Obviously this is an English language blog written by primarily American authors, so we cannot extrapolate this data to indicate the relative popularity of skepticism in general in each country. But there are two surprises.

The first surprise is that the United States is not the country where we’re most popular. We’re most appreciated in Canada. Either this means that our lone Canadian blogger, Daniel Loxton, is more popular than the rest of us put together; or that Canadians generally appreciate this content more than Americans. There are all kinds of demographic reasons that this may be true. Without surveying our readers for their demographic information and comparing that to the population at large, we can only speculate what some of these are. The United States has higher religiosity than Canada, and the population is generally less educated. But far be it from me to assert that only an educated public would appreciate this blog; it’s all speculation.

Similarly, New Zealand takes second place, relegating the United States down to third. What are the reasons that New Zealanders visit SkepticBlog more often than Americans?

The second surprise is that a block of three non-English speaking countries, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, have snuck in there higher than Ireland and the United Kingdom. Much of their population is bilingual and reads English without a problem, but it’s still their second language; we’d typically tend to expect more readers from the UK on an English language blog than from Scandinavia.

Scandinavia has a reputation for having low religiosity and low poverty, so perhaps this shouldn’t be so much of a surprise. My personal experience with attendees at skepticism conferences and talks that I give on the road has been that all socioeconomic levels appear to be well represented, but that’s my own informal observation only, and could well be wrong.

The Amaz!ng Meeting has had two conferences in London and one in Australia. Maybe it’s time the JREF threw one in Sweden?

Imagine there’s no Heaven, it’s easy if you try, No hell below us, above us only sky, Imagine all the people, living for today.

Imagine there’s no countries, It isn’t hard to do, Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too, Imagine all the people, living life in peace.

—John Lennon, Imagine, 1971

As this post goes live, I’m doing museum work at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Whenever I travel to New York City, there are certain places on the Upper West Side (where I lived for 6 years completing all my graduate degrees at Columbia University) that I always return to, just see how the city has changed, and relive memories. One of these is the Dakota Apartment Building, on the corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West. It has a long and famous history, from its origin as a unique building for the rich in the 1880s, to its use as a movie exterior (especially in Rosemary’s Baby and Cruel Intentions), to the many legends who have lived there: Lauren Bacall, Leonard Bernstein, Connie Chung, Rosemary Clooney, Roberta Flack, Jose Ferrer, Judy Garland, Lilian Gish, Boris Karloff, Rudolf Nureyev, Jack Palance, Gilda Radner, Rex Reed, Jason Robards, and Robert Ryan, among many others. Not every star can live there; some, like Billy Joel, Gene Simmons, Melanie Griffith, and Antonio Banderas, were denied residency by the governing board. But one resident of that building is more famous than the others, especially because he died on its doorstep.

Tomorrow, Dec. 8, 2011, will be the 31st anniversary of the day that Mark David Chapman gunned down John Lennon in the doorway of the Dakota (the doorway is shown to the right of Yoko Ono in the picture at the top) just as he and Yoko Ono were returning from a late recording session. I remember that event vividly, because I was just five blocks away at the time it  happened.  I was working very late that night, finishing research on my dissertation at the American Museum of Natural History at the time, and even had an office on the southeast corner of the building (near the corner of Central Park West and 77th St). If it hadn’t been winter and my windows had not been closed, I might have even heard the gunshots. Back then, there was no internet or 24-hour news on your iPhone, so I went home about midnight not knowing he’d been shot around 10:50. The news was still reported by TV newscasts and the newspapers—but  I didn’t have a TV when I was a poor grad student in New York, and the papers didn’t have the news until next morning so I didn’t hear about it until I woke up and hit the streets and saw the news on every newsstand.

I immediately rushed to the Dakota, where a huge crowd of mourners had gathered, and flowers, candles, and tributes were stuffed into every part of the fence around the building. I couldn’t stay with the mourners all day, but it was amazing to see how deeply  John had reached so many people. The vigil outside the Dakota lasted for days, until eventually it was called off at Yoko Ono’s request.  In 1985, Mayor Ed Koch renamed the adjacent part of Central Park (which John and Yoko could see from their windows) “Strawberry Fields” and there is a mosaic memorial plaza there with the word “Imagine” that is nearly always decorated with flowers, guitars, candles, and other tributes, even 30 years later.

Readers of this blog who are not Boomers like me may not appreciate what the Beatles, and especially John meant to my generation. It may seem odd to them that so many people still hold Lennon tributes on the anniversary of his death. But the Beatles were more than the most popular and influential musicians of our generation, or (judging from how often their music is still played) many generations. The Beatles, and especially John Lennon, were also the voice of the younger generation, not just the “hippies” (I was a bit too young to be a hippie then) but for nearly everyone under 30 back then. We faced a criminal Nixon Administration which was secretly and illegally escalating the war in Vietnam into Cambodia and Laos, all the while hundreds of our classmates were being drafted and shipped off to die there. (I just missed being drafted myself). Nixon (and also Reagan) demonized our generation in their quest for power, reaching out to the “Silent Majority” of older, more conservative white people. Nixon also used his “Southern Strategy” to transform the solidly Democratic Deep South into a Republican bastion, largely by playing to racist fears. All of these divisive practices are still influential today, especially in the way politics has been polarized, and the racism of the some southern whites has turned the South solidly red. In college, we reveled at every minute of the Watergate hearings, and the entire campus of my alma mater, U.C. Riverside, burst into celebration the day that Nixon finally stepped down.

