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

by Steven Novella

Or as Young and colleagues (1990, p.104) have put it, “[T]he human desire for explanations of all natural phenomena—a drive that spurs inquiry on many levels—aids the conspiracist in the quest for public acceptance.”

A 2016 study by Damaris Graeupner and Alin Coman found that conspiracy thinking correlates with feelings of isolation and helplessness. This fits nicely with the notion that conspiracy theories are a pathological attempt to feel in control.

interesting

A witch hunt is a dedicated and unjust investigation or prosecution of a person or group in which the extreme and threatening nature of the alleged crimes is used to justify suspending or ignoring the usual rules of evidence.

In other words, even when there is no evidence that would ordinarily be accepted in court, such as confession, eyewitnesses, or hard evidence, the witch may still be guilty because of other more subtle “indications.” This could literally be anything. The book essentially outlines a method for using confirmation bias to prove suspicions.

Malleus. witchhunt.

“the placebo effect” is a misnomer and contributes to confusion, because it’s not a single effect but the net result of many possible factors.

A common belief is that the placebo effect is largely a mind-over-matter effect, but this is a misconception. There’s no compelling evidence that the mind can create healing simply through will or belief. However, mood and belief can have a significant effect on the subjective perception of pain.

much of so-called “alternative medicine” practice is placebo medicine—using elaborate rituals with fanciful explanations to produce nothing but imaginary placebo effects. This strategy depends on the misperception of placebo effects as being real mind-over-matter effects, when in fact they are mostly illusion and deception.

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in later years relieved of them. —Hypatia

The distilled narrative of the Hawthorne effect is this: The act of observing people’s behavior changes that behavior.

“Hawthorne effect,” coined in 1953 by psychologist J. R. P. French, derives from experiments conducted between 1924 and 1933 in Western Electric’s factory at Hawthorne, a suburb of Chicago. The experimenters made various changes to the working environment, like adjusting light levels, and noticed that regardless of the change, performance improved. If they increased light levels, performance improved. If they decreased light levels, performance improved. They eventually concluded that observing the workers was leading to the enhanced performance, and the actual change in working conditions was irrelevant. This is now referred to as an observer effect.

interesting

most one-paragraph summaries in the public consciousness are not essentially correct. Sometimes more detail and nuance are needed to get to an acceptable level of correctness.

They also varied the duration of breaks and the intervals between them, with the same results. They gave shorter workdays, which increased productivity per hour, although if they decreased them too much, daily productivity decreased.

In a series of teacher expectation experiments, for instance, teachers were told that one set of students performed well on an aptitude test and were expected to perform well in the class. Over the next two years, those students performed better than the other students, even though the groups were actually equal at the onset. Further, the teachers sometimes expressed annoyance at students in the low-expectation group who did very well, exceeding expectations.

There were also the 1900 punch-card experiments of psychologist Joseph Jastrow. One group of workers in the US Census Bureau were told that their quota on the tabulating machines was 550 punch cards per day, which they were able to produce. When asked to increase their quota, they indicated that this would be too difficult. A second group were told nothing, and they produced 2,100 punch cards per day.

interesting

In the punch-card experiments there seems to be a self-expectation bias. People’s perception of what is reasonable and even possible was easily established by creating a set point. I think this would now be described as part of the anchoring heuristic—expectations can be anchored to a specific value, and later judgments then use that anchor as a reference point. Setting a quota is a strong manifestation of anchoring expectations.

Workers also influence each other. They establish norms of behavior and expectations for standards and productivity. In fact, the expectations of fellow workers may have more of an impact on behavior than management.

If people go on a diet, for example, the details of their diet don’t seem to matter (again, like the light levels, as long as they’re not so extreme as to create a functional problem). The fact that they are paying attention to what they eat and trying to be more active has an effect.

The bottom line of all this is that any intervention in almost any context will subjectively seem to work. There are a host of observational and psychological factors that will result in a real change in behavior but also a biased assessment of the results. This often leads to the false conclusion that the specific intervention (a treatment, a diet, a self-help strategy, or whatever) has specific efficacy and therefore the underlying philosophy must be valid.

Interesting. So the ceremony works itself

benign and reasonable interventions, even if they have no specific effect, may be a sensible way to make people feel like you are paying attention, that you care, that their voice is being heard, and may therefore improve the culture of the workplace.

Cold reading is used in stage magic for entertainment, but also by a wide variety of less honest practitioners to feign psychic or arcane abilities.

