Once you eliminate the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth (or a close approximation thereof). Almost A.C. Doyle

I have a friend who has often told me that as an atheist I rest too much on my preconceptions that God doesn’t exist for me to be open to evidence that his God does, in fact, exist.  He has told me that because of the problem of induction,  there is no way that I can “know” that God doesn’t exist, and that nothing in the scientific method can be used to support atheism.  Since no one can be justified, apparently, in drawing absolute answers from repeated observations, then it is silly to say that there is no God just because I have never experienced “Him.”

It’s the problem of induction, again.  I hesitate to discuss such a philosophical quandary among those who read this blog regularly; those who will likely school me on where my lack of formal philosophical training has failed me, but I have been thinking about the differences between science and religion as “ways of knowing.”

In order to maintain confidence that a causal relationship between natural phenomena has been established, one scientific method that I learned was to disprove a null hypothesis using statistical tools to analyze my data.  If the null hypothesis is not disproved, that means that the proposed hypothesis probably establishes a causal relationship and my investigation has yielded a good answer within a specified confidence interval. In other words, by following a scientific process, an investigator has come up with a good explanation for why something is so, or how something works.

This is only one of the methods that scientists use to discover how things work, one of the ways that people discover “how the world goes.”

Religion promises knowledge based on non-verifiable acceptance of authority, resignation to “mystery,” and the record of inscripturation.  Apologists for religion promise to provide “other ways of knowing” that aren’t limited to verifiable, positivistic methods. Religion, in general, tells people that we can know for certain that the supernatural exists and interacts in measurable ways with the natural.  Religion explains, in its “way,” the creation, miracles, interventions in personal lives and through catastrophic natural events.  The explanations are authoritative but not testable nor replicable through any reliable means.

There is a difference between the process of science and the nature of religion.  Science provides the “probable” answers, while religion promise certainty as long as the seeker will accept Mystery. ¹ Cosmologists have teased out most of the probable answers as to what happened following the Big Bang to within Planck Time and are still trying to determine how this universe came into being.  They don’t know absolutely if the current understanding of the process of expansion has been accurately described, but they have reason to acknowledge that it has been described very accurately using the process of inductive reasoning.

Inductive reasoning, as I understand it, is the process of analyzing subsets of the whole to make rational judgments of the nature of the whole.  For a common example of how inductive reasoning works, I will use political polling.  A sample of the population of likely voters is queried as to how they plan to vote in an upcoming election.  The larger the sample polled, the more likely the pollster is to obtain an accurate prediction of the eventual outcome.  Once the sample size exceeds a certain level, the returns of accuracy and confidence change little and it would be foolish and expensive and time-consuming to sample more than necessary.  A poll of all the people who will vote would be the most accurate way to predict an election, it would yield an “absolutely true” result, provided that none of those polled were deceptive or changed their minds.

The ideal sample size can be determine through some quick calculations, for example:

Determining Sample Size

((The trick to stats is designing the proper formula.  Once that has been done it is a simple matter of algebra.))

Nate Silver didn’t need to sample all of the voters in the 2008 election to predict that Obama would carry the electoral vote.  He merely needed to analyze the polls that sampled populations within the whole of the electorate.  The results he predicted were accurate to a specified confidence level, the famous “margin of error” of ±3 per cent.  There was a 5% chance that he could have predicted incorrectly.  In experimental design, a scientist will determine what margin of error will allow for the most probable and acceptable description of the causality of a natural phenomenon. Shorter:  Is this what caused that?  The  possible answers are not “yes” or “no.”  They are “probably” or “probably not,” or “that’s funny.”

The “problem of induction” is related to absolute knowledge.  If all knowledge is tentative, then any solution is as good as any other.  There is no certainty and there can be none, so my answer is as good as yours even if I haven’t done any serious investigation.  If you can’t state with a 0% margin of error that something is so, then you really have no useful knowledge. I can’t predict that the sun will rise tomorrow with absolute certainty, because I can’t see into the future.  I can confidently state that it will because I have an understanding that the sun doesn’t really rise, instead the earth rotates and creates an effective illusion that the sun is rising. For the Earth to stop rotating sometime in the middle of the night, events would be a bit more jarring due to the forces of momentum than I would care to deal with.  I wouldn’t then be too concerned that my prediction was wrong.

The “problem of induction” has been misused to claim that since there is no way to “know” that there is no God then God is likely to exist even if there is no direct nor indirect evidence of such an entity.  Not by any professional philosophers has this been done, mind you, but by friends of mine who think that they have stumbled onto something that “no atheist can answer.”

When it comes to the differences between religion as a “way of knowing” versus science as a way of understanding, religion offers something that science doesn’t.  Religion offers the comfort of absolute knowledge.  It offers the absolute answers, the answers that people want:  there is a creator that is watching after us and providing a way for us to experience a blissful afterlife.