But John Lennon spoke out against Nixon and the Vietnam War in way that no other rock musician, and indeed no other public figure, did. While lots of people were turned off by the hippies and the protesters (I just missed being part of the Columbia riots by a few years), the Beatles were so influential that John’s protests and songs reached people who were otherwise turned off by the youth movement. Naturally, John was on Nixon’s “enemies list”, and Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI did all they could to deport John and Yoko in retaliation.

Even more importantly to skeptics, John was the first hugely popular public figure to “imagine no religion”. Few people today realize how controversial that song was at the time because of those lyrics, but they spoke to an idea that was starting to grow among the younger generation, even though it was taboo in most polite circles. I remember when I first heard “Imagine” and how it spoke to my budding agnosticism.  I remember how liberating that song was to so many of my peers, when we became disenchanted not only with a corrupt, criminal U.S. government, but also began to drop the religious shackles of our childhood as well. For many of my generation, this was the beginning of the loss of religion and the rise of skepticism in our time. Certainly, John was not the only religious skeptic or prominent atheist of his time, but in contrast to people like Madalyn Murray O’Hair, John’s message reached so many of us through his music, and make it acceptable to question the religion we had been raised with. If you doubt his influence, just note how many times in recent years that the Religious Right attack Lennon and his music, or play “Imagine” as proof that the culture in under attacks by atheistic public figures. Even Ben Stein ripped off a few lines from the song in his crummy propaganda film “Expelled” while playing shots of protests and street violence.

Today, we see an entire younger generation with casual attitudes, indifference, and a certain cynicism about religion, and who will not tolerate racism, homophobia, sexism, and many other societal ills, but this wasn’t true of kids in the 1950s. Back then, even early rock’n'roll, Elvis Presley and James Dean were considered dangerous and controversial just for showing the slightest rebellion against conformity and the powers that be. That all changed with my generation, and for that I’m proud to say I’m a Boomer. We still have a long way to go to erase the racism, sexism, homophobia, and religious dogmatism that we inherited, but we’re never going back to the bad old days of the 1950s, and I’m glad of it.

Renmark North School, Grade 2, 1956. South Australia. Photo provided by Bonnie Poulter

[This week, I'd like to share a story excerpted from my recent LogiCON keynote. The speech is a bit on the personal side, as I'm sure you'll be able to tell. Much of it has to do with my own childhood. —Daniel]

My father has always been a wonderful storyteller.

When my brothers and I were little, my Dad would tuck us into our beds, “bristle” our cheeks with his stubble, and tell us stories or poems. We loved Australian bush poetry (we must have heard “Mulga Bill’s Bicycle” and “The Man From Ironbark” a thousand times), but our favorites were tales of his own childhood, growing up poor on the edge of the desert in South Australia. His Tom Sawyer-like childhood sounded magical to us: racing horses bareback over red sand, plucking oranges from the trees of his family’s tiny fruit farm, catching yabbies in the hidden backwaters of the River Murray.

Many of these stories had a subversive edge to them, I realize now. Many were direct lessons in skepticism.

I’d like to tell you one of those, as I remember it 30 years later — exactly the same way I recently told it to my own son.

The Elephant Story

My Dad as a scruffy school kid. 1956

Once upon a time, your Grandpa Farmer was a little boy like you. He had a mother and a father, and six brothers and sisters. They were very poor, and did not have the toys and treats that I had growing up, or that you have today. They trapped rabbits for food for their family (which was bad for the rabbits, but good for Australia). Every day, the kids would run barefoot over the burning sand to their schoolhouse, uphill both ways.

One day, my Dad’s mother came home with a rare and special treat — something almost too precious to believe.

It was a chocolate bar! The children gathered around in amazement. Their mouths watered. Their eyes sparkled. As their mother unwrapped the foil, the chocolate seemed to glow with deliciousness. It seemed to sing.

Carefully, carefully, their mother broke the bar into seven equal pieces: two sweet, small squares for each child. These she put into the children’s lunches.

That day my father ran to school. He could hardly believe his good fortune. All day he dreamed of the chocolate. It felt to him like lunchtime would never come.

But lunchtime did come, in the fullness of time. Trembling, my father took out his small chocolatey treasure….

“Watchagotthere, mate? Candy?” It was one of the bigger kids.

“Yes,” said my father. “It’s a special treat.”

“Can I have some?”

My father held the chocolate a little closer. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t have very much.”

The other boy considered this. “What about a trade?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” my father replied. “What have you got?”

“I’ll tell you what,” the older boy offered. “If you give me your chocolate, I’ll let you have a ride on my elephant.” He beamed with his own generosity.

“I… wait, what? You don’t really have an elephant. Do you?”

“Sure we do!” assured the big kid. “My father got him from a circus. We use him on the farm for plowing and stuff. He’s stronger than a team of bullocks, but he’s tame as a kitten! Also, he can jump over a tree. We ride him all the time. I could bring him to school with me tomorrow.”

Now, my father hardly knew what to do. He loved chocolate, but what kid could pass up a chance to ride on top of a real, live elephant? Swiftly the deal was made. They shook hands — and then the bigger boy woofed up that chocolate in two seconds flat.

That night my father could hardly sleep. He raced through his breakfast the next day, and practically flew across the sand to his school. He turned breathless into the schoolyard, and saw… no elephant. Puzzled, he went and found the older boy.

