Nonsense Intolerance cont.

As I’ve stated before I have a pretty low tolerance for nonsense masquerading as science. Well last Thursday I hit DEFCON 4.
On the way home from work I stopped by the library to pick up a few books that I had on hold. I also noticed that Victoria had a few on the shelf too. So I picked them up. One of them was a DVD titled simply “Brain”. The cover looked like a National Geographic type program. It looked interesting. I even had a pleasant conversation the librarian about how interesting it looked. After dinner Victoria suggested that we sit down as a family and watch it.
It started off just fine. Slick computer graphics showed cutaways of the brain. They then moved over to interview scientists who were doing research on that particular part. The format kind of reminded me of the Universe series that we really love. So the format felt comfortable. The first half hour of the program was just fine. I take issue with a little bit of the ethics of using this type of brain science to improve combat forces but the science was well done. Then it took a turn off the deep end.
The last half hour was about ESP. They extensively interviewed the unremarkable cold-reader, John Edward and explored his so-called psychic ability as if it was a foregone conclusion. That’s when I really blew my top. The first step to investigating any phenomena is to see it the phenomena really exists. You don’t speculate as to how something works until you’ve determined that it works. But that is exactly what Dr. Dean Radin did. And they gave him the last ten minutes of the show to spout his nonsense.
I completely lost it during one scene. Radin had speculated that during one of his readings Edward’s heart rate would synchronize with his subjects. When he tested it and found that their heart rates did not synchronize he interpreted this clear defeat by claiming that he must be syncing with the person who had passed on. Unbelievable! His test failed completely and he interprets the results as a success. But not just any success, a success that is unfalsifiable. How in the world could we test to see if Edward is syncing with a person who has crossed over? Radin has obviously convinced himself that psychic phenomena is real and all of his results, positive or negative are interpreted to support that forgone conclusion. The kids were laughing at me by this point. I was not reserving any comment and they thought it was funny that I was yelling at the TV. “You do know that they can’t really hear you, don’t you, Dad?”
I was patiently waiting for the token skeptical response. They had it. It was about a 15 second shot of the cover of Skeptical Inquirer with overdubbing that said little more than some in the scientific community question Dr. Radin’s research. That's it? Something as controversial as psychics and you can only spare 15 seconds and one still graphic.
After the program was over Victoria noticed that the program was produced by the History channel. If there is a more inappropriately named TV channel I can’t think of it. A close second it ABC Family. What in the world does a program on ESP have to do with History? But this is the same station that has marathons on UFO stories, etc.
So afterword I took advantage of the teaching moment to talk to the kids about what psychics really do. I showed them a few youtube.com videos of psychics being tragically wrong and having no remorse about the consequences of their wild guesses. I then took out a deck of cards and showed them how I could steer the kids into picking the card I had chosen and making them think that they had chosen it. I then showed them a video of Dr. Richard Wiseman doing a psychic prediction and explained to them exactly how it works.
Hey I’d think it was really cool if ESP really existed. But it’ll take more than these con artists and their carefully selected rubes to prove it to me. Shame on the History channel for giving an once of credibility to these con artists and pretending that there is any scientific validity to ESP.

Amen

I've just discovered this guy and I love his work. Far too much of what we call entertainment is about stuff that really doesn't matter. This guy is not.
He could have done with out the potty mouth on the last line but I wouldn't suggest he change it.

DragonCon with Aaron

Last Saturday, Aaron and I went down to DragonCon. It’s a science-fiction, fantasy and pop culture convention. As I grow older I don’t enjoy crowds nearly as much as I used to. So I have avoided these types of scenes for quite sometime. (I’ve been more claustrophobic at a movie theater than I’ve ever been in a cave.) However, a few years ago I got involved with an online community of skeptics, critical thinkers and rationalists. Piggybacked with all the actor autograph sessions, how to make cool costume classes and Dungeons and Dragons game sessions they a have a science and skepticism track too. This is only the second year for it and I wanted to get a chance to meet and talk with some of the folks I’ve been emailing, blog commenting, facebooking, listen to their podcasts and otherwise internet stalking for the last several years. So I braved the crowds and the chaos and Aaron and I went down.

I could only manage to squeeze in one day of the lectures so we were running back and forth to make sure that we saw the ones I wanted but I also had to make sure that Aaron didn’t feel like I was forcing him to sit through something he felt was boring. So I had to throw in several hours of shopping for costumes and looking at mangas and comic books. That was actually very fun too, but I was pleasantly surprised that Aaron had such a good time hanging out with me at the skeptical events and lectures.

