Another way to tell pseudoscience from ordinary bad science

Whether it's deserved or not, the general consensus on NASA's revelation of arsenic-based life seems to be largely negative, i.e. that the research was poor or tentative at best, and did not warrant the kind of hoopla the organization made over it; and Felisa Wolfe-Simon has taken a rather remarkable drubbing -- to the point where I've even seen some who condemn the research question whether her treatment has really been fair.

The NASA team didn't always respond in the best possible way, e.g. their rather odd comment that all dialogue had to be conducted via peer-reviewed journals, coming immediately on the heals of a rather splashy press conference they had just held. But one thing they never did was try to sue their critics.

The Burzynski Clinic, and the thug Marc Stephens

Mostly just wanted to do my part to Streisandify the shameless thug Marc Stephens, who claims to represent the Burzynski Clinic (though it's not entirely clear yet that he does) and has taken to such low methods as posting Google Satellite pictures of a 17-year-old blogger's house. The guy is a grade-A asshole, and no amount of daylight is too much for his thuggish tactics.

I also wanted to be clear about exactly what the Burzynski Clinic is doing that is ethically wrong. After all, antineoplaston therapy isn't completely implausible (though what evidence is available seems to go pretty firmly against it), and when there are no known better treatments, isn't it okay to try unproven methods, in the hopes they might pay off?

Not if you charge money for it. Patients typically don't pay to be in a medical trial, for somewhat obvious reasons. Even if antineoplaston therapy still looked promising (it doesn't) it would be unethical to charge patients exorbitant sums of money to receive it -- doubly so if the treatment is already looking dubious from the results of previous trials.

Public perception of journal publication vs. the Scientific Method

[I]f we take the scientific method and the process of peer review seriously, that commits us to occasionally (or even frequently) publishing work that we believe time will eventually prove wrong.
---Tal Yarkoni, writing at [citation needed]

Yarkoni was writing in the context of the recent infamous paper by Daryl Bem published in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which purports to show evidence of ESP. Yarkoni's analysis of the paper is truly awesome, and worth a read if you are at all interested in research methodology (which means: nobody except for actual researchers, and perhaps hopeless pedants like myself).

Yarkoni's conclusion is in line with the impression I was already getting from reading other bloggers' and pundits' comments on the paper: It's a good paper as far as it goes, even though the conclusions are almost certainly wrong. (I differ from Yarkoni in the weight that I give to good ol' Thomas Bayes in rejecting the ESP hypothesis -- I frankly think that is the most important indicator of how we know this paper is wrong, and the rest is just a post mortem to determine what went wrong) Bem has been admirably transparent and thorough in documenting what exactly he did. As I've written elsewhere, that in many ways redeems the paper's publication, in that it provides the opportunity for a teaching moment in experimental design and what exactly can go wrong.

The quote from Yarkoni with which I open this post is indubitably true from a research perspective, but in a broader societal context, it's highly disturbing. No, I'm not criticizing Yarkoni; he's damn right, and that's exactly what is so disturbing about what he points out. The public doesn't see it that way. The popular press really doesn't see it that way. For science journalists and the lay public, a single provocative paper published in a reputable journal (and even then, the public -- and to a certain extent I include myself in this -- is generally ignorant as to which journals are reputable) is as good as gospel.

What can be done about this? Yarkoni is right, that if the only papers that got published were the ones which had a very high probability of being correct in their conclusions, it would entirely sabotage the scientific method. In fact, pretty soon you wouldn't be able to publish any papers according to that criterion, because a big part of how certainty is achieved is via a long line of less certain research which all points to the same conclusion. And in any case, many people -- including myself -- are increasingly of the opinion that publication bias is a tremendous problem, resulting in large amounts of waste, as well as retarding the rate of science's natural self-corrective ability. In that light, the last thing we want is to publish fewer papers.

The most effective solution, I think, would be for science journalists to collectively behave more responsibly. But good luck with that. That's only slightly more likely than thinking the entire public is suddenly going to become more skeptical.

There is some hope -- as demonstrated by the recent evisceration of the NASA-funded paper into arsenic-based life forms, the blogosphere is increasingly flexing its muscles in order to keep that sort of credulous nonsense in check. In the past, the blogosphere couldn't really be effective in that role, because even if a zillion science bloggers pointed out the flaws, they were only reaching a niche market of readers -- but now, enough noise in the blogosphere amounts to a news story in itself, one the mainstream media feels obligated to report on.

There's a potential blueprint here: Mainstream science journalists breathlessly report on the latest novel finding of public interest, as if one half-way decent p-value proves some controversial hypothesis beyond a shadow of a doubt; trained researchers blog about how the news stories are all full of shit and explain why the paper is either wrong or should be taken with a grain of salt; other interested bloggers link to and write about these criticisms, and in typical Interwubzian fashion, generate a lot of drama and heat in a short period of time; and finally, that becomes a story in itself, forcing those same mainstream science journalists to write articles playing down the earlier reports.

It's far from a perfect system -- people will in general still remember the early credulous articles rather than the later more skeptical ones, and those with an agenda (Buy my supplements! Don't vaccinate! Religion makes you live longer!) will cite the peer-reviewed-but-wrong papers for decades as if there was nothing wrong with them and they were never contradicted by later research. But the sheer noise the blogosphere is capable of generating, and in such a short time, I think makes the situation somewhat more promising than it has been in the past.

In any case, go back and read the quote from Yarkoni at the top of this post. He's hit the nail on the head here. This sort of thinking should be taught in grade school, and hammered away all through a person's education. Science is messy, and by it's very nature it will frequently produce wrong results -- in fact it is this very embrace of uncertainty which gives science epistemological dominance over all other attempts to get at the truth. We should neither discount science because of its dynamic and ever-changing character (for that is where its power lies!), nor should we assume that every proper application of the scientific method produces an unquestionable truth.

