Rebecca at Skepchick has written a critique of Brian Dunning’s latest work. I originally heard the thing through the podcast feed, and it’s not quite as awful in audio-only. I groaned at most of it, chuckled a couple times, and assumed the style and execution was meant as a tongue-in-cheek self-deprecating parody. It still has a big dose of (fairly common) skeptic smugness that makes us all so endearing to others.

A lot of the points Rebecca heaped on in her piece seem like selective perception bias and poisoning the well. But wow! I sure had never heard about his wire fraud case or conviction before! I reproduce my comment on the Skepchick thread here, which pretty much summarizes my reaction:

Came to say/ask the same thing as phronk: it seems like pareidolia works fine in this usage.

As for science errors, the skeptoid ‘cast *seems* to have a good history of correcting errors in future episodes. Also of course career skeptics cannot be domain experts in everything at once. Citing the podcast’s factual imperfection as part of the argument that Dunning has an overall negative impact on skepticism seems to be logically unsupportable. (I would be interested to know if there is a systematic or recurring bias issue here that I wasn’t aware of.)

I am crushed to hear about the ebay fraud. While it is *technically* a “poisoning the well” fallacy to let this influence your opinion of someone’s skeptical chops, I won’t sit here and say with a straight face that the two should be held separate. After all, being convicted of fraud, by definition, sort of impugns your credibility. And credibility is the one thing that skeptics must always hold inviolate, because any chink in that armor becomes a fatal flaw in any sort of argument. Brian’s choice to participate in this scheme (or mastermind, or go along with, or whatever) sure could be the undoing of years of positive work.

Like a permanent, giant asterisk next to anything he does or argument he makes, and anyone who cites skeptoid as a source for any argument in the future.

Skeptics *must* be perfect in order to keep our heads above water. Unfortunately, we are not. Try to stay as close as possible. Protip: do not commit wire fraud.

I didn’t comment about the allegations of “casual sexism”, because I don’t know the guy at all. I could certainly see how a middle-aged white male could be at least tone-deaf to how he comes across to women. Is that basically the definition? Or is some active misogyny actually needed to qualify as a sexist? In any case, how you are perceived by your community and constituents (regardless of your intention) is definitely fair game when talking about what impact you are having on your cause.

I have so much cognitive dissonance about all this. Skeptoid has been a good resource, and I learn a lot listening. What should I do now? I have a strong urge to come down on one side or the other. First I find myself outraged, wanting to confirm details and vilify Brian, and chucking everything he has ever said or done as tainted. Then alternately I feel dismissive of the whole thing as an overblown hit piece by Rebecca, who seems to gleefully sidestep the burden of skeptical meta-cognition when she is writing or speaking about someone she dislikes.

In summary, I think Brian Dunning did a lot of good for the Skeptic community. And I also think it is probably ruined now. Dammit.

P.S. From the comments on the Skepchick thread, I just learned of the Gypsy Queen story on Skeptoid. Wow, what a completely tone-deaf way to try to make a good point. I’m going for “definitely, totally tone-deaf about giving offense”, as opposed to “affirmatively holds beliefs that would be found offensive”. Of course to some people, not trying hard enough to root out your own latent biases is sufficient grounds for dismissal. But so is writing a hit piece on people who have that flaw. And (probably) so is writing a blog article about both of them.

Update: Welp… so much for that. Rebecca makes the great point that defrauding people tends to make you an absurd choice as a voice of skepticism.

Update2: Aaaand, time to remove the Skeptoid link from the ol’ blog roll.

There are still puzzle pieces that don’t fit perfectly: paradoxes, disagreements, ideas we may never be able to test. Scientists thrill to scrutinize these areas, trading good for better each time they discover it.

We have even learned about the limitations and defects in our own powers of (supposedly rational) examination, and invented ingenious workarounds: by laboring together in an amalgamation of opposing biases and redundant checks, we inexorably move (on average) toward ever more correct results, even with our muddled, cloudy intellects.

It’s hard work, right? So why is it that non-scientific paradigms seem so compelling to so many people? One reason could be that people are unaccustomed to accounting for the burden of proof.

My HP 110 Mini netbook’s battery pack suddenly failed (0% available, charging… forever). Finding an official HP brand replacement battery turned out to be nearly impossible, not to mention it would cost at least as much as the crappy netbook was worth. So, I got a replacement from one of the second string, ebay store, non-OEM battery manufacturers. Even though, yes, I know it’s got like a 90% chance of exploding or slagging my desk. What else could I do apart from just pitching the whole netbook?

