Abbr. Enth.

I wanted to take a look into some of the more convincing claims of the paranormal, and I though a good place to start would be with self-proclaimed psychic mediums. I’m sure we’ve all seen or heard of the likes of Sylvia Brown, James Van Praagh, and John Edward, people who have made a name for themselves by claiming that they can talk to the dead. Of course I view these claims with a healthy dose of skepticism, but I’ll freely admit that watching them perform can be fairly impressive. So what makes these “psychics” so good? They’re right way too often for it to be purely guessing. Well, let’s take a look at their art. First we’ll look at the various types of readings, and then we’ll get into some of the other techniques that add to the performance.

Hot Reading
Hot reading is when the “psychic” goes into the reading already having done research about the client, or is being fed information on the fly. A good example of this is Peter Popoff, a “Faith Healer” who claimed that God was talking to him and telling him who in the audience needed healing. James Randi, a famed magician and debunker of paranormal claims, decided to check out his work. Of course Randi didn’t come unprepared, and wasn’t the least bit surprised when the FM receiver he brought with him started picking up a feed from Popoff’s wife. She was feeding him names, addresses, and afflictions that had been filled out on “prayer cards” by the attendees, right into an earpiece that Popoff was wearing.

Warm Reading
Warm readings are a bit trickier than hot readings, but not by much. In a warm reading the reader will make some very general statements about the person being read, usually utilizing general facts of psychology and culture. For example, it is very common for a widow to wear jewelry given to her by her deceased husband, so the reader will say something like “Your husband is telling me you’re wearing something he gave you.”

Another way to make a high probability guess about someone’s appearance just requires a little bit of knowledge of genetics. When the medium is talking about someone’s parents, children, or siblings, they can often make fairly accurate guesses as to the relative’s hair color, eye color, etc., based on the attributes of the person receiving the reading, if the reader knows how such traits can be inherited.

Cold Reading
Cold readings often start out as warm readings, but the reader takes it to the next level. They will often start with general things, like letters or general names (”I’m hearing a J. Is there anyone involved with a J in their name?”). From there they look for clues from the person’s reaction to see how to proceed. If they nod when the reader mentions the letter J then the reader may suggest names like “John” or “Joe”. If the person does not give a positive reaction then the reader moves on to another general claim.

Many people refer to this technique as “fishing”, since the reader is basically throwing out all kinds of stuff until he or she finds something to latch on to. Here’s a good explanation of it from the Australian Skeptics:

One way of fishing is to phrase each statement as question, then wait for the reply. If the reply or reaction is positive, then you turn the statement into a positive assertion. Often the subject will respond by answering the implied question and then some. Later, the subject will forget that he/she was the source of the information! By making your statements into questions, you also force the subject to search his/her memory to retrieve specific instances to fit your general statement.

Once some of the general facts are found then the reader can start honing in on the specifics by continuing to try for high probability hits. For example, if a person responds positively to the letter L then the reader would never guess “Liam”, they would probably start with “Larry” or “Laura”. Often when the reader says a name that is important to the person they will respond with “Yes, Larry, he was my uncle”, and it’s all too common to hear the reader say “Yes, he is saying he was your uncle”. This isn’t even reading, it’s simply repeating back what the person already said in a way that makes it sound like the medium is actually talking to Larry.

Unfortunately a lot of people who get sucked into this do so because they want to believe. Because of this the reader can make hundreds of false guesses in a reading session, but the person will only remember the ten actual hits that were made. Generally these misses aren’t shown on the TV shows, but when people manage to get some of the raw non-aired footage from show filming it’s astounding how many false claims they have to go through before they get one right.

Derren Brown shows exactly how susceptible we are to to this type of reading (as a side note, look at other videos of Derren Brown, he’s absolutely amazing and never claims to be using “magic” or “spirits”). The video linked there is about 10 minutes long, but it’s well worth the time. He provides readings for a bunch of people, many of whom say the readings are over 90% accurate, and then fills them in on how it was all a trick.

