Category Archives: Antiscience

Crackpottery, woo, superstition

Run for the Hills

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“Natural Preservatives in Toiletries” and “Essential Oils” are areas in which one can get a PhD — and are considered scientific disciplines — in the UK. At least, that’s according to the Advertising Standards Authority. I know next to nothing about the structure of bureaucracy across the pond, but the question why an advertising board gets to decide what is and isn’t science doesn’t pass the sniff test. I know that in the US, the Federal Trade Commission enforces truth in advertising, but it’s the Food and Drug Administration, and arguably science-backed body (rather than a bunch of Mad Men), that sanctions companies for misleading drug ads. If that’s not enough, it turns out you can get a Bachelor of Science degree in herbal and homeopathic medicine.

Official: PhD in ‘Essential Oils’ or ‘Natural Toiletries’ = ‘a Scientist’

I also find, via ZapperZ, that astrology is a science in India.

F*@&ing Bill O'Reilly — How Does He Work?

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Bill “God-of-the-Gaps” O’Reilly. Here’s a follow-on to his bewilderment on how tides work. As long as there is one thing that science can’t explain (or he doesn’t understand), all is well with his world. It’s amazing to me that this argument makes sense to him.

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Who Could it Hurt?

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I’ve got a post or two I could write up from what I experienced at ScienceOnline 2011, but for now, a link that was mentioned in one of the discussions.

Maria from Skepchick mentioned what’s the harm, which is a collection of incidents of people being harmed by uncritically accepting “alternative” medicine or antiscience. These beliefs are not benign. Logic is not usually effective in convincing someone who has made an illogical choice; I suppose e.g. a good rebuttal to the argument that such-and-such traditional mimbo-jumbo has been used for hundreds of years is that the dramatic lengthening of our lifespan has only occurred with the advent and adoption of modern medicine, and ask why that didn’t happen because of homeopathic acupuncture* (or whatever), but in case that doesn’t work, you can find actual instances of people being harmed by a particular practice.

Not all information is created equal. Some of it is correct. Some of it is incorrect. Some of it is carefully balanced. Some of it is heavily biased. Some of it is just plain crazy.

It is vital in the midst of this deluge that each of us be able to sort through all of this, keeping the useful information and discarding the rest. This requires the skill of critical thinking. Unfortunately, this is a skill that is often neglected in schools.

This site is designed to make a point about the danger of not thinking critically. Namely that you can easily be injured or killed by neglecting this important skill. We have collected the stories of over 670,000 people who have been injured or killed as a result of someone not thinking critically.

*which I practice. I have diluted it down to zero needles inserted into my back.

The Gospel According to Bruce

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I had an epiphany while was watching the movie Jaws recently: it occurred to me that the movie is an allegory for some of the science vs ideology political battling we have going on, especially if one looks at the "debate" surrounding anthropogenic global warming. It sounds weird, I know. But the really strange part is that the parable of the shark predated the AGW debate by about three decades, and that alone should be able to convince one of its divine truth.

Larry Vaughn is, quite simply, a denialist. As the Mayor of Amity Island, he's responsible for its well-being, and to him, this means primarily the economic well-being. As long as the people on the island are making money from the tourists, his job is secure. A shark attack is bad for business, so it simply cannot be allowed to be true. So the first death becomes a boating accident; all it takes is a small change in the coroner's report. Hey, we’ll just change the wording of this study’s conclusions

The story of the first attack has gotten out, so when the locals catch a shark, it is assumed that it’s the shark. When he’s presented with the opportunity to obtain actual evidence by cutting open the shark, he declines. But at least now it’s acknowledged there is (or was) a shark. Well, there is warming. But it’s natural! No reason to spend money on it.

When Hooper gets a shark tooth from Ben Gardner’s boat, it’s not enough that he has seen this — he can’t actually show the mayor the tooth, so at that point, the evidence doesn’t exist as far as Vaughn is concerned. He gets people to go in the water and downplays the shark attack with a reporter. Warming stopped in 1998!

 

*Bruce was the name given to all of the mechanical sharks from the movie. I am not sure if any of them taught Hegelian philosophy.

Uncommon Sense

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Pseudoscience, common sense, and the problem of scale

Fundamentally, this is a problem of scale. What is common sense? It is a body of knowledge derived from common experience. Even toddlers know that objects always fall down not up and objects that are out of sight still exist. These rudimentary scientific observations form the bedrock of common sense. But for something to be common sense, it must take place on a level we can appreciate with our senses. Simply put, common sense can only tell us about events that are common to human experience.

Buffalo Springfielded

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slacktivist: Climate change facts, for what that’s worth

This is a duty, telling the truth. It is the first duty we owe to the truth itself and to every neighbor we meet who is trapped in a lie. Facts matter.

But do not always expect facts to convince. Someone who has arrived at their current stance due to something other than facts will not likely be persuaded to budge from it due to the facts. Some small percentage, some few, are honestly misinformed, and for them facts and information will be persuasive and liberating. They will be grateful for the link. But for most the problem is not simply one of a lack of accurate information. For them, finding their way back to the truth will require retracing the steps that led them away from it — a path that had little to do with information or facts.

Regarding the facts of climate change — and also any other similarly oft-rejected set of facts that cannot reasonably be denied — the denialists can be grouped into three broad categories: 1. The honestly uninformed or misinformed; 2. The liars; and, 3. The deluded.

The facts presented on that NASA site will be persuasive to those who fall into the first category. For them, a clear presentation of accurate facts will be necessary and sufficient.

