Wherein We Define Skepticism...Again...

I was recently talking to one of my coworkers about the movie Paranormal Activity 2 when she asked me a question that caught me off guard: "Why do you like those kinds of movies if you don't believe in ghosts?".¹

In real life, my off-the-cuff reply was probably something involving Godzilla, but in a better, hindsight-informed world I might've said something like "well you watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer at Christmas time, but you don't believe in flying alpine ungulates with spotlights for noses."

Okay, so maybe that's not a great retort either, but the point is that tons of people watch movies that they know are ridiculous and still enjoy them, so it struck me as odd that someone would assume that I'm somehow such a scowling, closed-minded prig that I can't even enjoy a horror movie.

When in fact, I own a couple of horror films...

The fact of the matter is I like the Paranormal Activity films because they're fun to watch. The first one particular was a fairly effective distillation of everything I think is creepy. It doesn't really matter whether or not I think there are actually ghosts out there trying to eat people - if there were it'd be freakin' scary.

My movie tastes notwithstanding, I've found that some folks assume that skeptics don't want there to be paranormal things in the world. I've got a friend who used to dabble if amateur ghost hunting who's made statements to that effect before, and you hear it all the time from True Believers^TM on the internet: "Skeptics don't want there to be aliens because it would change the face of science." "Skeptics don't want telekinesis to exist because it would force a reevaluation of the current models of physics". "Skeptics don't want Bigfoot to be real because it would have potentially world-shaking ramifications for anthropology and evolutionary biology." Think I'm kidding? Check out this guy. Early on in his anti-skeptic diatribe, he claims that "Skeptics seem to like their world small and static; change upsets them."

Right.

Let's think for a second here. If psychic powers were proven to be real, we would have to rethink pretty much everything we knew about physics. If another race of sentient, tool-using, habitually bipedal hominids were discovered, it would radically change the face of anthropology. If alien life - not just intelligent alien life, but alien life AT ALL - were proven to exist...well, it would probably be the most important scientific discovery of all time.

You know what else? All of those things would be Totally. Freaking. Awesome. I can't speak for anyone else, but I'd love it if extraterrestrial life was discovered or a live dinosaur was pulled out of the Amazon...but I'm not going to confuse the degree to which I might want something to be true with the amount of evidence that it actually is true.

Skepticism isn't, as some people like to claim, about saying "that phenomenon can't be real", it's about saying "I'm not yet convinced that the phenomenon in question is real". Bigfoot's a good example of this- There's no biological reason that large, tool-using, habitually bipedal primates can't exist. There's 6 billion of them on the planet right now. However, there's also not a lot of good reasons to think that a heretofore unknown species of a large, habitually bipedal primate really is stalking the woods of the American Northwest while never leaving a corpse, never getting hit by a car or shot by a hunter, and never appearing in front of anyone who can hold a camera steady. Bigfoot could exist...but right now there's no good reason to think that it does.

Skepticism isn't about making claims of what can or cannot exist, it's about making honest evaluations of what is or isn't likely to exist given the available evidence. Hand-in-hand with that is the understanding that one's desire or distaste for something is irrelevant when considering this evidence. The article from Area 51 which I linked to above laments that skeptics "can't imagine a world in which the fantastic is plausible". That's an odd statement in the sense that it's simultaneously sort of true and incredibly misleading. Fantastic claims, even the ones we really want to be true, are inherently implausible...unless they're backed up by real evidence. Forget that at your own peril, lest you end up calling CNN on Christmas morning to announce proof of Santa's existence in the form of half-eaten cookie.

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1.) Yeah, that's right, I bought Paranormal Activity 2 despite all my bellyaching on Twitter about how the first one was a prime example of a good movie that should never, ever have a sequel. I saw it theatrically too. Sue me.

A Lesson in Skepticism

While taking a client out shopping this afternoon, I suddenly found myself face-to-face with a 7-foot high, walking red jelly bean. ¹ The towering creature lumbered towards us, its comically exaggerated chef's hat blocking out the sun as it menacingly spread its stubby arms, no doubt intent on seizing us up and stuffing us into its smiling maw. Certain that we were being attacked by a monster, I tensed myself for battle as the beast stalked ever closer.

Luckily, physical combat was averted when an older gentleman wearing a Jelly Belly t-shirt appeared and informed us that we had wandered into a promotional event. The monster, it turned out, was Mr. Jelly Belly himself. The older man gave us each a sample of honey-flavored jelly beans and asked us to take our place in a queue that was forming. My client and I had a hurried discussion, then got in line.

I didn't take my eyes off Mr. Jelly Belly.