Lehrer's getting a raw deal, but...

Jonah Lehrer is getting a lot of flak from the skeptic community over an article in the New Yorker he wrote about the "decline effect", whereby some statistically significant correlations tend to "wear off" over time as more and more attempts are made to replicate them.

It's an interesting problem, and for the most part he gave a thoughtful examination of the issues and their causes (the primary cause, IMO, being simple publication bias). However, he was harshly criticized -- and rightly so -- for the final paragraph of the original article in which he seems to flirt with a destructive form of post-modernism, a rejection of the very nature of objective fact. The worry is that he has given more fodder for science deniers of all stripes to ignore the overwhelming evidence in favor of evolution, climate change, etc. and against most forms of alternative medicine, psychic ability, etc.

I felt his first follow-up (sorry, I can't find the link at the moment) clarified his position sufficiently, and I sort of think the continued criticism he is receiving is overblown. I do want to highlight one rhetorical question from his most recent follow-up, however, because I think this question is very answerable. The context here is that he is discussing how the theory in evolutionary biology of "fluctuating asymmetry" initially got several false positives in numerous studies, before the preponderance of evidence turned against it.

This raises the obvious problem: If false results can get replicated, then how do we demarcate science from pseudoscience?

In principle, there is a very simple answer to this question, though of course applying it is often quite messy in practice: Bayes' theorem.

I'm a bit too busy at work right now to give even a brief treatment of the Bayesian mode of thought, but the Wikipedia article does a nice job, so read that if you are unfamiliar. As it applies to Lehrer's present question, we can (usually) demarcate science from pseudoscience by taking a guess at the prior probability.

Fluctuating asymmetry falls in the "science" camp, despite the fact that it ultimately turned out to be false, and even despite the fact that it was prematurely elevated to the status of "true" based on an (in retrospect) insufficient number of positive results, because it was a priori plausible. Homeopathy, on the contrary, falls in the "psuedoscience" camp, despite the fact that some trials of homeopathy have achieved positive results, because it is completely implausible.

As I said, this can get messy in practice. How would one classify early trials of acupuncture, when plausibility could be argued either way? And how much undue resistance was there to the theory of continental drift (now solidified in the more complete theory of plate tectonics) because most scientists at the time found the idea of moving continents to be a priori implausible?

But we already knew science is messy, and I think that overall Lehrer's original article and follow-ups have helped illuminate one of those messy aspects to a lay audience. I must reiterate that I agree with those who found the concluding paragraph of the original article to be severely misguided -- and I think in this most recent reply, he also missed an opportunity for a teaching moment by not digging deeper into his self-posed question. The question about demarcation does have an answer, one that is relatively simple in principle, if not in practice.

I feel bad for Chris Maloney, but he's still a quack

Oh dear. Maine naturopath Chris Maloney is at it again, this time sending a cease and desist letter to PZ Myers (who, it should be noted, hasn't said anything about Maloney in months).

I actually feel a little sorry for the guy. There is a grain of truth to the sentence in the letter that reads, "It is one thing to make statements against a particular profession -- it is another thing entirely to attack a particular practitioner, injuring his reputation by calling him a quack." Of course, the fact that they are two different things does not always make the latter bad... some people need to have their reputations injured, lest they retain an ability to con, fleece, or otherwise injure other people. In this case, Maloney is bringing it on himself by thinking he can silence criticism on the Internet. It's entirely foolish -- but I'm also struck by a certain naivety about it. I do kinda feel bad for the quack. If only he'd learn to keep his mouth shut...

"Shorty Awards Voting Fraud"

My representative to the Illuminati-Mason-Pharma-Vaccine (IMPV) Overlords, Orac, has ordered me to write a post with the title "Short Awards Voting Fraud", as you can read about here. I don't have much of a comment to make beyond linking to Orac's post, but I do want to highlight this from Mike Adams:

This contest also goes to show you that vaccine pushers will do almost anything to shut down the opposition and try to silence anyone who has the intelligence to question the so-called "science" behind vaccines. Since they can't win in an honest contest, they are forced to resort to cheating and lying in an attempt to rig the outcome. The Shorty Awards allowed them to do precisely that. You could accurately say, in essence, that the Shorty Awards has conspired with a group of liars and cheats to rig the outcome of their awards competition. That is a factual statement that will stand up in a court of law.

The reason I want to point this out is because I am trying to picture, if Mike Adams succeeded in winning the Shorty Award for Health, Orac threatening a lawsuit over it. I'm trying really really hard to picture it -- and it ain't happening. I could see Orac blasting the Shorty Awards, maybe even unfairly (Orac was one of the folks who, eh, maybe "overreacted" a bit over the admittedly dubious bestowing of the Richard Dawkins Award to anti-religion-but-also-anti-vaccine advocate Bill Maher...), but a lawsuit? The idea is just silly. Nobody on this side of the aisle would ever threaten a lawsuit because they lost a silly little Interwubz award. That's just... crazy?

Truth in Advertising

I just came across this awesome new herbal tea. I swear, I had a cold, and then I drank some of this tea, and then a couple of days later I didn't have a cold anymore! It was a miracle!

Clearly I am not an expert at Photoshop

In fairness, I don't have a huge problem with Traditional Medicinals. They do make pretty tasty herbal teas, and herbal teas are, well, tasty. Outrageous health claims luckily don't make the tea taste bad. I just wish Traditional Medicinals could be a little more like Celestial Seasonings... you know, CS talks about the flavor and rambles on about their "blendmaster" and stuff, and only occasional hints at pharmacological activity (and really, is it controversial that maté is a stimulant and valerian root is a mild depressant? I'm thinking the few claims Celestial Seasonings makes are probably reasonable). TM on the other hand is all about the woo.

They do make a pretty impressive ginger tea, though, you gotta give them that...

