Mike Shermer's SciAm Column = Skeptics' Glurge

Great Debates
1

Oh, it had to happen eventually, I guess: Glurge for skeptics, atheists, and other cosmic party poopers. Let’s call it “sklurge.”

Sklurge replaces the dimwitted and sentimental tone of glurge with the bitter, depressing, and hyperextended knowitallism of the kneejerk skeptic. Like glurge, however, it is all tone and dontchaknows–a data-add is completely absent. Indeed, a data-subtract may arise, owing to the urban legends contained therein.

Let’s take a recent Shermer SciAm sklurge piece, Folk Science: Why our intuitions about how the world works are often wrong, as an example.

The nature of incorrect thought is indeed an interesting one, but Mike fails to provide a single provocative example, instead trotting out a few cliches and skeptical truisms. His reasoning and fact management cannot be adequately described by words like “disingenous,” “sloppy,” and “falacious”:

Ludicrous, patently false, worthy of contempt. Before “modern science,” the Mayans were breeding crops, the Romans were building aquaducts, and the Chinese were predicting eclipses. A modern scientific method was not necessary for considerable progress both in the theoretical and applied sides of science.

The flat earth canard!? According to Wikipedia, “The Earth’s circumference was measured around 240 BC by Eratosthenes,” who got very close to the correct figure. I suppose Columbus’s crew were afraid of falling over the edge–right, Mike?

Huh? The belief that God created the world has nothing directly to do with “biology,” folk or otherwise. And I’m not sure which “folk” supposedly believed in an “elan vital.” Hey, you at least have to set up straw men before you can knock them down!

Here we see Mike being so completely lazy–there’s no other word for it–that he doesn’t both at all to pursue the purported topic of his essay. He’s not distinguishing between people being fooled by their senses (e.g., it the nature of objects to come to rest, the seat of emotions is in the heart as it beats harder and faster when strong emotions are experienced, etc.) and people coming to conclusions, in the past or present, with which 21st century skeptics disagree. The belief in the soul may very well be incorrect, but it has nothing to do with a pathology of “folk science.”

This last one is rich, rich I tell you! Mike has figured out economics–libertarianism and skepticism for all!

Ol’ Sherm goes on to say precisely… nothing… of substance in the article:

Again, stupidly phrased. The African Savannah of today is not so different as it was when we became homo sapiens. What he means to say is that we have created a new environment for ourselves–physical, social, and technological–for success in which our brains are not necessarily adequate. This correct observation has nothing to do, however, with a concept of “folk science.”

Maybe I’m being picky, maybe I value accurate and truthful expression. I dunno, but this isn’t right. We did perceive stars and galaxies many millenia ago, and we made what observations about them we could, many of which were correct. The reason why we were impeded in understanding the atom is completely different from why we did not immediately understand the nature of celestial bodies. Further, in either case, theory was just as important as observation: One doesn’t automatically understand what a virus is by looking at one through an SEM.

Yeah, but the point is? We do now understand these things based upon observations and theoretical progress over time.

He has made no valid point about “folk science” blinding us.

Again, that wasn’t “folk science.” A belief in a creative force was the universal belief of the species. The argument from design was not a cause of theistic belief but rather an effect.

Puhlease. The ancients had to call consciousness something, right? So the Romans called it “spiritus,” and they may have had various incorrect notions about the operation of “spiritus,” but that doesn’t mean that their doing their best with what information they had makes them victims of “folk science” any more than our incorrect notions will make us seem victimized 100 years from now.

If Mike’s point is that we have better science today than in yesteryear–no argument! But if Mike is claiming or implying that there was an “era of folk science” that greatly impeded our progress as a species, and from which we have been delivered by skepticism and atheism, then he simply hasn’t made his case. He hasn’t even made a sincere attempt.

A rich observation, this!

Mike ends the article with the typical media skeptic cheapshot:

OK, lemme guess: Those prayed for actually recovered better–the difference just wasn’t “statistically significant.” I’m sure that’s the case, otherwise Sherm would have cackled, “Those prayed for actually did worse. Haw haw haw!”

Not statistically significant, but “case closed”? That’s the only study that’s ever been done, and the only that ever need be done hereafter?

Of course, no matter how many peer-reviewed, perfectly primped studies purport to prove the paranormal, it’s never “case closed.” Noooo, those cases are always open. Open!

I’m sorry, but my woo-woo intuition tells me that even our hardline Doper skeptics are going to find that Sherm’s article fails to make the grade in many ways. In the meanwhile, please e-mail it to 5 friends, and tell them to e-mail it to five friends. Sklurge for all!