We stood in line in the clingy July heat for a good thirty minutes, but this was offset somewhat by the various free samples being handed out. Nothing topped the initial honey beans, although the 7UP-flavored ones were surprisingly good. I also given one that was meant to taste like some manner of peach booze, but it didn't really light my fire. There came a point when we were both ready to go, but we were so close to the front of the line -for what, we didn't yet know - that we had to stay. We were compelled.

In any event, it finally became apparent that we were in the midst of a promotion for a product called "BeanBoozled". According to a brochure I was given, the gimmick is this: In any box of BeanBoozled beans, the majority are regular, tasty flavors, but a few are intentionally vile "gag" beans.² It's less a snack product than a sinister game of tastebud roulette. I'm not entirely sure how marketable I think that is.

Turns out we were standing in line to spin a wheel of fate that would determine which color jelly beans we'd get to sample, but allegedly each jar of like-colored beans contained a mixture of outwardly identical traditional and "gag" beans. For example, if you were handed a black jelly bean, it might taste like licorice or "skunk spray". If you bravely ate the mysterious jelly beans with which you were presented, you'd be rewarded with filthy lucre in the form of a swanky-cool sticker, a fruit gel, and a bag of mixed, non-gross jelly beans.

I was a little dubious. I paid attention to the folks ahead of us in line, and I noticed that for all the hemming and hawing, all the theatrics and anticipation, no one seemed to get a gag bean. People would worry over their handful of beans, ask the lady handing out the samples if she was serious that the trio of milky white jelly beans might really be flavored like "dirty diapers", cast anxious glances at their friends...and finally gulp them down to find that they were really coconut all along. I smiled at my companion.

"There aren't really any gross ones," I assured him. "It's like that Halloween party game when you're supposedly sticking your hand in a jar of eyeballs but it's really just grapes. It's all about anticipation."

He nodded, and we smirked to ourselves as the last couple of people ahead of us spun the wheel and ate their (non-disgusting) jelly beans. By the time it was my turn to spin the wheel of fate, I was pretty sure I had the game all figured out. I spun the wheel and it settled on "Peach...or Barf". My client and I exchanged mock-worried looks as the Jelly Belly lady dealt me out a couple of beans with a tiny plastic scoop. This was going to be super-cheesy easy.

"Now you may want to try just a sliver..." she began as I popped them unthinkingly into my mouth.



I have to commend the small army of scientists working at Jelly Belly for their masterful recreation of the taste of vomit. It was truly a thing of grotesque beauty.

I walked away today with a free bag of mixed citrus Jelly Bellies and a new appreciation for what it does and doesn't mean to be skeptical. Being a skeptic doesn't mean being unthinkingly cynical and disbelieving, it means taking in all the evidence you can and using it to come to the best possible conclusion. It also means that acknowledging that we can consider all the available information and still be wrong if the information is insufficient or our analysis is wanting. We all know that, but we also all forget from time to time.

I sure remember now.


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1.) A word of explanation - I work with mentally disabled folks, and a fair amount of my job involves community integration activities to boost their confidence and ability to interact with new people. That said, I won't use my client's name here to protect his privacy.

2.) Fairly or not, I place the blame for "joke" jelly beans squarely on J.K. Rowling for her creation of "Every-Flavor Beans" in the Harry Potter novels.

Finding that happy median...

I've been informed that this is a pretty good representation of my interactions with others.

As usual, Dilbert contains a kernel of truth - It's very easy for a skeptic to come across as a know-it-all chode. I personally have a severely limited capacity for self-censorship, so I can only imagine that the effect is rather amplified for the poor folks that have to deal with me in person on a regular basis. The Girlfriend in particular suffers under the burden of this aspect of my personality. Immediately coming to mind is an incident from last summer in which I guilelessly gave voice to my disgust when one of her friends, coincidentally a new mother, explained to me that she'd recently had her newborn baby's neck popped by a chiropractor to cure him of his frequent burping and bowel movements.

I'm not always an especially tactful fellow, and I told this woman something to the effect of "babies are made for pooping and burping, and if you're going to let a chiropractor manhandle him then you may as well toss him into the gorilla pit at the zoo." I stand by what I said, but I'll admit that the main point of my message was likely canceled out by the inelegance of my delivery. Subjecting an infant to the quackish antics of a chiropractor is tantamount to child abuse...but I doubt I changed this mother's mind with my snarky comments.

The problem of stalwartly presenting a position while not driving people away with an off-putting tone is a difficult one. Skeptics shouldn't hem and haw when laying out arguments based on essentially settled matters of science (be it the age of the earth, in inefficacy of chiropractic, or the uselessness of horoscopes).¹ We should also strive not to present ourselves in such a way as to drive off the undecided masses. Everyone likes to play to their base, and I like a good roasting as much as anyone, but sneering and snark isn't always helpful in winning over new people to your side. On the other hand, winning people over is meaningless if you dilute your facts into oblivion in order to do so.