The conflict between science and religion is in the means of acquiring knowledge.  Religious authority is often derived from personal revelations of prophets who have experienced something that to them is “real” and “true,” as true as the feeling of a burned hand in a fire. I have “felt” the presence of the Holy Spirit, but I have also “felt” the presence of the pagan Goddess in a drawing down of the moon. Both experiences were very emotional, uplifting, exciting and convincing. God’s presence was revealed to me, as was the Goddess’s. I should also note that both experiences were accompanied by prophecies from the respective supernatural agents.

Through these experiences, I found out how religious people “know” what they know. There could be no doubt, because the words came directly to me while I was experiencing the ecstasy. There was no induction needed, because through those experiences I had the Truth.  As Thomas Paine wrote in The Age of Reason:

It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication — after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

I could tell you the Truth of those prophecies, but you would have to take my word for it.

Religion and science are not compatible because of the illusory nature of “truth.”  We all have truths.  Religion claims to provide Truth.  Science is just a process that uses methods to get close to truth.  Religion provides other ways of knowing.  My question is in knowing what?  What does religion help us know, exactly?  And if induction can’t be used to prove an absolute, is that really a problem that religion can solve?

I don’t know.

1. Have you ever noticed that Catholic theologians pronounced the word “mystery” with the “M” capitalized? How do they do that?

“I tire of being asked what I think about something only to have the conversation derailed at the first ‘bump’ in my logic, at the first self-contradiction,” Pat says, of life in general.

My response: “I savor your contradictions. It is my desire to explore them with you and to experience the change that happens when you wrestle with them.”

“Yes, I think you get it. How refreshing.”

As you can see, Pat and I have a deeply meaningful relationship. Enviable, in fact. It is based on not knowing things that we want to know, and how to fix that. There is also an element of bringing unformed or poorly formed thoughts to the table, cutting them up like a fruit salad, and enjoying them. Our conversations are like a cold fruit salad on a dusty hot summer day. Yes, very, very refreshing.

But not everybody has the opportunity to interact that way. This is because all utterances are questionable, if you want them to be. All communications are subject to measurement against a standard that one can easily justify as “Teh Standard,” even though one has merely pulled it out of one orifice or another. In fact, there is a place where that kind of communication is favored, revered, honed and practiced, and imposed by force of will and repetition on those who do not come to the table oppositional in affect and armed with snark.

That place is known…as the blogosphere.

But, dear reader, that is a feature of the blogosphere that I generally don’t like, even though it can be amusing, it can be productive, and it can bring lots of page views to my hit-counter. I don’t like it even though I am as capable as the next person of doing damage with printed word, baiting the most wary of trolls, and turning and churning the most innocent of conversation until it becomes vile like ogre piss. I don’t like it because I find it inhumane. I find it not the way I want to interact, not the way I want to understand. It is bitter roots and rotten offal. It is not a refreshing fruit salad on a dusty, hot, summer day.

I want to understand you. I don’t want you to say things to me in a way that I am brought to the edge of understanding and left to wait there, as though it was my job to figure out what you meant. I want you to just tell me what you meant.

I want you to understand me. I don’t want you to find meaning that I did not intend and then use that unintended meaning to abuse either yourself or me.

I don’t want you to misunderstand me, willfully or otherwise, and then fetishize the false or manufactured meaning of that misunderstanding like it was some sort of trophy. Your misunderstanding of my words is not your shrunken head.

But it goes beyond that. I don’t want you to be thinking the same thing today that you were thinking last month. I want there to be a conflict between what you thought about some thing the first time we talked about it and what you think about it now. I want to be your Red Queen, so we can keep moving yet luxuriate under the same forbidden tree. I want you to giggle when I mix my metaphors like a Kitchen Aid in heat. I want to hear the full version of the story behind the allusion.

Expect me to contradict myself. Sometimes what I say now will contradict what I said when we first met. Sometimes the end of my sentence will contradict the beginning of my sentence. Be an interesting grownup. Be an interested grownup. Don’t be a winged monkey. Don’t make it your business to jump on my wrongness and howl like some four-winged, maned, scale-covered, drooling mythical creature from a Piers Anthony book.

My wrongness is a comfortable table for two at a coffee shop. Your wrongness is a long, lonely drive on a nice day.

I’ll describe these two worlds by informally looking at the example of fluoride in the diet of infants and children. Fluoride is added to drinking water in many American communities. Therefore, a baby that is fed on formula that is made with tap water gets a dose of Fluoride that is larger than otherwise likely. If the formula is mixed at home using special extra-fluoridated water (which is advertised as having a health benefit for the little ones) then an even larger amount of fluoride is added to the infant’s diet.

There is some evidence that too much fluoride cases a condition that affects primary teeth in a negative way. So some research has been done on this.

The conclusion of the scientific research is probably best described in a document provided by the American Dental Association, which indicates that you would not do harm to avoid giving fluoride to your infants prior to six months of age to avoid this condition, unless you are in an area where the water is not fluoridated. The current medical literature seems to indicate that other effects of fluoride are probably not anything to be concerned about.

But, there is another point of view. This other point of view claims that fluoridosis (the tooth condition of concern) is a very very bad thing to happen, that is occurs widely in children with fluoride in their diets, and, that fluoride in diets also causes brain damage, food intolerance, depression, other gut problems and autism. And more. In short, fluoride is a poison.