2

What’s the debate? That we shoudl abandon the Scietific method and return to folk science? Or was this suppsoed to be in the pit?

I can’t say the article is the most coherent one written, but his point is well taken. The main thing you seem to be missing in the distinction between applied science (what we might call enigneering) and theoretical science. You claim that:

Which is simply not true. A theoretical structure of physics that was capable of making meaningful predictions didn’t get much off the ground until Galileo and Newton. Engineering can solve problems of the day, but theoretical science makes predictions about what we can do in the future.

3

A while back I offered to stay out of your next psi-based thread (this roughly qualifies, I guess). Should I do so? I genuinely would like to take Shermer’s side (his name was enough to draw me into this thread), but I don’t want to you to feel that I’m somehow oppressing your beliefs, though I might disagree with them.

4

I may be missing it, but I can’t take that point from Sherm, as he didn’t present it in his article.

It’s a matter of opinion. Galileo used to measure time with his pulse. Newton was almost all theory and no experiment. Neither of them had the concept, or anything close to it, of what we’d call the “scientific method.” They both added to science, as had people before them and would after them.

It doesn’t cut so clean. There is both theory and practice in engineering, too. Theoretical scientific work was done by all the ancient and medieval philosophers: Lucretius and atomic theory, etc.

5

Take his side, but I’m going to laugh if you think his article a) was well-written b) offered any insightful points.

If I were an atheist, I’d still be embarrassed for him. In fact, I don’t need to argue against any of his specific end-user beliefs. It’s his notion of “folk science” and our modern overcoming of it that is so ludicrous. Plus the bad writing.

6

I haven’t even read his article yet. I just wanted to give you a chance to exclude me since I did once make that offer.

7

Huh. It’s a pretty short article about paradigms and such. Our perception of the universe changed as our instruments improved, letting us detect things beyond the senses evolution provided us. In many cases, the older paradigms hang around in one form or another.

Sure, the ancients had a lot of impressive accomplishments. Arguably, that was modern science in its earliest form, since it relied on procedures that were empirically known for consistent success, and not just the occasional lucky success that a soothsayer might get from examining goat entrails and making predictions. The Romans might have rendered prayers and sacrifices to the gods in hopes their aqueduct projects would succeed, but engineering and math did the actual work.

Shermer doesn’t give nice tidy demarcations for the ancient vs the modern world. You have a valid point that some aspects we’d consider “modern” go back quite a ways, while Shermer’s point is that aspects that should be considered “ancient” are still around today. I don’t know what you were expecting from a 600-word essay. I got the impression from your OP that you were critiquing a much larger work.

8

So, what are you contending here? That nobody ever believed the earth was flat? That it doesn’t LOOK flat, and like the sky rotates around us?

9

Oh, and incidentally, in that study, the people who knew they were being prayed for did fare worse than those who weren’t prayed for, or those who were prayed for but didn’t know about it. But don’t let me interrupt your calm, reasoned discussion of Michael Shermer’s cackling.

10

That is incorrect.

From here.

While it is not the standard we use today, all those points are extremely valid.

Second, the fact that Galileo did not have an accurate method of keeping time does not mean that he did not understand the importance of measuring time in experiments. He used what he had available at the time. It wasn’t even close to perfect but it was good enough for the experiments he was doing.

Slee

11

Yes, incidentally, Sherm misrepresented the study. From the Harvard Gazette:

So, there was, contrary to Sherm’s specific words, a “statistically significant difference.” Prayer made people do worse, and the researchers ended up struggling to find an explanation for that.

My take is this: Intentions do make a difference, as the study showed. Further, it’s clear that someone involved with the experiment had to inform the patients of their status (or not, for 1/3 of the group). It’s quite possible that these people (whether they were atheists or overhopeful theists) could have twisted the intentionality of the prayers to affect the subjects negatively.

I find the “raise in stress level” explanation to be a little just so unless they were really bugging these people about how they were being prayed for.

12

Nicely put. Add some interesting examples, and you’ll have written the article Mike should have written.

And my point, which you seem to be agreeing with, is that there is no need for an ancient/modern demarcation in the first place. Like it or not, religious/irrational belief has existed side by side with scientific/rational inquiry since time immemorial.

Which is not to say that the prayers and rituals did harm. At the very least, they made public the intentions of their society and helped to create cooperation for the task at hand, etc.

No, but he’s struggling to make a point that he never ends up making. It’s awful writing.

