Hello everyone,

Tomorrow, May 13th (Friday the 13th no less!), Rebecca Watson will be visiting our campus! Rebecca Watson is the founder of Skepchick.org and co-hosts The Skeptics Guide to the Universe. The title of her presentation is “The Religious Right vs. Every Woman on Earth”.

This special event has been made possible through the joint efforts of Bruin Atheists and the Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists.

Please RSVP on the facebook event page:  http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/event.php?eid=193868633988159

Thanks, looking forward to seeing you there!

The talk this Friday will be on the Virgin of Guadalupe, the alleged miraculous appearance of the Virgin Mary in Mexico City in 1531.

Snacks and beverages will be provided; all are welcome!

The talk will take place in Ackerman 3517 at 5:00PM on Friday, April 15, 2011.

Whilst plugging our upcoming event "Here be dragons" on Bruin walk we met David Pollack an advocate for Humanistic Judaism.

The following is some info about their event happening tomorrow night, I hope to go and I also hope to see some BASStronauts there as well!

I heard a rumor that next Friday, March 13, there will be pizza at our meeting.  But you’re all skeptical, so you probably want to verify this for yourself by coming to our next meeting.  Ackerman 2408, 5:00-6:50 PM.

Meeting discussion

Our official discussion topic this meeting was SETI vs UFOlogy: why is one science and the other not? SETI, if you didn’t know, is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence by searching for transmissions from far away stars. Spencer disagreed with the premise of the topic, saying that he did not in fact consider SETI to be science, because it cannot falsify any hypotheses. Matt took an opposing position, saying that it’s worthwhile to search for extraterrestrial life, even if we do not believe that it exists nearby. Of course, that was only the starting point, and we wandered off in many random directions from there.

Someone in the group has in fact seen a UFO! She said that in Granada Hills, there was a giant floating triangle of lights. Eventually, the lights zoomed off in different directions. There were several witnesses. I don’t have any explanation for that one. Andrew mentioned that there is something called Project Blue Book, which studied many UFO reports. The project concluded that there are no alien UFOs, though there are several cases that they couldn’t fully explain.

Another question: What is your favorite skeptical topic (not counting religion)? A few of the answers: conspiracy theories, mainstream economics, homeopathy. Mine, of course, is anything physics-related.

Speaking of physics-related skeptical topics, have any of you seen the LaRouchians (aka the LaRouchebags) on campus? They’re a very politically oriented personality cult surrounding Lyndon LaRouche, and I think they prey on college dropouts. Among other things, they believe Newton, who may or may not have even existed, stole all his ideas from Kepler. Newton’s laws are plagiarized from Kepler’s laws. Joe tried showing them a physics problem involving friction, and asked them to solve it using only Kepler’s laws (which only deal with orbital motion). Their reaction was to question his credentials, and then promptly ignore him. They literally turned their back towards him, even while trying to talk to someone next to him.

And has anyone seen that guy on Bruin Plaza who yells out random words? Apparently, he’s the Universal Philosophical Genius. Supposedly, he read a book about quantum mechanics, and then decided that hanging out at UCLA was good times. A sample argument: How can distance exist if points have no size? Yeah… At least he doesn’t have a history of harassing people on campus like the LaRouchians do.

Incidentally, LOGIC, the Objectivist club, debated the LaRouchians years ago. And the LaRouchians won! The LaRouchians basically said that Ayn Rand wrote some good fiction arguing Objectivism, but where is the real evidence? Joe’s analysis was that LOGIC seemed more interested in just talking about Objectivism than actually calling out the LaRouchians on all their BS.

Does that mean our group has two roles, or one? I don’t think anyone would go so far as to say we should exclude theists, but there are a number of people who think of skepticism and atheism as the same thing, or closely related things. This is debatable. However, I think they are two different ideas, and I think you should think so too.

I will begin by conceding that skepticism and atheism are related. At the very least, they are correlated. But I think it’s more than that. Skepticism actually causes people to become atheists, and atheism causes people to become skeptics. Anecdotally, I became an atheist because I carefully considered arguments while under a skeptical mindset (meaning, an open-minded, but critical mindset). And many atheists are highly sympathetic to the goals of skepticism, because they realize that religion isn’t the only source of strange beliefs out there.

Furthermore, I think there are good reasons underlying the causational link. Not that skepticism logically entails atheism, or anything so direct. But I do think atheism is more in the spirit of skepticism than theism is. I think the idea of appealing to an unknowable entity in order to explain the universe, or for pretty much any purpose at all, is not good skeptical practice. Even for deism or fideism, my thoughts are along the lines of, “I don’t find that very compelling, and I don’t think you should find it compelling either.”

But of course I would think these things. Of course I think atheism is more correct than its alternatives. I wouldn’t be an atheist if I didn’t.