I’ll be the first to admit that some of these people are really good at what they do. They have the whole act down, and know what subtle hints to look for in eyes, voice, and body language, which makes this a great bar trick. The problem I have is when it is used to exploit someone’s grief or to con them out of huge amounts of money (Sylvia Brown makes up to $700 for a 30 minute phone session). Unfortunately there are no regulations on these things in the USA. A “psychic medium” can get thousands of dollars from someone and provide them nothing in return, and there’s nothing the law can do about it. So what can we do about it? Educate!

The aforementioned James Randi has set up the James Randi Educational Foundation which has held a long standing offer to pay out $1,000,000 to anyone who can provide proof of any paranormal ability. The members of the JREF even go out of their way to travel to the person with the claim, create a test that they BOTH agree on, and then do the test.

Randi doesn’t have a science background, but he spent quite a while as “The Amazing Randi”, a magician, which gave him some invaluable insight as to how these seemingly magical feats are accomplished. At first there were people lining up to take the challenge, but as the con artists realized that James Randi was not easily fooled, the line of challengers quickly became just the true believers, with the likes of Sylvia Brown and John Edward nowhere to be found. Since the challenge has been put forth the JREF has tested tons of people, from psychics to dowsers, astrologers to faith healers, and not one of them has even passed the preliminary testing.

Who could ask for more proof than that?

I really don’t see any reason to post this today, since the world is obviously going to be ending within a couple hours of the posting. 

Not sure what I’m talking about?  Check out the LHC Countdown, if you can. The last couple of times I’ve tried to check it I couldn’t get on because the site’s bandwidth was exceeded, so apparently there are a lot of people sitting there watching the slow yet inevitable countdown to doom.

So what can we expect to see from doom-seekers as the days pass by and the world doesn’t explode? Well I, for one, expect to see a shift in claims. When the thing gets turned on all those fear mongering nuts who were convinced that 8/8/2008 would be the end of Earth will start saying

“No, it’s going to take a couple months for them to accelerate a particle up to high enough speeds.”

And once we pass that barrier it will be

“But there’s only a 0.04% chance the particles will hit in the right way.”

And once it’s been online and crashing particles long enough to convince even the most hardcore apocalypse junkies that the LHC will not be their demise, that’s when we’ll start hearing about how

“It’s a government conspiracy! We’re all really dead and the government has planted our souls in machines on Mars to convince us otherwise!”

But that’s just my guess. Who knows, maybe people will actually admit that they were just being dumb.

Haha, I crack myself up.

Luckily, in the event we end up going the way of Alderaan, none of you will be around to say “I told you so,” so it’s a win-win for me.

Two weeks ago, in Part I, we looked at a video promoting the Expanding Earth theory and picked apart the arguments presented.  For those of you who need a refresher, here’s the video again.

While it is easy to find the logical fallacies presented in this video, making a bad argument doesn’t actually mean you’re wrong. In most cases just being able to point out the errors in the logic of the argument would be enough to dismiss it until someone comes up with a better argument, in this case I have decided to keep digging anyway. This week I’m going to look at the actual evidence for and against the Expanding Earth theory.

First of all, we have to ask why the Earth is expanding. What is causing it to grow in size? I have found two different reason that advocates of this theory will claim. The first idea is that all of the meteorites, asteroids, comets, and space dust that have been colliding with Earth have been adding enough to its mass to make the Earth measurably bigger. The second theory suggests that the expansion is causing the planet’s crust to stretch and expand, creating “rip-zones”. While these two ideas seem like they would be exclusive, proponents will often argue from both points of view depending on what suits their argument better at the time. Either way, we’ll look at both.

