For a skeptic, there is nothing more satisfying than discovering that some previously cherished truth has been overturned by new evidence. It is in that spirit that I offer the following Unlearning Report.

Empathy is Bad

Everybody loves empathy. Former President Barack Obama often spoke about our “empathy deficit” and the need to “see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us.” Amazon.com lists over 1,500 books with “empathy” in their titles or subtitles, and the Internet is replete with blogs and YouTube videos on the subject.¹ Yes, everybody loves empathy—everybody except Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom.

It seems wrong to be against something so kind and well meaning as empathy, but in his new book, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, Bloom builds a strong argument for empathy as a destructive emotion. He suggests that empathy is innumerate and myopic and that more good can be done by adopting “rational compassion,” a more detached form of caring.

For example, Bloom cites the research of C. Daniel Batson and colleagues who told study participants about a ten-year-old girl who had a fatal disease and was waiting in line for a treatment that would relieve her pain. The participants were told that they could move her ahead in the line, and when simply asked what to do, most said that the girl must wait because there were others ahead of her in line. However, when they were asked to imagine what she felt, they were more likely to choose to move her up the line. In this case, empathy made participants bend the rules unfairly.

Bloom spends considerable time discussing the innumeracy of empathy. This passage sums up the problem:

Stalin has been quoted as saying, “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” And Mother Teresa once said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” To the extent that we can recognize that the numbers are significant when it comes to moral decisions, it’s because of reason, not sentiments.²

In one study, participants in two separate groups were asked to give money to a drug that would save one child or a drug that would save eight children. They tended to give equal amounts, but when a name and a picture where associated with the child, donations were larger for the one child than the eight. Similarly, psychologist Paul Slovic points to the case of eighteen-year-old U.S. high school student Natalee Holloway, who went missing while on vacation in Aruba. Coverage of this case dominated the cable news for weeks, despite an on-going genocide in Darfur.

In addition, caregivers who are empathetic may also be less effective than those who are more detached. As a recent article in Aeon suggested, doctors who attempt to feel their patients’ pain will be ill suited to concentrate on their work. Similarly, when seeking the help of therapists, we don’t really want them to experience what we are experiencing. We are looking for a compassionate listener who can provide suggestions and support. Finally, there is evidence that, in contrast with a more reserved sense of compassion, sustained empathy can lead to burnout and negative emotions.³

As an alternative to empathy, Bloom advocates rational compassion, an approach consistent with the utilitarianism of philosopher Peter Singer. For Bloom, being a good person involves caring for others combined with an appreciation of how best to distribute that care. This is a view embodied by a growing Effective Altruism movement, which Singer also supports. Effective altruists donate money and time to others, but they do so after calculating where they can do the most good. When it comes to financial contributions, this approach often leads people to direct their funds to Africa and other parts of the developing world, where economic differences allow their dollars to go further. Effective altruists also consult rigorous evaluators of charities, such as GiveWell. It’s less about making the giver feel good and more about doing the most good you can.

You’re Not As Racist As You Thought

Since the 1990s, social psychologists have been studying unconscious biases—particularly those surrounding race, gender, and other socially relevant variables—using the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The test uses reaction times as an indirect measure of cognitive processes. In a typical arrangement, participants are asked to sort images or words by pressing either the “e” key of a keyboard with their left hand or the “i” key with their right hand. At first the task is simple. You might be asked to sort words that are either negative sounding (“bad”) or positive (“good”). In a similarly easy task, you might be asked to sort pictures of African American or European American men. The words in the upper left-hand and upper right-hand corners of the panels in Figure 1 indicate the left and right choices that participants are to use in sorting.

The IAT gets more difficult when trials combine the two kinds of stimuli— pictures and words—to be sorted. As shown in panels 3 and 4 of Figure 1, participants are told that either a word or a face might appear in the center of the screen, and they should sort the stimulus accordingly. These combined sorting trials provide the crucial test for presence of bias.

Typically, when the left and right responses combine categories that are inconsistent with the participant’s biases, then responses slow down. For example, if the participant has an unconscious bias against African Americans, it will take longer to decide the word “Happy” requires a right-hand response when it is arranged as shown in Figure 1 panel 4. The most common theory behind this effect is that certain mental operations are automatic and others require deliberation. When the categories are inconsistent with our implicit biases, slower deliberative processing is required to sort the stimuli.

Figure 1. Panels patterned after four possible trials of an Implicit Associations Task. In panel 1, participants press a left-hand key if the word is positive and right if it is negative. In panel 2, participants press left if it is a picture of an African American and right if it is a European American. In panels 3 and 4, either a word or a picture might appear, and the correct left or right response is indicated by the words in the upper left-hand and upper right-hand corners. (This figure is created by the author and only approximates the versions used in research.)

By now implicit bias is a well-established concept, so much so that Carl Bialik of the FiveThirtyEight blog recently cited unconscious bias against women as a possible explanation for the results of the 2016 United States presidential election. Over two million people have taken the IAT by visiting the Harvard University Project Implicit website,⁴ and in 2013 Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald, the researchers most closely associated with the IAT, published a bestselling book called Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good People. The IAT is often used in industry, education, and nonprofit organizations to spur an appreciation for the kinds of biases most of us harbor.

But how important is implicit bias? A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education outlines a growing number of questions that dog the IAT. Two decades after the test was first introduced, hundreds of research studies have used it, and several meta-analyses have been conducted summarizing the combined results of many investigations. Most notably Patrick Forscher of the University of Wisconsin and colleagues recently conducted a meta-analysis looking at 426 studies incorporating a total of 72,063 research participants. Furthermore, the Forscher study employed a number of improvements over previous meta-analyses.

Earlier investigations had already raised questions about whether the IAT is reliable enough to produce consistent scores when users are retested, and even Banaji and Greenwald admitted that the correlation between implicit bias and actual prejudicial behavior was weak.⁵ Unfortunately, the Forscher study found even weaker associations between unconscious bias and prejudicial behavior. Furthermore, implicit bias researchers have long assumed that interventions aimed at reducing these unconscious biases would result in changes in actual behavior, but the authors of the new meta-analysis concluded, “Our findings stand in stark contrast to these predictions” (p. 33). Forscher and colleagues suggest there is still value in studying implicit bias as an indicator of the culture’s effects on us, but they also state that any “efforts to change behavior by directly changing implicit bias would be misguided” (p. 34).

The Forscher study is still under review at the prestigious journal Psychological Bulletin and has not yet been accepted for publication. Nonetheless, there are two reasons to believe the results are worthy of attention. First, in an approach advocated by the Center for Open Science (COS), the authors used a publicly stated methodology and posted the raw data of their study so that others could examine and reanalyze it if they wish. As I mentioned in my last Skeptical Inquirer column, COS is a direct response to recent revelations about the unreliability of research in social psychology, medicine, and other areas. The hope is that opening up research and inviting peer comment throughout the entire process will result in more trustworthy outcomes. The recommendations of COS are quickly gaining acceptance among many scientific journals and professional associations.

Finally, one of the coauthors of the Forscher meta-analysis is Brian Nosek, who is both a cofounder of COS and, along with Banaji and Greenwald, the person most closely associated with early use of the IAT.

Believing in Luck Will Not Help Your Golf Game

This particular unlearning lesson hits close to home for me. In 2010, a group of researchers at the University of Cologne conducted the first study to show that believing in luck could improve performance of a skilled activity.⁶ Research participants were invited to putt a golf ball into a cup on the carpet of a laboratory. As they were handed a golf ball, half the participants were told, “So far it has turned out to be a lucky ball,” and the other half were simply told “This is the ball everyone has used so far.” Remarkably, in this and different versions of the study, participants who had the “lucky ball” actually sunk significantly more putts on average than those who did not get a lucky instruction.

I found these results quite interesting, and given that the German researchers had published their work in a prestigious journal and had conducted several related experiments, all of which showed the luck effect, I incorporated the study into the 2013 revision of my book on superstition and began to mention it in public comments about belief in superstition. It seemed plausible that, in the case of a skilled activity, such as golf, there could be a psychological benefit to believing in luck. There was no reason to credit anything supernatural in the findings, but just as placebos can produce real health benefits, it has long been speculated that superstitions might have a psychological effect that could translate into better performance on skilled activities. Unfortunately, in this case, I was too quick to jump at an exciting new finding.

In 2014, two researchers from Dominican University in Illinois published a replication of the German golf ball study in Social Psychology.⁷ This was a registered replication, which means that, similar to the Forscher meta-analysis, the researchers publicly stated exactly what they intended to do before they started collecting data, and, in addition, once the experiment was complete, they made the raw data publicly available so that anyone who wished to could independently reanalyze the results. Finally, the sample of participants for the Dominican study was roughly three times that of the German study, making it a much more powerful test.

As by now you may have guessed, the results of the replication were negative. Telling people “this ball has been lucky today” did not improve their ability to putt into a cup. It is true that the original study used German participants, and the replication used U.S. participants, but the Dominion researchers measured the level of superstition in their people and found it was comparable to that of the German participants. Of course, some kind of cultural difference could be at play, but superstition and luck are popular concepts in both countries. So it looks as though the famous golf ball study has become just another victim of the reproducibility crisis. We will have to wait for further research to determine if there is any psychological benefit to believing in superstitions.

Final Thoughts

1. I highly recommend Paul Bloom’s book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. It is well reasoned, clear, and entertaining.
2. If you have not already done so, you might enjoy visiting the Implicit Project website and taking one of the several implicit bias tests offered there. They are free, and although—as we now know—unconscious bias does not necessarily translate into biased actions, you might find the test interesting and thought-provoking. Do you think it really measures what it purports to measure?
3. It appears the best advice about luck and golf comes from a quote so good that it has been attributed variously to Ben Hogan, Gary Player, or Arnold Palmer: “The more I practice, the luckier I get.”

Notes

1. Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (New York: Ecco), 18-19.
2. Bloom, Against Empathy, 89.
3. Bloom, Against Empathy, 137-139.
4. http://kdvr.com/2014/12/11/study-if-youre-white-you-likely-have-racial-biases-you-cant-control/
5. http://www.chronicle.com/article/Can-We-Really-Measure-Implicit/238807
6. Damisch, Lysann, Barbara Stoberock, and Thomas Mussweiler. "Keep your fingers crossed! How superstition improves performance." Psychological Science 21, no. 7 (2010): 1014-1020.
7. Calin-Jageman, Robert J., and Tracy L. Caldwell. "Replication of the superstition and performance study by Damisch, Stoberock, and Mussweiler (2010)." Social Psychology 45 no. 3 (2014), 239-245.

Photo by Ross Blocher.

This fall, mere days after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, I did something possibly inadvisable: I got on a bus and headed into Mexico. I was tempted to stop everyone I saw at the border and tell them that I didn’t vote for the guy who wants to build a wall between my country and theirs. But knowing that they were busy and probably not terribly interested in my political leanings, I kept my mouth shut and walked through the metal detectors. Everything turned out fine.

I was there to take a tour of alternative cancer treatments in Tijuana, as a guest of an American nonprofit called the Cancer Control Society. My boyfriend, Drew, had found a leaflet for the tour at a health food store and handed it to me: “This looks like a thing you’d do.”

He was right. A couple of months later, my podcast cohost, Ross, and I had paid $100 each and were on a bus headed to Tijuana to hear about the latest and greatest cancer treatments which the United States has either rejected or not yet approved.

Frank Cousineau, the tour leader and president of the Cancer Control Society, stood at the helm of the bus, reading from one of about three dozen brochures and printouts he had given each passenger. They ranged from ads for medical devices to tabloid news about new cancer findings. There were so many recurring buzz words, I felt as if we had been submerged in a new religion, with its unique insular language: Laetrile, Amygdalin, hyperthermia, Gerson Therapy, Hoxsey Therapy, Virotherapy, Rigvir. To be fair, suddenly landing in the middle of a medical school class would probably feel the same way, but this tour was supposed to be for ordinary people, not experts.

Photo by Ross Blocher.

Cousineau said that his own mother had died of breast cancer, but that her treatments in Mexico had prolonged her life dramatically in a way that conventional medicine in the United States could not. He would take us to the clinic that had treated his mother, Oasis of Hope, along with three others. We wouldn’t be visiting some of the clinics that offered the therapies I was most familiar with: Hoxsey Treatment (in which a dangerous herbal salve burns the tissue off the skin), and Burzynski’s “antineoplaston” treatment (which has never been proven to work). Instead, we would be treated to some of the newer and more inventive procedures that dominate Mexico’s alternative medicine field today.

Most of the clinics see patients who have tried conventional treatments in the United States or elsewhere, and, feeling that they have been failed, come to Mexico for more “natural” treatments. For the most part, each center offers variations on the same therapies. A patient at any of these clinics would most likely endure several hyperthermia treatments, where the body is heated to as much as 113 degrees Fahrenheit, in an effort to simulate a fever. In the United States, hyperthermia is not widely available as a treatment because it is still being studied in clinical trials. Some offer specialized “vaccines” meant to attack the cancer with the patient’s own body chemistry. Patients will also receive organic, whole food diets that are thought to cleanse the system. Some of the clinics are extremely specific about this, making the diets almost entirely vegan, or putting them on diets which wildly swing from all-fruit to meat-based, “so that the cancer is always guessing,” and so on. And then there’s the apricot seeds.

Everywhere we went, they were talking about the apricot seeds. Apricots contain Amygdalin, which the National Cancer Institute calls “a chemical ingredient found in the pits of many fruits, raw nuts, and plants.” According to the Institute, when Amygdalin breaks down, it becomes Hydrogen cyanide (yes, the poison), which some people think curbs cancer growth. However, the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute of Health both conclude that there is no evidence that apricot seeds will help your cancer. In fact, if you take enough, it could send you to the hospital with liver toxicity. Yet, our tour guide continued to advise that we each take the kernels daily, and simply stop if we felt “too lightheaded.”

Photo by Ross Blocher.

The biggest shock came at our final clinic of the day: the Hope4Cancer Institute. Dr. Antonio Jimenez (a.k.a. “Dr. Tony”) runs the place, and hosted our group for a lavish vegetarian feast and a PowerPoint presentation on his services. While one of the other doctors had stood out for advising caution against cocksure sales pitches for proprietary treatments, Jimenez served up exactly that. Among his patented treatments was one that stood at as particularly suspicious to me called Photo-Dynamic Therapy, which supposedly uses light and sound to “destroy [patient’s] cancer cells without causing side effects.” As Dr. Jimenez continued with his PowerPoint, he described why cancer is so powerful: it corrals other cells to join in its deadly attack, communicating its agenda with them.

“They talk to each other,” he said.

In anyone else’s mouth, I would suspect this metaphor to be just that—a metaphor, but I had begun to doubt that Dr. Tony had his wits about him. I wanted to ask him if he meant that cells literally communicate, with words. I passed a note to Ross.

“Do you think he means cells literally talk to each other?”

“I assume it’s symbolic, but who knows,” Ross wrote back.

“I think I’ve already pissed him off,” I replied. I had already asked him a few hard-hitting questions. “Would you ask?”

Ross raised his hand, asked a couple of questions of his own, and then bravely broached my question for me.

“You mentioned these cells talking to each other,” Ross laughed gamely, “Now, did you… you didn’t mean that literally did you?” he said, apologetically.

“Yes,” Dr. Jimenez replied stoically. “Literally.”

“Wait,” I called out. “Do you mean they have a brain?”

“Yes,” he said, then stopped, stared, and waited for a response that did not come.

The room fell silent. A few people looked at me and Ross in disgust.

“Okay,” said Dr. Jimenez, “moving on.”

He continued his slide show, which ended in a Bible verse about how God wants us all to be healed. We shuffled out the front door into the dark Tijuana night and boarded our bus back to the United States.

As we took the long ride home, I looked at Penny, a 31-year-old woman with stage four breast cancer in a pink flowered dress. She was desperate for anything that might save her life, and the unproven treatments of Tijuana offered her a hope she couldn’t find at home. But that hope was almost certainly a false one, and the treatments would cost her anywhere from $27,000 to $46,000, based on the doctors’ estimates.

The incoming President had already announced that, once in power, he would require two regulatory cuts for every new regulation (he followed through this Monday); and was considering a new FDA chief, Jim O’Neill, who would not require that drugs work in order to be sold in the United States (as of this writing, O’Neill is still in the running). It is not hard to imagine that the empty hope offered in Tijuana will creep over the border soon, and that without the regulatory assurance of a strong FDA, ordinary Americans will not be able to tell an effective treatment from an ineffective one. Who knows how many lives could be threatened by such a development.

When I came home, my boyfriend, who originally found the flier, greeted me.

“How was it?” he asked. Then he saw my face. “Was it sad?”

“Yeah.”

Photo of Arlen Grossman by Jay Diamond.

On January 7, 2017, the first skeptic conference of the year, SkeptiCamp, happened in Monterey County, California, and was put on by my local group Monterey County Skeptics (MCS). In January 2014, we held our first SkeptiCamp, and I reported back on it. Now that our third and most successful SkeptiCamp has concluded, it’s time to disseminate the information we gathered. I want to not only interest readers in the lectures but also to inspire groups to put on their own SkeptiCamps.

First off, what is a SkeptiCamp? Started in Denver, Colorado, in 2007 by Reed Esau, SkeptiCamp began as a free one-day event. SkeptiCamp speakers are not normally people you will hear at the big skeptic conferences. They are usually locals who might even be speaking in public about a non–work-related topic for the first time. SkeptiCamps are meant to be fuss-free, low publicity, and donation and volunteer run. Each skeptic group has started with this model and adapted it to suit the needs of their group. Monterey County Skeptics sistered with the local Humanist group, Humanist Association of the Monterey Bay Area (HAMBA), as we are natural affiliates.

Early January might seem to readers an odd time of the year to hold a conference. That might be true in most of the Northern Hemisphere, but Monterey is located along the coast of California. It’s about a two-hour drive south of San Francisco and a five-hour drive north of Los Angeles. The weather here is normally mild. January is our cold month, but never anything that would stop people from attending. This year, the news was full of headlines saying “Monsoon Coming This Weekend,” which really didn’t happen, but I’m sure it had a lot to do with the drop in attendance from our expected numbers.

I suggest that you register your conference on Lanyrd. This is a free service that is owned by Eventbrite. Lanyrd allows you to have a public website where you can send people for registration and where they can view scheduling and all the info they might need to decide if they want to attend. Also, Lanyrd allows you to do a “call for speakers” several months in advance. Once the conference is over, Lanyrd acts as a repository for gathering all the videos, photos, audio, news articles, and slides from the event in one easy to use place. The GSoW project uses Lanyrd all the time to gather information for the Wikipedia pages we write. It’s a one-stop-shop for conferences. Of course, using Facebook and Meetup.com are essential as well. You can view our Lanyrd site at http://lanyrd.com/2017/skepticamp/.

The idea of SkeptiCamp is to bond your local group. You will find that you are going to rely on each other’s skills throughout the entire process of planning and executing the conference. In my case, I had several people step up to help, and we used a secret Facebook group for all our planning. This really helped everything come together. Meeting in person to discuss issues was fun but not always as productive. This year’s MCS planning committee was Deborah Warcken, Kathy McKenzie, Stirling Gerbic-Forsyth, Arlen Grossman, Glenn Church, Robin Welch, and me. It’s important to delegate; most people really do want to help and are just waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

The secondary importance for SkeptiCamp is community outreach. You are trying to get beyond the normal choir, to grow your group and show people that skeptics aren’t a bunch of curmudgeons and naysayers but are fun and interesting. Skepticism as a “thing” is unknown to most people; they don’t understand that there are communities, conferences, books, podcasts, and more that focus on all kinds of topics. It’s our responsibility to educate the public about these matters. We are all on a journey trying to muddle through to discover what the truth is, or at least as close as we can get to finding it out. Ben Radford during our camp told the audience that we should not blame people for not having great critical thinking skills. Why should they have them? Schools don’t focus on teaching these skills. IF it were intuitive, we wouldn’t face the issues we have now with anti-science and paranormal beliefs. Everyone in the audience has had to learn to think critically. Some are farther along on their journey than others. We had to start somewhere, so no one is going to ridicule people who are just beginning. So as far as community outreach, the group’s goal is to get media attention for the SkeptiCamp.

Photo by Susan Gerbic.

The night before the big day we organized a casual meet-and-greet at a local hotel. We had about twenty people attend, some of whom had never been to a skeptic event before. Several speakers were in attendance, and it was fun for people to be able to talk to them about their upcoming talks. I encourage groups to plan social gatherings before and after your Camp. We forget how important it is to have human interactions. If people were attending just for the lectures then they could stay home and watch the videos when they come out.