Why are otherwise sensible skeptics susceptible to AGW denialism?

First it was Penn Jillette, now it's James Randi. Why do otherwise sensible skeptics seem to be prone to buying into the claims of anthropogenic global warming denialists?

Okay, a sample size of two doesn't necessarily mean anything, but I think there is something to this. In my opinion, the reasons are twofold:

First, unlike most of the "hot topics" in the skeptical community, AGW is goddamn hard to understand. When it comes to creationism, anti-vaccination, alternative medicine, religious and paranormal beliefs, even as a layman I can pretty handily explain why it makes no sense. (On a side note, some of the anti-vaccination propaganda is somewhat harder to debunk, which may help to account for folks like Bill Maher) With AGW, on the other hand, pretty much the best I can do is point out that the vast majority of people with legitimate credentials say it's real, so I have to trust them on it. Of course, it helps that when AGW denialists show the graphs that are supposed to show that warming doesn't track with CO2, I think they show a pretty strong correlation given how noisy climatology data is... but I really don't know very much about the topic, and to be able to guess whether the predictive models are accurate or not, well that takes a lot of knowledge I don't have.

Second, and I think this is important because Randi alluded to this in his statement, environmentalism is a pseudo-religious endeavor for many of its adherents. For those who view it this way, often their goals end up being laudable anyway, but the reasoning is sometimes sloppy or just outright wrong.

"We taught a lion to eat tofu!"

I watched Wheel of Time the other night, which contains several interviews with the Dalai Lama (incidentally, I think the Lama is a bit of a douche... he pays lip service to a lot of good causes, I suppose, but anybody who refuses to deny that they are a god is pretty much an asshole automatically). At one point, Hertzog asks him what his message would be to the world. Most everything he said was positive, but when he talked about protecting the environment, he pretty much summed up exactly what I am talking about: He said the objective was to "keep the environment pure." I had to roll my eyes at that one... And indeed, it seems to me that for a lot of people who support environmentalism, it's not about sustainability or ethics, it's about a metaphysical idea of purity.

A "supersense" of purity is the driving force behind a lot of religious intolerance, it seems. It also feeds a substantial amount of the appeal of alternative medicine: Don't "pollute" your body with those "unnatural" pharmaceuticals. Flush those toxins which are "contaminating" your health. Etcetera.

So should we really be surprised that some skeptics, as soon as they get a whiff of something being associated with a purity campaign, immediately put their bullshit detectors into overdrive -- to the point that it sometimes scores a false positive?

You could even argue that this may have fed into Jillette's ludicrous denial of the dangers of secondhand smoke (which he has since at least partially retracted). When the subject of smoking came up on the denialism blog, I was shocked at how much vitriol some of the commenters had for smokers. It was as if, rather than smoking just being a public health hazard, they thought it was a horrible sin, and that anyone infected with the sin must be an evil despicable person.

I also think a supernatural sense of "purity" feeds into some of the the stricter outdoor smoking regulations... There is no doubt that prolonged exposure to secondhand smoke is hazardous, but it is weird to me that someone who is bothered being ten feet away from a lit cigarette has no qualms about waiting minutes at a crosswalk at a busy intersection. I'm no scientist, but I have trouble believing the former is as harmful than the latter. (Try this experiment sometime: Ride a bike down a fairly busy road where traffic mostly flows at a pretty decent clip, but where there are a number of widely-spaced traffic lights. Smell the air in between intersections, and at the intersections. Mmmmm, that intoxicating scent of exhaust mixed with burning rubber and melting brake pads -- gotta love it!)

So the moral is: As skeptics, we must be careful not to let the smell of zealotry become a primary indicator of trueness or falseness. Though they may be garner the support of superstitious fanatics using fallacious reasoning, AGW and the risks of secondhand smoke are both quite real.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

I've had an interesting story to share for some time about just how easy it is to fall into the post hoc fallacy, but I haven't posted it yet because it's also very sad and it helped to have some distance.

Back in July, my favorite cat and my first real pet as an adult suddenly got sick and died under very mysterious circumstances. It seems most likely she ate some kind of poison, but we never identified what it was -- she was an indoor/outdoor cat, so who knows what she could have gotten into? That morning, she appeared totally healthy. I clearly remember refilling the food dish that morning and seeing her chowing away, i.e. completely normal appetite. And then, that evening, her kidneys completely shut down, and even before we got to the vet I knew from her symptoms she was going to die.

She was eight years old, a little past midway point for a cat. I'm mostly over it now, but the one thing that still gets me is when I think to myself, "She could have had another eight years... all those wonderful times with Stash, multiplied by two." I tend to get kind of angry when I think that, so I try not to...

Anyway! Enough with the sad part of the story. So, it turns out that shortly before that we had decided we should put our cats on flea medication. We ordered it online, and it arrived a few days before her death. But despite my wife's helpful reminders, I kept forgetting to give it to the cats. I finally treated our remaining cat a couple weeks after Stash died.

Imagine if I had remembered to apply the medication when it first arrived..! I would be 100% convinced it was the flea medication: I put a chemical on my cat that she's never been exposed to before, and then 48 hours later she drops dead from apparent poisoning. I would have been devastated. I never would have forgiven myself.

And yet, it would all have been an illusion. Pure post hoc. Stash died for some completely different reason. I shudder when I think of the kind of unnecessary guilt and anguish I would have felt, if the chips had fallen just a tiny bit differently...

The obligatory Maher post

Welp, the atheist/skeptic blog-o-sphere is all on fire again about Bill Maher as the recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award, so I suppose I might as well cast my two cents into the conflagration.

In brief: I'm ambivalent towards Maher getting the award; I applaud those who hope to put the screws to Maher at the AAI Conference, though I doubt they'll really get much of an opportunity; and while I would have respected it if Dawkins had remained silent on the matter (he hasn't), I now think he is obliged to make some kind of clarifying statement distancing himself from Maher's quackademic views.

