 Welcome to the first official event at TAMP. I hope you're in the right place. Science and Skepticism 101, your introduction to what's all going on here at the conference. This is going to be most helpful to people who are unfamiliar with the movement, but also if you're a veteran in the movement, I hope that you can learn something from this. So a little personal introduction before we start. Many of you probably don't know who I am, so I'll give you a little bit of background. I am a JRF research fellow, so I work with the JRF. I help them with educational modules, blog postings, digital publishing, that kind of thing. I have a bachelor's degree in environmental engineering, and I'm currently a graduate student doing a communications program with communication about science, health, sustainability, and the environment. So I want to connect with you guys a little bit. How I got started in skepticism, I don't know about you guys, but I started listening to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Anyone listen to that podcast? All right, a lot of SGU fans. So I was taking a cross-country road trip, and I was listening to an SGU episode, and all of a sudden I realized I kind of had this skeptical epiphany, hey, I'm just like these people. I could do this sort of thing. This seems like something I could do. And two years later, here I am. So how many first-time tamers are there? Oh, perfect, we marketed this very accurately. So it's actually my first tam too, so I hope you'll forgive heavy reliance on notes and things like that, but I would love to meet each and every one of you guys. I'll be here the whole weekend. If I go too fast, if there's more questions you want to ask or resources you want to know about, I'd be happy to provide you with that at any time during the weekend. So let's get started. This workshop is mainly going to address the following questions. Very broad, very broad questions. What is science? What questions does science address, and more importantly, what questions does science not address? What is the nature of science philosophically and other distinctions we can make? What is pseudoscience? What are the philosophical distinctions between science and pseudoscience? Where do we draw the line? And we can go through some examples of that, and hopefully we're going to get to some demonstrations of pseudoscience as well that you all participate with me in. What is skepticism? Why do we need skepticism? Why is it so important? Why would we put on a huge conference like this just about skepticism? Well, I hope to show you why we do indeed need it. And finally, how do we practice scientific skepticism? So how do we find good information on the Internet in our daily lives? And I hope to provide you at the very end with some resources, books, podcasts, Twitter feeds, these kind of things, just practical ways to get really into the skeptical movement. So what is science? Well, I like Carl Sagan's quote about this. Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking. It's a way of skeptically interrogating the universe. If we're not able to ask skeptical questions, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs. I think this really gets the heart of what skepticism is and why I think we need it and why the JRF and TAM exists in the first place. So again, what is science? Well, to put it very simply, it's the most successful tool in human history, bar none. It's all around you. Science is all around you. Almost every single modern convenience that you take for granted is a product of one field of inquiry or another. Many other forms of knowing have been popular throughout the ages, unscientific ways of knowing, but none have really the explanatory power and the veracity of science, and I hope to show you the distinction between those types of thought. And as Neil deGrasse Tyson likes to say, the good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it. Of course, this is dependent on the philosophical distinctions. Are we really being objective? Things like that, we'll get to it. So what kinds of questions does science address? What kinds of questions can we address as rational, logical, scientific people? Well, science looks for natural observations for observed phenomena. This isn't because science refuses to accept the supernatural. A lot of times people will say, well, skeptics just kind of blot everything out. If it's supernatural or sounds supernatural, then it must be bogus, right? Well, in theory, maybe not in practice all the time, but in theory, science does not refuse to accept the non-physical or the immaterial. Why we do it now is because there's no really good evidence to suggest that that's a good explanation for things. If we look at the weight of evidence here, claims of supernatural powers, for example, confirmed by experiment, refuted by experiment, it's kind of a one-sided deal. And this is from the comic XKCD, which people enjoy. So opposed to kind of egocentric ideas like everything happens for a reason, that reason being me and my benefit, science says that everything has a reason for happening. And that's a very important distinction, meaning that the universe, as we consider it, is knowable. It's something that we can test. It's something that follows rules that we can discover through the process of science. So science does not really concern itself with unobservable and untestable questions. They might be interesting. Take, for example, the question, how many birds are currently in flight over the United States? It's practically an untestable question. Even if all the scientists work on it in our country, probably wouldn't get it quite right. It's an untestable question. It could be interesting, but for science it's rather uninteresting for forming new knowledge. And these are the kind of questions that we have to start separating out. Is it testable? Is it observable? Is it something that we can actually speak to? So why is science so important? Well, rather than going through a whole list of reasons why every single scientific field makes your life better, maybe not every field, but I'm only going to talk about just one. Let's think about just medical science. You probably wouldn't live past 40 or your children past the age of one or maybe your partner out of childbirth if it wasn't for medical science. Vaccines, surgery, pharmaceuticals, transplantation technology, this has spared us from some of the most debilitating afflictions there are in nature. To say that medicine and science by association has made your life more worth living is definitely an understatement. It might fly under the radar sometimes, but when we notice it, it's very, very integral to everything we do. So, kind of part of the first question, are the questions of science not answered? Well, I think the most famous example of this, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould advanced the idea of non-overlapping magisteria or NOMA. This means that science, for example, couldn't answer religious questions using one example because they're in different spheres of inquiry and they don't really Venn diagram anywhere. It's because they're asking either untestable questions or philosophically different questions. Theological questions shouldn't be the realm of science or so NOMA would say. Some religious apologists kind of make this claim when they say something like, okay, Mr. Scientist, what does justice weigh? Right, and I think most scientists would probably want to say something, but you can see how these distinctions become really fuzzy. Like, are you asking a question that I could really answer with science? Do these things really not overlap? Do I have to say I cannot apply my science and skepticism to everything? However, when they do get in the same sphere, these are times when they do genuinely conflict. So, for example, Professor Richard Dawkins likes to think that a lot of times religious claims tread into the boundaries of biology. I happen to agree with him. So, for example, if you're saying that all the organisms on earth have remained unchanged since the dawn of time, this is an inherently religious question. Oh, sorry, scientific question that we can test. So, in these instances, things do conflict, but if it's not conflicting, if it's asking different questions, science really can't say much on the topic. So, the difference between science and common sense. So, many times people who argue against the overall usefulness of science will say that science is just kind of an extension of our common sense knowledge about the world. I've heard in my program, for example, that science is just rediscovering things that common sense discovered a thousand years ago. So, why do we need such a rigorous thing? Well, I hope to show you why we need such a rigorous thing. I like this quote, common sense is a poor master. Its only criterion is that new ideas look like old ones. Now, why would this be the case? Well, psychologically, we tend to attend to information that fits our preconceived notions about the world, our beliefs, our values, our worldviews, and it's much easier for us to accept ideas that fit with our old beliefs, but that's just one part of it. So, why is science better than pseudoscience? Well, it uses theory. So, theories construct the overall enterprise of science. A theory is an abstraction that applies to a wide range of observations and makes explanations about other phenomena in that same class. So, for example, the theory of evolution applies to a wide range of phenomena, the diversity of life, embryonic development in some cases, and explains the observations of those phenomena with that theory, all of which is, of course, based upon evidence that we find. Gravity, too, gravity is also a theory that is explaining a wide range of observations that we see, namely bodies with mass interacting with each other. So, the distinction between using theory and just using common sense should be well common sense. Common sense has no structure to it. It's explicitly subjective, meaning that it just applies to you and your beliefs and preconceptions, and it's subject to all a manner of cognitive biases and flaws, which we will hopefully get to. With common sense, there is no need for testing, replication verification, there's no past or checks for you to fail, and there's no peers reviewing. This is why we need to use theory. Common sense also doesn't use any controls. So, when trying to explain phenomena, science rigorously excludes possible extraneous sources of influence when we're testing something. Common sense has no such control. Take, for example, the person who thinks that the rate of crime increases during a full moon. This might be a common sense idea because, oh, it's a full moon out, you see something on the news, there you go. But unless you're controlling for all the other statistics, say, you control and you look at each other night and look at the rates of crime, you wouldn't see that the rate