“Sorry about that!” said the boy. “My folks needed the elephant home on the farm today. I’ll bring him tomorrow.”

The next day my father was twice as excited, and ran to school twice as fast. But again, no elephant.

“Yes, sorry,” the older boy told him. “He needed a washing today. Big job to wash an elephant! I’ll bring him tomorrow.”

But the next day, the elephant was missing once more.

“Sore foot today! I’ll bring the elephant tomorrow for sure….”

At this point, I stopped and asked my own little boy, “What do you suppose happened next? Did Grandpa Farmer ever get his ride on the elephant?”

My son frowned, his eyes deadly serious. “No,” he said, his voice tense with the knowledge of injustice. “That other boy was lying.”

Skeptical Luminaries right to left: paranormal investigator Joe Nickell, Center for Inquiry founder Paul Kurtz, the Amazing One himself, and psychologist and magician Ray Hyman

On Sunday, October 3, a group of skeptics gathered in Falls Church, Virginia to celebrate James Randi’s 82nd birthday. What an amazing meeting it was … er, an astonishing evening I mean, as Randi prefers to retain the “amazing” adjective for his moniker, James “The Amazing” Randi. Take a look at just a few of the giants present in the above photo — the legends of skepticism (from right to left: paranormal investigator Joe Nickell, Center for Inquiry founder Paul Kurtz, the Amazing One himself, and psychologist and magician Ray Hyman).

click any of the following thumbnail images to enlarge

Also in attendance were Richard Dawkins, the magician Jamy Ian Swiss, the President of the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) D. J. Grothe, and many other skeptical luminaries from around the world, many of whom sang Randi’s praises in the tribute portion of the evening. Randi was presented with a beautiful birthday cake with his inimitable likeness on the icing, and something well short of 82 candles on top to blow out, which he managed successfully.

After dinner we all adjourned to the private library of a good friend of Randi and benefactor of JREF, who kindly allowed us to peruse his collection of some of the rarest books in the history of science, along with other spectacular items of considerable interest. It is, in short, the finest collection I have ever seen anywhere in the world. Any single volume on any of the shelves would be an item worthy of possession as one’s most cherished belonging, and here there were hundreds of such treasures.

How’s this for starters?: The Archimedes Palimpsest, purchased at auction for $2.2 million. Check out the two sets of lines on this page: one set of bold lines in Latin that was a medieval prayer book, and the other lighter lines in Greek that was nothing less than one of the most important treatises ever published by the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. I highly recommend the book, The Archimedes Codex, by Reviel Netz and William Noel, that uncovers the mystery story of how this book came to auction, and the scientific detective story of how Archimedes ancient words were coaxed back to life. (Quality paper for publishing was so rare in the Middle Ages that older books were reused by scraping off the text and reprinting over it.)

If that isn’t awe inspiring enough, check out the photo of a page from an ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead that Joe Nickell and I are examining. Because papyrus paper is so delicate this one is under glass (so we couldn’t “touch history” directly in this case), but Joe and I were trying to find Randi’s name in there somewhere…

Talk about touching some old stuff, look at this many millennia-old Babylonian cylinder with cuneiform writing on it, apparently an ancient calculator of sorts (if memory serves … it was a heady evening trying to take in all these treasures).

Going back tens of thousands of years, look at the magnificent Wholly Mammoth tusk, and guess what that is in my hand: yes, that’s Wholly Mammoth hair. Is there a lab somewhere in the world who could take the DNA from that hair and clone a mammoth back to life? Forget Jurassic Park; I’d settle for Paleolithic Land.

Given my interest in World War II and all things Nazi, which I had to learn in researching my book Denying History (about the Holocaust deniers), this item made the hair on the back of my neck stand up: it’s a first edition of Mein Kampf. This one in particular was signed by Adolf Hitler to “Dr. Goebbels”, 1925. Next to it is another first edition addressed in Hitler’s hand to Hermann Goering.

As well, the library contains two Nazi enigma code machines, designed and built for encryption and decryption of messages and was used during the Second World War. The cracking of the enigma code encryption algorithms by the British led project ULTRA is said to have shortened the war by at least two years, if not being the single most important step toward victory.

There is something about touching history in this way that almost beggars description. It’s visceral. Running my fingers over the cuneiform clay cuts in the cylinder while imagining some ancient Babylonian accountant or scribe holding it in one hand while pressing into the wet clay with a small writing stick in the other draws one back in time. Rubbing the tips of my fingers over the parchment paper of medieval manuscripts brings to my inner ear a Gregorian chant wafting through the cold, dank halls of a European monastery with monks keeping alive ancient wisdom through their endless hours of copying the masters.

Visiting this library, in fact, is like a time machine, transporting you back anywhere into the past you like just by touching the spine of a book and pulling it off the shelf. I know, this all sounds so … well … New Ageish. I am a materialist, a monist — someone who does not believe that there is something immaterial like a soul or spirit or essence of a thing that carries on beyond the physical material of its original pattern. But to hold an item of such antiquity and such rarity and originality overwhelms the senses and enthuses the emotions beyond what meager words such as these can convey.

I touched the past and it lived again.

Martin Gardner portrait by Konrad Jacobs. Courtesy Oberwolfach Photo Collection

By now you will most likely have heard the sad news of the death of Martin Gardner — the father of modern skepticism — at age 95. He was, as his friend James Randi wrote, “a very bright spot in my firmament.”