But that’s not what I want to rant about. This manufacturer, unlike most of the other Chinese companies on eBay, was shipping from the USA. Great news! Less chance of import hassles. Then, when I received the package, it was put together in a nice box, with little sealing stickers and foam, anti-static bag, the whole 9 yards. It even came with a warranty card!

Well, it says “Pay Attention”, so of course I did Apart from the obviously poor translation-ese, here’s a big red flag: the email address ending @gmail.com. I do not GET THIS. Why does a person (or people) go through all the effort to put together such a professional looking package and then FAIL so obviously on what must be the simplest, most inexpensive thing they could have done: use a real email address!

So just for grins I figured I’d get a look at their US corporate headquarters:

Back “in the day” the email domain you could count on to mean “not a serious company” was reliably going to be AOL. So I guess for clueless entrepreneurs, gmail has become the new AOL.

The blog has been in my skeptic list for some time, but I previously knew precious little of the author: manga artist and even a TED fellow!? After hearing her story of ascension to critical thinking I now have a massive, hopeless skepti-crush on her.

“But,” as Peter Griffin would say, “I digest…” The kernel of insight that motivated me to come here and post was the discussion Sara and the hosts had about the rationalist/skeptic underpinnings of her manga work. I never stopped to reflect on how most stories told in our civilization are deeply integrated with magical thinking (Star Wars) vs. rationalism (Star Trek.. at least they tried!). The din of background-woo is so constant that I barely noticed it. As if magic and heroes chosen of divine right were the very substrate of good storytelling.

I am still of the opinion that our irrationalities are founded in the cheap wiring of our brains. But I wonder how much our stories help keep us wrapped up in that warm, comfortable fog of belief. Can we tell great, entertaining tales where the heroes’ power isn’t supernatural or superhuman; but comes from reason, skepticism, collaboration?

Well I can’t even describe it very well, so obviously *I’m* not going to be authoring an enthralling skeptic-epic. But I hope that Sara’s onto something here. Follow her, and be enchanted by beautiful reason.

From Less Wrong:

we need to study the cognitive sciences, figure out the way our intuitions work and how we might correct for mistakes. Above all, we need to learn to always question the workings of our minds, for we need to understand that they are not magical.

While composing this post on No Agenda Forums, an interesting problem came up.  How can I show someone their own biases?  They are obvious to me, but (by definition) the other person’s entire system of thinking is arranged in such a way as to find their biases valid.

After coming to understand the limitations of our built-in processing, this problem really bugs me.  What kind of mirror can I use to show someone their errors?  How could they show me my errors?  Assuming my reasoning is faulty, would I be just as difficult to convince, or does my experience with fallacy and bias give me any advantage?

I guess this is what keeps a skeptic up at night.

Note: I addressed the following essay to the general population of the No Agenda Forums, a community that I cherish despite frequent frustration.  It is peopled by many conspiracy theorists and champions of various “alternative” things, such as alternative explanations, alternative medicine, etc.  In short, people I cannot really reach on a level of reason.  What I say may not do any good, but if even one in a thousand of those readers can see the light, then I am proud to have played a small part in the emergence of a rational mind.

It’s funny to me that no one here agrees on what “the truth” is, even in broad strokes.  But, (most) everyone agrees that authorities or experts must be lying to them about that truth…er, whatever it might be.  And if an authority occasionally says something you accept as truthful, then it must be to distract from something more secret and sinister.  The circular reasoning and contradiction are so palpable I can scarcely believe you don’t trip over them.

Ponder for a minute what this says about your thought process and your own bias.  You begin with an infallible conclusion, only trusting whatever evidence you see that supports it.  Evidence to the contrary is dismissed as untrustworthy by the very fact that it contradicts what you believe.  You decide wholly based on your own internal compass, even embracing the idea of cognitive bias as a sort of meta-physical truth detector.

This is, essentially, a definition of religious devotion to an unassailable faith.  You act as though you have arrived at your belief system through a a rational process, but even a novice critical thinker such as myself can trivially destroy your claims.

When you choose not to be cognizant and critical of your own bias, you disown reason itself, and make it impossible to discern the plausibility, likelihood, or truth about anything (except perhaps stumbling upon it as a complete accident).