If you Google the right terms you will find mostly this second view. If you put the same search terms in Google Scholar, you get the other view, that fluoride may be a little bad in quantity for infants, but otherwise, it is not the end of the world and is mostly good.

The “fluoride is deadly” point of view emerges over time in a very straightforward process, which I’ll call the denialistic method. I call it that not because it necessarily leads to denailist conclusions, but because it is a method that was perfected by denialists (and conspiracy theorists).

Step 1: A winged monkey flies out of someone’s back side and screeches an idea. The idea may be plausible, it maybe insane. Doesn’t matter. It’s an unformed idea about something. So far, this is similar to (and sometimes identical to) the scientific methods, and in the scientific method it is called “observation.”

Step 2: Someone identifies a positive relationship that relates in some way to the winged-monkey idea. It does not have to be a valid or logical relationship. For instance, if the winged-monkey idea is that “Crohn’s disease causes autism,” then the positive relationship might simply be a study that finds that both Crohn’s disease and autism are increasing in incidence or reporting over recent decades. This would be instead of formulating and testing hypothesis, as in the scientific method.

Step 3: The winged-monkey idea is now formed into an accretive model, or glommed onto an existing accretive model, where it joins other winged-monkey ideas to be used as part of a Gish Gallop to convince anyone who is unsure of the the verity of the model, or to drown out and hopefully shut up anyone who has serious arguments against it.

It is interesting to see the same exact form of argument in denialist movements, race-based science, among creationists, and Kennedy conspiracy theorists. I used to get annoyed at the Kennedy conspiracy theorists. But they were all about 20 years older than me and are now mostly dead, so we don’t hear from them as much any more. But I now realize that if Kennedy conspiracies were still viable and vibrant, a lot of people who are otherwise involved in the modern white supremacist movements or antivax movements or other Bizarro World activities would instead be busy working on who shot the President in 1963, and maybe they would leave the rest of us alone.

Scientists, science communicators and skeptics need to understand where the Bizarro World ideas come from and how they develop. They really are not that different from science ideas. There are only a few real differences between the accumulation of information and development of theories in the rational world of science and in Bizarro World.

One difference is the accumulation of evidence. Both accumulate evidence, but in the real, scientific world, much of the evidence eventually gets thrown out, while in the Bizarro world it is never thrown out. Another difference is in what evidence is taken in to begin with. Another is in the placement of an immutable descriptive model or theory at the beginning of the process in Bizzaro World, as opposed to attempting to arrive at a descriptive theory at the end of a process as is done in science.

That there are races and that the “black” race is inferior, in a way that is genetic with virtually no environmental effects, is the immutable theory that starts the “research” process about race among the racist scientists in Bizarro World. That any given compound or chemical pushed on us by the government, such as fluoride placed in our water supply in order to contaminate our precious bodily fluids, causes any problem one may think of (or that may be suggested by the constant screeching of the winged monkeys) is part of the fluoride denialist theme song. Many of the science denialists put a literal interpretation of the Bible in front of any subsequent scientific investigation, such as related to evolution, or modern medicine.

These different Bizzaro World groups have historical links even if the modern practitioners do not necessarily always realize it. Race-based science and fluoride-panicked science deniers have common ancestry with each other, and with the Bible thumpers, and may even share some connections today. Look no further than the John Birch Society to find many of these links. I’ll bet there are white supremacists living in cabins in the Rockies (or for that matter, the Catskills) who refuse to drink municipal water when they roll into town for supplies. Which is okay. The problem is when they leave their cabins and get real, important jobs …

Given that, I thought I’d capture what I set out to do in my post. Mind you, all these strategies involve modeling critical thinking. I have no data on how effective modeling may be, but it’s the best idea I have right now and it’s fairly easy to do as a writer.

Use the Controversy
This is something that a lot of science writers do. Controversy is conflict is the basis of story. Stories order information, making it more accessible, and stories get remembered. I only hope I did it right.

I used the conflict between those who want us to believe that IQ testing differences between racial categories is indicative of some underlying, immutable, fundamental difference between races and those who find the concept abhorrent. I also used the conflict between a researcher who showed up to tell a bunch of science geeks and some scientists that they were incompetent to understand his field and all the people he stepped on. I used the first so that people would know they were dealing with competing claims that would have to be analyzed and the second to find a study that people would be interested in analyzing.

What I didn’t do: I didn’t generate controversy where none existed (except by writing one of the posts to which said researcher objected). I didn’t report on the controversy (they say this, but they say that). I didn’t suggest the researcher had any political reason to produce the results he did, because I don’t have any way of knowing his motivation.

Check the Tools
The first thing I noticed when the author recommended his paper was that he was using a tool (reaction time testing) that I had seen used for intrapersonal testing (looking at the effect of situational variables) but not interpersonal testing (looking at the effect of variables intrinsic to the person). So I read up on the tool.