Many people feel the same way, and for good reason. Gardner’s impact cannot be overstated. It is fair to argue that Martin Gardner created the modern skeptical literature from whole cloth. His 1952 book In the Name of Science (retitled Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science for the second and subsequent editions; hereafter referred to as Fads & Fallacies) set the standard that later led to the creation of CSICOP — and to all that has followed since. Through his books and his “Notes of a Fringe-Watcher” column in the Skeptical Inquirer, Martin Gardner was a meticulous skeptical scholar for six decades. (Amazingly, his most recent Skeptical Inquirer articles appeared earlier this year.)

I’m writing this essay about this “good old man” in long-hand, sitting at the side of a neighbourhood swimming pool. I’m watching my own young son laughing and splashing, and thinking about life: its brevity, its preciousness, its cycles of wisdom and forgetfulness and rediscovery. How fleeting it can be — not only life, but memory and understanding as well. What will my son remember of the lessons I try to teach him? What will I remember of the things my own father taught me?

I wrote recently about the dawn of the organized skeptical movement with the formation of CSICOP in 1976. Today I’m looking back further — a whopping 24 years before the founding of CSICOP or any other skeptical organization. Gardner stepped onto the stage with Fads & Fallacies the year after Carl Sagan graduated high school. James Randi was, at age 24, making a name for himself as a bright young magician. It was the year that Paul Kurtz, a U.S. Army veteran of the liberation of Dachau, finished his PhD in philosophy. Legendary investigator Joe Nickell, whose historical overview essay style follows the Gardner model, was an eight-year old boy. Many of our most respected science advocates, like Michael Shermer and Steven Novella, had not yet even been born.

For my part, my own father was three years old when Gardner invented the modern skeptical literature — with the book I dug into again this morning.

A True Classic

I never met Martin Gardner, and it’s been years since I last re-read his books. Still, returning to Fads & Fallacies is like speaking to a close old friend I haven’t seen in years. (When we were shepherds, my brother Jason and I used to carry battered copies of skeptical masterpieces in our backpacks. Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World, Randi’s Flim-Flam! and Gardner’s Fads & Fallacies were among the most important of them.)

If you haven’t read Fads & Fallacies, you should. (I mean, really, head down to your local library today. What better way to honor Gardner’s life in skepticism?) Fads & Fallacies is a revered classic, of course, and yet completely modern in style as well as substance. Its crisp chapters each review the history and arguments of a specific pseudoscientific topic (such as creationist flood geology, Atlantis, or “orgone” energy), placing the development of that topic in context with its closest pseudoscientific relatives, and contrasting it with the relevant science. Gardner’s model is followed today by Joe Nickell, by Brian Dunning’s Skeptoid podcast, and of course by my own Junior Skeptic articles.

The scholarship of these articles is extremely impressive, and very certainly worth our effort to study. For years I’ve aggressively pursued primary sources for skeptical research, building a very respectable library on these obscure topics; and yet, a few minutes flipping through Fads & Fallacies just now informed me about a half dozen obviously important volumes I didn’t know anything about. And I should know about those books. Skeptics should know as much as we can of what Martin Gardner knew, because we’re the only people who can continue and build on his research.

One of the great lessons of skepticism is that weird ideas never go away. One of the functions of skeptics is the study of the history of claims and hoaxes, so that experts are available when those claims inevitably mutate or resurge. Readers of Fads & Fallacies will learn, for example, not only what is wrong with the concept of dowsing (relevant all over again, and lethal, in the wake of the Iraq bomb-detector scandal); about the key volumes and thinkers to develop the dowsing idea through the early 20th century (and before); and also about the related idea of radiesthesia (pendulum divining, which incidentally gave birth to pyramid power).

Gardner’s Blueprint

Among its many virtues, Fads & Fallacies stands out for its clarity as a blueprint for later skeptical research, organization, and activism. I’m somewhat known for a manifesto-type essay advocating for traditional skepticism. I could have saved myself 5000 words if I’d just written, “What Martin Gardner said.”

From the first page, Fads & Fallacies is explicit about the problem it wants to address: the influence and dangers of pseudoscience. Gardner was concerned about

the rise of the promoter of new and strange “scientific” theories. He is riding into prominence, so to speak, on the coat-tails of reputable investigators. The scientists themselves, of course, pay very little attention to him. They are too busy with more important matters. But the less informed general public, hungry for sensational discoveries and quick panaceas, often provides him with a noisy and enthusiastic following.

Gardner saw this volatile combination — poor public science literacy; the existence of cranks and con men; and, the fact that pseudoscientific claims are typically left unexamined by serious scientists — as a call to action. It is a call others took up in the decades that followed. Today we call that project “scientific skepticism.”

But why should anyone care about pseudoscience? Why is pseudoscience worth fighting? In every generation, skeptics ask themselves this question — a question Gardner anticipated.

Perhaps we are making a mountain out of a molehill. It is all very amusing, one might say, to titillate public fancy with books about bee people from Mars. The scientists are not fooled, nor are readers who are scientifically informed. If the public wants to shell out cash for such flummery, what difference does it make?

Gardner offered several answers to this question. To begin with, he noted, there is a human cost “when people are misled by scientific claptrap.” He offered the sad example of mentally ill people “desperately in need of trained psychiatric care” whose treatment is delayed by “dalliance in crank cults.” (Lest you doubt Gardner’s relevance today, he was talking about Dianetics, the basis of Scientology. Fads & Fallacies includes an in-depth chapter about Scientology’s history and claims.)

