The difference between skeptical thinking and scientific thinking

Skepticism has a serious problem, and there are a couple of reasons I’ve grown disenchanted with its current incarnation. Belief is a continuum, and I think that skepticism as it stands occupies an untenable part of that continuum.

On one side lie the extremely gullible; people who drift with the wind, and believe anything a sufficiently charismatic guru tells them, no matter how absurd. Far to the other side are the conspiracy theorists. These are people who believe fervently in something, who have a fixed ideology and will happily twist the evidence to support it, and are therefore completely refractory to reason and empiricism.

And then, somewhere in the middle lie science and skepticism. People readily conflate those two, unfortunately, and I think that’s wrong. Science is all about following the evidence. If a bit of evidence supports a hypothesis, you willingly accept it tentatively, and follow where it leads, strengthening or discarding your initial ideas appropriately with the quality of the evidence. You end up with theories that are held provisionally, as long as they provide fruitful guidance in digging deeper. It is ultimately a positive approach that winnows out bad ideas ruthlessly, but all in the cause of advancing our knowledge. I am far more comfortable with science then skepticism, because I’d rather be working towards a goal.

Skepticism is the flip side. It’s all about falsification and disproof and dismantling proposals. I think it is the wrong approach.

Consider one classic example: Bigfoot. Skepticism is all about taking apart case by case, demonstrating fakery or error, and demolishing the stories of the Bigfoot frauds. That’s useful — in fact, skepticism is most useful in dealing with malicious intent and human fakery — but it doesn’t advance our knowledge significantly. The scientific approach would involve actually studying forest ecology, understanding how the ecosystem works, and getting a handle on what lives in the forest…and at the end, you’re left with something informative about the nature of the habitat, as well as a recognition that a giant ape isn’t part of the puzzle.

Again, sure, there are good and necessary aspects of skepticism. When you’ve got a fraud like Burzynski peddling fake cancer cures, the skeptical toolbox is helpful. But in the end, when you’ve shown that injecting processed horse urine into people doesn’t help anything, what are you left with? Better to understand the nature of cancer and normal physiology, providing alternatives and useful explanations for why the cancer quacks are wrong. That’s why the best skeptics of quackery are doctors and scientists — they have positive insights to contribute in addition to simple falsification.

So far, I haven’t said anything that makes skepticism bad; it might be better regarded as a complement to the scientific approach, that clears away the garbage to unclutter the operating field. Unfortunately, the current doctrines of organized skepticism open the doors to pathology, because they so poorly define the proper domain of skepticism, and what they do say are inconsistent and incoherent. What we’re stuck with is a schema that tolerates motivated reasoning, as long as it looks like debunking.

So we get skeptics who argue against the dangers of second-hand tobacco smoke, or anthropogenic climate change — it’s OK, because they’re being critical — and these same skeptical entertainers are lauded for berating an MD and throwing him out of a party, because he had criticized their pandering to a quack…and also their climate change denialism. Do I even need to get into their contemptible sexism or their Libertarian bullshit?

And then the movement as a whole has been wracked with this bizarre denial of sexual harassment, and refusal to deal with the issue. I think part of it has to be a culture of dealing with complications by rejecting them — that the movement is full of individuals whose favored approach to the deplorable messiness of human interactions and the existence of malefactors is by retreating into a Spock-like insistence that the problem does not compute, and therefore can be ignored. It’s a culture of explaining away, rather than explaining.

Also…hyperskepticism. Some people take their skepticism to such pathological extremes that they become conspiracy theorists or fanatical denialists of simple human behavior. I encountered an example of this yesterday that had me stunned with its contrarian stupidity. Not all skeptics (hah!) are this bad, but too many tolerate and approve of it.

A short while ago, I received a very nice letter from a young woman in Indiana who liked my book. I scanned it and posted it, with her name and town redacted — it was a lovely example of a phenomenon we’ve noticed for quite some time, of the way the internet and books about atheism have opened the door for many people who had previously felt isolated. It also said kind things about The Happy Atheist, so of course I was glad to share it.

Some nut named Cavanaugh, in the name of True Atheism and Skepticism, has posted a lengthy dissection of the letter. He doesn’t believe it’s real. He thinks I wrote it myself. To prove his point, all he has is the scan I posted…so he has taken it apart at excruciating and obsessive length. He has carefully snipped out all the letters “w” in the letter, lining them up so you can easily compare them. My god, they’re not identical! He has another figure in which he has sliced out a collection of ligatures — would you believe the spacing between letters, in a handwritten letter, is not consistent? She used the word “oblivious” a couple of times…a word that I also have used many times. She wrote exactly one page, not two. He mansplains the psychology of teenaged girls to assert that there’s no way a 15-year-old woman could have written the letter. You get the idea. He is being properly skeptical, accumulating a body of “facts” to disprove the possibility that someone in Indiana actually wrote a letter.

