Can you OD on woo?

This is an experiment. Take care, readers, you might experience symptoms of distress and nausea if you actually watch this video.

Wow. “Quantum”. “Vibrational frequencies”. “Higher planes”. “Vibratory medicine”. Attractive young lady waving her hands over people. Did you know Melissa Hocking has a double degree in…Science? Really, it’s true — check out the Quantum BioEnergetics website if you don’t believe me. It’s got testimonials.

Many clients, adolescent, adult and child, have reported healings from Cancers, Mental illnesses, Depression, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Physical injuries, a variety of Disabilities including Cerebral Palsy, ASD (Autism), and many other Serious Afflictions.

Notice that she doesn’t just cure serious afflictions — she cures Serious Afflictions, which are far more serious than the lower case kind.

Unfortunately, my audience tends to be a little bit skeptical of this sort of thing, so you may be feeling a little dissonance and dismay, and you may be disturbed about this kind of outrageous bunkum and the way it’s taking advantage of gullible, sick people. If you’re upset, here’s what I want you to do. Rest your hands lightly on your computer keyboard, and lean forward until your forehead just touches the screen. Wait there for a few minutes. I have waggled my fingers over my laptop while composing this blog entry, and the beneficent vibrations will be radiating out over the internet in the form of quantum soothing bubbles.

Do you feel a little better now?

Then send me money.

Reproduction in Ireland

It’s all very confusing, and I’m not quite sure how they managed all these years…all those Irish children must have been the product of some amusing and peculiar accidents. At least the quacks are profiting from the confusion — here, for instance, is a mysterious bottle of an over-the-counter “organic” menopause relief remedy.

i-d70fa497b2b7dd5d5dd2ef7c12e4d82e-menorelief.jpeg

It’s the limitation that is the stumper: “Do not use if pregnant.” Are there many women bumbling about in the pharmacy thinking that they need to be relieved of this problem of menopause?

And then there’s this headline, “I’d lost my baby then somehow fell pregnant thanks to acupuncture“. There are clear and unambiguous causes of pregnancy — “somehow” isn’t usually a word associated with the process — and, well, acupuncture isn’t any of them. Although I suppose it could be an insulting reference to her partner’s penis size.

A poll with two bad words in it

Those two wretched words are “faith” and “homeopathy”. Please go kill it. Kill it, then burn it, then piss on the ashes, then use the ashes to fertilize a field and grow a tall stand of grass, then burn that, and then use the field as a fecal lagoon where you toss the waste from raising pigs, which you turn into bacon, thereby salvaging something useful from it.

See? I can too be an optimistic dreamer.

Do you have faith in homeopathy?

Yes: it works 68%
No: it’s nonsense 26%
I’ve an open mind on it 5%

A virtuous intolerance

John Beddington, Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK government, has had enough and isn’t going to take it any more. He’s urging a more vigorous response to the creeping woo.

“We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of racism. We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of people who [are] anti-homosexuality… We are not—and I genuinely think we should think about how we do this—grossly intolerant of pseudo-science, the building up of what purports to be science by the cherry-picking of the facts and the failure to use scientific evidence and the failure to use scientific method.”

“One way is to be completely intolerant of this nonsense,” he said. “That we don’t kind of shrug it off. We don’t say: ‘oh, it’s the media’ or ‘oh they would say that wouldn’t they?’ I think we really need, as a scientific community—and this is a very important scientific community—to think about how we do it.”

Beddington said that he intends to take this agenda forward with his fellow chief scientists and also with the research councils. “I really believe that. . . we need to recognise that that is a pernicious influence, it is an increasingly pernicious influence and we need to be thinking about how we can actually deal with it.”

“I really would urge you to be grossly intolerant,” he said. “We should not tolerate what is potentially something that can seriously undermine our ability to address important problems.”