First, regarding Maher getting the award... I know the reaction to the movie Religulous in atheist circles was mixed, but I loved it. In fact, it was the closing monologue that inspired me to become more vocal about my (lack of) belief and what I feel about the effects of religion on the modern world. For those who haven't seen it, the closing monologue is a denouncement of religion's crimes, together with a call to arms to speak out in the name of rationality, super-imposed over a montage of video of some of religion's more disturbing consequences. My friend Nicole transcribed the monologue when she first rented the movie, and I have included it at the bottom of this post. My favorite line was "Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking." I had never heard that sentiment put so succinctly or clearly before. I know others who were similarly inspired.

So I have no trouble seeing why AAI would want to honor Maher for his contribution. He made an anti-religion movie that is both powerful and mainstream. In a sense, this was as important a contribution as The God Delusion or god is Not Great. I know many of our more pedantic atheist friends hated the movie because, admittedly, it was not particularly deep in its style of argumentation, and was often unfair to the theists interviewed. But really, it was a movie, and an op-ed one at that. And as such, I thought it was highly effective.

I also think that if I were on the AAI committee tasked with choosing the recipient of the award, I would probably have argued against Maher. His alt-med views are not only an embarrassment, but potentially quite dangerous. While I am sympathetic to those who point out that AAI is an atheist group rather than a skeptic group, I think that if the word "atheist" is to meaning anything we must have some shared values. One of those values is a disdain for magical thinking.

Now, the evidence seems to indicate that all of us engage in a certain amount of magical thinking, so it is not a problem if some atheist activists privately hold crazy viewpoints. It would not bother me if the RDA recipient was privately anti-vaccine, but did not agitate for it. However, when someone becomes a mouthpiece for magical thinking, that crosses a line. This doesn't mean everything Maher has done is worthless, of course, nor does it necessarily mean that we can't honor those positive contributions he has made... but if the atheist community is to stand for anything of value, it is imperative that we make known our collective disdain for his alt-med propaganda.

Which leads directly to the next two points: That the atheist community should attempt to put the screws to Maher in a very public way, and that Richard Dawkins should make his disapproval of Maher's health-related views explicit.

As PZ pointed out, Maher's appearance at the AAI Conference is restricted to the award ceremony itself, and I've never heard of a Q&A at an awards ceremony. The grand plan hatched by Orac is not likely to play out effectively -- although I still think we can hope that some will be able to catch Maher privately and challenge him to explain/justify his anti-vaccine and other quack opinions (PZ has indicated a potential willingness to do so, for example) and publicize the results.

Of course, in some way, the blog-o-sphere fury over the award has already made the message fairly clear, and though some will see this as a tempest in a teapot, I am actually somewhat glad to see the amount of healthy debate surrounding this. At this point, I don't think anyone can fairly say (as at least one person did at Orac's blog) that the atheist community is about nothing other than self-congratulatory smugness in our shared disbelief. The sizable fraction of the online atheist community which has spoken out against Maher is itself a testament to the extent to which we value rationality and question authority. To quote another commenter at Orac's blog, "Nothing is sacred," and I think this debate has proven that.

The last point I want to make is that I think now Richard Dawkins needs to say something, even if it's something as simple as, "I think my documentary Enemies of Reason has made clear my position on anti-vaccine paranoia, alternative medicine, and general health-related quackery. Though we may not approve of all of Bill Maher's expressed opinions, nevertheless I join AAI in recognizing his grand achievement in bringing atheism to the mainstream via his movie Religulous." He doesn't need to slam Maher or say he is a bad or irrational person, he just needs to explicitly say "Maher is wrong on vaccines."

I'm going to quote one more comment from Orac's blog, and that will be it, I promise. stinger says:

[M]aybe he doesn't see the point of making a public fuss about an unworthy nominee. Courtesy would indicate that any public opinion he expresses be quietly supportive of the choice, and Dr. Dawkins is an extremely courteous person.

This initially gave me some pause, and I do see some merit in this position. However, I must respectfully disagree, and I'm sorry it comes down to something so minor, but the reason is because of one brief comment that Dawkins made on PZ's blog. I quote it in full here:

The Richard Dawkins Award (RDA) has no connection with the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (RDFRS). The RDA was instituted by the Atheist Alliance International (AAI) several years before RDFRS was founded, or even thought of. This year, the committee of AAI took the decision to give the RDA to Bill Maher. They asked me, as an individual, if I approved, and I was delighted to do so because I find him, and especially Religulous, very funny. I know nothing of any stance he may have taken on medical questions.

This year, RDFRS agreed to jointly sponsor the annual conference of AAI. The decision to do so had nothing to do with the AAI's decision to give the RDA to Bill Maher.

(emphasis mine)

Here, Dawkins has not only stated his approval of Maher as the recipient, but has proclaimed ignorance of Maher's quack views on medicine. This is unfortunate, because I think at this point it is not fair for Dawkins to plead ignorance. It unfortunately comes across as a bit of a "Lalalalalala, I can't hear you!" ploy. It is highly disappointing for Dawkins to endorse the decision to give Maher the award while completely ignoring the substantive component of the controversy.

I am afraid that this whole thing may give succor to those who falsely insist that "New Atheism" is more about fundamentalism and dogma than it is about rationality. And that's why I feel Dawkins needs to say something.


And now, as promised, the closing monologue of Religulous:

[Standing atop Megiddo, Israel]: It seems peaceful but this is the very spot where a lot of Christians believe life on earth will end. The irony of religion is that because of its power to divert man to destructive courses, the world actually could come to an end. The plain fact is, religion must die for mankind to live. The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge in having key decisions made by religious people, by irrationalists, by those who would steer the ship of state not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken.

