And Slaters Go Plop

Imagine, if you will, a person who believes in the power of homeopathy to heal. He’s had a number of experiences that lead him to believe that homeopathy is more than just a placebo. He doesn’t quite know how to explain why it works, he just knows that it does work. This person is no fool. He doesn’t believe every homeopathic claim without regard. He will apply the core tenets of skepticism to examine claims and will discard those where there is a perfectly natural explanation. But where there is no explanation and homeopathy has been used he accepts that this is a result of the the power of homeopathy.

Now, imagine a Christian who believes in miracles. She’s had a number of experiences and heard the testimonies of genuine and reputable people. She doesn’t know how it works only that, occasionally, it really does work. She’s no fool either. She understands skeptical thinking. She won’t accept any and all miracle claims and is aware that there have been many, many bogus claims in the past. But when she sees examples of miracles where there is no natural explanation and the miracle is done in the name of Christianity she accepts that this is a genuine miracle.

In both of these examples, the people are acting perfectly skeptically within their predefined set of beliefs. They are applying the techniques properly and should be commended. But in both of these examples there are two fundamental flaws which, when combined, render the process of skepticism almost useless.

First, if a magician performs a trick and you can’t think of how it could possibly have been done you are usually happy to shrug and say you simply don’t know how he did it. But we are pattern-seeking creatures and it often doesn’t sit well with us to say we don’t know. Especially when the claim seems genuine. We have to find an explanation. In both of these examples our Christian and our homeopath have not been content to simply say “I don’t know” in the absence of a natural explanation and have defaulted to the explanation provided by their predefined beliefs. Which is perfectly understandable given that they have good reason for their beliefs.

Or do they?

This leads me to the second flaw. We have to ask how the homeopath came to the conclusion that homoepathy is actually effective (beyond placebo) in the first place. Did they use the skeptical method? Or could they just not think of a natural explanation and so jumped to the conclusion that homeopathy must therefore be genuine? What about the Christian and her miracles? Was she displaying good critical thinking when she decided that there is a supernatural God capable of supernatural miracles? Why not be content with an “I don’t know” instead of attempting to fill the unexplained with what the unexplainable?

Skeptical thinking breaks down if your premise was not built using the tools of skepticism in the first place.

As an example of this, in a recent blog entry over at Beretta, the author posts three examples of miracles he believes to be genuine at the same time as taking some pains to point out that’s he’s skeptically-minded. One of them was of a man with a lump of some kind being prayed for who is then shown to have no lump. A commenter pointed out that the man is wearing a different shirt later on (which gives us no idea of how long it’s been since being prayed for or what has happened between) whereupon the author wisely agreed and subsequently withdrew his endorsement. But what if the man happened to be wearing the same shirt days, weeks or months later when the two videos were stitched together? How would he ever have discerned whether this was a fake or not?

Skepticism recommends that you should settle for “I don’t know” over a supernatural and unexplainable explanation. Sure, you sometimes have to temporarily choose an explanatory model in the absence of good evidence but if you’ve chosen one that relies on no known natural laws you really owe it to yourself to spend every minute of every waking hour doubting and re-examining your beliefs because:

“Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.” – Thomas Jefferson 1822

Coming up later today is a post about the misuse of skepticism (and, yes, I know this is the American spelling but it’s one of the words I’ve compromised on despite the fact I get a red wiggly underline every time I type it) and this is a good opportunity to highlight one of the many traps for the critical thinker.

I find that when someone genuinely believes something to be true, regardless of how illogical it is, I have a strong in-built urge to believe them. It’s almost like we have bullshit detectors that are heavily biased toward genuineness over prior experience or reasonable explanation. I suspect it’s probably somehow tied to the way in which our mirror neurons work.

When a magician performs a trick with a wink and a nod we don’t feel too tempted to believe that he really used magic to make the card appear but when the magician (or conjurer or faith healer or neurotic FBI target or wild-eyed prophet) genuinely believes in what they are saying I personally find that it takes a lot more effort to apply logic to the situation. Perhaps this is because I not only have to come up with a reasonable explanation for their claims but also a reasonable explanation for why they believe their claims. And I have a bullshit detector which has a default setting of “impassioned claims are true”.

If you are a Christian you may boggle at the inanity of this. If, like me, you are not a Christian this will probably make as much sense as the musical manipulation we normally see in happy-clappy churches.

As someone who believes in critical thinking, scepticism and rational enquiry it is with a little trepidation that I want to address the recent announcement of the Atheist Bus Campaign here in New Zealand.

