It is always interesting, and incredibly useful, to have insight from someone on the inside of a pseudoscience. Occasionally, someone who’s logical ability and intellectual honesty are reasonably intact gets sucked into a world of pseudoscience. If they are able to emerge out the other end still able to engage meaningfully with reality, they may have an incredible tale to tell. For example, Britte Hermes is a former naturopath who is now a real scientist and is able to report what really goes on in the world of fake medicine. Another example is Mark Edward, a former “psychic” who wrote his own tell-all. In such situations I have always found that things are much worse than even the fevered imaginings of a jaded skeptic.

The Guardian provides another useful example – the confessions of a former astrologer. Please read the full article. It provides concise insight into the psychology and business of new-age nonsense. The author, Felicity Carter, started dabbling in Tarot readings as entertainment, and as the story often goes, was convinced by the amazing accuracy of some of her readings. While she increasingly took her readings and her psychic power seriously, she always kept one foot in the “real” world and was apparently intellectually honest enough to ask important questions (at least in her current telling). Here are some of the key insights she provides.

The first is the way the new-age mind works. She states, “Astrology is one big word association game.” This is typical pre-scientific superstitious thinking. It probably derives from the fact that the human brain largely functions through association. We’re really good at it. We casually use analogies, and our literature is replete with metaphor. The problem comes from confusing metaphor for reality. This is often referred to as sympathetic magic, which is the conceptual underpinning of many pseudosciences, like homeopathy. In this world-view metaphors are not just abstract connections made in the human brain, they actually exist out there in the physical world. The happenstance arrangement of some stars as viewed from Earth slightly resembles a lion in the human imagination, so this virtual pattern actually imbues the qualities that humans perceive lions possess. It is an extreme metaphysical view of reality, with the universe being imbued with cosmic magic. If it makes you feel better you can say it’s quantum something. What matters is our gut intuition that metaphors are real.

All this makes it very easy to give a reading, regardless of the specific tools used – Tarot, astrological charts, tea leaves, numerology, or nothing at all. All you have to do is riff on free associations.

Continue Reading »

A recent opinion piece in the New York Times by Krista Burton is perhaps one sign of recent social trends – increasing belief in things like astrology, especially among millennials. Burton provides some insight into this phenomenon, but then also makes some horrible justifications for it.

Belief in astrology, the notion that the relative positions of planets and start affect our personality and perhaps our destiny, has been measured at about 25% in the UK, Canada and US in recent decades. However, as researchers, Nicholas Campion, points out, the number depends greatly on what exactly you ask:

In one of my groups – of mostly male students aged 18 to 21 – I found that 70% read a horoscope column once a month and 51% valued its advice. Other questions produced a huge variation: 98% knew their sun sign, 45% thought it described their personalities, 25% said it can make accurate forecasts, and 20% think the stars influence life on Earth. The higher figures are close to previous research which showed that 73% of British adults believe in astrology, while the lowest figures are similar to those found by Gallup’s polls.

It’s difficult to know how to parse all of that, but it seems like about half of people take astrology seriously to some extent, and 20-25% very seriously. That is a significant percentage of the population to believe in something which is 100% superstitious nonsense. Let’s get this out of the way now – there is no plausible mechanism by which astrology could work, there is no evidence that any form of astrology does work, and it is structured and functions like a classic pseudoscience. A moderate amount of scientific literacy, and a trace of critical thinking skills, should be enough to purge any belief in astrology.

Continue Reading »

I guess this is a theme recently – the return of previous pseudosciences that had been fading into the background. If you type “astrology” into the search window on this blog you get exactly two articles specifically about this topic in the last 10 years. Hopefully this won’t really change and astrology will remain safely on the fringe, an old-school pseudoscience curiosity.

But there are those who are trying to give astrology new respectability. A recent article by Ida Benedetto outlines the strategy, which is two-pronged. First, blame astrology’s poor reputation on modern psychology. Then the fix is an appeal to antiquity – return to the ancient texts. She writes:

“Astrology’s contemporary flavor has a closer relationship with the social science of psychology than the observational science it used to be based upon. If we can set modern judgments aside and learn the language of the ancient astrologers—a language that is now newly available due to the recent revival of classical texts—we may discover lost insights.”