When you cry “wake up”, what do you mean by it?  You do not accept what you are told, but instead you accept what you have invented.  To be “awake” as you are, is to be trapped in a fever dream of conspiracy and unreason, with no light to guide you; only the ever-deepening rabbit hole of your own delusion.

There is a much higher level of awareness than the one you defend and so cherish.  You already possess the tools to attain it: intelligence and doubt.  Turn these faculties upon yourself.  Doubt not only “authority”; learn the ways your own mind has evolved to be a poor reasoning machine.  Learn what logical fallacies and cognitive bias are.

The grand collective endeavor of science and reason tell us that the most simple, parsimonious, and mundane explanations are usually (but not always) correct.  This is not a dogma, but rather a good default position from which to begin.  The more complicated a claim is, the more skeptical you should be; the more work the claimant needs to do in order to show it’s valid.  As Carl Sagan said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.  People untrained in science may not find it obvious why this should be the case–  If you have not had the benefit of truly understanding the methods of science, please find the time to read The Demon-Haunted World.

You can escape the wall of religion in which you have trapped your own mind.  From the inside, it’s an insidious, invisible wall that only tells you you’re right.  From the outside it’s an unassailable fortress of irrationality.  Learn how to be wrong.  Revel in your mistakes as you discover them.  Each time you find an error, you win the opportunity to correct it.

I subject myself to the same standard that I ask of you.  Also, the same criticisms.  We are all imperfect in our reason, in some ways irreparably so.  But we can be clever enough to design systems that give reliable results in spite of our bias (science), and modest enough to understand and work around our own limitations (awareness of fallacy and bias).  And as we continue down the road of reason, we find flaws in these systems and refine them as well.  Nothing is sacred, everything is subject to scrutiny.

I can argue against unsupported claims, and try to provide directions for understanding why they are likely wrong.  But there’s no way I know of to plant the seed of desire to reason.  If, like me, you managed to reach adulthood without learning these things, then I hope you too will choose to born again into reason, science, and skepticism.

Science consensus

Bucked by genius, and morons.

The latter is common.

I received an email forward today from an extended family member, and it upset me more than if it had been spam or malware.  It was a mal-meme:

This is not sent for discussion.  If you agree, forward it.  If you don’t, delete it. I don’t want to know one way or the other.  By me forwarding it, you know how I feel.

–

I’ll bet this was a surprise to NBC.
NBC POLL
Do you believe that the word God should stay in American culture?
NBC this morning had a poll on this question. They had the highest Number of responses that they have ever had for one of their polls, and the Percentage was the same as this:
86% to keep the words, IN God We Trust and God in the Pledge of Allegiance
14% against

That is a pretty ‘commanding’ public response.

–

I was asked to send this on if I agreed or delete if I didn’t …..
Now it is your turn.  It is said that 86% of Americans believe the word God should stay.
Therefore, I have a very hard time understanding why there is such a mess about having ‘In God We Trust’ on our money and having God in the Pledge of Allegiance.
Why is the world catering to this 14%?
AMEN!
If you agree, pass this on , if not, simply delete.
In God We Trust

A quick check of the net reveals that this isn’t even a real thing.. it’s a fabricated email forward meme from 2004.  If there had been such a poll recently, I expect the results would have been far more one-sided.  I can’t say which side would have won, though: Internet polls on any religion-vs-secular topic are usually won by whichever side has more poll-crashing trolls online at the time.  In a similar fashion, any poll taking suggestions for naming an object will invariably result in “Steven Colbert” winning by an overwhelming majority.  The best uncrashed and non-fabricated poll I read about recently had “people of no faith” as the fastest growing segment of the population.  So why am I so upset by this?  After all, my family sends dumb forwards all the time.

I bristled most at the condescending tone of the author, not even interested in hearing their viewpoint challenged; not even granting that opposing points might be worth a discussion.  It’s so unintentionally analogous to proselytizing– [I don’t want to discuss this, just listen to me tell you what is right.  Go forth and convert others, or else GTFO].  The fact that people read this and think “Wow, I need to send this to everyone I know” bothers me.

Every time someone reads this, thinks it’s real, and forwards it, doesn’t that mean they, too are having “a very hard time understanding why there is such a mess” about the establishment clause?  What attempts do you suppose people make to understand?  How hard would it be for someone in the (fake) 86% to find someone in the (fake) 14% and see whether they have any valid points?  When you are part of the majority, the minority’s plight may not be immediately apparent, but that makes it no less real or important.  The author proposes a simple tyranny of the majority to resolve the issue with a minimum of fuss, and sees absolutely nothing abhorrent in that.