That is what we need: more activist scientists who point out the stupidity of our opposition. I know, Beddington will be taken to task by mealy-mouthed well-meaning apologists who’ll declare that direct conflict is bad and won’t persuade anyone, but I have to disagree — the constant backing off and making apologies for nonsense is what creates an environment in which lies can grow.

For a beautiful example, look at this article on the Huffington Post, AOL, and anti-vaccination movements. The HuffPo is still making excuses for defending the possibility of a vaccination/autism link, and is saying that the denialists have a reasonable position. Why, no they don’t: you might as well be arguing for a link between autism and anal probes by Martians in flying saucers. At this point, there’s no legitimate reason to refrain from accusing the HuffPo of peddling patent lies, and we need more people doing that.

There’s also a vast difference between being intolerant of people, which no one is advocating, and intolerant of bad ideas, which is expected of every scientist. We simply need to move that skeptical attitude out of the lab and into the wider sphere of public engagement.

Singularitarianism?

Ray Kurzweil is a genius. One of the greatest hucksters of the age. That’s the only way I can explain how his nonsense gets so much press and has such a following. Now he has the cover of Time magazine, and an article called 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal. It certainly couldn’t be taken seriously anywhere else; once again, Kurzweil wiggles his fingers and mumbles a few catchphrases and upchucks a remarkable prediction, that in 35 years (a number dredged out of his compendium of biased estimates), Man (one, a few, many? How? He doesn’t know) will finally achieve immortality (seems to me you’d need to wait a few years beyond that goal to know if it was true). Now we’ve even got a name for the Kurzweil delusion: Singularitarianism.

There’s room inside Singularitarianism for considerable diversity of opinion about what the Singularity means and when and how it will or won’t happen. But Singularitarians share a worldview. They think in terms of deep time, they believe in the power of technology to shape history, they have little interest in the conventional wisdom about anything, and they cannot believe you’re walking around living your life and watching TV as if the artificial-intelligence revolution were not about to erupt and change absolutely everything. They have no fear of sounding ridiculous; your ordinary citizen’s distaste for apparently absurd ideas is just an example of irrational bias, and Singularitarians have no truck with irrationality. When you enter their mind-space you pass through an extreme gradient in worldview, a hard ontological shear that separates Singularitarians from the common run of humanity. Expect turbulence.

Wow. Sounds just like the Raelians, or Hercolubians, or Scientologists, or any of the modern New Age pseudosciences that appropriate a bit of jargon and blow it up into a huge mythology. Nice hyperbole there, though. Too bad the whole movement is empty of evidence.

One of the things I do really despise about the Kurzweil approach is their dishonest management of critics, and Kurzweil is the master. He loves to tell everyone what’s wrong with his critics, but he doesn’t actually address the criticisms.

Take the question of whether computers can replicate the biochemical complexity of an organic brain. Kurzweil yields no ground there whatsoever. He does not see any fundamental difference between flesh and silicon that would prevent the latter from thinking. He defies biologists to come up with a neurological mechanism that could not be modeled or at least matched in power and flexibility by software running on a computer. He refuses to fall on his knees before the mystery of the human brain. “Generally speaking,” he says, “the core of a disagreement I’ll have with a critic is, they’ll say, Oh, Kurzweil is underestimating the complexity of reverse-engineering of the human brain or the complexity of biology. But I don’t believe I’m underestimating the challenge. I think they’re underestimating the power of exponential growth.”

This is wrong. For instance, I think reverse-engineering the general principles of a human brain might well be doable in a few or several decades, and I do suspect that we’ll be able to do things in ten years, 20 years, a century that I can’t even imagine. I don’t find Kurzweil silly because I’m blind to the power of exponential growth, but because:

  • Kurzweil hasn’t demonstrated that there is exponential growth at play here. I’ve read his absurd book, and his “data” is phony and fudged to fit his conclusion. He cheerfully makes stuff up or drops data that goes against his desires to invent these ridiculous charts.

  • I’m not claiming he underestimates the complexity of the brain, I’m saying he doesn’t understand biology, period. Handwaving is not enough — if he’s going to make fairly specific claims of “immortality in 35 years”, there had better be some understanding of the path that will be taken.

