Archive for Skeptical musings

Serious Questions about the Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) by Phil Zimbardo has been for me an example of the astonishing things that we humans are capable of. I guess as an example of human gullibility, I had not been skeptical about the experiment, which lacks quite a few scientific markers (aside from its ethical problems). During a talk by Barbara Oakley, she was asked to comment about the SPE because it showed the influence the situation and roles could have on human behavior. She responded that there are quite a few questions about this experiment and pointed us to a summary of the critique at Wikipedia. I finally had a chance to review this and am retiring another holy cow now: the experiment is, well, crap not nearly as thoroughly tested against reality as we are led to believe… (Thanks to a discussion in the comments, I now understand that Zimbardo does deserve credit for pointing to the importance of situational influences. I still think, though, that he, at best, could use SPE for the development of hypotheses, not as support for a theory, as he seems to be doing. I find it mindboggling that someone can become famous with such shoddy research - of course, who am I to criticize the famous Zimbardo. Well, I am a human being with a brain and I occasionally use that to debunk things, mostly for myself, but also for the few people who read my blog).

     Continue reading this post » » »

Comments (15)

Crackers and Other Mental Acrobatics

Last I checked, there was a period called The Enlightenment between our current time and the Dark Ages. But apparently not everyone has benefited from enlightenment as recent news make clear. As the Anglican church prepares to open their doors to women bishops, at least one current bishop is so distraught, he’s trying to switch religions: From Anglican to Catholic. My church history is a bit sketchy but wasn’t the Anglican church founded in protest of something the Catholics did? Oh, yes, some king of England didn’t get the divorce he wanted, so he just formed his own church. Okay, maybe things are a bit more nuanced than that but essentially King Henry VIII who loved to marry seceded from the Catholic church in 1534 to get one of those marriages annulled. Now, apparently, letting women have equal rights is enough to run back to the original church. (Hat tip to Jender for the link!)

And then there’s Crackergate. A university student in Florida took a souvenir from a Catholic church, except it wasn’t just any souvenir, it was the small bread wafer used by Catholics during mass. Now he’s being accused of kidnapping Christ (never mind that Jesus died a couple millenia ago, if he ever lived, and now supposedly sits next to god, or does that come later? In any case, he’s dead and his body was never found). But that was only the beginning of Crackergate. PZ Myers dared to pick up this story and in his usual non-mincing style explained what he thought of the whole upset: It’s a cracker!. Now he’s being burned at the (for now figurative) stake: The Catholic League, which claims to defend Catholics’ civil rights, apparently doesn’t care about anybody else’s civil rights, like freedom of speech. They want PZ Myers fired from his assistant professorship at the University of Minnesota. And all that because PZ called a cracker a cracker. As I told the President of the U of M in an email supporting PZ: “I think Catholics have the right to pretend that the cracker used at mass is something other than a cracker (as a former Protestant, I never quite understood this). But I do not think they have the right to impose their fantasy on anyone else, which they are doing by acting offended about PZ’s post and, actually, about the original incident as well.”

Crackergate ties in interestingly with a recent discussion I’ve had over at the Feminist Philosophers’ Blog on hate speech and freedom of speech. The Catholic League is claiming that PZ Myers uttered hate speech. Actually, some are even claim it’s a hate crime. Sigh. (I wish commentators on PZ’s blog would stop the name calling, though. That is always uncalled for, imo.) And what’s the crime, if there is any? There is absolutely no hate crime here (maybe some poorly chosen words but that’s not a crime - we’d all be in prison if it were; and, yes, PZ threatened to “treat [consecrated communion wafers] with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse.” Okay, what kind of “heinous cracker abuse” can there possibly be?!? Maybe he’ll - gasp - eat it!). I think that PZ had the right to call a cracker a cracker. I wouldn’t have said some of the things he said but he’s not one to mince words. Even Fox said that the “small bread wafer [is] to Catholics symbolic of the Body of Christ.” It’s a symbol for crying out loud (or do they believe in magic? Sorry, I don’t get this mental acrobatic…)! It means something more than what it is to those people to whom it symbolizes something. It is what it is to people who don’t buy into that symbology. Demanding that everybody else sees the symbol the same way is just ridiculous - and it shows quite a bit of insecurity. Just like gay marriage doesn’t do anything to straight marriages, calling a cracker a cracker doesn’t do anything to someone who sees it as a symbol of something under certain circumstances unless that person isn’t quite sure about that symbolism. Plus, if you can make up the story that a cracker changes into something else, why not make up the story that once that wafer leaves the church it magically turns back into a cracker? That would resolve the whole thing. And it would be a very good way to protect against wafer kidnapping. To get up in arms about this symbol and calling it a kidnapping is simply silly (how can you kidnap a person who died millenia ago - assuming he ever lived - who is just symbolically present)? We need to learn to distinguish symbols from what they are symbolizing. By prosecuting people for, say, burning the U.S. flag, we are undermining the very freedoms this flag symbolizes. By screaming bloody murder over the cracker, any claim by the Catholic church makes that they are supporting love and hope become tainted (okay, a look at the church history does that even more).