Let’s strangle this infant in the crib, as both prongs of this strategy are nonsense.

Continue Reading »

Yeah, I know. Astrology. That is seriously old school. What is amazing is that there are still people who vehemently defend this ancient superstition. It is a window into the flaws and biases of the human brain.

In a way the exact topic of this discussion does not matter. By studying any scientific discipline in detail one can learn many generalizable lessons about science itself, and even knowledge itself. Similarly, by studying any one pseudoscience one can learn many generic lessons about the nature of pseudoscience – although, it is easier to see these lessons when one studies at least several pseudosciences and sees the commonality among them.

Having written hundreds of articles about different pseudosciences, I often feel I could just click in specific names to general arguments. The details, however, do matter as they provide specific examples that aid in understanding the underlying principles and how to apply them. We tend to compartmentalize knowledge, and so seeing many different examples really does drive the concept home and help apply it broadly – especially to our own thinking.  Continue Reading »

Perhaps you have heard that the world of astrology is “in a crisis.” Some are calling it the “Zodiac crisis” – because “Zodiac” is a cool-sounding word that starts with “z”. This is all really a manufactured non-event by Minnesota astronomer Parke Kunkle, who decided to send out a press release informing astrologers and the public that their signs are all wrong.

This is all, of course, old news. Sun-sign astrology is supposed to be based on the constellation that the sun is in at the time of birth. The Babylonians made the 12 signs 2000 years ago. They left out a 13th constellation, Ophiucus, because they wanted there to be only 12. But worse, astrologers at the time did not know about precession.

The earth rotates like a spinning top – the earth spins and has an axis tilted to its rotation about the sun and for the same reason a top will rotate its axis, so does the earth. The earth goes through one precession cycle every 26,000 years. That means in the 2,000 years since the Babylonians locked in their dates for the astrological signs, the dates that the sun is actually in those signs have shifted by 1/13 – or one sign.

Continue Reading »

Humanity has an uncanny ability to turn any new potential boon into con. The promise of stem cell technology quickly spawned fraudulent stem-cell clinics to exploit the desperate. There is snake oil based on lasers, holograms, and radio waves. Any new tech or scientific discovery becomes a marketing scam, going back to electromagnetism and continuing today with “nanotechnology”. There is some indication that artificial intelligence (AI) will be no exception.

I am a big fan of AI technology, and clearly it has reached a turning point where the potential applications are exploding. The basic algorithms haven’t changed, but with faster computers, an internet full of training data, and AI scientists finding more ways to cleverly leverage the technology, we are seeing more and more amazing applications, from self-driving cars to AI art programs. AI is likely to be increasingly embedded in everything we do.

But with great potential comes great hype. Also, for many people, AI is a black box of science and technology they don’t understand. It may as well be magic. And that is a recipe for exploitation. A recent BBC article, for example, highlights to risks of relying on AI in evaluating job applicants. It’s a great example of what is likely to become a far larger problem.

I think the core issue is that for many people, those for whom AI is mostly a black box, there is the risk of attributing false authority to AI and treating it like a magic wand. Companies can therefore offer AI services that are essentially pure pseudoscience, but since it involves AI, people will buy it. In the case of hiring practices, AI is being applied to inherently bogus analysis, which doesn’t change the nature of the analysis, it just gives it a patina of impeachable technology, which makes it more dangerous.

Continue Reading »

Science is fun, interesting, and empowering, but it is also hard, especially at advanced levels. Even at a basic level, science forces you to think clearly, precisely, logically, and objectively. It therefore challenges our preconceptions, our biases, our hopes and desires and replaces these things with indifferent reality. Science becomes progressively tricky the more advanced it becomes, requiring an increasing fund of knowledge and mastery over subtle concepts and technical skills in order to be able to take the next step. At the cutting edge of science, nothing short of years of dedicated study is necessary to engage meaningfully with the enterprise of advancing human scientific knowledge. You also have to be able to engage productively with a community of scientists, all picking apart each other’s work.

