An older controversy: Marcello Truzzi and pseudoskepticism

While the blogs are arguing over the boundaries of skepticism, I want to summarize what I've read about an older controversy: those surrounding Marcello Truzzi.  Marcello Truzzi is credited with the saying, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" (later paraphrased by Carl Sagan as "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence").  In 1976, Truzzi was one of the founding members of CSICOP, the first major skeptical organization in the English-speaking world.  However, Truzzi soon resigned from CSICOP, and became one of its biggest critics.

[Marcello Truzzi.  source]

What happened?  (The short version)

In 1976, Marcello Truzzi was the editor of CSICOP's periodical, which at the time was called The Zetetic (zetetic being a synonym for skeptic).  However, Marcello Truzzi wanted to include paranormal proponents in CSICOP and in the magazine.  The CSICOP board disagreed and gave him a vote of no confidence.  They found a new editor and renamed the magazine Skeptical Inquirer.  Marcello Truzzi went on to publish his own periodical called Zetetic Scholar in 1978.

Marcello Truzzi criticized many skeptics for already having a conclusion prior to investigation, and for claiming to be impartial judges when they were really advocates for one side.  He popularized "pseudoskepticism" as a term for what he criticized.

That's what you can find on Wikipedia.  However, I dug a little deeper, into the archives of Zetetic Scholar (which are publicly available) to explore Truzzi's views.

The purpose of Zetetic Scholar

[The cover of Zetetic Scholar No. 1]

In the first issue of Zetetic Scholar (henceforth ZS), Truzzi explains the purpose by way of legal analogy.  Paranormal proponents and CSICOP act as lawyers on opposing sides of the case.  ZS, on the other hand, is not a lawyer, but an amicus curiae, or "friend of the court".*  ZS is merely interested in bringing the full body of information to the jury--the readers.  As such, Truzzi refrains from expressing his own opinion on most of the matters at hand.

*I'm told that in the real court system, amicus curiae are far from impartial, so perhaps the analogy is not as good as Truzzi believed.

It's not really about "balance" in the sense of pretending that paranormal claims are on equal footing.  The first article in the first issue is all about Bayesian analysis, and it argues that it is rational to so strongly reject paranormal claims if you have low prior belief in them.  In subsequent issues, other writers respond and critique this article--and that's the kind of balance that ZS has.

Truzzi says that the subject matter of ZS is paranormal claims, which he distinguishes from supernatural claims (issue 10).  Supernatural claims are about miracles that defy the natural order, where paranormal claims simply say that our understanding of the natural order is missing something.  Truzzi also uses other criteria for what belongs in ZS.  He would not include flat-earth claims because there is no group advocating such a claim, only individuals.  He would not include Creationism, because Creationists are only interested in discrediting evolution, and have no constructive alternative theory (issue 8).  He would not include the kind of stuff in the newspapers, because it would be overkill (issue 5).

The content and flavor of Zetetic Scholar

[A typical illustration, from Zetetic Scholar No. 2.  The creature is not related to any article.]

So what sort of stuff made it into ZS?  There are articles about UFOs, correlations between celestial bodies and human behavior, Velikovsky's theory* that Mars and Venus had catastrophic close-encounters with Earth, talking dogs, remote viewing, the sasquatch, and so on.  There are articles with meta topics, like the concept of pathological science, surveys of belief, and epistemology.

*Originally, Truzzi had Martin Gardner, one of the CSICOP founders, as a consulting editor, but Gardner apparently resigned when he found that Truzzi would be giving space to Velikovsky's theories.

The majority of the space is taken up by "dialogues".  They start with a "stimulus" essay, and then Truzzi solicits responses from lots of different people.  They go back and forth for hundreds of pages across multiple issues.  One can be forgiven for thinking this quite dry, but perhaps the driest parts are the bibliographies.  There are lots and lots of bibliographies, especially in the early issues.

Every issue, there is an editorial, which gives us a very brief glimpse into Truzzi's mind.  He mostly talks about the proper way to argue paranormal claims.  In issue 5, he expresses reservations about the words "crank", "pseudoscience", and "pathological science", because they may be used to prejudge.  In issue 6, he says true zeteticism is about suspending judgement while doing further inquiry.  In issue 8, he says it might be rational to try dowsing or alternative medicine when you are desperate and there is no orthodox alternative.