  • There is a vast difference between grasping a principle and implementing the specifics. If we understand how the brain works, if we can create a computer simulation that replicates and improves upon the function of our brain, that does not in any way imply that my identity and experiences can be translated into the digital realm. Again, Kurzweil doesn’t have even a hint of a path that can be taken to do that, so he has no basis for making the prediction.

  • Smooth curves that climb upward into infinity can exist in mathematics (although Kurzweil’s predictions don’t live in state of rigor that would justify calling them “mathematical”), but they don’t work in the real world. There are limits. We’ve been building better and more powerful power plants for aircraft for a century, but they haven’t gotten to a size and efficiency to allow me to fly off with a personal jetpack. I have no reason to expect that they will, either.

  • While I don’t doubt that science will advance rapidly, I also expect that the directions it takes will be unpredictable. Kurzweil confuses engineering, where you build something to fit a predetermined set of specifications, with science, in which you follow the evidence wherever it leads. Look at the so-called war on cancer: it isn’t won, no one expects that it will be, but what it has accomplished is to provide limited success in improving health and quality of life, extending survival times, and developing new tools for earlier diagnosis — that’s reality, and understanding reality is achieved incrementally, not by sudden surges in technology independent of human effort. It also generates unexpected spinoffs in deeper knowledge about cell cycles, signaling, gene regulation, etc. The problems get more interesting and diverse, and it’s awfully silly of one non-biologist in 2011 to try to predict what surprises will pop out.

  • Kurzweil is a typical technocrat with limited breadth of knowledge. Imagine what happens IF we actually converge on some kind of immortality. Who gets it? If it’s restricted, what makes Kurzweil think he, and not Senator Dumbbum who controls federal spending on health, or Tycoon Greedo the trillionaire, gets it? How would the world react if such a capability were available, and they (or their dying mother, or their sick child) don’t have access? What if it’s cheap and easy, and everyone gets it? Kurzweil is talking about a technology that would almost certainly destroy every human society on the planet, and he treats it as blithely as the prospect of getting new options for his cell phone. In case he hadn’t noticed, human sociology and politics shows no sign of being on an exponential trend towards greater wisdom. Yeah, “expect turbulence.”

  • He’s guilty of a very weird form of reductionism that considers a human life can be reduced to patterns in a computer. I have no stock in spiritualism or dualism, but we are very much a product of our crude and messy biology — we percieve the world through imprecise chemical reactions, our brains send signals by shuffling ions in salt water, our attitudes and reactions are shaped by chemicals secreted by glands in our guts. Replicating the lightning while ignoring the clouds and rain and pressure changes will not give you a copy of the storm. It will give you something different, which would be interesting still, but it’s not the same.

  • Kurzweil shows other signs of kookery. Two hundred pills a day? Weekly intravenous transfusions? Drinking alkalized water because he’s afraid of acidosis? The man is an intelligent engineer, but he’s also an obsessive crackpot.

Oh, well. I’ll make my own predictions. Magazines will continue to praise Kurzweil’s techno-religion in sporadic bursts, and followers will continue to gullibly accept what he says because it is what they wish would happen. Kurzweil will die while brain-uploading and immortality are still vague dreams; he will be frozen in liquid nitrogen, which will so thoroughly disrupt his cells that even if we discover how to cure whatever kills him, there will be no hope of recovering the mind and personality of Kurzweil from the scrambled chaos of his dead brain. 2045 will come, and those of us who are alive to see it, will look back and realize it is very, very different from what life was like in 2011, and also very different from what we expected life to be like. At some point, I expect artificial intelligences to be part of our culture, if we persist; they’ll work in radically different ways than human brains, and they will revolutionize society, but I have no way of guessing how. Ray Kurzweil will be forgotten, mostly, but records of the existence of a strange shaman of the circuitry from the late 20th and early 21st century will be tucked away in whatever the future databases are like, and people and machines will sometimes stumble across them and laugh or zotigrate and say, “How quaint and amusing!”, or whatever the equivalent in the frangitwidian language of the trans-entity circumsolar ansible network might be.

