Skepticblog

Last week I visited Santiago, Chile, at the behest and invitation of Alvaro Fischer, a mathematical engineer interested in the evolutionary foundation for understanding the social sciences. Alvaro is hosting a series of conferences this year in celebration of Darwin’s 200th birthday called “Ciencia y Evolución” (Science and Evolution).

Because Darwin spent nearly a third of his 5-year voyage around the world in Chile (1/3? Wow, who knew?), Alvaro thought it appropriate to host a conference there on evolutionary everything, with three different events (May on medicine and evolution, June on economics and evolution, July on politics and evolution, and September on everything Darwin with a veritable who’s who of evolutionary theory). Next week I’ll blog about the wickedly interesting conversations between the three of us evolutionary economists: myself (a libertarian atheist), Kevin McCabe (a conservative Catholic from George Mason University who does neuroeconomics), and Ulrich Wit from the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany (a socialist economist). Suffice it to say that the dinner conversations, along with the public debate, saw fireworks. More on that later. (continue reading…)

This week saw four celebrity deaths – well, at least four that were prominent enough in the news that I heard about them: Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, Billy Mays, and Michael Jackson. We pay attention to celebrity deaths because we pay attention to celebrities, and we pay attention to celebrities because they are celebrities. This is a trite answer, but essentially there is something in our culture and hard wiring that makes us fascinated with fame. Most of us will get a little weird when we are in the presence of a famous person.

Multiple celebrity deaths in such a short period of time often provokes the superstitious to engage their pattern recognition and hyperactive agency detection. This usually results in the notion that “celebrity deaths always occur in threes.” This is a classic example of open-ended criteria leading to confirmation bias.

What this skeptical jargon means is that the notion that celebrity deaths happens in sets of three is not bound by any specific criteria – who counts as a celebrity, and over what period of time do the deaths need to occur to count as happening together? If after one celebrity death you simply wait however long it takes for two more to occur, you will have confirmed the belief that the grim reaper does indeed kill celebs in spurts of three.

(continue reading…)

Don’t worry too much about believing in unicorns or whether or not they have wings for a moment or two. Better to check out the skeptical adventures of an unsure cartoon character whose critical thinking dilemmas have to be heard to be believed. I’m taking a break this week folks. Time to chill and laugh at the craziness that we skeptical folks feel sheeting over us like fast running lava.

(continue reading…)

People believe the strangest things. Usually it’s because they learned it as a child, and never stopped to question the validity of the belief.

When that belief is questioned by someone else it can be perceived as an attack not only on their intelligence, but also on the people from whom they first learned the information in question. Questioning beliefs picks away at the mentors and heroes from a person’s upbringing. (continue reading…)

I am fully prepared to receive a bashing for being politically incorrect in today’s post, but sometimes that’s the risk you take in pointing out flawed thinking.

Over the past couple of weeks, perhaps the biggest news story has been the election in Iran, widely considered to have been fraudulent, that resulted in the re-election of hardline fundamentalist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the Presidency. Violence and rioting were the result, sending warring factions into the streets. Rumors cited the arrest of the opposing candidate, and the shutdown of the Internet and cellular networks to quash dissent.

To show solidarity, many people in other countries, especially the United States, have sported the color green, which is the color of the opposing party in Iran. One place this adoption has been quite visible is on Twitter, the Internet sensation of the year, where free services have popped up to automatically color green your avatar (the photo of yourself on your account). I’d estimate that about a quarter of my Twitter friends, at the peak, have greened their avatars. For whatever proportion of the population this sample represents, that’s an astounding amount of support.

I found the greening of avatars to be an excellent example of the importance of keeping your critical thinking on its guard 24×7. In how many greening cases was critical thinking overlooked in favor of a compelling social movement? How much do the avatar greeners really know about this Iranian political party they’re so fervently supporting? (continue reading…)

I love me some Captain Disillusion. He does a great job debunking the bunk, and his sense of humor slays me. And in this particular video, well, he’s simply Amazing.

Captain D will be at TAM 7, I hear. Doesn’t that make you want to attend even more?

In the video, you can see my book over his shoulder. Awesome! And I’m dork enough to know he got the music at the end right, too.

When I hear of people that prescribe to the claimed powers of alternative medicines, I feel bad for them, but I usually don’t think twice about it. It’s their body, and if they want to be stupid about it, then that’s they’re own, misinformed business. If there’s a reasonable opportunity to subjectively offer some advice or point out an issue with an alternative medicine treatment, I’ll do so. It’s also important that I do not alienate my business clients, make enemies of my friends and receive tirades from complete strangers. One must pick his battles.

At what point does one need to intervene? When, in a business setting, does a persons decision to employ alternative treatments for possibly life-threatening illness become a liability for a company? What responsibility does a person have to insure that they are getting the best scientifically-based evaluations and treatment? (continue reading…)

An ironic coincidence — on Monday, June 15, I read two articles back-to-back: Andrew Newberg’s op ed piece in USA Today entitled “This is Your Brain on Religion” and Jeff Sharlet’s cover story for the May issue of Harper’s magazine, “Jesus Killed Mohammed: The Crusade for a Christian Military.”

Newberg is a neuroscience specializing in “neurotheology”, or the study of what happens to your brain when you do religious things, like pray, or think spiritual thoughts, or read scripture, or listen to a sermon. Newberg begins by recounting that in high school he had a Christian girlfriend (he is Jewish) whose family called themselves “born-again Christians”. Although they were always pleasant to him, “they were quite clear that in their view I had deeply sinned by not turning to Jesus. Oh, and because of this, I was going to hell.” That’s nice. (continue reading…)

I will be away this week, so I am dusting off some of my oldest skeptical writings and updating them. Below is a piece I wrote 12 years ago on ghost hunters, Ed and Lorraine Warren. The article is still relevant, and I enhanced it with some updated info. I also employed the wayback machine to provide links to old websites that are no longer active. I will be mostly out of touch, and only rarely monitoring the comments, so forgive me if I don’t respond quickly or at all.

______________________

Belief in the supernatural seems to be a nearly universal part of the human condition, but the details of specific paranormal belief systems depend on culture and location. In New England we have ghosts – or at least ghost hunters. So it is not surprising that in our younger days as activist skeptics, Perry DeAngelis, Evan Bernstein, my brother, Bob, and I (the investigative team of the New England Skeptical Society) cut our skeptical teeth investigating ghost hunters.

Taking on the New England ghost-busting industry led us inevitably to Ed and Lorraine Warren, the patriarch and matriarch of ghost hunting in New England. Ed and Lorraine hunted ghosts (Ed has since passed) – ghosts, apparitions, demons, possessed people, places and things. They did so for decades, and claim to have looked at nearly 4000 cases. They were made famous by books and movies, and as luck would have it lived only a couple towns over in Monroe Connecticut.

(continue reading…)

Oh great. Just what we need. At a time when most parents should be helping their kids deal with dire real world predictions coming from economists and scientists, we get the thrill of learning from the “experts” about how to coach our kids on how to become the next wave of mediums and ghost hunters. It’s enough to make me sick.  (continue reading…)