The other motif in the editorials are exhortations to get more subscribers.  ZS had fewer than 500 subscribers, which is what it would take to break even.  By all accounts, ZS is a labor of love. But over time, ZS goes on a less frequent and more irregular schedule.  In the last few issues, Truzzi apologizes for being late, and promises the next issue will be on time.  The last issue is in 1987, and the second-to-last is in 1983.

The Mars Effect

 

[Affectionate satire seen in Zetetic Scholar, No. 11.  Truzzi, in a bishop's clothing, says "The position of our church remains open and seeks to be fair-minded towards all parties in the Mars Effect controversy.  We only demand that the sinners REPENT!"  A sign says "First Church of Zeteticism Bishop M. Truzzi".]

In 1980-1982, CSICOP was embroiled in a drama surrounding its investigation of the Mars Effect.  The Mars Effect is an alleged correlation between people who become successful athletes, and the position of Mars in the sky when they were born.  CSICOP sponsored a study to confirm or disconfirm the Mars Effect, and published its negative results.  But one of the people studying it, Dennis Rawlins, resigned and accused CSICOP of using bad statistical analysis to hide positive results.  In response, CSICOP attacked Rawlins' character and motivations, which caused further controversy.

Because of Truzzi's connection to CSICOP, Truzzi felt the need to express his opinions on the matter, whereas usually he would refrain from expressing his opinions in ZS.  On the substance of the Mars Effect, he just says that critics have not yet disproven the correlation.

Truzzi has much stronger criticisms of the way CSICOP handled the claim (Issue 9).  He criticizes CSICOP's political, rather than scientific, response to Rawlins' accusations.  He talks about the tension between CSICOP's supposed role as an ultimate judge of paranormal claims, and its role as an advocate protecting the public from the dark forces of "irrationality" and "pseudoscience".  Truzzi thinks it's important that someone fulfill the role of advocate, but doesn't like that CSICOP also pretends to be a paragon of paranormal investigation.

Nonetheless, Truzzi does not wish to discredit CSICOP, only to reform it.  While Dennis Rawlins resigned and publicly criticized CSICOP, Truzzi took the path of resigning and starting his own magazine as a constructive alternative.

Pseudoskepticism

In the final issue of ZS, four years after the previous issue, Marcello seems to have stronger opinions (or perhaps he's just expressing them more freely).

First he criticizes Project Alpha, wherein James Randi hired magicians to infiltrate and fool parapsychology researchers.  He doesn't think it stands up to serious scientific scrutiny, and laments that skeptics are holding a magician (James Randi) up as their knight.  He disagrees with the quote by H.L. Mencken, "One horse laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms."

Second, he publishes an editorial, "On Pseudoskepticism".   He criticizes people (without pointing any fingers) for holding a negative position on paranormal claims, rather than an agnostic position.  If such a person claims to be a skeptic, then they are a pseudoskeptic.  Only by taking the agnostic position can someone avoid the burden of proof.  He also criticizes people for jumping to the conclusion that if paranormal claimants have the opportunity to cheat, then they must have cheated.

I do not know if anyone responded to this editorial, since no more issues were published.  I believe Truzzi still continued work on his Center for Scientific Anomalies Research (which was founded by him in 1981) for some years afterwards, but activity declined.  Truzzi died much later in 2003.

In which I defend Biblical contextualism

In atheist circles, it is dismayingly common for atheists to say: "Fundamentalists are, arguably, more true to religion than the moderates. Fundamentalists take the entire Bible seriously. Moderates, on the other hand just cherry-pick the parts of the Bible they like, and call the rest metaphor. But if you allow part of the Bible a metaphor, on what basis can you discern the literal from the metaphorical?"

First of all, there are some parts of the Bible that are quite obviously meant to be metaphorical: Jesus' parables, or the phrase "lamb of God". And there are some parts that are quite obviously meant to be historical: all those boring genealogies (though I would not trust their accuracy). I say it's obvious, but on what basis? It's on the basis that I can read. On the basis that I'm not stupid.