First off, let’s look at the claim that the planet is accumulating mass from an outside source. I’ll even do them a favor and ignore the obvious problems with gravity when we’re changing the mass of the planet. While space dust and meteors/asteroids are the most commonly claimed outside source of mass, some people also claim that the energy from the sun gets converted to mass by photosynthesis when it is absorbed by plants. Frankly, though, these people are dumb. Photosynthesis takes six carbon dioxide (CO2) molecules and 12 water (H20) molecules and converts them into one glucose (C6H1206) molecule, six oxygen (02) and six water (H20) molecules. For those of you who don’t feel like doing the math out, I’ll do it for you:

6 CO2 + 12 H2O
= 6 C + 6 02 + 12 H2 + 12 0
= 6 C + 12 0 + 24 H + 12 0
= 6 C + 24 0 + 24 H

That’s 6 carbon atoms plus 24 oxygen atoms plus 24 hydrogen atoms. Photosynthesis turns this into:

C6H12O6 + 6 O2 + 6 H2O
= 6 C + 12 H + 6 O + 12 O + 6 H2 + 6 O
= 6 C + 12 H + 24 0 + 12 H
= 6 C + 24 H + 24 O

That’s 6 carbon atoms plus 24 hydrogen atoms plus 24 oxygen atoms. Net change? Zero.  The energy from the sun does not create the glucose, it is merely a fuel for the mechanism.

So what about space dust and meteors? Well I couldn’t find any solid numbers about how much mass we accumulate from meteors, all the sources I saw said it was negligible without giving solid numbers. One source said that it was hard to calculate since a lot of the bigger meteors that would be adding more mass to Earth would also be sending a good chunk of dust into space, so even if there was a net gain it wouldn’t be the full mass of the asteroid.

As for the space dust concept, I knew this sounded familiar as soon as I read it, and as I was looking I found why. A common Young Earth Creationist claim is to say that the rate of space dust accumulating on the moon is high enough that if the moon was millions or billions of years old, there would be a layer of dust on it so deep our astronauts would have sunk in beneath it upon landing. This theory came about when in 1960 a scientist by the name of Hans Pettersson was in Hawaii trying to measure the amount of cosmic dust accumulation, and provided an upper limit of 39,150 tons per day. He suggested that this was a high estimate and that he preferred a number about 1/3 of that. In 1967 another scientist claimed that the number may be as high as 700,000 tons per day! Luckily, a few years later, we would have better technology available and in 1976 D. W. Hughes published a figure of 48 tons per day. So how much accumulation is that over the Earth’s lifetime? Somewhere around 1.5 inches of dust over 4.6 billion years. In 1993 another satellite recorded around 121 tons per day, but that’s still not nearly enough to accumulate what is needed to make this theory work. (The numbers and dates were taken from here).

Well I don’t know about you, but I consider that side of the argument debunked. Let’s move on to the idea that the Earth is expanding without the help of outside forces. I suppose someone who took a semester or two of physics may be quick to note the Ideal Gas law, which states that volume has an inverse relation to heat and pressure (as the volume goes up, heat and pressure go down, as the volume goes down, heat and pressure go up). A good example of this is the diesel engine, which compresses the fuel within a constant volume which causes a great amount of heat and ignites the fuel. The Idea Gas law was meant to be used on gasses, but the relation is there for solids and liquids too, just not as extreme.

If we apply this to the Earth, one can see that the liquid hot magma is creating heat, which would create more pressure, causing the Earth to expand. I think that’s the basic idea behind this approach to the Expanding Earth Theory. It does, of course, have its downfalls. First off, as the size of the Earth increased, it would alleviate that pressure build up, causing the magma to cool back down, which would then cause cause a decrease in pressure, making the Earth decrease in size again. This would produce a small cycle and would not have the ability to build up enough pressure to create such a huge change in the size of the Earth.

Even if you argue that the cooling would not create enough negative pressure to decrease the size of the Earth, this constant increase would be leaving a big gap between the crust and the magma, a gap which we can scientifically confirm is not there. I can’t find any more claims of evidence for this version of the theory other than how it’s “so obvious even a child could see it”.

There are also a ton of other reasons why this theory won’t work (where did the water come from?). The fact is, the theory looks good in a flashy video, but it doesn’t have the evidence to back it up unless you just ignore huge sections of science. Any theory that claims conspiracies and then cherry-picks its facts for evidence is well on the road to failure.

I like to refer to myself as a Skeptic. I think the term “atheist” is too specific, because I don’t limit my disbelief to just gods, but I approach everything from a critical perspective. Well…to an extent. I follow the axiom that extreme claims require extreme evidence. If you tell me you had a salad for lunch, I’m not going to call you a liar until you provide me with proof because there’s nothing extraordinary about your claim. Unless you’re a fatty. Fatties don’t eat salad. They eat Cheetos.

