study, began crunching numbers looking for something of statistical significance after the study was completed. That was the most significant stat he could come up with. Again, crunching numbers and data mining after a study is completed is appropriate; not mentioning that you rewrote your paper to make it look like it had been designed to crunch those numbers isn't.<br />
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It would have been appropriate in the Discussion section of their report to have speculated as to the reason for the statistically significant differences in hospitalizations and days of hospitalization. They could have speculated that prayer made all the difference and, if they were competent, they would have also noted that insurance coverage could have made all the difference as well. "Patients with health insurance tend to stay in hospitals longer than uninsured ones" (Bronson 2002). The researchers should have checked this out and reported their findings. Instead, they then took a list of 23 illnesses associated with AIDS and had Sicher go back over each of the forty patient medical charts and use them to collect the data for the 23 illnesses as best he could. This was after it was known to Sicher which group each patient had been randomly assigned to, prayer or control. The fact that the names were blacked out, so he could not immediately tell whose record he was reading, does not seem sufficient to justify allowing him to review the data. There were only 40 patients in the study and he was familiar with each of them. It would have been better had an independent party, someone not involved in the study, gone over the medical charts. Sicher is "an ardent believer in distant healing" and he had put up $7,500 for the pilot study on prayer and mortality. His impartiality was clearly compromised. So was the double-blind quality of the study.<br />
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Thus, there was quite a bit of significant and relevant evidence suppressed in the Sicher study that, had it been revealed, might have diminished its reputation as the best designed study ever on prayer and healing. Instead of being held up as a model of promising research in the field of spiritual science, this study might have ended up in the trash heap where it belongs.<br />
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<b>another example of suppressed evidence</b></div>
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In an effort to encourage reporters to be more critical of President Barack <a href="; Obama's economic stimulus package</a>, Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, encouraged reporters to determine the wastefulness of the package by getting "out your calculators" and divide the amount of money being spent by the number of jobs created or saved. Doing so produces the ridiculous figure of nearly a quarter of a million dollars per job. (The White House had estimated that $160 billion in stimulus money was spent and that 650,000 jobs were created or preserved.) Fortunately, many reporters didn't take the bait.<br />
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<a href="; Calvin Woodward of the Associated Press</a>, for example, responded by writing an article on some of the things that Stewart was not considering. When you consider <i>all </i>the relevant evidence, the notion that Obama is spending about $250,000 per job can be seen for the distortion that it is. Woodward notes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The calculations ignore the fact that the money doesn't go directly to each job holder, but also goes toward material and supplies as well. <br />
<br />
The contracts being made will fuel work for months or years. Jobs begun with stimulus money will probably stimulate more jobs in the future, e.g., a construction project may only require a few engineers to get going, but the work force may swell "as ground is broken and building accelerates." <br />
<br />
The stimulus package approved by Congress includes money for "research, training, plant equipment, extended unemployment benefits, credit assistance for businesses and more."</blockquote>
Editors at the
<a href="; <i> The Washington Examiner</i></a>, however, didn't do any critical thinking and wrote:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Even if we take at face value the White House claim that it created or saved all these jobs with approximately $150 billion of the economic stimulus money, a little simple math shows the taxpayers aren’t getting any bargains here: $150 billion divided by 650,000 jobs equals $230,000 per job saved or created. Instead of taking all that time required to write the 1,588-page stimulus bill, Congress could have passed a one-pager saying the first 650,000 jobless persons to report for work at the White House will receive a voucher worth $230,000 redeemable at the university, community college or trade school of their choice. That would have been enough for a degree plus a hefty down payment on a mortgage.</blockquote>
<a href=" for America took the <i>Examiner</i></a> to task for their "misleading cost-per-job stimulus math." The simplistic math doesn't capture the complexity of the effects of the stimulus package.<br />
<br />
Finally, it is an unfortunate fact that some prosecutors subvert the criminal justice system by not disclosing exculpatory evidence. As a result, many languish in prison unlawfully and can only hope that the suppressed evidence will be exposed and their <a href=" overturned by courts</a>. Police fabrication often goes hand in hand with suppressed evidence in such cases, e.g., the case of the <a href=" Six</a> and the case of the <a href=" Park Five</a>.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>false charge of suppressed evidence</b></div>
<br />
Cranks often make a false charge of suppressed evidence to support claims that their alternative view of science, history, or current affairs is justified. For example, Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson in <i>Forbidden Archeology </i>(1993) claim that scientists have been suppressing evidence of all kinds rather than give up the standard model for the age of the human species.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The evidence includes a nail found in Devonian sandstone, metallic tubes found in Cretaceous chalk, a gold thread found in Carboniferous stone, a small Carboniferous gold chain found in a lump of coal, a Carboniferous iron cup from a chunk of coal, a Cambrian ‘shoe print’, a metallic vase from Precambrian rock, and Precambrian grooved metallic spheres from South Africa.<a href=";
Unfortunately, none of this evidence exists because it's been suppressed, according to the authors, and we have to rely on reports of its existence from a variety of sources who are long dead.<br />
<br />