The rest of the Bible is less obvious, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to determine the genre of specific parts. For one thing, the Bible is not the only religious authority. There is tradition. The Church (especially for Catholics). Theology and Natural Theology. Or, if you like, you can ask God. No, I don't consider these to be legitimate authorities on anything I'd call "truth", but their authority is at least as legitimate as the Bible's. In what sense is it more "true to religion" to take the Bible's literal word as authority, as opposed to taking the teachings of the Church as authority?

If you want a more legitimate authority, you might try the study of history. I'm not much of a history person, but I believe in historical evidence. Just because it's one of the humanities doesn't mean you can't determine historical facts with a reasonable amount of certainty. When we disagree with historical revisionists like the Holocaust deniers and Afrocentrists, it's not because we simply dislike their political motives, but because they are actually incorrect, as determined by historical evidence. Historical evidence can be used to determine the context of the Bible. Who wrote it, when, with what purpose, within what culture, translated by whom, etc. From this, we might determine the relative reliability and authority of different parts of the Bible. I don't know any details, because I find it all rather boring, but at least I know that the field exists.

The atheists in the audience might ask, "Doesn't the fact that the Bible was written by flawed humans contradict the idea that it is the word of God?" Not really. It can't, because "word of God" is one of those vague waffly terms whose meaning is widely disagreed upon. In any case, it is far more obvious that the Bible has a historical context than it is that "Word of God" means every word should be taken literally.

My point is that it is possible to discern the good from the bad in the Bible, and there's no reason to take an "all or nothing" attitude. We ought to acknowledge the possibility, so we can move onto the real problems. The real problem: historical study of the Bible has been unduly biased. If anyone thinks the Bible is reliable evidence of physics-defying miracles, that's an obvious sign of bias. Second, normal everyday Christians are ignorant of any sort of Biblical scholarship. They simply assume that history backs up whatever they already believe. Or worse, they find a few biased experts who agree with them. Third, those who take the Bible metaphorically usually assume that it is morally instructive (or instructive in some other way). Perhaps this is sometimes true, but one needs an outside source of morality to determine which parts are good and which aren't.

More generally, I dislike some atheists' attitudes towards "moderate" religion. They seem to think that moderates somehow reduce to, or are a lesser form of fundamentalists. All this despite the fact that most of us would obviously prefer it if all religion were more "moderate". Moderate religion is often considered to be a "shifted goalpost" from fundamentalism. But goalpost shifting is only wrong when used for convenience within a debate; here the shift is the result of a long historical process. Besides, it's the fundamentalist movement that is relatively modern.

And regardless of whether moderate religion reduces to fundamentalism, the argument is about as compelling as an apologist arguing that atheism is a lesser form of nihilism. That is, you're trying to be charitable, but you actually end up making a straw man. I am in favor of directing much criticism towards fundamentalists and evangelicals, as well as making people aware of how large, powerful, and dangerous the fundamentalist faction is. But if your target is moderate religion, please argue against people's actual beliefs, not against the fundamentalist beliefs that you think are so much "better".

What's with Postmodernism?

When I write, I usually pick topics that I understand. Well, there's one topic in skepticism that I feel I don't quite get. What's up with skepticism's relationship with postmodernism? If you pay attention to the conversation that's going on (and I've heard this both offline and online), you find that most skeptics think postmodernism is one of their enemies. Why?

First, a few links to demonstrate what I'm talking about (and yes, I do bookmark these for months at a time).

• The Sokal affair - Alan Sokal famously published a nonsense article ("Transgressing Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity") in a postmodern journal without the editors catching it. This experiment suggests that postmodernism is indistinguishable from nonsense.
  
• Rob Knop runs into a postmodernist who promptly dismisses Big Bang theory as being a cultural projection.
• A postmodernist critique of evolution - The association between postmodernism and Creationism speaks very badly of postmodernism.
  
• A retrospective look at postmodernism - Rob Helpychalk gives us a more historical perspective on postmodernism. He gives a pretty good answer to my question "What's with Postmodernism?" but I guess I'm still confused.
  