Fatties aside, this philosophy applies to pretty much everything in my life, from religion (as you can tell), to science. I’m just as skeptical of extraordinary claims made “in the name of science” as I am to ones claiming to be miracles of the devine. That’s where this video comes in:

For those of you with a too short of an attention span to watch a 10 minute video, the premise is that the Earth has been greatly increasing in size, and that its rate of expansion is accelerating. It claims that the theory of plate tectonics is wrong, and that the reason that all the continents seem to fit together is not because of a pangean origin, but because a few hundred million years ago all of the continents took up the entire Earth.

It makes a very extreme claim, and makes an attempt to back it up with evidence. But what happens when we really look into it? It falls apart, just as a critical mind would expect it to.  My analysis of this video is going to come in two parts.  The first part (this one) is going to focus on looking at the logical fallacies presented in the argument.  The second argument will look more into the evidence for and against the hypothesis.

There are a few clues that you start looking for when you are debunking pseudoscience.  The first is shown very prominently in this quote from the video:

There is a kind of conspiracy of science among certain scientists. They know but are not telling you that the upper tectonic plates of earth also join in the pacific, not partially, they join totally. You are asked to believe that the continents swim or drift about willy-nilly, bumping and crashing as if they were on a greased skillet. This is not true. The simple truth is apparently too upsetting to too many apple carts?

It’s all too typical to see people with these absurd claims hiding behind conspiracy theory. If you think about it, it’s a pretty solid defense mechanism if your target audience is stupid. As soon as somebody opposes your idea you can just say they’re part of the conspiracy and BAM, they’re the bad guy and you’re the victim. Claims that scientists know something that they don’t want the general public to know, and yet the speaker knows, is simply appealing to our desire to know what the secret is. If you walk up to anyone and tell them you have a secret suddenly it’s the only thing that person can think about, and when it’s some big powerful group of scientists keeping the secret it’s all the more appealing.

The simple truth that shatters this quote is that scientists love upsetting the apple cart! It’s the people who do that who win the Nobel prizes! Look at Copernicus. He made the claim for a heliocentric solar system and it turned the common belief upside-down, and he went down in history for it. It’s absurd to think that scientists would be afraid to present this knowledge because this would be the breakthrough of a lifetime! I see similar claims all the time in the Intelligent Design movement; people just love to claim that scientists know life was designed by an intelligent being but are afraid to say anything. Purveyor of bad science, I scoff at thee!

The Atlantic spread is so obvious that a child would recognize it.

This one is a variant of “even an idiot could see X”. Of course the non-critical mind will immediately think “well I don’t want to be an idiot! I believe!” Even beyond that it’s just wrong. If you showed a child a map of the Atlantic sea floor do you really think he or she would start talking about the Atlantic spread? I think not.

I’m not making this up. This map comes from the scientific community.

This is a vague twist on the age old argument from authority, meaning using “an authority figure said it, so it has to be right!” as evidence for your claim. I see this one used a lot by the people who believe that autism is linked to child vaccinations (the evidence says otherwise, but it’s probably all a big conspiracy anyway). They will quote Jenny McCarthy, who is an avid spokesperson about the issue, but doesn’t have the scientific or medical background to be an authority figure here.  In this case the map used is valid, but the way it’s used as an argument makes it sound more like they’re referring to the same “scientific community” referenced by the herbal supplement sellers in my spam folder.

Why does the scientific community desperately cling to and promote the idea that the ocean bottom is sliding under the continents and into a magma which is twice as dense as solid granite, a totally unsupportable and scientifically unsound idea? They Have to. Or else they’d have to observe and admit that the earth is growing. And that, viewers, is a very big deal. That would change everything in science, from the smallest particle to the whole universe. One hundred years of scientific theory out the window.

This is another example of the first one I mentioned. I really don’t see how people think big discoveries are a bad thing for the scientific community. It boggles the mind. This one also makes the claim that the theory of plate tectonics is “a totally unsupportable and scientifically unsound idea” but never bothers to say why. In order for something to be a scientific theory it has to be supportable and scientific. Did the authors just not even bother to look up the Wikipedia page on plate tectonics?

