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Mass Media Funk is a commentary on mass media stories about the scientific,
the paranormal, the supernatural, and anything else that yanks at my
eyebrows.
Robert Todd Carroll
©copyright 2007
SkepDic.com
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Winking Alien promotional graphic for program on pseudoscience
November 19, 1997. Scientific American Frontiers took on
pseudoscience in "Beyond Science?," one of a series of science specials
currently being shown on public television stations. The host, Alan Alda, the mischievous
Hawkeye of M*A*S*H fame, joined in a fake alien autopsy, a dowsing experiment, a fake palm
reading, a graphology test, a simple test of a claim
made by those who practice therapeutic touch, and a visit to Hal
Puthoff's latest project on
"zero-point
energy." Several skeptics, including Ray Hyman, Barry Beyerstein, Stephen
Weinberg and Philip Klass, offered their views, but the main focus was not on debunking
specific pseudosciences. The purpose of the program was to explore the differences between
scientific and pseudoscientific methods, between "rational" and
"irrational" thinking.
The main lesson, it seems to me, was that the scientific method is
characterized by skepticism and mistrust of human nature. Of course there is no such thing
as A Scientific Method of Discovery, but there is a method to scientific thinking
and it includes being constantly vigilant against self-deception and being careful not to
rely upon insight or intuition in place of rigorous and precise empirical testing of
theoretical and causal claims.
While each of the examples of pseudoscience treated in this program was
aptly chosen, I think the segment on dowsing exemplifies one of the more significant
characteristics of the difference between science and pseudoscience. Three dowsers were
featured and each was extremely confident of his ability to find water with a dowsing rod.
Each claimed to have had many successful dowsing experiences over the years, which was
proof to them that dowsing "works."
Alda tried the dowsing rods and sure enough they crossed over where it had
been suggested to him that there would be water. It is thought that the authentic dowser
is unaware of subtle movements in his hands which cause the rod to bend. The movements
occur when the dowser thinks he is near his target. There may be a variety of sensual
clues which suggest the target. The dowser, however, does not reflect on those clues and
is essentially unaware of their influence. In any case, none of the dowsers considered it
important to doubt their dowsing powers or to wonder if they were self-deceived. They had
never considered a scientific test of their powers; for, each of them thought that the
fact that they had been successful over the years at dowsing was proof enough.
Furthermore, when each dowser failed--the one in a controlled experiment and the others on
the job of a well site that went over 600 feet for naught--they did not consider for a
moment that the failure could be indicative that their beliefs in dowsing were in error.
One of the dowsers who had led a drilling company to a dry site blamed the failure to find
water on himself, not dowsing. He didn't do it right, didn't follow the right method or
correctly interpret the signs. Or, they had drilled just a little off, barely missing the
fracture he knew had to be there at 161 feet. The man doing the drilling commented that he
didn't think there was anything to dowsing and dowsers. He'd seen dowsers proved wrong too
many times to believe in dowsing. The driller also claimed, however, that 99% of the time
you'll get water no matter where you drill. The driller was skeptical because the evidence
seemed to falsify the dowsers' claims. That skeptical attitude, plus the fact that perhaps
the odds are very great of hitting water in most places one might consider drilling, plus
the concern over self-deception, would have led a scientist to devise a test of dowsing's
claims, a test which would not rely on subjective impressions or selective memory and
which would eliminate as far as possible the likelihood of chance being a factor in the
outcome.
One of the dowsers claimed he could find metal objects, as well as water.