Let’s just have the government support all majorities and back-hand dissenters:

Republicans and Democrats are the only serious choices.

–

Straight people are the backbone of America.

–

This establishment doesn’t serve your kind.

–

Firearms are not for individuals, most households trust the police for protection.

I can imagine a reader who wouldn’t take offense at any of these toy examples, but my point is to illustrate that everyone identifies as part of some minority or other.  Where possible we ought to make an effort not to codify prejudice into the laws of the land.

Wishful thinking and unconstitutional legislation notwithstanding, neither our nation nor the universe itself operates according to the god in which you trust.

I love everything about this Skeptoid post, in which Brian makes great points about the peril of debating when the truth is on your side.  It’s counter-intuitive on first consideration, but as I’ve mused previously, debating has relatively little to do with truth and mostly pivots on charisma and debate tactics (many of which pragmatically employ fallacy and bias to torpedo the opposition).

I don’t agree with Brian that scientists must always be at a disadvantage.  After all, there’s nothing to stop someone from being right AND being a talented debater.  But it is folly to assume that the facts will be an asset, and naively blunder into a battle you will surely lose.  Further, you have to be careful about how you debate, because it’s easy for an opponent to leverage your use of “dishonest” debate tactics to cast a shadow on your credibility or factual claims.

I don’t have a lot to add to this excellent post about the narrative fallacy at lesswrong.  Here are some great excerpts, to convince you to go read the whole thing:

Essentially, the narrative fallacy is our tendency to turn everything we see into a story – a linear chain of cause and effect, with a beginning and an end.

…

Our brains are engines designed to analyze the environment, pick out the important parts, and use those to extrapolate into the future.

…

This tendency can be seen in a variety of lower level biases. For instance, the availability heuristic causes us to make predictions and inferences based on what most quickly comes to mind – what’s most easily remembered. Hindsight bias causes us to interpret past events as obviously and inevitably causing future ones. Consistency bias causes us to reinterpret past events and behaviors to be consistent with new information. Confirmation bias causes us to only look for data to support the conclusions we’ve already arrived at. There’s also our tendency to engage in rationalization, and create post-hoc explanations for our behavior. They all have the effect of of molding, shaping, and simplifying events into a kind of linear narrative, ignoring any contradiction, complexity, and general messiness.

Reading this analysis of yet another god of the gaps argument, I noted an intriguing passage:

With quantum mechanical uncertainty and the chaotic unpredictability of complex systems, the world is now understood to have a certain freedom in its future development.  (…)  It is thus perfectly possible that God might influence the creation in subtle ways that are unrecognizable to scientific observation. In this way, modern science opens the door to divine action without the need for law breaking miracles.

As I understand it, the author of the BioLogos piece has hypothesized a specific mechanism by which a supernatural agent could intervene in the natural world, in a manner consistent with our best understanding of the laws of physics.  Specifically, the hypothesis is that a supernatural force can “override” the outcome of chosen quantum events.

The author states that such actions would be unrecognizable by science as divine intervention.  It is certainly the case that for a given single quantum event, once the wave function collapses into one of its possible states, there’s no way to scientifically determine a “reason” for why that particular state has resulted instead of another.  The author implies that the accumulation of one or more supernatural quantum interventions can ultimately result in a change of some macroscopic events[*1].  But, due to the vast sea of quantum interactions that underlie everything in the world, we could never hope to learn about the divine force by starting from these macroscopic outcomes.

This seemed at first to be just another gaps argument, where something unknown is assigned to divine agency, in other words a completely uninteresting (i.e. untestable, non-predictive, useless) hypothesis that can contribute nothing to our understanding of the world.  But then I realized that I was committing the composition fallacy, as presumably was the author.  While it’s true that we cannot make a prediction about which state a particular quantum event will collapse into, we can make very strong statements about which states are valid ones, and about the probability that each state will result.

We can construct a particle emitter and measure a certain quantum characteristic of the particles as they hit a detector.  We can accurately predict what distribution the resulting states will follow, and we can say that the order in which the states come out should look truly random.  At face value this may seem irrelevant to the author’s hypothesis, but in fact it gives us the exact tools we need to build a god detector.

