# Are skeptics ever right in popular entertainment? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [February 7, 2013, 8:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-skeptics-ever-right-in-popular-entertainment/649630 "2013-02-07T20:26:30Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![GreenElf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/9de053/32.png) [@GreenElf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreenElf)\ **Post date:** [February 9, 2013, 6:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-skeptics-ever-right-in-popular-entertainment/649630/61 "2013-02-09T18:23:32Z")
MASH’s Captain Pierce tended to be skeptical, especially regarding the permanence of any ceasefire. ---
**Author:** ![Justin\_Bailey](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/justin_bailey/32/8792_2.png) [@Justin\_Bailey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Justin_Bailey)\ **Post date:** [February 9, 2013, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-skeptics-ever-right-in-popular-entertainment/649630/62 "2013-02-09T19:19:36Z")
> [@JohnT](#): > > **Contact** the novel was very anti-woo. > > **Contact** the movie was very pro-woo. Did we watch the same movie? Yes, Jodie Foster testifies before Congress that the world needs to believe her “just because,” but we’re shown that she really did meet with aliens and there’s real world evidence in the form of the tape that recorded eight hours of static even though she was only in the sphere for a few minutes. It’s not “woo” if the aliens are shown to be real. > [@drastic\_quench](#): > > Too big of a bone was thrown towards woo, when Marge gets the last word, stating that Lisa was squeezing her hand pretty hard when the angel appeared. Meh. I thought it was great as it was one of the few times that Lisa was shown as the eight-year-old girl she really is. It’s not woo, it’s that she’s _eight_. ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [February 9, 2013, 9:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-skeptics-ever-right-in-popular-entertainment/649630/63 "2013-02-09T21:04:15Z")
> [@Justin\_Bailey](#): > > Did we watch the same movie? Yes, Jodie Foster testifies before Congress that the world needs to believe her “just because,” but we’re shown that she really did meet with aliens and there’s real world evidence in the form of the tape that recorded eight hours of static even though she was only in the sphere for a few minutes. > > It’s not “woo” if the aliens are shown to be real. Compared to the book where she stuck to her story, never said “take me on faith”, and didn’t need to depend upon a “8 hours of static” foolishness (because the she finally found evidence of God’s existence via calculating pi in base-11 math), yes, the movie was totally on the side of woo. Sagan was very upset at this change but couldn’t fight it as he was dying of cancer. ---
**Author:** ![Renifer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/71c47a/32.png) [@Renifer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Renifer)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2013, 2:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-skeptics-ever-right-in-popular-entertainment/649630/64 "2013-02-10T14:55:08Z")
The Crucible. A different kettle of anti-woo as the supernatural in this case is not revered at all, only feared and repulsed. ---
**Author:** ![Yumblie](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/76d3ee/32.png) [@Yumblie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yumblie)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2013, 4:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-skeptics-ever-right-in-popular-entertainment/649630/65 "2013-02-10T16:13:11Z")
> [@Acsenray](#): > > The most bizarre manifestation I have seen of this is in Harry Potter. Hermione – a student in a school of magic, which, among other things, is populated by ghosts-- is skeptical of divination/fortune-telling and in the end, she’s proved wrong. I actually thought Hermione’s debunking of Trelawny’s predictions were a surprisingly good bit of skeptical writing. Hermione isn’t the mindless “skeptic” often seen in various media who disbelieves _everything_. She is able to accept the idea of magic and ghosts because she’s personally seen them. But right away, she can tell Trelawny’s predictions are useless because they’re so vague. There’s even a point later in the book where one of Trelawny’s supposed predictions from earlier in the year apparently comes true, but Hermione correctly points out that the prediction was so vague that of course something that fits the prediction would eventually happen. Later on I think it’s shown, either implicitly or explicitly, that Trelawny really is a fraud and the only reason she’s kept at Hogwarts is for her own safety; because of the one correct prophesy she made, she was valuable to the enemy. ---
**Author:** ![Knorf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/58956e/32.png) [@Knorf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Knorf)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2013, 5:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-skeptics-ever-right-in-popular-entertainment/649630/66 "2013-02-10T17:30:42Z")
In _Monk_, Monk thwarts woo on a number of occasions. ---
**Author:** ![Spice\_Weasel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spice_weasel/32/5435_2.png) [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-skeptics-ever-right-in-popular-entertainment/649630/67 "2013-02-11T17:51:21Z")
> [@cher3](#): > > There are a few Sherlock Holmes stories, most notably “The Hound of the Baskervilles” where Holmes doesn’t accept a supernatural explanation for something and is proved right. The Sherlock (TV series) take on this was interesting. In it, Holmes really genuinely struggles with his own skepticism because what he has experienced is so fantastic. It’s almost like a crisis of faith for him. In the end, though, skepticism wins out. ---
**Author:** ![Sister\_Vigilante](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9de0a6/32.png) [@Sister\_Vigilante](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sister_Vigilante)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 8:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-skeptics-ever-right-in-popular-entertainment/649630/68 "2013-02-11T20:04:14Z")
I came in to say Psych. Not only does Shawn fool everyone (except his partner and father, and a detective at the department) into thinking he’s psychic; but he’s a total skeptic himself. His partner Gus totally believes in cursed mummies and Shawn thinks the whole idea is ridiculous from the start. He did start out saying he heard spirits but they stopped that early on. And oddly enough, I liked Medium. ---