He agreed to a test which involved randomly selecting numbers which corresponded to
buckets which had been placed upside down in a field. The numbers determined which buckets
a metal object would be placed under. The one doing the placing of the objects was not the
same person who went around with the dowser as he tried to find the objects. This double-blind method is typical of science, to avoid the
possibility that the investigator's knowledge might influence the outcome of the test. The
exact odds of finding a metal object by chance could be calculated. (For example, if there
are 100 buckets and 10 of them have a metal object, then getting 10% correct would be
predicted by chance. That is, over a large number of attempts, getting about 10% correct
would be expected of anyone, with or without a dowsing rod. On the other hand, if someone
consistently got 80% or 90% correct, and we were sure he or she was not cheating, that
would confirm the dowser's powers. After confirming such powers, scientists would
proceed to try to come up with a theoretical explanation. Pseudoscientists are wont to
offer explanations for phenomena which have not even been established to exist.) The
dowser walked up and down the lines of buckets with his rod but said he couldn't get any
strong readings. When he selected a bucket he qualified his selection with something to
the effect that he didn't think he'd be right. He was right: he was never right! He didn't
find a single metal object despite several attempts. As Alda pointed out, this didn't
disprove dowsing. What it did prove, though, was that nothing could shake the faith of the
dowser. He couldn't explain why he couldn't perform, but that fact didn't dampen his
belief in dowsing or in his ability to dowse. The impression was that no amount of
empirical evidence would ever convince him that he was wrong. Such an attitude is typical
of pseudoscience.
Each of the dowsers claimed that the mind plays a role in influencing the
dowsing rods. But rather than accept Ray Hyman's explanation that the rods move to fit the
dowser's expectations, one of the dowsers proffered that ESP is
what influences the mind to influence the hands which move the rods. Alda commented that
that claim is truly beyond science, for there is no way to test the claim that it is ESP
which is influencing the dowser. Still, one could do a double-blind test to discover
whether the dowser using dowsing rods could find water or metal at a greater than chance
rate, but none of the dowsers felt such a test was necessary.
The attitude of the pseudoscientist was also demonstrated in the segment
on therapeutic touch (TT). Those who practice TT believe they are able to move
"energy," some sort of psychic force field or chi
which they believe permeates the body and surrounding aura.
They move their hands a few inches above the body, appearing to be pushing or moving some
invisible body surrounding the physical body. TTers claim they can feel the energy flowing
in their patients. They claim we all have this energy and that they can feel it. Like the
dowsers, they know TT works from experience. They've seen it work again and again. And it
never occurs to them that they could be self-deceived or that they should devise a
scientific test to rule out self-deception as being the main force at work here.
A young girl devised a simple test for the TTers. Our young scientist had
a randomly generated list of trials to perform which consisted of the words 'right' or
'left.' These referred to the right hand or the left hand of the TTer who was on the other
side of a thin wall with holes near the bottom for her hands to go through. The young
scientist would tell her subject when she (the scientist) had placed one of her hands
under the TTer's right or left hand. The scientist would record what hand she had placed
her hand under and what hand the subject had claimed she felt "energy" coming
from. This is a very simple test to determine whether the feeling of energy the TTer has
is objective or subjective, based on really feeling energy or on thinking she was
feeling energy. Of course, this test does not test the main claims of therapeutic touch.
Those claims are untestable; for, the energy allegedly measured is not physical energy and
can only be felt by people, not measured by any machine. Still one could devise a
controlled study where patients being treated in the same way for the same illness are
divided into two groups, one which gets TT and one which doesn't. Several physicians could
evaluate the patients before and after their treatments. These physicians would not be the
ones providing the treatment, to avoid their knowledge of who was getting TT from
influencing their patient evaluations. A third group might also be studied, one which was
given "fake" TT, i.e., TT by a skeptic who thinks this stuff is metaphysical
non-sense. The point of the Scientific American program was not to do such a test, but to
demonstrate what methods scientists would use to investigate and inquire, as opposed to
the lack of interest in such methods by pseudoscientists, who think they already know the
truth from personal experience and insight. Double-blind tests
are part of the scientific method of inquiry. Such tests are considered unnecessary by
pseudoscientists and thus they risk being self-deceived and in error in a profound and
fundamental way.
