Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

I've mentioned Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality before. It is a Harry Potter fanfiction written by Eliezer Yudkowsky. The central premise of the work is that Harry instead of having abusive step-parents has loving step-parents and his step-father is a scientist. Young Harry grows up learning all about the scientific method, critical thinking, and cognitive biases. HPMR does have its positives and negatives. Overall it is hilarious but there are times when Harry is didactic and Yudkowsky has clear difficulty in making his characters sound like eleven year olds. But overall, it is worth reading. I am recommending the fiction now for two reasons. The fiction has recently become the most reviewed fanfiction on fanfiction.net. Second, for the last Vericon masquerade a friend and I cosplayed as the versions of Harry and Hermione from HPMR. Pictures can be found at her blog. Note that the costumes were not made entierly by us. The badges were made by Ellen Dimiduk who does excellent costuming work. Now, Yudkowksy has a policy that people who make cool artwork about the story get cameos in the story. So the latest chapter of HPMR mentions two Hogwarts students, Katarina and Joshua, who helped make costumes for Hogwarts students. So of course people need to go read it now since I'm a character! So if you aren't reading it yet, go and read.

Newest Skeptics Circle

Over at the Digital Cuttlefish there's a new Skeptics Circle up. It has a lot of good posts. You can tell that it is worth reading because it includes my recent post here on skepticism and the scientific method. So go check it out.

The Skeptical Movement, Science and Naïve Popperism

Members of the modern skeptical movement frequently emphasize their use of the scientific method. Moreover, when discussing the scientific method and whether a given claim is scientific, members of the skeptical movement frequently emphasize falsifiability and experimentation. Both of these tendencies are problematic.

The organized skeptical movement has done a very good job over the last 30 years promoting skepticism and critical thinking. The movement has helped people understand the deep problems with many superstitions and pseudosciences. However, the skeptical movement’s characterizations both of how the movement functions in regard to science and how science functions are inaccurate. Moreover, the movement tends to exaggerate the degree to which falsifiability matters in science.

Let us first examine the claim that the skeptical movement uses the scientific method. No matter how one characterizes science and the scientific method, a central part of the method is experimentation and observation. However, the vast majority of skeptics will not engage in direct experimentation or observation of data nor in fact should they. For example, in an earlier blog post, I discussed why claims of ghostly interference with electronics were extremely implausible. I didn’t need to engage in any experiments to reach that conclusion. I and the commentators in the thread discussed the matter based on what we reliably knew about the universe (especially how electronics work) and then made logical conclusions based on those results. No part of that process required any use of the scientific method.

If we wanted to investigate the claim in more detail, we might try to do actual experiments. But I can dismiss the claim of ghostly interference with electronics with a high degree of probability without experiments. Similarly, I can dismiss homeopathy without doing experiments or without such experiments having been done by anyone since the theory of homeopathy contradicts basic understanding of how the universe functions. The vast majority of skeptics will never actually use the scientific method, but rather rely on small bits of science and a lot of critical thinking. That’s fine. The movement is doing good work that way. But we need not pretend when talking to people that we’re engaging in science when we aren’t. This is all the more a concern because the emphasis on science distracts from the most important part of skepticism- careful critical thinking.

Skeptics often characterize science poorly. Skeptics frequently emphasize the need for claims to be falsifiable in order for them to be scientific. The philosopher Karl Popper first proposed that the demarcation between science and non-science is falsifiability- the ability to falsify a claim. Thus, in a classical Popperian framework, claiming that there is an invisible, intangible dragon living in my bathroom is not scientific because the claim is not falsifiable.

However, naïve Popperism is not a good description of science as a whole. While falsifiability is a useful approximation of what is often scientific, there are many problems with it as a description of all forms of science. For example, as pointed out by Quine, people can add defensive hypotheses to defend an underlying hypothesis; it is far from clear when such defensive hypotheses are acceptable and when they are not. In Quine’s formulation, a defensive hypothesis is a hypothesis that is added to prevent the falsification of another hypothesis. Thus, for example, to return to the case of an invisible dragon in my bathroom, you could try to test for its presence by searching on spectra other than visible light (such as looking at infrared light). When no evidence is found using that method, I might add the defensive hypothesis that the dragon also doesn’t interact with infrared light. As I add more and more hypotheses to counter each experiment, I prevent my claim from being falsified, but, at any given point, the claim that a dragon is in my bathroom remains falsifiable – in theory at least. In portraying a scientific method which relies completely on falsifiability the skeptical movement ignores issues such as those raised by defensive hypotheses.