It also tries very hard to make the idea sound even bigger than it is.  Even if the Earth is growing, that doesn’t change chemistry, biology, anthropology, psychology, and most other forms of science.  It would have some big implications for physics and geology, but that’s about it.  And where’s the evidence saying that it would “change everything” even just in physics and geology?  Maybe it would just be new data, but would actually fit in quite well with what we know about physics and geology.  I’m not saying it would, I’m just pointing out the logical fallacy that the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise.

Tectonic spreading, even according to the most conservative scientists, has created 2/3 of the earth’s surface in the last 200 million years. And therefor, the same, the same must be true for all planets, including Mars. Must!

Perhaps this is just an accidental misuse of the word “therefor”, but otherwise this is a blatant non-sequitur (from the SGU: Non-Sequitur In Latin this term translates to “doesn’t follow”. This refers to an argument in which the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premises. In other words, a logical connection is implied where none exists.). I mean seriously, their claim is that if it happens on Earth it must happen on ALL planets. I would brush this off as a simple mistake, but given how much they emphasize it through repetition, I know they actually believe it.

Ok, one more and then it’s time to wrap up Part I. There’s still a bunch to choose from, but I think this one is the best:

Or…you can continue to ignore the facts and say, as the ancients said, that the Earth is unique and singular in the universe, and that we are the center, and the universe rotates around the Earth.

What they’re basically saying is that if you don’t believe in their theory, then you believe in a geocentric universe. This one spans so many logical fallacies I just cannot fathom how it ever made it to the theory. Let’s count them, shall we?  Again, these definitions are taken from the SGU link above.

1. Ad hominem An ad hominem argument is any that attempts to counter anothers claims or conclusions by attacking the person, rather than addressing the argument itself. True believers will often commit this fallacy by countering the arguments of skeptics by stating that skeptics are closed minded. Skeptics, on the other hand, may fall into the trap of dismissing the claims of UFO believers, for example, by stating that people who believe in UFO’s are crazy or stupid.
   
2. False Dichotomy Arbitrarily reducing a set of many possibilities to only two. For example, evolution is not possible, therefore we must have been created (assumes these are the only two possibilities). This fallacy can also be used to oversimplify a continuum of variation to two black and white choices. For example, science and pseudoscience are not two discrete entities, but rather the methods and claims of all those who attempt to explain reality fall along a continuum from one extreme to the other.
3. Reductio ad absurdum In formal logic, the reductio ad absurdum is a legitimate argument. It follows the form that if the premises are assumed to be true it necessarily leads to an absurd (false) conclusion and therefore one or more premises must be false. The term is now often used to refer to the abuse of this style of argument, by stretching the logic in order to force an absurd conclusion. For example a UFO enthusiast once argued that if I am skeptical about the existence of alien visitors, I must also be skeptical of the existence of the Great Wall of China, since I have not personally seen either. This is a false reductio ad absurdum because he is ignoring evidence other than personal eyewitness evidence, and also logical inference. In short, being skeptical of UFO’s does not require rejecting the existence of the Great Wall.
4. Tu quoque Literally, you too. This is an attempt to justify wrong action because someone else also does it. “My evidence may be invalid, but so is yours.”

Well, that’s all the time we have for today.  When I delve back into this for Part II I’ll look at the actual evidence for and against an expanding planet.  While we can pick apart someone’s claims for logical fallacies pretty easily, knowing that their argument is flawed doesn’t mean that their conclusion is false.  It would be enough ground to dismiss the argument until they came up with a better one in most cases, but I’d like to spend a little more time on this so I’ll keep digging anyway.  As it turns out, this expanding world idea is one that has been around for decades, so it has accumulated a lot of arguments for and against it.

So what have we learned today?  Hopefully I’ve helped to make you all a little more skeptical when it comes to claims of the extreme, but I would be quite happy if you all came away just knowing this: just because some guy made a YouTube video of it doesn’t make it true.