The basics of cold reading involve starting with general statements that are likely to be true about anyone: “I see you have financial concerns.” “You feel as if no one truly understands you.” “Your family has been on your mind a lot recently.” Such vague assertions can seem quite specific when someone is applying them to you. As you nod and express amazement, the reader makes other comments, following up on only those statements that garner a good reaction. The psychic says, “Maybe your sister . . . or an aunt . . . definitely a woman close to you . . .”—and he or she watches for your reactions to gauge when the trail is getting warm. Working this way, in a few moments the cold reader is telling you your most intimate secrets.

Cold readers may also use information obtained through other means. When this is done it’s technically a “hot reading.” The most infamous example of this is the faith healer Peter Popoff. He would have his targets fill out “prayer cards” with personal information, including what health issue they wanted healed. He was caught by James Randi (a famous magician and skeptic who uses his knowledge of magic to investigate fraud) having his wife feed him this information through a radio earpiece while pretending to be inspired by angels.

There is one characteristic that I have found to be almost ubiquitous among free-energy claimants—an utter lack of humility. This is a general feature of pseudoscience but seems to be epitomized by the type of cranks who think they have surpassed the fundamental laws of physics.

Animal magnetism, to Mesmer, was an alleged magnetic force created by living things that he could manipulate to cure rich, anxious clients of whatever ailed them. Today the meaning has morphed into “sexual attraction.” We also talk of people being “mesmerized” when something draws their rapt attention.

Interesting

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. By the time you start dealing with macroscale objects with millions to quintillions of atoms, all interacting in some way, any quantum behavior is long gone, replaced by more classical Newtonian mechanics. The objects of everyday life are essentially decoherence machines.

Homunculus theory is a class of medical philosophy that assumes one part of the body contains a functional map of the entire organism.

evolution is capable of producing design, because it’s not a random process. Natural selection is the nonrandom survival of organisms based upon their inherited traits. Mutation and variation are random, and the long-term path of evolutionary change is best described as chaos, but natural selection allows for the nonrandom accumulation of favorable changes.

Biologists can examine the sequence of base pairs in genes to map out their relationships with other genes, and in that way they can build a detailed map of which genes evolved from which other genes. What we find when we compare such maps among species is that they fit into a nice pattern of branching common descent. There are multiple other independent lines of evidence that also demonstrate not only branching descent but a reasonable overlap—the different lines of evidence generally agree about which species evolved into what, when.

It has now been established beyond any scientific doubt that the mind is what the brain does. The functioning of the brain is consciousness. In a sense, we are our brains. We know, for example, that if the brain is not functioning, then you are not conscious. If we put the brain to sleep, you go to sleep. In fact, recent studies have shown that you need about 40 percent of your cortex to be healthy and active to maintain wakeful consciousness.

Different brain states correlate to different states of consciousness. For example, when you’re asleep your brain is still functioning, but in a different way than when you are awake. When you dream, your consciousness is altered in a way that correlates nicely with alterations in brain function. As the brain develops, our mental states also develop. Children are different from adults because their brains are different.

brain

Consciousness, they argue, doesn’t have the properties of material things, therefore it is not a material thing. Therefore it is something else. Let’s call it spiritual. This may sound superficially interesting, but it is utter nonsense. They are making what we call a category mistake. They are assuming that consciousness is a thing, and they’re wrong. The brain is a thing, and it has all the properties of a thing. The mind is not a thing, it is a process. The mind is not the brain, it is what the brain does—it is the brain in action.

This line of reasoning also violates Occam’s razor. I might argue that when you turn on the light switch, a light fairy goes from the switch to the light and activates the light with their own fairy light energy. When you turn off the switch, the fairy returns and the light turns off. The fairy, of course, is invisible, incorporeal, and can travel at the speed of light. There is no way you can prove that my light fairy doesn’t exist. Sure, you can argue that opening and closing a circuit correlates with the light turning off and on, but that correlation doesn’t prove causation. When the electricity is off, the fairy goes to sleep. Electricity doesn’t cause the light, it is just a medium for the fairy. The problem with my fairy hypothesis is not that it’s wrong, it’s that it is not even wrong. It is simply unnecessary. It is an added supernatural step that is entirely superfluous and doesn’t actually explain anything. Saying that the mind is caused by spirit is as unnecessary. Occam slices it away.

We don’t yet know all the elements of brain function that are essential for consciousness or know how they work together, but we are making steady progress. It does seem, however, that every part of the brain contributes its bit to consciousness.