**Author:** ![SenorBeef](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senorbeef/32/2220_2.png) [@SenorBeef](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SenorBeef)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 11:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-skeptics-ever-right-in-popular-entertainment/649630/69 "2013-02-15T11:11:20Z")
> [@Balance](#): > > An actual skeptic, upon seeing regular, consistent evidence that the abilities are real, would not continue to disbelieve. Skeptics aren’t skeptical out of some odd faith in the nonexistence of something–they’re skeptical because they have seen no reliable evidence that that something exists. After watching someone achieve (presumably on a weekly basis) feats that the skeptic has no ready explanation for, but which could plausible be explained by the abilities the psychic claims, the skeptic should be calling for laboratory study of the abilities. If they can confirm the abilities in the lab, they may be able to figure out how they work–the first step to duplicating the results as a regular investigative tool, rather than relying on an incredibly rare genetic quirk (or whatever). At the very least, they should come around to an “I don’t know how it works, but it works” stance fairly quickly. > > Treating it the way you describe establishes a false equivalence between the skeptics and the woo believers: that both operate on faith. In essence, it attributes a magical worldview to the skeptics. This is actually a really good point, and another way in which skepticism is mocked and “disproven” in popular entertainment. Essentially, skeptics are defined as people who doubt no matter what, even when the thing they’re doubting is proven real. So you create a fictional universe in which there’s magic, and you perform magic in front of them, and then they just say I’m a scientist/skeptic, I don’t believe in magic! Which gives the message that skeptics are simply believers in some sort of faith of doubting or non-belief, rather than people who form their world view based on what evidence suggests is real. The message that people carry away from this, at least at a subconcious level, is “see, even when The Truth (whether it be ghosts or psychics or whatever woo) is right in front of them, they don’t believe it! They just don’t want to believe no matter what!” which feeds into their real life rationalization about why skeptics think their preferred woo is bullshit. It also makes for an incredibly stupid trope. “Oh, sure, the last 100 times you had a psychic prediction I rolled my eyes and doubted you, but you were right every time. But now you’re making another prediction, so I’m gonna roll my eyes and doubt you again. Because that’s what skeptics do.” ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 12:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-skeptics-ever-right-in-popular-entertainment/649630/70 "2013-02-15T12:20:36Z")
That’s why I think the characters on \* Buffy the Vampire Slayer\* and similar shows were essentially skeptics. Sure, they believed in magic and monsters, but that’s because they lived in a world with magic and monsters. They still asked questions, suggested theories and did research, and if what they tried didn’t work, they tried something else. They never took anything on faith, except, perhaps, for their faith in each other. ---
**Author:** ![shijinn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/cc9497/32.png) [@shijinn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/shijinn)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 12:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-skeptics-ever-right-in-popular-entertainment/649630/71 "2013-02-15T12:49:51Z")
> [@Lamia](#): > > … If Daphne had actually been psychic, she might have picked up on Niles’s crush on her rather than remaining oblivious for years. [Devil’s Advocate] it doesn’t work that way, the psychic business is supposed to be imprecise. on the other hand, a good fake psychic would excel at cold reading and would not be oblivious. [/DA] ---
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 12:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-skeptics-ever-right-in-popular-entertainment/649630/72 "2013-02-15T12:51:13Z")
You do get the ocassional skeptic being right… when it’s a “maverick” scientist who is skeptical of the “conventional mainstream” explanation/prediction. Essentially the popular media is about a world that does NOT go the way the regular world goes (because that would be mostly boring: who wants to see Dr. House handling routine maladies and hours of insurance paperwork day after day, or the CSI people taking a month to get back lab results labeled: “inconclusive”). So of course woo and “lone wolf” theories get a humongous pass. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 1:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-skeptics-ever-right-in-popular-entertainment/649630/73 "2013-02-15T13:12:41Z")
> [@shijinn](#): > > [Devil’s Advocate] > it doesn’t work that way, the psychic business is supposed to be imprecise. on the other hand, a good fake psychic would excel at cold reading and would not be oblivious. > [/DA] My understanding is that “cold reading” is a parlor trick in which you get the subject to reveal things while thinking that you are the one “reading” them. Why would cold reading reveal this to Daphne? ---
**Author:** ![shijinn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/cc9497/32.png) [@shijinn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/shijinn)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 1:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-skeptics-ever-right-in-popular-entertainment/649630/74 "2013-02-15T13:43:58Z")
oh? i thought cold reading was more like how it was portrayed on the _Mentalist_, where you could learn stuff about a person without them explicitly spelling it out to you. ---
