There Are Four Lights

Last Wednesday, I spoke at the Center for Inquiry‘s monthly science cafe, Cafe Inquiry. The talk and Q&A afterwards has been uploaded to YouTube in six parts:

Part 1 is my introduction and my explanation of skepticism and why I think it’s important. I also touch on why new age magical thinking and spirituality can be so appealing and easier to promote. My goal is to use storytelling to show skeptical values as virtues.

Part 2 is an overview of manga and why I’ve chosen it as a medium to tell stories that promote skepticism. I also speak about some series that have inspired me in my approach to doing this—-which is also an excuse to talk about Masters of the Universe.

Part 3 is about my series I’m producing, Legend of the Ztarr, and how I hope it will convey messages about critical thinking and humanism.

The Q&A discussion that took place afterwards is also available:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

I must admit I had a hunch that if I clicked a link from a facebook friend that lead to a place called The Temple of Visions that I was going to find some wooness. But whatev! The best part was coming across this dude, Nassim Haramein, and The Resonance Project. It was the perfect leap from artsy new age & raw food to pseudoscience faux-physics & crop circles!

Well, who is Nassim Haramein anyway?

Nassim Haramein’s lifelong journey into the geometry of space-time has lead to a coherent understanding of the fundamental structure of the universe.

Hmm, sounds neat. I definitely prefer coherent understanding to incoherent misunderstanding and who doesn’t want to know a bit more about the fundamental structure of the universe?

In this 4 DVD presentation, Nassim will take you on a journey through humanity’s evolution, exposing the changes necessary to produce an all-encompassing Unified Physics; a unification of not only the four forces of nature, but also evolution and the occurrence of consciousness.

Holy crap! This guy has solved it all! Forget simply unifying all of physics, he’s solved the mysteries of consciousness too. One wonders why he doesn’t have a few Nobel prizes yet…

Demonstrating the parallels between this theory and ancient codes found in documents and monuments, Nassim weaves a tale which may prove to be one of the most important discoveries of our time.

Duh, of course…I always forget that ‘the ancients’ knew everything but, unfortunately, hid in all in coded documents, artwork, and monuments. Jerks. Luckily, Nassim is here to help us out.

Have you ever wondered why those science classes were at all important?

Okay, you’ll notice in his series of questions that they start off pretty fine—-I mean, I’m certainly disappointed in my high school science education (is that what he means by ‘those science classes’?). My high school science teacher pretty much ruined my desire to take any more science credits by making us practice stippling over and over and don’t you DARE make little tails on your stipples or no one will take your paper seriously because you have one, two, homg THREE tails in your drawing composed of tiny little pencil dots!!! ahem…

Were you ever curious about the mysteries of Ancient Egypt?

Who doesn’t like learning about Ancient Egypt! However, when someone brings them into a conversation about unified field theories, my woometer starts to kick in.

What about the modern mystery of crop circles?

KABLAMO! My woometer is now on fire. Smells like stupid.

These DVDs explore all of the above as well as the following ::

DVD 1 :: The Search for the Fundamental Pattern Dimensions of Geometry, Chemistry, Scaling Law, Biology, Principle of Unification, Pyramids

DVD 2 :: From Micro to Macro – Unifying the Field Geometry, Structure of the Vacuum, Crop circles

There it is again! Crop circles? And do I smell pyramid power in DVD 1?

DVD 3 :: Everything is a Black “Whole” Ancient Egypt, Archeology, Black Wholes/White Wholes

DVD 4 :: Unlocking the Mystery – The Future is in Our Hands Bible, The Arc of the Covenant, Knights Templar, Emmanuel’s Tomb, Kabbalah, Tree of Life Decoded

Nice. My woometer has completely melted. The Bible, The Arc, Knights Templar…I bet there’s more knowledge to be decoded here. What I thought was a woo sandwich has turned out to be a woo cornucopia. One detail that caught my eye was that he’s referred to as a “scientist” on the cover artwork. Um, scientist? What kind? Usually, actual scientists call themselves physicists, biologists, astronomers, astrophysicists, geologists, or ya know…whatever field they specialize in. I guess it’s pretty clear this guy doesn’t stick to being an expert in just one field. He must be a whateverologist.

