Scientific Cenobites - Some notes on Skepticism, part 6 of 6

True Freethinker now concludes with "Some notes on Skepticism" authored by Rochus Boerner as part of the Scientific Cenobites series.

Setting Arbitrary Standards of Proof and Moving the Goalposts:
Changing previously agreed upon standards of evidence when those standards have been met.
This is how pseudoskeptics have been able to say with a straight face that there is not a shred of evidence for extraterrestrial visitation for almost six decades. When there were only eyewitness reports, they wanted credible eyewitnesses, such as university professors, doctors or law enforcement officers. When they got that, they wanted photos. When they got photos, they wanted videos and physical evidence. When they got both, they reverted to the safe demand of the landing on the White House lawn.




What is wrong with that demand? Every hypothesis must be tested on its own predictions. If a hypothesis requires a certain event to happen, and that event is not observed, then the hypothesis is falsified. But there is no logical basis for the conclusion that if extraterrestrials exist, they would want to make their presence generally known. Extrapolating from the way that human zoologists use stealth to observe wild animals, we would tend to expect extraterrestrials to behave in the same fashion towards us. The 'White House Test' for ETs is therefore illogical, because the ET hypothesis does not predict this event to happen. That the ET hypothesis has so far failed this arbitrary and unreasonable test means nothing.

Park's demand for a psychokinetic who can deflect a microbalance (in Voodoo Science) is of a similarly arbitrary nature. Even if it were met, ample historical precedent teaches us that the skeptics would dismiss this ability as a stage magician's trick, or as anecdotal evidence that proves nothing. The pseudoskeptics would, in other words, move the goalposts.

Former Nature editor John Maddox "moved the goalposts" in an attempt to get rid of Benveniste's paper. Even though Benveniste's research was solid, he would not publish it until it had been replicated by three independent laboratories. But when that condition had unexpectedly been satisfied, and Maddox had been forced to publish it, he remained convinced of the invalidity of the research and abused his position of power to discredit it.

Debunkery by association:
If paranormal phenomena are real, then we might just as well believe in werewolves, fairies and unicorns! [Atheism is Dead might as well add the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Invisible Pink Unicorns]To rhetorically imply, by means of direct suggestion or innuendo, that attempts at serious research into anomalous phenomena are no more credible than psychic hot lines, tabloid reports of miracles and newspaper horoscopes. James Randi is very fond of this rhetorical technique, as he uses it ad nauseam and beyond:

(..) cold fusion is a dead duck, the earth is not flat, and the fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Effectively, Randi is suggesting that there is some kind of connection between research into anomalous energy production associated with hydrogen and astrology and the belief that the earth is flat. A variation of this technique is to associate serious unconventional research with mass media outlets that report on it - Park's grotesque discussion of parapsychological phenomena as reported by a sensationalist, unscientific ABC program in his book Voodoo Science (p. 195-200) was already mentioned above.

Another variation on this theme is to associate an unconventional claimant with convicted frauds who are associated with the field. Of course, there is incompetence and fraud in every profession. There are surgeons who cut off a wrong leg and scientists who falsify data, but that does not lead skeptics to conclude that every surgeon is a quack and all of science is bogus. But exactly that kind of wild, slanderous generalization is commonly employed by pseudoskeptics to discredit unconventional fields of inquiry. When it comes to free energy, they discuss free energy con-man Dennis Lee. To discredit parapsychology, they devote much time and effort to Uri Geller, Miss Cleo and John Edward. To ridicule UFO research, they keep going back to Adamski and his claims of arian dream women from Venus. To discredit crop circles, they emphasize stories of crop circle researchers who were fooled by hoaxers, as if that somehow forbade the existence of the real thing. The possibility of health benefits from magnetic fields is repudiated by emphasizing obviously worthless charms and bracelets advertised in the yellow press. Acupuncture is dismissed as unsafe because it has lead to serious injury in the hands of unqualified practitioners.

To illustrate, here comes an excerpt from Robert L. Park's "What's New" column of Friday, April 5, 2002. Under the title "Free Energy: Perpetual Motion Scams Are At An All-Time High", Park attempts to discredit the Motionless Electromagnetic Generator by associating it with Dennis Lee:

In 1999, I went to Columbus, Ohio for ABC News to witness Dennis Lee demonstrate a permanent-magnet motor that was "more than 200% efficient." Actually, he didn't really demonstrate it. He stuck a magnet on the side of a steel file cabinet; turning to the audience he asked, "How long do you think that magnet will stay there?" He answered his own question, "Forever. That's infinite energy." Don't laugh, this week, Patent 6,362,718 was issued for a "Motionless Electromagnetic Generator" that "extracts energy from a permanent magnet with energy-replenishing from the active vacuum."