**Author:** ![jayjay](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jayjay/32/6765_2.png) [@jayjay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jayjay)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-skeptics-ever-right-in-popular-entertainment/649630/75 "2013-02-15T14:06:01Z")
> [@shijinn](#): > > oh? i thought cold reading was more like how it was portrayed on the _Mentalist_, where you could learn stuff about a person without them explicitly spelling it out to you. No, cold reading is stuff like John Edward used to do (and probably still does somewhere)…pick an audience member and start things very vaguely (“I feel a man…his name begins with M…no, A…” and meanwhile the self-deluding audience member is running through a catalog of deceased relatives and acquaintances and what their names were until he/she comes up with one. Then the “psychic” goes on the same way. Cold reading depends on the mark being willing to fully participate in his or her own deception. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 4:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-skeptics-ever-right-in-popular-entertainment/649630/76 "2013-02-15T16:19:53Z")
Lots of examples 1.) **Daughter of the Mind** – IIRC, the very first _ABC Movie of the Week_. It was based on Paul Gallico’s _The Hand of Mary Constable_, and is about apparently real manifestations of a nuke scientist’s dead daughter. Revealed, by the hero-skeptic, as the latter-day spiritualist-like workings of evil Soviet spies. 2.) The original Outer Limits episode _The Borderland_ has the scientist hero exposing mediums in the beginning (who later return to seek revenge), and contrasts their pseudoscience with his real science. 3.) the 1960s incarnation of [iDragnet\* had a skeptical Joe FRiday bringing pseudoscience con men to justice quite a bit. 4.) Jack Webb also did a series, _Project UFO_, which is sorta like his police dramas, but featured dramatizations of UFO cases. To his credit, in the pilot episode he included one case that was debunked by the skeptical investigators (although I believe the other two featured cases weren’t). I didn’t watch the series, so I don’t know how the other episodes fared. ---
**Author:** ![Condescending\_Robot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a183cd/32.png) [@Condescending\_Robot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Condescending_Robot)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2013, 12:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-skeptics-ever-right-in-popular-entertainment/649630/77 "2013-02-18T00:58:56Z")
> [@Leaper](#): > > I wonder about the implied attitude in this thread that seems to say, to me, “there’s enough woo out there; entertainment properties should not encourage it by even hinting that it’s real.” Seems like that would make for rather dull entertainment to me. There’s a difference between a scifi-type show where part of the premise is just that the setting is a world where ghosts or aliens or whatnot exist, and a show set in the ostensibly real world that says anyone who lives in real Earth and doubts the existence of ghosts/aliens/gods is a smallminded idiot. ---
**Author:** ![DocCathode](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/doccathode/32/18773_2.png) [@DocCathode](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DocCathode)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2013, 1:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-skeptics-ever-right-in-popular-entertainment/649630/78 "2013-02-18T01:06:32Z")
I was half-asleep and Gidget came on. A stereotypical Gypsy woman steals Gidget’s surfboard. When Gidget finds the woman and takes back her board, the Gypsy curses her. Her friends believe in the curse. Her father does not. Gidget doesn’t believe in the curse but bad things keep happening. Finally, dad says he’s given in and gives her a charm he got from a colleague. He tells Gidget that the charm is Hotep Nefti and he can beat any curse. Gidget relies on the charm and good things happen. She announces the curse is broken. Then, Dad reveals that Hotep Nefti is really just an old tie pin and has no magic power- just like the Gypsy’s curse. ---
**Author:** ![Achren](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/898d66/32.png) [@Achren](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Achren)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2013, 2:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-skeptics-ever-right-in-popular-entertainment/649630/79 "2013-02-18T02:54:53Z")
> [@Lamia](#): > > Does _Psych_ count? People who doubt Shawn’s ability to solve a crime are proven wrong again and again, but the whole premise of the show is that he does it using his highly trained powers of observation and does not possess any psychic powers at all. > [@Sister\_Vigilante](#): > > I came in to say Psych. Not only does Shawn fool everyone (except his partner and father, and a detective at the department) into thinking he’s psychic; but he’s a total skeptic himself. His partner Gus totally believes in cursed mummies and Shawn thinks the whole idea is ridiculous from the start. > > He did start out saying he heard spirits but they stopped that early on. And there are times both Shawn and Gus are excited about something being ALIENS or GHOSTS or MUMMIES, but there’s always a real-world explanation. IIRC, in one of the commentaries, Steve Franks says that there will never be a supernatural explanation for events in the show. ---
**Author:** ![Lamia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Lamia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamia)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2013, 4:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-skeptics-ever-right-in-popular-entertainment/649630/80 "2013-02-18T04:17:46Z")
There was an episode of _Glee_ where Finn, a good-natured but dumb jock, saw the face of Jesus in his grilled cheese sandwich and believed it had the power to grant his wishes. He wished that his team would win the big game, that he’d get to second base with his girlfriend, and that he’d be restored to his former position as quarterback. All of these wishes came true, but he had a crisis of faith after the third one. The current quarterback was seriously injured during a game, so Finn had to replace him. Finn feared this was his fault for wishing to be quarterback and went to the guidance counselor to talk about it. She told him that while she believed in God and that he cared about Finn, she didn’t think God interfered in football games or teenage petting sessions. She had Finn go over the events leading up to his three “miracles” and helped him see that these were ordinary things that happened for totally explicable reasons. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-skeptics-ever-right-in-popular-entertainment/649630.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-skeptics-ever-right-in-popular-entertainment/649630.md?page=5)