Unfortunately, the situation becomes even more complicated because sometimes one can add defensive hypotheses and still do good science. For example, consider the history of our understanding of the solar system. In the early 1600s, astronomers adopted Kepler’s model of the solar system in which planets orbit around the sun in ellipses. Subsequently this model was refined further by Newton whose mechanics gave orbits nearly identical to those of Kepler but slightly more accurate (essentially if there is a single planet around a star then Newtonian mechanics predicts an orbit that is a perfect ellipse. But in fact, gravitational attraction between planets makes the orbits slightly non-elliptical). However, with this very accurate, very precise model, new issues arose. The orbit of the planet Uranus seemed to be slightly off from what it should be. Thus, Alexis Bouvard posited the existence of an as yet unobserved planet, which later became discovered and named Neptune. Bouvard’s hypothetical planet was a defensive hypothesis built to defend the more cherished hypothesis of Newtonian mechanics against being falsified by experimental data. Bouvard’s defensive hypothesis was good science; the defensive hypotheses about my dragon are not. It is not clear how one can easily distinguish between the good defensive hypotheses and the bad ones.

So how do we determine when defensive hypotheses are acceptable and when they are not? Imre Lakatos suggested that we should look to whether a hypotheses is fruitful: hypotheses that lead to interesting predictions and new questions are fruitful; hypotheses that required unproductive defensive hypotheses should be rejected. While I am partial to Lakatos’s viewpoint, such an approach renders the line between science and non-science inherently subjective.

In addition to the problem of defensive hypotheses, there are many other problems with a falsifiability as the sole line between science and non-science. Naïve Popperism is insufficient to describe the borders of science. Skeptics need both a clearer understanding of the scientific method and a clearer understanding of how the skeptical approach relies on science

Skepticism Is Not an Excuse for Sloppiness

While browsing a local bookstore a few days ago, I ran across a copy of James Randi's "The Supernatural A-Z: The Truth and The Lies." Randi is a professional magician and has been at the forefront of the skeptical movement for some time. The book is an encyclopedia of supernatural and fringe claims described from a skeptical perspective. Randi is a witty and clever writer. I therefore bought the book and looked forward to an entertaining learning experience.

Unfortunately, this was not to be. Browsing through the book, I found that it contains many errors and misleading statements. And these were only those detected by me from the (small) set of entries of which I had some prior knowledge.

One of the most glaring series of errors occurs in the entry Tetragrammatron. The entry reads (with internal formatting suppressed):

In the kabalah, this is the term for the four-letter name of God. In effect, it is the name of a Name. It varies from text to text. Some versions are JHVH, IHVH, JHWH, YHVH and YHWH. Since these are too sacred to be spoken outloud, the word `Adoni' is used when the name is spoken. This has led to a serious misunderstanding, since in Hebrew texts only the vowels of Adoni (or of `Elohim' - this makes it more confusing) are printed. Thus are produced the reconstructions Yahweh, Jehova, etc.

There's so much wrong with this entry that I'm not sure where to start. I'm going to refrain from pointing out the many minor errors, such as that the term "tetragrammatron" isn't actually connected to kabalah. There's no circumstance where only the vowels are printed. I'm not completely sure where Randi got this idea or what statement that this was based on. The most obvious is that in Hebrew generally only consonants are printed. It is possible that somewhere Randi got vowels confused with consonants and then thought it was something which applied only to the four letter name. The other likely possibility is that Randi was confused by the practice that, on the occasions when something is printed with vowels (such as prayer books and certain religious texts), sometimes the four letter name is printed with the correct consonants but using the vowels from Adoni. However, this practice is not the root of the vowelization in either "Yahweh" or "Jehovah."