is static and does not increase in any significant way during a full moon. This is why we need to control for things, because assuming a connection is never important as actually proving a connection, proving a connection. Science also performs testing and verification. So, unlike common sense or intuition, if you want to call it, science systematically and empirically, meaning with evidence, tests its theories and hypotheses against the world. This is important when we know, which we'll get to a little bit later, that psychological studies show that we selectively attend to some information and exclude the rest of that information. So, if unchecked, most people would intuitively or common sensically select ideas, beliefs or facts with what fits within what they already know and dismiss the rest or ignore the rest or downplay the rest. So, the idea that the sun goes around the earth, I mean, it looks like it makes sense. It looks like it makes common sense when we just look at it. Humans feel like we're at the center of the universe. We seem pretty special, so why not just think that way? Common sense, right? Science is free from such constraints, from such egocentrism. Common sense also does not test correlation versus causation. So, science systematically pursues real relationships backed up by the evidence. Common sense does not. We see possible correlations everywhere because of our pattern-seeking brains, but that doesn't mean much if we can actually prove it with the data. It seems right is not a good explanation for anything. And we'll get to correlation and causation a little bit later. Lastly, science gives the appropriate way to metaphysical explanations. So, like I said before, questions and science does not answer. Science rules out untestable metaphysical claims where common sense does not. If it cannot be observed at least tangentially in some way, science really cannot say much about it and then therefore excluded. It's not, it wouldn't be uncommon for you to hear, and I've heard it before. You wake up in the morning and you go to your dining room table and you find that all your silverware has been moved one inch to the right. It's not uncommon for someone to hear, well, my grandfather just died. It was probably his spirit wanting to get ahold of me, wanting to contact me. Sure, why not? But if we want to explain this scientifically, then literally, it is literally more likely that a natural explanation explained what you saw. So it is literally more likely that the mafia came down from New York into your house and moved everything to the right for no reason and then left silently without you knowing about it. That is more likely than the metaphysical explanation where a floating bunch of protoplasm came down and thought about you and then moved something to hopefully get a message across to you. Because we haven't really found, based on the evidence, we haven't really found any reason to suspect that metaphysical explanations are the correct ones, it's just simply more likely that the natural ones are the correct ones until we find evidence saying otherwise. So, of course, the biggest problem is that common sense is often wrong. It's wrong all the time. Let's take an example of children eating sugar. It seems like common sense that if you give children a lot of sugar, it makes them more hyperactive. However, if you look at the medical studies, the systematic reviews published in medical journals, there is no connection. That might be surprising to some of you. But let's think about it for a second. You have a hyperchild, they eat sugar sometimes, and they're still hyperactive. Maybe you're just focusing on when you give them sugar? I don't know. But again, if we really test these things, opposed to our common sense notions about the world, we can find out a lot more than we could just on our own. So I want to take a quick note and talk about correlation and versus causation because through all the other workshops and for the rest of TAM, and when you go on in skeptics in the world, you'll hear a lot about studies, correlation between X and Y. This was found with this with a statistical significance. Let's talk about that a little bit. What are we talking about? So I have a little pet peeve here. Correlation does imply causation. It does not prove causation. It does imply causation because correlation is one of the things that we need to prove causation, but it's only one. So it does imply that there might be a causation there. It does not prove that there is causation there. I want you to burn that into your brains. So how do we actually prove causation then? Well, we need three things. First, we need a true correlation. So if we have X and Y, it needs to be true that X and Y are positively negatively or inversely related to the popular, sorry, to the proper statistical significance. There has to be actually something there. Second, we need to establish a time order. If we want to relate X and Y, X, if X is going to cause Y in our minds, X has to precede Y. It cannot equally be true that Y causes X if we want to see that X causes Y. One has to come before the other. If it's flipped, it's not the assumption that we want to make. Lastly, we have to control for all the confounding variables. These are the lurking explanations that we don't think of when we're studying something that could be mixing up what we're actually thinking is a true causation. So I have an example here. So on this chart, you have a cause and effect over here and then down here are the confounding other factors. This is just one way that confounding variables can interact causing both of these things but they can interact in a host of different ways as well. So for example, let's say that reading science blogs, the cause, just blogs about science, is positively correlated to scientific literacy. So the more you read science blogs, the more likely you are to have a higher degree of scientific literacy. Sure, this seems like it could be true. Seems like there might be a correlation there. Seems like it possibly could be common sense. But what if we look at other factors? What about educational level? Sorry, all the way down here. Educational level. Could it also be true that having a higher education could make you more likely to read science blogs? Could it also be true that having a higher educational level could increase your scientific literacy? These are the things we have to rule out. In this case, educational level could be causing both of these meaning that this explanation, this positive correlation here is just a phantom. These things are not related. It just looks like they are because another factor we haven't controlled for is causing both of them. So these are all the things that we have to rule out. So to move on a little bit, let's get to the nature and the philosophy of what science is. So like I said, science is one of the most, if not the most successful tool we've ever made for discovering the universe. Why is that? Why does it work so well? Well, first of all, it's very, very, very competitive. Science is competitive enough within institutions and among scientists themselves to drive science to self-regulate, and that's the really important part. Science checks itself against reality to make sure that it's continuously for the most part true. If you do not, as a scientist, if you do not make sure that your findings are correct, someone else will, and they will make their career off of showing that you made a mistake. This is always in the back of somebody's mind. Not only that, competition for grants, for funding money, all of these things keep science competitive enough to self-regulate, to not make errors, to not have high rates of fraud, and so on. There's peer review. If you don't know what this is already, this is a very important thing to know about, you'll hear about this in the next workshop, I'm sure, Dr. Google, is that science has peer review. So what this means is after a paper is submitted to a journal to be published, a scientific journal to be published, it's sent out to maybe a dozen other experts in the field, peers in the field, sometimes less. What those peers do is they look at the paper, they suggest revisions, they send it back to the author with those revisions, and they speak to the journal about whether or not that paper deserves to be in the journal. This is one of the most important parts of science, because if it does not pass peer review, if other experts do not think that this could be true, even if it's controversial, it does not pass. Science has a very, very high bar, and that's important. So let me give you an idea of how high that bar is. For the more respected journals like Nature or Science, excuse me, like Science or Nature, this process is intensely critical, like less than 5% of papers that are submitted to an ever get published critical. Very, very, very low rates. I'm sure all of these papers are probably good papers if they wanna be published in Science or Nature. However, less than 5% get it. Very, very high bars we're talking about. Science needs to be repeatable, and this is important. If another scientist in your field cannot follow your procedure and get similar results, then your results are suspect. Why is that? Well, research papers, if you've ever read one, had the unfortunate time of reading a research paper. They are worded in exactly the way that another researcher could look at it and follow the procedures to the T, all the methods, all the statistics, and get the same results. That's why they're written that way. That's why they sound so obtuse and uptight sometimes. It's so you can follow the exact same things and get the same results, because we want repeatable results. Unrepeatable results are not worth very much, and it's suspicious. If it's just a one-off, it's a very suspicious thing. It might be interesting. It might prove as a jumping off point for further study, but the really established things in science are things that can be repeated over and over and over again by different scientists in different time periods. Which brings me to inner subjectivity. So as humans, we can't really escape our many biases and preconceptions. But what science does is it takes scientists from different backgrounds, from different cultures who have different beliefs, who are from different time periods, who are from different parts of the world. And if those scientists find the same thing, it is more likely to be true that that thing is objective and not caused by them just being from a different place or a different time or a different country or something like that. So if I can get a scientist from 1900s Iran, if Iran was around, forget that area. And the scientist, you know, 2012 finding a same thing, we could be, we have a better idea that it's not those other factors that are causing this result and that's something objective about nature. Falsification, lastly. So the philosopher of science, Karl Popper, advances