The thing is, there are a ton of things that cause disagreement among skeptics. When I first subscribed to Skeptic magazine, I found that I disagreed with a third to a half of it. That is totally how it should be. Obviously, if there’s an article about investigating a paranormal claim, I would expect it to be a well-designed investigation with a more or less definitive conclusion. But a lot of these are opinion articles, or they are detailed interpretations of complicated bodies of evidence. If you’re not picking out lots of specific details that you disagree with, you’re not doing it right.

Religion is very clearly within the region of “stuff that skeptics disagree about all the time”. And it’s a very popular topic too, because everyone seems to have a unique opinion about it. I’ve spent years in the atheist and skeptical blogospheres, and I still occasionally see a perspective that is unusual and surprising, and not in a bad way either. I find that the variance of religious perspectives is much greater than the mere difference between atheism and theism. If we were to exclude theists from the skeptical movement, to be consistent, we’d have to exclude a lot of atheists too. We couldn’t possibly be so conformist.

To finish this off, I’d like to make two imperfect comparisons to give two different angles on how religion relates to skepticism.

First, religion is like politics. It is not a standard skeptical topic, but skeptics certainly tend to be politically conscious, and tend to enjoy discussing it. Libertarianism is not considered to be the same as skepticism, partly because less than half of skeptics are libertarians, but also because it’s a completely different idea. Even if every skeptic were a libertarian, and if skepticism really did lead directly to libertarianism, we would still not consider the same thing. It’s a difference of area of application, and a difference of method and conclusion. If you agree with the skeptical method, but by a strange twist of reasoning, come to an uncommon conclusion on one particular non-standard topic, you’re still a skeptic.

Second, theists are like women or ethnic minorities. Lamentably, there aren’t many of them in the skeptical movement. For whatever reasons, skeptics tend to be predominantly white males. There should be more minorities and women! Not because we want to be able to say, “We’re so diverse and tolerant,” but because we should be equal opportunity. I don’t like the idea that half of the population is for whatever reason less likely to be skeptical than the other half. Similarly, I don’t like the idea that religious people are less likely to be skeptical than the nonreligious. I don’t care if there’s a good reason for it. It’s still sad.

This piece originally appeared on my own blog, but since it is relevant to BASS, I am reposting it here.

Derren Brown is an English magician and mentalist, and he is part of the great tradition of skeptical magicians. Watch: he’s really good.

I shall begin this by saying we should all be careful of thinking that we know what is going on. I’ve heard that magicians often have a much easier time fooling people with more education. This is because people with more education tend to think they can figure out the tricks, when really they’re no better than anyone else. Therefore, it’s best if I admit right away that I have no clue how Derren Brown does it.

But watching the above video, I was rather dismayed. I still don’t understand how he did it, even after he explained it. I’m not convinced that he’s doing this the way he says he is. Just because he drops a bunch of hints doesn’t guarantee that the person will think he wanted a BMX bike. I know I didn’t want a BMX by the end of the video. I guess he could have thoroughly pre-screened the person, or shown the single successful attempt out of many failed ones. But still, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had simply dropped a bunch of subliminal hints to make it look like that’s how he does it, while using some entirely different trick.

Of course, the Youtubers are claiming that his method is NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), which I really don’t believe. Derren Brown is actually critical of NLP, and has never claimed to use it (see Straight Dope). More generally, I think NLP is New Age bunk. On the other hand, something like hypnosis is much more plausible to me, since it’s empirically a real phenomenon. Many of Derren’s tricks look like they could be hypnosis, not that I know how to recognize it.

That was a single example where Derren Brown explained his trick. Usually, he doesn’t bother explaining (see more examples here, here, and here). It’s maddening. Derren says he mixes “magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship” and the only things he doesn’t use are actors and stooges. But I cannot figure out for any single trick whether he’s using some crazy psychology, some crazy conjuring, or a combination of both. I guess Derren intended it to be ambiguous. But because it’s ambiguous, there are so many unanswered questions. Obviously, the tricks don’t attest to anything supernatural, but do they attest to any naturalistic amazingness? Or are they the kind of tricks you’d slap your face over? Do the tricks require conscious knowledge of the performer? Or is it like cold reading, in that the performer can fool even himself into thinking he’s psychic?

Personally, I think this is what’s going on:

There’s an article in the latest issue of Skeptic Magazine called “A Climate of Belief” by Patrick Frank. It says that the case for Global Warming being caused by CO2 is severely hurt by the fact that computer models of the climate are uncertain. At first, I thought it had raised a fairly good objection, at least good enough that I, mostly clueless about climate science, would have no idea how to refute it. But it turns out that the article fails at basic statistics.

The main argument of the article goes like this:

Computer models of climate show error bars in their results, but these error bars only show one kind of error: the variation between multiple runs of the simulation. What the error bars don’t show is the “physical uncertainty”, the measure of difference between the predicted and actual.

How do we estimate the physical uncertainty? We use the climate model to “retrodict” past climate, and then compare to the actual climate we had during that time. Frank shows that such retrodictions only calculated the total cloud cover with 10% accuracy. Of course, to show this, he uses retrodictions of the 1979-1988 period, and compares them to observations of 1983-1990. I have to wonder if it’s good practice to compare different decades.