This is not the only severe error. The entry for the Necronomicon reads:

Several additions of this grimoire have appeared. Said to have been first published in about AD 730, in Arabic, as Al Azif, by Abdul Alhazred, an English translation is attributed to John Dee. It relates powerful formulas for calling up dangerous demigods and demons who are dedicated to destroying mankind.

It is a bit surprising that a nominally skeptical work would discuss the Necronomicon without mentioning that it is a completely fictional work. The Necronomicon was originally written about by H.P. Lovecraft in his horror writing in the 1920s and 30s. It is in his explicitly fictional universe that all the details above are correct. Since Lovecraft, various hoax Necronomicons have been written, but those are all very much modern creations. While this is an error primarily of omission rather than commission it is a massive mistake which makes one wonder how much attention Randi has paid to the subject.

These are not the only entries with errors. There are misleading statements about the doctrines of Christian Science, and there are claims that are so wrong that two-minutes of fact checking would find them. For example, Randi claims that Cotton Mather presided over the Salem Witch Trials.

All these errors I found from browsing through the book for about an hour. There are many entries about which I know little or nothing and I have made no effort to check the accuracy of these entries.

There are serious pragmatic and ethical concerns with this sort of sloppiness. Pragmatically, there are three major issues: First, a moderately credulous individual might pick up this book, read through it and react against skepticism as a result of seeing such a major spokesperson of skepticism engaging in such intellectual laziness. Second, a skeptic might read the book, and rely on the incorrect information for later use and thus be caught out in a debate or discussion. Third, it is common for members of fringe groups to accuse skeptics of not taking the time to understand what they are analyzing. This gives unfortunate weight to that charge.

There are three ethical problems: Most seriously, readers expect when they buy a book by James Randi to buy a book that is accurate and has been subject to minimal fact-checking. It does a disservice to readers to sell them such poorly researched material. Second, Randi and the skeptical movement as a whole have repeatedly and correctly criticized various fringe groups for engaging in poor research and outright sloppiness. It is thus the height of hypocrisy to engage in the same behavior. Third, it is in general unethical to promote falsehoods and misunderstandings.

I'm also disturbed that I can find little discussion on the internet about the flaws in this book. The skeptical movement cannot be skeptical of others and then turn a blind eye to the flaws of their own. That's not skepticism. That's tribalism.

Haunted Locations

Many years ago, I ran across a website devoted to chronicling haunted locations throughout the United States. The website was full of fascinating entries. By happenstance, I recently found the website again and it has not lost its amusement value.

The website, theshadowlands.net, has user-submitted entries for haunted locations. The entries have minimal punctuation and grammar, rendering some of them borderline incoherent. But entries that aren’t incoherent are often hilarious. I’ll avoid mocking the writing because that’s just too easy. Many of the entries report electric lights flickering and unexplained power failures. Apparently none of these people have heard of bad wiring or old buildings. It might be interesting to interview these people to see how much their reasoning resembled that discussed in my earlier post on electronics and the supernatural.

Let’s start with my home state of Connecticut. One highlight is Loomis Chaffee High School. We are told that “One can expect that such an old establishment would have a history.” Yes, because 140 years old is so old. I’m surprised that every city in Europe isn’t crawling with ghosts.

Albertus Magnus College in New Haven is listed as having no less than four haunted sites. One of them, Rosary Hall, has a no longer functioning elevator. The area must be haunted because “staff have reported an evil presence it, as well as freezing cold blasts of air and moaning sounds.” Yes, elevator shafts never make noise. Nor do they ever have wind come through cracks. Elevator shafts after all aren’t long columns that can easily funnel air.

In Illinois, we have a cursed graveyard. What is the main evidence that the graveyard is cursed? “Some murders took with place within a mile.” I used to be a skeptic, but now I’ve seen the definitive evidence to convince me that there is real supernatural evil in the world. After all, some murders took place within a mile of a location said to be haunted. One question: there have been murders about a block from my house. Should I be worried that I’m at the epicenter of a horrible curse?

In Pennsylvania we have a place where dowsing rods were used to verify the presence of ghosts. I guess dowsing rods don’t just find gold and water anymore. Now they also find ghosts. And this also explains why all controlled tests of dowsing rods have failed: obviously they were done in locations where ghosts were present and the dowsers’ readings were confused by the ghosts. No doubt the evil skeptics make sure to perform the tests over old Native American burial grounds.