What is postmodernism? It's so hard to define, especially by me, since I'm young and have absolutely no historical perspective, and do not study humanities. Everything I say on this topic is without the slightest bit of authority. But basically, postmodernism is a set of ideas that has cut across all fields of study, and has greatly affected our culture. Sometimes, it's defined as the rejection of all meta-narratives (meaning that they do not accept that there is any "correct" overarching worldview). Every view is ultimately affected by the cultural context, and in the more extreme forms of postmodernism, every view is purely a construction of its cultural context. In the even more extreme forms, scientific facts are no exception. You can make reality into whatever you want it to be.

When skeptics think of postmodernism, they mostly seem to think about the more extreme forms that reject science. Well, we're used to focusing on the bad parts of everything, because that's where criticism helps most. But to condemn all of postmodernism based only on the extreme forms is to construct a strawman. I mean, the idea that there is no reality separate from our worldview is silly, but the less extreme forms aren't all bad. It's true that there is some degree of bias from our culture, and we have to keep the uncertainty of our own beliefs in mind.

From virtually every other source, I get a very different view of postmodernism. We live in the Postmodern era, which started maybe around WWII. So really, we're all postmodernists. Here's my extremely apocryphal impression of modernism and postmodernism:

Modernism: "Look back at all of history. Those guys don't know what they're talking about! We can do much better than that! Instead of looking at the past, we should be looking to the future. In the future, there will be no war, and we'll have flying cars!"

Postmodernism: "Look back at all of history. Those guys don't know what they're talking about! And based on the historical results, we find that modernism didn't know what it was talking about either. We're no different. Everything we've ever known has been molded by our culture. How can we know what is true anymore? How can anyone know?"

If postmodernism is a cultural era, then it follows that even the skeptical movement itself is a postmodern movement. After all, the skeptical movement is usually traced back to, what, the 70s? I could draw similarities--skepticism rejects all sorts of meta-narratives, and is forever mindful of uncertainties. But one of those meta-narratives they reject is postmodernism, so maybe skepticism is really a modernist backlash against postmodernism? Or maybe it's something else entirely?

So I'm confused. It's up to you, the internet, to set me straight!

Darwin: A really cool guy

Today is Darwin Day. Charles Darwin was born on Feb. 12 1809, making this his 199th birthday.

For the moment, let's put aside all thoughts of the current cultural battles over evolution. Instead, I'm going to talk about the man. My main source material is Voyage of the Beagle and Origin of Species which are available online.

Darwin was a really cool guy. I'd even say he's better than Newton or Einstein. Coming from a physics guy, that's quite a compliment! Seriously though, Newton is known for being antisocial, and Einstein is known for stubbornly rejecting Quantum Mechanics (the other physics revolution around the same time as Relativity). But when I look at Darwin, I see a model scientist.

Voyage of the Beagle

The most well-known part of Darwin's life was his voyage on the Beagle. He went on the voyage to accompany Captain FitzRoy, since it was improper for the captain to socialize with his insubordinates. But Darwin took this opportunity to do all sorts of adventuring. And did Darwin have adventures! Darwin had a habit of not only observing nature, but interacting with it, and forming new theories about it. Who can forget that time he hit an idle fox with his geologic hammer?¹ Or the time he discovered a new species of ostrich (which was named after him) only after having eaten it?² Oh, and the Galapagos lizards!

...when [the lizard is] frightened it will not enter the water. Hence it is easy to drive these lizards down to any little point overhanging the sea, where they will sooner allow a person to catch hold of their tails than jump into the water.
...
I threw one several times as far as I could, into a deep pool left by the retiring tide; but it invariably returned in a direct line to the spot where I stood.³

Darwin's lizard-tossing ways stemmed from his child-like curiosity about nature, along with his scientific search for explanations. This is why Darwin is cool.

Much of Darwin's voyage also involved interacting with the indigenous people. Since this is from a less enlightened time, the characterizations are quite painful. Darwin observed the "savage" peoples almost as if they were animals. However, he was anti-slavery, and we see glimmers of enlightenment as in the below example.

