What's the harm? Skeptics and scholars respond.

What's the harm? What does it hurt if I don't accept your principles of critical thinking and continue to accept weird thing x (some urban legend, piece of pseudoscience, New Age belief, or conspiracy theory) as true? 

This line is trotted whenever skeptics and lovers of science elucidate a culturally, though not scientifically, controversial fact like evolution, global warming, or the safety of vaccines. It is also used to thwart our bullish dismissal of dangerous nonsense, like holocaust denial, HIV denial, and the denial of the cancer-cigarette link, and silly fluff, like haunted houses, Bigfoot, astrology, and UFO abductions. I've been a skeptic for over eight years, but I have never had a rock solid response to "what's the harm." I usually just point to What's the Harm. This website chronicles examples of physical, psychological, and financial harm incurred by believers in weird things and is an invaluable resource if someone says something like "calling psychics doesn't harm anyone." The problem with over relying on this resource, however, is that it does not address what is the harm in having poor critical thinking skills and believing in weird things in general?"

While attempting to come up with a better rebuttal, I messaged the authors of many of my favorite books on science, critical thinking, and/or weird things. If anyone has a better answer to "what's the harm," I thought, it should be them. Despite not knowing me, they were very generous with their time and, upon my request, sent in thought provoking responses. I originally intended on placing their words throughout this article to fortify and strengthen my own points. Their points were so good, however, that I concluded I could add nothing of value to them. Instead, I am simply going to shut up and let these thinkers shed some light on this issue.

Dear Bill Nye the Science Guy, You don't understand philosophy.

Bill is a great guy, but severely mistaken about philosophy.

Dear Bill,

On one of your Big Think posts, you answered a question by a person called Mike about your thoughts concerning philosophy. Before I get to that, however, I want to say I am a big fan of your work. In my opinion, your ceaseless effort to make the world more scientifically literate, your environmental outreach, and tenure as the CEO of the Planetary Society are very admirable. I also love the respect and patience you show children (there is a reason why Bill Nye the Science Guy is still shown in schools) and think its awesome that you are willing to change your mind about GMO's. In my opinion, it takes a lot of chutzpah to admit when you are wrong. Given that you have the courage to reconsider your views, I decided to write you this letter. It contains commentary of your video and explains why I, a fellow skeptic, am troubled by your positions.

Skepticism in the classroom

Yesterday, I posted a quote from David Suzuki on my facebook group about science education failing to incorporate skepticism. This was shared widely and approvingly reposed by several highly followed pages.

If you are a science educator yourself, you probably responded to this quote by saying something like "that is easy for you to say. I have tried to teach critical thinking and it is very hard to find material that I could actually use in my classroom."

I take this complaint very seriously. It is difficult to find good critical thinking materials that are both interesting and can actually be applied in the real world. Another reasonable requirement is that these resources need to be very affordable or free. This is because, at least in the United States, good educators get paid just as poorly as bad educators. Even if they are phenomenal science teachers, they simply do not have the extra money available to buy a bunch of stuff. Fortunately for us, many skeptical educators have already anticipated your concerns and have gone through the trouble of creating free skeptical resources for the classroom. These booklets and videos investigate fascinating topics and are tailored for children and young adults who need a dose of critical thinking added to their school curriculum and can can be downloaded with the click of a button.

The first resource that you should check out is a series of short pamphlets/books created by the James Randi Education Foundation. All three of these guides are custom made with certain age groups in mind (one is for elementary, one for late middle school, and one for high school) and are about non-threatening topics like dowsing, ESP, and faeries (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer of Sherlock Holmes believed in them). The JREF has provided both student and teacher editions so that you have all the material you need to lead a class discussion.  

If this sounds interesting, please click here and download them.

 

The second resource that I recommend is Brian Dunning's movie, Here be Dragons. This movie is designed to be watched in one class period (it is 45 minutes) and covers very interesting material like conspiracy theories and homeopathy. Mr. Dunning does an excellent job of outlining logical fallacies and exposing many of the bunk that hucksters without being threatening. He also explains how certain features of science work, why people believe in weird things, and even provides an excellent reading list at the end for students who want to know more. 

 

If Mr. Dunning's movie sounds appealing, you can get it here for free. 

 

Third, I want you to check out this workshop on instituting skepticism in the classroom. It was conducted at TAM 9 (The Amazing Meeting, which is a skeptical conference held by the JREF each year) and was later posted on the web. It includes lots of goodies including advice for teachers and several activities that can easily be incorporated into a lesson plan. In one of the most interesting of these activities, your students will get to see how astrology fools our brains. This is a valuable because realizing you can be easily fooled is the first step to becoming a skeptic. 

 

If you want to see these resourced, they have been made available here. 

 

Finally, I want you to check out these lessons created by the Leonore Annenburg Institute for Civics. While the institute's name may not sound skeptical, their lessons are some of the best available. They teach everything from how to examine popular claims to how our biases lead is to distorted conclusions. Given the nature of their material, they could just as easily be included into a civics or history class.