You see, to test the hypothesis that a god influences quantum events in such a way as to ultimately result in a changed world, all we must do is:

1. Create a continuous stream of uniform quantum events that we can collapse and measure accurately.
2. Attract the attention and influence of a god to alter the events in a directed fashion.
3. Measure the accumulated distribution and randomness of the obtained states to see whether they have varied in a statistically significant way from expected values.

Constructing the apparatus is obviously within our means, and should pose no problems as long as the machine is properly designed and controlled for systematic errors.  Indeed in the event of a positive outcome, ruling out an undiscovered bias in the equipment (or experimenters) would be prudent before releasing findings.  Apart from this, interpretation of results should be easy and unambiguous, and the experiment would be trivial to repeat as often as needed by different groups to verify the results.

Step 2 presents several issues, and these will be the biggest points of contention:

• What methods should be used to attract divine intervention, e.g. focused group prayer, sacred objects or symbols near the equipment, sanctification of the particle emitter, construction by devout/holy individuals?  While the experiment can obviously be repeated with different parameters in place, the number of permutations is effectively infinite.  A manageable number of procedures could be agreed upon by consulting religious experts.
• Which deity or entity should be petitioned/invoked for the test?  It would be reasonable to rank the gods by highest patronage and proceed in order.  While it is not clear a priori that the number of people believing in a given god bears a relation to that god existing, this approach would most efficiently allow the greatest number of people to learn whether their god has interacted with the experiment.
• Power, i.e. how can we know that our target supernatural entity possesses the ability to influence our specific choice of quantum superstate, and that the entity is at liberty to operate in the time and place that the experiment is run?  I submit that this is not a problem but rather a built-in efficiency.  Although it means the experiment cannot detect any supernatural being incapable of participating, the entities of most interest are surely the ones held to be be omniscient and omnipotent[*2], which by definition will not have any such limitations.
• Hiding, i.e. how can we tell that a supernatural force would be willing to cooperate in such an experiment, rather than withholding its influence intentionally to frustrate the results?  Many candidate deities are held to be willing to communicate with at least those people who sincerely believe in them.  Therefore, as many believers as possible should be recruited to assist in contacting the god and requesting its intercession in the experiment.  It is imperative that this be done in good faith and with full disclosure to the believers, to minimize the chance that their god would perceive the experiment to be insulting, derisive, or insincere, and therefore abstain from participation.
• Isolation and experimental integrity– the apparatus and indeed the experimenters themselves are confined to the temporal plane; in a very real sense the experiment is part of the medium it intends to study.  There is no guarantee that the divine agency will refrain from interceding in harmful external ways, such as arranging the procession of events in the universe such that the experiment never takes place.  For this we must rely upon the assumed earnest desire of the deity and the believers to establish contact, and the desire of the experimenters to properly test the phenomenon.

If the hypothesis is correct then this or other similar experiments should show positive results given enough testing.  However, the experiment’s main weakness is that it cannot satisfactorily falsify the hypothesis on failure.  Repeated negative results cannot conclusively disprove the existence of a supernatural entity, or even disprove its ability to affect quantum states.  Several false negative situations could arise, among them:

• The entity may repeatedly abstain from interaction with the experiment, or may elect to alter the states in such a way as to retain the apparent distribution and randomness of the results (for example by exactly reversing each individual particle’s state outcome from what would have naturally occurred).
• Several distinct supernatural agents may attempt to exert influence over the experiment at once but in mutually opposing ways, such that the overall signal is not distinguishable from negative results.

If this experiment does not demonstrate a positive outcome, ideally a more rigorous test can be found that would be capable of falsification of the hypothesis.

—

Footnote *1: The alternative would be that the supernatural actor operates randomly, capriciously, or to such an insignificant extent that no notable changes ever occur in our observable, macroscopic world.  This would be tantamount to no intervention at all, and is therefore not an interesting case to pursue.

Footnote *2: Taken to mean the supernatural actor is aware of all possible quantum superstates in the universe and able to manipulate any or all of them in the hypothesized manner.

Debating

Like most sports, I’m not much good at debate.  I say it’s a sport because it’s a competition with a winner and loser where the participants’ skills have the largest bearing on the outcome.

I think that most people casually lump debate and argument into the same mental bin; if not as exact synonyms, then as different degrees of the same thing.  But they are really quite different!  A debate has almost nothing to do with logic or the correctness of stated facts, but these things are crucial to the outcome of an argument.