The truly skeptical reader might wonder why Lee's 1999 "demonstration" is "new" on April 5, 2002. The answer, of course, is that it isn't. It just needed to be exhumed because the MEG is too difficult to ridicule, given that (unlike Lee) its team of creators are physicists, its function is described in the peer-reviewed literature (Foundation of Physics Letters, 2001), that it has apparently been independently replicated by French inventor Jean-Louis Naudin and that no attempts are being made to solicit investments from individuals. To still effectively discredit the MEG (which Park, of course, has never examined in person), he talks about a known free-energy scam-artist in order to get the reader into a suitably dismissive mood, and then switches the target of his criticism at the last second, coupled with an appeal to emotional consensus implied in the phrase "don't laugh". [For clarification: I do not claim to possess any knowledge or evidence that the MEG actually works as claimed, or that the theory behind it has any merit whatsoever. My point is to illustrate the nature of Park's merely rhetorical dismissal of the MEG.]

Yet another outfit of scientific arrogance that practices debunkery by association to ridicule unconventional research is IG Nobel, an organization that awards its "IG Nobel Prize" annually for "achievements that cannot or should not be reproduced". Browsing through the list of past winners, we find a long list of recipients who were more than deserving of this dubious honor. In 1991, Dan Quayle, "consumer of time and occupier of space", is being recommended for demonstrating "the need for science education", and Edward Teller "for his lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it". But the same year also sees Jacques Benveniste attacked and ridiculed for what future historians of science will come to recognize as one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century, the experimental proof that water can carry information. The precise phrasing of the award also uses other pseudoskeptical techniques such as the ad-hominem ("prolific proseletizer [sic]") and misinterpretation of the actual claim (Benveniste never claimed that water is "intelligent").


Dismissing claims because of their philosophical pedigree:
Where debunkery by association seeks to discredit claims by linking them with similar, but unrelated, claims, this technique seeks to discredit ideas by discounting their empirical merits in favor of their philosophical origins. The Skeptic's Dictionary gives us once again a prime example. Under the heading "alternative health practices", we find the following definition:

Health or medical practices are called "alternative" if they are based on untested, untraditional or unscientific principles, methods, treatments or knowledge. "Alternative" medicine is often based upon metaphysical beliefs and is frequently anti-scientific.

But doctors of alternative medicine are frequently more scientific than their conventional colleagues. While the former employ modalities whose safety and efficacy has been demonstrated by decades (nutrition), centuries (homeopathy) or millennia (acupuncture) of clinical practice, the latter frequently derive their "scientific" knowledge from biased information and rigged drug studies communicated by pharma lobbyists. Death from alternative medicine is practically unheard of, but side-effects of conventional treatments are estimated to kill 100,000 people in the United States every year. It is therefore hard to dismiss alternative medicine on empirical grounds.

Yet for the pseudoskeptics, alternative medicine remains "unscientific", even "anti-scientific", because much of it is inspired by ancient beliefs and metaphysical ideas, such as the notion of a vital energy that animates the body, or the idea that thoughts create physical reality, not the other way. Pseudoskeptics find the notion that ancient civilizations could have known things that are still beyond the understanding of our current civilization deeply offensive. As rationalists, they believe that our ancestors were without exception superstitious, ignorant savages, and that our current understanding of nature represents the highest level of scientific knowledge that has ever existed on this planet. They are therefore categorically unwilling to entertain the notion that there could be any truth or validity to medical practices that were not developed by mechanistic, reductionist Western medicine. Whether or not alternative medicine has any merit is not at all a scientific question for them- it's personal.

Truly scientific thinking, of course, accepts truth based on evidence alone, regardless of the philosophies and beliefs of the messenger. To a scientific mind, the question of why Samuel Hahnemann came up with the idea of curing people with medicines that are so highly diluted that little or no trace remains of the original substance, has no bearing on the question of whether homeopathy has therapeutic value.

Another example of "dismissing claims because of their philosophical pedigree" is how academic paleoanthropology reacted to the challenge posed by Cremo and Thompson's Forbidden Archeology. Critics like to point out that the authors are "Hindu creationists" as if that somehow implied that their scholarly achievement was without merit. But from a logical point of view, the value of the arguments made and evidence presented by Cremo and Thompson is completely independent of the religious beliefs that motivated the research in the first place, just like the big bang theory is not automatically false because it is compatible with the Christian religious belief that our universe was created.


Slurs and Ridicule:
The true skeptic refrains from ad hominem attacks and name calling while the pseudoskeptic elevates them to an art form. Examples abound in pseudoskeptical books and periodicals.