The palm reading segment was interesting because it involved getting a
subject who did not believe in palm reading to have readings done by skeptic Ray Hyman. Dr
Hyman used to do this stuff for a living when he was a young college student. He got so
good at cold reading that he came to believe that he was
psychic. The skeptical subject was so impressed by Hyman's abilities that she started
talking like a true believer before the interview was over. She obviously tuned in to
certain claims Hyman made about her. She focused on what she liked hearing. She didn't
even seem to notice when Hyman was fishing (using general knowledge about people of her
gender, age, etc. and specific knowledge based on what she was wearing, how she presented
herself and how she responded to his questions, etc.). Nor did she notice that most of the
claims he made about her were based on information she had provided herself by her words
and gestures in response to his questions. Like the dowser, she used selective perception and focused on the "hits" and
ignored or downplayed the "misses." A scientific method of inquiry requires that
the "misses" not be dismissed, but recorded and evaluated. This segment of the
program seems to have been designed to remind us of the danger of letting down our guard
against self-deception and wishful thinking. It is a danger which scientists must
constantly battle. Even the wisest amongst us must be careful not to deceive ourselves
into thinking that we are too clever to be tricked or too smart to be led by suggestion to
believe things which are questionable. That is one reason why scientists devise rigorous
tests of claims: to prevent personal desire or beliefs from affecting outcomes.
The most amusing sequence of the program was the fake alien autopsy. There
was a little evaluation of the Alien Autopsy film promoted on the Fox Alien Network last
summer, demonstrating the poor quality of the fraud, especially the poor quality of the
dummy alien itself. The fake alien used by Scientific American was designed in Hollywood
and was very realistic. It seemed to have a skeletal structure and be a real body, while
the Fox Fake was more like a rag doll stuffed with sausages. This segment of the program
discussed the Roswell phenomenon: that thousands of people
reject the simple story of a weather balloon used in an Air Force experiment which crashed
in the desert. The Roswell crowd are convinced that there is a government conspiracy to
hide the truth that aliens crash landed on earth in 1947. It is encouraging to see so many
skeptical people, but the skepticism of the Roswell crowd is skepticism gone awry.
Testimony from reliable sources is rejected in favor of testimony from unreliable sources.
Facts are ignored if they support the simple explanation. General distrust in the
government is taken as sufficient reason to believe in the alien story and reject any
explanation, however plausible, which supports the weather balloon story. The mass media,
especially the Fox Alien Network, has done its share of encouraging and promoting the
Roswell phenomenon. Roswell is an example of what happens if the imagination is allowed to
run wild without a check in reality. (As one young boy on a holiday with his parents in
Roswell put it: "if nothing happened, then they probably wouldn't have all this
stuff.") Scientific skepticism is not the blank check to doubt everything which does
not fit with one's beliefs, as the Roswell skeptics seem to think. Scientific skepticism
requires that the physical evidence be taken for what it is, not rejected on general
grounds of distrust of the government. Scientific skepticism requires that one not
speculate about evidence which is not available on the general suspicion that such
evidence is being concealed. Scientific skepticism requires that one consider all the
testimony from everyone who was present or involved in the original project, and that that
testimony be evaluated against the actual evidence which exists, not against speculative
evidence which some claim existed.
Praising Occam's razor, Alda presented the
explanation which Phillip Klass and others have made regarding project Mogul. He
interviewed Charlie Moore who was part of the original Air Force project and laid out the
non-alien explanation. For the Roswell crowd, however, this issue of aliens crash landing
on earth is truly beyond science. No amount of scientific evidence or reasoning is likely
to convince the true believer that what happened at Roswell was nothing extraterrestrial.
Belief in such matters is akin to religious faith in God. I am struck by the similarity in
pose between William F. Buckley's response in a recent interview promoting his new book on
God and that of the Roswell crowd. "What's the evidence for the resurrection of
Christ?" asked the interviewer. Buckley gave two pieces of evidence. One, there were
eyewitnesses who testified to it. Two, the Jews and Romans did not deny it. The latter is
the argumentum ad ignorantiam: it is so because you don't prove or argue that it
isn't so. To the former, the skeptic responds with a question: why trust such testimony?