As early as 9 years old, Nassim was already developing the basis for a unified hyperdimensional theory of matter and energy, which he eventually called the “Holofractographic Universe.”

Nice, I have fond memories of making Spirographs too.

Okay, maybe you might be thinking “Jeeze, Sara. Why are you picking on poor Nassim and his lame DVD? Why do you care?” Well, turns out that The Resonance Project doesn’t just sell his lame DVD, where worst case scenario might be someone wasting $84.00 USD. No, sir—-The Resonance Project offers workshops where you can become a certified “Emissary” and teach Nassim’s lame seminars to others. Worst case scenario for this is blowing $475 and doing your part to help grow a cult. This requires a special sort of face-palm:

Meditation techniques based on this knowledge will also be offered as an invaluable tool to aid in further integration, as you learn how to more effectively tap into the vacuum energy and the curvature of space and time and connect to your own personal singularity.

Go here if you like to barf

Woo begets woo. It didn’t take long to get from an innocent facebook post about going to art exhibit to the boatload of pseudoscience that is The Resonance Project. I’m probably the kind of gal who would avoid going to a place called The Temple of Visions (only out of politeness to its patrons who probably wouldn’t appreciate my big dark skeptical aura effing up their new age experience), but I know plenty of people who might check it out. And if they decided to check out what other events the venue hosts, they’d find, like I did, Resonance Emissary Jamie Janover.

Personally, I would never fall prey to Jamie’s proselytizing—-not because of my skepticism, but because I have a strict policy of not taking anyone seriously if their website uses the font Copperplate Gothic Bold.

Does God have a Future?
A Great Debate Filmed by ABC’s Nightline

Today, we attended a debate between Michael Shermer and Sam Harris vs. Deepak Chopra and Jean Houston. The debate was “Does God have a Future?” and will air on ABC Nightline on March 23rd. It was splendid  to see Shermer and Harris speak again, after each giving their own great talk, last month, at TED. Chopra was predictably absurd, dishing out his brand of woo juice cocktail—-new age pseudoscience post-modernism blended with faux quantum physics. Jean Houston, whom I’ve never heard of, was a complete embarrassment. I don’t recall anything relevant in her boring anecdotes.

I had a chance to ask a question, so I came up with one for Deepak. He had mentioned “deeper ways of knowing” and gave the impression that this was through intuition and repeatedly referred to “the subjective”. So I asked, “Without the objective scientifiic method, how can we distinguish what is true from what we simply want to be true?” Deepak answered this by saying he would answer my question, but that he didn’t want to answer any more questions after that. He then proceeded to not answer my question by doing his little Chopra word dance of nothingness.

Now, I know correlation doesn’t always mean causation, but if you want to interpret Chopra’s actions as being totally scared off by my question of skeptical awesomeness, I have no problem with that whatsoever!

Not many people know this, but our cats, Mya and Twinkle, are certified new age gurus (as you can see in the photo, Mya is clearly in her psychic trance). Like all successful charlatans new age gurus, they now have their own website!

You are now just a click away from their on-demand new age wisdom service! Of course, some close-minded skeptics accuse them of being nothing more than simple random woo generators.

Hmm, hopefully I’ve mentioned here before that something I want to accomplish in my work is to create characters who are good role models as scientists and critical thinkers and to promote the use of reality-based reasoning and good skepticism. The movie “Knowing”, with Nicolas Cage, accomplishes the complete opposite. Scientists are drunken, miserable, lonely cranks that need to learn how to be happy from those who have blind faith in magic sky people.

The director, Alex Proyas, was quoted saying he wanted the movie to explore different viewpoints, “the scientific viewpoint of the logical construct of the universe and the one of faith, where people see this incredibly complex place we live in and go, ‘Well, how could this have all just happened randomly?’“ (my bold) This is one major annoyance with the film; it doesn’t even know what science is and what viewpoint it has. Again, audiences are getting the misguided message that science claims everything is random and stuff just happens by accident.