notion of falsification. So a claim that is not subject to disproof does not say very much in science. That is to say, a theory should be able to be disproven by some kind of observation. If some evidence, some conceivable evidence cannot prove a theory wrong, it becomes more of a dogma than it is in science. So for example, the theory of evolution can be falsified rather quickly if we started finding, say, dog fossils along with dinosaur fossils in the same geologic strata, if we ruled out that there wasn't a volcano that shifted stuff. If it really was true, this would put the theory of evolution on alert. This would be a problem. However, we've never found any such thing and trust me, it's not from lack of trying. Almost 200 years of trying to be disproven, yet it stands the test of time. So always keep in mind that with falsification and the ability to say that we were wrong about something and correct it and move on is not a weakness, it's a strength of science. And that's why it's important. So just a little bit on the philosophy of science. I'm gonna call the main philosophy of science logical empiricism. There's also positivism, other things. I'm just gonna use this term. So the first logical empiricists back in the day were critical of theology and metaphysics and they used science and they thought that the universe was knowable and it could be observed based on the laws of nature and things like that. A lot of them endorsed ideas of materialism, meaning that there is just physical matter in the universe, nothing non-physical, nothing immaterial. And they stressed empiricism, meaning that there's one objective reality to be known and that it can be discovered with the methods of logic and rationality in science. So they used inference as deduction and so do we to this day. So for example of this, the sun rises and sets. It doesn't really. But it rises and sets every day for the entirety of human existence. Let's say 200,000 years, depending on your definition of homo sapiens. If we can make that observation every single day for 200,000 years, I have a high degree of confidence to say that it will do the same thing tomorrow. That's inference as deduction. So I'm taking a bunch of observations and making a guess about what's gonna happen. Induction, I didn't type that correctly. Thank you and that's why I like presenting to skeptics. That's fantastic. So but the point of this is is that this is the best we can do. We make observations about the world and we make the best possible educated guess about how nature operates, which brings us to the next point. Can we really prove anything in science? So unlike more pure fields like mathematics, which have proves, science must settle for the most likely answer to everything, to anything, any question. This means that any fact in science is always open to our vision from new evidence and new advancements in theory. However, when we talk about scientific facts, most of these are so well-established that it would literally take a mountain of evidence to overturn them. They're so well-established. So scientific facts are facts in this way so we can establish temporary agreement between that fact and reality. So as far as we know, given all of the evidence, this reflects what reality really does, what nature really does. And that's the best we can do in science. We're never 100% proving anything. It is always open to new evidence and new theory. And that's the power of skepticism as well. We're always open to new evidence and new theory, hopefully. Science is fluid and that's a strength. So contrast this with other forms of knowledge that do not make room for new evidence and new theory. So as we skeptics like to say, you might be entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts. If you look at maybe what the Creationist Museum might say, dirt plus magic equals man, it's a scientific fact, we have two different definitions of what is a fact here. You're not entitled to your own facts, you have to base it on these other controls. So like I said before when we're talking about common sense, there's many unscientific ways of knowing that preceded science and continue past it. So a few of those, intuition. A lot of people rely very heavily on our intuition and it's useful sometimes, but not for everything. So by intuition, we could mean vague feelings or gut reactions about a question or a phenomena. But one problem with intuition as a knowledge source is that our intuitions are often wrong. Kind of like common sense, think back to our sugar and children example. Second problem is that intuitions are feeling based, they're mood based. A lot of times they might be subject to psychological, biochemical, other factors, meaning that the way you intuit something might be wholly dependent on how you rolled out a bed this morning. How you think another person objectively drives, how good objectively they are at driving, is way different if they just cut you off. Or you saw them cut somebody else off. Not necessarily a bad driver, but intuition might say, probably a bad driver, but is that based on our mood? We can't control for this. Lastly about intuition, if you ask five different people to make predictions based on their intuition about something, you're probably gonna receive five different answers. Furthermore, if you ask one culture what their intuition is about something and ask another culture, they might think each other, their explanations are ludicrous. This is just based on intuition and is not really objective, which is why we don't use it. Tradition, this would include unquestioned beliefs in superstitions, truisms, myths, just because they were passed down perhaps culturally from generation to generation through family, through media, and of course through religious institutions. As an information source, tradition is used all the time. But like intuition, many held beliefs are inaccurate. This is why perhaps some cartoon producers view creationism, which is wholly based in religious tradition, they view it a little bit perhaps unfavorably. Tradition doesn't get you very far if the tradition was wrong in the first place. So for example, at one time everyone thought that the earth was flat, that the sun goes around the earth, that applying leeches to the ill was a very good medical practice and that Salem, Massachusetts was once infested with witches. This is not a tradition that we need to hold to anymore. No, this is not a scientific way of knowing authority. So I hope you guys know what I'm talking about when I talk about authority. It's that appealing to experts just because they're experts. Not what they say, but just X is true because some experts said it is. So we're surrounded by experts and authorities all the time. Professors, physicians, attorneys, economic advisors, stockbrokers, mechanics, news anchors. But although they frequently provide valuable services, they can of course be wrong and they often conflict with each other on the same questions. So if we really want to appeal to an expert for authority, we want their knowledge to be a product of scientific inquiry and it's the inquiry and the evidence and not the expert who is making such and such a correct statement. They can disseminate knowledge and they do, but they're not oracles of knowledge. It's not just because they said it, therefore it's true. We already went through, why common sense? Not a good thing to rely on all the time. Lastly, personal experience. We all have a wealth of personal experience that we use to guide our lives, but we have to be cautious when we apply this to making observations and conclusions about the world. First, personal experience is both highly subjective and highly uncontrolled. Two things we already went over about the controls of science. And again, we attend to certain events and discard other events because there is so much going on in the world. Your senses just cannot take in everything that is going on around you. We do not pay attention to every sound. We do not notice everything in our field of vision and many things go undetected. So experience necessarily is incomplete and inaccurate most of the time. Second, we selectively remember, personal experience heavily dependent upon memory. We selectively remember things and our memories evolve and change each time we try to remember something. And we'll get to some examples of that a little bit later. So why is science superior to other ways of knowing? I hope this has become rather clear to you now. But science is a self-regulating, progressive body of knowledge. And it's one of the few, if not the only one. And by constantly checking its knowledge against the reality of nature and hopefully removing the subjectivity of human experience and interpretation, science remains the most useful and successful tool that we have so far for discovering the universe. By comparison, again, intuition is biased, personal, and many times emotionally driven. And science works. We see the benefits of it. We see it work. It gets you to the moon. It gets you to Mars eventually. This might seem like kind of a weak assertion of why science is so good, but it's hardly something that can be ignored. So the power of evidence. Evidence is what we base everything on as skeptics and as rationalists. Why is it so important? Well, it's what makes up scientific theory. And for those of you who don't know, I wanna go through this real quick because when you will hear people railing against science, again, I'll use creationists, is that something, oh, it's just a theory. And this is kind of an old trope in the skeptics movement. Something is just a theory. Well, what do they mean? Well, a scientific theory, it's a group of abstractions and observations about something. And then it makes explanations about further observations and that is tested against reality. A scientific theory is constructed to make sense of the available empirical data about observations about the world and is put forth as a principle or a body of principles that explains some sort of class of phenomena. So evolution, using the creationist example, is not just a theory. A theory is not an educated guess. It's what I just said. It's a collection of abstract concepts that explain a class of phenomena. It's not just, oh, it seems right. That's not what a theory is. So when people say that, remember too, gravity is just a theory. And I would posit that gravity, evolution with gravity, evolution is as well-established as gravity is. Nothing in biology makes sense without evolutionary theory, really. To say that it's just an idea and that some people like it, some people don't, that's not true. It explains almost everything we see in biology, just like gravity explains almost everything we see with bodies interacting with mass in gravitational waves. So why do we value evidence? Well, simply, evidence is unbiased. It's not a human who has their own thoughts and beliefs and desires. It's what theories are built