Comments (5)

Doubt Makers

During my exchange with Pat Frank in the comments to my post on the climate crisis, he raised a question about CO2’s pollutant status. When I researched the question, I found a write up by Weather Underground that recounted the history of that question: It stems from a campaign founded by Exxon. An article on the Doubt Makers by Michelle Nijhuis describes how industries, starting with tobacco, use a similar tactic to create doubt: The climate science models are just too unreliable, therefore we don’t really have to do anything.

     Continue reading this post » » »

Comments (38)

Science and God

I just got the latest eSkeptic, a weekly email sent by the Skeptic Society. Michael Schermer has just edited a pamphlet for the (gasp) Templeton Foundation entitled “Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete?”. Although I think that Schermer made the skeptic equivalent of a Faustian bargain, and with that gave Templeton false credibility, the question is interesting, especially in light of many religious-wrong groups’ argument that science undermines religion. Since Templeton has enough money, the essays are available for a free read online

The full list of essayists includes:

On the “Yes” side
  • Victor Stenger: Yes. Worse. Science renders belief in God incoherent.
  • Steven Pinker: Yes, if by science we include secular reason and knowledge.
  • Pervez Hoodbhoy: Not necessarily. You must find a science-compatible God.
  • Stuart Kauffman: No, if we redefine God as creativity in the universe.
  • Chrisopher Hitchens: No, but it should.
  • Michael Shermer: It depends: belief no, God yes.
On the “No” side
  • Mary Midgley: Of course not, belief in God is not a scientific question.
  • Kenneth Miller: Of course not. Science expands our appreciation of the Divine.
  • William D. Phillips: Absolutely not! Belief in God is not a scientific matter.
  • Robert Sapolsky: No. Belief offers something that science doesn’t.
  • Jerome Groopman: No. Not at all.
  • Keith Ward: No.
  • Christoph Cardinal Schönborn: No.

I agree with Victor Stenger’s answer and highly recommend his book God: The Failed Hypothesis. It makes a very good case on why science can indeed say something about the existence of God, though we have to carefully define God and set up clear hypotheses that can be tested. If we accept that premise, and Stenger makes a convincing case, we can test God’s existence like any other hypothesis. There is overwhelming evidence that the hypothesis of God’s existence is wrong. After reading Stenger’s book, I feel that any other argument is intellectually dishonest. Maybe I need to read Ken Miller’s answer…

I also like Steven Pinker (PDF) summary sentence at the end of his short but thorough answer:

Science, in the broadest sense, is making belief in God obsolete, and we are the better for it.

Comments (2)

Climate Crisis

Ken over at Open Parachute wrote a very good post about the climate changes we are facing. His summary does an excellent job of countering the arguments of climate change deniers.

Of course I had to add my 3 cents mentioning a couple of articles from the current issue of Skeptic Magazine.

There are a couple of interesting articles in the Skeptic magazine. One of them is arguing that

The claim that anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for the current warming of Earth climate is scientifically insupportable because climate models are unreliable.

IF I understand the article correctly (and that is a big if - I got somewhat lost), the author claims because climate models don’t predict well (your point 4), humans are not causing climate change. Obviously, this would confuse prediction with explanation: Even though we might not predict future climate well, as the other article points out, the models of historical climate change are pretty darn good but only if they take human generated pollution into account, which echoes what you wrote again in point 4.

I’d love to see other people’s interpretation of these articles, especially the first one. I am still hoping that I misunderstood something… Somehow, an article by a climate change denier in a skeptical magazine doesn’t seem too appealing…

There is also an interesting older episode of Point of Inquiry with Bill Nye in which he takes issue with climate change deniers.

Comments (70)

Two Views of the Universe

Richard Eckersley presents in his book Well & Good “two scientific descriptions of the world, which represent the extremes of the modern scientific worldview” (220). At least that is his claim. He first presents a description by Richard Dawkins from his article God’s Utility Function in Scientific American:

In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

     Continue reading this post » » »

Comments (2)