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The Borderlands Of Science
Michael Shermer's background is psychology and ultra-long-distance cycling; he's written a number of books on cycling and analysis of (and refutation of) Holocaust deniers. He's also president (apparently for life) of the American Skeptics society and a reasonably good writer. In this book, Shermer spends a lot of time talking about the scientific method, its strengths and potential flaws -- and, more importantly, its system for dealing with its flaws (which he claims "sets science apart from all other knowledge systems and intellectual disciplines" -- a heady claim I wish he discussed more).
Since this is supposed to be a review of The Borderlands Of Science and not Weird Things, I'll just say that if you like one, you'll like the other as well. In Borderlands, Shermer analyzes beliefs that are defensible, beliefs that could (or were once thought to) be scientifically accurate. Among these are, for instance, ramifications of cloning, confirmation bias in explaining racial differences in sports (about which Malcolm Gladwell has also written), and a whole, whole lot of discussion of Alfred Wallace. Wallace and Charles Darwin were both responsible for the theory of evolution. Wallace is not remembered as widely for a number of reasons, which are explored in frightening detail in roughly three and a half of the 16 chapters of this book. Not coincidentally, Shermer did his doctoral thesis on Wallace. The ratio of stuff-about-Wallace-or-Evolution to everything-else, by chapter, is 3:7; Shermer is pretty focussed on this specific discussion.
The book has four sections: a short introduction (which is quite heavy in skeptical theory, exactly what I wanted) and the main body, discussing borderlands theories, people, and history. In "Theories," Shermer tends to stray a little from 'why people believe weird things' into 'why stupid people believe weird things' (as he did in the book of the same title) and that's fun. He covers a lot of quite current topics (like cloning, Wacky Unified Field Theories, and the importance of Punctured Equilibrium in the evolution of evolutionary theory).
In section two, "People," he discusses the Copernican revolution and its effects, then goes off about Alfred Wallace. Here, he does something weird that needs more discussion. In analyzing Wallace, he constructs a psychological profile, which he derived by having a large number of Wallace experts fill out a survey of the "strongly agree, 9, 8,.. 3, 2, strongly disagree" sort, and then uses the results of these surveys to fill in his discussion of why Wallace became a scientific spiritualist, for instance. It's an interesting technique that he also uses with Steven Jay Gould and Carl Sagan. It is tempting to ask how much confirmation bias exists in a survey of this sort, though. Since I've already let the spoiler out of the bag, Shermer discusses Gould and Sagan, spends some time doing a statistical analysis of Sagan's greatness as a scientist (by comparing published papers by topic with a number of other contemporary, canonically great scientists) and pauses briefly to smack Freud upside the head in a somewhat snarky comparison of Freud and Darwin.
Finally, in section three, "Histories," he does a lovely discussion of the myth of pastoral tranquillity, including a quick summary of four ancient civilizations that probably managed to destroy themselves through environmental stupidity without (as he puts it) any need of Dead White European Males coming in and inflicting devastation from outside. Shermer then analyzes (and debunks) the theory of transcendent genius, the Mozart Myth, as he calls it, and goes back to two more chapters on Wallace and evolution, in a discussion of the Piltdown Man hoax and why that should have (but doesn't seem to have) supported the idea that science can be self-correcting and learn from its mistakes.
I like what Shermer is doing, and he writes well and readably. If I sound a bit impatient, it's because I want him to be writing about the application of critical thinking rather than case studies, and when he starts out writing just what I want to read, then goes off in a different direction, he leaves me standing at the intersection saying "hey, wait, this isn't the bus I wanted." The book could stand to be either edited down into two books (a Wallace analysis, and a case-studies book on how science inspects itself), or edited up with a clearer discussion of the math involved in his statistical analysis of Sagan or his psychological profiling of people.
In the end, I liked this book, I learned a fair bit from it, and I would recommend it to people who want to learn more about both critical thinking and science history.