The <a href=" industry has long been accused of suppressing evidence</a> regarding various free energy devices and technology. (The link here mentions a <i>60 Minutes</i> piece on cold fusion in its defense. Please see <a href=" review</a> of Scott Pelley's pampering of Martin Fleishmann.) Wikipedia has a separate entry for the conspiracy theory "<a href=" energy suppression</a>.")<br />
<br />
NASA and the U.S. government have been falsely accused of suppressing evidence regarding <a href=" visitations</a>, the <a href=" moon landing</a>, and who knows what else. Conspiracy theorists frequently accuse the U.S. government and Big Pharma of suppressing evidence on a number of things including the <a href=" behind 9/11</a> and the <a href=" of vaccinations to harm us</a>. This should not surprise us since both <a href="; <sup>[<a href=";, <a href="; and <a href=" Pharma</a> have suppressed evidence many times in the past. The government and Big Pharma won't tell us that <a href=" flu shot promotes Alzheimer's</a>, according to conspiracist <a href=" Blaylock, M.D.</a> Former dentist <a href=" Horowitz</a> warns us that the evidence has been suppressed that proves that the AIDS and Ebola epidemics were intentionally caused by the U.S. government and that the H1N1 vaccine causes sterility<span style="font-size: small;">.</span> The master of self-serving nonsense, <a href=" </a><a href=" href=";, has been telling the world for years that "they" have been suppressing evidence for "natural" cures, good diets, and how to get out of debt.<br />
<br />
To prove that evidence has been suppressed one must do more than provide suggestions, implications, and claims from others who can't be cross-examined and who can't produce the evidence that relevant data has been suppressed. One must produce the evidence that relevant evidence has been suppressed. That has not been done by one of the weirdest conspiracy theory/alternative medicine cranks I've ever come across: <a href=";, which claims to be the "world's first downloadable medicine." These characters, who go by names such as <a href=" S Van Cleave, Michael H. Uehara, and Nicholas Brandon Zynda</a>, also call their operation <a href=" Technology</a>. They recently appeared at the <a href=" Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas</a>, touting their quantum computing based on extraterrestrial technology that allows medicine to be digitized and downloaded to your cell phone and magically teleported to your body. The world of science-based medicine has been duping us for centuries with its chemical-based approach.<br />
<br />
These folks use the slogan "Treat disease with data not drugs." The claim, contrary to all known science, that quantum physics allows them to use a special quantum computer to directly transfer data to your phone that then somehow is magically digitized and directly uploaded to your body exactly where it's needed. Never mind that such geniuses should be able to eliminate the physical
device (smart phone, computer. or tablet) as an intermediary. Anyway, they claim that <a href=" treatment systems are not compatible with human physiology.</a> How do they know this?<span style="font-size: small;"> "<span style="font-size: small;">T</span></span>he universe, including the human body and conditions that afflict it, all operates [sic] according to the principles of quantum physics. Chemical based treatment systems do not operate according to those principles and, as such, are not compatible with the human host." (Nice contradiction, don't you think? On the one hand <i>everything</i> operates according to the principles of quantum physics but chemical treatments <i>don't</i> operate according to the principles of quantum physics.) If these claims were true--which they are not--it would mean that there has been a vast conspiracy involving the entire scientific community for several centuries to suppress not only scientific evidence but logical principles as well.<br />
<br />
These quantum/extraterrestrial folks claim they have a humanitarian research group called <a href=";(Zürich Alpine Group): <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
ZAG understands that quantum problems require a quantum solution and has found a way to transfer bioinformation from its quantum computer via quantum teleportation to the brain, [and?] also [has made?] a quantum computer, [sic] to reprogram the brain to effect positive medical changes within the body and mind. These technological advancements have thus given birth to the world's first downloadable medicines. </blockquote>
They've kept their work quiet because Big Pharma is lurking in the wings ready to steal their secrets. Anyway, none of these downloadable "medicines" are free (including the one that supposedly gives protection against <a href=";) and I would bet that the claim that all profit is going to charity is as true as the rest of the claims on their websites.<br />
<br />
If you're still paying attention, you should know that your pet can be protected, too:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Use
your cell phone (your pc, laptop or tablet) to instantly diagnose and
medically treat your pet at home with guaranteed results with a radical
new technology of extraterrestrial origin. Using pure data, QuantumVET
Tricorder Plus treats by programming the brain of the species with
biodirectives.</blockquote>
It should be noted that what the quantum/extraterrestrial folks claim about effecting physiological changes by a quantum computer via quantum teleporting is false because the mass of biological molecules and the speed with which they communicate via ion channels and mechanically are several orders of magnitude too large for quantum effects to matter. See <a href=" Unconscious Quantum</i> by Victor Stenger</a> and <a href=" Spark of Life</i> by Frances Ashford.</a>2013/01/suppressed-evidence.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Robert Todd Carroll)49tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8778506545780706793.post-6397848960669880792Mon, 07 Jan 2013 16:38:00 +00002013-01-07T15:44:39.240-08:00anecdotal evidencetestimonialsanecdotal evidence (testimonials)Testimonials and anecdotes are used to support claims in many fields. Advertisers often rely on testimonials to persuade consumers of the effectiveness or value of their products or services. Others use anecdotes to drive home the horror of some alleged activity or the danger of widely-used electronic devices like cell phones. In the mid-90s, there were many people, some in law enforcement, claiming that <a href=" were abducting and abusing children</a> on a massive scale. The anecdotes involved vivid descriptions of horrible sexual abuse, even murder of innocent children. The anecdotes were quite convincing, especially when they were repeated on nationally televised programs with popular hosts like <a href=" Rivera</a>. A four-year study in the early 1990s found the allegations of satanic ritual abuse to be without merit. Researchers investigated more than 12,000 accusations and surveyed more
than 11,000 psychiatric, social service, and law enforcement personnel.