We started out our Camp by handing out flyers with the schedule as well as a brief definition of skepticism and humanism. I emceed the entire event and was sure to explain that the lectures for the day might challenge the beliefs of attendees. “The lecturers will not be attacking people personally, only the claims made.”

At our 2016 SkeptiCamp we hit on a fun warmup that slyly added critical thinking to the event and allowed for some audience participation. Arlen Grossman wrote the “What’s Your Quotation Quotient?” column for The Monterey Herald newspaper for nine years, and we asked him to give the audience popular quotes and then three choices for who said that specific quote. With a show of hands, Arlen asked the audience to vote. Then he revealed the correct answer and explained where the quote came from.

Photo of Glenn Church by Susan Gerbic.

Our first speaker, Gary Griggs, works in ocean sciences, and his research deals mainly with erosion and sea levels. He gave us a terrific forty-minute lecture on climate change mostly focusing on the Monterey Bay Area. One thing that struck me was that before his lecture I went up and introduced myself and asked how long he was going to stay with us. He said that he didn’t quite know as we might ask him to leave after his lecture. After talking with him a few more minutes I realized that he thought we were a doubter group. He hadn’t Googled us and had never heard of a pro-science community called skeptics. Quite eye-opening to him and me.

Next up was our own local political skeptic, Glenn Church. He writes a monthly blog on politics called The Political Skeptic. Glenn kept changing his topic, and so I didn’t know quite what to expect. The lecture he gave us was called “How and Why Did Donald Trump Win?” Glenn claims that it was a perfect political storm. What really interested me as one of the organizers of the Camp was how non-partisan it was. It was just the stats and the interpretation of those numbers. Fake news hurt; American voters were unable to separate the facts. Both Clinton and Trump were very unpopular candidates. One analysis Glenn pointed out was that Clinton needed her own Checkers speech to improve her popularity and draw out the vote. You can see Glenn’s notes on his speech and video of it here.

Photo of Ben Radford by Jay Diamond.

Ben Radford was brought in from New Mexico just for this SkeptiCamp. He is a great talent and one of a very small group of professional skeptics. I’m sure readers of csicop.org already know about his prolific career. Ben was asked to speak to the room twice; the first lecture was more of a general introduction of skepticism. His later lecture at the end of the day dealt with more specific topics and fake news. People tell him that topics such as ghosts and psychics are beyond science and that we can’t understand these things. Ben reply’s, “Of course you can…. Science is the prism we use to understand the world…. You can’t put odd topics like ghosts and UFO’s in a box and not try to understand these things, open up that box, and take a look inside it.”

After lunch, we had a quick segment by Jan Wachtel who reported back on her visit to the Missouri Penitentiary as a tourist. She attended a ghost tour at night where she said they primed the group to hear noises and see ghost orbs. Jan said it was a very creepy place, and it was easy to see why believers in ghosts would think they saw them. Oddly, when asked who the ghosts were, the tour guide said that they have never gotten a name because too many ghosts wander the halls. Jan returned the next morning and went through a history tour, which she said was much more interesting. It was dismaying that they offered many ghost tours a day but only one history tour. Obviously, the tourism revenue was higher for the paranormal than the historical.

Kyle Polich gave a lecture at our very first SkeptiCamp talking about stats as is his expertise. He has a podcast called The Data Skeptic. I really had no idea what Kyle was going to talk about this year, and at the meet-and-greet he said he was going to be talking about a conspiracy theory concerning missing hikers in National Parks. I still had no idea. Well, Kyle knocked it out of the park with the most surprising lecture. It concerned a man named David Paulides who is a frequent guest on Coast-to-Coast AM. He normally talks about Bigfoot but has lately written books on something he calls the Missing 411. Apparently, according to Paulides, people have been disappearing from or missing time after visiting National Parks. Kyle became interested because he listens to a lot of paranormal podcasts, and the word clusters came up in relation to data. Kyle as a data scientist said this peeked his interest. Paulides, takes any case of a missing hiker as being a part of the conspiracy, even if the case has a natural explanation. He gave no reason for these disappearances but finds odd correlations for them. For example, two women missing in different years both had names starting with an “A” with three-letters, Amy and Ann. Paulides in another example stated that something was odd because in a few of the disappearances berry bushes were nearby. Seriously! After the lecture, I asked GSoW to get involved, and one of my editors, Rob Palmer, went through David Paulides’s Wikipedia page and cleaned out all the bad citations and promotional language. Kyle’s research is now a part of the Wikipedia page. I asked Kyle to write up his investigation for csicop.org, so watch for it soon.

MCS member and practicing attorney Robin Welch was next up. She spoke to us about the observation and case law concerning the separation of church and state issues in the United States. She went over all the founding documents and discussed how focused the Founding Fathers were on leaving religion out of them. Robin also explained the differences between “free-exercise” and “establishment,” something that many people get confused. She talked about several case studies and was complimented later on her ability to sum up entire case law into one sentence.

Leonard Tramiel, who serves on the Board of Directors for the Center for Inquiry and on the Executive Council for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry gave us a talk on the basics of skepticism. He used graphics that showed optical illusions explaining how our brains fool us. He showed a graph that can be found on Wikipedia called the Cognitive Bias Codex. This included logical fallacies that he explained with examples. Leonard tells us that education is the key. We need to understand these biases and why we think the way we do. Skeptics “need to get it right more than we [currently] do. In a complex world, we need to get it right more often than we did in the past. … We need to understand why we are more likely to get it wrong.” He goes on to explain that people aren’t stupid, just mistaken. This is common for most of the population.

This ended the formal part of our conference. Everyone felt it was a success. We had fifty-four people show up, and forty-eight were there the entire day.

SkeptiCamp is all over for my local group, and now we have a whole year left to plan the next one. We received a lot of feedback, and other MCS members have told me that they would like to speak next time. We have added a few new members to our Meetup, and I feel like this whole experience did what it was meant to do. The people already in MCS bonded further and the attendees left feeling motivated and educated. Two people who drove up from Los Angeles told me that they are going to start planning a SkeptiCamp for the summer in their area. We exposed more people to scientific skepticism as a community, and I think that we will move the attendance numbers up for SkeptiCal, which is held in Berkeley on June 11, as well as for CSICon held in Las Vegas the weekend before Halloween. And we handed out a bunch of Skeptical Inquirer magazines that were given to us by CSI. I think that we will be able to continue to grow and give back great content to our community. Please contact me directly at susangerbic@yahoo.com if you should have any questions or need help planning your local SkeptiCamp.

Pertinent Links

YouTube videos from MCS SkeptiCamp: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLo47WezQVTsYXjWf_vD9dYwEecwA6n9Mu

Monterey Herald coverage: http://www.montereyherald.com/events/20170106/national-author-to-keynote-monterey-county-skeptics-third-annual-skepticamp

Monterey County Weekly coverage: http://www.montereycountyweekly.com/blogs/arts_culture_blog/three-skepticamp-guests-speak-on-science-church-and-trump/article_65241f6e-d387-11e6-972e-e7ea2908dc8e.html

Monterey Herald coverage: http://www.montereyherald.com/science/20170107/skepticamp-show-proof-critical-thinkers-told

In the 1970s, only fitness fanatics went to the gym. Now a twice-weekly visit is the norm for anyone who wants to keep their body healthy. A similar revolution is happening in brain fitness and training. But there’s a problem: no one knows exactly what they should be doing. Brain training games aren’t necessarily all they’re cracked up to be—so there may be other ways to become more focussed, reduce anxiety, improve our maths skills, or better our sense of direction? Override chronicles Caroline Williams's year-long mission to find out.

Caroline Williams: I have a degree in Biology, that's where I started off. I never became a proper scientist, but then after university, I did a masters in science communication or science journalism really, and from then, just got into writing about science. Yes, you see the benefit of being a science journalist is that you don't have to do the slow tedious process of doing science, that takes years, and years, and years, and you just go in at the end and say so many exciting stuff. You get to know the latest that's going on without having to do it. That's what attracted me to journalism.

Kylie Sturgess :  Override: My Quest to Go Beyond Brain Training and Take Control of My Mind is an exciting title. Did it take a while to come up with it?

Caroline: Well, Override came to me halfway through the process of trying to sell the book to publishers, because originally it was called PIMP My Brain, with the idea of being like PIMP My Ride.  But some people didn’t like that!

They thought it was a bit-- they didn't like it anyway. I thought Override is more-- it describes what you are trying to do. It takes what you've got, and just flip the switch, and go, “I don't want to be like that, I want to be like this.” The subtitle came along at the end, when I was like, “Oh, I feel like we need to go beyond brain training.” At the start I was going to look into brain training and what actually it meant, and whether it worked or not, and I very quickly found out that it doesn't really do what it's claimed to do, and what a lot of people think and hope it's going to do for them.

Kylie: How long did it take you to plan this book? Did some of your previous journalism tap into the subjects that led to this extended investigation?

Caroline: Yes, some of them bubbling away for a very long time. I've been a science journalist for about fifteen years or so, and it's around the time when I started, that the idea came through into the public that you can change your brain throughout your life, throughout the whole of adulthood. Then it didn't take long for people to then jump on that and turn into brain training apps: “Improve your brain age by doing these things everyday - these puzzles every day.”

I guess from then I saw two things. First, I thought, “Really, is that going to do anything?” Then the science started to show that “No, it doesn't.” It's like the physical equivalent of doing a lot of sit-ups, and expecting your heart and lung fitness to improve. It's doing one thing expecting everything to improve. At the same time, it was all the idea of your brain changing was being co-opted by self-help, left right and centre, saying, “Look, there's neuro-plasticity, you can change who you are.”

I was also curious, so I got this shopping list of things I'd like to change about my own mind, and brain. Let's try it, let's see what we can actually do. Because what was out there already wasn't satisfying for me in any other way. It was like, either do crosswords, or meditate, and that was about it.

Kylie: But it's one thing to read general articles or phone up someone and say, “Hi, what does your research say?” It's another thing to pop yourself into an MRI…

Caroline: Yes. I've never had an MRI scan before I did all this. I was a bit worried about it I suppose. I'd heard it was really loud and clunky and awful, but luckily, by the time they shoved me in these scanners I'd usually been doing several hours of psychological tests by then, and I was completely exhausted, and I actually found it quite restful. Then they shove you in! There were some guys at Canvass University, who just made it the most fun.

They were talking to me through headphone inside, and they just sounded like something like mission control from NASA, and they're like, “Hey, are you okay in there?” I'm like, “Yes. I'm fine. Okay. Let’s go!” That was good, but the one that was really worrying was the brain stimulation, whether it was magnetic stimulation or electrical stimulation.

There's something a bit nerve-racking about having someone strap electrical things to your head and then switch them on, with the idea that they're going to change something inside your head. But it's like, “Yes. I'll live to tell the tale, so it's fine.”

Kylie:  One of the great things about this book, is it addresses many myths. In fact, it jumps into them quite early in the book. What ones concern you the most? I'm certain there's some that probably hit the wallet quite hard…

Caroline: Yes, this one size fits all brain training apps that are out there. They're quite careful nowadays to not claim too much publicly because one of the biggest ones Lumosity got fined $2 million for claiming too much. But I think people do buy into them and they think-- I was speaking to a friend at the weekend who was saying, “Well I do this every day because my mother had Alzheimer’s and why aren’t they going to help me stave off that.” She's basically doing everything she can to try and stop the same thing happening to her which is totally understandable.

But the problem is there isn't any good evidence to back it up. I think people are spending money and time doing something that's probably isn't doing them any good at all. Actually, in terms of keeping your brain healthy there's a lot more evidence to things like physical exercise, aerobic exercise and good diet and keeping your social life going and they seem to have much more impact on your brain than anything you can do in 10 minutes a day.

Kylie: I think one of the great lessons I learned from this book was that anxiety is bad for everything, I was like, “Oh good, great – an excuse not to worry so much!”

Caroline: Yes, when I started out I knew that I was a bit of a stresser and a bit of a worrier but I had no idea the impact it was having on everything. It was robbing me of my ability to control impulses like to be distracted, it was taking away from that, it was taking away brain power I could be using to solve Math problems. I was going, “I can't do this.”

It was getting in the way of thinking and also just this underlying current of everything that was just really unhelpful, and I did scour the literature to find some benefits of anxiety, and I really couldn't find anything, at least not for the individual. I think if you consider it in terms of groups in evolutionary terms, if you have somebody who's anxious in a group and he's always looking like a meerkat for danger then it's probably good for the group as a whole but that particular meerkat person will probably won't have the most efficient brain, will probably die younger for a lot of stress. Yes, it's really not good for anyone!

Kylie:  Overall, was it difficult to maintain some of the lessons you've learned in the book? Caroline: Yes, well, the one that has really stuck is the sustain attention training I did which wasn't so much about learning a skill, it was about getting to learn the state of mind that is best for focusing for long periods which I thought is called relax and ready but it's like being in the zone really. What I learned from that is it's actually not what you want to do to try too hard to focus to stare at your computer screen and go, “Come on, I've got a deadline.” That's not the best way to do it.

The best thing to do is just allow your mind to wander, have a little bit of downtime if you got the time and can go for even a ten-minute walk round the block, just clear your head and go back and that state is much more likely to show up. That's been a real revelation, it sounds like not much at all but it really has been something that I have used ever since. The other thing that stuck with me is the idea that mindlessness, the opposite of mindfulness is actually really important to make room for as well.

It's the best state if you want to be, creatively, as it gives you a mental break. Rather than trying to fight that and think that you've got to be on all the time, just giving yourself a bit of time to let your mind wander where ever is, it doesn't feel like work but it's actually going to make you more patient anyway and it's going to make you feel better and more relaxed. It's definitely worth making room for I think.

Mick West lives in Shingle Springs, California, and is a writer for Metabunk and a regular skeptic conference attendee. I know Mick from TAM 2014 and SkeptiCal in 2016 where we hung out for a bit with a group of people and played Apples to Apples. Mick also presented a paper presentation at CSICon October 30, 2016, titled “Expert Elicitation vs. Chemtrails.”

Susan Gerbic: So, Mick. It’s nice to catch up with you. This website you run, Metabunk, sounds right up the skeptic alley. Tell me about that site.

Mick West: Metabunk is a skeptical forum, where we do investigations into a wide range of phenomena from conspiracy theories to UFOs. We also discuss best practices for communicating the results of an investigation (the debunking) and how to help people get out of the “rabbit hole” of conspiratorial thinking. It grew out of my old blog Contrail Science, which was about chemtrails. Metabunk still has a strong focus on the chemtrail theory.

Gerbic: Chemtrails? Doesn’t everyone know they don’t exist and what they see in the sky are contrails? And the few people who still believe that the government is poisoning us aren’t likely to listen to reason, right? Note: I just looked at the pageview stats for the Chemtrails conspiracy theories Wikipedia page, and 99,560 people visited it in the last thirty days. I suppose I’m living in a bubble.

West: Chemtrails is a surprisingly popular theory; it’s right up there with things like the 9/11 conspiracy theories. It all stems from a fundamental distrust of science and authority. You are always going to get a percentage of people who are true believers. My goal is to minimize that as much as possible, stop people falling for it, and help them get out as easily as possible.

Gerbic: I understand that you are also a pilot. Do you know pilots who believe in this conspiracy theory?

West: I only flew small, single engine planes, which isn’t that hard. I’d not be surprised if some single-engine pilots fell for it. But I’d be very surprised if there were any commercial pilots who believe in it. Most of them have heard of it and find the idea ridiculous and sad. Some of them even get harassed about it, as people think they are part of the plot because their planes leave contrails.

Gerbic: Tell readers more about your talk at CSICon.

West: It’s about a paper I coauthored with three climate scientists. They were tired of chemtrail believers harassing them and disrupting their conferences, and they basically wanted to demonstrate what real scientists thought about the chemtrail theory. We gathered some of the typical evidence used by chemtrail believers (photos of contrails and chemical element tests of water and air) and asked a large group of experts what they thought of the evidence. Basically, the answer was “these are just photos of normal contrails” and “the tests show normal background variations.” We wrote it up and published it, and it was very well received by the media. I hope it is helpful in getting the message across. It’s slow progress though.

Gerbic: You are a regular skeptic conference attendee. What do you get from attending? Surely you already know all this information, or at least where to find it online so you can stay home and watch from your computer.

West: Firstly, the experience of listening to a talk first hand is an order of magnitude better than watching it on YouTube. There’s no distraction, and you can’t help but be focused on the lecture. I remember more; I learn more new things; and I get to almost immediately discuss the talk with other people who have likewise been engaged—in some cases with the person who just gave the talk!

Secondly, it’s a large gathering of like-minded people, many of whom have become friends over the years. It’s great to both chat with skeptic friends and meet new skeptic people from all around the world. Every conference I’ve been to I’ve met new people and had many interesting conversations.

Finally, I treat it as a bit of a mini-vacation—my wife came with me to CSICon in 2016, and we were able to take in a Vegas show as well as hang out with the other skeptics at the bar and at the various social events.

Gerbic: The Sunday Papers is always one of my favorite parts of these conferences. Short and to the point, well-rehearsed, and usually about topics I have not heard on stage at other conferences. Ray Hall really knows his stuff about how to put this together. This year the Sunday papers followed Lawrence Krauss’s lecture. That must have been exciting!

West: Very exciting! Lawrence gave a fascinating lecture, and it was great that most of the people who were there for that stayed on for all the Sunday Papers. I was a bit nervous as I was last up, but I had a great audience. I was happy to see Richard Dawkins in the audience, as he was a science hero of mine when I was at college. And there were a lot of other skeptics in the audience that I admire, so it was great to give the talk to them.

Gerbic: CSICon will soon be putting out the call for paper presenters for the October 2017 event. People interested will need to be organized and get everything turned in (tentatively) by August 20. What tips would you offer anyone interested in presenting?

West: You need a topic that’s of interest to the skeptical community and can be neatly encapsulated in fifteen minutes. You want something unique, not just some point of science you know about but rather a short story about something specific that you were involved with. Something like a paper you wrote or an investigation you did into a specific event or an account of some education initiative or press outreach that you were part of. So less “Why Homeopathy Is Just Water” and more “How I Tried to Get CVS to Stop Pushing Homeopathy.”

Then you need to make sure it fits in fifteen minutes. I’d recommend you get at least a rough draft of the talk before you submit your proposal, that way you’ll get something the selection panel will recognize as a doable size.

The best way to get started though would be to look at the previous papers—at least the descriptions. See the type of topics that get picked, and think if there’s an event you could talk about that you have a unique perspective on. A good test for that would be if it’s something you’ve explained to other people before and they were actually interested.

Gerbic: Tell me about some of your favorite parts of CSICon? Favorite lectures?

West: There are two types of lectures at CSICon: those that I was interested in, and those that I did not know I was interested in until I listened to them. My favorite lectures were those that dealt with the way people think. In particular, Elizabeth Loftus’s talk on false memories was very thought provoking. Many conspiracy theories exploit the selective nature of people’s memories—so it’s fascinating to hear how people actually go about implanting memories. I think understanding how the brain works is very helpful to skeptics. We need to comprehend how faulty thinking happens if we are going to help fix it.

It’s great that CSICon is a single track, as you get exposed to new ideas that you might miss if there were multiple tracks. Like Anthony Pratkanis’s talk on Altercasting. I did not even know what it was and probably would have skipped it if there was something else on, but it was incredibly fascinating. Much food for thought.

The Sunday Papers of course are the prime example of that. An eclectic mix of generally novel topics. Even though I was getting ready to give mine, it was still fascinating listening to the others. It’s things you might never hear about otherwise. Plus, you can go talk to the speakers afterward.

That opportunity to have a chat with the presenters is key. Like with Joe Nickell’s talk where he explained why he preferred the term investigator instead of debunker. Later that day I gave him my business card, which says “Mick West—Debunker,” and we had a spirited discussion on the topic. That’s something that just works so much better in person than over the Internet. And everyone is very approachable. I talked to other speakers, even had a brief chat with Richard Dawkins, and at TAM 2015 I had quite a long discussion with Randi.

Something I think would be great to address at CSICon is the function of skepticism in social media—and the role of new media in general. There’s a real danger in falling into a bubble by being overly attached to a traditional set of media (print, blogs, newsletters) that is becoming increasing irrelevant. Skepticism needs to evolve with the understanding that information (and disinformation) is now propagated by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. Understanding how this works and how we can best use those channels of communication is crucial to keeping skepticism relevant and effective.