The first lecture that we attended was Seth Shostak from the SETI institute. I’ve been listening to his podcast, Are We Alone for a few years. I’ve seen him on Colbert Report and so I knew that he’d be entertaining. Seth did a great job of explaining the “real” search for aliens and really showed that science and reality can but just if not even more interesting than the science fiction being show in neighboring rooms of the same hotel.

Next we saw Richard Saunders do a great little presentation targeted at teaching kids how to be critical thinkers. They did a live dowsing experiment and Aaron actually got to participate. I was very impressed with the relatively simple way that they showed the importance of making sure that any tests and experiments are blinded. Then they showed the added layer of making the test double blind. Saunders did a great job of making skepticism seem fun. All too often skeptics get portrayed as being cynics. Saunders and everybody else did a great job of debunking that notion.

Between lectures I was able to talk to the folks at the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. I would have loved to have stayed through Sunday to have seen their live taping of their podcast but I just couldn’t fit it into my already hectic schedule. I thanked them for saving me from talk radio. I like listening to news and information rather than just listing to music while I work and years ago their podcast was one of the first that I found to fill the void after I started boycotting the noise, illogic and repetition coming from talk radio.

The last lecture before we heeded home was a panel discussion With Seth Shostak, Joe Nichol, and Phil Plait that was moderated by Pamela Gay. Each panelist talked for about ten minutes about their own area of expertise and then opened the floor for questions. The questions were the most enjoyable part of the discussion. A few folks from the regular DragonCon crowd had wandered in and I’m not sure it was exactly what they expected. The phrase “alien hunter” was in the lecture description. All the members of the panel did a great job of explaining that it’s not that we don’t believe, belief has nothing to do with it. We just haven’t seen enough evidence to convince us that flying saucers are real.

Shostak made the comparison of aliens visiting Earth to Spaniards visiting America. 50 years after the Columbus everybody in America had mounds of evidence that Spaniards were here. It’s been 50 years since the first flying saucer and alien abduction stories jumping into the culture. Why don’t we have a comparable body of evidence? I thought the analogy was perfect and actually rather funny.

I knew that I would enjoy the skeptic events, but I was again, really surprised how much Aaron enjoyed them. Victoria and I have always been science geeks. We hardly watch any TV and the shows the kids really like are educational stuff on PBS. We check out Nova videos from the library. Even the few fiction series that we watch have a high level of science and rationality to them. I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised that Aaron would enjoy it. After all he’s been hanging out with me for the last 15 years. I guess I just didn’t realize that so much was rubbing off.

Measuring Progress

The world of quantum physics is really bizarre. Some of the things that our world does on this microscopic level just don’t make sense to our brains that have evolved to survive in our world of medium sized objects like trees, dogs and automobiles. On the quantum level there is one particular thing really intrigues me. It appears that the very act of measuring some things changes them. It’s quite the paradox that when you try to measure the quantum state of some particles the quantum state changes as soon as you’ve measured it. So you can technically only know what the state of that particle was at the time you measured it but It’s likely something different now that you’ve measures it. The analogy isn’t perfect by any means but a macroscopic example of this would be something like a speedometer on a car. Even a perfect speedometer has a little bit of friction. That friction would tend to slow down the car just a little. How ironic that the very act of trying to measure a car’s top speed would be impeded by the very process of measuring that speed.

So why did I bring this up today? Well you see last night I went to a curriculum night for my son’s middle school. In our world of strict state and federal over-involvement when it comes to the school system the concept of measuring a student’s progress has taken on a life of its own. And the “No Child Left Behind” program has made that even worse. At our curriculum night every single one of my son’s teachers expressed thinly veiled contempt at the sheer volume of government mandated testing that is required this year. They all hinted at the fact that there were so many tests scheduled that they didn’t even have time to teach the kids that material. Just like measuring the quantum state of a photon or the top speed of a car, it appears that we can’t accurately determine the performance of a public school student without adversely affecting the very education being tested.

Earlier this week I listened to a podcast that stressed the necessity of unstructured play in the lives of children. The doctor doing these studies found that during these unstructured play times is when kids learn compassion, empathy, irony, flexibility and forgiveness. I’m concerned that in our effort to measure and quantify our children’s ability in algebra, history, science and literature that we are crippling their learning of other, ultimately much more important concepts.

*****