I think that rock bottom truth — people get hurt — is ample reason for people of conscience to care about pseudoscience (especially medical pseudoscience). Nonetheless, Gardner provided other answers as well. One is that unchallenged pseudoscientific beliefs (even when apparently harmless) can reenforce other (perhaps more dangerous) unfounded beliefs.

What about the long-run effects of non-medical books like Velikovsky’s, and the treatises on flying saucers? It is hard to see how the effects can be anything but harmful. Who can say how many orthodox Christians and Jews read Worlds in Collision and drifted back into a cruder Biblicism because they were told that science had reaffirmed the Old Testament miracles?

(To appreciate the prescience of this comment, consider that Answers In Genesis still finds it necessary to include on its list of “Arguments That Should Never Be Used” the Velikovskian notion that the Earth stopped rotating for a day during the life of the Old Testament figure Joshua. Check out their surprisingly good debunking article on the topic of Joshua’s missing day.)

Worse, Gardner argued, pseudoscience erodes scientific literacy in general — a process as unpredictable as it is dangerous.

An even more regrettable effect produced by the publication of scientific rubbish is the confusion they sow in the minds of gullible readers about what is and what isn’t scientific knowledge. And the more the public is confused, the easier it falls prey to doctrines of pseudo-science which may at some future date receive the backing of politically powerful groups. As we shall see in later chapters, a renaissance of German quasi-science paralleled the rise of Hitler. If the German people had been better trained to distinguish good from bad science, would they have swallowed so easily the insane racial theories of the Nazi anthropologists?

Gardner’s Solution, and Legacy

What was Martin Gardner’s solution to the problem of pseudoscience? The first step is implicit in his decades of painstaking work: scholarship. To tackle pseudoscience knowledgeably, skeptics take on (to greater or lesser extents) the task of becoming scholars of pseudoscience.

This is a colossal project. Skepticism’s traditional subject matter includes hundreds of pseudoscientific and paranormal topics — each with its own literature, history of development, major figures and major works, and collection of critical responses. Sometimes, as with homeopathy or astrology or dowsing, the history of a single topic stretches back centuries. Martin Gardner researched that vast field for decades, acquiring a depth of knowledge and understanding that is unparalleled among living skeptics. It is left to each of us to fill some small, specialized part of the gap he has left.

In 1952, Gardner showed us what skeptical scholarship looks like, setting the standard that skeptical researchers follow today. At the same time, he called for the now-traditional other half of the skeptical coin: working to advance scientific literacy.

We need better science education in our schools. We need more and better popularizers of science. We need better channels of communication between working scientists and the public. And so on.

And so on. The road always continues — and eventually, the travelers do not. Martin Gardner lived to see his personal call to arms grow into a lively research field, an activism movement, and even (through skepticism’s digital renaissance) a flourishing global subculture. It’s a wonderful legacy. For a time, it is ours to preserve. And so, tonight I’ll be raising a glass to the memory of Martin Gardner — and thinking hard about the things he had to teach.

I wrote to the producers of the show in advance to offer my assistance, and to remind them, “When The Hour interviews Adam, there will no doubt be thousands of viewers who are either suffering from cancer or watching a loved one suffer from cancer — all potential customers” of Adam’s lucrative books and healing workshops. (According to ABC News, then-19 year old Adam was already making over a million dollars a year in 2006.)

Watch the CBC interview on YouTube

This, I cautioned the producers, “places a heavy due diligence responsibility on the CBC” to cover these life-or-death medical claims “with exquisitely careful critical scrutiny.”

I never heard back from them. However, I learned later that a more insistent skeptical activist took the matter as far as the CBC Ombudsman. Upon review, the Ombudsman’s decision was that the show’s host bore a lower due diligence burden because

George Stroumboulopoulos is not a front-line, hard news interviewer; he approaches sometimes difficult subjects in a less confrontational manner than investigative journalists might.  But his task is different on what is, at base, an entertainment program.

This “entertainment” argument often shields paranormal claimants from critical scrutiny in newspaper “lifestyle” sections and “unsolved mystery” TV segments, but let’s set that aside for the moment. Today I want to dig into a different, though related matter:

Entertainment or Education?

The skeptical community has its factions and schisms. Some of these reflect the growing pains of an academic project trying to come to terms with its new life as a popular movement (what is sometimes called “skepticism 2.0″). Other disputes amount to border clashes between skepticism and parallel rationalist movements (humanism, atheism, Objectivism, and so on).

One of skepticism’s earliest splits occurred right at the birth of the pioneering Skeptical Inquirer magazine, back before it was even called by that name. The Zetetic, as it was then known, was a small journal whose first editor Marcello Truzzi left the magazine almost immediately. At issue was a question that still preoccupies skeptics today:

Is the primary job of the skeptical literature to provide a forum for debate? Or, is skepticism supposed to educate the public about science, pseudoscience, and hoaxes?

Now, this is something of a false dichotomy. Nearly all skeptics agree that the answer is “a little of both.” But skeptics do tend to split along these lines, leaning in one direction more than the other. Some prefer debate and “challenge everything” novelty, which is undoubtedly the most entertaining. Others emphasize a mandate for science literacy outreach and consumer awareness regarding fringe science claims.