Let’s jump over to Massachusetts. We have an abandoned train tunnel where “On some nights temperatures drop several degrees.” Right, getting colder at night is a sure sign of a haunting. In Haverhill, we have among other locations “Lizzie Bordens lawyers house” (ERV would be happy about the lack of apostrophes). Apparently if a murder is famous enough, the lawyers get to haunt places also. After the lawyer died, a family lived there but there were problems: “The family moved out that month of fright and fear.” I think I’ll go back on my promise of not mocking the writing style by noting that that sentence did not have a period at the end; I had to add that. But even with the bad grammar, I’m really scared now. I wouldn’t have believed if the family had only moved out of fear or out of fright. But they moved out due to both. The ghost must be real and very dangerous. And now we come to the entry that forced me to write this blog post.

In Marblehead there is a middle school that is severely haunted. According to the page:

In the girls’ locker room there is a ghost of a young man who died in a motorcycle and he haunts the girl room. Also there was a report of UFOs over the school and it was even in the local news paper there was a photo of the UFOs. The town of Marblehead was a built on a psychical portal a sort of window that lets in both negative and positive spiritual energy, a “hellmouth” as it was called in the 17th century.

I thought that the idea of a “hellmouth” as a magical portal was a late 20th century idea. By sheer coincidence, the only other one of which I’m aware also happens to be at the site of a school. That school is Sunnydale High in Sunnydale California. Apparently someone has been watching too much Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Aside from notable individual entries, there are also larger patterns in the entries. None of the Ivy League schools are haunted. Harvard isn’t mentioned at all. Yale is only mentioned in passing when talking about a building bought by the earlier mentioned Albertus Magnus. Similar results apply to the rest of the Ivy League. What could explain this apparent lack of ghosts? Here are a few possible explanations for this apparent lack of otherworldly manifestations: One explanation is that the ancient Ivy League schools already have a secret society devoted to stamping out ghosts and so everyone else not involved do not get a chance to notice the ghosts. This society might not only be devoted to dealing with ghosts. They might also deal with other threats, especially when they work with their colleagues from Miskatonic University. Yale no doubt plays a critical role in all this since it has the Voynich Manuscript, which we all know is really the Necromonicon.

This hypothesis however isn’t satisfactory. Many other schools also aren’t mentioned. Stanford does not have any entries nor does the University of Chicago. It seems like the more prestigious the school, the fewer ghosts it has. Maybe there are ghosts at those institutions but the ghosts are scared that, if they manifest themselves, then the smart people at those schools will make proton packs and go all ghost busters on their asses.

Another possibility is that the people at these schools are just more closed-minded. They have their “books” and their “science” and their “critical thinking.” Consequently, even when they see clear evidence of ghosts, they rationalize it away by saying things like “Hey, a mile from a location is pretty far away” or “elevators shafts are long and generally leaky. Wind can go through them easily” and other stuff that is generally said by closed-minded, skeptical meanies.

Now, suppose for a second that we set aside the convincing evidence of ghosts that we’ve seen. Forget about the cursed graveyards with murders within a mile. Forget about the haunted elevator shaft. Definitely forget about the hellmouth which has nothing at all to do with a fictional television show starring Sarah Michelle Geller. What other explanations could exist for this apparent disparity in ghost reports? Two possible explanations then emerge: First, people at more prestigious schools are more skeptical and so say things like ““Hey, a mile from a location is pretty far away” or “elevators shafts are long and generally leaky. Wind can go through them easily” and other stuff that is generally said by people who bother to use their brains. However, my own experience with Yalies does not make me inclined to think of them as a terribly skeptical group. Second, people at such schools don’t feel a need to tell spooky stories to give their schools a unique reputation. If your school isn’t so well known, having a ghost might make you feel like you’ve got some unique flavor.

Full disclosure: Boston University, where I am a graduate student, has an entry: The room that Eugene O’Neill died in is said to be haunted by his ghost. So far, the ghost has bothered none of my classes.

107th Skeptics is Now Up

The 107th Skeptics Circle is now up at The Skeptics' Field Guide. It includes a lot of interesting posts including my own post here on electronics and the supernatural. I strongly recommend interested readers go and check it out.