With David Hume, we ask "what is more likely? that these witnesses got it right or
that they are deluded, mistaken or lying?" And we wonder why some people use the
methods of science when it suits their purposes but reject those methods in favor of
faith, also when it suits their purposes. We ascribe such a pose to the will to believe,
but we are nevertheless left nonplused at such loyalty.
Barry Beyerstein, who has written extensively on
the pseudoscience known as graphology, joined Alda for a graphological personality
evaluation by Datagraph, a major player in this
business. [Datagraph seems to be a former major player; they seem to
be defunct as of Oct. 2000.] Their spokesman claimed that their analysis of 420 handwriting features is
accurate to 90% and is used to create a unique "mindprint" of each individual
evaluated. (Alda noted that psychologists consider psychological personality profile tests
to be "moderately reliable.") They submitted eight handwriting samples for
analysis and then reviewed the profiles, trying to figure out which one was their own.
They couldn't. Alda did an assessment and of the 14 personality traits Datagraph uses, he
thought they were right on 4 of his, wrong on 8, and 2 were maybes. He noted to Beyerstein
that it would be easy to be influenced by what you would want to be true of you, even if
it weren't, and how you could be influenced by the printed judgment to engage in a bit of
selective memory to validate the claim. Furthermore, the content of the writing
could influence the evaluator's judgment. A scientific analysis would not rely on such
sloppy techniques and subjective measures to do the evaluation. When an evaluator, John
Nezlek, was asked to comment on the reliability of Datagraph by comparing its profiles of
some subjects who also took a standard psychological personality profile test, he refused
to commit, saying that there were not a significant number of cases studied to warrant
drawing any conclusions. Such tentativeness is typical of good science, and generally
lacking in pseudoscience. Nezleck is currently doing further study on the subject.
The oddest segment on the program was a visit to a place in Texas called
the Institute for Advanced Studies, run by Scott Little and Hal Puthoff (of remote viewing fame). Their main interest seems to be
"zero-point energy" in particular, and finding a source of unlimited energy in
general. Puthoff claimed that there is enough zero-point energy in a coffee cup to
evaporate the oceans. Physicist Stephen Weinberg claimed that there might be the energy
equivalent of a gallon of gasoline in the entire earth. Since this debate seems to be a
scientific one, rather than beyond science, one might wonder why it was featured in the
program. I'm not sure myself except that Little offered some comments on the importance of
scientists to be wary of fooling themselves, especially when they are looking for the
"most fabulous object in the universe" or some such thing. People can easily
fool one another, as well as themselves, intentionally and unintentionally, and
significant steps must be taken to prevent self-deception. In one experiment which hadn't
even gotten off the ground yet, the instruments started to give readings that energy was
being produced from some mysterious source. Little commented that you have to assume it's
an error and "tear it down" before breaking out the champagne.
In the meantime, I think we can break out the champagne and congratulate
Scientific American for a program which represents one small step for public television,
and one giant leap for rationality and scientific skepticism.
further reading
November 12,
1997. "Athletes
swallow expensive doses of hope" was the title of an article by Chris Hays in the
Sacramento Bee. The article did an excellent job of explaining why it is so
difficult to get unbiased information about body building supplements: the main source of
information comes from body building magazines which are all owned by the supplement
manufacturers themselves. Even so, Hays claims that "everyone agrees" that creatine
"works." A typical ad on the internet reads
Creatine monohydrate provides safe nutritional support for athletes seeking peak
performence in short-duration, high intensity workouts. By supporting the body's natural
ability to regenerate the primary energy immediately available to working muscle, creatine
monohydrate has the potential to increase optimal work output in activities such as
weight-lifting and sprinting.
