Skepticblog

Last night was my birthday. For my party, we had a scientifically controlled wine test. I had fun. I had a lot of fun. We’ll have more on this next week.

In the tradition of making end-of-the-year lists of the “Top 10 X” I present my personal picks for the Top 10 Science Books of 2010. Most of these books are available in audio format as well as the old-school ink-on-bound-paper format, and I highly recommend Audible.com as the go-to source for easy listening to these selections while driving or riding your bike from your MP3 player or iPhone/iPod (use one ear bud instead of two so you can hear on-coming traffic, ambulances, etc.). (continue reading…)

Three years ago I wrote a post about a popular illusion – the spinning girl or silhouette illusion. This is a popular online illusion, and also remains my most popular post. (Original illusion by Nobuyuki Kayahara here.) The popularity of this illusion seems to be tied to the fact that it is used in many online quizzes, with the claim that the direction in which you see the girl spin will tell you which side of your brain is dominant. In my prior post I primarily addressed that claim – explaining that the “left brain – right brain” thing is all nonsense, and which way the girl appears to spin tells you nothing about your personality or talents. (Briefly – while many neurological functions are lateralized to one side of the brain or the other, both hemispheres are massively connected and work together to form your abilities and personality.)

The real question prompted by this illusion is why do we perceive it as rotating one way or the other, and is there a preference. It turns out, most people will see the girl spinning clockwise. You can get her to switch and spin the opposite way to your original perception – but when first looking at the illusion most people will see her spinning clockwise.

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click to enlarge photo

This past weekend, December 17–19, 2010, I joined paleontologists Donald Prothero from Occidental College and John Long from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County on a fossil hunting, rock hopping, geology viewing, petroglyph scanning excursion through the Mojave Desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Through the entire trip I kept thinking “I wish the creationists and Intelligent Design theorists would try their hand at some actual field work because then they would see (and hear and smell and especially touch) what nature is really like and what the history of life reveals in the rocks, instead of sitting in an air-conditioned or heated office in some think tank building or school of theology department, trolling through published papers by real scientists who do this field work, trying to find some little gap that must be filled by the creating designer. (continue reading…)

Last week Michael Shermer wrote a nice post about JFK assassination conspiracies, and not surprisingly a couple of conspiracy advocates showed up in the comments. While reading through their arguments I was struck by how consistent the tactics and tone of conspiracy theorists tends to be. They are heavy on sarcasm, ridicule, and condescension, and like to call anyone who disagrees with them “gullible.”

It also struck me that skeptics can often take a similar tone, and certainly conspiracy theorists (as with deniers) think of themselves as being the true skeptics. But they are skeptics’ evil twins – they use a tone that only the harsher skeptics use, and only when dealing with the truly absurd – those topics that we do not wish to legitimize with serious treatment, but don’t wish to ignore either. Some claims deserve ridicule, and anything less falsely elevates them.

It is true that sometimes skeptics do not properly adjust their tone when dealing with topics that range from the truly absurd to the genuinely controversial. I do think it is counterproductive and unfair to attack a well-meaning and generally scientific individual with whom you happen to disagree about a complex and controversial topic, as if they were a homeopath or creationist. This is a minor problem, for example, with the show Bullshit. Penn and Teller have created a premise for their show that does not lend itself to a nuanced discussion of a scientific controversy – and so they end up giving circumcision and second-hand smoke the same treatment as magnet therapy and feng sui.

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Conspiracy theorists love to point out that sometimes, conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Well, of course they do. Conspiracies are often discovered. One famous one surrounds the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, which resulted in the deaths of two drivers, including that greatest of all motorsports heroes, Ayrton Senna.

It was one of the worst races ever held. In qualifying, driver Rubens Barrichello was knocked into a coma in one of the most horrific crashes ever seen. Later, F1 rookie Roland Ratzenberger was killed when he plowed into a tire barrier, dying from a basal skull fracture. All this before the race even started.

And once it did start, it got worse. An accident on the starting grid sent tires over the fence and into the spectators, injuring nine people. Two laps later, Senna, leading the race, went off the track and hit the wall, dying from a suspension bar that penetrated his helmet. This caused a long delay, sending shockwaves throughout the racing world. And then the race restarted again, and still the mayhem continued. (continue reading…)

On Tuesday, December 7, I walked through and around Dealey Plaza in Dallas where JFK was assassinated by a lone assassin Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO). Or was he? A lone assassin, that is? Yes, he was, but that is not what anyone giving informal tours of the plaza will have you believe if you give them a few minutes (and a few bucks).

I was in town filming a documentary for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The subject was conspiracy theories, so it was with some irony that we happened to be filming on December 7 because there are many conspiracy theories surrounding that date as well, a date that will live in infamy, as Franklin Roosevelt so crowned that fateful day in 1941, because he supposedly either helped orchestrate the attack on Pearl Harbor or else he knew about the attack and allowed it to happen in order to galvanize the American public into supporting England against the Nazis and getting the United States into the war. (continue reading…)

While there is a complex spectrum of attitudes toward science, there are three clusters worth pointing out, specifically in reference to the provocative New Yorker article by Jonah Lehrer called The Truth Wears Off. The first group are those with an overly simplistic or naive sense of how science functions. This is a view of science similar to those films created in the 1950s and meant to be watched by students, with the jaunty music playing in the background. This view generally respects science, but has a significant underappreciation for the flaws and complexity of science as a human endeavor. Those with this view are easily scandalized by revelations of the messiness of science.

The second cluster is what I would call scientific skepticism – which combines a respect for science and empiricism as a method (really “the” method) for understanding the natural world, with a deep appreciation for all the myriad ways in which the endeavor of science can go wrong. Scientific skeptics, in fact, seek to formally understand the process of science as a human endeavor with all its flaws. It is therefore often skeptics pointing out phenomena such as publication bias, the placebo effect, the need for rigorous controls and blinding, and the many vagaries of statistical analysis. But at the end of the day, as complex and messy the process of science is, a reliable picture of reality is slowly ground out.

The third group, often frustrating to scientific skeptics, are the science-deniers (for lack of a better term). They may take a postmodernist approach to science – science is just one narrative with no special relationship to the truth. Whatever you call it, what the science-deniers in essence do is describe all of the features of science that the skeptics do (sometimes annoyingly pretending that they are pointing these features out to skeptics) but then come to a different conclusion at the end – that science (essentially) does not work.

I often feel that those in this third group – the science deniers – started out in the naive group, and then were so scandalized by the realization that science is a messy human endeavor that the leap right to the nihilistic conclusion that science must therefore be bunk.

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Several weeks ago I did a Skeptoid episode about the insecticide DDT. DDT has been banned in many places, though some question the wisdom of such bans. It’s a great topic for Skeptoid, and people had been requesting it for some time. I went into it with enthusiasm, because I knew very little about the subject other than what most people have generally heard. But there was fallout. I get burned in effigy every week by somebody, usually kooks, but the criticism this time came from science web sites. The headlines were:

Skeptoid Fact Check
Brian Dunning’s DDT Fail
Skeptoid Disappoints about DDT and the Environment

There may have been others. As of this writing, not a single person has contacted me directly with any corrections or heads-ups that I was being blogged about; I had to stumble across mentions of these on Twitter (to which I’ve had spotty access, having spent most of the intervening time in Australia with little or no free time).

I was befuddled, surprised, and actually quite shell shocked, since I thought I’d done a pretty good job and was proud of it. So let’s cut straight to the chase and see what the blowback was all about. (continue reading…)