And that’ll be kinda cool. I wish I could live to see it.

Hercolubus or Red Planet

Hi, Ben!

Ben is my neighbor, and I think he’s on his way to being a good skeptic. He found this book at the library book sale and had to share it with me — although he had a hard time holding back the laughter as he tried to describe it, and now that I’ve read it, he’s right…it’s hilarious.

We are doomed, according to V.M. Rabolú. There is a giant planet called Hercolubus, or the Red Planet, which is going to collide with Earth and destroy the human race entirely. Rabolú is warning us, not that there’s much we can do about it.

How does he know this? He’s an astral traveler. You can trust him because he provides verifiable evidence to show that he actually has visited other planets. For instance, he’s been to Venus.

The Venusians have perfect bodies: a wide or broad forehead, blue eyes, straight nose, blond hair, and an astonishing intelligence. They are more or less between 1.3 and 1.4 meters (4’3″-4’6″ feet) tall. Nobody is taller or shorter. There are no potbellies and you do not see deformed people. Everybody has an angelic figure: there is perfection in men and women because it is a planet with an ascendant, superior Humanity. There are no monsters like those you can see here.

They wear a wide belt full of red, blue, and yellow buttons all around, which flash like a lighthouse. When in danger, they press a main button, which you can imagine is like a buckle we have on our belt. Just by pressing it, a circle of fire is formed which can destroy a bullet and everything that it catches around it.

How can they be perfect? They’re little runts with poor fashion sense.

Rabolú has also been to Mars.

Life on Mars is exactly the same as on Venus. There is freedom in everything. The Martians can move to any place on the planet, without needing papers or passports or anything like that, and without needing anyone’s permission. Wherever they may go, there is a place to sleep, eat, clothing to change themselves, in whatever place on Mars. Wherever they may be, they find everything they need, because there are no borders but complete freedom. It is exactly the same way on the other planets of our solar system.

Martians have stronger bodies than Venusians, visibly more vigorous, for they belong to the Ray of Force.

On Mars everybody wears a soldier’s univorm: shield, helmet and a suit of armor. All these war clothes are made out of a material similar to bronze. They stand out because they are warriors to the core, but not warriors in the sense that we would call it here. There are no wars among them or with the other planets. Their war is directed against evil, to defeat evil, not against one another.

There are apparently some small number of people who take this very seriously. Why, they even have a website! With a video explaining it all!


HERCOLUBUS : THE PLANET OF THE END OF THE WORLD
Uploaded by Alcioneassociation. – Up-to-the minute news videos.

Now you may be wondering…it’s all well and good that this wise interplanetary traveller is sharing his knowledge with us, but we’re about to be destroyed! At the end, he gives us his Formulas to disintegrate the Self and go out into the cosmos, just like him, and escape our destruction. Here’s all you have to do: lie down, recite these formulas 3 or 5 times verbally, and many more times mentally, and you will be translated:

Mantra LA RA S: this mantra is pronounced so that the sound of each syllable is prolonged:

Lllllaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaa (rolling the r).
Ssssssssssssssss (like a hiss).

Another mantra for unfolding within the astral body is: FARAON

FaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaRrrrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaa
Oooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn. (rolling the r)

If you have problems with this, the website has recordings of how to say the formulas properly. They also have a form so you can order your very own copy of the book. Get to work! You don’t have much time!

I am wondering exactly how many people are able to swallow this nonsense. There may not be many, but those few have got money — they’re mailing this silly book out for free, after all, which has got to add up. I’m not believing any of it, and I doubt that Ben is, either — at least, I haven’t heard any strange chanting from next door lately. Although, apparently, someone in Morris, Minnesota ordered this thing and gave it to our library, so there may be Hercolubians among us.