on and it's what science is made of. And hopefully, if it's handled in the right way, it's usually free from the meddling hands and the meddling minds of humans. And why are theories important? Well, theories, kind of a subset of a worldview, are lenses through which we view the world. In its raw form, the data that we get from the world, from our senses, is too jumbled and far too expansive to make sense of it on our own. We use theories to get a hold of this chaos and to make sense of it in an organized framework into something that we can understand. The best theories predict something in nature and they're correct about those predictions. My advisor in my graduate program likes to say, real explanations aren't phantoms that just pass through things and don't affect anything. Real explanations bump into things and they move them. And why they move them is what theory is. Very, very basic explanation of that. Why should we trust science? Why is it, I'm saying how important and useful it is, but why should we trust it? Well, just to take one part of it, I think most people, what they'd be alarmed at the most is scientific fraud. So, of course, there have been cases of scientific fraud and some of them are terrible. The vaccine and autism link, probably, I think, one of the worst cases of fraud in history. Piltone Man, Cold Fusion, these things. But how prevalent is it? Does it really color the rest of science for us? Well, let me put it this way. In a survey of published papers in 2011, out of a total of 4.8 million scientific papers published, 788 were retracted and not all of those were fraud. About 30% of those were fraud. What does that mean? For every 6,109 articles published, one was retracted that might have had a problem or could have been fraud. This is a 0.016% rate of possible fraud. Of course, we might not be defining everything. Sure, but would this bump up 0.016% to something where we really, really start to question should we be using science at all? I don't think so. So, background on science, let's get to a little bit more of the fun stuff and why we are here in the first place. What is pseudoscience? Well, what best, I think, distinguishes science from pseudoscience generally is a lack of evidence, lack of plausibility. Therefore, I want this quote here from Christopher Hitchens to kind of color the rest of our discussion. That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. So what is pseudoscience? Where do we draw the line between what is scientific and what is pseudoscientific? Well, it's a problem and we have a name for it. We call it the demarcation problem. Where do we draw the line? This might seem easy to do if we're talking about something like astrology versus cosmology. This might be an easy line to draw. But what about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, SETI, or string theory? Both of these have zero empirical data going for them. I would say that they're more informed by science and they'd be more open to it than say a classic pseudoscience would. But like, based on the evidence, they're not doing much better. I'm not saying that they're pseudoscience, but this is the problem. The line becomes fuzzy when we start trying to draw it. It's more of a continuum from science to pseudoscience rather than a rigid distinction. And that's some of the hard decisions that we have to make as skeptics. Again, falsification. A claim that proposes something that cannot be ruled out by some kind of observation does not mean much to us. It's a little used to science. Evolution can be falsified. Many creationist claims cannot. So why is this important? Well, when pseudoscience does not take into account new information that could falsify it, that's a good indicator that perhaps now it's pseudoscience. For example, we might get to this with the next workshop with Dr. Google. But acupuncture, when the systematic reviews come in that it doesn't matter where the needles go or even if they go in the skin, does that change the field at all? Hardly. Would a practitioner down the street know about that or care about that? I doubt it. Of course, it's a big enterprise. Maybe they just didn't hear about it. But still, some of these enterprises, some of these pseudosciences, when they don't incorporate new evidence with what reality says, that's a problem. So what are the hallmarks of pseudoscience? Well, chronically, it's a lack of evidence and that it conflicts with other scientific principles. Further than that, if it's using a lot of pseudoscientific buzzwords, perhaps quantum, magnetic, organic, negative ion, frequency, energy, holistic maybe? That's a good one. Doesn't necessarily make it pseudoscience might be an indicator though. So conflicting with other scientific principles is an important part to remember here because a pseudoscience like homeopathy pushes notions of medicine that completely would contradict other forms of medicine. Homeopathy supposes that you do not need any active ingredient to get a physiological response, that one aspect of an ailment can be used to cure that same ailment or that if you dilute something out of existence, the water remembers what you diluted into it and that will cure you based on what I just said previously. This conflicts with everything that we know about medical science and none of this makes sense in a scientific world view. When it really conflicts, again, just by definition, pseudoscientific. And pseudoscience is largely supported by anecdotes and speculation. Well, one time when I was 12, I used an Ouija board and it seemed like it worked. It was kind of freaky, me and my sister, it was dark, there was candles, stuff was moving, maybe it was a ghost. This is not the kind of thing that we base a rigorous scientific field on. And as we'll get to later on, personal experience, and we said before, cannot be the basis of science and you cannot really trust everything you see or you hear. So a little bit more practically, what does pseudoscience look like? Well, how about I rattle off a few? The 2012 apocalypse, the Apollo moon landing hoax, astrology, the face on Mars, the Flat Earth Society, the Bermuda Triangle, channeling, crop circles, cryptozoology, extracentiary perception or ESP, ghost hunting, psychic surgery, ufology, parapsychology, chiropractic, colon cleansing, crystal healing, faith healing, homeopathy, magnet therapy, traditional Chinese medicine or TCM, acupuncture, creationism or its derivative is intelligent design and irreducible complexity, quantum mysticism and professional motion, just to name a few. Or anything that you might hear from this dude is probably pseudoscience. If you don't know, this is a guy who was talking about ancient aliens on the history channel. I don't think it should be called the history channel anymore. The pseudoscience channel, right. But he's turned into a meme where he just says, you know, that's basically what he's saying. Oh, and that's an example of an argument from ignorance if you know what illogical fallacy is. I don't know what that thing is in the sky. Must be aliens. Okay, so let's get to some demonstrations about what pseudoscience is. It's gonna be exciting. So I wanna demonstrate balanced bracelets to you. Everyone is gonna learn. I wanna do a little psychology experiment with you about astrology. I wanna show you a video about dosing rods and I wanna show you how to make a homeopathic remedy. If you can't, if you can't read this, what this says, this is another XKCD comic, which I highly recommend. Okay, I've diluted this semen 30X. Well, we'll be sure to get pregnant now. Belief in homeopathy is not evolutionary selected for. It seems silly because it is. So, it might have, so instead of really beating around the bush with this, I'm just gonna rather say this is a scam. But why is it a scam? Who knows what balanced bracelets are? Pretty much everybody. Okay, well, if you don't know, they are a holographic bracelet that kinda looks like this. It's made out of silicone. It has a hologram in it that's embedded with frequencies. I don't know if you people have seen it before. Who's ever been tested in like a mall or a kiosk? Okay, just a few of you. Great, so then we will figure this out. Now, what I wanna do is I wanna act as a marketer. I wanna act as one of those mall demonstration people. And what I'm gonna need is a volunteer. You went first, so let's get over here. Let's give him a round of applause. All right, this is Paul, everybody. So, let me just get in the character for a second, okay? Paul. Hey, hey, great to see you here. I understand you wanna have your balance augmented. Oh, absolutely. Oh, fantastic, well, I have the product for you. Now, what I have and what was just developed is a holographic quantum negative ion awesome bracelet and what I'm gonna do is first I'm gonna test your balance and then I'm gonna give you my product and we're gonna see if it makes any difference. Okay, so what we're gonna do, you can come here and stand next to me. What I'm gonna do, what I'm gonna ask you to do, stand up like this with your arms rigid so I can press down on them and put one leg up, okay? So first, first we're gonna test your balance, okay? Arms rigid, that was okay. I think we should test your balance again. So let's try it again. See, that wasn't great. Now, what I wanna do is I wanna give you my magnetic organic natural bracelet and I want you to put it in your hand and what I want you to do is really feel the negative ions coursing through your cheek and I want you to really feel its power, okay? So we're gonna do the same thing, get in the same position and we're gonna test your balance again, okay? Wow. That first thing, great. Second thing, $60, please. All right, let's all give Paul a round of applause, huh? Fantastic. I was pushing down really hard. I think we can see that if you didn't have an idea of what was going on, that's rather convincing. It is, I mean, we're all skeptics here and I already said this is a scam but just as someone off the street going into a mall saying, hey, do you work out, let's get help, that is very convincing, I think so. But as I said, I think it's a scam. Why do I think that? Well, let's get a little mathematical with it, huh? I apologize, but I'm gonna drag you kicking and screaming through this math, I swear. So what I'm calling this is the scarecrow test, that's all it is. So I'm making some assumptions here. He's just a stick figure because physics is just assuming lines and points. So I'm assuming that his hand was four feet off the ground and that from the point where I pushed down on his hand, it was two feet from his foot or what I'm calling the point of rotation where he would balance off of. Now, how I am gonna say to you this scam works is changing the direction of force. So the first part of the scam, one direction, second part of the scam, the other direction. So what's going on here? Oh, so, oh yeah, we're getting force diagrams here. So right here, I'm just assuming