It turns out that I was mostly correct. The majority of uses for the tool involve things like attentional priming and measures of distraction, although some trends in individual differences due to age and sex have been found. A good chunk of my post is giving the reader a summary of the background needed to understand the use of this tool, as well as resources for further understanding.

Check the Controls
Once I understood how the tool was used and what results it had produced in the past, I understood what variables affected it. I saw that age and sex had been controlled for and noted that in the post. I also noted some that could plausibly also vary with race and noted that they hadn’t been measured, much less controlled for.

Check the Claims
This was where things really fell apart and where I think much reporting of scientific findings falls apart. The researcher was making claims online about what his study proved that weren’t part of the Discussion section of the paper and weren’t supported by the citations in the paper. That didn’t mean they were wrong, but it did mean they were well worth investigating.

In the end, I contrasted the study’s findings with the researcher’s assertions by setting them next to each other. I presented the strongest support I could find in the literature for the leap being made by the researcher and explained where and why it still fell short of bridging the gap.

Untangle the Logic
This one came up in the discussion on my post. Someone asked me to evaluate the overall evidence for there being genetic differences between races that lead to differences in intelligence as measured by IQ tests. I think this person was looking for a simple summation.

Instead, they got an explanation of why it isn’t a simple question, as I broke the large hypothesis down into smaller hypotheses that would each, individually, need to be proved in order to prove the large one. I identified six, but there are almost certainly more. Making the steps explicit hopefully exposed some of the leaps of logic required by those who still say that “of course” these differences are real and genetic.

Identify the Biases
Also in the comments, someone noted that I was setting a high bar for evidence on this particular topic. I agreed, noting it wasn’t entirely an academic question, but I also pointed out that I was wary of accepting weak evidence because we’ve identified cognitive biases that make us more likely to believe the race/IQ hypothesis instead of the appropriate null hypothesis, which is that there is no connection.

We make a whole host of attributional errors on a regular basis. That is to say, we are much better at seeing how environment affects us than others and groups of which we’re a part than those we’re not. In each case, we’re more likely to look at “the other” and ascribe behavior to fundamental features of the other instead of to environmental factors. Race is one of the mostly highly “othering” factors in our society, and I pointed out that counteracting that bias (not even a one-race-good, other-race-bad bias) requires a great deal of skepticism.

Easter Eggs
All right, despite what I said above, this one doesn’t involve modeling critical thinking. There is a statement toward the end of the Discussion of the paper I blogged on that is pure assertion without experimental support. Nothing in the study addressed the question, and there was no citation.

I didn’t point it out. I don’t know how many people will read the paper in full, but those who do will have enough information after my post to have a little moment of discovery of their own when they read that. They will have figured out for themselves that something is wrong. I hope they find that as rewarding as I do and that it offers encouragement to continue thinking critically.

Okay, that’s it for my ideas. For those of you who read my guest post, were these strategies effectively modeled? And more importantly, did you identify the Easter egg statement in the original paper?

You’ve met the others, too. “My friend told me about an Oprah show where she talked to a writer who explained how the universe really works. I always knew it was a special place made just for me.”

There’s no polite way to say it, but it can be said simply. They’re both doing it wrong.

Any of us who present complicated or contentious information to the rest of the world–bloggers, podcasters, journalists, interviewees, teachers–have an opportunity to help people figure out how to interact with it. We can model critical thinking. We can tell others why we trust those we do. We can….

Well, there has to be a fair number of things we can do. If I knew what they all were, I wouldn’t have proposed this topic at ScienceOnline ’10.

C. Trust and Critical Thinking – Stephanie Zvan, PZ Myers, Desiree Schell, Greg Laden, Kirsten Sanford

Description: Lay audiences often lack the resources (access to studies, background knowledge of fields and methods) to evaluate the trustworthiness of scientific information as another scientist or a journalist might. Are there ways to usefully promote critical thinking about sources and presentation as we provide information? Can we teach them to navigate competing claims? And can we do it without promoting a distrust of science itself?

In addition to the crew who’ve signed on to the session, I expect we’ll get lots of good ideas from the session attendees. That’s the grand thing about an unconference. Well, that and the fact that we can start early and finish late, with input on the blogosphere even from people who can’t afford the time or travel to the event itself.

We’re dealing with a spectrum of trust, of course, among other things. See my examples at the top of the post. Trusting anyone to trusting no one. Credulity to cynicism. And not to indulge in reflexive centrism, but the healthiest point in this spectrum is somewhere between the two ends.

It’s easy to spot what’s wrong with each extreme. The credulous can’t account for fraud or for the fact that our brains are are only good at some kinds of impulsive (gut) decision-making. The documentation of cognitive biases and fallacies is not just a creative venture. The cynics can’t account for anyone who doesn’t do science for mercenary reasons (and how many people do?) or for the continuous advance of knowledge. We really do understand more about how the universe works than we ever have, even if we have much, much more to learn.

The problem in getting to that healthy point is two-fold. First off, we need to encourage the credulous how to identify the professionally sympathetic. We also need to help the cynical identify sources of information that they can trust. However, we also need to do this without swinging the pendulum too far and making cynics of the credulous and vice versa.