It’s for these reasons that there is a lot of bad science out there. There are also those who prioritize things other than the pursuit of scientific knowledge, such as money, fame, or advancing an ideology. Many people mean well, but simply get the science wrong. Even successful scientists can make egregious errors, stubbornly stick to false ideas, or let their own ideology get in the way. So what is the average science enthusiast to do? Unless you have a fairly high level of scientific expertise in general and also in a specific field, you cannot hope to engage with the cutting edge of that field. To some extent, you have to trust the experts, but what if the experts disagree, or some of them are just wrong?

There is no easy answer to this, but there are skills and methods other than actual expertise in a specific field that can help a layperson have a pretty good idea which experts to listen to. This requires some scientific literacy, especially about how proper science operates. It also requires a certain amount of critical thinking skills – knowing something about logic, self-deception, and the nature of evidence. Further, we can learn to recognize the different types of pseudoscience and pseudoscientific behaviors, which can act as reliable red-flags to help spot fake science. Recently promoters of the Electric Universe have appeared in the comments to this blog, and this is a good opportunity to review these red flags.

The idea of the electric universe (EU) is that electromagnetism actually does most of the large-scale heavy lifting when it comes to the structure of the cosmos, displacing gravity as the main long-distance force. There are different flavors of EU, with some doing away with gravity completely, and others allowing for some gravity (to help explain phenomena EU can’t) but still relegate it to a minor role. One major example is that EU proponents believe stars are fueled by electromagnetism, and not by gravity-induced fusion. Here are two great videos that give a concise summary of the history of EU belief and why it is complete and utter nonsense. But I will review the major problems with EU and use them as examples of crank pseudoscience.

Crank pseudoscience is a flavor of pseudoscience that operates at a technically sophisticated level, but is missing some of the key elements of actual science that doom proponents to absurdity. But it also contains many of the generic features of pseudoscience. Let’s review, starting with features more typical of crank pseudoscience.

Does not engage meaningfully with the scientific community.

Science is a collaborative effort, especially at the advanced cutting edge level. This is because it is so difficult at this level, you need the self-corrective process of peer-review, rejection of error, criticism of wrong ideas, challenges for evidence and by alternative theories, etc. Without this self-corrective process, fringe groups or individuals tend to drift off from reality into a fantasy land of their own creation, although gilded with the superficial trappings of science. EU proponent Montgomery Childs exemplifies this in an interview (in the second video above) when he tries lamely to justify not bothering to publish any of his findings in scientific journals. Actual experts in plasma physics and cosmology therefore just ignore his fringe work – unless they have data to look at, they don’t have much of a choice. This is a core feature of crank pseudoscience – cranks tend to toil alone or in small fringe echochambers and not engage with proper experts.

Work outside their actual area of expertise (if they have one).

Often we see scientists or engineering getting into crank science when they venture beyond their specific area of expertise. Sometimes this is just hubris – in fact we joke about the Nobel Prize effect, where some Nobel Prize winners go on to support pseudoscience later in their career. There is also an aging-scientist effect where researchers toward the end of their career start looking at their legacy, or lack of one, and want to make a big splash somewhere. Some choose a small fringe pond where their credentials make them a big fish, and start promoting nonsense. The problem, of course, if that being an expert in one area does not equip you to contradict actual experts in a separate field. Electrical engineers are not cosmologists or physicists. It is therefore helpful to see what the most appropriate experts say about a theory, not just anyone with letters after their name. Actual experts reject the EU as completely nonsense (with good reason), and its proponents are all in unrelated fields.

Make grandiose claims while minimizing actual scientific knowledge.