He goes on to say that 10% cloud cover has a huge impact on global temperature. How big? 1.1°C a year. That means that after a hundred years, the uncertainty is 110°C! See the graph below of the uncertainty as it increases with time.

This graph is what really set my skeptical bells ringing. Yes it’s true that if the uncertainty is very large, we can draw no conclusions. But how can the error be so large? Intuitively, it does not make sense. If all your results are accurate within, say, 10°C, but the error bars are 100°C, that either means you’ve overestimated your error, or you got really, really lucky. Even global warming deniers will grant that the models are accurate within 10°C. Are they feeling lucky?

So where does his estimate of uncertainty go wrong? Frank’s problem is pure statistical innumeracy. Unfortunately, statistics is not common knowledge, so this sort of innumeracy can go right over some people’s heads. Allow me to explain.

Problem 1: Uncertainties do not add! If you have 1.1°C uncertainty in the first year, and 1.1°C uncertainty in the next year, what is the cumulative uncertainty? You might guess 2.2°C, but this assumes that both uncertainties are always in the same direction. Half of the time, they will be in opposite directions and partly cancel each other out. The result when you work out the math is a total uncertainty of 1.56°C after two years. Sure, it’s possible that it will be off by 2.2°C, but error bars are only supposed to cover the most likely data. The uncertainty does not increase in a straight line. It should be proportional to the square-root of time. That is, it will increase more slowly after a little while. I was extremely shocked at such an egregious error. Has Frank never taken a statistics class?

Problem 2: Uncertainties are reduced in a stable system. The environment is a mostly stable system. That is, it doesn’t swing wildly in temperature every century. If the temperature is a little higher than average one year, something will push it towards normal temperature. For instance, higher temperature might increase cloud cover, which reflects more of the sun’s light away from Earth. Therefore, a temperature uncertainty this year may not survive to the next year. When I said the uncertainty is proportional to the square-root of time, I assumed that the system has no stabilizing mechanisms. In fact, the uncertainty will increase much more slowly than that.

Problem 3: What’s the difference between Frank’s uncertainty and the already reported error bars? Frank asserts that they are different, but I’m not so sure. Frank bases his uncertainty estimate on the predictions of cloud cover. But is this uncertainty different from the uncertainty between different runs of the simulation? I imagine each time the simulation is run, it gives a slightly different prediction of cloud cover in the same way that it gives a slightly different prediction of temperature. So not only is Frank calculating the uncertainty incorrectly, it may have already been accounted for.

Frank seems incredulous that we can estimate the temperature decades from now when we can’t even estimate next year’s temperature accurately. But actually, this makes sense. We can’t predict the whether next week, but we can predict overall trends between seasons. Large, overall trends are easier to predict than year-to-year fluctuations!

I only spot the statistical errors, because that’s the part I know. Given the kinds of errors I see, I wouldn’t be surprised if the rest of it were also riddled with flaws.

My friend, Brian Dunning (from the Skeptoid podcast), is in the process of creating a new TV show called The Skeptologists. They’ve just finished principal shooting for the pilot. Hopefully it gets picked up and we get more of this awesomeness!

Quoting from the Skeptologists site:

We’re not willing to just accept stories of the paranormal or supernatural. We want proof. Each week, we’ll take on a handful of wild claims — from the Bermuda Triangle to Bigfoot sightings to haunted houses — and apply accepted scientific practices and experiments to see if these ideas really hold up. Whether in the field or in the lab, we’ll literally put these subjects to the test in the hopes that one day we may find something that can’t be explained. Each episode will investigate one or more popular paranormal, supernatural, or other type of phenomena, in favor of evidence-based science.

The cast includes:

• Yau-Man Chan, 4th place contestant on Survivor: Fiji and Cheif Technology Officer for UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry
• Mark Edward, a professional mentalist specializing in magic of the mind.
• Dr. Steven Novella, a academic clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine, president of the New England Skeptical Society, writer of the Neurologica blog, and host of the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast.
• Dr. Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, writer of the Bad Astronomy blog, and a renowned astronomer, author, lecturer, and blogger.
• Dr. Kirsten Sanford, holds a PhD in physiology from UC Davis and is known more for her Sexy Geek nomination from a Wired magazine contest than for her intelligence.
• Dr. Michael Shermer, historian, author, monthly columnist for Scientific American, founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine, and Executive Director of the Skeptics Society.
• Brian Dunning, host and executive producer of The Skeptologists and producer of Skeptoid: Critical Analysis of Pop Phenomenon podcast and book of the same title.

They have a one minute sneak peak trailer out on youtube. Here it is:

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You can HELP the Skeptologist by sending an e-mail of support to skeptologists@newrule.com. Write-in in support of this show idea and let them know why you would watch a show about critical thinking, science and skepticism. The e-mails will be collected and used to help with the show getting picked up. (They won’t use your e-mail for anything other than this purpose by the way.)

Let’s hope we see this on the air soon!