You can purchase The Borderlands of Science from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
"Flim-flam!" or just about anything by James Randi (the guy who exposed Uri Geller),
he's a magician, not a scientist and has a good sense of humor.
(Also don't miss out on his $1 million dollar prize or his weekly newsletter on what the kranks are up to..)
I used to subscribe to (and read) the Skeptic Observer at one point. It was interesting.. but I think in some cases the dyed in the wool "skeptics" swing too far on the other side. Yes, the majority of them are anti religion, anti creation, anti anything that cannot be proven, but if you extrapolate a bit, you realize (or I realize, anyway, YMMV) that its very very subjective.
100 years ago they would not have believed aspirin works. (Heck.. medical science STILL cant tell you _why_ it works, just that it does.)
1000 years ago, they probably would not have believed in Lions or a round earth or some magical force that cannot be explained like gravity.. but they all exist.
I worry about anyone who feels the need to debunk and be skeptic just because.. faith is somewhat required in daily life, even if it is faith in the traction of your tires while going around a corner. And the fact that we keep finding scientific reasons for things that have been based on "faith" in the past works both ways.
Just my opinion, though far from humble.
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
"the way it turned into case studies of debunking, rather than the process of debunking"
Actually, I'm not sure you can do a "generic" how-to debunking book: eventually, you have to apply those tools to real-life situations. Shermer sets out the tools in the first section, then shows how they apply to specific cases: I think that's an excellent way to do it.
I did enjoy Borderlands, though not as much as Weird Things (perhaps because Weird Things was more "fun").
With all the current cloning fun going on, a book like Borderlands becomes even more important.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
The theory that sometimes evolution happens in spurts as opposed to slow gradual change is Punctuated Equilibrium, not Punctured Equilibrium. I used to be a Molcular Biologist.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
Knowledge is fractal, and domain specific. Can something be in two places at once? Well, yes-no. It depends on the domain. If it's an electron, the answer seems to be sort-of "yes, if you can't see it in mid process".
People who are certain are a large part of the problem. WHENEVER you are certain, you've made a mistake. You may have mistaken a high probability value for truth (which usually works quite well), but you've made a mistake.
That said, there are definitely a lot of scams out there. If something looks unreasonable, then you need to insist on a higher degree of proof than if it seems reasonable. In either case you may be wrong. But it's better to live with the knowledge that you may be wrong than to fool yourself into certainty.
And also, much knowledge is time-bound. When I was a kid the idea of people going to the moon in my lifetime was laughed at. Now what they laugh at is the idea of people going back to the moon. But they are laughing for very different reasons, and in a very different way. (I happen to think that the second group of people is as wrong as the first, but it looks like it will be China or Japan that proves this.)
If something contradicts experience, then it may be either wrong, or misunderstood. Don't doubt your experience, even though you KNOW you left your sock on top of the dresser, and then it wasn't there. (I tend to model this [humorously] as parallel universe slippage.) Your memories of your personal experiences are all that you have to work with. But doubting that you understood what you saw is quite reasonable. And doubting the truth of what you were told is quite reasonable.
Telepathy... I have not seen either a proof or a disproof that met my standards. I also have a lot of trouble with defining it. E.g.: If I were to have an implanted cell phone that operated by direct neural connection, and someone else had a corresponding model, would this be telepathy? If so, then it's just a few years away. But the crucial point here is that I don't see any reason to decide. And I don't see any way to decide in general, though certain special cases are decideable. Of course, an existence proof would be a "sort-of" proof. But one might wonder exactly what was prooved. I saw one claim that there was a repeatable experiment that could transmit about one bit per day via telepathic channels... I never bothered to investigate this much, but 1) special setup was required (e.g., isolation rooms for both the sender and the receiver, and the willingness of both of them to be confined for the months that the test message required). and 2) it didn't seem useful for anything short of interstellar messaging, presuming that it would work in that situation (HAH!). So it may be true but worthless. (So much is.)