The irony is, unlike new age garbage like numerology, scientific theories actually do make accurate predictions for the world around us. Real predictions…not just after-the-fact pattern matching that happens with divination games like astrology, tarot, and psychic readings. You can use scientific theories to accurately launch a small rover into space and have it travel to another freakin’ planet and predict where it should land on that planet, hundreds of millions of kilometers away! Or you can have a theory like evolution, which predicted, about a hundred years before the discovery of genetics, that such a system should exist–it predicted the existence of an entirely new field of science!

Science is all about discovering how the world works and the cause behind the things we see and experience. It is faith that gives empty answers for why the world is the way it is; it’s faith that tells us that the big questions about the universe are infinitely mysterious and beyond our grasp.

And, frankly, it’s a little tiring to see the happy religious characters lecturing to grumpy miserable scientist characters in films and TV. The happiest people I know are scientifically minded and lead their lives free of faith and the supernatural. All the religious and new age people I know are quite unhappy, worry-full people, who always seem to be lost and unsure. Anecdotal, I know…

It’s not hard to see why such a horrible movie is doing so well at the box office. A lot of people are full of doubt, fear, and uncertainty about the future. It’s a comforting idea that there’s a magic solution that can warn us of danger and protect us against the unknown…and the only thing you have to do is keep believing, no matter what the facts tell you.

Just keep listening to the little voices inside your head–they know a lot more than the objective voice of reason coming from your MIT colleague.

Cage, you and your pseudoscience crapfest are forcing me to quote again:

For me, it is far better to understand the universe as it really is, than to persist in delusion, however satisfying or reassuring.

-Carl Sagan

CBC Newsworld is playing Doc Zone right now with an episode called “Fly Me to the Moon”; “NASA’s 50th anniversary is marked in this documentary celebrating humans’ fascination with the moon”. But what’s with the sudden spoonfull of woo I’m seeing? They’re talking to an astrologer from Toronto (apparently the Moon represents ‘the woman’ because INSERT HIGHLY GENERALIZED STEREOTYPICAL FEMININE QUALITIES) and some guy on a piano is singing “Age of Aquarius”.

Oh, nice…next they’re talking to and about police, nurses, ambulance workers, etc., who believe that crazy(er?) stuff happens during a full moon. They could at least mention confirmation bias. sheesh.

Shame on you, Doc Zone, shame on you…

Oh how I luvs the Bad Astronomer. I believe I first came across Dr. Phil Plait’s astronomy blog when I was searching the interwebs to check up on a claim by some astrology proponents. It actually wasn’t that long ago when I got my first taste of new agers trying to make astrology sound sciency. I was pretty amazed at how easy it is to disprove all the pseudoscience claims. Thus, began my journey into the world of scepticism.

Though I’m just a hobbyist astronomer, I can turn into a bit of an astronomonster when the subject of astrology is brought up. There is just so much that is wrong about astrology. The first major hint that there might be something wrong with this kind of model is that it was invented by humans who thought the universe was geocentric. That’s basically all it takes to shatter astrology: discovering that our solar system revolves around the sun. But new agers don’t trouble themselves with silly things like laws of physics. Too bad, because Dr. Phil does such a nice job of explaining!

If you do manage to convince them that astrology can’t possibly work (I’ve never been successful), the last argument is that their experience in using astrology works for them. Ah, mon amie, it’s confirmation bias and the Forer effect that create the illusion that astrology works. “The Forer effect refers to the tendency of people to rate sets of statements as highly accurate for them personally even though the statements could apply to many people.” The personality models of astrology are all highly generalized so that each zodiac has pretty much the same chance of describing anyone, regardless of when they were born. It’s simple; the personality models of the zodiac are highly generalized and the personalities of people are highly complex. Of course you’re going to get a match.

It’s really simple to test astrology to see if it actually works in describing people’s personalities based on the month they were born. You simply take the traits each zodiac proposes, but then blind what zodiac (aka, birth month) the set of traits is from, and have people rate how accurately it describes them. If people end up highly rating or being matched with the ‘correct’ zodiac at a rate no better than chance, then it’s clear the model doesn’t work as it claims. This is exactly what happens each and every time astrology is tested.