George Bush prayed a lot about Iraq but he didn’t learn a lot about it. Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It’s nothing to brag about, and those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are intellectual slave-holders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.

Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don’t have all the answers to think that they do. Most people would think it’s wonderful when someone says, “I’m willing, Lord. I’ll do whatever you want me to do.” Except that since there are no gods actually talking to us, that void is filled in by people with their own corruptions and limitations and agendas, and anyone who tells you they know, they just know what happens when you die, I promise you, you don’t. How can I be so sure? Because I don’t know, and you do not possess mental powers that I do not. The only appropriate attitude for man to have about the big questions is not the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion, but doubt. Doubt is humble and that’s what man needs to be considering, that human history is just a litany of getting shit dead wrong.

This is why rational people, anti-religionists, must end their timidity and come out of the closet and assert themselves. And those who consider themselves only moderately religious really need to look in the mirror and realize that the solace and comfort that religion brings you actually comes at a terrible price. If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and sheer ignorance as religion is, you’d resign in protest. To do otherwise is to be an enabler, a mafia wife for the true devils of extremism that draw their legitimacy from the billions of their fellow travelers.

If the world does come to an end here, or wherever, or if it limps into the future, decimated by the effects of a religion-inspired nuclear terrorism, let’s remember what the real problem was: that we learned how to precipitate mass death before we got past the neurological disorder of wishing for it. That’s it. Grow up, or die.

Thanks, Nicole!

"Toxins" and the Fallacy of Limited Depth

I came across a fallacy classification that I had never heard of today: The Fallacy of Limited Depth. The fallacy is when an argument or theory fails to identify an underlying cause, and instead appeals to membership in a certain category.

When talking to woomeisters, specifically those who subscribe to one of the various "toxin" ideas, I have struggled to articulate why it is not good enough to simply say that "substance A contains theoretically dangerous substance B, therefore substance A is bad." My usual response is that "the dose makes the poison," but this is unsatisfying to many -- particular when we are talking about anti-vaxers, because of course the usual response is that babies' metabolisms are different and therefore it is difficult to say what dosage could be damaging or cause developmental issues.

I think "the dose makes the poison" is a partial answer, but the other part of the answer is that they have committed the fallacy of limited depth. To assert, for example, that there is formaldehyde in vaccines, and then move on as if this was an argument in itself, is to commit this fallacy, because no mechanism has been provided by which such a small amount of formaldehyde could be harmful. It is simply a categorical association, i.e. formaldehyde is a chemical, it's used in embalming, therefore things that contain formaldehyde are bad.

Or another would be the "too many, too soon" hypothesis. There is a shallow appeal to the idea that a large number of vaccines in a short period of time could somehow be harmful, but without a mechanism, the hypothesis is fallacious. It simply appeals to the categorical similarity with other things where it may be possible to have "too much, too soon," e.g. like solid foods.

So I'll have to remember this one....

The "Gish Gallop"

When I was writing about the vaccine meeting, there was a term I wanted to use but it escaped me at the time. I remember it now. It is the "Gish Gallop", named after a Creationist douchebag named Duane Gish. The term was coined by NCSE director Eugenie Scott to describe Gish's propensity to rapidly switch from topic to topic, while never rebutting any criticisms of his ideas.

Duane Gish, Creationist Douchebag

To put it more generally, the "Gish Gallop" is the phenomenon where a denialist -- whether it be a Creationist, an anti-vaxer, a homeopath, a 9/11 truther, a Holocaust denier, or whatever -- can throw out fallacious arguments, or even make up facts out of whole cloth, faster than any rational person could possibly rebut.

At the vaccine meeting, there were a number of claims made which I was almost certain were either completely false, or else a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of some other fact. Some of them I was able to rebut in real-time using my enV2, which has a totally shitty web browser, so if I can rebut your claim using that thing that's gotta tell you something... but for the majority of these claims, I just had to maintain a skeptical posture and move on.

I suppose I could have just made shit up too, but ultimately that undermines the whole point. I am not an activist, I merely can't stand when people make statements that are false or misleading. I suppose a pro-vaccine activist might lie to promote vaccines, but that is not my agenda. Can I lie in order to insist on the truth? No. It is inherently self-defeating.

Relativism, Absolutism, Religion, and Alternative Medicine

I used to think that absolutism was the hallmark of religious extremists and general cranks and nutjobs of all stripes. I also thought that it was important to recognize just how much of our perception of reality is relative. While certainly some things are completely outside of subjective perception -- e.g. if you get hit by a car, it doesn't really matter what you believe happened, you are still injured or killed -- I used to believe a lot more things were subjective than the average person believed.

While certainly many religions, and all fundamentalist religions, demand a moral absolutism, I am beginning to change my mind. I am now beginning to suspect that, excluding morality for the moment, the average person is probably too much of a relativist. And I am certain that religion and all sorts of woo rely far more on relativist interpretations of reality than on absolutism.


Now don't get me wrong, the fundamentalists and the cranks and the denialists all have their axioms and their dogma. But I believe they justify their adherence to dogma based not so much on an absolutist interpretation of reality, but on the belief that since all perceptions are subjective, "facts" become relative and therefore it is not important whether their beliefs adhere to the facts.

What inspired me to write this post was this quote in a recent NY Times article from Terry Mortenson, a lecturer and researcher for the idiot Creationist propaganda group Answers in Genesis and a spokesperson for the Creation Museum:

Everyone has presuppositions what they will consider, what questions they will ask. The very first two rooms of our museum talk about this issue of starting points and assumptions. We will very strongly contest an evolutionist position that they are letting facts speak for themselves.

Not to single out the religious, I was told something very similar from one of the anti-vax faithful at the vaccine meeting I posted about a couple of weeks ago. When I asserted that I was interested in the truth about vaccines rather than being partial to any particular approach, she responded that "the truth is different for everyone."