The EU claims to overhaul much of science, which is itself a red flag. It is hard to prove that established science is all wrong, and it’s getting harder as science advances and the foundational concepts of science are increasingly supported by evidence and derivative theories. What cranks often do is grossly exaggerate what is currently unknown in a scientific field, or the meaning of anomalies, and they downplay what is known with confidence. This often become simply lying, making boldly false claims about the state of the science. EU proponents, for example, ignore or deny the evidence for the Big Bang, black holes, stellar fusion, and gravity. The claim that they have overturned pretty much all of astrophysics, stellar astronomy, General Relativity, and more – all on the flimsiest of pretexts. In other words, they reject theories supported by a mountain of evidence, and replace them with theories that have (at best) an ant hill.

They don’t actually explain 0r predict anything.

Another core feature of science is that it makes testable predictions. What this means is that there has to be some way to determine if one theory is more correct than another, because they make different predictions about what we will observe in the universe or the result of experiments. Scientific theories also should have explanatory power (it can explain what we see) – but this is actually necessary but insufficient feature of science. Astrology has explanatory power – if you are willing to just make up BS explanations for stuff. It’s easy, and pattern-seeking humans are good at, finding explanations of stuff. The problem with EU is that it really does neither – predict or explain. In fact, shifting from current cosmological theories to EU would be a massive step backwards. EU cannot explain a ton of established phenomena that are well explained by current theories, such as the evidence for black holes or dark matter, the lifecycle of stars, the existence of neutrinos from stellar fusion, and many more. There are also fundamental problems with EU, such as the known behavior of electromagnetism and charged particles. What EU proponents do, rather, is simply hunt for patterns, and then make very superficial connections between some aspect of EU theory and some astronomical phenomenon.

This is what triggered some of the comments – the regular rings of dust found around WR140, caused by the periodicity of the wind-binary star system. EU proponents said – look, concentric rings. We see those in the plasma dohickey thing. They then count that as a “prediction” when it was actually just retrofitting, and not very well. They falsely call the rings “perfect” when it is the very imperfections in the rings that can be accounted for by the astronomical explanation.

Portray the scientific community as a conspiracy of the small-minded.

If you have a nonsensical fringe theory and don’t publish your findings (except in fringe journals created for that purpose), it’s likely that the broader scientific community with ignore or reject your claims. They should – you have not earned their assent by demonstrating your claims with objective and publicly available evidence. When that happens, cranks universally claim they are the victim of a conspiracy. They don’t self-correct, address legitimate criticisms, recognize the shortcomings of their theories, do better experiments or, in short, engage in legitimate science. They cry foul. They say something to the effect that “mainstream” science is all a conspiracy, and scientist are simply too dumb or too scared to recognize their towering genius. This is the point that self-comparisons to Galileo or Einstein are typically brought out.

EU proponents do this in spades. There is a large, vibrant, world-wide community of astrophysicists, all at different parts of their career, in different countries and institutions, just trying to figure out how the universe works and hopefully make a name for themselves doing so. Yet a few fringe scientists, without the proper expertise, allege they have proven all of them hopelessly wrong, because they are all biased or don’t know what they are doing. And they are stubbornly not convinced by silly superficial evidence its proponents won’t bother to publish. Imagine!

In the early days of my skeptical activism I and my colleagues often took on some of the classics of pseudoscience, such as UFOs, dowsing, astrology, and ghost-hunting. As a New England-based group we also focused on local pseudoscience, which means ghosts and ghost-hunting. By coincidence we had perhaps the most famous ghost hunters in the world living just a couple towns over from us, Ed and Lorraine Warren. They were made famous by the Amityville Horror case, and more recently by The Conjuring series of movies.

Even 23 years ago, when we encountered the Warrens, they were famous. They made the college circuit with their talks and slide-shows, held ghost-hunting classes, and spawned dozens of breakaway groups over the years. They were clearly the big fish in our little pond, and so we didn’t know what quite to expect when they agreed to allow us to interview and then investigate them. I want to stress this was a collaborative endeavor throughout, although they certainly weren’t happy with our final conclusions.

On our initial visit Ed gave us a tour of his basement museum, which he claimed was the most haunted place in the world. It included that Raggedy Ann doll that is now the focus of The Conjuring movies, which was kept behind a glass case with a stern warning not to open. I was amused that the collection of haunted items includes a D&D handbook, the Unearthed Arcana. We also asked Ed to show us his best piece of evidence after years of hunting ghosts, and without any hesitation he said it was his video of the White Lady of Union Cemetery. This video has now been digitized and uploaded to Youtube, so you can see for yourself what Ed considered his best evidence.