I am firmly a member of this latter, more conservative group, as I laid out in the essay “Where Do We Go From Here?”:

In particular, we should renew our focus on the investigation and criticism of paranormal claims. Here’s why:

1. People get hurt.
2. No one else does anything about it.

In my view, consumer protection is the most foundational function of the skeptics movement: we investigate, report on, and promote awareness about products which are generally ineffective, sometimes dangerous, and occasionally deadly — and which no other watchdog group bothers to research.

Due Diligence for Skeptics

The skeptical literature sometimes presents arguments of the form, “Is consensus view X all it’s cracked up to be?” These heterodox articles (sometimes written by unqualified outsiders) offer novel food for thought, challenging widely held views on global warming, second-hand smoke, the validity of psychiatric diagnoses or animal testing, and other such material. Long-time skeptics may enjoy a little frisson when encountering these arguments for the first time: “Ooh, that’s new! I never thought to wonder about that before. Wouldn’t it be interesting if X really were a load of hooey?”

This is fun stuff, but I suggest that the skeptical literature should try to avoid this temptation. It’s not impossible for contrarian articles to be correct, but it’s all too easy for them to be wildly wrong (or badly uninformed). To the degree that contrarian arguments are out of step with the prevailing current of opinion among relevant domain experts, “wrong” is the way to bet.

In either event, such articles are typically misleading in that they give fringe positions undue weight — and lend them the credibility of the wider skeptical movement. (Paired “for and against” pieces imply that both positions are equally plausible, which is rarely true; but most contrarian articles are run without any immediate rebuttal.) This can seriously mislead readers about the actual state of the science — an inversion of the stated goals of all skeptical organizations. In my opinion, that violates a public trust I described recently in the Skeptical Inquirer:

At the core of the skeptical literature is a promise: “If you read this, you will find out what’s really true about weird claim X.” Skeptical magazines can aspire to keep this promise, to accurately deliver the best available science and scholarship, only when they’re able to identify mysteries, set experts to work solving them, and set other experts to work fact-checking the answers.

That is to say: skeptics bear a heavy due diligence burden. The more we present skepticism as “the scientific perspective,” the heavier that burden becomes. People turn to us for reliable information and science-based analysis. That is exactly what they should get.

Nor is it only skeptical magazines who bear this burden. All public skeptics — TV celebrities, podcasters, and bloggers included — have an unrelenting ethical responsibility to do their homework, stay close to their expertise, and get the facts right.

To deal with that burden, here’s the simple rule I propose: No skeptic should ever say anything that isn’t correct.

The Utility of a Preposterous Standard

Is this a reachable goal? No, of course it isn’t. It’s ridiculous. Perfect objectivity and accuracy are forever as far away as the end of the rainbow. But I would argue that there is value in the dogged, doomed pursuit of this aspiration. After all, every step we take toward that goal is a step in the right direction.

What sorts of steps? I’ll tackle that in a more substantial way in future posts, but I think we all know the general outline. I try to consider questions like these:

• Do I have the expertise to express an opinion about this?
• Have my facts been reviewed by anyone who knows what they’re talking about?
• Would those I’m critiquing agree that I’ve described their position accurately?
• Have I given undue weight to fringe positions?
• Have I given enough weight to criticisms of my own position?
• Have I accurately described the uncertainties and assumptions of my position?
• Am I using arguments that science has already considered and debunked?
• Have I sought out the primary sources?
• Can I prove what I’m saying? (Really? Am I sure?)

…and so on. Not exactly rocket science, so to speak, but exactly the sort of good practice that rocket scientists (and all evidence-based researchers) rely upon to advance knowledge.

You wouldn't believe how many letters I got telling me I put the pips on the wrong sides of these dice I made for Junior Skeptic

Do I get things wrong in my own work? Bloody right I do, and it chews me up to know how easily that happens. (I virtually guarantee that there are mistakes in this post, even if only typos. Blogs are especially vulnerable to error: they are published almost as soon as they are written, and rarely vetted by proofers or editors.)

My own mistakes are why I recite that impossible rule to myself so often: “Never say anything that isn’t correct.” It’s a mental exercise (think of the “fear is the mind killer” bit in Dune), a way to at least partially restrain my own temptation to reach beyond the evidence — or speak beyond my expertise.

And I fail, of course. But how can we reach for anything less? Make no mistake: there is a human cost when skeptics get things wrong. It doesn’t matter if your soapbox is as large as CNN or as small as your Twitter feed: if anyone is listening to what you say, then you bear the burden of Spider-Man’s Law: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

My keynote talk was Why People Believe Weird Things, a shortened version of which you can see on Ted.com, where I originally delivered this lecture. It includes much discussion about how east it is to fool the brain, perceptual illusions, cognitive missteps such as the confirmation bias, priming effects (where you prime the brain to see or hear the world in a certain way), and especially the power of expectation.

Surprisingly, everyone there was most friendly toward me, even though what I was basically telling them is that pretty much everything they believe about the paranormal is wrong. Many came up after to tell me that they too are skeptical of many of the phony baloney scam artists there are out there who are ripping people off with various flim flams, but of course they added the proviso that not all paranormal phenom are perpetrated hoaxes and that they like science because it can help them to discriminate between the true and false paranormal patterns. Okay, whatever it takes to get people interested in science, however, I did make it clear that to date science has yet to find any conclusive evidence for ESP and the like, so that instead of turning to the paranormal as an explanation for presently unsolved mysteries, why not just leave it as a mystery until science can explain it? In science, I noted, it’s okay to say “I don’t know.”