I was crossing a ferry with a negro, who was uncommonly stupid. In endeavouring to make him understand, I talked loud, and made signs, in doing which I passed my hand near his face. He, I suppose, thought I was in a passion, and was going to strike him; for instantly, with a frightened look and half-shut eyes, he dropped his hands. I shall never forget my feelings of surprise, disgust, and shame, at seeing a great powerful man afraid even to ward off a blow, directed, as he thought, at his face. This man had been trained to a degradation lower than the slavery of the most helpless animal.⁴

The Origin of Species

Perhaps influenced by his voyage, Darwin later came across the idea of natural selection. But he delayed publishing his work because he was acutely aware of the controversy that it would provoke. Instead, he spent years and years accumulating more evidence to make his case stronger. Truly, this is how a scientist reacts to controversy: by collecting evidence! Darwin was actually very afraid of the controversy that would ensue, and delayed publication for twenty years. Only when a friend, Alfred Russel Wallace, had come across the same idea, did Darwin choose to publish.

Origin of Species is actually very well written. Well, admittedly, it's a little dense, mostly because Darwin is always putting in phrases like "seems to me," "perhaps might," and "quite conceivable." This is the language of someone who wants to avoid overstating his case. Darwin very clearly states all the observations and reasoning he has in favor of his theory, as well as all the flaws, and his responses to these flaws. Darwin was, of course, wrong on many points (hilarious examples: flatfish trying to twist their eyes⁵, stags with one antler⁶, fish traveling by whirlwinds⁷), but such a large scientific theory could scarcely have had a better start.

Oh, and he's poetic too! Below is the famous passage at the end of his book.

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.
...
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.⁸

Happy Darwin Day!

And check out this awesome artwork, thanks to Travis Morgan.
And more artwork? From cpurrin.
And there are other people talking about Darwin Day too! Click on the picture below.

I encourage you to find the passages I refer to!
1. VotB Ch 13
2. VotB Ch 5
3. VotB Ch 17
4. VotB Ch 2
5. OoS Ch 7
6. OoS Ch 5
7. Oos Ch 13
8. OoS Ch 15

Quantum Mechanics: particles or waves?

Quantum Mechanics! It's everyone's favorite physics topic, outside of cosmology. Few people understand it, and no one understands it fully. I am admittedly a little reluctant to get into this topic because I've only had an introduction to quantum mechanics so far in my formal education. Well, I at least understand it better than your average science journalist (though I'm probably worse at explaining it).

Most every explanation of Quantum Mechanics starts with a question. Is light a particle or wave?

particle


wave

How could scientists possibly be confused about this? Well, both particles and waves transmit energy and information between here and there. A particle is simply a point that moves from here to there. A wave is a disturbance that transfers from here to there through a medium (at least, we used to think it required a medium). In the above example, the ocean is a medium for an ocean wave. The ocean wave is a fluctuation in water level that transfers between this patch of water and that patch of water. It does not require that the water itself move from here to there.

Particles and waves behave very differently. Particles have a definite position and come in whole-number quantities. Waves do not have a specific position, and may come in any quantity. Waves can move around obstacles. Waves have a property called frequency, which is a measure of how quickly it fluctuates up and down. Waves can interfere with each other such that a fluctuation up and a fluctuation down cancel each other out. There are many more differences, since the mathematics that govern particles and waves are completely distinct.

Though particles and waves are completely different, it is not immediately obvious which one describes light. Historically, scientists just couldn't figure it out. Pythagoras thought light was a particle, Aristotle thought it was a wave. Newton thought it was a particle, Young thought it was a wave. Cocktail Party Physics probably gives a better treatment of the history than I could.

In the early 20th century, there was very good evidence on both sides. Maxwell's equations predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves that behave just like light. Einstein used the photoelectric effect to show that light comes in discrete quantities (this is, by the way, how he got his Nobel Prize). Physicists had long assumed that light is one or the other, so the ambivalence of evidence was confusing to them.

The culmination of the debate was a single experiment that simultaneously showed that light had properties of both particles and waves. This experiment was called the double slit experiment... and is explained on the next page.

Art, Realism, and Science

Earlier, I had taken a class on the history of modern art. Now, I'm not a big fan of history. Frankly, I find it boring, especially ancient history. But one thing I've found interesting (and I've only seen this in college) is the history of ideas and culture. I liked the class on modern art not so much because of the art (I guess surrealism is good), but because art, especially in the modern art period, provides a cross-section into the ideas of each time.

