Gullible Skeptics

A friend of mine wrote this here. I was wondering what people on the forum think about it.

Quote:

There are two equal and opposite errors that take up way too much of people's time: gullibility and skepticism. I have friends who have a tendency to be dismissive of all things "spiritual", and not without reason, as exemplified by this image: On the other hand, I have friends who say they can see "auras", and Mrs Wonders is an expert in various more-or-less deadly martial arts whose ontological language is--if taken literally--is not consistent with a great deal of what we know about physical reality. And I myself have witnessed quite remarkable things. For example, as part of an improv theatre workshop a group of ten or twelve people stood in a circle with gaps between us that were wide enough for someone to walk through, while one person went out of the room. We then decided that between two people there was a "doorway" into the circle, and elsewhere there were walls. We all tried to stand as neutrally as possible while remembering our respective roles. The person who had left was brought back into the room by the workshop leader and told to find the door. The first guy got it right on the first try, the second person on the second. Then we ran out of time, but the leader assured us that this was typical performance, which is credible, because they'd hardly run the exercise if it took the average person five or six tries to find the "door", which is what you'd expect on average. The game was set up to allow only three tries, which would predict on average only a quarter of the participants would find the way in. There are various ways of describing this. One is to say something is complete gibberish, like, "We are spiritually atuned to the invisible fields of energy that emanate from our anahata." Another is to say: "That didn't really happen." The first is gullibility, which is taking folk ontologies literally. An ontology is a belief about what exists. A folk ontology is what people come up with on the fly as a convenient, lazy, and usually incorrect explanation for an observed phenomenon. The second is skepticism, which I define as denial of phenomenon, but which often happens for a surprisingly gullible reason. The impulse to each is understandable. We're used to a world were "What you see is what is there." So when someone behaves as if they can "see" a doorway that exists only in the minds of a group of people, we jump to the false assumption that there is something simple going on, like an emanation of "energy"--a folk ontology--which is nonsense. And because the most popular explanation is nonsense--and a hugely expensive and dangerous form of nonsense at that--there are people who are understandably apt to deny the phenomenon as a way of sweeping it all away. This is especially appealing because--although it will come as shock to some--people have been known to lie and fake this sort of unusual ability. That said, we know the literal explanations, the folk ontologies, are nonsense because we are stupidly good at detecting energy of all kinds, but we can't detect this supposed "energy field" by any means whatsoever, and seriously: we're really good at detecting energy fields. A fair bit of my pure physics career was spent detecting neutrinos, which are fantastically difficult to convert into something we can sense with mundane instruments. There are roughly a million neutrinos passing through an area the size of your thumbnail every second, but only one or two neutrinos will interact with your body in your entire lifetime. Even so, the existence of neutrinos was inferred in the 1930s and they were directly detected in the 1950s. Most neutrino detectors are huge: mega-grams of water or similar, and buried deep underground. A few--including one I designed as part of the San Onofre neutrino oscillation experiment--are just a hundred kilograms or so. My work on San Onofre was sometimes made difficult by electrical interference that was eventually traced to an adjacent lab, where the LIGO collaboration was using powerful lasers to perfect their gravity wave detector, which has now been operation for over a decade and has detected something even more subtle than neutrinos: elastic deformations of the space-time continuum that are so tiny they displace the detector elements by less than the diameter of a proton, which is about a millionth of a nanometer. So when we go looking for the supposed "energy field" that is used to describe many subtle perceptual phenomena, and we don't find it at anything like the magnitude that would be required to alter the activation in synaptic connections either in sensory nerves or in the brain itself, we can say with some confidence that it does not exist. "Proving" negatives is one of the easiest things to do, and a great deal of science is based on it. The logic is always the same: "If X exists, it will necessarily produce Y as a consequence. We do not see Y, therefore X does not exist." There's always wiggle room--and some people have made entire careers out of wiggling--but people without a pecuniary interest in selling ******** are rarely willing to buy it. Ergo, any claim whatsoever by anyone that there is any kind of "energy field" responsible for anything unusual around the human body or senses is nonsense because it requires the field to be strong enough to affect our synapses, which require easily detectable amounts of energy to trigger, and which triggering happens via perfectly ordinary electro-magnetic interactions. Any such energy thingy cannot at the same time be so weak as to avoid capture by a bevy of scientists armed with detectors that can catch phenomena that deposit a fraction of an electron-volt in the apparatus. But: this does not mean the phenomena don't occur, which is the skeptic's error. Human beings are incredibly complex systems, and our senses are subtle and multi-dimensional. We are highly evolved to detect the tiniest deviations of posture and muscle tone and more... if we open our minds to them. And some people are no-doubt more sensitive than average, or just sensitive to different things. The problem with skeptics, in fact, is that they are too gullible. They take the folk ontologies of the gullible as literally as the gullible do themselves. This is a general problem: my friend Ray has an education in religious studies and points out that critics of religion often take scriptures as literally as the most fundamental of fundamentalists, ignoring all the more challenging metaphorical interpretations. In a non-religious context, consider James Randi's examination of "dowsing" for water, which involved asking dowsers to wander around the upper story of a warehouse where there was a vat of water in the lower story, and see if they could detect it. The problem with this is it assumes that dower's accounts and understanding of what they are doing is accurate, and we have no reason at all to believe that. That is: we don't have any reason whatsoever to believe that they have any especial sensitivity to water. None. What we know is they claim to be able to tell people where to drill wells. Why would that have anything to do with a sensitivity to water? Hydraulic engineers tell people where to drill wells all the time, and no one things, "Ah, they must have a special sensitivity to water." In my work as a scientific consultant I often meet with prospective clients who think their problem is that they need a particular bit of technology: a device, an algorithm, a thing. They think this because they've conceptualized their problem in a particular way. The consultant's job in this case is to talk them through the background and figure out what problem they actually have. In maybe half the cases it's not related at all to what they initially presented with. Recognizing you have a problem doesn't mean you know what the best direction is to go for a solution: figuring that out is part of the consultant's job, and this is generally true. We go to doctors not just for treatment, but for diagnosis. Likewise, being able to do something does not imply you know how you're doing it. A tennis player is not the best person to talk to about materials science, even though materials science is integral to what tennis players do, from the court surface to the ball, the racket, the shoes, the whole deal. Most lay people have a variety of folk beliefs about how they do what they do that don't stand up to systematic scrutiny. I probably do myself, although practically by definition I've got no idea what they are. This doesn't mean they can't do the things they have erroneous explanations for, though. So assuming that dowsers have an ability to detect water is unjustified, no matter what they themselves think or say. Put them out in a real landscape, full of subtle cues as to what's going on underneath, and see if they beat a professional hydrologist. That, and that alone, will test the phenomenon. Anything else tests the explanation for the phenomenon, which we know from the outset is probably nonsense, because almost all folk ontologies are. Taking folk ontologies literally is a mistake, and it's a mistake that is too often shared by both the gullible and the skeptics. Instead: be a consultant. Be an explorer.

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