Here’s some iPhone pics I snapped while waiting for my talk to begin. Included is a pic of Frank Sumption and I. Frank is the inventor of “Frank’s Box,” which I wrote about in the January, 2009 issue of Scientific American. Frank’s Box is also called the “Telephone to the Dead,” and consists of a simplified radio receiver that cycles through the stations at breakneck speed such that one only hears snippets of words and sentence fragments, and it is here where the dead allegedly sneak in their messages to us living (or, where in my explanation, the “patternicity” happens, or the natural tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise. I also snapped some pics of Bruce Goldberg, with whom I once appeared in the mid 1990s on a television show about past lives. Bruce is still churning out the self-published books, now on how he communicates with time travelers from the future. Finally, I will admit that New Agers have the coolest crystals.

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First of all, why is it okay to mix science and religion (with atheists eagerly do in debunking religious claims) but not okay to mix science and politics/economics? Why is it okay for liberal atheists to stick it to religious believers and twist the knife slowly, but when it comes to getting your own (political/economic) beliefs challenged, that’s off limits — NOMA (nonoverlapping magisterial) for science and politics? I don’t see how they are different in principle. Skeptic is a science magazine, not an “atheist” magazine; nevertheless, we routinely deal with religious claims and no one ever complains about that. The closest we have come to political/economic issues is environmentalism (Vol. 9, No. 2 — sold out), overpopulation (Vol. 5, No. 1), and global warming Vol. 14, No. 1). For all three we published several articles; in Vol. 14, No. 1, for example, we published articles both skeptical of global warming and accepting of global warming. So I don’t see what would be wrong with publishing articles pro, con, and neutral on political and economic claims.

One person wrote me a private email that said he thought of me as the next Carl Sagan, but now that I’ve gone to the dark side (turning Right, although I’m as critical of the Right as I am the Left), because Carl was “apolitical.” Carl Sagan was many things, but apolitical was not one of them. Carl was a Liberal and proudly wore his politics on his sleeve, such as when he marched in protest at nuclear sites or testified before Congress about the dangers of nuclear winter. I admire him for having the courage of his convictions, which intimately blended his science and (Left) politics. If you think Sagan was apolitical it is because you happen to agree with his politics and so those ideas seem simply correct, not political. If you don’t share his politics (I share about half of them), then it’s obvious that Sagan was not apolitical.

The liberal bias in the skeptical community was identified by many people in the comments section of my blog, for example by “DR,” “James,” and “Devil’s Advocate”:

… Sadly, there is a lot of hatred toward libertarianism at JREF [he means TAM]. I can be an atheist, believe gay marriage is ok, think nothing of smoking pot, and I won’t get half as much grief from a conservative that I do from an American liberal who reels and squirms when I say that the welfare state is immoral or that free trade and voluntary transactions in capitalism promote fair and just outcomes. It’s like the only reason why I have rationalized this set of morality is because I’m a supremely evil person and must be wrong… —DR

… I’m disappointed, but not surprised by the large group of liberal skeptics. I’ve talked to too many Democrat-card-carrying skeptics that spout the same unoriginal, canned rhetoric and continual spewing hatred of Republicans. For a group that supposedly supports tolerance, they’re anything but tolerant …
—James

I’ve three times over twenty years joined local skeptic groups and all three times there was a presumption that if I was a skeptic, then of course I’m also liberal in my politics. Two times I tried to be what I am but was marginalized, treated like a Goldwater (or Reagan, or Bush) mole. The third time I tried to avoid political discussion, but it was not possible, so, unwilling to lie, I left. My refusal to come over to pure liberalism clearly wasn’t going to be tolerated. All I wanted to do was examine UFO claims and crop circles, but… —Devil’s Advocate

Another critic named John D. Draeger makes a good point that I wish to acknowledge: “He [me] does NOT believe that political persuasions and different economic models for how societies should be run are moral value judgements…. Social services can be paid for in different ways, and in a democratic society it’s up to the majority to define how that is done. Social services can be paid for in different ways, and in a democratic society it’s up to the majority to define how that is done.” That’s true, in a democracy the majority rules how to divvy up public funds for social services, and that tends to be more of a value judgment than a science. But as someone else wrote just below that, quite cleverly I think…

First of all, democratic societies can still be evil, as the famous saying goes: “democracy is two wolves and one lamb voting on what to have for lunch.” And then in another famous quote (attributed to several), “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. Thus our founding fathers gave us a republic … if we can keep it.

Even this is a value judgment, I agree, but surely we can apply some forms of social science to inform our value judgments. For example, we may as a society make the value judgment that it would be good if every child received a basic K–12 education. I agree with this value judgment, and would add to it the value judgment that it would be equally important for every child to have a computer and Internet access because that is the future of education. So we share that value judgment. However, the next question is a pragmatic one: who is going to pay for this education (and computers/Internet)? Parents? Churches? NGOs? Charities? Government? If the latter — the value judgment we have made — then do parents get to choose among the various government schools of where to send their children? (No.) Do parents who choose to send their children to private schools have to also pay for government schools? (Yes.) Is that fair? You make that value judgment. I don’t think that it is fair. To be consistent, if you are pro-choice on abortion you should also be pro-choice on education. The deeper value judgment here is being pro-choice about everything. Choice = freedom.

