Miscellanea

I recently had a few opportunities on a plane to catch up on some reading and podcasts.  A few of the more interesting things I came across:

A bunch of interesting articles in The Economist for the past few weeks:

January 28-February 3, 2012:

"Saving Lives: Scattered Saviors" -- harnessing social media and mobile devices to deploy first aid faster than an ambulance can arrive (United Hatzalah in Israel believes it will be able to have first responders on the scene within 90 seconds).

"China's new tribes: Ant tribes and mortgage slaves" -- a new vocabulary in Mandarin describing emerging social groups in China.  (Reminds me of Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe.)

"Affinity fraud: Fleecing the flock" -- the rise in affinity fraud, especially religious affinity fraud, during the economic downturn, and why it works so effectively.  (Also see my blog post from 2008 and another on the same topic from the Secular Outpost in 2006.)  Briefly mentioned is the Baptist Foundation of Arizona affinity fraud, which victimized my step-grandfather by stealing most of his retirement savings.

"Visible-light communication: Tripping the light fantastic" -- an update on where we stand with Li-Fi (using LED lighting as a mechanism for data transmission).

February 4-10, 2012:

"Synaesthesia: Smells like Beethoven" -- A new study finds correlations between odors and sounds, even among people who are not synaesthetes.

"Scientific publishing: The price of information" -- On the boycott of Elsevier by scientists tired of excessive charges for journals, and the competition from arXiv and PLoS.

"Biomimetics: Not a scratch" -- lessons from the microstructure of scorpion armor for reducing wear rates on aircraft engines and helicopter rotors.

Podcasts:

Philosophy Bites interview with Alain de Botton on Atheism 2.0: de Botton, author of Religion for Atheists, argues that there are good and useful components of religion which can be secularized, and that it is as legitimate to borrow things we like from religion while discarding what we don't as it is to prefer different kinds of art and music.  (Also see the Token Skeptic interview with de Botton and watch his TED talk.)  I think his picture of religion, like that of Scott Atran (In Gods We Trust) and Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained) makes more sense than the way some atheists talk about it as though fundamentalist religion is the essence of religion, and should be discarded completely (which doesn't seem likely to happen as long as we live in social communities).

Rationally Speaking interview with Joseph Heath: Heath, author of Economics without Illusions: Debunking the Myths of Modern Capitalism (Canadian title: Filthy Lucre: Economics for People who Hate Capitalism, which the publishers decided wouldn't sell in the U.S.), talks about misunderstandings of economics on both the right and the left.  (Also see this BloggingHeads TV interview of Heath by Will Wilkinson, who writes: "The section on right-wing fallacies is largely on the money and a great challenge for rote libertarians and conservatives. The section of left-wing fallacies is terrific, and it would be terrific if more folks on the left were anywhere near as economically literate as Heath.")  Heath's "Rationally Speaking pick" also sounds fascinating, Janos Kornai's The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism, which explains the creative but ultimately futile ways that human beings tried to replace markets with planning and design.)

The Decline and (Probable) Fall of the Scientology Empire!

The title of this post is the title of my multi-book review article in the current issue of Skeptic magazine, which is primarily about last year's Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion by Janet Reitman and The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion by Hugh Urban.  It's a very long article for a book review in the magazine, running from pp. 18-27 with a couple of sidebars and a couple pages of footnotes. What I had in mind when I started writing it wasn't what I ended up with--my envisioned article would probably be more like a book that tells the story of Scientology's two wars with the Internet, which Reitman only devoted a few paragraphs to.  (If that never happens, the best place to find the information in question is in the writings of Village Voice editor Tony Ortega, who has done more than anyone to cover those topics.)  I also would have liked to have done a bit more analysis of Urban's book, which I think is a bit wishy-washy in places in the name of academic objectivity, and makes a few promises at the beginning that it fails to deliver on as though it were rushed to completion.  But I think it came out OK, and I recommend Reitman's book as the best and most up-to-date single overview of Scientology and its history, and Urban's for its coverage of Scientology's battles with the IRS for religious tax exemption and its contribution to explaining what Hubbard was up to when he created Scientology.  I think Hubbard died believing his own nonsense, because some Scientology doctrines literally became true for him--he was the one person in Scientology who really could dream things up and make them happen around him, through the efforts of his devotees.

I also hoped to devote a bit more space to what I allude to in my first footnote, referencing John Searle's The Construction of Social Reality, pp. 90-93 and 117-119, about how institutions can quickly collapse when collective agreement about social facts is undermined, as seems to be happening at an accelerating pace within the Church of Scientology.