Gerbic: What did you think of the Halloween party?

West: The Halloween party was very entertaining. Most people were in quite impressive costumes, which is something I’ll have to work on for next year. The skeptic community is just a lovely bunch of people, very varied and open. They also know how to have fun.

Gerbic: Any last thoughts, Mick?

West: I think that events such as CSICon are becoming more and more important, especially with the election of a president who has what seem to be anti-science leanings. Skeptics are fairly politically diverse, but we are united in our opposition to fake science, alternative facts, charlatans, and bunk. CSICon is part of the solution—a place where we can recharge our skeptical batteries and form and renew connections with other skeptics to try to turn back the tide.

Gerbic: So great talking to you. Hopefully, I’ll see you at SkeptiCal this year June 11 in Berkeley, California. And of course, CSICon which will be October 26-29.

West: Indeed, you will. I’m looking forward to it. And thank you again for all the skeptical work you do, especially the Guerilla Skeptics on Wikipedia project.

Mark Boslough: To anyone who has followed the “climate wars,” your name is a household word. Deniers even coined the phrase “Mann-made global warming” in an attempt to make it synonymous with their belief that global warming is an elaborate hoax. From my vantage point as a scientist and skeptic, you seem to be the person they love to hate more than anyone else except perhaps Al Gore. Why do you think they have singled you out from the scientific community as their poster child for sustained vilification?

Michael Mann: Well—there are certainly other leading climate scientists who have been frequent targets of climate change deniers. But I suppose there are a few things that are different in my case. For one, I am directly associated with one of the most prominent graphs in all of climate science, the “Hockey Stick” curve that my coauthors and I published back in the late 1990s. That curve became an icon in the climate change debate. It told a simple story—that the warming of the planet we’re experiencing is unprecedented. That made it a threat to fossil fuel interests and, as I detail in my book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, it made me a direct target of the industry-funded climate change denial machine. The Eye of Sauron was fixed on me. Rather than shrink from the battle, I chose to fight back—by defending my work in the public sphere and by devoting myself to public outreach and education. That no doubt further antagonized climate change deniers. Ultimately, they provided me a platform for informing the public discourse over what is arguably the greatest challenge we have faced as a civilization. I consider that a blessing, not a curse.

Boslough: As you say, you weren’t the only author of the 1998 Mann, Bradley, and Hughes “Hockey Stick” paper that made such an impact. You were just an up-and-coming postdoc and your coauthors were already prominent. I was taking a paleoclimatology course at the time and had never heard of you, but we were using Bradley’s textbook. A couple of years ago I attended a dinner for the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, and two guests sitting at my table introduced themselves as “Et and Al.” They were Bradley and Hughes, and the joke was a reference to their having been eclipsed by you. Do you think you were the main target of Sauron’s initial wrath because you were first author or because deniers mistook you for easy pickings?

Mann: That’s right. Interestingly, much of the focus was on me alone, rather than my two senior coauthors, Ray Bradley and Malcolm Hughes. I suspect the reason was twofold. I was the first author and was quoted in most of the media coverage, so I was the scientist most directly associated with the research. But additionally, I was viewed as far more vulnerable to attack, as I was only a postdoc at the time, a far cry from the job security of a tenured faculty position—which both of my coauthors had. The climate change denial machine wanted to bring me down, to destroy my professional career before it even got going, to make an example of me for other younger scientists who might too consider speaking out about climate change. In The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, I refer to this as the “Serengeti Strategy.”

Boslough: Seems like this strategy backfired spectacularly in your case. Have they successfully destroyed anyone else’s career? Are they still pursuing the Serengeti method, or did they learn their lesson?

Mann: Well, yes—I like to think the hyenas tangled with the wrong zebra.

But unfortunately, this tactic continues to be deployed. Over the past year, the Republican chair of the House Science Committee, Lamar Smith of Texas, a recipient of considerable fossil fuel money, has initiated a campaign of persecution against leading climate scientists at NOAA and elsewhere, abusing his authority by serving them with vexatious subpoenas demanding their internal email correspondences and other such items, simply because he and the fossil fuel interests who fund his campaigns don’t like the conclusions of their research. This has sent a collective chill throughout the entire climate science community, and it speaks to the fact that the Serengeti Strategy is very much still alive and well.

Boslough: You say they are still going after leading climate scientists. But as I pointed out in my NCSE review of your Hockey Stick book, even hyenas know to attack the smallest and weakest members of a group. Is Smith really trying to destroy these scientists, or is he just trying to waste their time and discredit them in the eyes of his campaign donors and scientifically illiterate constituents?

Mann: Evil is as evil does. The motive, in the end, is personal destruction. It is to make cautionary examples of individual scientists for others who might think about playing a prominent role in the public discourse over climate change. Here’s what will happen to you if you too put your head above the parapet! Now, whether it is the politicians like Lamar Smith, James Inhofe, or Ted Cruz themselves who are driven by this motive, or whether they are just being loyal foot-soldiers of the fossil fuel interests who have this motive is, in the end, in my view immaterial. We must judge them by their actions, and we must recognize them for the threat that they represent to society.

Boslough: Maybe there’s a selection bias involved in my perceptions. Am I only aware of the fittest survivors whose reputations within the scientific community were actually enhanced? Are there examples of climate scientists who couldn’t take it and quit? Or is it more subtle, with young scientists dissuaded from entering the field or keeping their heads down in a way that makes them invisible?

Mann: I suspect the real impact of the attacks is more difficult to detect. On the one hand, scientists coming into the field now appear to be more mobilized, more willing to confront misinformation and disinformation head on, more willing to engage in the public discourse, whether through social media or other means. But what I worry about are the young scientists we are losing to other fields, scientists confronted by a choice between those areas of science perceived as “safe” (e.g., dark matter, quarks, and black holes) and “unsafe” (e.g., climate change and other areas of environmental research) from attacks by vested interests and the politicians who do their bidding.

Boslough: I’m guessing you had no formal training in how to deal with political assaults on your science and had to learn it on the fly. Can those skills be taught to young scientists who are working in fields that make them vulnerable to attack?

Mann: Indeed, I did not. They don’t train you for this in graduate school science programs. Perhaps we need to add a boot camp experience to our graduate training. Not only can we teach young scientists how to function in the increasingly hostile environment they may find themselves, we must teach them to do so. Fortunately, there is growing educational infrastructure for this within the scientific community. At meetings like the American Geophysical Union annual fall meeting—the largest member society in the earth sciences—there are now numerous workshops and sessions focused on science communication, the law, and other subjects that are critical to the defense of science from politically or ideologically motivated attacks. It’s unfortunate that this is now part of the job description of doing science, but it’s a good thing that scientists are recognizing this and rising to the occasion. The stakes are simply too great—we cannot lose the battle against the forces of unreason and inaction. The silver lining is that we are now creating a whole generation of scientist communicators who are not only doing great science but are effectively communicating the science and its implications to the general public.

Boslough: Did I hear that you have another book coming out?

Mann: The Madhouse Effect represents a collaboration between myself and the Pulitzer Prize–winning editorial cartoonist of the Washington Post, Tom Toles. We attempt to use humor and satire, as embodied in Tom’s cartoons over the years (and a number of new cartoons exclusive to the book) to ridicule the absurdity of modern day climate change denialism. There is no better tool than satire to expose hypocrisy, and nowhere is there greater hypocrisy than the ongoing campaign by fossil fuel interests and their hired hands to deny the well-established science of human-caused climate change. Indeed, climate change denial would be humorous if the stakes weren’t so great. The book takes the form of an annotated compendium of Tom’s cartoons, which we use to explore everything from the fundamentals of science and how it works to the scientific evidence behind climate change, the predicted impacts, the campaign to deny climate change, the hypocrisy of denialism, the dangers of geoengineering, and, finally, the path forward. Ironically enough, we end on a cautiously optimistic, forward-looking note.

Boslough: Since this interview is for skeptics, I have to ask one more thing. Why do some members of the media still refer to individuals who reject the scientific method and mainstream climate science as “skeptics” even though they embrace the pseudoscience of denialism? How can we educate the general public about what skepticism really means?

Mann: Yes—this continues to irk many of us. We need to restore the term skeptic to its rightful place in the scientific discourse. In The Madhouse Effect, we mock—with a great new Tom Toles cartoon exclusive to the book—the laughable manner in which climate change deniers attempt to claim the mantle of Galileo, when they are the very opposite of Galileo, or Einstein, or any of the great paradigm breakers in scientific history. Galileo was a talented, well-trained, mainstream scientist, versed enough in prevailing scientific thinking to identify subtle holes therein. He wasn’t a crank, so poorly versed in the science that he didn’t understand the basics—that’s what most climate change deniers are. Faux skepticism, i.e., denialism masquerading as skepticism, is another one of those aspects of the climate change debate that is so absurd that satire and ridicule is really the only way to address it properly. And that’s what we do in The Madhouse Effect.

I am a young medical doctor, a rheumatologist, from Portugal. I have been interested in science since I can remember. Entering medical school in Portugal is hard; you have to be one of the top students in the country. Then you have six years of medical school, one year of general practice, and four to six years of specialty training. I am now working as a rheumatologist in public and private practice, and I belong to the Board of Rheumatology of the Portuguese Medical Association. I also represent Portugal (Rheumatology Division) at the European Union of Medical Specialists (UEMS), and I am a co-opted member of the Standing Committee on Education and Training of the European League Against Rheumatism (EULAR).

In Portugal, as is probably the case on the rest of the planet, there is a serious lack of scientific knowledge by the general public and many politicians. The public is bombarded with a specter that goes from fraud to infotainment and a confusing mixture of quasi-scientific studies whose purpose is no different from click-bait ads. Real scientific breakthroughs are levelled in traditional and social media as being as important as these click-baits, while increasing importance is given to the personas and not the ideas. If scientists had the money to buy super sports cars and started dating celebrities as routine, maybe in the swampy gossip some science would be delivered Trojan Horse–like to the unwary public. On a more serious note, at the decision-making level I would dare say some mistake economic interests for science, while others deliberately use confusing scientific jargon to create pseudoscience to suit a political need. Like Carl Sagan, I also consider living in a science-driven technological world filled with scientific illiteracy is dangerous and the best path toward disaster.

Returning to my small (yet quite illustrious) country: in recent years, there has been a fairly strong movement promoting the so-called “alternative medicine.” This is not something associated with one specific social or political party or the current or past governments but a trend that has been growing in strength and influence across society, motivated by alternative practice interests. These interests include endorsing alternative medicine practitioners and recognizing them as valid health practitioners, approval of alternative “treatments” to be used on patients (without scientific testing), and the perennially present economic backstage. Lobbying and political contacts not only allowed alternative medicine practitioners recognition by the Portuguese Health Ministry and other health authorities, but even tax exemptions similar to doctors. Yes, an appointment by a specialist doctor will have the same tax exemption as a “fully qualified” homoeopath. Patients can deduct both appointments in their own taxes as if no differences exist in principle, training, requirements, and outcomes. I will be blunt: most, if not all, of these “alternative” treatments are nothing more than quackery. Most have no scientific evidence. The results of the few serious randomized controlled trials prove them identical to placebo, and yet this magical thinking is damaging real medicine, real doctors, and especially real patients

My area of expertise is especially prone to these magical thoughts. Until fifty years ago, the word rheumatism defined what are now over 150 different rheumatic diseases. Although we have state-of-the-art treatments with immunotherapy and expensive biotechnological drugs, the truth is the etiopathology of most conditions still eludes us. We are proven wrong, we change ideas about diseases and treatments, and we make mistakes. We don't know everything, nor we claim to, but what we do know is due to science. And we have learned a lot in recent years, with more accurate diagnosis, better follow-up, and being able to offer live-changing treatments to patients.

It's very hard to debate with most of these “alternative medicine” practitioners, as many fail to understand that science is not a belief or faith (like theirs), it's a system of proof. If science proves me wrong, I am compelled to change my thoughts. I would love if new ideas, refreshing new concepts, and treatments would arise from alternative medicine. The fantasy of a common substance, mysterious unknown energy source, or even some exotic unheard-of plant being the cure to some of the most unfortunate diseases that affect humankind is shared by doctors and alternative practitioners alike. Unfortunately, I am also aware that you have to prove, and for that you have to use science. I keep wondering if in the midst of hundreds of sham treatments and diagnostic methods and procedures used by alternative practitioners, something real and useful is lying dormant because no one looked at it through skeptical lenses or tested it through the scientific method.

Sometimes I think all this is like trying to explain what an immunoglobulin is to someone who refuses to believe bacteria exist and considers microscopes an illusion. Where do you start? Of course, some people in the “alternative medicine” community try to learn science, and some use it. I even know some alternative medicine practitioners who are highly critical of their own community, devoted to learn medicine in a scientific way. But what do you do when the principia behind your practice are simply wrong, while you are being validated by a health authority? Shouldn’t health authorities be entirely science-driven?

The so called post-truth politics, as coined by David Roberts in his blog, is the trendy Orwellian speak of the decade. In this environment that censors truth to favor political bias, science is welcomed with a yellow smile. It looks good to be “scientific” on the photo, but only if it helps your agenda. From black holes to viruses, the universe is “shockingly” indifferent to this. Our future as a species, however, is dependent on how we face the truth using the proper tools (science) and how we apply them to the best of our knowledge toward the common good. If we, based on social pressure and obscure interests, demolish the barriers (and how thin they are sometimes) between science and quackery, truth loses meaning, and progress is seriously impaired. Even worse, we will harm those in need with a grim conviction validated by our own deluded peers.

I have to say most of the medical community is worried about this issue, and most of my colleagues are appalled by what is happening. We’re in the twenty-first century watching health authorities approving what was already quackery in the nineteenth century! Unlike the “alternative medicine” proponents, who thrive on lobbying action and protest, bannering deceptive slogans of free choice and practitioner recognition, doctors tend to educate. And health education is a hard, laborious, and often frustrating task. Quoting Russel: “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves and wiser people so full of doubts.” I don't pretend to be wise; I don't wish to call others fools; and I don’t think this is the whole problem with the planet, but Russel has a point. It’s time for doctors to openly expose and fight the usage of pseudoscience in healthcare.

An essay by Dr. Richard Gallagher, a psychiatrist who purports to be “a man of science,” was featured in the July 1, 2016, online Opinions section of the Washington Post. The essay elicited strong reactions from many quarters; for example, it has drawn over 2,800 online responses as of this writing. Although the title of Gallagher’s essay is alarming enough—“As a psychiatrist, I diagnose mental illness. Also, I help spot demonic possession”—his grasp of science is even more troubling. In his essay, Gallagher claims to be able to identify individuals who are demonically possessed and to help exorcists distinguish them from people suffering from genuine mental illnesses. As clinical psychologists, two of whom are members of the Public Education and Media Committee of the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology (SSCP), we are deeply concerned that his approach to explaining human behavior has the potential to damage the profession and contribute to harmful mental health practices.

At the outset, Gallagher tries to persuade readers that he is a skeptic. He describes himself as “inclined to skepticism” and notes that he once told an exorcist, “I wasn’t likely to go in for a lot of hocus pocus.” He argues that “respect for evidence,” among other virtues, guides his approach to psychiatry, teaching, and evaluating claims concerning demonic possession. Further, he asserts, reasonably, that in most cases behaviors attributed to possession can be accounted for by “more prosaic problems” such as “a medical disorder; mental illnesses,” suggestibility, or “fraud.”

Gallagher’s Observations

Nevertheless, Gallagher’s apparent skepticism dissolves once he recounts the story of his first encounter with a woman whom he concluded was possessed by a demon. He describes her as a “self-styled high priestess” who “called herself a witch and dressed the part, with flowing dark clothes and black eye shadow around to her temples.” It is unclear if the woman’s prototypical appearance influenced his conclusion that she was “possessed” (see Tversky and Kahneman 1974 for a discussion of the representativeness heuristic), but almost certainly other elements of her behavior did. Shortly after touting his many Ivy League affiliations (which in science should carry less weight than the ability to think critically and a commitment to basing arguments on high-quality data), Gallagher builds suspense by telling readers that he has witnessed phenomena that he cannot explain using conventional knowledge. He then relates the following observations regarding this woman’s behavior:

She could tell some people their secret weaknesses, such as undue pride. She knew how individuals she’d never known had died, including my mother and her fatal case of ovarian cancer. Six people later vouched to me that, during her exorcisms, they heard her speaking multiple languages, including Latin, completely unfamiliar to her outside her trances.

Logical Problems

There are several serious inferential problems with Gallagher’s arguments (see also Novella 2016 for a critique of Gallagher’s claims). First, “undue pride” is hardly a rare or idiosyncratic weakness. Second, Gallagher neglects to consider the possibility that the woman’s apparently preternatural awareness could merely be the result of cold reading. Cold reading consists of a set of techniques, such as making educated guesses based on population base rates or providing highly generalized descriptions that apply to almost everyone (the P.T. Barnum effect), which are routinely exploited by fortune-tellers, psychics, magicians, and others who wish to persuade people that they possess paranormal abilities (Hyman 1977; Rowland 2001). Third, some of what appears to be evidence of this woman’s psychic abilities could also or alternatively reflect hot reading, that is, obtaining information about a target using nonparanormal means, such as reading newspaper obituaries or searching the Internet. Fourth, the assumption that a person could speak multiple languages only while in a “trance” is dubious at best. Did Gallagher entertain the hypothesis that she simply hadn’t advertised having learned these languages previously? And how do we know that her Latin was especially accurate? Fifth, it is unclear why, given what is widely known about the limits of eyewitness testimony (Arkowitz and Lilienfeld 2009), Gallagher would be so willing to believe the “vouched” reports of a group of eyewitnesses, especially those who are presumably motivated to believe in demonic possession.

The “self-styled high priestess” whom Gallagher discussed reported that she had connections to Satanism, going so far as to identify herself as Satan’s “queen.” Yet the accuracy of her report should be highly suspect given psychological research on memory. For example, laboratory research indicates that individuals who report experiencing past lives (Meyersberg et al. 2009) and alien abductions (Clancy et al. 2002) display higher rates of false recall and commit more recognition errors than do comparison participants.

Gallagher further offers levitation, extreme strength (which can be caused by excess cortisol and adrenaline surging through the bloodstream; Wise 2009), and “statements of astonishing venom and contempt for religion” (which do not require a paranormal explanation) as compelling evidence that demonic possession is real. Without a doubt, evidence of levitation without assistance would be extraordinary; however, we shouldn’t assume it is due to demonic possession. Notably, Gallagher acknowledges that “I have not witnessed a levitation myself, but half a dozen people I work with vow that they’ve seen it in the course of their exorcisms.” Thus, his most impressive ostensible evidence for the existence of demonic possession again relies on secondhand eyewitness testimony. In addition to the great potential for errors in memory, might those who report witnessing levitation be unduly motivated to see it? Might they be misinterpreting another behavior, such as erratic jumping, as levitation? Indeed, Gallagher neglects to note that skeptics have debunked similar apparent episodes of levitation (“yogic flying”) among people practicing transcendental meditation, demonstrating that they reflect little more than unimpressive hops (Carroll 2011). Moreover, when asked why he and others have been unable to produce more compelling evidence of levitation, Gallagher offers an answer that smacks of a common sign of pseudoscience, namely, evasion of peer review: “One cannot force these creatures to undergo lab studies or submit to scientific manipulation; they will also hardly allow themselves to be easily recorded by video equipment, as skeptics sometimes demand.”

Although Gallagher claims to engage in “careful observation of the evidence” related to demonic possession, his conclusions regarding the possibility of being a “sophisticated psychiatrist” who believes in demons reveal his biases:

Most of my scientific colleagues and friends say no, because of their frequent contact with patients who are deluded about demons, their general skepticism of the supernatural, and their commitment to employ only standard, peer-reviewed treatments that do not potentially mislead (a definite risk) or harm vulnerable patients. But careful observation of the evidence presented to me in my career has led me to believe that certain extremely uncommon cases can be explained no other way.

To say that something “can be explained no other way” suggests that Gallagher, a “practicing Catholic” and author of a book about demonic possession, has fallen prey to confirmation bias, the ubiquitous tendency to attend only to evidence that supports one’s beliefs and to neglect evidence that does not (Nickerson 1998). Yet confirmation bias is exactly what the tools of science help us to overcome. Furthermore, it is worrisome that Gallagher seems almost to scoff at the dedication of some mental health providers to using treatments that do not mislead vulnerable patients.