 

If this sounds appealing to you, click here to get these lessons.  

Hopefully these free resources serve you well in your classroom. In my opinion, they are all excellent and (if I had one) I put my seal of approval on them. If you are teaching your child critical thinking at home and feel left out, keep paying attention to my blog because I will be posting a list of affordable children's books that teach skepticism very soon. In the meantime, I recommend you incorporating these lessons at home.

 

Spock vs. Critical thinking

He may be bad at reasoning, but Evil Spock has an amazing goatee.

Some of the most egregious misrepresentations of what it means to be rational come from my favorite fictional character, Star Trek's Mr. Spock. If you are not familiar with the literature on rationality, this is probably surprising to you. After all, Spock is portrayed to show close to no passion (except when he can no longer repress it) and he makes decisions based on cold, calculating logic. This is not, however, what it means to be a critical thinker.

As it has been pointed out by Eliezer Yudkowsky, Julia Galef (who is the first to use the following two examples), and Luke Muehlhauser, there is nothing rational about Spock's decision making process. For whatever reason, Gene Roddenberry wrote our Vulcan hero as someone who does not take other sentient being's emotion into account when he is deciding what to do. To see what I am talking about, examine this dialog between Spock and McCoy on the the episode Galileo Seven:

McCoy: "Well, Mr. Spock, [the aliens] didn’t stay frightened very long, did they?"
Spock: "A most illogical reaction. When we demonstrated our superior weapons, they should have fled."
McCoy: "You mean they should have respected us?"
Spock: "Of course!"
McCoy: "Mr. Spock, respect is a rational process. Did it ever occur to you that they might react emotionally, with anger?"
Spock: "Doctor, I’m not responsible for their unpredictability."
McCoy: "They were perfectly predictable, to anyone with feeling! You might as well admit it, Mr. Spock: your precious logic brought them down on us!"

The type of rationality that Spock is betraying here is known as epistemic rationality. This kind, also known as type 1 rationality, is our commitment to having as accurate a view of the world as we possibly can. If Spock were abiding by a commitment to know the world as it really is, then he would have been obligated to take into account all of the evidence about behavior even if it went against his preconceived notions of logic. By not doing so, he is being the very definition of delusional (having a sustained disregard of reality).

The other type of rationality that Spock has a hard time grasping is instrumental rationality (or type 2 rationality).  Unlike epistemic rationality, instrumental rationality is about applying your knowledge to a task and finding the most reliable and efficient way of completing it. For example, on the episode Charlie X, Spock loses in chess to Kirk and declares "Your illogical approach to chess does have its advantages on occasion, Captain." But Kirk's playing style is a textbook case of instrumental rationality. This is because, if Kirk's goal is to win at chess, his methods allow him to consistently accomplish what he desires.

Spock also goes against instrumental rationality when he downplays the importance of passion. While it is certainly true that passion can cloud one's judgement and lead to an overestimation of one's own prowess, it also motivates us to dream up and embrace many of our goals. For example, being passionate about the stars motivated Vincent van Gogh to paint and Galileo Galilei to turn his looking glass to the sky. This is what David Hume meant when he said "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions."

In closing, Spock has the wrong idea about rationality. Clear thinking is about abiding by two types of rationality. The first is having the most accurate map of the world possible, while the second is about reliably and effectively achieving your goals. This is very different than reasoning devoid of emotions or saying esoteric dictums about decision making.  If you want to learn the actual methods of critical thinking, stay tuned to this series. In the meantime, live long and prosper.

Red flags to beware of

Philosopher Harry Frankfurt begins his treatise, On Bullshit, with an observation about the amount of baloney out there and how we take for granted our ability to detect it.

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern. We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves.

I agree with this sentiment. While most people think that they can easily spot a con artist, few (at least in the United States) have highly calibrated baloney detectors. Like it or not, your neighbors and your loved ones have probably been snowed by at least a few charlatans. If you think I am exaggerating, please look at the alarmingly large number of people who are taken in by baseless occult and paranormal beliefs.

I, however, do not think the battle against nonsense is lost. Critical thinking can be learned and we can make our baloney detectors more highly calibrated. A great first step towards for anyone who is trying to become a better critical thinker is to learn the warning signs that usually accompany baloney. While spotting these red flags does not guarantee that a claim is false, they should make you skeptical of whatever is being sold or proposed.