The researchers could find <a href=" unequivocal evidence for a single case of satanic cult ritual abuse.</a><br />
<a name='more'></a><a href="; </a><br />
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There have also been scares fueled by anecdotes regarding such disparate items as silicone breast implants, cell phones, and vaccinations. In the 1990s many women blamed their cancers and other diseases on breast implants. Talk show hosts like <a href=" Winfrey and Jenny Jones</a>
presented groups of women who were suffering from cancer or some
other serious disease and who had been diagnosed after they'd had breast
implants. The stories tugged at the heartstrings and brought tears to many sensitive eyes, but the scientific evidence did not exist that there was a causal connection between the implants and any disease. <span style="font-family: Arial;">That fact did not prevent lawyers from extorting $4.25 billion from implant
manufacturers. </span>Marcia Angell, former executive
editor of the <i>New England Journal of Medicine</i>, <a href="; brought the wrath of feminist hell upon herself in 1992</a>
when she wrote an editorial challenging the Food and Drug
Administration's decision to ban the manufacture of silicone breast
implants. The scientific evidence wasn't there to justify the ban. She
eventually wrote a book describing the fiasco: <a href="; <i>Science on Trial: The Clash of Medical Evidence and the Law in the Breast Implant Case</i>.</a> The scientific evidence is now in. The implants don't cause cancer or other diseases, and <a href=" FDA has lifted its ban.</a> When the data were collected, they showed that women with silicone breast implants did not suffer cancer or any other disease at a significantly higher rate than women who had not had implants.<br />
<br />
The public fear that cellphones might be causing brain tumors was first aroused not by scientists but by a talk show host. On January 23, 1993, Larry King's guest was David Reynard, who announced that he and his wife Susan had sued NEC and GTE on the grounds that the cellphone David gave Susan caused his wife's brain tumor. There was nothing but junk science to back up her claim, plus the fact that the tumor appeared near where she held the phone to her ear. She was diagnosed seven months after receiving her phone and died a few months after filing the suit. The suit was dismissed in 1995. A dozen similar lawsuits followed; all were dismissed (<a href=" href=" href=").</a> For those who think scientists and industries don't take anecdotes seriously, consider this: soon after Susan's lawsuit was dismissed the cellphone industry committed $25 million for safety studies. Many studies have been conducted over the past fifteen years and <a href=" far no evidence of a causal link between cellphones and brain cancer has been found.</a><br />
<br />
The vaccination rate in many places has dropped significantly in many parts of the world. In my northern California university town, 40% of the kindergartners at the Davis Waldorf school are unvaccinated. In the Sacramento area, there has been a 34% increase in "personal-belief exemptions" from state-required vaccinations for kindergartners over the past four years. Statewide, the increase in waivers has been 37% over the same period. The greatest decline in vaccination rates has occurred among the wealthier and more educated segments of society (<a href=" vaccine rates fall," <i>Sacramento Bee</i>, 1/6/2013</a>), not because of scientific evidence that vaccines are harmful but mainly because of fear caused in large part by <a href=" of children getting autism and other neurological disorders from vaccinations</a>. Oprah Winfrey, for example, <a href=" to a systematic letter campaign from parents of kids with autism</a> to feature on her show actress Jenny McCarthy and others to share their stories about getting a vaccination and then being diagnosed with autism. This kind of <a href="2012/06/post-hoc-fallacy.html">post hoc reasoning</a> is common among those who believe anecdotes are more trustworthy than scientific studies. <a href=" studies have repeatedly found no causal connection between vaccines and autism or serious neurological disorders. </a>The benefits to members of society from universal vaccination against communicable diseases such as measles, mumps, polio, and diphtheria far outwe