That may sound like two problems, but it isn’t. It’s teaching people how to sort information and sources. We can still cause a broad swing, nonetheless, if we’re not careful. Finding out that the positive evidence for parapsychology was mostly based on bad research design and not reporting negative results certainly made me cynical for a time, although it mostly now gives me ideas on what to look for in good research design.

The second part of the problem is that, barring severe brain dysfunction, neither the cynics nor the credulous really exist. The spectrum isn’t a spectrum but a rugged terrain. Those people who don’t trust scientists believe the people who tell them where the conflicts of interest arise and those who poke holes in (or near) methodology. The one who trusts all of Oprah’s guests is deeply suspicious of pronouncements from faceless governments, universities and corporations.

Whether we’re right or wrong on a particular topic, we’re all partly credulous and partly skeptical. There is too much information required to make reasonable decisions in modern life for us evaluate it all. Instead, we trust some sources and distrust others and trust still others only on some subjects. We accept some evidence as valid and reject some as flawed or irrelevant. We decide when consensus has been reached among the experts who “count.” And often, we do all that without examining how or why, even if we think of ourselves as skeptics.

Does that mean we’re doing it all wrong or that it’s impossible to do it right? No, or we’d live in the postmodern nightmare my stock cynic at the top of this posts thinks we’re in. It does mean there’s plenty of work to be done, because the problem isn’t a simple one of teaching people how much to believe, but teaching them how to figure out what to believe, instead of basing their decisions on who is saying the things they want to hear or the things that get their attention. It isn’t even necessarily the case that credulity or cynicism aren’t occasionally called for.

So, skeptical and scientific interwebs, share your tricks. What do you do to promote critical thinking? How do you help others figure out who to trust when they aren’t experts in the field? And maybe more importantly, help us learn from an even wider group. What have people done to help you understand what you can trust and what you can’t?

We’re weird about a lot of things, but we’re particularly weird about fear. We’re weird about what we fear and how we react to fear. Phobias are clear examples of irrational human fears, but they’re hardly unique, just extreme.

Security guru Bruce Schneier has written an excellent, extensive essay on the ways in which people screw up fear and their reactions to it. (One caveat: Don’t get too caught up in the evolutionary psychology. It makes for great just-so stories and mnemonics, but it’s untestable speculation.) In particular, he focuses on the trade-offs we make in order to feel secure.

There are several specific aspects of the security trade-off that can go wrong. For example:

1. The severity of the risk.
2. The probability of the risk.
3. The magnitude of the costs.
4. How effective the countermeasure is at mitigating the risk.
5. How well disparate risks and costs can be compared.

The more your perception diverges from reality in any of these five aspects, the more your perceived trade-off won’t match the actual trade-off. If you think that the risk is greater than it really is, you’re going to overspend on mitigating that risk. If you think the risk is real but only affects other people–for whatever reason–you’re going to underspend. If you overestimate the costs of a countermeasure, you’re less likely to apply it when you should, and if you overestimate how effective a countermeasure is, you’re more likely to apply it when you shouldn’t. If you incorrectly evaluate the trade-off, you won’t accurately balance the costs and benefits.

A lot of this can be chalked up to simple ignorance. If you think the murder rate in your town is one-tenth of what it really is, for example, then you’re going to make bad security trade-offs. But I’m more interested in divergences between perception and reality that can’t be explained that easily. Why is it that, even if someone knows that automobiles kill 40,000 people each year in the U.S. alone, and airplanes kill only hundreds worldwide, he is more afraid of airplanes than automobiles? Why is it that, when food poisoning kills 5,000 people every year and 9/11 terrorists killed 2,973 people in one non-repeated incident, we are spending tens of billions of dollars per year (not even counting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) on terrorism defense while the entire budget for the Food and Drug Administration in 2007 is only $1.9 billion?

Much of the essay is devoted to the factors that disproportionately enhance our perceptions of risk, such as novelty, whether a risk is chosen or forced, and the detail with which a risk is described. None of these, of course, affect the actual degree of risk involved, but they all affect our perception of it.

Knowing that we have these biases should allow us a respite from fear. Discovering that our fears are irrational should provide us the ideal solution for that security trade-off: diminished fear at no cost to us. But what happens in real life? I got to find out this week.

Princeton, Minnesota, a good-sized small town just outside the Twin Cities metro area, experienced an event earlier this week. Three packages, consisting of glass bottles filled with an inert powder plus some wires, were found outside three public buildings. They were treated as potential bombs until analyzed, and the town was searched for more, with none found. The three packages were variously described as “suspicious” and as “incendiary devices” before it was determined what they were.

On the same day, five plastic bottles were found in ditches outside of town. They contained ingredients that produce gas when combined, such as vinegar and baking soda or Diet Coke and Mentos. Four of the bottles had ruptured from the gas.

Two young men have been arrested, although they haven’t yet been charged.

When Quiche Moraine’s Greg Laden reported the incident on his personal blog, he noted that the likelihood that these were anything other than an ill-conceived prank by local teenagers was very low. Teenagers are, after all, notoriously bad at predicting the outcomes of their “funny” ideas, and it was homecoming week in Princeton.

