Tag Archives: Scepticism

Psychic advert
Science

Psychic Readings are True

Yes, it’s a delib­er­ately sceptic-baiting title. The plan is: it winds people up, they point out how I’m wrong and I learn something.

Psychic advert

I fore­see you are about to lose some money. Photo by Timothy Krause.

I’ve not com­pletely mad though. Obvi­ously not all psychic read­ings are true. It would take an enorm­ous tal­ent to ignore real­ity that has shown many read­ings to be false or fraud­u­lent. If I could do that I’d have a golden future in polit­ics. No, I’m only arguing the true ones are true.

Even that sounds odd. By defin­i­tion the true read­ings are true. Isn’t it a bit dif­fi­cult to believe that any read­ings are true if, like me, you don’t believe in psychic powers? Surely that’s going to need a weaselly approach to ‘truth’? I prefer to say simple, but you can call weasel in the com­ment box below if you like.

The idea has been form­ing since I went on an Applied Cold Read­ing course. Applied Cold Read­ing works best if you can get things wrong, but some­times it hap­pens that you fail to get things wrong.* String a few of these fails together and your sub­ject is stunned by how much you got right. Now you and I know that we were aim­ing for misses, but to your sub­ject that doesn’t mat­ter. You were right. That’s what she knows. The fact that you were right by acci­dent or chance is irrel­ev­ant. You were right.

And now you’re in trouble because she’ll expect you to keep being right. But that’s your prob­lem.
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Book in the snow
Life, Science

Applied Cold Reading

Book in the snow

The best photo I’ve seen of cold read­ing by SPDP at Flickr.

I took a week­end off to attend a course in Lon­don on Applied Cold Read­ing. The course was given by Ian Row­land, who might be famil­iar to some read­ers as ‘Ian who from where?’, for every­one else he’s the author of The Full Facts Book of Cold Read­ing.

The Full Facts Book is mainly about Cold Read­ing in a psychic con­text. There are lots of people who can tell you how cold read­ing works in a psychic con­text. It relies on Barnum state­ments, state­ments that feel per­sonal but they’re true for every­one. I don’t find that a sat­is­fy­ing explan­a­tion. I get the impres­sion that the Barnum effect works best on gull­ible people. I know a few people who take psych­ics ser­i­ously and they’re all far less gull­ible than me. Another reason it’s a poor explan­a­tion is that there aren’t many people with a father called Brian, with dark hair, who’s miss­ing fin­gers from his left hand.
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Zoltan, mechanical fortune teller
Life, Politics

Barnum and Bunkum

I’ve been think­ing over the Pro­ject Barnum debate, as seen on Jour­demayne’s blog. It’s a good example of how two intel­li­gent people sin­cerely try­ing to work out what is best can dis­agree. Fol­low­ing alleg­a­tions against Sally Mor­gan, should psychic events be banned from theatres? Jour­demayne argues no and Michael Mar­shall says yes.

Zoltan, mechanical fortune teller

Zoltan, a fortune-teller who prob­ably won’t sue for libel.

I agree with Jour­demayne, but not with how she gets there. Con­tinue read­ing →

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Politics, Science

Another Petition

This time in sup­port of Simon Singh.

I thought quite a bit before put­ting this up. While I sup­port Simon Singh, I have doubts about Sense About Sci­ence. Sense About Sci­ence is loosely con­nec­ted with Spiked Online through Liv­ing Marx­ism, which seems to think Chris­topher Mon­ck­ton is a cred­ible speaker on cli­mate change. The cli­mate change debate is one of the major sources of pseudos­cientific non­sense on the web, so it’s dis­ap­point­ing that Sense About Sci­ence has so little on the topic. In the end I signed because Jack of Kent is ask­ing for sig­na­tures. It was a big help that George Mon­biot and Nick Cohen, who are aware of the his­tory of the group, signed. Even now I’m not com­fort­able with the title of the let­ter, which implies sci­ent­ists might some­how be exempt from laws that apply to every­one else.

This is another reason why I’m wary of sign­ing any­thing that gets passed along by a group. If you want to sign with hon­esty you need to look into exactly what you’re sign­ing. Often there simply isn’t time to do that.