what is positive for calculation purposes. Here, I'm just assuming I was pressing down with 10 pounds of force just to make it easy at a 45 degree angle just to make it even easier. Again, four feet, two feet. Down here, this arrow is the moment at A. A moment is just an engineering term for rotational force at a point. So how much spin I was giving to his foot? Yes, I know, that looks daunting, but I won't read all of it. So what I'm doing here, there's an engineering principle called statics. And what statics mean is that if a body is not moving, all the forces on that body have to equal zero. Makes sense, right? Newton's laws of motion has to be acted upon by a force. If it's not moving, it's not being acted upon by a force or it equals zero. So what I'm assuming, if we look back in our diagram here, I have to assume that the force I'm pressing down on with his arm is equivalent to the rotational force at his foot if he's not gonna tip over. So in effect, if I calculate what that force is at his foot, that tells me how much force he would have to resist to not tip over. So all I did in the calculations here, I apologize for the calculation speak, but I took the X and Y components of that force with a 45 degree angle. I put it, you know, sine, cosine, you guys remember that kind of stuff. And I made everything equal zero with the moment included. And what do we get? Well, if you can't see, I'll just tell you, I get negative 42.4 foot pounds of force. Now, what does that mean? All the negative means is that the moment was going in the opposite of the direction that I assumed. So what that looks like is that when I was pressing down on Paul, first I was pressing down in this direction, meaning that if this is positive, he would have to resist me leaning this way with 42 pounds of force to keep from falling over. 42 pounds this way as opposed to this way. As you can see, that's a lot to resist with just your foot on the ground and just rigid arms. You should, you're just trying to stay upright. Right, and it's a lot of force, but the force, the number here isn't really the important part. It's the comparison that's the important part. So part two of the scam, all I'm doing here, same angle, same force, same moment. I'm just changing the direction of force towards his body. And I will say that is what I did. First time I pressed away, second time I pressed towards him. That's all I did. Oh, I'll get to that. I'll get to that in a second, it does. So if I change the direction of force, all I'm doing is changing one plus from a minus in my calculation here. And what do I get? I get 14.1 foot pounds. Positive. What does that mean? That means that's only one third of the force and you can lean into it. So again, if I'm pulling on like this, this time I'm pressing towards my body, I can lean in towards him with one third of the force to stay balanced. If you combine that with practice effects, meaning that he's already done it a couple times, he knows what's gonna happen, he doesn't wanna look embarrassed, and that instead of using the small muscles in my elbow to try to resist this way, I can use my entire core here to lean into it. You have the makings of a scam. So that means power scam. All of those factors contribute to this. It's simple physics. It's really nothing else. Sir, you pointed out does the position on your arm make a difference? Yes. That also would fall into what a moment is. So without getting into even change, if I didn't even wanna change the direction of force, what a moment is is you multiply the force by the distance it is from the point where it rotates. So if I press down on Paul far away from his arm, like near his hand, if you multiply that times a long distance, if it's 10 pounds, that's a lot more force than if you multiply it by a fraction of that distance and press down near his shoulder. He would have a much easier time resisting a much less force. But I think this is a little bit more instructive on what is going on because I think most people would pick up on if I pressed on his hand and then press on his shoulder. It's a little bit harder to see. So in the vein of making this an actual workshop, I mean not just talking at your faces, I think that we could all use a stretch and what I want everyone to do, maybe get to know each other a little bit better, maybe pick a partner, and I want you to try this. I want everyone to try this scam. All I'm doing is changing the direction of force in a scarecrow position. And you don't have to use something fancy. I have a balance bracelet here, but you can use your phone or your keys, or you can just say something's in there. But I want everyone to try this so that when you go out to a mall or a kiosk or someone asks you in the gym, hey, do those actually work? It's like, oh, how about I replicate the same results with my shoe? I want you guys to be able to do that. So I want everyone, Levantin say here. And I want people to try this. So I'll give everybody about five minutes or so. So you guys feel like that was something that you could maybe go out and do with your friends because, or in your classroom or something, that is exactly what I want. It's really simple to do and it's very effective, as effective I think, as demonstrating it in the first place. Okay, another attendee just asked me, and I think I can do you both one better. So the conclusion I'll get to, obviously it's a scam. This is a parlor trick just based on simple physics. Combine that with buzzword rhetoric, maybe some convincing demonstration on others, and you have this. This is not worth the silicone, really. If you look at the markup, like 50 cents to $50, like 9,000% increase. And you can even tell time. But the point is, not even just specific to these, if anything is making that kind of profit margin, you should be suspicious of it, of course, unless it's Apple, as I use one of their computers. So I said about doing you one better. What was I using here? This is not a balance bracelet. This is a placebo band. It says right on the side, the power of belief. These are manufactured at the same plant in Asia where a power balance is made. There's a group of skeptics in Australia called the skeptic bros who made these and sell these. And this is one of the most convincing things to do with it, as one attendee told me. If you can do that demonstration with one of these and say this is a fake one, why are they spending their money? And I want to say, these are on sale today at the SGU table for much, for much, much less. So this is just, it's a good conversation piece. So I wanted to plug it if you guys were interested. So let's move on to another pseudoscience, huh? Who came up with the power balance? The first one were two brothers in California, I think. And they were just saying things like, don't you want to prove you're in fitness? Gee, all right. So let's move on. I want to get to astrology as a pseudoscience. We're not gonna go too much into it, but what we are gonna do is have a little bit of an experiment. So I want everyone to listen carefully to what I'm gonna say. And I'm gonna read you, sorry. I'm gonna read you something that you could easily find in any horoscope. And afterwards, we're gonna ask you about how accurate this is. So, you have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses, you're generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times, you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and becomes dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as being an independent thinker and do not accept other statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times, you are extroverted, affable and sociable, while at other times, you are introverted, wary and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be unrealistic. So, what I want you to do does it honestly, honestly. Do those words, could they apply to your life? I want you to take a second, rate it in your head from zero to five. Zero to five. So, who would say zero to one? Raise your hand. One to two? You could use decimals. Zero to five. We're all skeptics here. You could use four point two five if you really want to. So, zero to one. One to two? Two to three. Three to four. Four to five. Okay. So, psychologist Bertram R. Forer found that people tend to accept vague and general personality descriptions as uniquely applicable to themselves without realizing that just the same description could be applied to just about anybody. From the show of hands, almost everybody was at four to five or three to four. So, when we do this test with psychology students every year, the average is still four point two out of five or 84% accurate. I can take these same descriptions that you can find in any horoscope and everybody will find it accurate. It's meaningless. People want to make these descriptions fit to their lives. They want something to be special. They want to have a cosmic connection to some planet, something like that. You're born under Jupiter, some other such nonsense. But this provides the basis for the widespread belief in astrology, I think. If you can give a vague general statement that I could write up in literally two seconds and it applies to everybody and everyone thinks that I'm very accurate at determining what their life is like, this is what astrology is. So, I want to move on right away. Get to some dousing, Rod, ridiculousness. Instead of explaining to you why I think this is bogus, I will let the amazing one himself do so. He's not. We've heard many opinions, both for and against, in this vital area of dousing for good and bad places to live and work. If life and death decisions are also to be based on the results of dousing, surely we should try to establish once and for all whether it works reliably. Please welcome my final guest, Clive Thompson. I apologize for the video quality, by the way. Well, at the moment I'm doing quite a lot of water divining and I'm also helping out the Paris Mountain Mining Company and looking for the mineral ore band which goes around the mountain. Well, can I, Clive? You've agreed to attempt to find a piece of zinc bar like this one right over here, which is concealed under one of the seven boxes that you see behind us. Is that correct? Yes, that's correct. Right, and you're happy to do it this way, are you? I'm happy to do it this way. It's not normal. We work normally in the open, you know, on the mountain side or wherever looking for ore, but realizing you're doing a studio one, I'm willing to have a go and see if it works. Hurt, please show us the effect of your dousing rod on this sample of zinc ore and we'll just conceal the sample with a box so the conditions are exactly the same as when you come to do the test. Righto, James. To explain how the rod works, when you're facing the ore, I don't know if you can see this, but I'm trying to, we put a white-ended tip there. It has a slight sideways move when you're there. Take it off and it dies. See, it dies, comes