(All posts on Scientology at this blog--65 so far since 2005--can be found here. An overview of my involvement in Scientology's battles with the Internet is in my 2006 "Scientology Sampler" post, which was updated with a 2009 post, "Scientology v. the Internet history lesson.")

UPDATE (26 January 2012): Tony Ortega, editor-in-chief at the Village Voice and prolific investigative journalist on the subject of Scientology, says very nice things about my article and Michael Shermer's associated article in Skeptic at his "Runnin' Scared" blog, where there are lots of comments.

This issue of Skeptic should be available in all Barnes & Noble stores beginning around the first of February.

Books Read in 2011

I picked up the pace a bit in 2011, with a little help from acquiring a Kindle in July...

Books read in 2011:

• David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
• Dan Ariely, The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic
• Kevin Behr, Gene Kim, and George Spafford, The Visible Ops Handbook: Implementing ITIL in 4 Practical and Auditable Steps
• John W. Creswell, Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches, Third Edition
• Gordon R. Dickson, The Alien Way 
• Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website
• John Duignan with Nicola Tallant, The Complex: An Insider Exposes the Covert World of the Church of Scientology
• Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong, Updated Edition 
•  Floyd J. Fowler, Jr., Survey Research Methods, 4th Edition
• Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin 
• Jefferson Hawkins, Counterfeit Dreams: One Man's Journey into and out of the World of Scientology
• Alan Haworth, Anti-Libertarianism: Markets, Philosophy and Myth
• Marc Headley, Blown for Good: Behind Scientology's Iron Curtain
• Gene Kim, Paul Love, and George Spafford, Visible Ops Security: Achieving Common Security and IT Operations in 4 Practical Steps
• Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
• Peter D. Kramer, Should You Leave?
• Lawrence M. Krauss, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science
• Patrick Lencioni, The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers (and their employees) 
• Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions
• Nancy Many, My Billion Year Contract: Memoir of a Former Scientologist 
• Robert McLuhan, Randi's Prize: What Sceptics Say About the Paranormal, Why They Are Wrong and Why It Matters
• Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal
• Delbert C. Miller and Neil J. Salkind, Handbook of Research Design & Social Measurement, 6th Edition
• Kevin Mitnick with William L. Simon, Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker 
• Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller
• Milton L. Mueller, Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance
• Ronald L. Numbers, Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion
• Judith Pintar and Steven Jay Lynn, Hypnosis: A Brief History
• Kevin Poulsen, Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground 
• Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion
• Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
• Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry 
• Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow, True Names
• Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
• David Schmidtz and Robert E. Goodin, Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility: For and Against 
• Amy Scobee, Scientology: Abuse at the Top
• Robert Sellers, Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole, and Oliver Reed
• Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers
• John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America 
• Jim Steinmeyer, The Last Greatest Magician in the World: Howard Thurston versus Houdini & the Battles of the American Wizards
• Donald Sturrock, Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl
• Nassim Nicolas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Second Edition)
• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 
• Hugh B. Urban, The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion

(Previously: 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005.)

Time and Newsweek magazine covers, U.S. vs. rest of world

This recent comparison has been making the rounds:

As have a few other recent examples:

But this has gone on for many years.  A few others from a few years back:

I suspect the weekly news magazines are simply basing their cover decisions on what sells in the U.S.  Sad.

Skeptics and Bayesian epistemology

A few prominent skeptics have been arguing that science and medicine should rely upon Bayesian epistemology.  Massimo Pigliucci, in his book Nonsense on Stilts, on the Rationally Speaking podcast, and in his column in the Skeptical Inquirer, has suggested that scientists should best proceed with a Bayesian approach to updating their beliefs.  Steven Novella and Kimball Atwood at the Science-Based Medicine blog (and at the Science-Based Medicine workshops at The Amazing Meeting) have similarly argued that what distinguishes Science-Based Medicine from Evidence-Based Medicine is the use of a Bayesian approach in accounting for the prior plausibility of theories is superior to simply relying upon the outcomes of randomized controlled trials to determine what's a reasonable medical treatment.  And, in the atheist community, Richard Carrier has argued for a Bayesian approach to history, and in particular for assessing claims of Christianity (though in the linked-to case, this turned out to be problematic and error-ridden).