Logical fallacies are also evident in many of Gallagher’s key arguments (see Novella 2016). After noting that many cultures believe in possession and the paranormal, he states, “despite varying interpretations, multiple depictions of the same phenomena in astonishingly consistent ways offer cumulative evidence of their credibility.” Here, Gallagher commits the bandwagon fallacy—the erroneous assumption that widespread belief in a claim constitutes sufficient evidence for it. Or, as psychologists often say, reliability (consistency) should not be confused with validity. His assertions also seem to court the argumentum ad antiquitatem fallacy—the erroneous assumption that a belief must be true because it has existed across long stretches of time. More likely, the fact that belief in the paranormal has been “astonishingly consistent” across cultures says more about the nature of human cognition (i.e., that there is something about the brain that renders us susceptible to supernatural beliefs) than about the existence of demons. Later, Gallagher commits the logical fallacy of false equivalence—assuming that two things are the same when in fact they are not—when comparing evidence for demonic possession to evidence for George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware. He contends that “in both cases, written historical accounts with numerous sound witnesses testify to their accuracy.” Perhaps had historians claimed that George Washington levitated across the Delaware, Gallagher’s comparison might be defensible. Yet even if this hypothetical scenario were true, it would not change the fact that Gallagher is again relying on anecdotal testimony.

After initially advertising his “skeptical” approach to evaluating claims of possession, Gallagher commits the common error of confusing skepticism with cynicism. He states, “while the American Psychiatric Association has no official opinion on these affairs, the field (like society at large) is full of unpersuadable skeptics and occasionally doctrinaire materialists who are often oddly vitriolic in their opposition to all things spiritual.” Unwillingness to entertain a remarkable claim (cynicism) differs greatly from demanding evidence that is as remarkable as the claim (skepticism). A skeptical thinker could, in principle, be persuaded to consider the possibility of demonic possession if the data were overwhelming. Nothing that Gallagher offers as evidence for demonic possession, however, approaches the realm of the extraordinary.

Implications for Mental Health Practice

Finally, it should be noted that many practicing mental health professionals occasionally encounter nonpsychotic individuals who express concerns about the possibility of demonic possession, alien abduction, sightings of long-deceased individuals, and other implausible phenomena. Indeed, large swaths of the population believe in these and related paranormal claims (Rice 2003). At the end of his piece, Gallagher asserts:

Those who dismiss these cases unwittingly prevent patients from receiving the help they desperately require, either by failing to recommend them for psychiatric treatment (which most clearly need) or by not informing their spiritual ministers that something beyond a mental or other illness seems to be the issue. For any person of science or faith, it should be impossible to turn one’s back on a tormented soul.

To the contrary, rigorous skepticism is not equivalent to denying a suffering individual care. Furthermore, as a psychiatrist, Gallagher is not obliged to confirm or disconfirm his client’s belief in demonic possession. Rather, his job is to improve his or her psychological adjustment. Some well-meaning mental health professionals, in an effort to enhance their clients’ functioning, “join the resistance” by engaging in discussions regarding the veracity of their claims, however fantastical they may be (Lebow 2006). At some point, however, responsible psychotherapists should begin to explore ways in which the client may hold such beliefs while still functioning adaptively. In other cases, therapists may need to encourage their clients to consider alternative explanations for their bewildering thoughts and experiences. By endorsing a set of paranormal beliefs, embracing what is more akin to an antiscientific mind-set, and going beyond joining with the client, Gallagher sets the stage for other practitioners to do more harm than good. At a bare minimum, clients deserve mental health practitioners who understand the nature of science and appreciate the value of critical thinking skills, demonic possession be damned.

References

• Arkowitz, H., and S.O. Lilienfeld. 2009. Why science tells us not to rely on eyewitness accounts. Scientific American Mind (January). Available online at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it/.
• Carroll, R. 2011. The Skeptic’s Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
• Clancy, S.A., R.J. McNally, D.L. Schacter, et al. 2002. Memory distortion in people reporting abduction by aliens. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 111: 455–461.
• Hyman, R. 1977. Cold reading: How to convince strangers that you know all about them. The Zetetic [Skeptical Inquirer] 1: 18–37.
• Lebow, J. 2006. Research for the Psychotherapist: From Science to Practice. New York: Taylor & Francis.
• Meyersberg, C.A., R. Bogdan, D.A. Gallo, et al. 2009 False memory propensity in people reporting recovered memories of past lives. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 118: 399–404.
• Nickerson, R.S. 1998. Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology 2: 175–220.
• Novella, S. 2016. A psychiatrist falls for exorcism. NEUROLOGICblog. Available online at http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/a-psychiatrist-falls-for-exorcism/.
• Rice, T.W. 2003. Believe it or not: Religious and other paranormal beliefs in the United States. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 42: 95–106.
• Rowland, I. 2001. The Full Facts on Cold Reading (2nd ed.). London, England: issuu.com.
• Tversky, A., and D. Kahneman. 1974. Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science 185: 1124–1131.
• Wise, J. 2009. When fear makes us superhuman: Can an extreme response to fear give us strength we would not have under normal circumstances? Scientific American Mind (December). Available online at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/extreme-fear-superhuman/.

There are things we know we don’t know and things we know we know; but sometimes the things we know we know aren’t so. An article by Herman Pontzer in the February 2017 issue of Scientific American, “The Exercise Paradox,” describes new research findings that challenge our conventional wisdom about diet, exercise, and weight loss.

We think we know these things:

1. You can’t lose weight by dieting alone; you have to exercise too.
2. People who exercise burn more calories; if you burn more calories without taking in more calories, simple physics shows you will lose weight.
3. One of the causes of the obesity epidemic is that people are less physically active today than they were a few decades ago.

Surprises from the Hazda

Before examining these ideas, let’s look at the new research. Pontzer studied the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa. They have to do hard physical work to hunt and gather their food. It would seem obvious that they would expend more energy than the average American. But they don’t. Hazda men eat and burn about 2600 calories a day; Hazda women, about 1900 calories. That’s the same as adults in Europe and America. Tests showed that Hazda adults burn the same number of calories to walk a mile as Westerners do. So what’s going on?

Not just the Hazda

There is plenty of corroborating evidence. Studies of farmers in Guatemala, the Gambia, and Bolivia showed their energy expenditures were similar to those of city dwellers. Rural Nigerian women were far more active than African-American women in Chicago, but their energy expenditure was the same. An analysis of ninety-eight published studies confirmed that people in third world countries with physically demanding lives had similar energy expenditures to more sedentary people in the developed world, who had the advantage of labor-saving conveniences.

And animal studies show similar results. Captive primates expend the same number of calories a day as primates in the wild. In Australia, kangaroos and sheep kept in pens expended the same number of calories as those allowed to roam free. In China, pandas expended the same amount of energy in zoos and in the wild.

Couch potatoes do expend about 200 fewer calories a day than people who are moderately active. But the most active people burn no more calories than moderately active people.

How Can this Be?

Apparently we have some kind of built-in energy expenditure control that adjusts to maintain a given level. The Hazda’s bodies adjust to higher activity levels and manage to keep total energy expenditure the same. They may do this by diverting energy from the body’s maintenance and housekeeping tasks. Exercise is known to reduce inflammatory response by the immune system and to decrease hormone levels. Lab animals do not increase their energy expenditure with exercise; instead, they ovulate less frequently and repair tissue damage more slowly.

Primates burn only half as many calories as other mammals, corresponding to lower rates of growth and reproduction. Humans use about 400 more calories a day than chimpanzees, and chimpanzees use more calories than gorillas and orangutans. Apparently, humans evolved to have a metabolism that burned more calories than other primates in order to support the extra activity of our brains. There is an energy cost to having to find more food, but we compensate by cooking to make more calories available, by using our brains to obtain food more efficiently (by farming, trading, transportation, etc.), and by sharing food in times of scarcity. Our tendency to store fat helps us survive famines but it also makes us obese.

Back to the Three Things We “Know”

1. “You can’t lose weight by dieting alone; you have to exercise too.” I knew this couldn’t be true, because concentration camp inmates lost weight without exercising. And I watched my own husband lose sixty pounds in five months by eating sensibly and not exercising at all.
2. “People who exercise burn more calories; if you burn more calories without taking in more calories, simple physics shows you will lose weight.” The physics of calories in/calories out is undeniable, but our metabolism adjusts to compensate for calories out. So effective weight loss requires finding a way to reduce the “calories in” side of the equation. No matter how hard your metabolism is working to sabotage your diet, physics insures that reducing calorie intake from your current level will result in weight loss. The principle is simple; the implementation is not.
3. “One of the causes of the obesity epidemic is that people are less physically active today than they were a few decades ago.” I think we can now say with confidence that this is not true. The obesity epidemic was caused by increased calorie consumption and not by decreased activity.

This Doesn’t Mean You Can Stop Exercising

Exercise is still vitally important to health for other reasons. It helps prevent a variety of diseases. It makes sense to exercise to stay healthy, but it doesn’t make sense to exercise to lose weight.

Since the 1960s, high rates of childhood vaccination in the United States have led to dramatic declines in cases of polio; measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR); chicken pox; and other diseases. The benefits to society have been overwhelming. Over the past two decades alone, vaccines have prevented an estimated 322 million disease cases, 730,000 early deaths, and $1.4 trillion in related costs (Whitney et al. 2014).

Government-led vaccination programs have been so effective that many Americans aged forty-five and younger have little to no comprehension of the lethal threats that these diseases once posed, contributing to their doubts about vaccine safety and their opposition to government mandates. In a 2015 national survey, 41 percent of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds and 35 percent of thirty- to forty-nine-year-olds said that parents should be able to decide whether to vaccinate their children. In comparison, only 23 percent of fifty- to sixty-four-year-olds and 20 percent of those sixty-five and older said the same. These differences are likely partially explained by the comparatively greater proportion of younger Americans who believe that vaccines are unsafe (Pew Research Center 2015).

Yet despite these troubling trends, in 2015 the rate of vaccination for infants and kindergartners in the great majority of states and communities remained at or above 90 percent. At such rates that approach “herd immunity,” it is difficult for infectious diseases such as measles to spread, enabling outbreaks to be contained. But according to 2015 estimates, some states and communities remain dangerous outliers. In Arizona, it is estimated that only 84 percent of infants are vaccinated for MMR. In Michigan, only 59 percent are covered for rotavirus. Moreover, across states, poor communities tend to have disproportionately low rates of infant vaccination (Elam-Evans et al. 2014). At the other end of the spectrum, in some wealthy communities in California, the rate of vaccination for kindergartners is only 50 percent (Yang et al. 2016).

Overall, these statistics paint a complicated portrait. Vaccination rates remain strong in the great majority of U.S. communities, suggesting that vaccine doubts among parents are not translating into a national-level problem. Yet in some communities, childhood vaccination rates are dangerously below herd immunity levels. To counter these trends, research suggests that a nationally focused education and media campaign could create awareness among parents of a false “controversy” that backfires by generating greater doubt and concerns (see Nyhan et al. 2014).

Instead, what are needed are carefully evaluated communication strategies tailored to the dynamics of doctor-parent interactions and to specific communities, regions, and school districts that have high rates of non-vaccination. Policy measures, such as changes in state laws and programs that make it more affordable or easier to access vaccination services, are also needed. In each approach, the complexity of parent attitudes and decisions needs to be carefully considered. Simplistic characterizations of parents as either antiscience “deniers” or pro-science “believers” are misleading and counterproductive.

Health Care Providers and Access to Services

Not surprisingly, the most relevant population to target from a communication standpoint is parents with young children. In this case, a 2010 nationally representative survey of parents provides several tentative insights. That year, more than 80 percent of parents with children under age six said that they had already vaccinated their children, and another 11 percent said they planned to vaccinate their kids with all recommended vaccines (Kennedy et al. 2011).

Despite a high rate of reported compliance, only 23 percent of parents said that they had no concerns about childhood vaccines. Many, even if deciding to vaccinate their children, harbor a variety of questions, concerns, and even doubts. Top concerns included that it might be painful for children to receive so many shots (38 percent of parents); that children were receiving too many shots in one doctor’s visit (36 percent); that children are getting too many vaccines during the first two years of life (34 percent); that vaccines might cause fevers (32 percent); that vaccines may cause learning disabilities and autism (30 percent); and that the ingredients in vaccines are unsafe (26 percent) (Kennedy et al. 2011).

When asked which sources they are most likely to turn to for advice, 85 percent of parents mentioned health care providers, and 80 percent said that they trusted their advice. No other source came close. Surprisingly, despite fears about the spread of misinformation online, parents were far less likely to say that they turn to the Internet. The authors of the study conclude that “the Internet probably supplements, but does not replace, direct communication with a health care provider or other trusted individual” (Kennedy et al. 2011).

Given the central role that health care providers play, there is some debate over the best approaches they should adopt in communicating with parents. Some experts argue for a “presumptive” approach in which health care providers assume during routine visits that parents agree to the recommended schedule of vaccinations. In the presumptive approach, providers broach the topic by simply saying, “Well, we have to do some shots,” and may follow by adding, “So, we’ll do three shots and the drink. Is this okay?” Research suggests that this approach results in the highest rate of vaccination compliance among parents and their children (Opel et al. 2013).

Others argue for a “participatory” approach in which health care providers actively volunteer to address any concerns or questions that parents might have about vaccination. Research suggests that this approach results in a lower vaccination rate than the presumptive strategy, or may delay vaccination as parents put off the decision for a later visit. But advocates of the participatory approach argue that it reduces feelings of possible alienation or distrust among parents and avoids a possible backlash against overly presumptive health care providers (see Hendrix et al. 2016 for discussion).

Apart from the communication approach used by health care providers, other strategies are needed to increase vaccination rates among children from low-income households. These may include eliminating co-payments for vaccination-related doctor’s visits, implementing home visits by health care providers, providing vaccination services at day care facilities and schools, and including vaccinations as part of other government benefits provided to low-income women and children (Community Preventive Services Task Force n.d.).

Engaging ‘White Privilege’ Communities

Several studies have identified the socio-demographic correlates of those outlier schools or districts with high rates of parents seeking vaccine exemption for religious or philosophical beliefs. For these parents, cost or access to health care is not the problem. Indeed, belief exemptions are most likely to occur in communities of so-called “white privilege,” defined by their economic affluence and overwhelmingly white populations.

For example, in California, between 2007 and 2013, the percentage of religious and philosophical exemptions for children statewide is estimated to have increased from only 1 percent to 3 percent, but some suburban communities in the state are estimated to have exemption rates close to 50 percent. Within these mostly white communities, non-vaccination rates tend to be highest in smaller private and charter schools. Studies have found similar correlates of nonexemption rates in several Midwest areas (Yang et al. 2016).

There is no silver-bullet approach to shifting the views of parents in these affluent communities. Each needs to be more carefully studied, identifying the specific parental concerns and beliefs unique to each context. Research should also examine how information about vaccination is shared among parents within the community, including the role of local health care providers, schools, churches, parent groups, elected officials, the news media, and social media.

Several legislative and policy strategies are perhaps even more likely to be effective. For example, in 2015 California joined other states in no longer allowing parents enrolling their children in schools and day cares to claim a religious or philosophical exemption. Following the adoption of the rule, the percentage of vaccinated kindergartners entering the state’s schools was the highest in a decade (Pearlstein 2016).

More research, data, and time are needed to fully assess the impact of the California mandate and similar actions in other states. Such mandates are likely to be legally challenged and may reinforce distrust and alienation among parents. An alternative is to require that parents opting for a belief exemption pay an annual processing fee, set at a sliding scale based on income. The goal is to make a belief exemption by parents less convenient and more burdensome. The strategy is not only likely to increase vaccination rates but also generate revenue for vaccine education and outreach programs. More analysis of this strategy is merited (Billington and Omer 2016).

References

• Billington, J.K., and S.B. Omer. 2016. Use of fees to discourage nonmedical exemptions to school immunization laws in US states. American Journal of Public Health 106(2): 269–270.
• Community Preventive Services Task Force. N.d. Increasing appropriate vaccination: universally recommended vaccinations. The Guide to Community Preventive Services. Available online at http://www.thecommunityguide.org/vaccines/universally/index.html.
• Elam-Evans, L.D., D. Yankey, J.A. Singleton, et al. 2014. National, state, and selected local area vaccination coverage among children aged 19–35 months—United States, 2013. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 63(34): 741–748.
• Hendrix, K.S., L.A. Sturm, G.D. Zimet, et al. 2016. Ethics and childhood vaccination policy in the United States. American journal of Public Health 106(2): 273–278.
• Kennedy, A., M. Basket, and K. Sheedy. 2011. Vaccine attitudes, concerns, and information sources reported by parents of young children: Results from the 2009 HealthStyles survey. Pediatrics 127(Supplement 1): S92–S99.
• Nyhan, B., J. Reifler, S. Richey, et al. 2014. Effective messages in vaccine promotion: A randomized trial. Pediatrics 133(4): e835–e842.
• Opel, D.J., J. Heritage, J.A. Taylor, et al. 2013. The architecture of provider-parent vaccine discussions at health supervision visits. Pediatrics peds-2013.
• Pearlstein, J. 2016. California’s pro-vaccination law may be working. Wired (January 21). Available online at http://www.wired.com/2016/01/californias-pro-vaccination-law-may-be-working/.
• Pew Research Center. 2015. Americans, Politics, and Science Issues. Washington, DC. Available online at http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/07/01/chapter-5-public-views-about-biomedical-issues/.
• Whitney, C.G., F. Zhou, J. Singleton, et al. 2014. Benefits from immunization during the Vaccines for Children Program era—United States, 1994–2013. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 63(16): 352–355.
• Yang, Y.T., P.L. Delamater, T.F. Leslie, et al. 2016. Sociodemographic predictors of vaccination exemptions on the basis of personal belief in California. American Journal of Public Health 106(1): 172–177.

In an article in the Skeptical Inquirer (Nickell 2014) and in the book American Hauntings (Bartholomew and Nickell 2015, 57–77), I analyzed the Perrons’ claims of demonic activity and showed that they were consistent with the effects of strong winds, misperceptions, schoolgirl pranks, vivid dreams, simple suggestion, role-playing, and other factors—including one child’s having had an imaginary playmate—and the effects of memory after some thirty to forty years. Then there was the influence of Ed and Lorraine Warren—“demonologist” and “clairvoyant,” respectively—who made a dubious career of convincing such troubled people that they were plagued by demons while seeking book deals and encouraging their coauthors, some admit, to fabricate elements to make the books “scary” (Nickell 2014, 23).

Figure 1. Norma Sutcliffe stands at her historic home, now made notorious by the movie The Conjuring (2013), which bears little resemblance to the truth. The barn in the background never saw a hanging.

Norma Sutcliffe, who with her husband, Gerry, acquired the property in 1987 and has lived there until the present (Figure 1), reports no demonic activity. Yet the two have been plagued by a “Conjuring-instigated siege of their property,” according to legal papers filed in their lawsuit against Warner Bros. Studios. Uninvited people suddenly appear on their property, while others make harassing phone calls at night. There have even been Internet discussions about destroying the eighteenth-century residence because “it’s so full of evil”—among other outrages (Sutcliffe 2015–2016).

Norma invited me to visit her eighteenth-century property in mid-June 2016 to see for myself much of the rest of the evidence behind the fictionalized and fantasized story. Guided by her, I toured the historic Arnold-Richardson house and property, visited old cemeteries in the area, and searched archival records in the Harrisville town hall and library—all helping to further dispel the falsehoods and exaggerations that have been used to promote this utterly bogus case of demonic activity and demon possession.

Revealing Tour

Norma walked me through the historic house—from cellar to attic—where I saw the locations of many occurrences reported by the Perrons that were supposed to give evidence of demonic presences:

Dark Passages. With what the Perrons would come to think was an ominous warning, the previous owner told Roger, “For the sake of your family, leave the lights on at night” (Perron 2011, 45). But Norma found that a light would have been needed downstairs so family members could get to the bathroom in the middle of the night from their far-flung bedrooms on two floors—requiring treks through multiple rooms that were dangerously dark. The man obviously had given practical advice—not a warning of supernatural entities, which, in fact, he made no mention of.

Apparitions in Carolyn’s Bedroom (now a study). Carolyn Perron once stirred from sleep to feel a “presence” and see a grotesque female figure looming above her while she was “immobilized” (Perron 2011, 185–187; Johnson 2009, 70–71). Clearly, she experienced a common waking dream that occurs between sleep and wakefulness, coupled with sleep paralysis since her body was still in the sleep mode. And this was not the only waking dream to occur among the Perrons (Nickell 2014; Bartholomew and Nickell 2015).