To explain further, he encourages you to simply ask, “And then what happens?” The brain sees an image; that information goes to the association cortex, which gives it meaning as a thing; and then that information goes to the amygdala for the assignment of emotion to the thing you are seeing (if it is living). And then what? Well, then that information goes to some other part of the brain where memories are stored. And then what? Well, that provokes a pattern recognition in your memory of a previous event involving the object. And then what? Then that information goes again to the emotional centers to provoke the emotions you have associated with that memory. And the chain keeps going. It never stops. All these components of brain function that we’ve identified just keep going around in circles. The brain talks to itself, it receives new information, it activates circuits and networks, which provokes other networks, on and on until you die.

That endless chain of activity (which pauses when you sleep but is actually replaced by other types of brain activity that just don’t produce wakefulness) is your stream of consciousness. It doesn’t ever have to go anywhere or report to anything. It’s simply consciousness.

This is also the most basic function of nervous systems, to provide reward for adaptive behavior and pain for harmful behavior. Pain and reward are the essence of function. For this system to work, however, pain has to “feel” bad and reward circuitry has to “feel” good on some level. As creatures become more sophisticated, their reward and aversion circuitry also become more sophisticated. This evolves into complex emotions. Think, too, about motivation. Fear is a great motivator to get you to focus and marshal all your energy to run really hard away from that predator.

It is also what many self-help authors and gurus would have you believe. It falls under many names—mind over matter, the law of attraction, manifestation, magnetism—but all its iterations have one thing in common: Absolutely no scientific evidence backs up such ideas.

research shows there are many benefits of a negative or pessimistic outlook. Pessimism correlates with higher earnings, fewer marital problems, more effective communication, greater generosity, and less disappointment. It is apparently helpful to worry, at least to some extent. Excessive optimism can make us careless and set us up for failure.

Interesting

An excessively positive outlook can also complicate dying. Psychologist James Coyne has focused his career on end-of-life attitudes in patients with terminal cancer. He points out that dying in a culture obsessed with positive thinking can have devastating psychological consequences for the person facing death. Dying is difficult. Everyone copes and grieves in different ways. But one thing is for certain: If you think you can will your way out of a terminal illness, you will be faced with profound disappointment.

Death and positivity

Often the products being sold are themselves dubious. They may be services that seem too good to be true (can you really cut your electricity bill in half?), questionable medical products, or everyday products with extraordinary claims. You can ask yourself, “If these products are so good, why aren’t they sold in stores?”

Well said

The gray zone is when an actual product is being sold through an MLM model. In some cases the product is just a shield for what is ultimately a pyramid scheme.

Group blogs by professionals are also usually good sources of information. They’re more credible than individual blogs or web pages, which are highly variable depending on the individual. Commercial sites are generally less trustworthy. The worst sites, however, are extreme ideological sites that exist to promote a specific narrative. Sometimes the goal is to promote a narrative and sell you stuff, as on the infamous medical conspiracy site Natural News.

Narrative

It’s extremely important that you specifically look for a variety of sources and opinions. Before I accept any claim, I always want to know who disagrees with that claim and what the reasons are for their rejection of it. If possible, I then want to find out how the first side answers their critics, and how the critics answer these responses. In essence it’s important to follow a discussion through to the end. Sometimes you don’t know who has the better position until you’ve heard all the point-counterpoints and find out who has the last word.

It is also extremely useful to check yourself against other people you respect and who have the appropriate expertise. I always check my understanding of a topic against the experts when I can. If my take is different from theirs, I need to find out why. Usually it means I’m missing something.

You need to make a concerted effort not to cherry-pick—don’t just accept the first answer, or the answer you want. Don’t seek out an expert who agrees with you and then conclude that you must be correct. Seek out experts who disagree with you. Those are the people you need to listen to.

Interesting

The process is never over. All conclusions are tentative, and you should not stake them out forever or make them part of your identity. If you learn new information, happily incorporate it into your assessment. Take pride in the ability to change your mind. This doesn’t mean you never have strong opinions, just that they should be only as strong as the evidence and logic support, and open to revision.

The story of GMOs is also a lesson in how to recognize a position that is ideological rather than science-based. Ideological positions tend to be rigid. They settle on their conclusion and then search for justification, and they will change their justification as needed but never question their conclusion (which is actually their starting point).

As you’ll see, those who are against GMOs are against GMOs all the time. They will cite one reason, and if you ever definitively knock it down, they migrate over to another.

But this is part of the anti-GMO narrative, to create a false dichotomy and declare everything on one side of the divide to be suspect and not safe.

a recent review of a dozen well-designed long-term animal feeding studies comparing GM and non-GM potatoes, soy, rice, corn and triticale found that the GM and their non-GM counterparts are nutritionally equivalent.