I conclude this little phenomenology of pseudoskepticism with an extensive quotation that reads like a compendium of invalid criticisms. It is taken from The Memory of Water, an account of the scientific witch hunt against Jacques Benveniste. Its author, French biologist Michel Schiff gives a list of phrases directed by scientists at Benveniste and his research, which I quote in its entirety:

a 'bizarre new theory', a 'unicorn in a back yard', a 'Catch-22-situation', 'some form of energy hitherto unknown in physics', 'cloud-cuckoo-land', 'unbelievable research results', 'sticking to old paradigms', 'defying the rules of physics', a 'hypothesis as unnecessary as it is fanciful', 'data that did not seem to make sense', 'discouraging fantasy', 'unbelievable circumstances', 'circus atmosphere', 'spurious science', 'magical properties of attenuated solutions', 'unbelievable results', the 'product of careless enthusiasm', a '200-year-old brand of medicine that most Western physicians consider to be harmless quackery at best', 'dilutions of grandeur', the 'egotism and folly of this man who rushes into print with a claim so staggering that if true would revolutionize physics and medicine', 'mystical powers', 'magic', 'quackery', 'charlatanism', a 'therapy without scientific rationale', 'unicorns revisited', an 'explanation beloved of modern homeopaths', a 'circus atmosphere', 'spurious science', 'belief in the magical properties of attenuated solutions', 'what seems to be an aberration', 'results that could not be explained by current theory', 'respectful disbelief of Nobel prizewinner Jean-Marie Lehn', the 'cavalier interpretation of results made by Benveniste', 'interpretations out of proportion with the facts', 'magic results', 'high-dilution experiments and much of homeopathy with their notions of alchemy', 'revolutionary nature of this finding', 'generally efficient physicochemical laws being broken', ' throwing away our intellectual heritage', 'how James Bond could distinguish Martinis that have been shaken or stirred', a 'delusion about the interpretation of the data', the 'extraordinary claims made in the interpretation', 'Cheshire cat phenomenon', 'no basis for concluding that the chemical data accumulated over two centuries are in error', the 'circus atmosphere engendered by the publication of the original paper', the 'fact that it still takes a full teaspoon of sugar to sweeten our tea', 'existing scientific paradigms', 'throwing away the Law of Mass Action or Avogadro's number', 'original research requiring a general science background sufficient to recognize nonsense', 'reports of unicorns needing to be checked with particular care', 'not believing that no-more existent molecules can leave an imprint in water', 'the first issue of New Approaches to Truly Unbelievable and Ridiculous Enigmas', 'speculating why water can remember something on some occasions and forget it on others', 'outlandish claims', 'not publishing papers dealing with nonsense theories', 'data grossly conflicting with vast amounts of earlier well-documented and easily replicated data', 'extraordinary claims', 'shattering the laws of chemistry',' divine intervention being probably about as likely', 'findings that contravene the physicochemical laws known to science', 'data that purport to contravene a couple of centuries of chemical data', a 'whole load of crap','1074 oceans like those of the Earth needed to contain only one molecule of the original substance', the 'usual rules of interactions in biology or in physical chemistry where the molecule is the basic vector of information', the 'failure of fundamental principles', 'defying all laws of physical chemistry and of biology', 'unbelievable results', 'observations without any objective basis', one prominent scientist pointedly not reading Benveniste's paper 'because it would be a waste of his time', 'standard theory offering no explanation for such a result' and 'a priest stating during mass that water keeps the memory of God'.

The anger and outrage these scientists are feeling as they are trying to come to terms with the cognitive dissonance generated by the Benveniste results is palatable. Gone are sweet logic and reason, and gone is the scientific method that says that evidence can never be dismissed on theoretical grounds. The gut feeling that such results are simply 'unbelievable', no matter what, dominates the response. The existing physical models are confused with eternal laws of nature, and their apparent inability to account for the results is taken as a personal insult. The church fathers who refused to look through Galilei's telescope could hardly have been any more irrational than the highly educated scientists who produced these outbursts of scientific bigotry.
[For True Freethinker's Galileo related post see here]

Other online references that might be of interest are

Online Articles by George P. Hansen

Distinctions Between Intellectuals And Pseudo-Intellectuals (Sydney Harris)

Zen . . . and the Art of Debunkery (article by Daniel Drasin)

On Pseudo-Skepticism (article by original CSICOP co-founder Marcello Truzzi)

Extraordinary Claim? Move the Goal Posts!

sTARBABY article by Dennis Rawlins

Myths of Skepticism

Folklore and the Rise of Moderation Among Organized Skeptics

CSICOP Scare!

Debunking the Debunkers

CSICOP Takes Stock of the Media

True Disbelievers: Mars Effect Drives Skeptics to Irrationality

CSICOP: The Paradigm Police

The Right Man Syndrome: Skepticism and Alternative Medicine

Cognitive Processes and the Suppression of Sound Scientific Ideas

Symptoms of Pathological skepticism

The Logical Trickery of the UFO Skeptic

Skeptical Inquirer Smears Wilhelm Reich (Again): A Rebuttal