Realism was an art movement that lasted from around 1850-1870. For those who don't know, the realist style consists mostly of paintings of peasants and workers from real life. For the class, I read an article (sorry, no reference available) which was talking about the Realist attitude towards all sorts of things including the subject of art, the technique of art, social classes, and science. It was that last one that caught my eye, of course. The author described Realist art as trying to become more like science (which would in turn become more like art). Since the goal of art was truth, artists would try to look at their subjects "objectively" and without emotion.

I disagree with the whole attitude about art's goal, but aside from that, I think the Realists have severely misunderstood science. Yes, science is objective, but it's not about objective observation. If a scientist claims that he has measured things "objectively" and without any passion, does that really carry any weight? How could we even measure how objective we are? Scientists are humans too, and they are not necessarily any more objective than anyone else. I might even argue that scientists must look at everything subjectively, through the lens of scientific theory, in order to make any sense of the world.

The way we get objective truths out of all this is we apply the scientific method. We correct for selection biases, use a control group, apply error analysis, have a peer-review process, etc. And then we test the results over and over again in case any mistakes were made the first time. Science distills objective truths from scientists' subjective experiences.

I think the attitude that scientists must observe "objectively" is what got us the useless notion of avoiding the first person in scientific reports. Just another reason to hate the idea.

To go back to the art, the objectivity really shows! See, it's no coincidence that peasants became a subject right at a time when people were worried about proletariat revolution, and around when the Communist Manifesto was published. Realism was first created by revolutionaries, but it was of course later adopted by people who took the opposing point of view. Look at The Gleaners by Jules Breton.


Yep, look at the happy peasants. They're not at all upset about being on the bottom of society and having to bend over all day to collect the last bits of grain. And what a benevolent supervisor (on the right) they have! Did I mention that since it's Realist, it must be the objective truth?

I wonder if this same attitude was reflected in scientists at the time or if it was just artists who thought this way. I hope it was just the artists.

Special Relativity Part 0: More historical background

For a long time in physics, there had been a debate about the nature of light. Is light a particle or a wave? Nowadays, we know that it's both, but that's another story. In Einstein's time, light was primarily thought of as a wave due to the discovery of Maxwell's equations.

Maxwell's equations are a bit advanced to go over for my purposes, but all you need to know is that they completely describe the behavior of electric and magnetic fields. Electric fields affect magnetic fields, which affect electric fields, and so forth. To gloss over all the math, this feedback loop creates an electromagnetic wave that moves at the speed 2.998 x 10⁸ meters per second. This number matched the speed of light so well that Maxwell correctly guessed that light is made of electromagnetic waves.

At the same time, there was something very odd about Maxwell's equations. In classical mechanics, all velocities are relative. We cannot feel the Earth moving beneath us because we're moving at the same speed. We cannot feel the Earth's orbit because we orbit along with it. We cannot feel our solar system's orbit around our galaxy, or our galaxy's motion through the cosmos. If the entire universe was moving in one direction, we could never know, since we move along with it. Maxwell's equations predict a specific velocity for light, but a velocity relative to what?

At first, scientists postulated that light was moving with respect to something called the luminiferous aether (nice sci-fi name there), also just called ether. The ether is supposed to be a medium for light waves the same way that the ocean is a medium for ocean waves. The ether would operate on light similarly to how wind operates on sound. Light would move faster when moving in the same direction as the ether, and slower when moving in the opposite direction. Since the earth cannot possibly be staying still with respect to the ether (since for one thing, it rotates), scientists predicted that light would move faster in some directions than in others. The famous experiment to test this was called the Michelson-Morley experiment, which involved putting two light sources on a rotating table. The experiment failed spectacularly, showing that light moves at the exact same speed in all directions.

In science, a failed experiment only provides new opportunities. To Einstein, the Michelson-Morley experiment showed that we must discard the concept of ether, along with many other things from classical physics. Einstein found that the speed derived from Maxwell's equations is very special in that there is no need to specify a reference frame. The speed of light is the same no matter which way you are going.