All of this is true and, one would think, reassuring for the residents of Princeton. After all, shouldn’t they prefer to treat this as a prank until they know there’s a reason to be afraid? Shouldn’t they want a reason to say, “Oh, yeah. Whew!”? Apparently not.

I actually go to Princeton.Look up your facts turns out they found 4 more.Totaling up to 7.This is not some homecoming prank.

I to live in Princeton and what happened here today is not some high school prank please get your facts straight..Princeton and Zimmerman are also the fallout centers in the event of a problem or threat at the Monticello nuclear plants…just a little to coincedential.

Those of you NOT in Princeton, your speculation tries to make our situation trivial. It wasn’t YOU that got the call to pick your children up at their (or other) schools because of suspicious packages found around town. It wasn’t you that had to explain to the kids why their school wasn’t safe on Wednesday, but that they had to go back on Thursday. It wasn’t you who’s entire security was shaken…so maybe you should get the facts straight. It is confirmed that one of the packages was an incendiary device…in other words, contained materials used to make a “fire bomb”. It is not confirmed whether there were “only” the three packages, or if four more were indeed found. HOWEVER, our small, tight-knit, community needs support & encouragement right now. Not a bunch of BS from those removed from the scene…

Interestingly enough, everyone in Princeton (or at least everyone who was following events online) seemed to resent the idea that they might not be in danger. Not only did they not take the opportunity to relax, the idea that they could just made them more angry, even though, in the end, there were no bombs and it was a pair of teenagers who were arrested, just as the odds would lead us to expect.

Does this mean that we’re doomed when we try to fight fear? I’m not sure it does. I think it’s more likely that we’re currently fighting fear the wrong way.

Take the classic childhood fear of monsters in the unseen places–under the bed, in the closet, in the dark. How are most of these fears treated? Do we tell children it’s natural to be afraid of the unknown, but that these things don’t need to stay unknown? Do we hold their hands while they open the doors and look under the bed?

No, or at least not often. Instead, we say, “Don’t be silly, honey. There are no monsters. Go to sleep.” And we do it at the same time that we’re teaching them that there are things in the world to be afraid of.

So now people have a choice when they’re afraid. They can be right, or they can be silly. Sometimes we even tell them outright that they were foolish to have been afraid. Given that choice, who wants to do the work required to evaluate unscary alternate explanations?

If we want people to become more rational, particularly about fear, we need to change what we’re telling them. We need to tell them that their fear is understandable even when it’s not justified by the circumstances. We need to stop saying that irrational equals stupid or silly, and we don’t need to do that just because it makes people resist our messages. We need to stop saying it because it isn’t true.

Irrational is human, and pretending it isn’t, expecting people to be anything else is…well, it’s as irrational as anything we’re trying to fight. When it comes right down to it, people are weird, us included.

The Shakers got what they wanted, as well. They lived their lives mostly segregated from the rest of the world. Segregated from each other, as well, since purity, to them, meant no sex.

As you can imagine, a sect without sex has something of a recruitment problem. The Shakers never grew beyond a few thousand members, and without being able to indoctrinate from birth, they’ve shrunk to somewhere fewer than a dozen members currently. They’ll die out soon. For all intents and purposes, they already have.

While the Shakers did have a disproportionate affect on U.S. music and design, that’s a topic for a different post, one on art and children perhaps. The more important point here is that they’re gone–and why.

One of the most amusing things about watching the Republican party turn into a purity movement over the last couple of decades, maybe the only amusing thing, was the realization that purity movements are, by definition, self-limiting. Not only do they define themselves by what they are not, but they’re rarely content with yesterday’s definition of pure. The Shakers escaped that, maybe because they valued equality so thoroughly, maybe because of where they started(!), but most groups that value purity above all else start to get competitive about it.

Generally, however, purity movements either abandon their quest for purity in favor of rewarding in-group status (see the treatment of recent Republican infidelity revelations) or they splinter into tinier sects, some still obsessed with purity, others offering various loopholes (see the Mormon polygamist groups).

None of these outcomes are anything I want to see for any group I’m involved with, so I twitch when I see someone trying to draw, for example, simple lines between what is and what is not feminism. And when I say twitch, I mean I tell y’all about it.

Most recently, I’ve been twitching about these big, overlapping groups of rationalists and critical thinkers who are out here fighting the good fight against various forms of irrationality. I was talking to Genie Scott on the radio in the midst of the accommodationism debate. I watched people recommend that anti-creationists withdraw from Bloggingheads because it had given insufficiently critical air time to creationists. And all too often, I see people dismiss naive, ignorant questions with the same contempt they expend on proselytizers and the peddlers of woo.

Are we turning into our own purity movement? It wouldn’t be difficult to do. We do, after all, value accuracy. There are places where, ethically, we need to draw hard, fast lines. And we have better evidence that we’re right than most of these other purity movements. It would be terribly easy to draw harder, faster lines, excluding those who don’t meet our standards for accurately portraying the most current evidence for…well, anything really.