It's worth observing that Bayesian epistemology has some serious unresolved problems, including among them the problem of prior probabilities and the problem of considering new evidence to have a probability of 1 [in simple conditionalization].  The former problem is that the prior assessment of the probability of a hypothesis plays a huge factor in the outcome of whether a hypothesis is accepted, and whether that prior probability is based on subjective probability, "gut feel," old evidence, or arbitrarily selected to be 0.5 can produce different outcomes and doesn't necessarily lead to concurrence even over a large amount of agreement on evidence. So, for example, Stephen Unwin has argued using Bayes' theorem for the existence of God (starting with a prior probability of 0.5), and there was a lengthy debate between William Jefferys and York Dobyns in the Journal of Scientific Exploration about what the Bayesian approach yields regarding the reality of psi which didn't yield agreement. The latter problem, of new evidence, is that a Bayesian approach considers new evidence to have a probability of 1, but evidence can itself be uncertain.

And there are other problems as well--a Bayesian approach to epistemology seems to give special privilege to classical logic, not properly account for old evidence [(or its reduction in probability due to new evidence)] or the introduction of new theories, and not be a proper standard for judgment of rational belief change of human beings for the same reason on-the-spot act utilitarian calculations aren't a proper standard for human moral decision making--it's not a method that is practically psychologically realizable.

The Bayesian approach has certainly been historically useful, as Desiree Schell's interview with Sharon Bertsch McGrane, author of The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy, demonstrates.  But before concluding that Bayesianism is the objective rational way for individuals or groups to determine what's true, it's worth taking a look at the problems philosophers have pointed out for making it the central thesis of epistemology.  (Also see John L. Pollock and Joseph Cruz, Contemporary Theories of Knowledge, 2nd edition, Rowman & Littlefield, 1999, which includes a critique of Bayesian epistemology.)

UPDATE (August 6, 2013): Just came across this paper by Brandon Fitelson (PDF) defending Bayesian epistemology against some of Pollock's critiques (in Pollock's Nomic Probability book, which I've read, and in his later Thinking About Acting, which I've not read).  A critique of how Bayesianism (and not really Bayesian epistemology in the sense defended by Fitelson) is being used by skeptics is here.

Rarely-used cliche on the Token Skeptic podcast

My favorite part of the Token Skeptic podcast #76's interview with Sara Mayhew and Jack Scanlan is 28:30-28:42, where Scanlan says "everyone hates pop songs."  That's a self-annihilating sentence along the lines of "No one goes there anymore; it's too crowded."

That reminds me of Saul Gorn's compendium, "Self-Annihilating Sentences: Saul Gorn's Compendium of Rarely Used Cliches," which I have in the original hardcopy but is now available online for everyone's enjoyment.

The origins of Screaming Trees?

Here's a famous photograph of pulp fiction author and Scientology creator L. Ron Hubbard holding a tomato plant connected to an E-Meter.  Hubbard claimed in 1968 that tomatoes would "scream when sliced," as detected by the E-Meter. [UPDATE: The photo appeared in "30 Dumb Inventions" on Life magazine's website, attributed to the Evening Standard of January 1, 1968, but the claims and the photo appear to be from 1959, see below.]

Hubbard was likely inspired by Cleve Backster, who had made similar claims based on connecting plants to a polygraph starting in 1966.  Backster published his claims in the Journal of Parapsychology in 1968, and his work was subsequently popularized in the 1973 book, The Secret Life of Plants.

I wonder, however, whether the inspiration for both of these crackpots came from a piece of fiction in the September 17, 1949 issue of The New Yorker--Roald Dahl's "The Sound Machine," which is reprinted in numerous short story collections, including his volume Someone Like You (1973). In this tale, a man named Klausner, obsessed with sounds beyond the ability of human beings to hear, builds a machine to convert higher pitches into human-audible sounds.  He discovers, to his horror, that plants and trees shriek with pain when cut.

Does anyone know of any documented references from Hubbard or Backster to Dahl?  Or is there another common ancestor I've missed?

My title includes a reference to the Seattle-area grunge band, Screaming Trees, whose Wikipedia entry doesn't comment on the origin of their name--but Dahl's story seems a likely inspiration there, too.

UPDATE (6 February 2013): It looks like the Hubbard photo pre-dates Backster, and was likely taken in 1959 or 1960!  It prompted a feature titled "PLANTS DO WORRY AND FEEL PAIN." in the December 18, 1959 Garden News.

UPDATE (10 February 2013): David Hambling's "The Secret Life of Plants" in the December 2012 issue of Fortean Times (p. 18) points out that Charles Darwin's 1880 The Power of Movement in Plants suggested that plants have something like a nervous system, and that Jagadish Chandra Bose published a 1907 paper on the electrophysiology of plants.  He puts Backster before Hubbard, making the same mistake of dating Hubbard's claims by the Life magazine photo caption.