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Digital Academia

Blogging and the English Law

donkey
A guest appear­ance from the law. Photo (cc) Jür­gen Schiller Gar­cía.

First a dis­claimer: My legal qual­i­fic­a­tions go as far as an A-Level I did at nightclass.

Non­ethe­less I’ve been read­ing a few posts recently on Eng­lish law by other blog­gers and they all seem to be mak­ing the same mis­take. The blog­gers are intel­li­gent, fair and reas­on­able and the make the assump­tion that Eng­lish law would be too. So I’m throw­ing up some points for dis­cus­sion, most of it applies to blog­gers around the world, but there are one or two stings for blog­gers based in Eng­land and Wales.

Tip One: Be a multi-millionaire

This is use­ful in any legal sys­tem, but espe­cially in Eng­land when you real­ise where the law comes from. We don’t have a 20th cen­tury or 19th cen­tury legal sys­tem in the UK. It’s a multi-layered cake of cases which has been built up over the cen­tur­ies. Old laws remain in effect because they’re often use­ful. For example until a few years ago the legal defin­i­tion of murder in Eng­land dated from Lord Coke’s rul­ing in 1597.

Murder is when a man of sound memory, and of the age of dis­cre­tion, unlaw­fully kil­leth within any county of the realm any reas­on­able creature in rerum natura under the king’s peace, with malice afore­thought, either expressed by the party, or implied by law, so as the party wounded, or hurt, &c. die of the wound, or hurt, &c. within a year and a day after the same

It was only updated recently because life-support machines were mak­ing the year and a day clause questionable.

A lot of law is like this, it isn’t form­ally writ­ten down. It’s com­mon law which means there’s a huge tra­di­tion of rely­ing on pre­ced­ent and find­ing the right pre­ced­ent is where a lot of law­yers make their money. Unfor­tu­nately there wasn’t a medi­eval inter­net and Eng­lish legis­la­tion is a bit slow. Laws developed for a time when few people had access to a press are being called into ser­vice for libel on the inter­net. There are few pre­ced­ents, so hav­ing a very good law­yer to make your case is a massive help. Incid­ent­ally, the fact the law goes back many cen­tur­ies in the UK is part of the con­tri­bu­tion to the fact that Scot­tish law is not the same as Eng­lish law. Chan­ging one doesn’t neces­sar­ily have much effect on the other.

Par­lia­ment could codify the law, and every so often they do. There’s plenty of demand for new laws though so older laws tend to get tidied when the clam­our gets loud enough. With my big cyn­ical hat on, there’ll be an elec­tion soon and all the politi­cial parties will want fund­ing from donors with deep pock­ets. These would also be the kind of donors who are best pro­tec­ted by a vague and pur­chased justice and will want to fund parties with other pri­or­it­ies, as par­lia­ment­ary time is lim­ited. It’s not going to change soon. Simply declar­ing swathes of com­mon law out­dated isn’t a prac­tical option either. If you want a bet­ter libel law then you’ll need to pres­sure MPs to change it.
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Politics, Science

The Power of Doubt

Petri Dish
Petri Dish. Photo by believekevin.

There’s an inter­est­ing story on the BBC News site about the woman who dis­covered AZT could help inhibit the devel­op­ment of AIDS. It’s inter­est­ing because it shows what is usu­ally the reac­tion to a dis­cov­ery. She was examin­ing petri dishes and found one sample where no cells had died after infec­tion.

“I rang my super­visor, then I said: ‘I won­der if I for­got to put the virus in these 16?’” she recalls.

That tends to be my reac­tion. “That’s inter­est­ing!” fol­lowed by “I won­der what I did wrong?” In my exper­i­ence that ques­tion is cru­cial because often the reason I’ve found some­thing inter­est­ing is because there’s a gap in my know­ledge rather than find­ing some­thing new. It seems to be the reac­tion of people I work with. It’s com­mon to ask a friend to look over what you’ve done and bounce ideas off people because it is pos­sible that a simple mis­take has been made.

It’s import­ant because it’s the dif­fer­ence between scep­ti­cism and cyn­icism. Con­tinue read­ing →

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