I’ve given more thought than most would on the issue of the existence of God and, after many years of deep belief, have come to the difficult conclusion that it is just not true. For many this question is simply not an issue; they’re either completely ambivalent and would see someone as a bit wonky for believing or they know ‘deep down’ that God exists.

The campaign represents my beliefs nicely. I even respect the use of the word ‘probably’ in the opening line “There’s probably no God”. It’s nice and accurate and less like the dogma we mistrust so much in religion.

You’d think that I’d be quite enthusiastic about the campaign but I’m just not.

I think that replicating the campaign here in New Zealand smacks of an identity crisis fuelled by a little too much US Internet consumption. We just don’t have the same problems they do. A person can become the leader of our nation and not believe in an imaginary God. People don’t seem to think I’m a morally inferior person when they find out that I’m an atheist.

Sure, we have our problems. The main one I can think of regarding religion is that religions are tax exempt by default; all they have to do is “further their religion”. And there is the occasional exorcism/murder but that’s pretty much down to pig-stupidity and I doubt any amount of buses with signs would stop that. Most of our problems are down to a lack of critical thinking. Whether it be alternative medicine that just doesn’t work or our embarrassing statistics on global warming denial or our deep fear of anything not ‘natural’ (whatever that means). Here in New Zealand we have a deep distrust of science and we lack the ability to carefully weigh facts. It’s almost like we’ll back whoever comes out with the most anti-scientific sentiment as if we are backing the number-8-wire-underdog who will come through in the end with their wacky but revolutionary ideas.

I feel that the closest thing to a ‘magic bullet’ here in New Zealand is to teach children how to think critically, how to examine evidence, how not to be fooled in life, at a primary school level. Methods that we can all agree on that they can apply later in life when someone tells them about the latest healing remedy or their life-transforming revelation or the magnets that help them sleep, etc, etc.

I feel that all an Atheist Bus Campaign will do is make those who are ambivalent think that atheists are wannabe martyrs and give a platform for media-desperate fundamentalists who will come off looking semi-respectable in contrast.

To those running the campaign I say good luck and that I agree with what you are saying. I just don’t think it’s going to achieve what you think it’s going to achieve.

No one believes that they are dogmatic. We’re all far too reasonable for that carry on. But we can all point to a number of other people who we would term as dogmatic and, with a little imagination, we should be able to understand that they probably don’t think they are dogmatic. This leaves us with a dilemma; how do we know that we are not being dogmatic ourselves? If we can see others acting dogmatically who are unaware of it then, chances are, we could be too.

By ‘dogmatic’ I am describing an absolutist kind of belief that, if I could summarise in my own words, boils down to the fact that you would really rather hold to what you believe than accept an alternative even if the alternative is true. Dogma is the belief you refuse to interrogate.

Dogmatism can get in the way of new truths. The reason for this is that if you are unwilling to honestly put a belief to the test then you will never find out if that belief happens to be false. A valid argument can be made that perhaps there are some beliefs that we’d be better off clinging to rather than risking finding out a truth that would cause you great unhappiness. Would you like to find out that your partner cheated on you all those years ago? What if we discover that we are really just a brain in a jar somewhere living a simulation? What if God really is imaginary? What if God really is real? Whether we dare to search for the truth of a particular matter is a personal decision. But if we refuse to honestly put our beliefs to the test then we ought to show a little more humility when telling others what we ‘know‘ to be true.

So, assuming we do want truth, how do we avoid dogmatism? The best way I can think of is to actually value truth over any existing belief. This can be excruciating, especially when a belief is foundational to any meaning you get out of life. I found it very difficult many years ago to say to myself in all honesty that I would hold truth higher than my belief in the existence of God. If you’ve never believed in God you’ll probably struggle to understand the significance of this but, to a believer, God is truth and so it can seem a kind of fundamental blasphemy to say that you would even challenge the idea. If you do believe in God, fear not, many respectable people have done what I did and kept their belief afterwards and I greatly respect them for it.

Other than valuing truth over existing beliefs I’ve come across another technique that can help to break the emotional attachment we often develop with our dearly-held beliefs. That is to regularly switch perspectives or, “state the opposite”. An example of this is to first say what you believe i.e. “Labour has the best health policies” and then say the opposite i.e. “National has the best health policies” or, “Act has the best health policies” and try to mean it. You can do this with just about any belief in which you are tempted to take sides and it really can help to make you more objective because it can lessen the effects of the ‘in-group/out-group’ factor.

Does anyone have any other good tips or tricks for finding truth that can be used by anyone regardless of their starting assumptions?

In a perfect world, when faced with a contentious issue, we would assimilate the facts, weigh them against each other and come to a reasonable consensus (pending further information, of course). We don’t live in a perfect world however and I’ve observed in myself and in others that we often tend to treat our existing beliefs about the way the world works as if it were our favourite football team; we’ll stand behind them through good times and bad, through confirmatory and contradictory evidence.