Opening Cellar Door. This had a habit of partially opening during the night, “Even after the family remembered locking it” (Johnson 2009, 48). Also when someone walked past the door, it might suddenly open behind the person’s back (Perron 2011, 149). Norma explained that the door was a bit warped so that the antique latch did not fully engage. Thus, temperature fluctuations (such as the house’s wood and metal cooling at night) could cause the latch to release and the door to pop open. (It was never actually “locked,” only latched.) Or when someone walked by, depressing the floorboard, the latch could again release and the door open. Norma and Gerry had the door fixed after they moved in and discovered the problem (Sutcliffe 2015–2016).

Locking Attic-Room Door. On one occasion, two girls were playing with a Ouija board in an attic room when they were unaccountably locked in—ostensibly by evil entities (Perron 2013, 24–25). Actually, the door has the same type of latch as the cellar door, and if the door had been pulled unthinkingly or had been allowed to swing after the girls entered, the latch bar would bounce upward as the door closed and then drop down and engage, “locking” the girls inside the room. No demons were needed.

Dead People in Walls. Young Cindy Perron claimed she could feel the spirits in her bedroom, insisting there were “seven dead soldiers buried in the wall” (Perron 2013, 279). However, the walls were only seven inches thick—we measured—so that could never have happened. (She also perceived “a whole bunch of people eating in our dining room” and several “little ghosts”—“native children”—playing in a nearby pine grove [Perron 2013, 69–70, 164–165].) Her claims were surely only the imaginings of a child who exhibited many of the traits associated with fantasy proneness (Nickell 2014, 23).

Fly Infestation! Andrea Perron wrote pages about “houseflies” in their home, appearing unaccountably “in the middle of deep winter.” There were “clusters of them huddled together, as if plotting the next move.” She concluded: “It was far more than infestation. It was manifestation.” In time, “inexplicably, the phantom flies disappeared,” she said, but years later Lorraine Warren “would arrive and explain that the flies were there with purpose and reason, as the harbingers of things to come.” Andrea would call them “the devil’s pets” (Perron 2011, 83–94, 265–266). In fact, clues to the real explanation are found in her own words (“winter,” “clusters,” etc.), which indicate that the infestation was probably caused by housefly-lookalikes called “cluster flies” that behave as described (see “Ask the Orkin Man” 2016). They are explained by science, not demonology.

Kitchen Phenomena. Several supposedly supernatural events occurred in the kitchen (now the dining room), “Considered one of the most active rooms in the house” (Perron 2011, 448). For example, Andrea once witnessed a pot of meatballs “go flying off the surface of the stove without the assistance” of her father. Actually, her mother disagreed, and in fact Roger Perron was at the time “seething with anger” and had not only “touched” the pot handle but even followed up by “kicking the pot past his daughter.” It seems absurd therefore to postulate a “kitchen witch” (Perron 2013, 235–238).

On another occasion, Carolyn started peeling an orange when she saw blood trickling from it. She first thought she had nicked herself with the knife but could find no wound. To keep her youngest daughter from wandering in and becoming frightened, she hastily cleaned the blood from the sink and floor and threw the “bloody orange” in the trash (Johnson 2009, 545–555). The most likely explanation here, I think, is that she had mistakenly gotten hold of a California blood orange. Some of these can resemble ordinary oranges but yield a deep, blood-colored juice—hence, the fruit’s name (“Blood Oranges” 2016).

Many more examples could be given, but these are sufficient to show how the Perrons repeatedly suggested supernatural explanations for mundane events—even before they found themselves under the spell of the Warrens.

Deaths Multiplied

Numerous people have allegedly died tragic deaths at the Arnold-Richardson house—an implication being that their unrequited spirits haunt the place or that they have somehow been transformed into malevolent entities or demonic presences. But what are the facts about the deaths of the people allegedly involved? Historical research reveals the eye-opening truth.

The central figure is a reputed witch named Bathsheba Sherman. Based on amateurish “research” of local records and lore and later confirmations by “psychics,” Carolyn Perron focused on Bathsheba, allegedly accused but acquitted of murdering an infant as part of a ritual sacrifice, “a deal struck with the devil” (Perron 2011, 298–299, 321–325). It was even said that Bathsheba had hanged herself in the barn near the Perron home (Johnson 2009, 43–46, 51; Perron 2011, 404). The time came when the “demons” were consolidated, when “Mrs. Warren referred to the God-forsaken spirit as the lone demonic presence in their house, calling her by name: Bathsheba” (Perron 2011, 328).

Figure 2. Norma Sutcliffe points out the cellar well where—according to unfounded accusations—Bathsheba Sherman supposedly drowned her children. In fact, she never lived in the house.

In fact, as we shall see later, no records are known to confirm any of the allegations against Bathsheba Sherman. She is buried next to her husband, Judson, in the Riverside Cemetery in Harrisville, where her tombstone records her date of death as May 25, 1885. The Burrillville town records¹ give the cause of death as “paralysis.” Her obituary in The Burrillville Gazette (May 29, 1885) corroborates the cause as “a sudden attack of paralysis”—almost certainly a stroke. Her funeral service was conducted by Rev. A.H. Granger, a Baptist minister, one of various facts belying the claim that she was a witch.

But if Bathsheba Sherman did not hang herself in the Arnold-Richardson barn, maybe it was instead Susan Arnold, age ninety-three, as later claimed by Carolyn Perron (Perron 2011, xx, 102). Alas, despite the Arnold surname, her suicide was at her home elsewhere on Harrisville Road. According to a newspaper clipping (“Burrillville” 1866), Susan was the fifty-year-old wife of John Arnold. She locked herself in an attic storeroom where she was found hanging “from a wardrobe hook with a very small cord.”²

Other Arnold deaths wrongly assigned to the famous house include those of Prudence Arnold in 1849 and Johnny Arnold (son of Edwin, who did once own the property) in 1911 (Johnson 2009, 50; Perron 2011, xxi). Prudence was not yet twelve when she was murdered—her throat slashed by a jilted suitor—at the home of her stepparents in Uxbridge, Massachusetts (“The Inquest” 1849; “Uxbridge Tragedy” 1849). And a despondent fifty-seven-year-old John A. “Johnny” Arnold committed suicide by taking “a dose of paris green” (commonly used as an insecticide and rodent poison) “at his home near Tarkiln” (“Obituary” 1911)—not at the Arnold-Richardson house as alleged by Perron (2014, 182).

Still other alleged deaths on the historic house property have no known basis in fact. These include the infant whom Bathsheba Sherman allegedly killed, the wound “presumably inflicted with a needle” through the base of the skull (Perron 2011, 384–385; Johnson 2009, 51), and one or more of Bathsheba’s own children, whom she is “rumored” to have drowned in “the basement well” (Figure 2) (Johnson 2009, 51).

However, there is no available documented record of Bathsheba (or anyone else, for that matter) having killed an infant. Had any such documentation been known, it would likely have been recorded in what is known as The Black Book of Burrillville, a list of the unusual deaths in the township of Burrillville, from 1806, compiled by historians (Matthewson n.d.).

In light of what we have seen so far, consider the following quotation—in which every single statement but one is false:

The Black Book of Burrillville, the town’s former public records book, reveals that over the course of its existence the property has been host to two suicides by hanging, one suicide by poison, the rape and murder of eleven-year-old Prudence Arnold by a farmhand, two drownings,³ and the passing of four men who froze to death, in addition to other tragic losses of life. (“The Conjuring Filming Location” 2016)

One man, Jarvis Smith, did die of exposure on the property on March 20, 1901 (Matthewson n.d.). Otherwise, none of the previously listed deaths occurred there; neither was Prudence Arnold raped, judging from the official report (“The Inquest” 1849). And the Black Book—which I personally examined from beginning to end (Figure 3)—is not “the town’s former public records book.”

The problem is not the Black Book of course but of numerous shoddy researchers compiling bogus claims, misinterpretations made by them and others, and attributing the false information to sources they have misread or never seen.

Figure 3. Author researching a compendium of deaths, known as The Black Book of Burrillville. (Author’s photos)

Clues at Hand

Volume three of Andrea Perron’s wordy, repetitious, self-published trilogy, House of Darkness House of Light (2014), continues to relate anecdotes from the Perrons’ residence in the 1970s. The accounts provide clues as to what really took place.

In the first volume (Perron 2011, 243–244), much was made of a “solid blue tubular beam of light” that shot down the chimney into a room, then retraced its route and disappeared. Carolyn “would speculate about the effects of the light for many years to come.” Hearing about it, Lorraine Warren insisted that, writes Perron, it was supernatural, “manifesting as a beam of Cosmic Light traveling through space and time, then entering a specific portal; delivering a message received by mortal souls who have witnessed its affect [sic] yet remain unable to discern its meaning”—perhaps a “blessing” or a “curse” (Perron 2011, 244).

Reportedly, the phenomenon happened twice more (Perron 2011, 244). Current resident Norma Sutcliffe also once saw a blue light shoot across the bedroom, but she is quick to say that she does not attribute any such odd happening to the supernatural. And in volume three, Perron (2014, 332) now concludes that—while the light was the “most amazing thing” she ever saw in the old house—it was really “a tube of blue lightning.” That is consistent with the rare phenomenon of ball lightning that has been reported to enter houses, sometimes through chimneys (“Ball Lightning” 2016).

Elsewhere in volume three we read of an interesting apparition of a woman that appeared only to Christine at night and always in a window as an accompaniment to her reflection. She found it disturbing. Andrea gives a secondhand account (Perron 2014, 13–14):

. . . [S]he’d glance at a window, only to see the woman standing behind her own reflection in the glass. The spirit was always the same. So much taller than the youngster, she stood out in the crowd. . . . No optical illusions involved, no mistaking it for something else beyond the glass, this was an entity. As if standing at the mirror, there she was, right behind the kid, gazing at the glass with her . . . just watching Christine watching her.

Having researched something like this before, I think it was indeed an “optical illusion”: a double reflection of the girl, despite Perron’s haste to convince readers otherwise. Note that the second image was that of a female, taller, and always fixed in the same position relative to her. Everyone has seen his or her image reflected in a window, especially at night. Actually, both the front and back surfaces of the glass reflect an image, but these are usually so close together as to go unnoticed. Seeing a reflection from an angle could enhance the separation, but an even more intense effect can be produced by wavy old glass such as that at the Arnold-Richardson House. I had occasion to duplicate and photograph such an effect to explain Abraham Lincoln’s having once famously seen his double image in a mirror (Nickell 2001, photo on p. 11).

Quite another entity was partial to April, the youngest of the Perron girls, who was only five when the family moved into the house. Supposedly, April often communicated telepathically with a little boy named Oliver whom she could find “always upstairs in the chimney closet.” She believes he is still there (Perron 2013, 93–99). However, during their final week at the house in 1980, April spent a lot of time upstairs (Perron 2014, 183–184): “Day after day, for hours and hours she waited, speaking to him gently. . . . How could April bid him a fond farewell if he refused to come make his presence known? In spite of her prompting he was a no show on the stage of life and afterlife.”

What had happened? Such entities are unknown to science—except as the familiar “imaginary companion” with whom certain young children interact as if the entity is real. The phenomenon seems to be rather more frequent among lonely or unsociable children or those who have difficulty in their family relationships (Goldenson 1970, I: 597–598). April now says she often “felt like an abandoned child” who had to spend much of her time alone. Also, “our mother appeared depressed most of the time and our father was just angry” (Perron 2014, 339). It seems that, as typically happens with imaginary companions who become outgrown as the child finds different ways of meeting his or her emotional needs (Goldenson 1970, I: 598), “Oliver” simply went away and could no more be reclaimed than April could herself turn back time and become that little girl again.

Conclusions

The evidence mounts that the Perrons were a dysfunctional family. They were not preyed upon by “demons” (whose existence is not supported by science), but rather they believed in such due to religious and paranormal propaganda, as evident throughout Perron’s books. The merest noise or other odd happening was treated with the illogic of what is known as an argument from ignorance: “We don’t know what caused it, so it must have been paranormal.” A “demonologist” and a “clairvoyant,” Ed and Lorraine Warren, were anxious to convince them that demons—and a book deal—were lurking in the shadows. In the final volume of her trilogy, Andrea Perron (2014, 216) tells how Lorraine Warren eventually proposed just such a deal to her mother Carolyn.

Carolyn’s five daughters appear to have followed her lead: with the judgments and imaginations of children, they were soon competing for much-needed attention, reporting every “demonic” occurrence. When their father Roger doubted much of the phenomena and denounced the Warrens as “a pair of two-bit charlatans” (Perron 2013, 263), Carolyn felt that he questioned her integrity and the girls stood “squarely in her camp” (Perron 2011, 112; 2013, 195). Eventually, he seemed—at least after suffering estrangement and divorce—to acquiesce in favor of family harmony.

It is no wonder that hysteria came to reign and “demons” were ever-present, or that things have since quieted with the thirty-year tenure of Norma Sutcliffe, who does not believe in demons. Still, the quiet has been disrupted by the Hollywoodization of the old farmstead and the misrepresentation of truth by shoddy research, misperceptions, exaggeration, probable mischief, suggestion, and more, including the power of the almighty dollar. We see that the major “demons” were Ignorance, Superstition, and Greed, and they still hold some in their power.

Notes

1. The death register (vol. 1A, 1854–1900) gives her name as Bathsheba Greene, apparently after a later marriage, but she is buried beside her first husband, Judson Sherman, with his surname.
2. The determined woman had in the room with her a gun, knife, and vial of mercury. Also she had laid out on a bed in another room “all the clothes for her burial.”
3. Andrea Perron (2011, 472–475) refers to two Bakers, a father and son, who “reportedly drowned on this property.” However, the Black Book (Matthewson n.d.) relates only a single Baker drowning, the suicide of Chester A. in 1949, “in Harrison Mill Pond.”

References

• “Ask the Orkin Man.” 2016. Available online at www.orkin.com/ask-the-orkin-man/large-slow-moving-flies/; accessed July 5, 2016.
• “Ball Lightning.” 2016. Available online at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning; accessed July 15, 2016.
• Bartholomew, Robert E., and Joe Nickell. 2015. American Hauntings: The True Stories behind Hollywood’s Scariest Movies—from The Exorcist to The Conjuring. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 55–77.
• “Blood Oranges.” 2016. Available online at www.calif-citrusspecialties.com/blood_orange.htm; accessed July 7, 2016.
• “Burrillville.” 1866. Unidentified newspaper clipping (Sutcliffe 2015–2016).
• “The Conjuring Filming Location.” 2016. Available online at https:roadtrippers.com/us/harrisville-ri/points-of-interest/the-conjuring-filming-location?lat=40.80972&lng=-96.67528&z=5; accessed July 7, 2016.
• Goldenson, Robert M. 1970. The Encyclopedia of Human Behavior, in two vols. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co.
• “The Inquest.” 1849. Inquest held at Uxbridge, MA, by coroner Aaron Burden; text in “Uxbridge Tragedy” 1849.
• Johnson, Keith. 2009. Paranormal Realities. Privately printed: New England Anomalies Research (i.e., Keith and Sandy Johnson).
• Matthewson, J.C. N.d. The Black Book of Burrillville. Manscript “copied from the original by John Smith.” Updated in 1999. Lodged in archives at Jesse M. Smith Memorial Library, Harrisville, RI.
• Nickell, Joe. 2001. Real-Life X-Files. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• ———. 2014. “The Conjuring: Ghosts? Poltergeist? Demons?” Skeptical Inquirer 38(2) (March/April): 22–25.
• “Obituary of John A. Arnold.” 1911. Unidentified clipping (Sutcliffe 2015–2016).
• Perron, Andrea. 2011. House of Darkness House of Light, Vol. 1. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse.
• ———. 2013. House of Darkness House of Light, Vol. 2. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse.
• ———. 2014. House of Darkness House of Light, Vol. 3. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse.
• Sutcliffe, Norma. 2015–2016. Communications with author including in person at her home June 15–16, 2016, together with sheaf of photocopied and annotated documents.
• “Uxbridge Tragedy.” 1849. Clipping from Woonsocket Patriot, week of February 9, 1849 (Sutcliffe 2015–2016).

Bob Knaier is an attorney currently living in Southern California, originally from Buffalo, New York. Bob spoke at CSICon 2016, presenting a paper titled “Homeopathy on Trial: Allen v. Hyland’s, Inc. and a Failure of Evidentiary Gatekeeping.”

Susan Gerbic: Bob, great to get a chance to talk to you. You are a long way from Buffalo. Are you missing those winters? I was raised in California and didn’t see snow until I was an adult.

Bob Knaier: Ha, I think you may have done it backward. My only fond memories of the snow are from my childhood. As an adult, living in it can be a chore. I have no doubt that doing so builds character—the people of Buffalo are as tough as they come—but no, I don’t miss the snow. I don’t even visit in the winter if I can avoid it. That said, I love Buffalo. I met my wife, Michelle, there. We both have family and friends there. The food can’t be beat. And upstate New York has a long history of fostering “freethought” and other similar movements. Buffalo is the home, after all, of CFI! It is also, however, the source of perhaps my one residual indulgence of full-blown irrationality, of belief without evidence. I have no doubt, every year, that the Buffalo Bills will make the playoffs.

Photo by Susan Gerbic.

Gerbic: I love the Sunday paper presentations; the talks are fifteen minutes, and I always learn something new. Tell our readers about your talk on homeopathy and this trial, Allen v. Hyland’s.

Knaier: My talk was about the rules for admitting expert testimony at trial, the responsibility of courts to act as evidentiary “gatekeepers” by precluding such testimony when it has no proper scientific basis, and how that gatekeeping function failed in a trial against Hyland’s, Inc., a manufacturer of homeopathic “medicine.” The admissibility of expert testimony is one of the things on which I focus in my practice. I have been doing this for years but only recently realized the extent to which it overlaps with my interest in skepticism more broadly.

Expert testimony can be a critical part of complex litigation and, for perhaps obvious reasons, can be quite persuasive at trial. But it can also be misused. Litigants sometimes offer expert testimony that has no reliable scientific basis. When that happens, juries can be misled into believing things without sufficient evidence. That should sound like a familiar problem to skeptics. In litigation, however, there is an answer to that problem. The rules of evidence preclude experts from offering speculative, unfounded testimony. In the context of scientific issues, the rules are intended to ensure that expert testimony has a reasonable scientific basis—that juries are not being fed “junk science” or pseudoscience.  

So, you can imagine my excitement (and dismay) when I came across an example of expert testimony being offered in support of a classic piece of pseudoscience: homeopathy. In the summer of 2015, a case went to trial in Los Angeles in which consumers alleged that Hyland’s misrepresented the efficacy of its homeopathic products—given that those products, by the very principles of homeopathy, generally contain no active ingredients. Hyland’s nevertheless offered testimony from several expert witnesses, purporting to explain how homeopathic remedies can and do work. In my view, those experts should never have been allowed to testify. Under the rules of evidence, their opinions were unfounded, unreliable, and wildly unscientific. The court thus should have exercised its “gatekeeping” function and precluded them from misleading the jury. Regrettably, it did not do so. It allowed the experts to testify, and, as a result, the jury found in favor of Hyland’s.

Photo by Karl Withakay.

Thus, in my talk I explained the responsibility of trial courts to preclude the admission of unreliable evidence in support of purportedly scientific claims; discussed the nature, history, and evidentiary basis of homeopathy; and described the Hyland’s trial and its outcome. I also considered the harms that can flow from allowing unfounded expert testimony to reach a jury and spoke about the importance of ensuring that litigants and courts focus their efforts on precluding pseudoscience from distorting the civil justice system. In case fellow skeptics want to read more about this, I am publishing a paper on it in the Spring 2017 issue of Jurimetrics: The Journal of Law, Science, and Technology (a journal of the American Bar Association Section of Science & Technology Law and Arizona State University’s Center for Law, Science & Innovation).

Gerbic: Can you give a few pointers to those people who are hoping to apply to give a paper this October?

Knaier: Presenting at the Sunday Papers session is really an honor. The audience includes not only other conference attendees but also conference speakers. In other words, if you get to speak on Sunday, you may very well be presenting your ideas to some of the renowned skeptics, scientists, and thinkers you came to the conference to see. Let’s face it, there are few things more challenging than giving a talk to a group of highly accomplished, intelligent skeptics. But doing so can also be tremendously rewarding. So give careful thought to your topic and prepare as thoroughly as you can.

With regard to a topic, consider how you might apply skeptical inquiry to your own work or life experiences. That way, you can tell the audience something they might not already know, but through the lens of a shared methodological worldview. If you can strike that sort of balance, you might be able to make your initial proposal stand out.

