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Keywords: statistics, predictions, uncertainty, randomness, book
I've talked before about how how people can be overly confident in their ability to understand the past and predict the future. A good illustration of this is a book called "The Next 100 Years" by George Friedman.  As I see it, Friedman falls into the mental trap of looking at history and seeing it's progression as inevitable. With the benefit of hindsight, it's hard to see how historical events were really uncertain and chaotic, and how the outcome really could have been different than the one that history records. From this misunderstanding he has looked through history for patterns, and whether they actually exist or not, has found them. From these supposed patterns he's projected out into the future to try and understand the forces that will shape the next century. This seems to me like a good case study to highlight the ways that smart people can fool themselves and build a case that sounds compelling, but when you examine it closely you see that it rests on very shaky ground. I read this book last year and am working off notes from an online discussion I had at the time. I want to make clear that even though I criticize the book, I did enjoy reading it. Especially the narrative of the coming war in the 2050's. He admits that the details of the war are more speculative than the other areas, though to me the rest of the book is almost as speculative. But in spite of being better suited to science fiction than anything else, it's a fantastic story. But let's look at the arguments that Mr. Friedman puts forth as the solid basis for his claims:
Keywords: link
I regularly check my hits from Google searches, and through that I found out that I'm in the #2 spot for the search term: "Dr. Algund Eenboom" crazy - in case you don't remember, Eenboom is one of the talking heads from the Ancient Aliens series that I've been analyzing. I took a look at the #1 result, which came from a website called Poffy The Cucumber's Movie Mania. The author of the article, Jon Dunmore, happens to actually be a friend of Giorgio Tsoukalos (that guy's a riot!), and does an excellent review of the Ancient Aliens series. He has really good style, and I love the way he writes: | ANCIENT ALIENS is - like all von Däniken's Chariots
of the Gods books - speculative fiction masquerading as hard
science. Each of the scores of segments in this 5-part series starts off
promising, knowledge dripping like blond ambrosia off naked Valkyrie
shoulders, and then - oil slicked into a gutter of disinformation with
red herrings, straw man arguments and narrators with scary voices. |
I wish I could write like that. Take a look, it's worth the read!
Keywords: Mehmet Oz, woo, alternative medicine, health
Probably the biggest illustration today of how health woo concepts have made it into the mainstream virtually unchallenged is personified by doctor Mehmet Oz, co-author of the YOU books and endorsed by the queen of television herself, Oprah Winfrey. It's dismaying that he's become so popular and his health advice is often taken as gospel by so many, because a lot of what he has to say is pure nonsense. The interesting dichotomy here is that Dr. Oz is a trained, and by all accounts competent, heart surgeon. He knows how to fix your ticker, and with the exception of possibly allowing a medically untrained woman into the room to align your body's healing energies while you're under, he adheres to the best medical practices for doing so. But his knowledge of other areas of medicine is decidedly spotty. He's like a mechanic who can fix your engine with the best of them, but if you ask him to take a look at your brakes he's suddenly out of his depth. And it wouldn't be so bad if he'd admit his limitations, but instead he pretends that he actually knows what he's talking about, and has fooled a lot of people into believing it. The biggest problem is that he has very little understanding for the standards of scientific evidence required in medicine. That's not necessarily an impediment for a doctor - after all, diagnosing and treating medical conditions doesn't absolutely require that kind of skill. But if you want to keep up with the latest medical research, you should have enough an understanding of science and statistics that you can read the research critically. Otherwise your forced into choosing between credulous acceptance or cynical denial, neither of which is useful at all. Dr. Oz falls into this camp, credulously accepting many woo claims while cynically playing down the abilities of western "allopathic" medicine. He explains his view in this quote from his book "Healing From The Heart", where he explains his feelings on the Grandmother Cell Theory, which suggests that everything we know and feel about a person (such as a grandmother) is contained in a single neuron in the brain:
Keywords: link
It just came to my attention, as I was looking at my referral links, that my good buddy Ben Radford has quoted me on his website in support of his book. He's also included a link to dumbassguide.info. I just love the absurdity of the situation. The list of quoted reviews are otherwise nothing but skeptical heavyweights - James Randi, D. J. Grothe, Richard Wiseman, Martin Gardner, Michael Shermer.... and then me. And what's more, the way I'm quoted makes me sound as though I think I belong in that group! How awesomely absurd is that? That just made my morning. 