Adversarial collaboration

In an argument, the two sides start with differing opinions or understandings about a topic.  Well-conducted arguments can get very pedantic and take a long time to conclude.  Sometimes the facts needed to decide an argument aren’t available.  Although they can get heated with emotion, at the end of a good argument both sides should depart with the same understanding, reached by applying logic to the available facts.

Arguments are a great way to battle cognitive bias!  It’s a system of informal collaboration: each participant tries to find the logical or factual flaws that the opposing side is laboring under, and point them out.  Unlike a debate, this process has nothing to do with ego, wit, or the invocation of clever but misleading fallacies.  The goal of an argument is not to win, but rather to be (or become) correct.  This is a subtle but extremely important distinction.

As a skeptic, I love to argue.  I love to be right and convince someone else of it, and I also love to be proven wrong and thereby learn.

It’s a trap! (sometimes)

When you’re in an argument, you have to be vigilant for signs of “impedance mismatch”, i.e. an argument conducted in bad faith–  If only one side is interested in arguing but the other side moves into debating then the the progress and outcome of the discussion will be of undefined significance.  Just as if one person is figure skating and the opposing side suddenly switches to ice hockey.. nothing meaningful can be said about the results except it won’t end well.

If the debating party is clever, they can very easily prevail over the arguing party.  Attractive, unsupported claims can be made quickly so the debater stays on the offensive.  They can weave straw men and ask questions that don’t have snappy answers.  If the opponent is able to keep up, the debater can arbitrarily move the goalposts.  The arguer quickly gets mired down, spending time to refute or reason through even a small portion of the claims.

Citing that your opponent is not being truthful and flagging their fallacies doesn’t win debates.  This is why those with logically inconsistent (or unsupportable) viewpoints love to debate, especially against scientists and critical thinkers.  It gives them the chance to win without being right!  By selecting an opponent who is beholden to logic and really wants to change the other’s mind, the debater is practically assured victory.  Even if the quarry detects the trap and switches to debate tactics, the attacker can force a stalemate by pointing out the logician’s hypocrisy for using fallacies!

What to do

If you are a critical thinker and you love to debate, then dive in, be ruthless, and take no prisoners!  Don’t go to the dark side, though; be ever vigilant in checking your cognitive bias.  Winning debates doesn’t make your position correct.

If you are like me, argumentative but more interested in truth than victory, then surround yourself with like-minded people.  If you find your positions challenged aggressively it can be an ego hit to defuse a debate instead of meeting it head on.  But it’s nothing like getting sucked into a trap when you’re unprepared; losing the debate despite being right.

As Orac states:

Science as it is practiced today relies on a fair measure of trust. Part of the reason is that the culture of science values openness, hypothesis testing, and vigorous debate. The general assumption is that most scientists are honest and, although we all generally try to present our data in the most favorable light possible, we do not blatantly lie about it or make it up.

Science is a massively collaborative endeavor, with each researcher relying on the existing mesh of literature as a starting point for their own contributions.  When everyone is being honest, a good methodology and peer review will prevent most obvious problems of bias and rigor.  In other words, the facts are pretty well understood, and everyone has a pretty good idea about how robust various theories are.

This is important, because it means when research is invalidated (or some theory is shown to be inferior to a new one), it tends to be an incremental change, not a destructive one.  Anything we learn will update, clarify, and add to our existing understanding.  Any new theories we employ will work at least as well as the old ones they unseat.  Relativity is more correct than Newton’s laws, but that doesn’t mean apples must be re-checked to verify that they do in fact fall toward the earth instead of levitating or falling toward the moon.

When a researcher repeatedly confabulates data in a case of massive fraud, it knocks everyone for a loop.

It’s hard to overstate how serious this revelation of scientific fraud is for the field of anesthesiology and medicine. Dr. Reuben was considered a pioneer in his field, and his work is not only widely cited, but serves as the basis for an amount of anesthesia practice that few academic anesthesiologists can lay claim to.

Ripping out all his results will weaken everything that has been based upon them, even indirectly.  This is a rare case where we actually know less now than we (think we) did before, so everyone’s pissed off about it.

There is much wailing about how this fraud will be used as an illustration of the evil conspiracy of science and business.

Every crank alt-med site and blog on the Internet is going to be harping on this incident as The Proof That Conventional Medicine Is Hopelessly Corrupt and their favorite woo is being kept down by The Big Bad Pharma Man.