Also, something doesn't have to be valid to be useful. Newton's mechanics are known to be false. But that's what NASA uses for orbital calculations.
Of course, Newton's mechanics are exactly bogus... but then what does bogus mean, precisely?
etc.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Fred Cohen (of the Deception Toolkit fame, http://all.net) offered the following suggestions in a posting to RISKS-22.44.
"... If you are studying criminal behavior, reading books by crooks is probably a good idea. But if you want to know about cons, far better books are:
"Flim-Flam" by James Randi
"Scam School" by Chuck Whitlock
and "Rip-Off" by Fay Faron
All three are by legitimate researchers who present results taken from scores to hundreds of incidents and present how and why scams work, the
techniques used, the different plots, and so forth. They present many excellent examples of how these sorts of crimes work, how they impact
the victims, the psychology of the criminals, and so forth.
[snip]"
If this were true, only stupid or unreflective people would believe in and all smart people would believe the same things about stuff like UFOs and a lot of other "debatable" issues.
And the problem is that is just patently not true. The list of people far more intelligent than me and (I'll intuit from your ill-considered response) you, BoomerBuddy, who also believe in some aspect of spirituality, goes on and on. Great writers, politicians, mathematicians, logicians, and scientists can be found among the ranks of believers of various creeds.
What's more, there is tons of (sometimes very acrimonious) discord in the hallowed ranks of science over what is true and what is not true, what is possible and what is not possible. I am not slagging science here - I am a believer in, and fan of, and a former student of science - and I probably know more about it than 90% of people (and believe me, that's not pride talking because it really isn't saying a hell of a lot).
But I'm sick of people that treat science like the end-all be-all of human reason with a dogmatism that would do the least reflective religious zealot they despise proud and seem incapable of grasping that there are wider philosophical issues (like consciousness, free will and morality) that science has little or no grasp on - and which metaphysical and spiritual disciplines provide sophisticated and elegant treatments of.
So yeah, big deal, your parents dragged you to church every Sunday for fifteen years and then you went to college and "got over it" because your intellect is so superior to all the schmucks. "Sad really." Spare me, pal - I don't need your sympathy for my beliefs, which I maintain and practice with my eyes wide open, and with my intellect, doubt, skepticism, spirit of inquiry and open mind intact. It's an attitude you would do well to work on, because if the history of science is any indication, a whole bunch of the stuff you believe in is wrong.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Ultimately, these theories gain respectability in large part due to the people backing them, and a desire to look at the world through a desire to achieve particular goals. This is no surprise but it does limit critical thought. Critical thought is in many ways impossible without trustworthy evidence, and a desire by a majority to look at evidence critically, but this leads to a conundrum - where do you start believing? If contrary evidence exists, who do you trust? Is there time in the universe to actually examine every claim critically, or examine every piece of evidence? Is it surprising people lock themselves into belief systems and attempt to examine only that that is related to that system?
Skewing this problem further is the not insignificant fact that people's perspectives are shaped by the evidence provided to them and their educations. This begins at school age, where any number of factors may skew how a person develops their own belief systems. State education is dying in the US, and many would argue that such schooling is unduly influenced by governmental factors. Private education however, creates equal and opposite horrors, with parents likely to choose schools that promote their own belief systems and hang-ups, and such schools looking more attractive than those that at least make an attempt to promote critical thought. And a parent's choice is only part of the problem, a school that is inherently designed to promote a specific belief system will attempt to promote itself to a wide range of groups; this leads to a situation where a relatively small number of groups can encourage particular ideologies and ways of looking at the world.
It doesn't stop at schooling. An explosion of information sources, and a lack of accountability where TV networks, publications, and other heavily promoted sources of information have become little more than pulpits for what the proprieters believe is a reasonable balance between the views they wish to express and what the public will stand, has lead to a situation where a huge amount of information presented is unfair, inaccurate, and promotional of particular belief systems. As competition has increased, quality has decreased. A "liberal", ie largely accurate, fair and balanced, media has become used to promoting views of the world that fit a less liberal agenda, lead by Fox, and groups playing catch-up to Fox's brand of popular illiberalism.