Furthermore, he lards his account with purely imaginative stories about what my correspondent was thinking — he injects his account with the most contemptible interpolations, like this one.

It’s okay, Mr. Myers, she reassures him, I think you’re cool. I’m just like you, and if I can make it through, so can you. Keep spreading the word. Oh, and come rescue me from Indiana — I’ll be legal in 2016.

That was not in the letter, of course: he made it all up. On the basis of his own foul-minded speculations, he transformed a pleasant fan letter into a come-on from a small town Lolita. It’s a disgusting spectacle of hyperskepticism gone wild. Oh, and skepticism and atheism: Jebus, but you do have a misogyny problem. Please stop pretending you don’t.

And boy, am I glad I cut out the name and hometown from that letter. Can you imagine if I’d left it in, and asshole Matt Cavanaugh thought it would be clever to do some investigative skepticism, tracked down her phone number, and called her up to slime her with innuendo directly? It would be a natural and expected step in the hyperskeptical toolbox to make such a thorough examination of all the data.

So stands movement skepticism, perfectly tuned to question the existence of chupacabras or UFOs. But also poised to doubt the existence of the US Postal Service, while simultaneously sneering at atheists who reject the biggest chupacabra of them all, god, flying in the grandest possible UFO, heaven. When your whole business model is simply about rejecting fringe claims, rather than following the evidence no matter how mainstream the target, you’ll inevitably end up with a pathologically skewed audience that uses motivated reasoning to abuse the weak. And you end up valuing flamboyance and showmanship over the contributions of science…unless, of course, the scientist has grope-worthy breasts.

So no thanks, skepticism. I’ll stick with science.

Also, if my Indiana correspondent should stumble across this faux “controversy,” I am very, very sorry. Apparently it isn’t quite safe yet for everyone to come out — the wider internet, as well as rural America, has its share of small-minded, pettily vicious shit-weasels.

Sometimes, scientists abuse these terms, too

It’s good to see popular abuse of scientific concepts called out in this article, 10 Scientific Ideas That Scientists Wish You Would Stop Misusing, but sometimes I’m more concerned about scientists who perpetuate the abuse. The one on statistical significance, for instance…the whole idea of setting up “p<0.05” as some kind of Holy Grail for publication has led to a lot of bad science.

I also very much liked Marlene Zuk’s comment on learned vs. innate:

One of my favorite [misuses] is the idea of behavior being "learned vs. innate" or any of the other nature-nurture versions of this. The first question I often get when I talk about a behavior is whether it’s "genetic" or not, which is a misunderstanding because ALL traits, all the time, are the result of input from the genes and input from the environment. Only a difference between traits, and not the trait itself, can be genetic or learned — like if you have identical twins reared in different environments and they do something different (like speak different languages), then that difference is learned. But speaking French or Italian or whatever isn’t totally learned in and of itself, because obviously one has to have a certain genetic background to be able to speak at all.

Deconstructing metaphors

Oh, that’s right — that’s what philosophers are good for. They’re really good at questioning models. John Wilkins has been busily dismantling the cheap and easy metaphors we use to describe molecular biological concepts in a series of posts, taking on genes as language, other popular gene myths and metaphors, and explaining why genes aren’t information. The problem is that when we explain stuff we know well to students, we use metaphors and analogies to get across the initial ideas, and unfortunately, because scientists are human, the metaphors take on a life of their own and sometimes become the dominant paradigm for understanding the reality. And that can be hazardous.

I’ve lived through the era in which everyone started thinking of the genome as an elaborate computer program — we still have lots of people thinking that way, and in some ways it’s gotten worse as bioinformatics has brought in a synergy with computer science. But it’s not! It’s nothing like a series of instructions! This model has become a serious impediment to getting the new generation of advanced students to understand the biology, and worse, they try to shoehorn the biology into how they think a sophisticated computer program ought to work.

We’ve also got the problem of naive idiots thinking the metaphor is the thing and drawing false conclusions. The genome is a recipe, and every recipe needs a cook, therefore God, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam.

Genes and DNA are one important component of a complex of compartmentalized biochemical reactions, in which every reaction product interacts with and influences the state of the whole. We’re seeing an excessive reductionism borne of the last 50 years of success in molecular biology, and it’s about time the pendulum swung back to a more balanced perspective. One gene tells us very little; you need to step back and look at the interactions of networks of gene products in a complex environment to understand what’s going on in the cell, and then you have to step back further to look at patterns of interactions between cells, and then further still to see how individuals interact with one another and the environment, and then you have to step way back to see how populations interact, and then, maybe then, you’re really talking about evolution.

This is a test

It’s true — I’ve heard a lot more about student protests of commencement speakers this year. At the Twin Cities branch campus of my university, for instance, there was an eruption of student activism over inviting war criminal Condoleeza Rice to give the commencement address — although part of the protest may have been over the fact that she would have been paid $150,000 to spew a few platitudes for 20 minutes.