Keywords: randomness, uncertainty
A lot of what goes on in pseudoscience is the result of people finding patterns where none exist. I think the concept of randomness and how we can find illusory patterns in it warrants a little bit of an exploration here for anybody who hasn't thought about it. Randomness is one of the hardest things for people to understand. Even those of us who pay lip service to the role of randomness in the universe have trouble with the concept. We're just too good at seeing patterns. We see them everywhere, even when no template for the seen pattern exists. See my recent post about the nebula that looks like a hand. We typically expect anything that's random to show absolutely no pattern. We think random things should resemble an undecipherable mess. But that's not the case. Patterns in randomness are everywhere, and they can fool you more easily than you think. I performed a classic experiment by creating a computer program that draws random dots on the screen. I ran it a few times and picked my favourite examples to show you here:
Keywords: book
So I decided to send an email to Ben Radford, skeptical investigator and
co-host of the Monster Talk podcast. I had a
question about his investigation of the KiMo Ghost, and I mentioned that
I was looking forward to his new book, "Scientific Paranormal Investigation" coming out. He told me that
his book was already available, I just couldn't buy it from Amazon.com
yet. Then he offered to personally sign a copy of the book for me. I readily agreed, and about a week later I
received the book in the mail:  As promised, the title page is signed by Radford himself:  I've never had a book actually signed by the author before, so that's kind of cool. Of course, I take this to mean that we're now best buds. I know he still hasn't responded to the last email I sent him, but we're in tune so I understand that he's just busy and he knows that I'll forgive him for not answering my question right away. When you're on the same wavelength like that, you don't need to put this kind of thing into words. I know that he values and respects me, after all he did show it by sending me a personally signed copy of his latest book. How many people would he do that for?  Order form on Radfordbooks.com....... Shut up!!!
Okay fine, so he does it for everybody. Big deal! You can tell by the way he wrote "Keep It Real!" for me he really meant it. After all, he used an exclamation point and a smiley face!
In any case, even though we're best buds I'm not about to sacrifice my integrity and give him a glowing review in spite of what I might think of his book. So fortunately for him, I found the book to be very engrossing.
A couple of quotes from the book really appealed to me:
Keywords: randomness, uncertainty, epistemology
A little over a year ago NASA released an interesting image of a nebula captured by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. What's interesting about this image is that it's a nice example of pareidolia. On first glance, this nebula looks remarkably like a human hand:  What I find fascinating about this image is how much of the resemblance to a human hand evaporates when you examine it closely. Much of the distinguishing features of the hand are made up of very insubstantial mist, only giving the vague impression of the shape of a hand. If you take the time to simply draw an outline around the clearest parts of the nebula, the illusion of a hand disappears altogether:  To me it now looks more like a hitchhiking moose hand puppet.
Take this as a cosmic reminder that you can easily see the illusion of a pattern in something that is essentially random.
Keywords: book
I just finished the book "Lies, Damned Lies, And Science" by Sherry Seethaler. I enjoy books like this that help instill a greater understanding about how science and statistics work. What is taught in this book is the kind of information that we should be teaching to our children at school so that we can have a more scientifically literate population. The book helps provide people with the tools necessary in order to understand a greater perspective on issues than that which is typically filtered through the media. Decisions on public policy relating to issues of science need to be made by weighing the pros and cons of all options, even that of keeping the status quo. Uncertainties need to be acknowledged, and when there are trade-offs we need to recognize what kind of choices they entail and not paint issues in black and white terms. How we frame the question is also very important. I would recommend this book to anybody who's confused by all the media claims, studies, and statistics. If you want to develop the ability to sort through it for yourself, this book will help you get there.
Keywords: environment
I've been considering exactly how I want to write this article. What I want to talk about is a perceived message/theme/impression that I've picked up from the environmental movement. And I don't want to give the impression that I'm painting every environmental activist with the same brush, nor do I want to give the impression that the concerns of environmentalism aren't warranted. I believe that there is reason for concern, and I don't believe that environmentalism is one big entity where everybody agrees on everything. And I'm marking this as a "musing" because I'm only talking about my impressions. One thing that bugs me is when people start talking about their impressions and the messages they perceive as though they were foregone conclusions. I want to make it clear upfront that I'm just laying out my concerns here, using my blog to express my dumbass thoughts about an issue that has been turning over in my mind. Hopefully that's enough of a disclaimer. Let me explain what I'm talking about:
Keywords: aliens, ancient alien theory, conspiracy, historical
You've gotta love this Ancient Aliens stuff. It's time to take a look at the third segment of this episode, where they talk about the evidence for an ancient worldwide communications network.  We might as well just label this segment "Ancient Flight Part 3", since they're just talking more about what they consider to be evidence for ancient flying ships. You can view this episode here, Each segment corresponds roughly to one of the ten minute YouTube entries. So this third segment begins in the third YouTube video, beginning at 2:57. The segment ends in the fourth video at 3:32. You can see my reviews of the first two segments here and here. So, let's get our hands dirty and look at the new claims being made here.
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