If you are then chosen to proceed further into the selection process, preparation is key. Ray Hall does an extraordinary “gatekeeping” job of his own by vetting candidate talks. Be sure to meet his deadlines and substantive requests. You’ll be asked to provide, within a matter of weeks, a draft paper and a set of presentation slides. So be prepared to work hard. Your ultimate submission should be polished and well-written. And again, you are proposing to make a persuasive presentation to a room full of skeptics, so it needs to be thoughtful and well-supported. Treat it as a labor of love. If you don’t love your topic, and care for it accordingly, it will be hard to make others care for it.  

Gerbic: You have attended a few skeptic conferences. What brings you back to these?

Knaier: I think of these conferences as an intellectual vacation—not a vacation from deep thought, but rather a vacation to deep thought. Many of us may not get a great deal of intellectual stimulation in our everyday lives, or at least may not regularly be among others who share a commitment to skepticism, reason, and free inquiry. These conferences offer a brief opportunity to experience that. They can be a real oasis in that regard—particularly when held in the Las Vegas desert! Michelle and I attended our first TAM in 2010, attended every year through 2015, finally came to our first CSICon in 2016, and are looking forward to coming back in 2017 and beyond.

There is really nothing quite like these conferences. One thing that makes them stand out in my mind is that they do not generally revolve around a specific subject matter. Unlike, say, a specialist academic conference, a skeptics’ conference revolves around broad methodological commitments. We thus get to see, meet, and listen to intellectual heroes of all stripes, discussing and explaining a wide variety of subjects. I always leave re-charged and ready to keep fighting for the cause of reason.   

Hunter Perrin as Zombie Trump with Bob Knaier. Photo by Susan Gerbic.

Gerbic: Can you give me some of your favorite moments?

Knaier: There are so many! Presenting at the Sunday Papers session was an unforgettable experience. In addition, the talks at CSICon 2016 were outstanding. Seeing and hearing from James Randi and Richard Dawkins was inspiring as always. Lawrence Krauss explained, like nobody else can, our place in the universe. As a practicing lawyer, I took away valuable insights into human psychology and decision making from speakers such as Elizabeth Loftus, Carol Tavris, and Maria Konnikova. And it was an honor and a pleasure to see Harriet Hall speak—given that her work on homeopathy helped inspire my own talk.

But CSICon is about more than the talks. It’s also about the moments before and after those talks. Michelle and I met Richard Dawkins in the registration area, chatted with Joe Nickell before heading into an excellent Halloween party, and got to meet like-minded skeptics from all over the world. And speaking of the Halloween party, I will never forget the sight of Richard Dawkins dressed as a lepidopterist (butterfly catcher)—giant net and all. The fun, friendly atmosphere at CSICon was truly shared by everyone. I can’t wait to be back.

Gerbic: Thank you so much, Bob. I’ll see you at CSICon 2017. A reminder to readers to put in your vacation requests now. October 26–29, Las Vegas, Nevada, Excalibur Hotel and Casino. Arrive in time to attend the workshops usually held Thursday morning, and stay for the Sunday Papers. My advice is to join the Facebook group that will keep you informed where people are hanging out, ‘cause that is what happens at these events. There will be an area somewhere with people looking forward to meeting you. And get all the extra sleep you can beforehand. Don’t forget your Halloween Costume!

For someone who may well be the only full-time skeptical investigator in the United Kingdom, my exact route into skepticism is somewhat hard to recall. Lacking any previously unshakable belief in something entirely unsubstantiative, there was no Damascene moment of dramatic volte-face for me. Instead, my discovery of the skeptical movement came piecemeal, in what is doubtlessly a story familiar to many people: watching a TV show led to finding a podcast, which opened up a world of skeptical media, which prompted me to search for local skeptics and, soon, to set up a skeptics society.

When I cofounded the Merseyside Skeptics Society in early 2009, Skeptics in the Pub groups had only recently begun to spread beyond the well-established London event, with groups in Oxford and Leicester before our own in Liverpool. If numbers tell a story of success, the growth in the Skeptics in the Pub movement is encouraging: seven years on, there are over forty active local groups. In effect, there’s barely a town in the country that doesn’t have a nearby skeptical presence.

The organic growth of the U.K. skeptical scene arguably demonstrates both the strength and weakness of a bottom-up, decentralized movement. Apparently uniquely across the skeptical world (or certainly across Europe and North America), there is no official organization at the head of my country’s skeptical efforts. With no central body determining what can and can’t be done, local chapters run autonomously, making the barrier to entry as low as the ability to find an adequate venue and to book a suitable speaker. This openness has undoubtedly done wonders for the rapid growth of the U.K. skeptical community in the past decade.

The inevitable downside to a movement with no center is a lack of a figurehead to drive activism and direct enthusiasm into effective pursuits, meaning opportunities to counter pseudoscience directly and publicly sometimes pass by, with local groups focusing their energies on their own local activities. This downside is certainly not insurmountable if approached correctly. In fact, within a year of the formation of the Merseyside Skeptics Society, we had started the 10:23 Campaign—a series of publicity-raising stunts designed to drive home to the public the inefficacy of homeopathic remedies (a pseudoscience that carries a particular embarrassment for British skeptics, given the U.K. government’s support for homeopathy in the National Health Service (NHS) to the tune of some £4 million, nearly $6 million).

The stunt itself was nothing new: taking a homeopathic “overdose” in order to highlight that the remedies contained nothing but sugar. What made our plan different from previous, similar stunts was the scale: we aimed to have skeptics all across the country taking a public “overdose” at precisely the same time, at 10:23 am (the time being a reference to the Avogadro constant, which can be used to explain the inert nature of homeopathic products). To achieve this goal, we needed to convince skeptical groups around the country to get behind our plan and to join us. Fortunately, as I’ve seen on many occasions since, when you approach a skeptical group with an appeal for support rather than a prescriptive diktat, you invariably find a passionate, enthusiastic, and warm response. More often than not, skeptics want to help and want to be part of an idea they can see the value of.

Our 2010 10:23 Campaign was an overwhelming success, with 300 skeptics in thirteen cities swallowing sugar pills in illustration of the cause. The stunt garnered national attention, remaining the top story on the BBC website for the whole day and appearing in every national newspaper. So successful was the campaign that in 2011—astonishingly, in retrospect, less than two years after we first founded the Merseyside Skeptics Society—we took the campaign worldwide, approaching every skeptical group we could find, offering the same appeal for enthusiasm, aid, and action. On February 6, 2011, 1,700 skeptics in seventy cities across thirty-two countries—including a research scientist in Antarctica—collectively took part in a stunt that was dreamt up by a small, local group in Liverpool one afternoon. As one illustration of the effect, sales of homeopathic products across all of Poland fell by 17 percent after the 10:23 Campaign made the national news there.

As successful as the 10:23 Campaign was, NHS funding of homeopathy in the United Kingdom was far from defeated. This, perhaps, is the biggest downside to an autonomous and decentralized skeptical community: only so much can be achieved with limited volunteer time, and volunteers rightly focus their attention and activism where their interest takes them. It is the skeptic’s lot to repeatedly tread old ground, as long-debunked ideas require constant re-skewering. For some skeptics, this same-old familiarity can breed fatigue, and names once-synonymous with a cause drift away as real life and other interests take precedent.

The ability to circumvent that fatigue is one of the real strengths of having a dedicated and professional skeptical body, which is why I was so delighted to become possibly the country’s only full-time skeptic when I became the project director of Simon Singh’s charity The Good Thinking Society in 2014. Among the many projects we’ve undertaken in the past two years has been to systematically chase up and challenge the funding of homeopathy by the NHS, going deeper into the specifics of funding agreements, health policies, and commissioning processes than any voluntary skeptic has had the time, interest, and expertise to do in the past. In doing so, we’ve been able for the first time to accurately expose where in the country public funds are spent on homeopathy and to work with lawyers to bring legal challenges against regional funding decisions with encouraging signs of success.

The space to methodically and tactically investigate has, for perhaps the first time, put homeopathy’s place on the National Health Service under genuine pressure, with our first real major victory coming in June of this year when NHS Liverpool agreed to end homeopathy funding in the city as a direct result of our campaigning. We intend to keep that pressure up around the rest of the country, and having the time and the manpower to stay on top of this issue gives us a genuine chance of a positive outcome. And, naturally, our chances of success are amplified enormously by having the support of a vibrant and passionate skeptical community.

If our chances of dislodging homeopathy from the public purse once-and-for-all give me cause for cautious optimism, we certainly can’t afford to be complacent. Skepticism is still a growing movement, accelerated by the advent of social media but still finding its feet as a broader social phenomenon. There have been growing pains, and to a degree those are inevitable. Some skeptical positions even appear to have penetrated the mainstream: when I first became an active skeptic in 2009, it seemed like the public overwhelmingly conflated the term homeopathic with herbal or natural—indeed, this was the very point the 10:23 Campaign aimed to address in the public consciousness. These days, comedians have entire routines based on the nonsensical tenets of homeopathy—and popular routines at that.

Perhaps the skeptical message is starting to break through. Or, perhaps, that may simply be confirmation bias. I’ll withhold judgment until I have more data. After all, I am a skeptic.

Katie Dyer is an Associate Professor at California State University, Fresno. She works in Child and Family Science. She studies parent education and infant sleep. She also teaches research methods and talked about results of one of her studies this past October at CSICon 2016. Her presentation at the Sunday Papers was called, “Evaluating Education for Critical Thinking: Can College Classes Reduce Belief in Nonsense?”

Susan Gerbic: Katie, what a great time we had at CSICon 2016; I’m really looking forward to seeing you again this year. Same place I’m told, at the Excalibur, October 26–29, 2017. You have been coming to these skeptic conferences for only a few years, what keeps you coming back?

Katie Dyer: My first TAM was 2011, so I’ve been to four TAMs and one CSICon. I keep coming back because it is such great fun! A gathering of people who like to talk about intellectual things and the implications of logic and science? This is what I think about all the time. These are the issues that I read about, that I talk to my friends about. Professionally, I confront these issues every day. And they matter! Because I study children and families, I’m concerned about things like the anti-vax movement threatening the health and well-being of families across the globe. I’m concerned about how memories are formed and distorted because I’m concerned about finding the truth about child abuse allegations based on those memories. I want to protect grieving parents from so-called “psychics” who exploit them as they suffer. I’m concerned about taxpayer dollars being used to send classical music CDs to pregnant women out of a belief in the Mozart Effect when that money could be used to provide health care instead. These are the reasons I care about teaching my students about skepticism. And CSICon is a place where I can meet up with folks interested in the same things. It’s really great intellectual fun.

Photo by Karl Withakay.

Gerbic: Your paper presentation was about how college students with critical thinking “priming” can get more out of a class than those that do not. Is that a fair assessment? Can you please tell readers more about your study?

Dyer: You must know that researchers love nothing better than a request to talk about their research! So, thank you! My colleague Ray Hall and I studied the effectiveness of critical thinking classes in terms of reducing students’ epistemically unwarranted beliefs. We wondered if it is enough to teach students how science works. If they know how science works, will they automatically be able to spot the problem when something other than science is offered to support a claim? The answer based on our research was “no.” That’s just not enough. We studied about 800 college students, some in research methods classes, others in a critical thinking class that directly addresses pseudoscience, and the remainder a comparison group who received neither intervention. We found that students in the comparison group didn’t change their beliefs at all, but neither did the students in the research methods classes. Only students who were actively instructed about pseudoscience reported reduced belief in various kinds of epistemically unwarranted beliefs. We concluded that students do not easily transfer their understanding of science to issues where people are actively trying to fool them. Instead, it is necessary to explicitly discuss how pseudoscience works to fool people. When we show them exactly the tricks that are used (including the tricks our own brains play on us), then students do reduce their epistemically unwarranted beliefs. Critical thinking education must be explicit about instructing students what to watch out for.

Gerbic: Do you feel that universities can learn from this? Have you heard of others that are attempting to implement this in their classrooms?

Dyer: We teach at a university in the California State University (CSU) system, which is somewhat progressive on this point. The CSU system requires all students to take a critical thinking class before a bachelor’s degree will be awarded in any discipline. It is part of our General Education (GE). We suggest that classes that fulfill this GE requirement should explicitly address nonsense, use real-life examples of pseudoscience to instruct students about logical fallacies and problems with perception, rather than assuming that students will automatically infer these lessons.

And yes, we do know many others who are teaching critical thinking this way already. The many teachers who come to CSICon are doing this. We have met teachers at all levels who come to this conference. They are looking for inspiration, for encouragement, for material they can use in their own classrooms. Ray and I have been inspired to document these educational efforts, at least at the University level where we work, and empirically investigate the results so that all of us can continue to develop an evidence-based pedagogy.

Gerbic: How young should we be trying to teach critical thinking to children? Are there best practices that already exist?

Dyer: These are great questions, but ones to which I don’t have the answers, I’m afraid. One of the things that make these difficult questions is that scholars have not yet settled on any operational definitions of “critical thinking.” I think most would agree that it has to do with the ability to evaluate claims in such a way that false claims can be identified as false. But that is very broad as it is, and I hear lots of educational leaders talking about critical thinking as far more broad than that! So if we haven’t yet agreed on what critical thinking is, then it’s hard to nail down any of the other details. But research on cognitive development suggests that humans develop the capacity for scientific thought (the tradition of Jean Piaget refers to this as “formal operations” or “hypothetico-deductive reasoning”) in early adolescence. That is probably when kids become capable of these components of scientific thinking. I believe that the groundwork is often laid before that, but I can’t really test that claim until we get some agreement on what we’re actually talking about.

Photo by Susan Gerbic.

Gerbic: Let’s talk about CSICon 2016 now. Tell me about some of your favorite parts. (Katie, I want to hear about lectures and also at least one thing that happened outside the lectures, remember we are trying to encourage people to attend this year.)

Dyer: I know some TAM and CSICon attendees say that the magic happens in the hallways: meeting up with old friends, making new ones, the energy and camaraderie and such. I don’t disagree that the hallways are great, but personally I love the talks. It’s rare that I miss a single one. Often, I’m starstruck. We had some genuine heroes on site in 2016. Paul Offit. He does great work, tirelessly, for the health of our world. I think he’s a hero, and I loved seeing him give another talk. Same for Michael Mann. These two men have improved our world by working on behalf of truth. So to see them at CSICon makes me swell with pride at the movement of which I am a part. And I have some academic, intellectual heroes who attended too: Elizabeth Loftus, Carol Tavris, and Eugenie Scott. These professional women are my role models. I got to hear them each offer a professional address, and I was also able to chat them up a bit casually. Wow!

My other favorite part of the meeting is when I get surprised, when I learn about something I hadn’t expected. For instance, I really enjoyed Joe Schwarcz’s lunchtime talk about his work confronting nonsense in chemistry and Kevin Folta’s talk about pseudoscience in agriculture. The Sunday Papers always provide this and did so again in 2016. The sheer variety of the talks is very exciting. Algorithms, football, blood type, chemtrails, and courtroom drama! It was fabulous!

And of course, to have Mr. Randi and Deyvi in attendance, always free with hugs and conversation. That’s a treat.

Gerbic: CSICon has this fun element that makes it stand out from other skeptic conferences. That is that it happens near Halloween, and they do a fun Halloween party. I know you and your husband, Ray, came as social media? What was that all about?

Dyer: Yes, we did! Well, I think Halloween is great fun. I have a costume party in my department at Fresno State every year; my colleagues and I usually do it up big. My children (I have four daughters) have been in on this their whole lives, and we generally take our costumes very seriously, planning them out many months in advance. Every year, we try to find a group costume idea that we can all get on board with, and every year we can’t manage it. Until 2016, that is. Somehow, we settled on the idea of iPhone apps, and everyone agreed to participate. Ray was Instagram (because he posts there nearly every day as @physicsfun, sharing videos of physics toys with more than a half-million followers), and I was Facebook (for no comparable reason, it’s just something I use every day). My four daughters dressed up as Spotify, Neflix, SnapChat, and Musical.ly. Ray’s son was Audible and his cousin was What’sApp?. It was a massive group costume success, and probably the only one we will ever have a family full of independent-minded people! Ray and I came to Vegas as a small envoy of our Family of Apps!

Gerbic: Can’t wait to see you and Ray at the next CSICon. Same place: Excalibur Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. Same weekend: October 26–29, 2017. Readers make sure you arrive in time for the Workshops on Thursday morning and stay until Monday. So much happens on Sunday night. CSICon has great lectures but the social aspect is something you should not miss, and socializing is happening all throughout, so get a lot of sleep before you arrive and expect to catch up on it Monday.

When I was twelve years old, UFOs were real. More than that, they really were from other planets and piloted by real aliens. There was a real monster living in Loch Ness and real tracks were left behind in the snow by the real Bigfoot. Some people had ESP, and others could really bend spoons with psychic power. What an incredible world it was for me in 1977.

By the time I was thirteen or thereabouts, inspired by TV series such as Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of . . . and books on UFOs, I created a questionnaire sheet (using a template from a long forgotten magazine or book) for my friends to fill out if they had really seen a UFO. My memory tells me I ended up with ten or so reports. The questions were something like “What time of day was it? Were you alone at the time? Can you draw what you saw in the space provided?” It was so interesting. No, it was much more than just interesting—it was deeply fascinating.

Interests come and go during the teenage years, but somehow the paranormal remained when other fads faded from my mind. Mostly it was UFOs, with my parents happy to indulge this passion—at least I was reading! For someone with mild dyslexia (why is that word so hard to spell?), reading anything was a positive move for me. One of the titles I remember was A Young Person’s Guide to UFOs by Brian Bell. As I write this, I am flipping over to Google search and looking at the cover. How the memories flow back!

At one stage for a school art project, I screen-printed a drawing of a UFO, classic saucer shape, onto a T-shirt with the words “Watch the Skies.”

I was happy with my limited capacity to research these matters: I had my books (a few more could be found in the school library), the odd TV show, the odd news report of a sighting, and of course stories and legends.

Then everything changed.

It was 1980 or maybe 1981, and I was home on a Sunday afternoon to watch a popular TV show of the time, Great Mysteries of the World, which more or less combed the world looking for other TV documentaries on anything strange and under sixty minutes (including commercial breaks). On this particular Sunday, the documentary aired was James Randi in Australia produced by Dick Smith. Apart from remembering him from an episode of Happy Days and seeing live the time he was thrown off an Australian TV talk show (search the Internet for Don Lane and James Randi to find it), this was the first time I’d seen Randi in action as it were. So, I sat there and over the next hour watched Randi and Smith put a number of water dowsers to a test in a field “on the outskirts of Sydney” (the field has long since gone, replaced with modernity). It was all very interesting and entertaining, and in the end the results showed clearly that all the dowsers had failed.

Then came the moment, and for me it was life-changing, when Randi turned to the assembled dowsers and said, “Of the dowsers who are here today... I’d like to see a show of hands. How many still believe in dowsing?” All the hands shot up. What? What just happened? What? I just saw them all fail, without question all fail... but... they all still believe in dowsing? This moment really struck a chord with me. It was and still is one of the best examples of how humans believe things and keep believing no matter what.

Of course, the way I believed in things did not suddenly change (apart from seeing that water dowsing was a delusion), but at least for a start I could see how the dowsers fooled themselves and how they could be wrong, all of them. And if they could be so wrong, then why not other people who also deeply believed things?

It’s one of those coincidences, the ones that many New Agers insist are “fate,” that around the same time Carl Sagan’s Cosmos TV series was broadcast in Australia. It was the one-two punch of reason. The episode featuring the Betty and Barney Hill UFO story was particularly powerful.

Mysteries and claims of the paranormal held such a fascination for me, but now there was a new aspect, a new perspective for me to consider. People might well be wrong or right, but testing them to find out for sure is even more interesting and engaging than I could ever imagine. It was for me the gateway to science.

So it wasn’t photos of Mars (although they were very cool), new discoveries about biology, or the promise of solar power that tipped me, led me to having an understanding of the method of science. It was James Randi and his testing of a paranormal claim and Carl Sagan’s soothing tones. I wonder how many other people can report the same?

Now I look back over the past sixteen years of my heavy involvement with the international skeptical movement. Twice president and a life member of Australian Skeptics and a fellow of CSI, I have tested many, many dowsers and others for not only the Australian Skeptics prize but also for the JREF $1,000,000 prize, played a part in the downfall of Power-Balance, produce a skeptical podcast, and (now in its thirteenth year) perform a skeptical science show for school students. That’s what you get from watching Randi and Sagan when you’re fifteen!

