Skepticism & beliefs

Here is a detailed article on the steps used to test a paranormal claim for James Randi’s Million Dollar Challenge. Although the claimed power was simple, the required testing was not.

The trials and tribulations of the 2014 James Randi Educational Foundation’s Million Dollar Challenge..

Mr. Wang claims that he can project or transmit a power, force or energy, hitherto unknown to science, from his right hand into the hand of a receptive subject. The subject will be able to feel this energy as warmth, movement, tingling or other notable sensations in their hand. It is also claimed that this energy (possibly known as “Qigong”) can be transmitted through various materials including wood, plastic and metal. It is important to note that this claimed ability still works even if the subject is unaware of the direct actions of Mr. Wang.

On the surface of it, this may appear to be a relatively simple claim to test, but experience has shown us that even simple claims can be quite a task.

Here is an interesting article from Skeptic that asks whether conservatives or progressives are more anti-science. Common wisdom is that conservative thinkers are more anti-science, but this article reviews a book that demonstrates that progressive thinkers are also waging a war against science.

Let’s settle this thing once and for all—right here, right now. Who are more anti-scientific—Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or progressives? Conventional wisdom would have us believe—or at least so says science writer Chris Mooney—that Republicans have waged an unparalleled and all-out war on science.

Indeed, certain big business interests continue to see basic climate science as an entirely too inconvenient truth. And, yes, some religious leaders will likely always deny the facts of human evolution, abortion, homosexuality, and stem cell procurement and therapeutic cloning. Responsible journalists have documented and exposed these affronts to reason quite thoroughly with appropriate vigor.

But are progressives really so different? Not according to Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell. In Science Left Behind, the authors contend that American media have long bestowed a “free pass” on the political Left (primarily progressives), who are just as likely to “misinterpret, misrepresent, and abuse” science to advance their ideological agendas. In fact, the authors say, progressives are currently waging an “undeclared war on scientific excellence itself.”

Harry Houdini was an escape artist, magician, and showman. He was also an important skeptic famous for exposing the simple tricks used by mediums of his time. This article explains why we should light a candle to Harry on Hallowe’en.

Houdini’s careers in magic as well as escapology, aviator, filmmaker and movie star, author, book collector, and magic historian, are all fodder for fascinating stories in their own right. But we should particularly honor, this and every Hallowe’en, his career as a skeptic. While the link between magic and skepticism preceded Houdini by at least three centuries in the written record alone (marked with the publication of the classic Elizabethan text, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, by Reginald Scot, in 1584), and other magicians of the Edwardian era spoke out stridently against spiritualism both in the United States and Great Britain, nevertheless, Houdini crystallized the role of the magician in critical thinking, and the importance of having qualified magicians present when investigating self-proclaimed psychics.

Here is a disturbing article from the National Post on how some municipalities are practicing anti-science under pressure from fringe groups.

Attacks on science: Canadian municipalities often more likely to listen to activists than scientific facts | National Post.

In the past few years, towns, villages and cities throughout Canada have passed a wave of laws that could well be described as “anti-science.” Water fluoridation bans. Anti-WiFi resolutions. GE free zones. The decisions often fly in the face of scientific consensus, ignore the advice of experts and lend legitimacy to groups once considered fringe.

But, as activists are starting to discover, science does not matter when a city hall meeting is facing a room full of angry townsfolk.

Wired Science is reported that a Tennessee court has thrown out lie detection “evidence” from brain scans because it was unscientific. The defendant had offered the scans as proof that he was not lying about defrauding the government over Medicare payments.

The defense tried to use brain scans of the defendant to prove its client had not intentionally defrauded the government. In a 39-page opinion, Judge Tu Pham provided both a rebuke of this kind of fMRI evidence now, and a roadmap for how future defendants may be able to satisfy the Daubert standard, which governs the admissibility of scientific evidence.

It is particularly important to note that the company actually violated their own protocols during the scan. After two tests produced different results, the testing was repeated a third time until the desire result was obtained.

“Dr. Semrau risked nothing in having the testing performed, and Dr. Laken himself testified that had the results not been favorable to Dr. Semrau, they would have never been released,” Pham noted.