in and it dies again. So to amplify that, I give it a voluntary upward movement. So aim it at the ore and what do you get? You get a large oval form which is easy to distinguish. If I take it to the side, see it die. Now close my eyes, bring it in, I can feel it moving, dead. Well, that seems to be a very dramatic demonstration. Now, will you please try to locate the ore sample taken from the same piece of zinc ore which is hidden in one of the boxes behind us? Of course, if chants along were operating here, you'd have a one in seven chance of finding the sample at your first attempt. Using guesswork alone, we'd expect you to locate the zinc ore sample by your third or fourth attempt. Good luck, Clive. Thank you very much, James. Right, I'll take number one first in the upward movement. There's no there. Well, James, we'll bank on seven, see if it's there. Well, I'm number seven. All right, let's take a look and see. Now, even I don't know underneath which box the zinc ore is and I see that it's not here. Well, Clive, would you like to have a second try at it? Let's try number four again. Number four. It was wrong, so let's try another attempt, shall we? Here we are at box number two, the third guess and, ah, there we are. There's the piece of zinc ore, pardon me. Well, Clive, would you join me here for a minute? Yes, sir. We said that by chance you'd find it on your third or fourth attempt. You found it on the third attempt, so your results sadly seem to be no better than chance. Well, we'd like to thank you very much for coming tonight. Okay, so what's going on here is what we call the idiomotor effect. So the idea is, and you could, I mean, you could see him moving the rod with his hand back and forth. So the idea is that you can never really stop moving. You can never really stop your arm from moving. There's always gonna be small, imperceptible movements that are happening through your arm, and if you use something long, like a dowsing rod like that, those small, imperceptible movements get translated all the way down and make a big effect at the end. You could see how much more he was waving the things side to side when he knew the box it was under before he did the test. I mean, subconsciously, he knows it's there. You know, it could be influenced that way. An attendee pointed out to me while we were watching. You notice how James Rainey was doing things to make sure it was statistically significant, that it was controlled, that it was blinded. He didn't know which box it was under. These are all things that are important when we test these kind of things. And this seems silly. Dowsing rod seems silly, yeah. But this man is hired by a very large mining company. And even worse, the equivalent of dowsing boxes are being sold in Iraq to detect bombs. Could you see the possible problem with that? This is real harm. This isn't just some silly, this isn't just something that we can talk about at drinking skeptically and not really care about it. The outcropping of these beliefs cause real harm and this is why we have meetings like this. So let's move right on. Sorry to bring it down a little bit. Let's move on to homeopathy. What I wanna do is I wanna show you with the help of some water bottles, how to make a homeopathic remedy. Now, what I did is I got a recipe from hpathy.com, which is apparently the largest homeopathy website on the web. And I took one of the recipes and I wanna show you that. But first, to familiarize yourself again, homeopathy claims that like cures like. So if you're allergic to cats, take some cat dander and dilute that and drink that and you'll be good. Get seasick, take some seawater, dilute that, drink that, you'll be good. Yes. That there's memory in water. Anything you dilute into water, water will remember and therefore it can cure you of that. If that's really the case, just imagine the horrors of our sewage system. Oh man. We, yeah, we need to be aware of that. And of course the extreme dilution of substances. So what's going on here? Homeopathy states is that if you take the mother tincture as they call it, just something, let's just say of it's seawater because you wanna cure seasickness, obviously. You take a small percentage of that, maybe 1%, maybe 10% and you put that into a bottle of just water. So it's 90% water, 10% seawater, for instance. You keep doing that 90-10 split all the way down up to 400 times and the more times you do that, the more potent the cure gets. I'm not making it up. So let's do it. I wanna read you the introduction to this recipe before I get to the recipe because it's something that I think you should do. So what's the value, this is not me speaking, it's a woman who is not a doctor. What's the value of knowing this recipe? It's immense. If you're seasick, you can make a remedy out of seawater. If you're sick from vacationing in Mexico, you can make a remedy out of the pathogen-infested local water. If the polluted air or pollens in the air are causing your problem, you can put a saucer of water outside for a few hours or days and let it collect what is ever in the air and then make a remedy out of that. The list of possibilities is endless. Of course, in fact, when you're desperate and you seemingly tried everything, there's your own body to make remedies from. Your discharges, your urine, your blood, you're never really out of remedies, are you? So let's just go through this and see what the recipe says. So I have two cats and I'm usually covered in cat hair so I'm just gonna use cat dander as an example. And I don't need very much of it because I'm gonna dilute the heck out, right? So what am I gonna do? Let's see, unopened bottle of water. Unopened bottle of water. Let's read the recipe. So get a small bottle of spring water. Any water will do, fantastic. And pour half of it out. Let's save the water. I'm gonna do less than half a little bit because of the size of this cup. Now I have half a bottle of water. Pour in a small amount of what you're trying to make a remedy of. So your bottle should be about a 90-10 split of whatever that is. I'm gonna take some of the cat hair that's on me. I'm gonna do this a little bit. Really, this is not above what they do with this thing. The water knows I'm not. Now make this about a 90-10 mixture. You might be saying to yourself, Kyle, you don't have any measurements on this. How do you know it's a 90-10 split? Well, what does the recipe say? There's no need to be fussy about percentages, just guess at what 10% might be. Sure, no problem. Okay, so I have my cat dander solution in here. Now, success this solution 40 times and after you have done that, get a piece of paper and write down one X, meaning it's one times diluted. This means pound the bottle into your opposite palm 40 times. All right, so I'll just keep in my head that that's one X. That's one times diluted. Okay, now how do I make, let's make it more potent. What do I do? Now pour out 90% of this solution. Okay, let's get another cup of water. Pour out 90% of my cat dander solution. 10%, sure, I'm just guessing, but that's okay. So let's pour, it says now refill the bottle up so it's 90% to 10% again. All right, that's the song you said. Okay, so, and now what? Oh, okay, success another 40 times, okay. Two X, fantastic. I could just, just like, I could go on, this goes all the way up to say 200 X is what most homeopathic remedies are diluted to in this way, in this way. And then they take the solution and they put it in an eyedropper and they either make it a homeopathic liquid remedy or they drop it on some sugar pills. Not bad thing if there is actually active ingredient in it, but it's there. What does this mean, the way I'm diluting this? Oh, well, well, sorry, I forgot something. When your remedy, this is the recipe talking again, when your remedy is no longer working, you'll need to raise the potency. Okay, pour out 90% of your bottle, refill it again halfway, success it 40 times, pour out 90% of the bottle, refill it halfway, do the same thing three more times, and you've raised the potency by three degrees. So I could go all the way up to the top to a 200 X dilution, but if you're curious about what a 200 X dilution actually would look like, I kind of Martha Stewart prepared one from earlier, which is an unopened bottle. So what does this mean? What do these dilutions really mean? I'm sorry, I didn't expect so many people to be at the back, so you'll have to bear with me with this chart here. So I have one X, two X, six X, eight X. Okay, small dilutions. I get to eight X, what does that mean? At eight X, I could drink arsenic. 24 X, if I used, say cat, I don't know what a bowl of cat dander would be. Maybe about 60 grams, I don't know. If I use 60 grams of cat dander, I have a 60% chance of getting one molecule of original ingredient in my remedy. One molecule. If I go to 60 X, which is not even close to what is recommended, up to 400 or 200, if I go to 60, I would have to eat a billion times the mass of the earth in pills to get one molecule. If it was liquid water, I would need to consume 10 billion times the volume of the earth to get one molecule, it gets better. What if I go to 400 X or 200 C, which is the common dilution for acylinococcinum, which is a homeopathic remedy for cold and flu symptoms? What does that mean dilution-wise? Well, you know the volume of the universe is pretty big, right? No, it gets better. I would need 10 to the 320th power universes to get one molecule of active ingredient at that dilution rate. What does this mean? This is just water. It's just water or it is just a sugar pill. Why should we care? Why should we care about pseudosciences like this? This is fun. We have fun as skeptics. We have fun talking to each other about how ridiculous some of this seems. But why do we care? Well, just a couple of things. Pseudoscience obscures the truth. It has people constantly falling for scams. People are wasting time and money where it could be spent elsewhere for real benefit, especially when it comes to medical claims. It's a propagation of ignorance, a distrust for science, which can lead to parents not vaccinating their children, for example, or bogus medicine being sold in pharmacies. I wanna take it down just a second and tell you about an anecdote about this recipe that I had. Well, before I worked on this workshop, I took this same recipe and I posted it on my personal website and I got a lot of comments on it, mostly from homeopaths. And then I got a comment from the author of this recipe. And she said, blah, blah, blah, science can't study homeopathy. And I said, okay. She said, I know homeopathy works because I cured my daughter with it once. I said, okay, I'm glad your daughter's okay, but next time you should probably go to a doctor. I didn't say much else. She said, in the next comment, she said, no, no, no, no, no. It's okay, I know homeopathy works because my daughter had a serious staff infection and I took some of her spit and I diluted it in exactly the