This is a fairly natural thing to do and if we are aware of our own confirmation bias we can do a lot to gradually eliminate those ideas we previously held to be true but which were, in fact, false.

However, I’ve noticed that when two people attempt to discuss a contentious issue from two very different starting assumptions, instead of fostering a willingness to seek the truth regardless of the impact to our existing beliefs, we are driven further toward defending them against this new ‘enemy’.

I think that if our goal is truth then we ought to spend most of our time challenging our existing beliefs in dialogue with people with whom we have much in common. That way we’ll be less inclined to go into defensive mode and more likely to gracefully discard what was previously an incorrect belief.

This would mean that in many cases there would have to be a certain level of exclusivity to discussions but I think it would go a long way toward self-improvement even though it may take a very long time to unravel long-held presuppositions.

I want to be able to thrash out what I see as difficulties to do with consciousness or first causes without having to deal with the distraction of religious dogma or new age pseudo-science and, more importantly, I’d imagine that there are many conversations that other people would like to have without me jumping in and blurting out what I know must be true.

So, for those of you who have found me an irritation in the past, I hope to be less in your face with what I perceive to be the absolute truth. If you think I’ve got something wrong and you hold very similar starting assumptions to me then please feel free to rigorously discuss your ideas with me. If you hold very different starting assumptions please try to allow for the fact that you may be wrong and I will try my best to do likewise. We may, after all, both be wrong.

In a perfect world we should be happier to learn that we have been wrong than that we have ‘won’ an argument.

Back in August 2006 a company called Steorn took out a full-page advert in The Economist claiming they had developed a free energy device – charmingly called an Orbo – and were looking for qualified scientists to be a part of their validation process. Steorn is based in Dublin, Ireland and is headed up by a guy called Seán McCarthy.

The claim of free energy is a big one. Many people have attempted it – even Da Vinci tried his hand at it – but so far no one has succeeded. Free energy isn’t the same as solar energy or wind energy, it’s an entirely different beast. There is a law in physics called The Conservation of Energy which says that the energy contained within a closed system will remain constant. This is not a law to be trifled with as it has an enormous amount of strong scientific evidence to support it and, so far, not a shred of evidence against it. Some physicists have even said that a violation of this law “would undermine not just little bits of science – the whole edifice would be no more”.

What Steorn are claiming is that they have a device which, isolated from any external energy source, will produce more energy than it requires to run. This is huge. This would solve all of the world’s energy problems. Imagine it; hook this thing up to a 9 volt battery and it will produce more than 9 volts which you will be hook up to another Orbo (or even back into itself, thus removing the need for a battery in the first place) and so on, giving you potentially infinite energy.

So, should we believe them? After all, scientific knowledge is continually being added to and there have been plenty of times in the past where the ‘scientists’ of the day have scoffed at a new idea. Could this be the next major development in our understanding of the universe? A whole new paradigm? They seem like really genuine people and qualified engineers have been singing their praises. There doesn’t seem to be any overt financial scam going on either.

What we should do is be sceptical (or, ‘skeptical’ if you live in the US). This simply means that we should demand good evidence before believing the claim. And there are some strong warning signs that we should heed as well:

1. So far there have been thousands of claims of free energy but none have succeeded
2. The most alluring of these claims have involved magnets, the Orbo does too
3. We have not heard back from their panel of science validators
4. Good science is usually done in the public domain where peer review is encouraged rather than by going directly to the media
5. They attempted a demonstration in July 2007 but it was a complete failure
6. They have provided no explanation for how they have been able to achieve free energy
7. So far all we have is anecdotal evidence
8. It goes against some of the best-established science

My thoughts are that they probably genuinely believe in what they are doing (I like to look for the good in people) but that they are either accessing an external source of energy they hadn’t considered or that they are subconsciously allowing themselves to overlook another critical issue in their excitement. I’m deeply suspicious given their reluctance to demonstrate the technology and their unconventional approach of avoiding the public rigour of the scientific community and instead choosing to talk to the media (who are much more gullible).

I would love for them to have broken a strongly-held law of physics, especially given the potential benefit our world could gain. But I’m going to need some very strong evidence before I’m convinced.

I’ll leave you with Robert Park’s Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science:

1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media
2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work
3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection
4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal
5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries
6. The discoverer has worked in isolation
7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation

On Sunday we are going to see Tim Minchin who is here for the Auckland Festival 09. We managed to get the last couple of seats available for the night but I understand there may still be some left for Saturday.

[update] And very good it was too!