I highly recommend you take forty-four minutes and watch James Randi in Australia on YouTube. One day I’ll tell you the story of how in 2001 I found the only known copy, recorded by famed Australian Skeptic Barry Williams off the TV onto VCR in 1981.

Growing up in Salinas, California, during the 1970s, if you wanted to know anything, the outlets for finding it out were minimal. We relied on the newspaper, radio, and a couple of TV channels for our information. If you wanted more detail, there was always the Encyclopedia Britannica and the public library. Finding anything critical of the paranormal back then was difficult. If it was mentioned, it was inevitably sensationalized—either advocating for the phenomenon or leaving you with “no one really knows. . . .” I was extremely gullible and naive, had no one to ask, and the Cold War was in full swing. It was a time of badly wanting to believe in the paranormal, life after death, and that a caring deity would not allow WWIII to happen. That is just what life was like then.

When I discovered Skeptical Inquirer magazine in 1996, it was eye-opening. I believe the first issue I picked up was the January/February “Star Cradle” one. My subscription began with the September/October 1997 issue. Inside I found answers to lots of questions—about ghosts, psychics, Bigfoot, all that fascinated me. I learned about things I had never thought of, and upon reading some articles I thought, “People believe that?” Other articles made me say, “Wait, that isn’t real?” In early 2002, I received a flyer from CSICOP (now CSI); only an hour drive away there would be a gathering of skeptics. I walked in and decided to change my life. I acted as the hostess, inviting people to sit at a large table I had chosen and introducing people to each other even though I knew no one. They must have been quite amused. I had never been surrounded by such smart people before. I should have been completely intimidated, but they were so nice. My confidence (completely faked) and their reaction to it allowed me to find my people, and I had never before felt so accepted.

After that weekend, I was invited by Carol and Ben Baumgartner to attend Ray Hyman’s Skeptic’s Toolbox (a CSICOP workshop held in Eugene, Oregon), and after that weekend in August 2002, I was completely hooked on this world.

Fast-forward a few years, and every­thing completely changed; the Internet became popular and nearly everyone had email. The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) forum allowed me to meet other local skeptics, which allowed me to cofound Monterey County Skeptics in 2007. Then Facebook expanded the community even further. JREF cruises were without Internet, which forced us to sit and talk for long hours. I met more amazing people, again building even stronger communities. Finally, I attended a lecture where Tim Farley was speaking about Wikipedia and why skeptics should care about it. Months passed and I finally started making small edits, completely self-taught. I started mentioning on Facebook what I was doing, and people asked me questions. When people asked if I might talk to their group and then more people were interested, eventually I had to take it seriously; that was the birth of Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW).

The project is, and always has been, about more than repairing Wikipedia in order to educate millions of people I will never meet. GSoW has been about the people in our community. I wanted to support those who were doing the science, writing the articles and books, lecturing, and podcasting. Not only so that when they are in the public eye readers will have something to see, but because I want people to know our history, to be inspired by our spokespeople as I am.

My personal focus in the community mostly has been to support people and projects—to find, train, and motivate people to do more to make our community stronger and grow. I’m a major advocate for conferences, as I know from personal experience that great things happen when people meet face to face. Share a glass of something and learn together. Outside of GSoW, I try to remain relevant, to be a thorn in the side of my favorite purveyors of pseudoscience, grief vampires. I have organized several projects (again calling on our community—look up Operation Bumble Bee, Operation Ice Cream Cone, and Operation Tater Tot for more information).

I want to thank CSI for giving me an opportunity to speak to you; I would never ever have imagined that my name would be printed in the pages of Skeptical Inquirer as it has been several times. Sometimes I think I’m still faking the confidence and you are just too nice to call me on it. Congratulations on forty years of amazing work, Skeptical Inquirer; I hope we can tango together for many more.

Photo by Karl Withakay.

Craig Foster is a professor in the Behavioral Sciences and Leadership Department at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Craig presented a Sunday paper at CSICon 2016 titled “Predicting Pseudoscience: Concussions and the Developing Defense of American Football.”

Gerbic: Craig, so glad to get a chance to catch up with you. I’m very excited to talk to you because this was your very first CSICon; in fact, it was your very first skeptic conference of any kind. When we first talked, it was Friday morning and you were just a few hours into this. What brought you here and what did you expect?

Foster: Hi Susan. It’s great to catch up with you as well.

I took over my department’s statistics and research methods sequence almost four years ago. I thought that the course should place greater emphasis on scientific reasoning as an everyday skill. This led me into the area of pseudoscience, a topic that I found, and continue to find, fascinating. I expected that CSICon would provide a crash course in the development of scientifically unreasonable beliefs.

To be perfectly honest, I also was intrigued to see who would attend a conference devoted to skepticism. I wasn’t judging or anything like that. I was obviously aware that I was also a member of this group. I just thought it was interesting. I am a social psychologist after all.

Gerbic: How did that impression change over the weekend?

Foster: CSICon as a vehicle for learning about scientific reasoning and pseudoscience exceeded my expectations. The speakers were incredible. They were clearly well-practiced in conveying important scientific issues in understandable and engaging ways.

My impression of the people did not really change because I didn’t know what to expect. I never expected them to be so friendly. I felt comfortable introducing myself to anybody.

This might seem odd, but I did leave CSICon with a greater appreciation for skepticism as a movement. The world would be a much better place if we could mitigate some of the implausible beliefs that are ultimately harmful. I really admire all those skeptics who try to minimize that harm by addressing misinformation.

Consider, for example, only James Randi’s work on faith healing. How many lives has he saved by exposing the problems underlying faith healing? We’ll never know. Maybe Professor Krauss can find an alternative universe where James Randi neglects his work on faith healing to become the lead singer for Van Halen. Then we’d know.

Craig Foster and Susan Gerbic at CSICon.

Gerbic: What were the highlights from the Conference?

Foster: Well, learning about skepticism from Susan Gerbic was one. Don’t edit that out Susan! I really enjoyed meeting Elizabeth Loftus because I admire her important work so much. There were so many other people I enjoyed meeting. There are still more whom I would like to meet. Maybe next year. I brought up the notion of the skeptical superhero in class this semester. I could have used a picture of several people who were at CSICon. (I used a picture of Paul Offit, BTW.)

I really don’t want to highlight any particular talk because they were so uniformly positive. I take that back. I will say that Ron Lindsay’s talk about pseudoscience and conspiracy theories being hard targets rather than soft targets was particularly meaningful to me. As a social psychologist I totally agree. Humans’ ability to elude sensible interpretations of the available evidence is remarkable.

Both of the interviews were outstanding. I thoroughly enjoyed Richard Dawkins’s reflections about science and religion. James Randi was the real deal like always.

One of the best things about the conference though was feeling like I was surrounded by people that would understand my point of view. I don’t need that every day, of course. Skepticism should encourage people to listen seriously to other points of view. Still, I have defended atheism for as long as I can remember, and I take personally the negative and unfair claims that people sometimes offer about atheists. It was kind of strange and really cool to be in a group where I could share my agnosticism, if I cared to, and nobody was going to think that I am some type of amoral nihilist. I also like just being around other people who are interested in learning about science and reason.

Gerbic: Craig, I first met you at CSICon when you approached me when I was sitting at my GSoW table wearing a Medusa outfit. We had a great conversation, but you told me that we already had a “history” because of a Wikipedia edit I had done. Can you please explain what that was all about?

Foster: Sure. United States Air Force officers need solid scientific reasoning. We thought that we could facilitate scientific reasoning by having Air Force Academy cadets experience a pseudoscientific product rather than simply read about such products. We decided to examine Phiten necklaces because they were popular and we could create a useful control condition by covering Phiten necklaces and similar clothesline segments with tape. The cadets wore Phiten or clothesline for a couple of days. Naturally, they did not report any statistically significant differences in terms of their mood at the end of the trial. There is no sensible mechanism to explain how these necklaces would work.

Later, I learned that some glorious Wikiepediatrician had edited the Phiten Wikipedia page on our behalf. Remember, I was still new to skepticism at that time. I never thought to simply go into Wikipedia myself and update the Phiten webpage. Now, when people look up Phiten on Wikipedia, they see the scientific problems underlying these necklaces and other Phiten products. I know that investigating and debunking Phiten necklaces won’t save the world, but I do like to think that we have helped promote scientific reasoning. I would also remind people that $20 is a considerable amount of money for many families in the U.S. and internationally. Phiten also offers more expensive products like the titanium crystal necklace for $390. I wouldn’t want young athletes who don’t have the money to spend on Phiten products to feel like they are at a disadvantage.

Gerbic: You wrote this all up and it appeared in the May/June 2016 issue of Skeptical Inquirer. From time to time we GSoW editors will do something we call Backwards Edits. That means taking a notable citation (such as your article as it appeared in SI) and then adding it to a Wikipedia page. Most of the time we have no knowledge of the topic beforehand. This is what I did. Then I wrote to Ken Frazier and asked him to let you know. I wanted you notified so you knew that your article was no longer just “speaking to the choir” but was now the only criticism on the Phiten Wikipedia page. This way it reaches out to people who would probably not be normal SI readers. Possibly the media will do a story on Phiten in the future and will now be aware of the test you did.

I’m glad you didn’t go to Wikipedia to make that edit because as the author of the piece you have a conflict of interest. It’s best to leave it to the regular Wikipedia editor. The problem is that we don’t have enough editors. (Shameless plug here for readers interested in joining the GSoW team: we train and mentor; write to me at GSoWteam@gmail.com) By the way, in the last thirty days the Phiten Wikipedia page has received 1,467 page views.

Tell me more about how you are teaching critical thinking to the students in your classes? Are you doing more of these tests?

Foster: Not yet. I have considered a couple of ideas. There are two things that give me pause. First, I would like to examine whether the in-class experiment achieves the learning goals that I believe it achieves. Interestingly, this would create two conjoined studies—one that tests a pseudoscientific claim and another that tests the learning outcomes associated with the test of the pseudoscientific claim. Second, I also want to keep the investigation safely apart from religious beliefs that are not at odds with science. For example, testing Ouija boards would be interesting, but it gets into the realm of the afterlife more than I would like. Maybe I am being overly cautious, but I do need to maintain an environment that is fair to science but not unnecessarily challenging toward faith.

I have tackled this issue from a different angle. I asked some of my coworkers to prioritize what they would want our cadets to learn in a statistics and research methods sequence. This “assessment” was pretty rough, but appreciation for empiricism was clearly at or near the top. Interestingly, our course did not previously spend a lot of time encouraging this appreciation. It is easy to tell students that empiricism is important, but it probably takes more than that to get students to really embrace it. I wanted cadets to immerse themselves in the notion that there are many folk beliefs that are partially or wholly inconsistent with the science of behavioral science. I therefore made this the overarching project for the first semester. Cadets are required to find a behavioral science folk theory that is not supported by science. They need to describe the folk theory clearly and then review the scientific evidence that questions the folk theory. I am hopeful that this experience will help cadets appreciate the need for behavioral science rather than behavioral opinion.

Gerbic: When we first talked, you told me that you were going to be giving a Sunday paper. I asked about your topic, and when you mentioned football I started to protest. You quickly explained that football was just an example; the lecture was more about predicting future pseudoscientific beliefs. After listening to your paper, I was extremely impressed. I not only enjoyed your presentation, but I “got it.” Please tell readers about your paper.

Foster: Thanks. I am grateful to hear that. I thought all of the Sunday presenters were really, really good. I confess that I felt some pride in being included with the others. I also was a little concerned that I had to hold my own in the middle of such competence.

My talk was simple theoretically. Scholars never predict pseudoscience. They always examine existing pseudoscience retroactively. This is understandable because predicting pseudoscience is exceptionally difficult. Still, I think it would be strong science indeed if we could use the known characteristics of pseudoscience to predict the nature of a developing pseudoscience.

There are different ways this could be done, but it came to me one day that the future might bring forth pseudoscience in defense of American football. The public seems to be increasingly aware of American football as a public health problem, but many people remain tremendously passionate about the sport. To be blunt, if American football becomes truly threatened, it is not going to go gently into that good night. A community of athletes and fans will develop formally to distribute scientifically unrealistic or unsubstantiated defenses in an effort to save American football. As I noted in my talk, one can already see the initial elements of this community. I still think that the full-blown pseudoscientific community is yet to come. I am grateful for CSICon and Fort Collins SkeptiCamp for allowing me to share these predictions in this type of public forum. Again, the future is tough to predict. We’ll see how this plays out.

Gerbic: So, CSICon 2016 is over. And one of the reasons we attend these events is to renew that “spark” that keeps us going, to meet new people and renew old acquaintances. It appears from what I see on Facebook that you are keeping busy in the skeptic world. I “introduced” you to a good friend of mine, Linda Rosa (of Therapeutic Touch fame). And then I saw that you presented at the Fort Collins, Colorado SkeptiCamp.

Foster: Thanks for introducing me to Linda Rosa. She embodies the characteristics I love most about skeptics. She is intelligent and insightful, and she uses those skills to try to promote the best possible health practices here in Colorado. She does it because she cares about the well-being of others.

I suspect that CSICon gave me a particularly strong spark because it was my first attendance at a skeptics’ meeting or conference. I found myself thinking that I have been a skeptic my whole life but I only found skepticism a few years ago. To see that there is a community of people who have similar skeptical views was refreshing.

My experience at CSICon has been really useful to me professionally as well. It encouraged me to consider how I can insert skepticism into my department’s statistics and research methods sequence. This has facilitated my thought about how skepticism can be separated from political partisanship and from different aspects of faith. I have a responsibility to promote scientific reasoning in a way that maintains a constructive and respectful environment by balancing these tensions fairly. This isn’t always easy of course. However, I do think we need to “go there” because these tensions won’t change for cadets when they are on active duty. They need to be pro-science and pro-scientific reasoning while also being respectful.

Gerbic: Thank you so much for doing this interview with me, Craig. I know you were brand new to all this and really didn’t know what to expect. Readers, keep in mind that everyone at these events is approachable. There will always be an area where people are gathered. As we get closer to the date, look for the Facebook group that discusses where people are hanging out. Readers, put in your vacation requests now. October 26–29. Las Vegas, Nevada—Excalibur Hotel Casino. Arrive in time to attend the workshops usually held Thursday morning and stay for Sunday Papers. As a longtime skeptic conference attendee, my advice is to just stay till Monday; it’s so much easier, and you can thank me later.

The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer are celebrating forty years of organized modern skepticism—though of course skepticism itself has a long and honorable tradition, as practiced by Harry Houdini, Benjamin Franklin, Reginald Scot, David Hume, and others.

As it happens I have been closely involved with CSICOP/CSI for half of its existence, and therefore much of my adult life (had I been told at ten what I’d be doing at forty, I’d have considered that an extraordinary claim indeed). In some ways, the decades seem to have passed in the blink of an eye, and in other ways, it has taken an eternity.

I wasn’t there in the early years: the heady seventies when astrology was rampant and Uri Geller was cranking out the woo trying to stay one step ahead of James “The Amazing” Randi. My entry to skepticism came in the mid-1990s when I began writing for Skeptical Inquirer after seeing a back issue (with a cover article by Randi) debunking a certain famously ambiguous and wily French author. A few years later at conferences, I got to meet both Randi and Carl Sagan, and with the encouragement of those two pillars of skepticism and others—as well as a fortunately timed editorial vacancy at Skeptical Inquirer—I joined the organization.

One of CSI’s strengths is its broad array of expert contributors from seemingly disparate disciplines. When I give talks on skepticism, I often emphasize that people from any background can contribute meaningfully to our mission. I remember speaking to one woman who was interested in my investigations but felt she had no expertise, as she was neither a scientist nor an investigator. “What do you do?” I asked, and she replied that she was an optometrist—a job she assumed had no connection to skepticism. I mentioned several claims related to eyes and vision, including optical illusions and something called the “Bates Method,” which rather improbably claimed to not only improve eyesight through eye exercises but also chronic illness and tuberculosis. She left my talk with a scribbled page full of notes on skeptical subjects within her purview.

I have yet to have a person name an occupation or hobby that doesn’t have some angle into pseudoscience or paranormal claims. An auto mechanic can write about wild claims of improved fuel efficiency of “breakthrough” gas additives or devices; a dentist can examine alarmist claims about the dangers of fluoridated water or amalgam fillings; and so on. Anyone with a willingness to learn and share is welcomed. The fundamentals of skepticism are not difficult to learn, but they are often counterintuitive and require study. Skepticism is inherently multidisciplinary, and that is one of the things I find most intriguing about it. Magicians and psychologists help explain how we can be fooled—and how we fool ourselves. Folklorists help us understand how myths and legends influence our lives and inform our world views. Scientists help design, conduct, and publish research that tells us what’s true about the world. Skepticism is a big tent, and there’s room for everyone when people focus on the work rather than sowing discord over real or imagined ideological differences unrelated to skepticism.

My main interest has always been in investigative skepticism—specifically, applying scientific methods to “unexplained” or seemingly mysterious phenomena. I’ve spent more than fifteen years researching all manner of putatively unexplained phenomena, including ghosts, chupacabras, miracles, crop circles, UFOs, and much more. It’s a subspecialty in a rarefied field; there’re only a handful of people in the world who do these science-based investigations and conduct experiments testing paranormal claimants. There are other equally important roles in skepticism, but this is the one I’ve adopted—along with my writing, editorial work, and public outreach.

Any contributions I’ve made to skepticism and science literacy are owed in no small part to my being able to draw upon the wisdom and expertise of exceptional colleagues. Through my work at CFI, I’ve met a constellation of amazing people and personal heroes, including Randi, Sagan, Elizabeth Loftus, Jan Brunvand, Phil Klass, Carol Tavris, Martin Gardner, and others too numerous to name.

Sagan’s indispensable book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark opens with the quote, “It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.” To me this reflects not only the goal of science and skepticism but humanism itself: Instead of merely complaining about problems we face, we should work to solve them; we should investigate to understand the world and use that information to make the world a better place. Sometimes that involves explaining to the public why alternative medicines don’t work (even when they appear to); sometimes that involves comforting a terrified family by explaining that their home’s strange nocturnal sounds are not evil spirits. Skepticism benefits the world in innumerable ways.

Today, astrology is a bit of a relic, and Uri Geller has finally (if tacitly) admitted he’s a magician. But as longtime skeptics know, our work is never done. Discredited ideas and fanciful fallacies never go away but instead reappear as old wine in new bottles, repackaged in fashionable terms for a gullible new generation. Pseudoscience, superstition, and nonsense will always be with us in some form, wasting human resources (money, time, effort) and preying on the vulnerable. As long as there is darkness, skeptics will be there to fight for the light amid a chorus of curses.

Artículo traducido por Alejandro Borgo, Director del CFI/Argentina.

This Book Won’t Cure Your Cancer. By Gideon Burrows. 
NGO media, 2015. ISBN 978-0955369599. 212 pp. 
Paperback. $15.79.

Gideon Burrows tiene un cáncer inoperable que está creciendo lentamente, pero inevitablemente le causará la muerte. Ha escrito un destacable libro sobre su experiencia, This Book Won’t Cure Your Cancer (Este libro no va a curar tu cáncer). Es lexicógrafo profesional, y describe su experiencia tan vívidamente que el lector logra entrar en su vida, en lo que siente, y comparte su incertidumbre respecto de lo que el próximo análisis o la próxima visita al médico revelará.

Junto a él sufrimos el pánico y el miedo, el caos, las agonías de las demoras y la incertidumbre, el desagradable ambiente de un hospital, y los malos modales de los especialistas. Lo seguimos a través de las difíciles decisiones sobre como compartir las malas noticias con amigos, familiares y sus hijos; entendemos por qué esto engendra sentimientos de culpa. La historia es tan atrapante como una novela policial; esperamos con ansiedad ver el resultado del próximo escaneo y cómo se van a dar las cosas. Ello le pone un rostro humano a la experiencia del cáncer, lo cual haría que el libro fuera valioso nada más que por eso. Pero es mucho más que eso.

Los episodios que aparecen gradualmente en su historia personal están vinculados a la controversia sobre cómo pensar críticamente sobre la medicina basada en la evidencia y tratamientos alternativos. No puedo dejar de recomendar este libro.

This article was originally featured in Skeptical Inquirer in English.
Click here to read it.

Información poco confiable

Cuando a la gente se le diagnostica cáncer, se vuelve vulnerable y se desespera. Buscan información y esperan encontrar libros de recetas de cocina, relatos milagrosos, medicina alternativa y “curas prohibidas” respecto del cáncer. Los amigos los bombardean con consejos. Muchas de estas fuentes “ofrecen esperanza a la gente cuando la necesita, pero sin basamento alguno”.