Some correspondents hated the political diagram because it seems to elevate libertarianism above the traditional left-right spectrum. Okay, then you come up with something other than the left-right linear spectrum to visualize where someone would fall on that line who is socially liberal and fiscally conservative. You draw it and I’ll publish it in a future blog.

Some people hate the word “libertarian.” I’m not crazy about it either, but haven’t thought of a better label. Labels are useful because they enable people to take cognitive shortcuts, but they also lead to shortcuts to nuanced thinking about what someone believes. “Oh, you’re one of those…” full stop. We all do this, of course, but I call myself a libertarian for the same reason I call myself a feminist, an atheist, and a pro-choicer — because it is the accepted language and we have to communicate ideas with language. But I much prefer to be assessed on specific issues.

Several of you said that I am a victim of one of my own central tenets of baloney detection: the confirmation bias, where we look for and find confirmatory evidence for what we already believe and ignore the disconfirmatory evidence. Yes, I will admit, I do this. Everyone does, and we must guard against it, especially when it comes to religion, politics, and economics. To combat this problem, I read the conservative Wall Street Journal and the liberal Los Angeles Times. I listen to such conservative talk radio hosts as Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Praeger as well as the very liberal Bill Maher. I have read Karl Marx’s books as deeply and carefully as I have read Adam Smith’s books. I have read a host of books from liberal and conservative and libertarian authors on the current economic meltdown. And although I have a few libertarian and conservative friends, because I work in the sciences and in publishing, the vast majority of my friends, acquaintances, staff, co-workers, and colleagues are liberals who I can assure you are never shy about letting me know where they think I’ve gone off the political or economic rails.

Finally, let me add that one of the appealing things to me about the libertarian worldview is that it is optimistic, uplifting, and most importantly (to me) anti-elitist. I’m in favor of doing whatever we can to allow the little guy to succeed and to break up power blocs that prevent the average Joe or Jane from reaching their full potential. The Constitutional divisions of power in our Democracy — emulated by many others around the world — are a huge improvement from centuries past that allowed or enabled some to succeed at the expense of others. That was a zero-sum world. Over the past 200 years the spread of democracy and capitalism has done more toward achieving a Nonzero world than anything else — more people in more places more of the time have more power and liberty and wealth than any time in the previous four millennium. Therefore, the more we can spread democracy and capitalism the better off more of us will be more of the time.

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The flyer was for the ‘Vital Orbit™’ Personal Human Force Field.

Personal Human Force Field - note that all the contact tags have been removed

At first, I dismissed the picture, and wondered why my friends pick me to send things like this. But, then I started thinking about it a bit more, and I’ll admit my curiosity got the best of me. You can’t see it in this image, but there was a weblink on the flyer for the Jejune Institute and the Vital Orbit product. I checked it out.

Phrases like:

Channels users own Hydrodynamic activities to project a spherical charge armament against all material bodies and organic compounds. Unintended matter undergoes total magnetic reversal (a process called “negativism”).

and:

The Vital-Orbit reduces these basic tenets to a demonstrable formula by harboring hydro-dynamics multiplied by intention (aquatic/thought). It is proven, time tested, bonafide.

had me rolling on the floor.

But, there was more, I noticed. There was a whole website to explore. The products offered are all fabulously imagined devices to make life better, and the Founder… well, his “meet the founder” video is a piece of work.

Everything about this Jejune Institute was simply too good to be true (what is with the 1972 – 2036 copyright? And, seriously… Jejune? The word means dull or insipid, or lacking in knowledge.). I wanted to know more, so I went to Google and YouTube.

In Google, I found an interesting article describing the Jejune Institute as the doorway to an ARG, or alternate reality game, which use the real world as their platform. So, by following the clues laid out before you, you can head quite willingly down the rabbithole of surreal life.

It turns out the game was launched last October (2008), and from the looks of it has gone through a couple of iterations and gathered quite a cult following. There is one flickr photostream dated April 30, 2009 chronicling a fairly large gathering for some scavenger hunt aspect of the game. The institute even has a Yelp page.

Following links, it all appears to be a well thought-out, intricate game. I guess the only way to determine the truth is to take the final step, and actually start playing.

Are you in?

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.It’s easier for most to leave well enough alone than to face the possibility that their heroes might have had faults.

I ran across this blind-belief in the kitchen last week, when I was told by someone that it’s bad for your health to allow something from the freezer to thaw and then be refrozen. “It will make you sick,” I was told.

“Where did you learn this?” I asked.

“Oh, I learned it growing up,” was the reply. “And, my son, he got sick after eating refrozen food.”

I told her that the refreezing isn’t necessarily good for the quality of the food as it damages whatever is being frozen, but it doesn’t affect your health.

She said that the bacteria would make me sick.

I told her the bacteria don’t multiply while they’re frozen. It’s how long the food is left out while not frozen that makes the difference. If you froze spoiled food, thawed, and ate it; or froze perfectly fine food, thawed it, left it out for too long, refroze and re-thawed it, then you might have a problem.

She sighed dramatically, rolled her eyes, told me I was wrong, and left the room. Conversation over.

She had personally experienced trouble with refreezing food, which reinforced her belief about not refreezing. She learned this rule from someone who she looked up to as a child, and who helped shape her world view.

Her rules, her belief system, keep her healthy and safe. She and her family never get sick from refrozen food.

She wasn’t about to give me anymore time to put a chink in her belief system.