PZ Myers and Chris Mooney fired many broadside at each other a few months back over this very subject. It began when Mooney wrote in his book Unscientific America that overly abrasive skeptics may be driving the average American towards an anti-science stance with their vitriolic tone. Myers responded with a book review that basically accused Mooney of wanting to water down the facts in order to avoid offending people. This all resulted in a very public pissing match between the two, with skirmishes erupted across the blogosphere as their supporters rallied and railed. The only problem is that both of the were right.

Mooney is 100% correct that the ham-fisted approach can be counterproductive, but Myers is likewise spot-on in his claim that apologizing for the facts or acting like there's a controversy when there really isn't one (i.e. evolution vs. creationism) is misleading and ultimately harmful. ² A skeptic can fiercely condemn the pseudoscientific without giving the middle finger to everyone who isn't firmly in his camp from the start.

It's not much of an exaggeration to say that the future of skepticism rests largely on effective communication. The charlatans certainly have no problem getting their message to the masses, so skeptics must do the same. Skeptics have the more difficult task, however, because we face a problem the charlatans, hucksters, and fakirs don't: sometimes we must tell people what they don't want to hear. It's easy to get someone to listen to you if you're promising them easy wealth, eternal youth, or a posthumous paradise. Convincing people to give up those "comforting delusions" isn't nearly so simple.

I propose that the goal all skeptics must strive for is to lay out our positions strongly and with no undue equivocation, but to do so without breathing fire and driving away the people who might hear us out. This goal is certainly attainable - look at the writings of Carl Sagan or Martin Gardner - but it doesn't come easily. I've been writing this blog for years now and I still don't always hit the tone I want. Until then I just have to work on finding that happy median.


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1.) Neither should we feign certainty about matters that are not yet so clear-cut.
2.) Bluntness has its place as well. The "New Atheist" movement has used very direct, aggressive argumentation to send to pasture certain sacred cows that deference and circumspection would have been ill-equipped to handle. It's a matter of using the right tool for the right job.

Joe Nickell's Adventures...

I recently received a copy of Joe Nickell's Adventures in Paranormal Investigation as a gift, and during my during my recent expedition to the stinking wilderness that is rural Pennsylvania I finally got the opportunity to dig into it. Nickell's a Kentucky native, just like your old pal Skippy, but unlike me he actually gets paid to do paranormal investigations because they link into his job as a folklorist and professor at the University of Kentucky. Accordingly, Nickell gets to travel the world investigating hauntings, miracles, and urban legends - kind of like Kolchak the Night Stalker. Nickell has also written numerous books, of which Adventures is the latest. I thought I'd bang out a quick review because I found it to be an addicting little book, but please forgive my brevity and rather jagged prose - I'm trying to wrap this up during my lunch break.

Adventures in Paranormal Investigation is largely a collection of Nickell's articles from The Skeptical Inquirer, though some of the entries are apparently somewhat expanded. A couple of dozen different subjects are covered, from "vanishing hitchhiker" stories to stigmata to alien abductions, though most of them are given only a brief treatment. Overall none of the entries really go into great detail, but the book is still an interesting read. Honestly the best entries are the ones in which Nickell gets to show off his background in folklore, such as the discussion of haunted castles towards the end of the book. Nickell has an impressive gift for research, a prime example being his exhaustive tracing of the origins of a yarn about a "haunted dungeon" at a fortification in Florida, and entries that highlight this shine brighter than, say, his brief sketch of a study correlating alien abduction experiences with fantasy-prone personality traits. That being said, Nickell includes a bibliography at the end of each chapter, so interested readers immediately have a jumping off point for further study.

One concern that does come up occasionally (Because most of the book's chapters originally saw print as individual articles, I suspect) is that Nickell seems to have tendency to repeat himself. Over the course of about half a dozen chapters on ghosts and/or aliens, for example, the reader will encounter, verbatim, the same sentence about waking dreams. I found that to be a little tedious. I was also a little bothered by Nickell's brief hand-wringing about how he's a "paranormal investigator" rather than a "debunker" - I think that's a mincing of words that can probably be done without.

Overall Adventures in Paranormal Investigation is a worthwhile book even though it mostly just scratches the surface of its subject matter. Keeping in mind, however, that it is largely composed of Nickell's Skeptical Inquirer columns, regular readers of that magazine may find themselves reading over material that they've seen before. In particular, the chapter called "The New Idolatry", which deals with weeping religious statues and the like, ran in the Skeptical Inquirer fairly recently. Still, the book has a light "armchair reader" quality and will likely appeal the most to the curious and to casual skeptics who don't plow through quite as much skeptical literature as I do. Check it out. It's definitely worth a look.

Skippy Sees a UFO...