Creatine is a nitrogenous organic acid, C4H9N3O2,
found in the muscle tissue and which supplies energy for muscle contraction. Joseph Clark
has written a scientific paper on the
use of creatine in sports (J.F. Clark. "Creatine: A Review of its
Nutritional Applications in Sport." Journal of Nutrition, 14;
322-324, 1998. ). It is very technical sounding but he notes that "30%
of the population have a diet and metabolism such that they do not benefit from creatine
supplementation." The only negative side effects mentioned were water retention and
heat intolerance. The positive benefits include such things as an increase in muscle
peak torque production while decreasing plasma ammonia accumulation. The author does
note that a healthy body self-regulates the production of chemicals (creatine is
synthesized in the liver and kidneys, using three amino acids derived from food intake)
and will shut down production when more of the chemical would be redundant. Furthermore,
beyond a certain amount of some chemicals the body simply will not use them; hence, futher
supplementation is pointless or harmful (if the body can't eliminate the excess, for
example). (This is why certain supplements are probably pointless, such as DHEA. Taking a supplement may shut down its natural production by
the adrenal glands.)
October 26, 1997. An article in the New York Times by Jane E. Brody reported
the results of a 13-year study involving over 10,000 Americans which "found no
evidence of increased longevity among vitamin and mineral supplement users in the United
States." This is especially bad news, since most of the people who take vitamins are
non-smokers who don't drink heavily and who eat more fruits and vegetable than the rest of
us. (The study also found that supplements failed to help the longevity of smokers, heavy
drinkers, and those with chronic diseases.) The results of the study have been out for
four years. Nevertheless, it is estimated that some $6.5 billion a year is being spent by
Americans on vitamin and mineral pills. Why? I suppose because there is a chance that the
pills might help fight cancer, give one more energy, help one live longer, etc. It is true
that the information regarding nutrition, vitamins and minerals is bewildering, confusing
and contradictory; that uncertainty gives some wishful thinkers hope that the stuff will
do them good. Maybe. And maybe that is why vitamins and minerals are so popular among MLM programs. But why ignore the possibility that these pills
might be doing some harm? Vitamin E can interfere with the action of vitamin K (which
promotes blood clotting). Too much calcium can limit the absorption of iron and too much
zinc can reduce the level of copper in the body (decreasing "good" cholesterol).
Folic acid can react adversely with anticonvulsants and each year the greatest number of
poisoning deaths among children is from iron supplements meant for adults.
It might seem like $6.5 billion is a lot of money, but consider that Americans spend
about $2.5 billion on Halloween candy and costumes.
August 21, 1997. In a repressed-memory case, the 2nd District Court of Appeals
overturned a ruling by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Wendell Mortimer, saying testimony
is inadmissible if procured by administering the drug sodium amytal, a so-called
"truth-serum." Holly Ramona was given the drug by Marche Isabella, who had
assured Ms. Ramona that she was incapable of lying while under the influence of sodium
amytal. Isabella also told Ramona, who sought treatment for bulimia and depression, that
80% of those with eating disorders had been sexually abused. The evidence for this claim
was not presented. Soon after being given this dubious information and the drug, Ramona
began having "flashbacks" of childhood abuse by her father. Assured by another
therapist, Richard Rose, that she could not lie while under sodium amytal, Ramona became
convinced the "flashbacks" were genuine memories. She accused her father of
molesting her. He denied it and she sued him for damages. Her father, Gary Ramona, sued
the therapists for planting false memories in his daughter. He was awarded $500,000 by a
Napa County, California, jury. Even so, his wife divorced him and he was fired from his
$400,000-a-year job as a wine marketing executive as a result of the charges made by his
daughter.
The unreliability of testimony influenced by sodium amytal has long been recognized in
the scientific community. Such testimony has been barred from use in California courts
since 1959. According to scientific experts, the drug makes subjects suggestible and prone
to talking, but is not a "truth-serum." Subjects can lie, confabulate,
fantasize, etc., as well as tell the truth while under the influence of sodium
amytal.
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