Naughty museum, bad, bad!

I previously mentioned that the Science Museum in London is peddling quackery — they have exhibits that purportedly present nonsense like homeopathy and acupuncture as reasonable potential alternative treatments for some people. Since then, the Science Museum strove pitifully to cover their butts with some excuses, excuses that fall flat. I’ve seen photographs of the exhibits, and they go beyond objective anthropological reportage to uncritical acceptance of woo and the presentation of anecdotes as validating evidence. They should be deeply, horribly embarrassed, and should be looking into the biases of the people who designed the exhibit.

It’s one thing to discuss cultural practices as part of the story of that culture; it’s yet another to use the excuse of myth or sociology to uncritically present bad methods as if they are scientifically valid. The reason we should go to a legitimate science museum is to see the evidence and learn about the scientific reasoning behind it. Discarding critical thinking and whitewashing quackery is the antithesis of a real museum; it does draw in crowds, I’m sure (see the Creation “Museum” for a beautiful example), but at the cost of your integrity and the respect of the scientific community.

Marianne Baker and Alex Davenport have a reply to the Science Museum. I hope they pay attention instead of scrabbling to make more excuses. I’ve been to the Science Museum, lovely place, lots of fine exhibits…I wouldn’t want to have to start referring to it with “museum” always in quotes, if you know what I mean.

Randi is putting a million dollars on the line

Homeopaths have another opportunity to get rich quick: all they have to do is show that it works, and Randi will give them a million dollars.

This is what Randi demands:

Randi issued a one-million-dollar challenge to the manufacturers of homeopathic products to prove their claims, and challenged major drug retailers like CVS, Rite-Aid, and Walgreens to stop tricking consumers into paying real money for fake medicine.

I noticed that my local grocery store is selling generic chain-labeled homeopathic “remedies” for colds and flu and other common ailments. Somebody is making a lot of money selling sugar pills.

There’s more in the LA Times.

Peter Goodgold is a scam artist

I had no idea that ions combined to produce fungi and bacteria in water — I guess spontaneous generation isn’t dead after all. That’s one of the claims of a con artist named Peter Goodgold who sells magic water ionizers that cure all illnesses…because, as he says, there is actually only one disease, acidosis. It’s complete nonsense as the video below explains.

His gadget can’t work, and has to be doing a lot of things to the water that he isn’t telling anyone about. How does he respond to the demonstration of his incompetence and dishonesty? Why, he threatens to sue and files complaints to get any rebuttal videos taken down. The creator of the expose explain his situation here:

So yes, if you can, mirror the video. I’ll just do what I can to promote it and make sure that Goodgold’s bluster just means many more people will see him exposed.

It’s in the Daily Mail, so I’m confident it got everything wrong

Actually, I know they got a lot wrong. The Mail reports that a study “proves” students believe everything they read on the internet. They cite some work done with the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus site, which they claim was created as part of a study to test student gullibility. This is wrong; that site has been available for years, and it’s a satire and humor site; look at the rest of zapatopi.net to see what I mean.

Also, I actually use the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus every semester, in the first lecture of our introductory biology course! After giving an overview of the scientific method and how to ask good scientific questions, I use it as an example: I show them the page, read a few excerpts, and ask them what they think…and always the majority of students are skeptical. The few who will grant it tentative plausibility always follow up with specific questions about the site and about where they can get additional information to confirm it.

Then we discuss how to validate scientific information, what we look for to trust a source, and further, I ask them to think more deeply about how, if the website passed a routine sniff test, we’d also go on to test unusual claims in nature. My experience has been that students are much more rational and practical about evaluating material on the web than we’d give them credit for (of course, there are also always a few students who still turn in papers with wacky web sites cited as sources — but they’re a minority).

And speaking of sources that rely on the gullibility of readers for credibility…the Daily Mail should not be casting aspersions. If you want to know everything you need to know about the Daily Mail, read this horrifying story.