Okay, so... No. I certainly do not dispute that "starting points and assumptions" will have a strong influence over what conclusions a person comes to, and I readily acknowledge that rational people can come to different valid conclusions based on the same facts. However, none of this in any way erodes the idea of objective truth, nor does it give people a free pass to believe whatever they want.

Some conclusions contradict the facts, and those conclusions must be false, regardless of one's "starting points and assumptions". Even when multiple conclusions fit the available facts, we can be reasonably certain that either one or zero of those conclusions are actually true.

(Side note: I am leaving aside Einstein's general relativity, as well as quantum uncertainty, as I do not think those concepts are even remotely relevant to evolution or vaccines or pretty much anything the religious and the alties preach. Even then, there is still an objective reality. For instance, while two observers, one moving very close to the speed of light relative to the other, may measure time and space differently, their measurements are still deterministic based on observable facts, i.e. the one traveling at the speed of light can't just come up with a completely made-up measurement based on his personal "starting points and assumptions". Similarly, even when we examine the apparent randomness at the quantum level, reality still plays by an immutable set of rules. The fact that we can't precisely know a particle's mass and velocity at the same time, for example, does not mean that you can measure the mass of a proton and then assert that its velocity died for our sins.)

When I responded to the anti-vaxer, my reply was (roughly): "No, sorry, not to be an absolutist, but some things are true and some things aren't." I sort of wish I had not used the word "true", because that has an implication beyond what I meant. I think I would have preferred the words "factual" or "accurate". Certainly, perceptions are relative, and when we get into areas that are heavily influenced by perception, I think that "truth" is still a meaningful concept even as facts go flying out the door. For instance, I think the love I feel for my beautiful infant son is "true" in a sense that I have trouble articulating but which I think my readers will understand -- but it would be somewhat meaningless to talk about this feeling being "factual" or "accurate". It is a purely relative experience, and there is great value in this.

On the other hand, my son's height and weight, whether he is sick or not, the times and amounts he goes to the bathroom... these are all objective facts, and while my "starting points and assumptions" might influence my personal perception of these facts, that does not at all erode the existence of an objective reality of those facts. I might think my son is taller than he is because I love him, but if so I would be wrong, and to try to say that my guess at his height is somehow just as valid as the doctor's tape measure because I have different "starting points and assumptions" than him would be absurd.

And yet, this absurdity is fundamental to religion, alternative medicine, and all sorts of woo and crankery. It is a sneaky mental game. They state quite correctly that their different conclusions are the result of different "starting points and assumptions", but then use this to imply that their conclusions are somehow valid. This is a logical fallacy.

It is similar to the old "you can't be an atheist without faith" argument that goes something like this: You can't prove there is a God (true). You can't prove there is no God (also true). Therefore, the odds of there being a God are 50/50 (absolutely not!). I have faith that the coin comes up heads and there is a God (true), and you have faith that the coin comes up tails and there is no God (no, actually). Therefore, you are just as religious as me!, says the Christian.

Uncertainty does not imply equal probability. Similarly, variability in the conclusions people reach from certain facts does not imply equal validity. Some conclusions are more valid than others, and ultimately once enough facts are known then one conclusion must be the correct one.

So does this make me an absolutist of sorts? I'm not sure. I must admit, even when it comes to morality, I am not particularly a relativist. Certainly cultures disagree on what is moral. But I think the vast majority of those disagreements fall into one of two categories:

The first category encompasses things which I don't think are really morality at all. A benign example would be the Hindu prohibition against eating cows. We can argue all day about the morality of eating meat, but I think one would have difficulty making a decent argument that it is moral and/or ethical to eat a goat but not to eat a cow. (All other things being equal, that is... I am assuming neither animal came from a factory farm) Even though one culture finds this immoral and another finds it moral, I don't think it really qualifies as a moral judgment at all. It is merely culture. Maybe it is more similar to "etiquette" than it is to morality, albeit a strongly proscribed piece of etiquette.

The other category is when one of the cultures is just flat out wrong. And yes, I really did say that. Fuck your cultural relativism, when people are put to death in Iran just for being homosexual, when girls in Africa have their clitoris lopped off in some misguided attempt at piety, when boys in the FLDS church are dumped on the streets of Salt Lake to fend for themselves, these things are wrong, and I will not apologize for saying so.

So I guess the only things left where I am a relativist are things that are obviously personal (ranging from the trivial, like taste in music, to the profound, like familial love) and things that are arbitrary customs (like a prohibition against a certain food).

Does this make me an absolutist? Intolerant? Closed-minded? I sure hope not..

The Vaccine Meeting

Well well well. So last night, my wife and I went to the vaccine meeting I mention in another post. Here is the blurb for the meeting (with identifying info redacted because I don't want to pick on these people too much..):

Dear Friends,
**** Health Care will be hosting a discussion on Vaccines. The talk will be led by local Chiropractor **** *****, who specializes in Pregnancy and Pediatrics. We know it can be overwhelming with all the anti-vaccine and pro-vaccine information out there. We will discuss vaccine safety, your options, state laws and more. We hope you can join us!
When: Tuesday June 16th at 6:30pm

Now, the mention of being "overwhelm[ed]" by both "pro-" and "anti-" information almost made me think this was going to be, if not balanced, at least somewhat of an equal time style discussion, a la Bob Sears position on vaccines. Of course, the fact that it was being led by a Chiropractor did not bode well... and then I found out that the woman at whose house it was being held makes herbal "potions", so uh... yeah, I pretty much knew this was going to be altie central. Deep into the belly of the beast...

My wife wanted to go because a few moms from her playgroup were going to be there, and two of them were still very much undecided when it comes to vaccines. She hoped I could bring some balance to the discussion, and maybe help them make a better choice. Also, my wife thought she might learn some more info she hadn't heard before. You never know, right?