I expect good writing and clear thinking from a media skeptic like Shermer who’s given a major pub as a soapbox.

13

Gulp. I agree with Aeschines for the most part. It’s sloppy, patronising and full of half truths. It’s glurge.

14

I’d ask you to explain the relevance of this point, but that would be unfair (as it is impossible for you to produce that which does not exist).

The current world is different from the world in which humans evolved, and as a result intuitions shaped by the former may be misleading in the latter. Whether those differences were caused by natural events, human engineering, or mice upgrading their world-computer is irrelevant.

On the contrary. Let’s look at two of his examples (you know, those things you think he should have added because you didn’t notice that he already had):

This exact argument is raised so incessantly that I’m morally certain that every creationist author has programmed his word processor to cut-and-paste it at a single keystroke.

What’s your explanation for the blanket Biblical, Koranic, etc prohibitions on charging interest, if not a misapplication of a custom that makes sense in the context of helping a friend or relative through a rough patch but not in the context of modern business investment?

15

Sorry Aeschines, but you’re wrong. The distinction between knowledge before the modern scientific method and what we have today is decent enough to draw a telling distinction. You raise counter-examples that are basically just off point.

While it’s true that people were capable of figuring stuff out prior to a scientific method being formally defined and widely accepted, and even many times getting things right, that doesn’t mean that the modern scientific method wasn’t necessary and didn’t radically change anything. It’s nice that someone figured out that the earth was round and even about HOW round (though, of course, they did it by applying something very akin to the scientific method), but the idea didn’t spread or survive or continue to be confirmed so that it was widely understood or appreciated. There was no large and persistent body of checks and counter-checks: just some guys who wrote some books that some other people read, maybe.

And the fact is, Shermer is right, and you basically have to be in pure denial about history to doubt it: all sorts of beliefs with very little support or meaning at all survived and were even the basis for entire societies, all because there was little sense that all testible truth claims should be tested. All the examples he gives of this are perfectly valid. Again, it’s nice that some people figured out that the earth wasn’t flat with a dome. But the reality is that this is what most people believed for a long long time, unimpeded, in part because there wasn’t commonly any sense in which it made sense to anyone to test or question recieved thinking.

That’s all different now. And while that doesn’t prevent us from being wrong, at least most of time we’re at least wrong for the right reasons (i.e. we figured things out as best we could, as opposed to simply taking mostly everything on faith).

Trial and error works as a sort of proto-scientific method. But it’s not good enough, and pure trial and error without a large community of checks and challenges often ends up with all sorts of superstitious connections and elaborately wrong conclusions.

16

As I said, it’s a sloppy article.

There is nothing unscientific about using one’s pulse to measure time. Given the instruments of the time, it was a reasonable thing to do. Galileo challenged the conventional wisdom about motion and falling bodies as no one had before him. His method of taking data and analyzing it mathematically was a revolutionary idea at the time. Perhaps it’s hard to see just how revolutionary that was because we take it for granted that mathematical models help us understand the physical world, but someone had to show us that first. Someone being Galileo.

And Newton was fortunate in that he didn’t have to take a lot of measurements because other people had already done that. His brilliance was in developing a theory that not only explained the existing data, but made new predictions. That’s what science is about. For example, it’s one thing to observe a pattern of lunar inclipses and then being able to predict the next one. It’s another thing entirely to understand why lunar eclipses occur in the first place.

How much of that theoretical work do we use today?

17

Can you think of any substantial difference than our technology and greater body of knowledge? To say “the world has changed” is a misleading way of saying, “Our evolution is slow, our pace of technical innovation is fast, and that mismatch continously causes problems.”

I repeat: The argument from intelligent design was never a cause of theism in ancient peoples, who universally believed in a higher power. It’s been part of Christian apologetics since the Middle Ages, perhaps earlier, but it was not a part of “folk science.”

Who knows, that’s a big sociological question? But do you think Shermer’s concept of “folk economics” gets us any closer to the truth (presumably the truth of libertarianism)?

18

You mean other than the atmosphere, climates and resident plant an animal life?

19

Those are “substantial differences”? The climate of Africa 100,000 years ago on the Savannah, the plants and animals, are substantially different?

20

“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln…”

I don’t see how the shorter version is “misleading”; it’s just less precise. Either one is apropos to Shermer’s (perfectly valid) point that intuition can be misleading about phenomena that were not a common part of human experience until fairly recently.

Yes, and they universally believed that the “higher power” had initially created the world.