1. Appeal to illegitimate authority. You can hardly turn on the tv without seeing an add with men in lab coats endorsing a male enhancement product. Likewise, almost every strange claim on the internet is seemingly backed by the late electrical engineer, Nikola Tesla. These appeals, however, are worthless. A product's soundness can only be judged by the supporting evidence, not by appealing to a man in a commercial in a lab coat or a figure in the history of science. If we do not know enough about the claim to say something intelligent, then the proper authority to consider is the consensus held by the contemporary, relevant experts.  
2. Appeal to political correctness. Many claims argue that you should accept them because it is the moral or or politically correct thing to do. For example, many have charged that it is immoral to accept the theory of evolution because it means that we are apes. It is irrelevant, however, how warm and fuzzy these ideas are. All that matters is if the preponderance of evidence supports them. If it does, then you are simply denying reality by dismissing them. It should be noted that it is equally wrong to accept a claim because it is politically incorrect or considered shocking.
3. Appeal to ancient wisdom. Whenever anyone appeals to the wisdom of ancient people in an effort to seal their claim off from scrutiny, be skeptical. Despite their deep desire to learn, the most advanced ancient people only knew a fraction of one percent of what we know today. Their knowledge about medicine, engineering, and astronomy was limited at best and they were completely oblivious to fields like virology. Even worse, they practiced things that we know to be a waste of time like astrology and feng shui. While an idea they proposed may be correct, they cannot be excused from a critical examination. 
4. Appeal to nature. Many proponents of alternative medicine try to promote their ideas by appealing to the fact that they are natural. They say things like "holistic medicine is better for you because it consists of all natural ingredients." The problem with this is that while there are many natural things that are good for you, there are just many that are harmful. Jellyfish neuro-toxins and botulism are both natural. So are poison ivy and e. coli. The only way to know if a natural remedy is good or bad for you is to examine the evidence and look at what the relevant medical experts have said about the issue.
5. Appeal to energy. One of the favored ideas of New Age proponents is using the word energy to describe some sort of supernatural force or entity. The problem with this is that, scientifically speaking, energy can be defined as "the ability of something to do work." If you substitute this definition into sentences about how energy somehow has something to do auras, ghosts, and telepathy, these claims become nonsensical or meaningless. Whenever someone uses energy in a way that bucks against this traditional usage, be skeptical. 
6. Forgetting the misses.  Many psychics want you to believe that they can talk to the dead because they can accurately predict many details about your life (an accurate prediction is called a hit). When they are trying to convince you, however, you need to also keep track of how many inaccurate predictions they made (misses). Since mankind is predisposed to want to believe, we tend to forget to do this and end up being stunned that a psychic could get twelve hits out of seventy probing guesses. When these are factored together, we need to ask ourselves "is this any better than if someone was just making educated guesses based on previous information and my physical appearance?" 
7. Shotgun method. This is a popular debate tactic employed by hucksters (the most notable being creationist Duane Gish). The shotgun method is used when one makes more claims than you could possibly ever refute in a given time period. When you fail to sufficiently address 30 claims in 30 minutes, the huckster states that their claim must be right because you have not word-for-word refuted them. Stacking baloney, however, does not make a claim true. Only solid evidence that is skeptically examined, not parlor debating tricks, can  support to a claim. If the huckster really wants their claims to be taken seriously, then they have to submit them for sustained scrutiny by experts.
8. Appeal to the absence of evidence. It is a favored tactic of hucksters to argue that the lack of evidence for their claim makes it more plausible. This is seen when UFO proponents hold up documents with big black lines through it or charge that the government is "covering it up." The problem with this is two-folds: First, it eliminates the ability for a claim to be tested because "the evidence is being covered up" can be used to get out of almost any objection. (testability is also a key property of science and lacking it makes a claim less plausible). Second, not having evidence gives you no positive reason to accept something. After all, if we had to accept claims with no evidence, we would have to believe in Santa Claus, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the invisible, undetectable dragon in Carl Sagan's garage, and Bertrand Russell's Teapot. Since this is absurd, the burden is on the believer to provide positive evidence.    
9. Appeal to the middle road. A typical line used by people who hold centrist positions is that they must be right because they are in the middle of two extremes. "Evangelical Christians and atheists are both fundamentalists. I, on the other hand, hold the moderate position of being spiritual." Being in "the center", however, does not automatically make something correct. (Keeping with our example,) if Christianity or atheism were shown to be very plausible, then the spiritualist would be wrong to hold their position because the evidence would go against it.
10. World salad. Whenever you hear words like quantum consciousness, poststructuralism, quantum entanglement, and hermeneutics used to defend some sort of anti-scientific or spiritual belief, your baloney detector should immediately go off. This is because postmodernist philosophers and proponents of Quantum Mysticism tend to use words like these to make their ideas sound more sophisticated. While this may sound impressive to the lay person, their use of these words is almost always nonsensical or semantically meaningless. They are doing nothing more than randomly inserting words into sentences to make them sound complicated. This is attested to by the Deepak Chopra generator and the postmodern generator. Both of these websites run on engines that randomly assemble words into sentences that are impressively sounding, but meaningless.  

This list is certainly incomplete, but it is an excellent starting point for those learning how to think critically. When you memorize these and other red flags, you will notice that your baloney detector will start to go off all the time.  If you are having a conversation with someone who is trying to convince you of a natural remedy or that one of Oprah's guests have psychic powers, pointing them out will help you explain to your family and friends why they should not waste their money and time on supporting hucksters.