Skepticblog

The recent flap over the inopportune comments by General Stanley McChrystal and his staff in the presence of and even directly to a Rolling Stone magazine journalist, and the ensuing hue and cry “off with their heads” for what amounts to something akin to alcohol-fueled barroom B.S.ing and locker-room boys-will-be-boys jock talk, affords an opportunity to distinguish between public talk and private talk.

Private talk is what we say in private to our spouses, family, friends, and colleagues when there is a presumption of privacy such that one’s comments will not go public. Public talk is what we say when we want to make a formal statement or declaration with the intention of and responsibility for what was said. Too often we confuse these two very different forms of expression. Everyone is treating the private talk of McChrystal and his staff as if it were intended for public consumption. It is almost as if McChrystal had held a press conference and issued a formal public statement that Joe Biden’s new name is “bite me.” Surely we should recognize the vast gulf that exists between these two types of talk, and no one would want to insist that all private talk be held as if there were a microphone in the room that was on and broadcasting. Locker rooms and barrooms would go deadly silent. (continue reading…)

One of the things that I love about the skeptical community is that it is a vibrant intellectual community that is not afraid to turn its critical eye inward. There is also sufficient diversity of background and perspective, superimposed upon a generally skeptical outlook, to provide some genuine conflict. While you won’t find many bigfoot believers in our ranks, we do run the spectrum from liberal to libertarian, militant atheist to Christian, scientist to artist, and politically correct to Penn Jillette.

The wringing of hands may at times seem tedious – but it’s all good. As long as we remember that at the end of the day we are all skeptics, a cultural minority looking to change the world.

Occasionally our diversity of approach does erupt into outright conflict, with the preferred medium usually being blogs. This happened recently in response to the appearance of Pamela Gay, an astronomer and co-host of the Astronomy Cast podcast with Fraser Cain, on my own podcast, the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. Pamela is a Christian, and on the SGU we have a tendency to be less than respectful of unscientific beliefs, including religious beliefs that wander into the arena of science.

This post is not going to be about the epistemological conflict over the limits of empiricism  – whether or not science can address issue of pure faith, and how faith is distinct from “religion” – the latter being a cultural construct that involves many things, including using faith to invade science. If you are interested in that discussion, you can read here.

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The British government is about to take some serious steps to make it a crime to take money under false pretenses – especially if that pretense has anything to do with calling back dead people from their graves. It’s about time. We can only hope that the numskulls in our own government* will get a clue and follow suit.

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This is a frame from Westall 66: A Suburban UFO Mystery which aired on the Australian Sci-Fi Channel on June 4th. I did not get to see the show, as it has not aired in the United States as of this writing; but my educated guess is that the filmmakers were attempting to illustrate the investigative process, by eliminating possibilities. (To learn about the 1966 Westall UFO, you can check out my Skeptoid episode about it.)

Their presentation purports that there are only three possibilities to explain the UFO sighting: Hoax or hysteria; experimental aircraft; or an object of extraterrestrial origin. Actually, that’s four possibilities, since a hoax and mass hysteria are two completely different things. (continue reading…)

I’ve been winding down these last few evenings with a real treat: Benjamin Radford’s new book Scientific Paranormal Investigation. I expect to tackle a full review soon; for now, I’m getting a kick out of his unapologetic pitch for serious skeptical scholarship. It’s a topic I think about often, but rarely more than right this second — staggering as I am under the weight of my own current research.

How important is scholarship for skeptics? Should skeptics know a lot about the paranormal literature (or, rather, the many niche literatures for the many niche paranormal topics)? And, does it matter whether we know much about the literature of skepticism?

When I’ve asked these questions in the past, I’ve received mixed responses. Some skeptics argue that vast encyclopedic knowledge is essential. Others claim that traditional skeptical expertise is more or less irrelevant to modern skeptical activism. (continue reading…)

Sorry for the short and late post today – I am out of town working on a special project and am exceptionally squeezed for time.

I will just leave you with wishes for a happy summer. The Analemma – the path the sun takes as it shifts its position in the sky day to day – has reached its apex in the northern hemisphere, and thus causing the greatest amount of daylight north of the equator.

This is always a bitter-sweet day for me – it also means the sun will begin its long journey down. For the next six months we will be losing daylight.

But the Summer will soon bring TAM8 - which I am greatly looking forward to. I hope to see many of you there.

Kelli Faulkner's Facebook Photo

As I reported in my last post, the aforementioned Kelli Faulkner: remote viewer and medium who was on ABC”s Indiana New Extra staff has now been left off the station’s news team. Hurray!This is one small step for skeptics and one great leap for rational thinking. It shows when a few phone calls (mine) and and some pressure is brought to bear on peddlers of nonsense who should know much better, we can make a difference. If you are unaware of Kelli’s story, read my past blog “ABC has a Medium on Staff” from May 22. (continue reading…)

I’m all in favor of innovative solutions, and of doing what it takes to get there. In most cases. There are a lot of directions in which we might go that make no sense. Some may make sense in the future, but don’t appear to now, and vice versa. I wish I had a car that was free to run and had zero emissions. What am I willing to do to get there? Should I buy a Prius, which is a step in the right direction?

In terms of the ratio of dollar cost to environmental benefit, trading your existing car in for a Prius to take advantage of its marginally better mileage is probably about the worst thing you can do. A single-suspendered redneck who simply keeps his 15-year-old pickup is doing way more to protect the environment than you are. You see, any time anyone buys a new car, we are instructing that a new car be built that would not otherwise have been needed. When you consider the entire resourcing chain of every component on a new car, it’s clear that its environmental impact is significant. At the same time you order your new car, someone buys your used one, and somewhere down the line someone is sending an old clunker to the scrapyard, and another environmental impact event is created. The redneck’s higher emissions over the lifetime of the car are a drop in the bucket compared to your new car purchase. You elitist bastard. (continue reading…)

Last week I blogged about lying: “Everyone Lies: Why?”

Deception is one thing, self deception is quite another. This week TED.com has posted my new TED talk, delivered at the last TED conference, in which I present material from my forthcoming book on the neuroscience of belief, tentatively entitled The Believing Brain, a central theme of which is how we are so easily deceived and how we deceive ourselves. Here is a brief summary of the thesis of the talk, although because it is so visual I strongly recommend watching the TED video.

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The notion that magnets can be used for healing is as old as knowledge of magnets themselves. Several ancient cultures, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, and others, discovered natural magnetic rocks – lodestones. They had a hard time explaining the unusual properties of these rocks given the scientific knowledge at the time, and came up with fanciful explanations like minerals have souls too. This was compatible with the general belief that everything has an “essence”.

It then seemed natural that since living things have an energy and essence, and certain rocks contain an energy and essence, that such rocks could be used to heal illness – to transfer their energy to a living being. Even today this idea has an emotional and even rational appeal. Who wouldn’t want to be healed by the equivalent of McCoy’s medical scanner – invisible and painless energy fields work noninvasively to return our tissues to health at the cellular level. When we fantasize about future medicine, that is what we imagine.

It is no surprise then that through the centuries magnetic healing has been very popular – and its popularity has only increased with advancing scientific understanding of magnetism, and eventually electromagnetism.

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