Backster, by the way, was inspired by Bose's work.  He says that he started his work with plants on February 2, 1966, as reported in the introduction of his "Evidence of a Primary Perception in Plant Life," International Journal of Parapsychology, Vol. X, No. 4, Winter 1968, pp. 329-348.

UPDATE (21 October 2021): On a 1966 episode of the Joe Pyne Show, in discussion with Lewis Marvin, Pyne asserted that it has been scientifically proven that tomatoes scream when cut, likely referencing Backster.

UPDATE (5 December 2022): Not sure how I missed including the Jack Handy "Deep Thoughts" that goes: "If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason."

Scott Atran on violent extremism and sacred values

Chris Mooney has a very interesting interview with anthropologist Scott Atran on the Point of Inquiry podcast, in which Atran argues that terrorism is not the product of top-down, radical religious extremist organizations recruiting the poor and ignorant, but of groups of educated (and often educated in secular institutions) individuals who become disaffected, isolated, and radicalized.  Much U.S. counterterrorism and "homeland security" activity assumes the former and thus is attacking the wrong problem.

He also argues that reason and rationalism are the wrong tools for attacking religion, defends a view of religion as a natural by-product of the sorts of minds we've evolved to have (very similar to Pascal Boyer's account, which I think is largely correct), and throws in a few digs at the new atheists for making claims about religion that are contrary to empirical evidence.

Some of the commenters at the Point of Inquiry/Center for Inquiry forums site seem to be under the misapprehension that Atran is a post-modernist.  I don't see it--he's not making the argument that reason doesn't work to find out things about the world, he's making the argument that the tools of science and reason are human constructions that work well at finding things out about the world, but not so much for persuading people of things, or as the basis for long-term institutions for the sort of creatures we are.  Atran shows up in the comments to elaborate on his positions and respond to criticism.

My compliments to Chris Mooney for having consistently high-quality, interesting guests who are not the same voices we always hear at skeptical conferences.

Obama conspiracy theories debunked

Yesterday I received an email that contained yet another argument that Obama's birth certificate (the PDF'd scan of the "long form" certificate) was a fake, based on erroneous claims about the name of Kenya in 1961 and the name of the hospital which were already debunked at Snopes.com four months ago.  But this prompted me to see if there were any more advocates of wild claims about the birth certificate, and I came across Douglas Vogt's alleged analysis of the birth certificate and, more importantly, a very well-done, detailed debunking of that analysis by Kevin Davidson (known on his blog as "Dr. Conspiracy"), who has done a great job of responding to numerous Obama conspiracy claims.

Check out his "The Debunker's Guide to Obama Conspiracy Theories."

Vogt, the author of the analysis which Dr. Conspiracy debunks, is also an example of "crank magnetism"--he is the author of Reality Revealed: The Theory of Multidimensional Reality, a 1978 book which looks like a classic work of crackpottery.  Vogt bills himself as a "geologist and science philosopher" who:

has funded and directed three expeditions to the Sinai desert where he was the first person since Baruch (Jeremiah’s grandson) to discover the real Mount Sinai. He discovered all the altars that Moses describes in the Torah. In addition he was the first person since Moses to see the real Abraham’s altar also located at Mount Sinai and not in Jerusalem. He has discovered the code systems used by Moses when writing the surface story of the Torah, which enabled him to decode the Torah and other earlier books of the Hebrew Scriptures.

His book features:

The first information theory of existence. explains many of the hardest phenomena in the Universe such as: the causes of the ice ages, polar reversals, mass extinctions, gravity, light, pyramid energy, kirlian photography, psychic phenomena, and more!

So in addition to a self-proclaimed expert on typography, conspiracy theorist, and "birther," Vogt is apparently a creationist, pseudo-archaeologist, Bible code advocate, and promoter of a wide variety of pseudoscience claims.

Counterfeit Dreams

Jeff Hawkins was a Scientologist and member of the Sea Org from 1967 to 2005.  He was responsible for 1980s marketing campaigns that brought L. Ron Hubbard's book Dianetics back to the New York Times bestseller lists.  Beginning in 2008, he wrote a book-length series of blog posts about his experiences which has led to many further defections from the Church of Scientology. The blog posts have been edited into a hardback book, one of several by long-time high-ranking recent defectors (others include Nancy Many's My Billion-Year Contract, Marc Headley's Blown For Good, and Amy Scobee's Abuse at the Top).

I've read the first few chapters at his blog--it's quite well-written and the comments from others who have shared some of his experiences are fascinating.