I really, really, really didn't want to go. I knew my voice wasn't wanted there. I knew they would bring up some things I knew to be false, but couldn't refute -- denialists are bounded only by their limitless imagination, so no matter how well prepared you are, they can always just make something up, and then you have to go off and spend time debunking it. Also, I have a very hard time containing my temper when people say things that are flat-out wrong...

But my wife didn't want to be there all by herself, and she had already promised the other moms from her playgroup that she would go, so off we went...

We arrived with our three-month-old son, just as they were starting. A car parked outside bore a bumper sticker that said "knowvaccines.org" (bah-dump!). A book laid out on a table had a picture of a baby with dozens of needles stuck in him. This did not bode well...

They had just begun going around in a circle and having everyone introduce themselves and why they were there. It didn't take long before it became clear that this was going to be a circle-jerk of epic proportions. Sure, scattered here and there were a few new parents who said they had not made up their minds and that they were just trying to get as much information as possible. But the vast majority clearly already had a strong opinion. There was the guy from England who claimed that he knew a kid growing up who had gotten autism from a vaccine. There was the mother of three whose first two kids had gotten fully vaccinated, and the third had had a reaction to the DTaP vaccine and she basically freaked out and decided all vaccines were evil -- and many other similar stories.

Then there was the couple hosting the meeting, who, get this, thought there was no contradiction between the following two statements: "We don't want to try to convince anyone of anything, we want everyone to make up their own minds with all of the information" and "My kids will get vaccinated over my dead body!" Ummm.... Sorry, but when you make inflammatory statements like the latter, you are trying to convince people. Consider:

Roommate #1: "Hey, can I have some of that pizza?"

Roommate #2: "Dude, that pizza has been sitting out on the counter for a week. There's no way I would eat that shit, that's disgusting."

Roommate #1: "So you're saying I shouldn't eat it?"

Roommate #2: "Oh, not at all! I think you should consider all the facts and make up your own mind whether or not to eat the pizza. We all have a choice!"

Yeah, um.... no.

My wife also got in a good subtle dig at the hosts when they told about how important it was to tell schools that you have a religious objection if you want to get a vaccine exemption. She asked, "So, do you actually have a religious belief against vaccines?" The woman had an answer, but you know, it's good to point out that for the vast majority of folks this religious exemption thing is a lie.

The final story, one that was both heartbreaking and infurating, was by an older woman whose daughter had died of cancer... and she somehow came to blame this on vaccination (if I recall, she was influenced by the writings of paleontologist-turned-vaccine-denialist "Dr." Viera Scheibner). I didn't even know how to react to that -- cancer caused by vaccines?? That's an entirely new one on me. Anyway, this woman ended up participating quite heavily, and it saddens me to say that her pain and her convictions are causing her to basically just make stuff up... More about that later. One story that stuck with me was when she told about doctors telling her they could not discuss the issue with her because her "passion" was getting in the way, which she characterized thusly: "They weren't really saying I was passionate, they were just upset because I had too much information." I wrote that down, and you'll see why soon...

I tipped my hand early by pointing out that the VAERS database includes all adverse events occurring shortly after vaccination, rather than just ones that have been shown to have a causal effect. That made me unpopular pretty quickly, of course, and soon enough I was the center of attention. D'oh...

From there on out, I played the role of correcting inaccuracies ranging from the mundane-but-clearly-wrong (the woman whose daughter had cancer claimed that J. Anthony Morris had been the head of the FDA for several years, when actually he was the chief of vaccines only -- and I suspect they were quote-mining him, although I am having trouble finding good debunking info) to the outright insane -- like the claim that vaccines haven't been responsible for the decline in infectious disease, that it really is just poor sanitation.

This last point leads to one point on which I was unfortunately utterly unprepared: They trotted out this chart, which the chiropractor running the meeting claimed as proof that measles had been mostly cured by the time the vaccine came about. I knew this could not be right, but she insisted it was from the CDC, and numerous other people nodded and said they had seen the chart. Stupid me, I should have asked to see the chart up close, because it shows mortalities from measles, etc., not cases. Well, yeah, better healthcare improved the survivability of measles. However, actually cases of measles declined by 99% after the vaccine was introduced. Stupid me, though, I was unprepared for this bit of trickery, and had to just let it go.

There was a lot of discussion about relative risks, the benefits of vaccines, etc. At one point I said that if people really were concerned about vaccine side-effects, they should "Get vaxed for their grandkids' sake", because if these diseases become extinct in the wild, nobody has to get vaccinated anymore. Hooo boy, I got daggers when I said that one. Wow.

Let's see, what else... oh, the chiropractor got her papers mixed up at one point and said, "I can't find the list of vaccine ingredients". Well! I had just printed out the CDC's list before coming to the meeting (you know, the accurate one), so I was able to trot right up and give it to her. "Oh, this won't work," she said, "because it doesn't list what all these things are" and why they are so terrible. Facepalm! I told her I could tell everyone what each ingredient was, but she managed to find her own list of lies before I got a chance.

First thing she said was that there was anti-freeze in vaccines. What. The. Fuck. As I mentioned over at Orac's blog, I was not prepared for this, because I thought the anti-vax folks had abandoned this canard. I don't recall the name of the chemical the chiropractor said was anti-freeze (it was not one of the usual suspects.. I think it might have been beta-propiolactone?) and I didn't have time to write it down either, unfortunately. I tried e-mailing the chiropractor this morning, and she replied with a bouncing reply-to address to say to call her office. It's on my agenda for later... I suspect she doesn't want any of this in writing...

She also played the formaldehyde gambit, but I parried this by getting one of the crunchy folks there to admit that we had probably breathed more formaldehyde from the outgassing of the carpet of the room we were in than anything in a vaccine.