Skeptic's Circle #103

The 103rd Skeptic's Circle is up at Bug Girl's Blog. There's a lot of good material there. You can tell because it includes a entry of mine on critical thinking and pop culture. Go check it out.

Critical Thinking and Popular Culture.

Many things reinforce our natural tendencies against critical thinking and skepticism.[i] These include human tendencies to see patterns, wishful thinking, and the presence of pre-existing irrational beliefs and superstitions. One often overlooked reinforcement mechanism is popular entertainment, where critical thinking and skepticism are portrayed as tendencies to be overcome. In television and movies, there is an emphasis on the need to have faith and the importance of belief. Moreover, skepticism is often caricatured as a stubborn refusal to acknowledge the supernatural in the face of overwhelming evidence.

This theme of skepticism as a problem is not new; some episodes of the original Twilight Zone included this theme. One modern television show which repeats this theme is The X-Files in which two FBI agents investigate paranormal activity. Mulder, the credulous agent with the slogan "I want to believe," is invariably correct about the existence of whatever paranormal phenomenon he is investigating while Scully, the skeptical agent, refuses to believe in the supernatural no matter how much evidence she has seen.

In The X-Files skepticism is not just incorrect, but pathologically false; the skeptics, represented by Scully, refuse to modify or reduce their skepticism in the face of clear evidence of the supernatural. In this case, skepticism is reduced to a caricature of people who simply refuse to believe despite evidence to the contrary.

This theme occurs not just in television, but across many genres of movie. In horror movies, this occurs almost every movie. [ii] A few examples from the last few years are “Gothika,” “White Noise” and “Darkness Falls.”

This theme is so common that the rare cases where there is a strong skeptical bent are noteworthy. Consider, for example, the original Scooby Doo. I am curious if readers can point to any others like Scooby Doo.

Moreover, in a handful of cases critical thinking is not just a barrier to be overcome, but actually causes death and destruction. One of the most extreme examples of this is an episode of Dark Visions, a recent Twilight Zone knockoff. In an episode entitled “Harmony”, a young man goes to a town where no one sings and the townspeople kill anyone in the town who tries to sing. The people believe if anyone in the town sings, some sort of supernatural creature will be woken up and it will then kill everyone. The end of the episode features a mob about to kill the young man and his friends. He gives a stirring speech that convinces the people that the only monster which exists is inside themselves,and that they are afraid of singing due to the emotion it brings. The entire town begins to sing "Amazing Grace". And then in the last 30 seconds of the episode, it turns out that the monster is real and that their singing has woken it up. The episode ends as the monster begins to destroy the town. The last note by the Rod Serling knock-off is a warning against questioning the beliefs of others. I’m hard pressed to imagine how one could send a message that was more anti-critical thinking.

There is one place where such messages are both particularly common and particularly nefarious in their impact: movies and television aimed at children. In such cases, even when there is a skeptical element, it becomes quickly watered down. For example, many of the sequels to Scooby Doo had supernatural elements.

A recent and glaring example is the charming movie “Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium”. The premise of the film is that there is a magical toy store powered by belief in magic. The new owner does not have sufficient belief and so the store's magic fails. However, the store’s magic begins to return when a child playing with a magnetic toy asks if the toy is magical and the shop owner replies that she believes it to be. According to “Magorium,” critical thinking is not just bad. Rather, one should actively convince oneself and others that well-understood phenomena are magic.

As long as the entertainment industry continues to reinforce in the popular mind that critical thinking and skepticism are barriers to be overcome by unquestioning faith and magical thinking, the proponents of rationalism and reason will face uphill battles.

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[i] The exact distinction between critical thinking and skepticism is not always clear. For purposes of this entry I will use the terms interchangeably.

[ii] This isn't strictly true. There are some movies such as “Unrest” that just take the spirit world's existence for granted with only token skepticism. In “Unrest” all the characters take for granted that souls and an afterlife exist. The character taking the most skeptical outlook believes in souls and an afterlife but does not believe in “corporeal manifestations.” This character pays for his attempt at rationality by suffering the loss of multiple limbs at the hands of a ghost.