I'm kind of a military nerd. It comes from taking so many classes on international conflict during school and from having two brothers who have spent time working as civilian contractors for the Navy. I especially love airplanes, as some of you might have guessed from the pool of slobber under my post about the A-10. On the other hand, rotary craft aren't quite my thing - for one, I have a heck of a time identifying them by sight. I tend to assume that any winged helicopter that isn't obviously a Hind is an Apache, and as far I'm concerned every twin-rotor chopper is a Chinook. On the other hand, I like to think I'm halfway decent at identifying modern military planes from the ground. (Though for some weird reason I get F-15s and F-18s mixed up.)

In any event, I didn't end up going to the big air show that was in town yesterday because, well, it was 45 and raining. I did, however, end up making a mall run. The mall happens to be in the flight path of the aircraft en route to and from the air show, so I got to see a couple of F-18s (I think...) fly overhead and all was right with the world. Then, while sitting at a red light, I glanced up and saw a blazing bright light far away and high up in the sky. At first I thought it was one of the jets I'd just seen laying on their afterburners, but the light was sustained for far longer than you'd have expected for something like that. Weird...

I then though that maybe it was a plane doing a flare drop for the crowd at the air show, but no, the light wasn't falling from a craft - it was the craft. Ah ha, I thought, it's an aircraft reflecting light from the sun! But what kind? By now the traffic signal has changed and I'm granny-driving down to the next light trying to keep an eye on the aircraft - I'm foaming at the mouth to know just what it is. It had a weird outline for a jet, with what looked like a large bulge jutting up in front of the tail. It was at a funny angle to me, and even after it flew out of the sun glare the outline seemed unfamiliar to me. What the heck kind of fighter jet was this?

Finally it got a little closer to my position and turned its profile to me - It wasn't a fighter jet at all, it was an E-3 Sentry (aka AWACS), a jet-liner sized command and control plane whose back-mounted radar array gives it one of the most distinct profiles in aviation! Having just seen some F-18s at relatively close range, my brain was trying to jam this new craft into a "fighter jets, up close" category rather than looking for larger planes at a greater distance. With no reference points in the sky, I had no sense of scale to show me that I was looking at much large craft than I expected to see. It wasn't that I was seeing something unfamiliar - it was that I was actively trying to see something other than what I was looking at.

I can only wonder how many UFO sightings come from folks under similar conditions. Had I been a UFO true believer confronted with a mysterious craft that not only had a weird body outline but seemed to be ablaze with light I can imagine the conclusions I would have jumped to. (I should know. Once upon a time I was a UFO true believer.) What's most illustrative about the incident is that I absolutely love reading about, looking at, and studying military aircraft. If someone had told me yesterday morning that I'd run into an AWACS and not be able to immediately identify it, I'd have laughed them off. Nonetheless, put into a situation I wasn't expecting, with my mind striving to jam a square peg in a round hole, I had trouble seeing something obvious for what it really was.

Just what, I wonder, would I have been posting today if I were a UFOlogist who had set out yesterday evening to look for intruding spacecraft?

It's about more than ghosts...

A brief quotation from Dan Agin's "Junk Science" serves here as some chewy food for thought:

"As a rule, the more polarized the political stance, the more likely realities are twisted to suit the arguments, and at the extremes of polarization it's no surprise to find that those on the extreme left and extreme right essentially practice the same methods..."

These are words worthy of being taken to heart. Though I devote a lot of my attention to the questionable actions of the political (and especially the religious) right, the left is far from sinless. From the irrational fear of nuclear energy to the spread of rampant and choking "political correctness", the left has woven its share of threads into the tapestry of the ridiculous that now hangs over the United States and the world.

The defense against this is a skeptical and critical worldview, a demand that claims be backed with verifiable evidence and that policies be dictated by reason rather than impassioned wishful thinking. Skepticism isn't just for dealing with psychics and ghosts and Mothman. The value of skepticism would be sorely limited if its application was constrained merely to the paranormal. After all, Sasquatch isn't in charge of allocating federal money for medical research and the Loch Ness Monster doesn't keep a blog about the alleged evils of transgenic foods. While paranormal charlatans can fool us, steal our money, and use our emotions against us, political and corporate entities can do all these things and more on a scale that is almost unimaginable- but only if we let them.

I've come to see the examination of these more fantastic claims as a sort of practice, a skepticism 101 that lays the foundations for one's ability to deal with the more insidious flummery that surrounds us. The mechanisms for examining the claims of a psychic are not much different than the mechanisms for examining the rationale behind political or corporate policy. Though the subjects for consideration may be very different, we must still strive to reach conclusions based on the evidence and solid, neutral reason.

Because we live in a representative democracy, the public must learn to protect itself from specious reasoning. On its face the equation is simple: The better the powers of reasoning that the voting public can bring to bear, the more rational public policy and governance will become. The real application is unlikely to be quite so perfect, but it's a mark to strive for nonetheless.