Continue Reading »

In the last 20 years I have been called to jury duty several times. Every time I was dismissed almost instantly, once I made it known that I am a professional skeptic. Apparently lawyers fear that kind of skepticism on their juries (at least one side always did). The same is true of many of my skeptical colleagues, so I am not an isolated case. Once my brother said during the process that he wrote an article on the fallibility of human memory and eyewitness testimony. His but barely hit the seat when he was dismissed.

It is unclear how best to interpret these anecdotes, but what is clear is that justice requires facts and needs to align optimally with reality. Falsehoods and pseudoscience do not generally lead to justice. It is for this reason that courtrooms have elaborate rules of evidence, and generally they work well. Even in our adversarial system, you need to use generally valid arguments, you need to back up your statements with evidence, and there are rules of admissibility. Each side provides a check on the other, as a neutral arbiter presides over the process. It is imperfect (because imperfect people are involved) but at least it has a process.

One area where this process has historically had significant problems, however, is in forensic science, and the admissibility of science itself. The main problem, as I see it, is that it is based largely on authority, in both a good and bad way. Each side is allowed to find their own experts, and they can cherry pick experts whose opinion aligns with their needs. Often a non-expert jury is then tasked with sorting it out. There are standards for which expert testimony is admissible, and this has been a controversy unto itself. Here is a good summary:

Prior to 1993, the Frye standard for admitting expert testimony was the prevailing standard for guiding federal and state courts in their consideration as to whether scientific expert testimony should be admitted at trial. Frye v. United States[1]. The Frye standard requires that the proponent of the evidence establish the general acceptance of the underlying scientific principle and the testing procedures. Notably, Frye only applies to new or novel scientific evidence. However, in 1993, following a revision to the Federal Evidence Code by Congress, the Supreme Court of the United States annunciated the new standard in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc.[2] The Daubert inquiry was meant to be flexible and focused on scientific principles and methodology, not conclusions. The Daubert opinion emphasized that the Federal Rules of Evidence governed admissibility and suggested a series of factors a court could consider, but did not establish a test per se. Under Daubert, the admissibility of expert evidence rests squarely within the discretion of the trial court judge. In contrast to Frye, Daubert applies to all expert witness testimony.

This article is about the fact that Florida has reverted to the Frye standard recently. This highlights the fact that legal precedent is largely how this is sorted out, and may differ for every state and at the federal level.

Continue Reading »

Homeopathy is pure pseudoscience. No reasonable review of the evidence can come to another conclusion. Most people who use homeopathic products don’t even know what it is – they generally think that the term refers to herbal or natural remedies. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, for most people, when I tell them what homeopathy actually is, their first reaction is disbelief. As silly as homeopathy is, it is good to give occasional reminders of how nonsensical the homeopathic industry is and how absurd their claims. This reminder is about homeopathic X-rays, which I will get to below.

The two core claims of homeopathy include the notion that like cures like – that a substance that causes symptoms will reduce those same symptoms in teeny tiny doses. There is no science to this claim, and no, it does not operate like allergy shots or vaccines. The substances and doses used generally do not provoke any immune response. They don’t provoke any response at all, because the doses are so tiny, they are usually non-existence. That is the second core foundation of homeopathy, extreme dilutions.

How extreme? A typical 30C dilution involves dissolving the starting ingredients 1:100 thirty times. That is a 10^60 dilution. There are about 10^50 atoms in the Earth, so you would need 10 billion Earths worth of homeopathic potion to have an even chance of getting a single molecule of “active” ingredient. But to the homeopath this is a feature not a bug, because they believe that the magical “essence” of the starting ingredient remains behind.

Homeopathy, in other words, is not medicine but magical potions, based on prescientific superstitions. That doesn’t stop corporations from pretending it is real medicine and selling it as such.

Continue Reading »