We may have been missing the point. Zach Weinersmith explains the situation.

studentprotests

He then goes on to explain the reason behind these costly displays. I give you a choice. You can go read the rest of the comic, which is the easy way out. Or you can go read this paper by Joseph Henrich (pdf), titled “The evolution of costly displays, cooperation and religion: credibility enhancing displays and their implications for cultural evolution”, which will take rather more of your time, requires slogging through a little math and logic, but will enhance your credibility because of your investment in the subject.

The paper is also a little annoying because it will require looking at a university, or any other institution, through the same lens you would a religion. I made that sacrifice, though, so that you can see my opinion as justified and worthy by virtue of my effort.

Now I have to take my wife on a walk to the coffee shop…to help her “determine how much to commit to, or believe in, a particular representation”. I can tell that thinking this way is going to lead to a rather cynical transactional view of relationships.

Cannibalistic humanoids from the deep

I met Karl Banse, the famous oceanographer, a few times. Back when I started college, I was an oceanography major for a brief while, but then I got introduced to embryos of marine invertebrates and got seduced into developmental biology. I had no idea that he was destined to write a scientific paper on the biology of mermaids (pdf available), or I might not have drifted over to the zoology department.

Or on second thought, I might have been propelled even faster. It turns out that mermaids are nasty creatures.

Regarding mermaid behavior, a recurrent theme is the habit of the females to haul out on beaches (usually in pairs) allegedly to lure, then seduce sailors; their voices were repeatedly recorded as being “irresistible”. Perhaps they lured- but the stark fact was that they then drowned the men and devoured their flesh. Similarly, when ships broke up in gales, the females pulled sailors down into their abodes for further disposition.

Once again, Disney betrays reality. Ariel was not accurately portrayed.

How not to do science

Via Mano, we get to learn what it was like working in the stem cell lab of Piero Anversa.

The day to day operation of the lab was conducted under a severe information embargo. The lab had Piero Anversa at the head with group leaders Annarosa Leri, Jan Kajstura and Marcello Rota immediately supervising experimentation. Below that was a group of around 25 instructors, research fellows, graduate students and technicians. Information flowed one way, which was up, and conversation between working groups was generally discouraged and often forbidden.

Raw data left one’s hands, went to the immediate superior (one of the three named above) and the next time it was seen would be in a manuscript or grant. What happened to that data in the intervening period is unclear.

A side effect of this information embargo was the limitation of the average worker to determine what was really going on in a research project. It would also effectively limit the ability of an average worker to make allegations regarding specific data/experiments, a requirement for a formal investigation.

The general game plan of the lab was to use two methods to control the workforce: Reward those who would play along and create a general environment of fear for everyone else. The incentive was upward mobility within the lab should you stick to message. As ridiculous as it sounds to the average academic scientist, I was personally promised money and fame should I continue to perform the type of work they desired there. There was also the draw of financial security/job stability that comes with working in a very well-funded lab.

On the other hand, I am not overstating when I say that there was a pervasive feeling of fear in the laboratory. Although individually-tailored stated and unstated threats were present for lab members, the plight of many of us who were international fellows was especially harrowing. Many were technically and educationally underqualified compared to what might be considered average research fellows in the United States. Many also originated in Italy where Dr. Anversa continues to wield considerable influence over biomedical research.

Wow. I was sure lucky. When I was in grad school, I was in a research group of about the same size, with primarily 3 people running 3 labs: Chuck Kimmel, Monte Westerfield, and Judith Eisen. They were independent and co-equal. Their post-docs and grad students and undergrads pretty much had free run of all of the labs, to the point where it was often difficult to tell who was officially associated with which lab. We had weekly lab meetings in which we’d freely share data with each other; if someone had a good idea or a set of relevant skills, we’d have collaborations. When it was time to publish a paper, the people who had done the work would get together to write it, and authorship reflected the research team, not some hierarchy…so I emerged from grad school with papers published with both Monte and Judith, but not a one with my titular lab head’s name on it, because he had these scruples about not putting his name on work to which he had not personally and directly contributed.

I thought that was how everyone did science, as an open and egalitarian process. I guess I was wrong.

If you want more examples of science being done badly, Harvard has released the full report on the Marc Hauser scientific misconduct case. It’s clear that he faked data, and demanded that his students confirm his hypotheses. Hauser’s defense: “people in his laboratory conspired against him, due to academic rivalry and disgruntlement”, a claim that did not hold up in the investigation.

I seriously cannot imagine Chuck Kimmel, or any of my academic mentors, ever tolerating any of the shenanigans Hauser was pulling. Just the idea that you’d gather data and then pass it up a hierarchy for analysis, and be told by your advisor what it meant…bizarre.

Man, was I lucky. I hope all of you who are in grad school are following these scandals, and seeing modeled how science should not operate — and are standing up for scientific integrity in your own labs. Be involved in every step of an experiment, collaborate and share ideas, question authority. It’s the only way to do good science.