same way I just did it. And I gave it to her and she got better. Now, she takes her daughter getting better as confirmatory evidence that homeopathy works. What if her daughter didn't get better? What if she wasn't so lucky? If I'm right and there is nothing in that, she is playing a very dangerous game with people's health. This is why this is important. This is why this is important to talk about. It's not all fun and games. Sadly, I think that if her daughter didn't get better, she would have just probably said, I didn't make the recipe right. It wasn't potent enough. This is the real harm that comes from this. It's not just doing calculations and saying whatever, don't sell it in pharmacies. It's really advocating for the scientific position on this. What if her daughter was not okay? And that still, when I talk about it, it makes me feel terrible. What if she wasn't? Let's bring it back up a notch. So what is skepticism? I like Carl Sagan's quote about this. For me, it is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying or reassuring. That's rather concise. Before something a little bit more concise, I think skepticism kind of boils down to this. Evidence or get the heck out of here from the amazing one himself. So what is skepticism really? Well, skepticism at its heart is constructive doubt. It's the intersection of consumer protection and scientific literacy built upon the framework of the philosophy of science, the methods of science. And a skeptic, all of us, whether you're new or you're old, a skeptic demands logical and rigorous evidence for any claims before the claim is supported. And that evidence should be from science. Skepticism today mostly deals with extraordinary claims of the usual sort like Bigfoot or UFOs and homeobics and things like that. But you can apply it to anything at any time in any part of your life. Skepticism is just a mindset, really. It's not a worldview, it's a mindset that keeps us from blindly accepting anything without the proper evidence and rigorous testing. Skepticism does not equal cynicism or close-mindedness. This is kind of piggybacking on the part of science. Skepticism is always open to new ideas, but these ideas have to pass the high bar of evidence that we have. Many pseudoscientific claims do not fault this bar. And because so many people are so invested in believing in them, they think that we're the close-minded ones. Don't you think that if a pseudoscientific field was real, say, cryptozoology or quantum mysticism, that there would be a horde of scientists running at it for research grants, noble prizes, things like that, if there was really anything to it? I think they would, because I know a few of them. Why do we need skepticism? I was enjoying our demonstration so much, I'm gonna have to speed up just a little bit, I hope you'll forgive me. So why do we need skepticism? There are too many biases and cognitive failures to really rely on our own experience. I've kind of made that clear, and I wanna make it more clear. We are bad, for example, very bad at estimating risk. And risk is a big part of our lives. Most of you would be more afraid of flying in a plane than driving. I'm gonna make that guess. Though statistically, driving is the most dangerous thing you do every day, it is. Yet we don't think about it, because it just happens a lot, so it's okay. So I wanna test you this on risk. You guys are a smart bunch and your skeptics, we'll see how you do. So this is gonna be a little bit more of it, but how many people do you think dive each year from either one of the two things I'm saying? Which causes more deaths? This is an estimation of risk. And I'll ask for your raised hands after I say both of them. So homicide or suicide? Who thinks homicide? More people die from each year. Suicide. Skeptics is going good. Right, suicide, far more prevalent, happens a lot more often. Yet we see homicide in the news so much that we have this mean world complexity that when we go outside, someone's gonna shoot us. If we're not estimating risk correctly. Okay, asthma attacks or tornadoes? Who thinks asthma attacks? Who thinks tornadoes? Ah, man. Doing good. Again, this highly media worthy event obscuring what risk actually looks like to people. So it is asthma attacks. Car accidents or the seasonal flu? Who thinks car accidents? Who thinks the seasonal flu? It's close. I'd say about two thirds of you went with the seasonal flu. It's the seasonal flu. Thousands and thousands of people die each year, which is why you should get vaccinated. Or just drink enough. They have homeopathic vaccines now. Do you know that? That's the other part. Harm, real, real harm. Anyway, so last one. Drown, this is gonna be tough. Drowning or Parkinson's disease? Drowning, Parkinson's. It's half and half. No, no, no, no, no, you're half and half. Not me. Don't assume that. Parkinson's disease, more people die from each year. Again, drowning. Every summer rolls around. We hear about it a lot. A handful of people. Not even breaking 100. I don't mean to diminish that, but so. So I'm gonna skip over just one thing. And so just how bad are we? I wanna drill this into you. Why do we need skepticism? Why do we need to be here? Why do we need to talk about this? Well, anecdotal evidence, eyewitness testimony, relying on ourselves is like playing telephone. Who knows what telephone is, the game? Okay, so say I had 10 people in a line and I tell the first person, you know, I whisper in there, Carl Sagan is the man. And they whisper what they heard to the next person, what they heard to the next person all the way down the line. And at the end of it, you get like, Deepak Chopra's a genius. Like it comes out totally twisted. Totally contorted. And that's why, and it's just, it's a superfluous example, but that's why we can't rely on everything we see and we're here when we're not really paying attention. There's too much going on in the world to really be fully aware of it. We have to actively select some information and dismiss the rest. One of these is change blindness. Who knows what change blindness is? Okay, for the people who don't, this is how much we just do not pay attention to. Most of us think we're pretty observant, but with a bit of mind control, I wanted to see if I could make these people take even the most obvious things for granted. Excuse me. Do you know how to get to Trinity Church from here? Yeah. You see that church down there? Yep, straight through there. And then you have to keep going down. Yeah, sorry. Excuse me. Sorry, can you push me? You see what that church is down there? Yeah. You stay on that, which is a bleak roadway. And then you walk down two or three blocks and Trinity Church is over by the inside. We'll walk you in that direction. Okay. Excuse me. You don't know where Trinity Church is, do you? Might be Wall Street and Broadway. Okay. Well, we're down here somewhere, aren't we? Yeah. You see Trinity Church. Sorry, all right. Uh, yeah. Inside the Trinity Church, right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you keep going that way, you'll go all the way then you go down to four blocks. Thank you very much. That seemed almost too easy. So later on, I see how far I can take it. Excuse me. Trinity Church is? It's in that direction. Okay. Last time, I switched with someone who looked a little bit like me, but where's the fun in that? Man, hope you think. Yeah. The other side, you see where the lady's standing? Sure. That's the booth, no, the lady in the grave. The other side. Yeah, the other side of the booth. But you say you don't know where it is. Exactly Wall Street, no, but it's in that direction. Okay. Yeah, okay. Okay, so when we do this test, and this is not just one-in-game, psychologists do this test with people, and over 50% of people fall for this consistently. That's, I mean, in the social sciences, 50%, that's high. That's almost enough to generalize to almost everybody would fall for this. Unless they change race or gender, that triggered something in our brains that's a little bit more subconscious than we notice it. Again, just how bad are we? We selectively attend to something and dismiss the rest. If you have seen this video, don't think nothing. This is a test of selective attention. Count how many times the players wearing white pass the basketball. How many passes did you count? The correct answer is 15 passes. Now be honest here. But did you see the gorilla? We're was legitimately did not see the gorilla. Right, this should be abundantly clear to you now. We do not see everything we think we see when we're paying attention. We have a very small spotlight of attention that we focus on things. Everything else is in the periphery, rather dark, rather obscure. One last thing, I'm gonna have to really speed up here. I'm having too much fun with you guys up here. But I wanna get to some, the multi-haul paradox. I'm gonna go through it very quickly. So the idea is on a game show, there's three doors. One has a goat, one has a car behind it. The question is, you pick one door and then I as a game show host, I open a door with nothing behind it. So let's say you pick number one. Okay, number one, awesome. I will open door number three for you and then before I reveal if you have a goat or a car, I'll allow you to switch doors if you want. The question, the paradox is statistically, should you switch? Most people think yes. Many people, if you want a goat, you don't have to switch. Many people think that it's just a 50-50 chance, just two doors. Why not? Well, this is why not. What's going on here is really interesting. If the prize is equally likely to be behind each of the doors, then if a player picks door one, there's a one in three chance the prize is behind. That means that there's a two in three chance that the prize is behind doors two and three. Now take away door three and there's still a two in three chance that it's behind door two. So switching effectively doubles your chances of winning. That's it. Intuitively, even very, very, very smart people get this wrong consistently. It's confusing. We're not wired up for this kind of thinking. Again, why we need skepticism? So moving right along, what is skepticism? What are the hot topics in skepticism today? Well, just so you're familiar with it, and I've talked about some of these, the anti-vaccination movement. Parents not vaccinating their kids because they think there's something wrong with vaccines. This is not only something very important to us, but because it can cause so much harm. 2010, nine infants, 10 infants in California died of whooping cough. They coughed themselves to death for no reason. Completely preventable diseases spurred on by these little pockets of people who don't think this is safe. This is a problem. Teaching creationism in schools. Pseudoscientific medicine, like homeopathy, like ear candling, like chiropractic, sorry. Global warming deniers. This is still somewhat contested among skeptics, but I will, I'll