I agree that is likely to happen, but that argument is an obvious faulty generalization.  All you have to do to break the spell is to point out a more important result:  When the scientific community discovers an error (be it an innocent mistake or a calculated fraud) we freely choose to reexamine and, if necessary, excise all the affected parts of the corpus.  Lies and mistakes happen, but when we find them we fix it, even if it’s unexpected, embarrassing, or painful.

This is why, even when individuals can epically FAIL, science will still WIN.

Hybrid fusion-fission energy generation a possibility via Futurismic.

Isn’t it interesting how this story swept through the internet?  Everyone, of course, wants to get rid of nuclear waste right?  Awful, evil stuff.  Bury it in the earth if you have to.  Making it disappear in a magic theoretical reactor is even better, what great news!  But what struck me is how no one seems to realize that this is by no means the first idea for a reactor to deal with nuclear “waste”, and that the stuff isn’t really waste at all once you understand a little about it.

Read on, and discover a whole nuclear world that you’ve probably never even heard of.

I’m not an expert, but it should be mentioned that this “hybrid’ is not the only idea for handling spent LWR fuel, not by a long shot.  There are several (fission) reactor designs that can actually gobble up all our “spent” fuel and burn up the long-lived radioactive compounds to produce energy.  Vastly more energy than the once-through LWR reactors managed to extract from it in the first place.  An order of magnitude more– energy that’s just sitting around in the spent fuel being all nasty and lethally dangerous now, and we could be using it to power our elecrtic cars and toothbrushes for the forseeable future.

I’m not going to try to make the case here, I’m not a nuclear physicist and my research into this has been limited so far.  Just enough to realize there’s a lot more here than most people know about.  The sites Energy from Thorium and Nuclear Green are good places to start for anyone who’s interested to learn more.  These sites are maintained by strong advocates and enthusiasts, but I would ask you to at least familiarize yourself with what they have to say before writing them off as cranks.  And they’re not good candidates for “industry shills” because frankly the current nuclear power industry is nowhere near this far along, and shame on us for that.

While we’re swinging for the fences with fusion research (that’s cool but seems to stay 2 decades away forever), there’s a lot of great fission approaches that are comparatively easy, but research and development are languishing basically because public sentiment associates nuclear energy with bombs and accidents.  The bitter irony* here is that the new reactors, by design, can be safe in all the ways that people associate with nuclear danger, and green in all the ways people associate with nuclear .. um, evilness?  I’m not talking about throwing more security at it, or digging a deeper hole for the nasty byproducts.  I seriously mean safe and good.  I know, it knocked me over too when I first started hearing about it.

* I thought about it, and yes I think that’s an appropriate use of the word ‘irony’

Skeptical threat level orange: Energy production is one of the hardest topics on which to find rational discourse and unbiased information.  Personally I don’t have a horse in this race, I’m not a nuke head or an anti-nuke.  I’d love it if fusion was practical now.  It would be great if solar and wind could produce power on the scale we need**.  Maybe the next breakthrough will do it, of course let’s keep up the fierce R&D.  And that’s all I ask for nuclear.  Get your head out of the 1960’s and give it a fair shot.

** Heck it’s not even a scale problem yet, the EROEI is still so bad on wind and solar that they’re the butt of jokes, among those who bother to do the calculations.  Remember ethanol from corn?  Remember when everyone thought it was going to be awesome… before someone did the math?

We suck at thinking, all of us– humanity.  It’s poetically tragic given that we haven’t met any life forms who can do a better job of it yet.

We skeptics enjoy thinking of ourselves as rational and reasonable, smugly superior among a vast sea of credulous, closed-minded believers.  But we’re not nearly as clever as we think, nor are we very different from the true believers.

Our hardware

Humans didn’t evolve to think rationally, but rather expediently.  Our myriad cognitive biases probably came about because they were useful shortcuts to solve the kinds of problems hominids faced pre-historically.  Some may be primitive processes that worked well enough to avoid being bred out over the millenia.  Other biases probably serve as heuristics that can let us quickly reach the right answers even though our brains are not very fast or accurate processors.  I’m not qualified to make claims about the origins of cognitive bias; however it happened, here we are in modern times saddled with a lot of built-in dumb.