In fact, the accommodationism debate seems to be working very hard to head that direction over a question of words. Yes, that’s right, words. Which ambiguous, context-dependent words are used to most accurately capture the weird, diverse, sometimes irrational and illogical way the mind works has become an issue of utmost importance. Descriptive words are becoming fighting words.

We can do that if we want to. No reason rationalism can’t have its own academic slapfights that mean nothing to the rest of the world. No reason we can’t splinter into tiny sects. No reason at all…except that it means losing sight of one of our major goals–education.

See, here’s the thing about education: it’s progressive. We start with the simple, the general, and build from there. Take reading. While significant numbers of children can easily learn to read using a whole-word method, the evidence has grown that the most sure way to teach almost all children to read is intensive work in phonics.

This means that we teach them that “a” sounds one way in “car” and a different way when an “e” is added to make “care.” This gives them the tools they need to decipher the vast majority of “a” sounds. What we don’t do is bring up words like “career” before they’ve got the basics down. In order to be accurate, the rule would have to be that a vowel sound is short when alone and long when followed by an “e” except when…or in the exceptional cases of…. But this just isn’t helpful for the new reader.

Rational thinking is progressive as well. It is most decidedly not something we’re born to. If it were, there’d be no need for all the outreach that we do. We would never have to teach the difference between anecdote and data. We would never have to caution against confirmation bias or uncritically accepting authority. We wouldn’t have to point out when our skeptical spokespeople are trading on their reputation for skepticism instead of in skepticism itself.

Even in those last cases, we counter fact with fact to show that the situation cannot be so simply stated. We don’t declare that those who overstate their own degree of critical thinking to have put themselves outside the realm of critical thinking or to be a danger to critical thinking in general. We simply point out that no one is perfectly rational about everything, label the situation as a prime example and move on with our common goals of increasing general levels of rationality and decreasing the harm that the hucksters can do.

Am I saying that we should never argue with the educators over their means? No, no more than I’m saying that each of us must always take the time to fully answer naivety (although this person could use some reading material if someone has links handy) or that those of us with multiple avenues to reach a broad public should never abandon one as annoyingly cumbersome.

I am saying that it’s a very big, irrational world out there, and that we should be wary of choosing our targets based on the fact that they will listen to the arguments we make. In many ways, our allies are the easiest people to argue with, just because they care about the same things we do. They are not, however, where the biggest gains in rationality are to be made. That comes from reaching out to the people who have several steps to take before they would even register on our rationality meters.

And there is our choice. Rationalists are a finite resource. So is the energy we can dedicate. We can spend it reaching out to the (often oblivious and sometimes annoying) general population, or we can turn it on each other until we are all cleansed of irrationality and imprecision. I know which requires the greatest work, and I know which one I’ll choose every time.

Let’s just say I’m not with the Shakers.

However, I haven’t been inclined to take the book terribly seriously. I’ve mocked Sheril and Chris for applying certain double standards to their communications and those of scientists and atheists. I’ve pulled together some prior objections to their message that the book doesn’t address and new objections to some of the points in the book. But I haven’t spoken to the book directly myself, and not because I don’t appreciate Chris and Sheril’s prior work or think they shouldn’t be taken seriously themselves.

The reason I haven’t addressed the book is because there’s been something nagging at me about it that I haven’t been able to put my finger on. There was a connection I wasn’t making. Then, while planning for a project meant to promote general skepticism, I finally got it. It shouldn’t have taken me that long.

The scope of Unscientific America is too narrow. There are problems in our collective understanding and acceptance of science, yes. However, these are the same problems we experience in many parts of our public life. Politicians have the same difficulties in engaging the public in their work as scientists. History experiences the same denialism and conspiracy-theory mongering that’s found in debates that should be purely scientific (and long settled). Media coverage of crime is as badly slanted toward the sensational, or more, as any scientific reporting. Our poor understanding of advertising claims is hardly limited to the pseudoscience of “natural” remedies.

No, the problem is much wider than that described in Sheril and Chris’s book. These are problems stemming from a general lack of the fundamentals of skepticism: curiosity and critical thinking. Unfortunately, that means the solutions they propose aren’t likely to help as much as one might hope.

Scientists can talk forever. They can do it eloquently. They can express their passion and the wonder they find in discovery. They can be funny and clever and humble. But a listener who isn’t prepared to engage with the material will, at best, walk away with a slightly better view of scientists and about two and a half facts with which they can impress those of their friends who are impressed by that sort of thing.

This won’t prepare them to deal with the next scientist they come across, who might be a chemist working in an oil refinery who doesn’t “believe in” anthropogenic global warming, or maybe an astronomer entranced by the majesty of “the heavens” who tells them that evolution can’t result in new species. It won’t give them the tools to determine whether that scientist is someone to be trusted on that subject. It will just make them feel better about taking someone else’s word for things that make their life more comfortable. That doesn’t help us. It doesn’t help them.

So what can we do? Ah, that is the question, isn’t it?