assert myself, that the scientific consensus is anthropogenic, human cause, global warming. I'll put that out there, we can talk about it later. And quantum nonsense hawkers, like someone that I won't. The secret of the universe expresses its ephemeral self-knowledge. Well, of course it does. So what are the goals of the skeptical movement? Well, I think they can be broken down into three parts, and I adapted this from something Michael Schumer had said before. The first is debunking. It's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it. Because there is so much more pseudoscience than science out there, the skeptical voice has to be heard, and it should be heard, for some of these claims, especially the harmful ones that I was talking about earlier. Not many people like their beliefs critically examined. They think that we are attacking them specifically. But as a movement, we are ridiculing, if we do ridicule, we are critiquing the belief and not the believer. We're not interested in innocent people who just don't know any better. And that sounds condescending, but they just don't know any, but they don't have the right information to make a good decision. We're not after those people. We're after the people who knowingly offer bogus and make millions of dollars doing so. Second, understanding, ridicule and satire is obviously a part of the skeptical movement. But like I said, we wanna ridicule, if we do so, we wanna know why people are thinking the way we do. We don't attack them. We wanna understand their beliefs. Really listen to them. And you have to remember that just listening to someone is important. Some of these beliefs aren't because maybe you have the wrong information or you're stupid, or some reason like that. Maybe it's for a personal reason. Creationism, for example. Maybe you were raised in a Catholic household and you had no information otherwise. It's not because you think evolution is a stupid theory, it's because you were raised out. Some of these personal factors, you really have to listen to people. And get to know them as people. This is important. We're all human beings here, we're all mammals. Last part, enlightenment. The power of positive skepticism is linked to reason, rationality, logic, science. And I think that science offers us a worldview that is awe-inspiring enough. And I feel like it's enlightening. So how do we promote positive skepticism? Scientific skepticism. I am gonna breeze through this because we have five minutes left, unfortunately. So how do we find and engage good scientific information? How do we find reliable information on the internet? And I say blaze through, but you can come up to me and we can go through any of this. I don't care, we can talk. How do you find reliable information on the internet even though sometimes it feels like you're just having an internet argument? And what about on a personal level? How do we do this? Well, first, find good scientific information. Find scientific papers. They're the best source of information that you can find out there. Rigorous methods. It's established, it goes through all the controls, the peer review. These are things we can look to. Don't be afraid of them. You can look at the free abstracts and these abstracts are written specifically so that other researchers can look at someone else's research and say, what were your results? What did you do? What did you find? Can I include that in my research? That's why you don't really need to be afraid of them. You can read the abstract first. If you have the chops, look into the actual conclusion, see the statistics. And if you even have any more chops, look into the method section, see what they did experimentally, how they randomized people, if they're placebo blinds, these kind of things. It's a hierarchy. But we can start with the abstract and we can look at what was found. But how do you find appropriate papers? Well, try using Google Scholar for one. Google Scholar is a very good source on Google. Add review or systematic review to your search. If I search for systematic review of homeopathy, you will get a systematic review, which means it's a review that looks at all of the available evidence and then weighs it. Is it overly positive, negative or inconclusive? If you look at homeopathy, overly negative. No better than placebo. That's what a review of hundreds of studies finds. It takes all the good information in one study, condenses it down into something you can look at. Do your own review. If no review exists, look at maybe 10 articles abstracts. Do your own little bit of weighing. See, is it largely positive, negative or inconclusive? Narrow your search to current papers. Look within the first one to two to five years. Current papers have, when you write a research paper, you go through what's called a literature review, where you go over all the previous research and see what they find before you do what you found, because it informs what you do. Those papers will have that and it'll hopefully inform you on what the state of the field is at the moment. Check out the next workshop. If you stay in here, Dr. Google, a bunch of doctors will be talking about how to find specifically health information online and in your daily lives and I would highly recommend it. How do we find reliable information on the internet? Well, first, you could use the ABCs of web literacy. You could analyze web page for authority. Who is speaking? What is their title? Again, I said that's not always important, but it does, credentials do matter. If it's a scientist from NASA, it's more than just Joe Schmoe. Determine accuracy. Is it, does it have outside references? Is it in line with scientific consensus on the topic? Look at bias. Is the page trying to sell you something? Is it fair and balanced in that it conforms to scientific evidence? Is it a global warming denier website? Not very, rather biased. Look for current data. Again, like doing the recent reviews. Is the page updated frequently, for example? Is it modified? Is it taken care of? Is it incorporating new evidence? Determine the level of coverage. What is everything looking at? Does it go to the depth that you need it? And look at the preponderance of evidence. So do a bunch of reputable websites say the same thing? More likely it is to be true. How do I personally promote skepticism? Well, join social groups. We have tables here, CFI, Skeptic Society, Secular Student Alliance. All these things can help you and everyone's very friendly, very well-natured. We'd love to have you. Start a blog, podcast newsletter, Facebook page. If you feel like what you wanna say really needs to be heard. Enlighten yourself, read good books, and I'll give you some information on that. Listen to good podcasts. Listen to skeptical material. For example, I went on iTunes and I got a whole year's worth of psychology lectures from Yale and it was fantastic. For free. You can do that for yourself. You can listen to it in the car on the way to work. Attend conferences or lectures in your area. You'd be surprised how often your college has an interesting speaker or an interesting event going on. You can go. A lot of times they're free. Keep abreast of current science. Technology helps this. RSS feeds, hefty Twitter feed, follow the right people. Just be aware of what's going on in the world around you. Don't stay stagnant. Do your own research. If something seems dubious, go out and find it. Try to do your own review. Look at each side equally and see where the claims are. Stand up for science in person and online. If someone says something that you don't agree with, I mean you don't have to be a dick about it. Don't be a dick. You don't have to be a dick about it. But if someone's saying like, oh I don't vaccinate my children, why? Why not? Explain that to me. It's something, if you have the knowledge base, you can do it. Even though you wanna say something like this sometimes. Okay, so I'm wrapping up here. I'm gonna have to skip over a scientific worldview that's fulfilling. I think it is. Question and answers. But just quick before I end some resources. Real quick. Some books, and we have a lot of these for sale on the back table outside. Demon-Hunted World, Carl Sagan. Why People Believe World Things, Michael Shermer. Flimflam by the Amazing One. The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris. Very interesting, skeptical. Greatest show on Earth, Richard Dawkins. That's also at the table behind. Organizations that are here. JRef, the Center for Inquiry, the New England Skeptic Society, which the SGU is a part of. The Richard Dawkins Foundation, Skeptic Society, which publishes Skeptic Magazine. Podcasts you can listen to. Podcasts I listen to. Skeptic Society Universe. It got me started. I'd recommend it to everybody. And stick around for the live shows because they're good. It's not for everybody. Skepticality, the official podcast of Skeptic Magazine. Point of Inquiry, always good. Skeptoid, weekly doses of small bits of skepticism and skeptically speaking from Canada. It's always interesting. Twitter, I'm gonna blaze through these. Phil Plait, the bad astronomer, Rebecca Watson. Science blog, Skeptic Zone. President of Australian Skeptics. That's Richard Saunders. Skeptics Guide, JRef, Neil Tyson. Peezy Meyers, Richard Dawkins. Skeptic Science for Climate Information. Richard Wiseman, my fellow fellow, Tim Farley of What's The Harm.net. Bug Girl from Skeptic. And again, I'll give you whatever you want if you come up and talk to me afterwards. Blogs, Neurologica, which is Dr. Steven Novella's. Blogs, Skeptic, Bad Astronomy. The Skeptic Friends Network. Good Place to Interact with Those Skeptics. The J.R.S. Swift blog. Science-Based Medicine. Again, Dr. Google Stuff. Feringula, not exactly Rockin' Science is a general blog, very, very well written. And Skeptic Blog, where Skeptic Blog were a bunch of leading skeptics right on topics every week. Some personal information. I write for the Science-Based Life Blog kind of playing off the Science-Based Medicine blog. You can follow me on Twitter, Sci-File. It's kind of, it's kind of clever. I write for the J.R.S. Swift blog every other week, so you can find my content there. I write for a blog on the Nature Network called Student Voices, where I talk about Skeptical Topics for Students. And I'll be around all weekend, so I would love if you came to say hi. I'll be at the J.R.S. Table. I'd love to talk to you guys and talk about any more of this stuff. So that being said, I just want, thank everyone for coming out real early and making this workshop a success. And my first workshop, very entertaining for me. I hope that you benefit in some way rather, even if you're a veteran or if you're a newbie, I hope you take something away from this. Again, I'll be here all weekend. I'd love to drink skeptically or just talk with you guys, whatever, I'm cool. Again, I thank you for coming out and I hope you enjoy the rest of TAM. Thank you.