The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

by Steven Novella

In fact, the expectations of fellow workers may have more of an impact on be...

The self-help industry is largely selling placebo/Hawthorne effects as well.

At this point reality is more complex than even the experts have a handle on.

31. Skeptics’ Guide Entry: Cold Reading

Section: Cautionary Tales

See also: Me...

Cold reading is a collection of mentalism techniques used to create the illusion of having gained specific knowledge about a target through supernatural means. The techniques involve use of vague statements, high-probability guesswork, and feeding back knowledge gained from the subject the...

Like any magic trick, a good performance can seem amazing, even inexplicable. Once you know how the trick is done, however, it becomes embarrassingly mundane.

The basics of cold reading involve starting with general statements that are likely to be true about anyone:

Going from vague statements to specific examples when connecting a guess to yourself is a known psychological phenomenon. It was first described by the psychologist Bertram R. Forer in 1949 and is now known as the Forer effect, although it’s also often called the Barnum effect after the famous carnival showman.

All of these factors apply to cold readings. Readers pretend the information is specific to the target. They carefully craft their persona and the atmosphere of the reading to create the proper mystique of authority. And they mainly tell people what they want to hear.

Experienced cold readers are very knowledgeable about statistics—the most common names, jobs, or eye color. That kind of statistical information is useful for other mentalist tricks too. Mentalists may know very specific things. For example, knowing that most airlines have red in their logo allows them to predict, about an airline crash, “I see red on the tail.”

Skilled cold readers may also remember information blurted out by their target early in the reading, which they will ignore and then feed back to them later as if they divined the information themselves.

Cold readers are opportunistic an...

Cold readers may also use information obtained through other means. When this is done it’s technically a “hot reading.”

The art of cold reading also involves turning misses into hits. If a statement about the subject of a reading turns out not to be true, well then maybe it’s true of the subject’s friend who is with them.

A miss can also be turned into a prediction. You haven’t found a lost animal recently? Well, keep that one in mind—you will in the near future.

Most people who visit a psychic, reader, or healer want to believe; they want a successful reading, even if they fancy themselves initially skeptical. Subjects will typically remember all the lucky hits and forget the misses, even egregiously blatant misses, so that the reader’s performance will be all the more impressive in the retelling.

Now that you know how cold readings are done, however, you are less likely to be impressed by the random hits of clever guessing. Even you, Mark.

32. Skeptics’ Guide Entry: Free Energy

Section: Cautionary Tales

See also: Perpetual Motion...

Free energy is the claim that the law of conservation of energy can be broken, that we can create some process that ...

They could be misguided, scientifically illiterate, a hopeless crank, have a tenuous relationship with reality, or simply be a con artist knowingly lying. But chances are they are not, as they would have us believe, a lone brilliant scientist who has succeeded where all others have failed in achieving the seemingly impossible.

There is one characteristic that I have found to be almost ubiquitous among free-energy claimants—an utter lack of humility.

Long-Lasting Motion Is Not Free Energy

Missing All the Energy Inputs

Converting Energy from One Form to Another

All We Need to Do Is Scale Up

Fraud

Lack of Humility

Perpetual motion machines are the ultimate crank magnets.

Free-energy devices themselves are a tangible metaphor for the crank mind. They’re elaborate, often fascinating and even beautiful, and include a great deal of technical detail. But they’re missing something essential for real science and progress.

They are cut off from reality, removed from the scientific community. They are monuments to arrogance. And mo...

33. Skeptics’ Guide Entry: Quantum Woo

Section: Cautionary Tales

See also: Umm… nothing co...

Today one of the most popular legitimate scientific ideas used to justify nonsense is quantum mechanics.

One reason is its unmitigated success. It has been so successful and so impactful that quantum theory and relativity are considered the premier scientific theories of the entire twentieth century.

A significant portion of the world’s gross domestic product is completely based on quantum mechanics. Transistors, computers, lasers, even the World Wide Web would not exist without quantum mechanics.

The overall allure of quantum theory for the mystic is that it is so counterintuitive. It’s only counterintuitive to us, however, because we evolved in a macroscopic world where quantum and relativistic effects are not apparent.

So we can be forgiving when non-geniuses today have a hard time wrapping their brains around relativity and quantum theory. But this leads to the potential for pseudoscientists to say, “Hey, I know my claims are weird and fantastical, but quantum theory is weird and fantastical, so therefore I may be onto something.” That’s when common misconceptions about quantum theory can cross the line into quantum woo.

Chopra’s moon comment exemplifies a common theme in quantum woo, that the bizarre phenomena of the quantum realm bubble up easily into our macroscopic realm of everyday life. This is simply untrue. Decoherence is so universal that once you start looking at anything much bigger than an atom, the weirdness starts disappearing. That’s why quantum computers and similar experiments are so hard to pull off. The high level of isolation or extreme cold required to demonstrate quantum behavior is exceedingly difficult to maintain.

For Chopra to think that the moon is in some superposition that requires the regard of a conscious mind to be fully actualized shows that he has left modern quantum theory and is well into Quantum Woo Land. (Actually, I think he is the mayor of Quantum Woo Land. Someone give him a sash.)

By now, you may have recognized that quantum woo is often used as a giant argument from ignorance. It’s often invoked as something we don’t fully understand and therefore my magic is real.

34. Skeptics’ Guide Entry: Homunculus Theory

Section: Cautionary Tales

See also: Pseud...

Homunculus theory is a class of medical philosophy that assumes one part of the body contains a function...

The word “homunculus” originated in the seventeenth century, when the practice of alchemy was still in its heyday.