Burrows leyó “el más grande libro sobre cáncer de todos los tiempos”, Anti-cáncer: un nuevo estilo de vida, de Servan-Schreiber, y se decepcionó amargamente. El libro ofrece un plan para mantener a raya al cáncer a través del balance mental y dietas, pero se dio cuenta que el de que Servan-Schreiber hace extrapolaciones injustificadas a partir de estudios científicos particulares y anécdotas, y le echa la culpa a la víctima tratando de establecer una causa relacionada con el estilo de vida del paciente por una clase de tumor para el cual la ciencia no encuentra causa alguna y que probablemente se deba solo a la mala suerte.

Servan-Schreiber pensó que había derrotado al cáncer, pero éste volvió. Entonces escribió un segundo libro. En lugar de reconocer que sus métodos no funcionaron, él racionalizó que no había seguido su propio consejo cuidadosamente: no había hecho nada para controlar el estrés o quizá no había comido apropiadamente. Murió poco después de que fuera publicado su segundo libro. La gente sigue leyendo sus libros y acatando sus consejos. Muchas personas ni siquiera saben que murió.

La cultura del cáncer

Burrows describe la cultura predominante sobre el cáncer que lo muestra como una batalla, llama a los pacientes guerreros valientes y celebra a los sobrevivientes victoriosos. Dice Burrows:

Luchar contra el cáncer no es una batalla dura, es una terrible enfermedad de la que hay que huir. Es un rompecabezas difícil de resolver, algo que hay que tratar de poner a raya usando las mejores herramientas que tenemos… No soy valiente. Simplemente continúo. Haciendo todo lo posible. Llorando y riendo, y olvidando y recordando, yendo lentamente y remando. Como lo hacemos todos, se trate del cáncer o no.

Tres especialistas le dieron el mismo diagnóstico. Su cáncer es inoperable. Va a avanzar inevitablemente y necesita tratamiento, pero por ahora todo lo que se necesita es monitorear la situación con distintos métodos y controlar sus daños con medicación. Los amigos le sugirieron que busque algún cirujano que lo quiera operar. ¿Y que pasaría si él buscara por todo el mundo y encontrara cinco médicos que no lo operarían y uno que sí? ¿Sería racional confiar en la opinión del sexto médico que en la opinión de los cinco restantes? Por supuesto que no. No debería confiar en él. Desafortunadamente, muchos pacientes confían y gastan fortunas. Terminan peor o igual que como estaban.

Burrows habla sobre las falsas promesas de oncólogos no convencionales como Burzynski (véase el artículo de David Gorski publicado en el Skeptical Inquirer Stanislaw Burzynski: Four Decades of an Unproven Cancer Cure, en el número Marzo/Abril de 2014) y el estímulo de “intentar cualquier cosa”. Dice que no es razonable “intentar cualquier cosa” si no hay evidencia de que “cualquier cosa” funcione. La gente dice que es bueno intentar porque no hay evidencia de que no funcione. Y marca la falacia de ese razonamiento: “Hay millones de cosas de las cuales no se ha probado que no curen el cáncer, pero ello se debe a que esas millones de cosas no han sido intentadas. Ello no significa que constituyan una cura potencial o que sea sensato intentarlas”.

¿Qué pasaría si él propusiera que hacer volar 100 globos rojos podría curar el cáncer? ¿Hay algo más ridículo que las enemas de café? ¿Cuándo debemos intentar algo y quién nos dice lo que es ridículo intentar? Incluso los médicos que practican la medicina alternativa no se ponen de acuerdo. ¿Dónde hay que marcar la línea divisoria? Si no se ha probado que un tratamiento sea efectivo, que no es biológicamente plausible, que no ha sido probado en animales, y no está respaldado por la mayoría de los científicos expertos ¿no sería algo similar a la prueba de los 100 globos rojos?

Él no culpa a la gente que está en la búsqueda de una cura milagrosa. Comprende la desesperación y el confort que significa tener algo de donde agarrarse. Más bien él culpa a aquellos que ofrecen algo sin un fundamento imparcial, preciso y con base concreta. El poder y la responsabilidad de aconsejar sobre tratamientos oncológicos “debería llevarse a cabo con resultados y pruebas idóneas.

¿Qué constituye una prueba?

Burrows describe la forma en que la gente ignora la realidad aferrándose a sus creencias. Cuando la hija de Chris Woollam, uno de las que apoyan los tratamientos alternativos, sobrevivió más que el promedio de los pacientes, éste lo atribuyó a los tratamientos alternativos, pero cuando el tumor volvió y la mató, la culpó a ella por no seguir su tratamiento adecuadamente. Cuando la “guerrera” Jessica Ainscough falleció, sus seguidores afirmaron que ello se debió a que no siguió correctamente la terapia de Gerson. Aquellos que se someten simultáneamente a los tratamientos convencionales y alternativos y sobreviven, a menudo se niegan a reconocer los tratamientos convencionales: “...no importa lo que pienses qué te ha curado o haberte hecho sentir mejor. La opinión no tiene nada que hacer aquí, solo la biología y la ciencia”.

Abundan los tesmtimonios. “Conmigo funcionó” es una suerte de “prueba social” pero en realidad no constituye evidencia alguna. De hecho, los testimonios personales son los enemigos de la prueba. Escuchamos hablar de éxitos, pero no escuchamos los fracasos porque no se guardan los registros. Para ser tomada en serio, una teoría tiene que ser falsable. Excusas tales como decir que el tratamiento no se siguió correctamente no pueden llevarnos a determinar si realmente funcionó. Los estudios científicos controlados pueden probar si funciona: están basados en el hecho de que se pueda probar o no que determinado tratamiento sea falso. Los partidarios de la medicina alternativa frecuentemente rechazan la visión científica: argumentan que sus tratamientos no se ajustan a ensayos randomizados controlados, y que podrían funcionar para una persona incluso aunque los estudios muestren que no funcionó para otras personas.

Él culpa a los prestadores de tratamientos alternativos por no llevar a cabo los más básicos controles científicos. Si tienen un tratamiento que es eficaz, deberían estar dispuestos a informarlo a todo el mundo. Sería sencillo publicar información honesta, con listas de pacientes y datos sobre todos los éxitos y fracasos. El argumento de que no hay dinero para poner a prueba a las medicinas alternativas es falso. Incluso los pequeños negocios pueden monitorear los indicadores de performance. Los consejos sobre dietas contra el cáncer abundan, aunque, él indica: “La ciencia ha demostrado que llevar una dieta saludable y hacer ejercicio en forma regular, baja el riesgo de contraer cáncer. No previene el cáncer. Ni tampoco lo cura”.

Otros fragmentos de sentido común que Burrows comenta incluyen:

Las noticias en los medios

Los noticieros informan sobre el desarrollo de nuevos tratamientos científicos contra el cáncer junto con relatos sensacionalistas sobre afirmaciones pseudocientíficas no confiables. Se esfuerzan por mostrar un “balance” y le dan a los tratamientos alternativos más crédito del que merecen. Y se equivocan: no es una cuestión de dos políticos presentando argumentos opuestos. Se trata de hechos científicos y la opinión de expertos versus las opiniones infundadas de no-expertos (y algunas veces de charlatanes). Las noticias confunden más de lo que informan.

Confrontar las sandeces

¿Es cruel o grosero confrontar con gente que dice barbaridades sobre el cáncer? Si no lo hacemos ¿estamos permitiendo que se produzca más daño solo para evitar un sentimiento personal de incomodidad? “¿Hasta qué punto nuestro rechazo a criticar significa que la energía, la pasión y el dolor se canalicen alejándonos, más que acercándonos a una investigación que lleve a la cura del cáncer?”

Sabiduría ancestral

“Las prácticas ancestrales no siempre son sabiduría ancestral… Que algo haya sido hecho en los primeros días de la civilización para curar enfermedades, debería precavernos sobre dichos tratamientos y no transformarnos en entusiastas para probarlos por cuenta nuestra… El progreso significa reemplazar los tratamientos viejos e inefectivos, los no probados y peligrosos, por nuevos y mejores métodos, probados y seguros”.

La religión

La gente pregunta “¿Y qué sobre Dios?” Como ateo, la cuestión nunca afectó a Burrows, incluso aunque posee un título en teología. Burrows explica por qué la plegaria se lleva a cabo: probablemente para hacer que aquellos que rezan sientan que estan actuando de forma virtuosa, y por qué es lógicamente indefendible presentarla como causa de la mejoría de alguna enfermedad.

El cáncer es natural

“Al cáncer no le importas”. No es que algo haya salido mal: es el ADN haciendo lo que el ADN se supone que haga. Sin la mutación del ADN no habría evolución. El cáncer es una consecuencia natural de los mismos mecanismos que te hacen crecer el cabello o que se curen tus heridas. Hay muchos tipos de cáncer, y la mitad de nosotros con el tiempo lo va a contraer. El cáncer no es siempre una sentencia de muerte. Podemos curar algunos de ellos y vivir con otros.

Ataques a los médicos

Los partidarios de la medicina alternativa aman criticar a los médicos. Es indudable que hay muchas equivocadas en la medicina convencional. Falla el sitema. Los médicos no son perfectos: yerran en diagnósticos y cometen errores. “Pero si ejercemos el escepticismo y dudamos de los médicos, de la oncología y la medicina convencional, entonces deberíamos considerar a la medicina alternativa con el mismo grado de duda y escrutinio. De hecho yo diría que hay que dudar más de la medicina alternativa porque ésta se pone fuera de la medicina convencional que ha sido probada a través del tiempo y la experiencia, para conseguir lo mejor”.

Las grandes farmacéuticas y las conspiraciones

La industria farmacéutica es responsable de varios pecados, pero es ridículo decir que no desea encontrar una cura para el cáncer o que ya hay una cura pero se mantiene en secreto. Burrows explica por qué dichas teorías conspirativas están completamente equivocadas. La idea de que no hay dinero para los productos naturales es fácilmente refutable por el éxito que tienen el agua embotellada y los negocios de comida “natural para la salud”.

¿Quiénes son los expertos?

Los auto-proclamados “expertos” escriben libros. Pero lleva dos minutos buscar en Internet para demostrar que hay expertos en ese campo que cuestionan o están en desacuerdo con ellos. Burrows puso su vida en manos de verdaderos expertos que saben más sobre su tumor que cualquier paciente o cualquier auto-proclamado gurú del cáncer. Puede elegir sobre las medidas que tiene que tomar para cuidarse, pero “éstas marcan los límites sobre las decisiones que puedo hacer. Esa es la manera de comportarse racionalmente, y comprendo que ellos lo saben mejor que yo”.

Los principales asuntos para la sociedad

La medicina convencional y la alternativa operan en dos universos separados, incomunicados. Los partidarios de la alternativa fracasan en su intento por comprender las realidades científicas de los modernos tratamientos contra el cáncer. Los partidarios de la medicina convencional frecuentemente fallan en su intento por apreicar los miedos y malentendidos de sus pacientes. A los pacientes se los deja en el limbo. Como sociedad, necesitamos mantener una conversación sensata sobre la muerte y no solo sobre mantener vivos a los pacientes con cáncer a cualquier costo. Deberíamos aprender cuándo dejarlos libres. Un reciente estudio encontró que los pacientes hospitalizados con un plan para el fin de sus vidas no solo tienen una mejor calidad de vida que aquellos que insisten en cualquier posible intervención, pero viven más tiempo.

Esperanza

Al final del libro, Burrows se encuentra estable y está lejos de perder la esperanza. Pero su esperanza se centra en el racionalismo y el realismo. Espera lo posible, no lo imposible. Quizá un cambio en la medicación podría mejorar su estado; tal vez viva lo suficiente como para que la ciencia encuentre una cura efectiva para su tipo de cáncer. Burrows cree que la realidad y la ciencia siempre son mejores que las mentiras y la creencia en la magia. Piensa que es una vergüenza que los pacientes se vuelquen a la medicina alternativa y esto haga que no sean elegibles para tests clínicos que ofrezcan una esperanza real para contribuir a una vida mejor.

Burrows predice que los creyentes en la medicina alternativa van a demonizarlo por escribir este libro, pero les promete lo siguiente: “Si ustedes pueden encontrar la firme evidencia -en una publicación de revisión por pares- que sus tratamientos o terapias de prevención contra el cáncer funcionan, ya lo la llamaré medicina alternativa. La llamaré medicina. Y si se prueba que es efectiva para mi tumor cerebral, voy a ser el primero de la fila para obtener una dosis”. El mensaje de Burrows es que frecuentemente actuamos en forma irracional respecto del cáncer. No escribió su libro para aconsejar a los pacientes sobre el tratamiento del cáncer sino para animar a la gente para que observe la información que le dan (de fuentes convencionales o no-convencionales) con una mirada más crítica. Este libro complementa perfectamente la obra The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, del ganador del premio Pulitzer Siddhartha Mukherjee. Leyendo ambos libros te ayudará a comprender muy bien todo lo que vale la pena saber sobre el cáncer y sobre la gente que lo sufre.

For centuries, rumors circulated about an ancient lost city—not Atlantis but a “White City” of immense wealth hidden in the Honduran jungles of Central America. Myths of treasure and every imaginable curse ran rampant—but the fact that the city existed somewhere out in the jungles was widely accepted by Hondurans. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the jungle with hundreds of artifacts and tantalizing stories of having seen the crumbling walls of the Lost City of the Monkey God for himself. Soon after, he committed suicide without revealing its mysterious location.

Seventy-five years later, writer Douglas Preston climbed aboard a rickety, single-engine plane carrying a machine that would change everything: an expensive laser technology on loan from NASA that could map the terrain under the dense rainforest canopy to a resolution within three feet. That flight revealed for the first time an unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis, tantalizing proof of not just the mythical city but an entire lost civilization—contemporaries of, but distinct from, the Mayans. Preston worked as a writer and editor for the American Museum of Natural History and has written for The New Yorker, Natural History, National Geographic, Harper's, Smithsonian, and The Atlantic. The author of several acclaimed nonfiction books—including the bestseller The Monster of Florence—Preston is also the coauthor with Lincoln Child of the bestselling series of novels.

THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD: A True Story was published by Grand Central Publishing and is available in hardcover (978-1455540006, $28).

I attended a talk by Preston about his research and new book—at Albuquerque’s historic KiMo theater, whose resident ghost I investigated and debunked several years ago (as described in the first chapter of my book Mysterious New Mexico)—and followed up with a telephone interview, excerpted here.

Benjamin Radford: You seem to have a knack for finding yourself in the middle of fascinating mysteries and real-life adventures, between the deadly jungles of The Lost City and The Monster of Florence, where you’re tangling with a serial killer. Most writers lead a fairly sedentary life—why are you different?

Douglas Preston: Well I think it’s probably a little bit of stupidity there [laughing]. I find myself falling into my own stories: like with The Monster of Florence, I started off thinking I was writing a story about these long-ago crimes in Florence, these serial killings, but all of a sudden we [Preston and his coauthor Mario Spezi] got pulled in by the police investigation, and pretty soon I was being interrogated as a suspect... it was really crazy.

Radford: I’ve read The Monster of Florence; it’s a remarkable story.

Preston: Oh yes. And here with the Lost City, I’d been following this guy, Steve Elkins, who’s been looking for this lost city for twenty years. To be honest with you, I’m thinking he’s not going to find anything; he’s crazy. But he’d been doing a lot of research, he had some very good evidence for it, and I just stuck with it, and then boom—he actually found it! That really stunned me, I couldn’t believe it... It was just an incredible thing that you could actually find a lost city in the twenty-first century somewhere on the surface of the earth.

Radford: As you talk about in the book, finding the Lost City came at a great cost, both in terms of the expedition, your health, and other factors. Can you talk about what went into finding it?

Preston: The legend of the Lost City did talk about the city being cursed, that all who went in there would become sick and die, and so forth. And of course I completely dismissed those legends. Well it turns out that part of the legend is kind of based on the truth, and that is that the valley is a hot zone of disease, and two-thirds of the expedition came down with this really serious tropical disease called mucocutaneous leishmaniasis. It’s incurable, I’ll have it for the rest of my life, and it’s really quite an awful disease. But I’m getting excellent treatment.

Radford: And what about the difficulty of finding the location in the first place? It’s a very remote area of Central American jungle, very forbidding terrain.

Preston: It was very expensive; it cost millions of dollars to find the city. Super-high technology was used in the initial flyover of these unexplored valleys, using a technology called LIDAR [Light Detection and Ranging, a remote sensing method that uses light in the form of a pulsed laser to measure variable distances to the Earth], and then getting into the valley [to manually verify the readings] was only possible with helicopters—you couldn’t go on the ground, these mountains are impassable, the jungle is just too thick. So there was a lot of expense in it, and the human cost in illness was pretty catastrophic. I mean, a number of people got sick, some people died; it was really damaging for some people... But at the same time nothing great is really ever accomplished without sacrifice and without risk. Everyone who came into the project knew it was in one of the most dangerous areas of the entire world, and yet we all wanted to do it. So I don’t have any regrets myself... I’d do it again even if it meant getting leishmaniasis again.

Radford: Speaking about personal risk, I understand there are soldiers at the site there right now guarding against potential looters. And their lives are at risk just being there. Do you think whatever information about the Lost City and its inhabitants we can glean from the ruins will be worth the blood and treasure it takes to get it—especially in a poor country? Six million dollars is a lot of money anywhere, and especially in Honduras.

Preston: Well, that’s right... a lot of expense went into it. Most of the money came from outside Honduras, and a lot of it was spent in the country so it’s probably a net gain financially for Honduras. But it’s also very important on a spiritual and cultural level; the people who built this great prehistoric civilization are the ancestors of present-day Hondurans and it’s really important to know your history and understand it in order to know where you are today. The Spanish history of Honduras is very well known, but the native or American history is not well known, in fact it’s a huge mystery... So in that regard I think it’s very important for Honduras, I know it’s been a huge story there. The president of Honduras loved it and took a great interest in it; he helicoptered out to the site several times and brought out some of the first artifacts. So it’s been very important to Honduras to get in touch with their pre-Columbian history.

Radford: You talk about some of the myths and legends surrounding the city; where did they come from?

Preston: These legends and stories really date back about 500 years to the time of Cortez. He wrote a famous letter in 1526 while he was in Honduras to the emperor Charles V and reported that he’d heard very reliable information of a wonderful and rich civilization in the interior of Honduras, a very wealthy and rich advanced culture, and ever since then there have been legends and stories about this lost city, sometimes called the White City, Ciudad Blanca, sometimes called the Lost City of the Monkey God, somewhere in these mountains. A number of people have looked for it, and some have actually died in the search...Like most legends, it’s based on the truth; it’s based on the fact that there was a great civilization in this area that actually built more than one city.

Radford: Let me touch on some of the challenges to writers and science popularizers when reporting a story such as this. There’s always a tension between wanting to communicate complex ideas in science, anthropology, archaeology, and so on to the public, but not overly sensationalize them. You touch on that in your book, expressing a bit of reluctance about calling it a “lost city” in the vein of Indiana Jones, but in the end you have to get people’s attention.

Preston: Well, this is something that you as a science journalist know about very well... As you mentioned, you have to strike a balance between writing a heavy and scientific tome, which nobody will read except scientists, or going too much in the other direction and writing something that’s so frivolous and nonfactual that you’ve really done a very great disservice to the science. I try to occupy the middle ground. Everything in the book is accurate, nothing is made up, everything has been very carefully vetted—but it is exciting, this is a sensational discovery.... As for using language like the “lost city,” well it is a city and it is lost! I know some archaeologists have said, “Oh, that’s just Indiana Jones hype” but in fact it isn’t hype. It is actually real and it is quite exciting, and I want to convey that excitement to the reader without burdening them with a lot of scientific jargon.

Radford: And I think you’ve done that very well. In your book—which I’m still reading—you strike a good balance between giving the readers important background information, but also, refreshingly, touching on the logistical, political, and other considerations. There’s a lot more that went into it than just stumbling on a lost city.

My time almost up, I had one final question for Preston: Having spent time in Honduras, as I recall there are three Honduran beers: Salva Vida, Imperial, and Port Royal. Which is your favorite?

Preston: Port Royal.

Radford: You’re a Port Royal man?

Preston: Let me tell you, after I came out of the jungle, sitting by the pool drinking a frosty Port Royal, I think that was the best beer I’d ever tasted.