The lady whose daughter "got cancer from vaccines" told a story about how the individual vaccine doses do not have thimerosal on the ingredient list, but that the large box they come in does, and therefore doctors are lying. I couldn't respond to this one either, but I suspect based on the overall veracity of her information that the poor woman might have just simply made this one up. She also said the Jonas Salk claimed later in life that if he knew all of the damage that would have been done by his polio vaccine, he never would have created it. I thought I remembered hearing this myth once before, so I tried to look it up on my phone... but couldn't find anything. I think she just made up out of whole cloth! If someone has an idea what she was talking about, please let me know in the comments section.

I didn't even get a chance to debunk the thimerosal-autism link, because then the cancer-daugher-lady was on to Andrew Wakefield. Yes, really. She fawned excessively about how "good-looking" and "honest" he was, and his "irresistible British accent", before painting him like a martyr for the cause. When I brought up that he is being investigated for professional misconduct, her response was that they haven't "yet" succeeded in revoking his license. Yeah, great defense...

I was unfortunately unable to pursue all of this to the degree I wanted, because I was eventually asked to be quiet so that people could hear the chiropractor's presentation, since after all, that's what they were there for. This was particularly ironic because the lady whose daughter had cancer had just finished telling a story about how she went to a conference on vaccines and how they eventually started ignoring her questions because she was anti-vax -- and how this showed they really didn't want to hear both sides. Har har har. It was at this point I said, "Okay fine, but don't confuse my being passionate with having too much information." Hey, what can I say, I'm an asshole. At least I'm an asshole for the good side?

It's also worth pointing out that the lady who blamed her daughter's cancer on vaccines talked just as much as I did, and she wasn't the presenter either, and nobody asked her to stop... it's because they only want to hear one side. Which brings me to the one time I lost my cool, and that's when the chiropractor claimed that I had been fed a lot of one-sided information. How dare she. Heh, I don't remember exactly what I said, but I thought it was something like, "That's not true, I've been to Age of Autism, Generation Rescue, all of these places, and I am well aware of both sides of the argument. That is an ad hominem attack. If you're going to say that about me, I'm going to say that about you, that you only have one-sided information." At least, that's what I remember saying... my wife said it basically came across as "I know you are but what am I."

heh, oops... Well, what can I say? I was furious. She had asked me to let her go ahead with her presentation, which is fine, but her parting shot was that I only had one-sided information. What a cheap, dirty, underhanded tactic.

Anyway, even though I am ranting a lot here, I mostly kept my cool, which was good. I do honestly believe that a reason a lot of people go running into the hands of anti-vax is because they hear a little bit of propaganda, get scared, ask their doctor about it, and get an unfriendly and/or aggressive response that just turns them off. The word "bully" is thrown around a lot when anti-vaxers discuss the experience with their pediatricians. While the hardcore anti-vaxers are already lost, the same is not true of many frightened new parents who have just gotten a few tidbits of misinformation. It's important that their concerns are addressed point-for-point, with patience -- even if their concerns are fucking retarded bullshit. heh, oops, I'm letting my temper show through again.

One of the couples from my wife's playgroup left when I was silenced. The husband wanted to hear what I have to say, and I am supposed to look him up on Facebook today. I think the wife was a little mad at me, heh, but oh well, she is cool and I think she is level-headed enough to sort through this stuff.

We had to leave shortly thereafter because my son was getting really fussy, and anyway I couldn't take all that much more. I probably could have done more good by staying, but man, it is stressful being in a room of twenty-against-one! I remember seeing Hitchens do a two-hour debate on this panel that was him and four theologians, and thinking at the time how exhausting that must be. Yep, pretty much.

One of the other husbands caught me on the way out and asked me a bunch of questions. So I guess it wasn't a total loss. If I just planted some seeds of skepticism in one or two people, it was probably worth it. I hope.

I'm sure there's all kinds of crap I am forgetting... There was one point I distinctly remember when the chriopractor was talking, and I was jotting down single-word notes on points I wanted to rebut... and she was spouting false or misleading information faster than I could write! I left with about a page and a half of notes on crap I hadn't even gotten a chance to address... but what can you do? There is a potentially infinite amount of fallacious arguments, and only a finite amount of time for rebuttal. Especially when you are trying to rebut inside an echo chamber.

So anyway, it was, uh... interesting. Would I do it again? Maybe. But only if I had a bottle of fine bourbon waiting for me when I got home...

Update: Apparently my wife's friend who told her about this meeting has already had like eight people e-mail her to complain about my "negative energy". The contention is that it wasn't the content of what I was saying, but that I was interrupting the presenter. This doesn't hold water, though, because the lady whose daughter had cancer interjected at least as much as I did, and nobody had a problem with that...

And anyway, even if I was being rude, I don't really care... If you say something that is provably false to a room full of concerned parents, I'm interrupting you and correcting you, end of story.

Into the Lion's Den...

Tonight my wife would like me to go to a talk about vaccines given by a local chiropractor, and organized by, eh, well, practitioners of "alternative medicine", so you can guess that it will probably not be particularly pro-vaccine.

There is a close association between the nontheist community and the skeptic community in general, and let me tell you, any skeptical person should be incensed at the anti-vaccination movement.  They are spreading dangerous -- sometimes fatal -- misinformation, sometimes even outright lies.  Many worried parents are being taken in by this, and it's causing a drop in vaccination rates that, let me be perfectly explicit here, will result in dead babies.  I hope I'm not being overly melodramatic; this is just the reality of the situation.

Anyway, she wants me to come so I can correct any misinformation that surfaces.  I'm certainly no expert, I'm just a guy with a degree from the University of Google who is a little bit better at telling the bullshit from the non-bullshit than your average Oprah-watcher.  I also have trouble watching my temper when I talk about the anti-vax movement, because it's ultimately a selfish and inhumane position.  So we'll see...  It may be disastrous!