Belief systems feed off belief systems. Critical thought takes a back seat as assumptions become treated as facts, and the sheer volume of dubious and inaccurate information wieghts so heavily that more accurate pictures of the world look less and less likely. People believe because someone who says things that repeat other things they believe are saying these things.
And, frankly, there's bugger all anyone can do about it.
KMSMA (WWBD?)
A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics. A -5 point starting credit.
© 1998 John Baez
From Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit (linked above), your question "Why the else would anyone believe in god?" falls under the category of "begging the question, or assuming the answer". What evidence do you have that all adults that believe in God only do so because of childhood teachings?
The prototype for this type of work is Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles MacKay. On Amazon, here.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
Proof is only subjective if it is used to support faith, and then it's not really proof, it's more of an opinion. Saying "I have faith car A is the best race car." is a subjective opinion. Saying "Because it has run 48 of 50 races, car B appears to be the best race car in those races." is an objective conclusion based on "proof". If you call that subjective and go with the first statement, you aren't really basing anything proof.
True, not every proof begins with an absolute baseline, but it can always be traced back to one. Your argument about school textbooks illustrates only that without complete data sets, conclusions can be wrong. Wow.
And just which "debunkers" are you referring to? Debunkers of creationism, or debunkers of evolution? They have fairly different arguments. On the one side you have observed (the flu evoles to survive, you know) and inferred evolutionary occurances, both of which are willing to incorporate new data to smooth out the edges, or move entirely as appropriate. On the other you get twisted logic (the world is too ordered to not be created) and egotism (we are not related to monkeys!). I don't see either of these using absense of proof.
Or are there other debunkers your referring to? Debunkers of Holocaust? Debunkers of Santa Clause? Debunkers of the moon landing? Granted none of these may be the ones you were generalizing, but I'm guessing the first two were the ones from how you openned your post.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
Classic debunker examples include:
-
Nobody saw that rock fall out of the sky,
therefore your claim that rocks (ice balls,
frogs) fall out of the sky is false.
-
Your airplane prototype crashed, therefore
men will never fly.
-
You haven't produced a half-man/half-ape
fossil, therefore Man is a special creation.
The pattern is that incomplete evidence or faulty reasoning is taken to disprove the conclusion, instead of the correct result: that the status of the conclusion is (was) unknown. Rocks might or might not fall, Man might or might not fly, humans and modern apes might or might not have evolved from a common ancestor. We don't know if life originated "elsewhere", We don't know if antimatter repels matter gravitationally, we don't know if some people can sense the death of relatives from afar. We might never know.Scientists are prone to this fallacy, perhaps because they are temperamentally uncomfortable with uncertainty. That's why they became scientists in the first place. That's also why saying "I don't know" is considered, among scientists, so virtuous; it's hard to bring themselves to say it.
Among scientists, the fallacy manifests most harmfully when the conventional theory for a phenomenon is no better supported than the alternatives. Careers are blighted. Recent examples from biology that suffered "debunking" for decades include:
Okay, I'll bite this troller's bait. This review, and probably the book (I won't actually review something I haven't read, so a caveat here that I'm just going off the reviewer's obviously biased sentiment) and certainly this comment are all typical of a particular (and if I may say so, garden variety and dime a dozen) variety of "skeptic." This smart guy has everybody figured out - they are slaves of their childhood training, not liberated minds like ol' Boomer here.
You're just bitter because you have chosen to waste your life grovelling, while the rest of us can do as we please. You probably also suspect in your heart of hearts that we're going to get away with it. Poor, afraid sucker.
Examples that spring to my mind:
Crystals storing healing "energy".Quartz is piezoelectric, 'nuff said.
Homeopathic cures. Anyone heard of Avogadro's number?