The answers to this won’t be easy. Skepticism isn’t easy. It requires concentrated effort in a society designed around distractions. It requires time and effort that anyone living at a subsistence level doesn’t have to spare. It requires habits of thought that have negative social consequences. The person who upsets the standard order is generally not popular.

However, the situation is far from hopeless. One of the better ongoing conversations at SkepchickCon this year was about how we lead people to skepticism. Masala Skeptic had some great suggestions about being a safe (non-mocking) place to bring questions that need a skeptical viewing, not having all the answers (being willing to say, “I don’t know either. Let’s find out.”) and not pushing too hard for agreement. Others threw around ideas about keeping schools from suppressing the innate curiosity of children. We talked about the need to reclaim the word “skeptic” from the denialists.

All of us came away from the convention invigorated by the reception we received and determined to do more to promote skepticism generally. None of us, however, think that the strategies and tactics for this will fit within a slim book. This will take broad and diverse effective behavior.

So while we’re all out here following our chosen paths, what else do you think people can do to promote skeptical thinking? And maybe more importantly, what are you doing?

Eventually in my moving on, I got to Facebook, where I discovered that two celebrity deaths is not enough. One friend was “weirded out by the three celebrity icons that have passed away recently… Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson.” Then there was ” Wow….I know these things seem to happen in threes, but wow.” and “Hopefully Ed McMahon was recent enough to fulfill the law of threes…” and “It happens in threes. It happens in threes.”

The idea even made the news.

Apparently, not everyone was in agreement that Ed McMahon was sufficient to round out this menage, however. A quick look at Twitter found Jeff Goldblum in the trending topics. Searching turned up a combination of Tweeters debunking and passing on the rumor that Goldblum had died…and plenty of references to the idea that these things happen in threes, an idea that may have contributed to the acceptance of the hoax. (A smaller stream of rumor followed a similar hoax regarding Harrison Ford.)

Let me just say this straight out. These things do not happen in threes, and it takes some weird ways of looking at the world to suggest that they do. Now, we’re wired to look at the world in some pretty weird ways, I admit, but we don’t have to stop there.

A quick current look at Wikipedia’s list of celebrity deaths for yesterday lists a dozen people. Admittedly, many of these celebrities are not anyone my circle of friends would have heard of, as they don’t follow Indian politics or Belgian pop music, but does that mean these people don’t count? How about the other three Americans on the list, two writers and a rock singer. Do they count?

Suppose we decide this “law” only applies somehow to people we’ve heard of (and no, I’m not going to try to figure out how this law knows to restrict itself to action within certain social groups). That favors a menage that includes McMahon. However, Wikipedia tells us that on the day McMahon died, Jerri Nielsen also died, making four instead of three.

But you’ve never heard of Jerri Nielsen, you say? Oh, yes, you have. She’s the doctor who treated herself for breast cancer while trapped at the South Pole over the winter. Her book was a bestseller, and her story inspired both a movie and an episode of House. In the last 10 years, she’s been much bigger news than McMahon and his sweepstakes promotions, even if her death got less attention. Still, we have to set her aside to have our threes.

It should be becoming obvious by now that the rule of threes is a tidy example of confirmation bias, or the fact that our brains are better at arranging, attending to and storing information that supports what we already think than data that contradicts our beliefs. I’m not talking about some form of intellectual dishonesty, but simply the fact that it takes us much less work to recognize something than it does to discover something new and figure out how it fits into the world.

It was, in fact, fascinating to watch how confirmation bias played out in the case of the Facebook friend who was weirded out. Someone suggested to her that David Carradine and Bea Arthur had also died recently. She responded by saying they were both part of the previous three. So I decided to see whether I could figure out who the third person was.

Looking at celebrities who died between Arthur and Carradine, I quickly came upon fantasy author David Eddings, whose death definitely made an impression on her. Aha! I had our three.

Then I found Dom DeLuise, who would have been as much a part of her childhood as he was of mine. DeLuise was Hollywood, so she probably meant him. But counting DeLuise because he was Hollywood means we really shouldn’t overlook Carole Cole, who also died between Arthur and Carradine.

Still, not being able to come up with an obvious three wasn’t the most fun part of my exercise. That was discovering that the two people she’d grouped in the “previous three” had died more than a month apart. Bea Arthur died April 25. David Carradine died June 3. That just wasn’t how she remembered it.

This doesn’t just happen to true believers, either. Even people who were arguing against the idea that things come in threes were compressing time once people had made associations between events. Two people thought McMahon died on Wednesday instead of Tuesday. Time compression in memory happens even among skeptics, which tells us how much work it is to fight confirmation bias.

Bad news happens in threes because we ignore the rest of the bad news. Bad news happens in threes because our memories elide the time in between us hearing about the deaths that shock us. Bad news happens in threes because we pay attention to the times when three things happen instead of two or four or eleven. But bad news doesn’t come in threes because these things always happen in close groups of exactly three like events, even when someone tells you they do.

So the next time you’re feeling weirded out because two bad things have already happened, deal with those instead of worrying about what’s coming next. Something will come, but it will come on its own schedule and may well be good rather than bad. No laws. No rules. Just life.