The work-around

Putting aside bias in order to think rationally is a learned behavior.  We can jury-rig our minds into a feedback loop of self-analysis and doubt to avoid or detect as much of our own bias as possible.  In some ways it will always be a Sisyphean effort since we are running this “rationality” program on top of an inherently biased system anyway.

When it’s really important to be fair, we have to make the human mind cancel out of the equation.  Studies have to be designed with blinds so the participants and experimenters can’t inadvertently affect the results.  Even then, the hypothesis or experiment can have an undetected bias baked in via unstated assumptions.  Even a flawless study will be subject to a gauntlet of human peer reviewers and publishers.  Finally, if a study fails to turn up something interesting (i.e. a “negative” finding), it is far less likely to even see publication.

Closed-minded

A fully rational analysis would consist of evaluating all relevant data without bias.  How is a casual human thinker to know what information can be relied upon, or where to find it?  It’s clearly impossible to become an expert in every field, and even learned experts may disagree among themselves or be proven wrong in time.  To be able to function, we must routinely discard the majority of information available to us.  What we accept and internalize, by default, tends to align with our existing notions.  See confirmation bias, expectation bias, selective perception, mere exposure, N.I.H., status quo bias, and wishful thinking.

Discarding possibly relevant information when deciding (or defending) a position is a pretty good definition of being closed-minded.  In the excellent Skeptoid program (#134) Brian Dunning points out that we tend to be automatically skeptical of some information based on our personal biases.  Conversely we are uncritical of information that resonates with our world view.

We are all skeptics.  We are all believers.

Believers, even atheists?  Scientists?  Absolutely.  I’m not propping up that old saw that science is some form of religion; it’s absolutely not.  What we all believe in is our current mental inventory of experience and information– we each believe that we are right, and that people who disagree with us are using flawed reasoning.

The kernel of progress

The preceding enlightenment was my main reward for listening to this week’s Skeptoid.  Brian also makes a related observation to pull focus back to rational thinking:

The real difference between skeptics and believers is that skeptics have a useful foundation of scientific knowledge and an aptitude for following the scientific method. These tools allow us to distinguish poor quality evidence from good quality evidence. And, importantly, they help restrain us from drawing poorly supported conclusions from the evidence that we do accept, no matter how strongly we want those conclusions to be justified.

The scientific endeavor

Science embodies the best approach we have to convert ideas and information into a robust understanding of the cosmos.  It’s a collective endeavor, because individual biases can be canceled out by getting a lot of different people to argue over the same stuff.  Properly applied, science will reward the mitigation of bias, and ruthlessly prefer theories that best explain the data.  Since it’s run by closed-minded, skeptical, credulous humans, science is not perfect.  But with each revision it gets a little better.

There are so many fallacies and biases that I can’t keep them straight, even though critical thinking is something I value highly.  I’m not much good at debate, and although I’d love nothing more than to engender critical thinking and skepticism in others, I don’t have any good ideas on how to do that, except maybe hitting them with a WWIT? question.

But what about aspiring skeptics– people who already have the spark of reason but haven’t yet learned to see the fnords on their own?

You can’t just toss formal logic at them and say “here, you’re good to go”.  There ought to be some kind of primer or baseline; some few principles to learn, understand, and then apply.  I read a thoughtful post entitled Obstacles to Critical Thinking, and realized that the items discussed therein would be a great place to start.

• When I have an emotional stake in something, I am extremely likely to be affected by selective validation.
• Don’t give authority a free pass from skeptical scrutiny, especially when I like or tend to agree with the source.
• Just because something is normal, conventional, or popular doesn’t make it true or correct.
• My memory is not as accurate or complete as it seems, and neither is anyone else’s.
• My mind is heavily optimized to use and trust cognitive biases, so thinking critically will always be a challenge.  Don’t get cocky!

In fact, running these checks on a regular basis is probably a good idea no matter what your level of skeptical skill.

“What would it take to convince you that you’re wrong?”

That one sentence is all you need to figure out whether someone is capable of being reasonable about any particular subject.  In fact, making people admit to themselves that they’re not willing to entertain any possibility of being wrong, could be enough to break the spell.

I love that most everyone here is willing to be wrong about everything.

Through disagreements, we are able to see our views reflected back at us and change them if necessary. Or, even if they don’t change, we may gain insight into just why we hold a particular view.

That’s how I try to approach my whole life.  It’s just as rewarding to “lose” an argument as to be right in the first place.  Either way, it means I come out of the discussion feeling smart.