Confirmation bias is the trick behind making most forms of divination, including astrology, ‘work’. Basically, it’s when we count the hits and not the misses. We do this often because we’re pattern seeking creatures. The example I use most often to describe confirmation bias is the myth that more accidents/births/craziness happens during a full moon. This is statistically untrue; when you compare lunar cycles to rates of crime/accidents/births etc. there are no relationships. But then why do so many reputable sources, like nurses and police officers, swear that this myth is true? It’s because they are just going by the memory of their own experience; they’re only recalling the times where a full moon matched up with a crazy night, and made no mental note of those crazy nights where there was a quarter moon or crescent. This happens in astrology too; we remember the times when the model did work, and don’t make a connection when it doesn’t. We may ignore the times when we met someone who didn’t match up very well with their zodiac, or just focus on the traits of their zodiac that do match with them.

Solipsism is the argument that nothing exists outside the mind or, at least, that you can’t prove the existence of anything outside your own mind. Of course, this is philosophical solipsism, which I’m discussing in this post, and not the psychiatric condition involving detachment from reality.  I have no problem discussing philosophy; however, I rarely hear these types of arguments when actually discussing philosophy. I’ve only heard this kind of talk from people trying to create a loop-hole where their beliefs can escape scientific scrutiny-or any kind of criticism.

I’d like to share a little anecdote of a conversation I had which sums up quite nicely the typical response I receive as a skeptic talking to a believer. The conversation was with a very nice, friendly new age woman who ended the conversation by telling me that it was fine that I needed evidence for things, but that some people “can just have an inner knowing of how things work”. She thought it was arrogant and close minded to “…Believe in what we can only process with our 5 senses…” That sentiment has become quite commonplace in my experience with new agers and religious proponents. It is quite frustrating, indeed, to be called arrogant by those claiming to have privileged knowledge of the universe; a special viewpoint of nature that is inaccessible to outsiders and immune to any standards of evaluation. This position, like that of solipsism, seems to be the ultimate egotistical world view.

That’s not to say that because an idea is self-centered that it has to be wrong as well. Of course not, it’s simply that I have become very cautious of ideas that put humans or individuals at the center of the universe; the pattern of discovery, to date, continues to dismantle ideas that place us in a privileged position. Long ago, we had to give up the idea that the universe was geocentric and Darwin proved that we can’t hold on to the idea that humans are the center of creation either; we weren’t specially formed, separately from other life on this planet. And so, it seems to me that solipsism and similar ideas are another attempt to carve out a special place for ourselves.

If we remember that ideas we are emotionally invested in should be held to even higher standards of critical thinking, then the claim that anyone (or everyone) has privileged and inaccessible knowledge of the universe definitely needs to be treated with an extra dose of scepticism. It looks like even though people have given up on the idea that they are physically at a center of the universe, the desire still remains, and so it is replaced with the idea that we are at a non-physical center. I can’t help but feel very cautious of this thinking; given the incredibly good track record nature has for being indifferent to human concerns.

And I can’t help but see a streak of intellectual dishonestly in using forms of solipsism in discussions relating to scientific discovery. Dr. Phil Plait, aka the Bad Astronomer, recently posted this to his twitter account: “If the Universe obeys rules (the supposition in question) then it will do so whether we are here or not. There is an objective truth.” When I hear people argue against objective truth, it’s usually a last attempt to save a deeply held belief from evidence against it. In a universe with only subjective truth, everyone’s personal beliefs are protected from the very scary concept of being wrong. And if there’s one thing that science can do is be completely unambiguous about what is untrue.

So it doesn’t really surprise me that a typical response to the fact that science deals with what can be known is that nothing can be known. If something can be known, then it is in the realm of scientific inquiry. But if you can never truly know reality, only experience it then all ideas are conveniently defended from criticism. Again, I have nothing against that idea as a philosophical argument, but nearly every time I’ve heard this point brought up in conversation, its purpose seems to be to avoid the evaluation of a belief by the scientific method. If I needed to turn the universe upside-down, redefine reality and truth, and throw the concept of knowledge itself out the window in order to make sure what I believe isn’t wrong, I just might have to stop and reconsider why I believe it’s true.

Again, I think it’s important to consider carefully why we want to believe some things are true. The idea that the universe needs us-that nothing exists without our own thoughts and experience-is tempting. But regardless of how self-centered solipsist-type ideas seem to be, whether it’s true or not is irrelevant. It’s irrelevant because the universe requires that you operate as if it were untrue.