For those who fall in the latter two categories, a clear presentation of accurate facts will be necessary, but it will not be sufficient.

Simple Skulduggery

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I should probably just let all of this crap about the Conservapedia’s odius maltreatment of science, in the abuse of relativity go; in case you missed the addendum, drkyskull has an extensive debunking up at his new digs (he gets most of them, with one exception being the “clocks on the geoid” issue I tackled)

But I just can’t.

And it’s not because Schlafly’s blathering about the tenuous connection to moral relativism, when his argument for scientific relativism (his version of science being just as good as the “liberal” science) melts my irony meter. No, it was a footnote on that page that got my attention:

Contrary to the claims of Relativists, the GPS system has never been based on Relativity. The Time Service Department, U.S. Navy, observed that “the Global Positioning System (GPS) does not include the rigorous transformations between coordinate systems that Einstein’s general theory of relativity would seem to require” in part because “the effects of relativity, where they are different from the effects predicted by classical mechanics and electromagnetic theory, are too small to matter – less than one centimeter, for users on or near the earth.”

Time Service Department, U.S. Navy? Hey, that sorta sounds familiar!

(At one point I ran across a statement to the effect that this “GPS has never been based on Relativity” was endorsed by The Time Service Department, but I can’t find it now. No hits to Conservapedia show up in Google, so I assume they don’t crawl the site, but that means no cached pages). Time Service being the department at the US Naval Observatory, since that’s where the link to the paper leads; I’m not aware of there being some other Time Service department within the navy. If there is we’ll go clean their clock.

The paper in question (PDF) is by Henry F. Fliegel and Raymond S. DiEsposti of the Aerospace Corporation, and was presented at a Precise Time and Time Interval (PTTI) Conference; all that’s going on here is a web site hosting some conference proceedings. So in general, to say that Time Service “observed” this is way too strong of a statement. And I’ll go a step further. I’m not an official spokesman, so nothing I say has any kind of official weight or sanction, but I’ll step up just as close to the line as I can and say that I can’t see any circumstances where the Time Service Department would claim that relativity is not part of GPS, because it’s blatantly untrue! I’ll decipher the chicanery that’s going on here.

The statement is paraphrased from the abstract, and that’s apparently as far as anybody involved with this claptrap bothered to read. What is actually written is this

The Operational Control System (OCS) of the Global Positioning System (GPS) does not include the rigorous transformations between coordinate systems that Einstein’s general theory of relativity would seem to require

See what he did there? He omitted the first clause of the abstract, and made it sound like GPS doesn’t incorporate relativity. But what the paper is really saying is that the OCS doesn’t incorporate relativity. Why? Because it’s incorporated in the satellites! If you read the paper, or any of the many, many, many descriptions of GPS, you’ll see that the kinematic and gravitational time dilation effects are compensated for.

[E]ach GPS space vehicle (SV) clock is offset from its nominal rate by about -4.45×10^-10 (= -38 microseconds per day) to allow for the relativistic offsets between the differences between the SV and the ground. Of this -38 microseconds per day, about -45 are due to the gravitational potential difference between the SV at its mean distance and the earth’s surface, and +7 to the mean SV speed, which is about 3.87 km/sec.

This intellectual dishonesty is, unfortunately, par for the course for this strain of crackpot.

Thou Shalt Not Dilate Thy Time

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For a long time I’ve thought that for all the anti-relativity crackpots there are, at least they are not driven by a religious ideology, thus sparing us the kind of battles that have to be fought to get evolution taught.

That’s apparently not the case anymore, though relativity still isn’t generally (or specially) taught in high school anyway, so school-board nonsense is avoided.

Conservapedia has an entry entitled Counterexamples to Relativity

The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.[1]

…

[1] See, e.g., historian Paul Johnson’s book about the 20th century, and the article written by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe as allegedly assisted by Barack Obama. Virtually no one who is taught and believes relativity continues to read the Bible, a book that outsells New York Times bestsellers by a hundred-fold.

I know that the religious right has a propensity for being anti-science, but I though at least they liked GPS. The maps and/or navigating algorithms may be occasionally wonky, but GPS works.

The list of “counterexamples” is interesting, and while I haven’t had time to follow up on all of them, there are a few head-scratchers as to why they should purportedly lead to relativity being wrong, and a few jaw-droppers, like

The inability of the theory to lead to other insights, contrary to every verified theory of physics.

That’s a serious case of denial (or should I say, bearing false witness). Relativity hasn’t led to other insights? It’s such a clue-deprived statement; it’s hard to respond to such a steaming load of stupid.

Several are trivially debunked, like the twins paradox objection, and the last one,

Relativity predicted that clocks at the Earth’s equator would be slower than clocks at the North Pole, due to different velocities; in fact, all clocks at sea level measure time at the same rate, and Relativists made new assumptions about the Earth’s shape to justify this contradiction of the theory.

Eisntein made this prediction in his 1905 paper [1], i.e. before he came up with general relativity. The oblate distortion of the earth changes the gravitational time dilation so that it is equal in magnitude to the kinematic term, but with an opposite sign. The shape of the earth is not an assumption, people measure it.

I would think this all a joke but for Poe’s law. These people haven’t a clue and are fiercely proud of it, which compels me to quote myself: I have never understood the phenomenon of wearing one’s ignorance as a badge of honor.

[1] Update: In the paper (On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies) he specifically states that it holds for a rigid sphere.

The stupid, it burns.

Update II: Takedown at Skulls in the Stars

Update III: more from me on the subject