"Natural" cures being better than pharmacuticals. Lead and Radon exist in nature, should we take those too?
"Faith" healing. Confirmation bias anyone?
Aromatic healing. No comment needed.
Cold fusion, where neutron counts around 2x background were detected, is a good example. Effects of power-line RF on humans fall into this category. The FDA's insistence that medications be proven "effective" above the noise threshold causes many drugs to be rejected.
Mainstream science isn't immune to this problem. Some papers in particle physics reflect a very small number of recorded events. It's worse in the life sciences, where there's more noise and less ability to control it.
"If you need statistics to interpret your experimental results, that indicates that your experiment is badly designed" - Rutherford
This outrages me, a person who believes in miracles. Why? Because fraud does make it hard for others to tell where the hand of God is involved.
Why do I believe in miracles? I'll just say: personal *private* experience, supports it -- but I did believe that they occur, long before I had such personal experience.
Is that a reason for you to believe in miracles?
No.
Nonetheless, one place where I don't think there was a scam involved, was the formation of Youth Challenge (or was it Teen Challenge), as written in the story "The Cross and the Switchblade." Do I know that to be a true case of miracles?
No. I was not there.
Do I believe it to have been a case of miracles? Yes. The patterns all indicate to me that it was probably real.
Should the government get involved, and prosecute the pastor who did this? I dunno -- I tend to be pretty libertarian.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I look at the responses to this story and notice that the posts are divided into roughly two factions:
1/8th complain that "skeptics" are too eager to shoot down any new/unpopular idea (paraphrased VERY heavily)with various and sundry reasons.
7/8ths dog pile on the 1/8th with quite a bit of name calling - referring to "head up your ass", "religious zealot" and my favorite "just a loony".
There are huge holes in arguements on BOTH sides, and typically - the people who posted to this topic really should read up on logical thinking and practice it some more.
Shouting "Think logically, retarded bitch!" is just plain dumb.
Insulting someone for religious beliefs is just plain dumb.
Besides - the world is alot more fun if you just DON'T ask for proof. Believe anything anyone says to you. It makes life oh-so-much more exciting.
I'm the guy that when he heard the old kids story about "step on a crack, break your momma's back" was found on the playground stamping on the broken sidewalk screaming "That's for beating me when my sister broke the car windshield and blamed it on me, you insensitive harpy!!!"
One rule of thumb that I have come to believe is: given a sufficient lack of evidence on a given subject, people will invent beliefs.
A simple example: imagine a small village next to a large mountain. The mountain is steep and treacherous so no one has ever climbed the mountain. Telescopes don't exist so no one can see the mountain in detail and there exist parts of the mountain that are completely out of view. Given time you can bet that various dreams/imaginings of the nature of the mountain would turn into stories which would become myths and eventually some people would believe that these well aged stories are true. We would look at this and say "No, believing those stories are silly. The real answer to What is on the mountain? is I don't know." but given an absense of answers people would rather invent answers than face the troubling prospect that they don't know the answer.
Which is a shame since admiting I don't know is a necessary precondition for learning.
what is a dragon but a dinosaur?
Did you forget the big wings, breathes fire, coexisted with humans part?
Might griffins and unicorns be extinct species?
Griffins? There's no way you could have a flying lion. Simple lift calculations prohibit it (the same lift calculations that get thousands of airplanes in the air everyday.)
Is it possible that unicorns are extinct species? Sure. But it's possible the pushme-pullme is an extinct species. In either case, it'd be nice to see just the least bit of hard evidence.
In 1799, the platypus was first described by a British scientist, Dr George Shaw.
Why was he a fool? Come on, he probably got a dozen of these type of things a week. Was he supposed to believe in every furred fish and other bizzare creature that went across his desk? He responded in exactly the correct way - he took the time to investigate the reality of what he was faced with when faced with doubts, instead of trumpeting it to the stars everytime someone tossed a hoax across his desk.