The Pink Salt Trick for Weight Loss is a Scam Work of Art

I regularly keep tabs on a few Youtube channels and have become fascinated by some of the scammy ads that I am forced to watch. I've become particularly enamored by ads for the "pink salt trick" for losing weight. The people featured in the ads (probably partially AI creations) go on, and on, and on, about how a few simple ingredients can cause massive weight loss, without diet, exercise, or using weight loss drugs. Somehow they never get around to explaining what those simple ingredients are.

If you search Youtube for the pink salt trick, you will get lots of videos from supposedly different people telling the same basic story. It's funny to see different women repeating the exact same talking points about their alleged experience. Claiming that they had to eat more burgers just to stop from wasting away is a nice touch. I was particularly amused by the claim that the pink salt trick is more effective than Zepbound and Mounjaro combined, since those two are actually the exact same drug under different names. I assume that the dialogue is carefully crafted to stay just within the bounds of the law (or perhaps Youtube's advertising standards), thus the mispronunciation of drug names or references to "those Lilly pills" (Lilly doesn't have weight loss drugs in pill form yet). If you take a step back, these videos are a masterclass in manipulating human psychology.

Curiosity finally got the better of me and I clicked one of the provided links. I was taken to a website that claimed that the new recipe was causing celebrities to lose 14 pounds in 10 days...which is not at all a healthy rate of loss. I don't know if it's even possible to lose that amount of fat that quickly. In addition to a video, the webpage had the words, "Scientific References" above logos for leading news sources (NY Times, CBS, ABC, FOX, CNN). None of these had any clickable links. Below that was a number of testimonials allegedly from Facebook. At the bottom was a disclaimer that began with this sentence: "He [sic] result of this content may vary from person to person, depending on each organism." LOL.

The video player wouldn't allow me to go forward or back so I sat through the whole thing, which lasted probably 45 minutes. The video started off a lot like the ads on Youtube, but it eventually transitioned to (supposedly, more later) The Oprah Podcast with Oprah talking with actual endocrinologist Dr. Ania Jastreboff. Oprah and Dr. Ania talked through Dr. Ania's discovery of the pink salt trick and it's miraculous effects, and how it mimics the weight loss drugs. Obviously, the pharmaceutical companies are furious about this and have threatened to ruin Dr. Ania's career. There was a subtle transition that was interesting to watch. Initially the pink salt trick was so simple that anyone could do it in a few seconds. Much later in the video, Dr. Ania stated the 4 ingredients: pink (Himalayan) salt, green tea extract, berberine, and resveratrol. A little while later she said that the recipe requires ingredients of a purity that can only be obtained from a Chinese supplier, and that it has to be formulated in an precise way.

At last, Oprah revealed that the product you need is LipoVive, and from there the video followed typical infomercial techniques. Although you can order it in packs of 1, 3, or 6, viewers were encouraged to order the 6 pack for several reasons. First, it brings the price per bottle down from $89 to $49. (Incredible savings!) Second, if you bought the 6 pack you would be entered into a drawing for a chance to hang out with Oprah on an all-expenses paid vacation to Greece. Additional incentives included books on how to lose weight easily, which seemed like a weird thing to include if LipoLive actually worked. Finally, it turns out that that Chinese company has a difficult time getting those pure ingredients and only makes them once every 6 months. So if you only get 1 or 3 bottles, you may run out and not be able to replenish your supply in a timely manner. Dr. Ania warned that failure to complete the 6 month regimen could cause you to have to start over, so you don't want to risk running out. Oprah said that the website was the only place to get LipoVive, and she was concerned that stock was running out quickly.

There were hints that the video was not really Oprah and Dr. Ania, I mean aside from the ludicrous notion that pink salt and a few other ingredients could mimic the GLP-1- based weight loss drugs. Whenever the video showed a wide-angle shot of both Oprah and Dr. Ania at the table, their lips were not synced to the audio. However, the close-up shots were quite convincing and a testament to the power of (I assume) deepfake technology.

How do I know it was a deepfake (aside from all the other red flags)? Because the actual conversation between Oprah and Dr. Ania on The Oprah Podcast is also available on Youtube. Their conversation has nothing to do with the pink salt trick, and I recommend it for anyone interested in obesity. The genius of this whole thing is that it uses actual content from the podcast and intermixes it with fake material. The result is an informercial that slickly leverages the authority of Oprah and Dr. Ania to hawk LipoVive (...maybe?).

But Wait, There's More!
As it turns out, LipoVive has its own independent website. The LipoVive website seems legitimate (to the extent that these types of supplements can be called legitimate) and includes the standard disclaimer that "the FDA hasn't evaluated the statements provided on this page." While it claims that the product encourages (whatever that means) the natural production of the GLP-1 and GIP hormones [1], and that it assists in weight loss, it does not make any of the outlandish claims that the pink salt videos do. Also, instead of the 4 ingredients listed by "Dr. Ania", the LipoVive website lists 8 ingredients (none of which are pink salt, if you can believe it). This has me wondering if the pink salt trick website is a double scam: convincing people to buy a product that not only doesn't do what they hope it will do, but also isn't even real LipoVive. (Maybe they just take your money and run.) After all, the fake Oprah podcast is clearly grounds for a lawsuit, and presumably regulatory/legal action. If you were the maker of LipoLive, why would you endanger your business like that?

Through all of this, I feel like I may only be scratching the surface of the scam. I found other Youtube videos on the pink salt trick that led to a different website pushing a different product called Mitolyn, with no mention of pink salt. Other videos give a recipe that consists of pink salt, lemon juice, and honey. And with all of the different videos, I'm starting to wonder if the products are mostly beside the point and that most of the money is being made from video views. The cleverness of scammers shouldn't be underestimated.

Entertaining as this all is, the bottom line is that pink salt will not do anything meaninful to help with weight loss. Heck, it's not even in the products that are marketed at the end of the rabbit hole. And as the science of weight loss and obesity continues to progress and pharmaceutical companies develop drugs that acheive near-miraculous results, there will continue to be scammers that prey upon people by pushing ideas and products with no value.

Notes:
1. The GLP-1 and GIP hormones produced by the body are degraded very rapidly, so boosting their production isn't much help. The success of the drug versions is mainly due to the fact that they are modified to stay in the body for much longer.

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Conspiracy Theories are Sweatpants of the Mind

There's a classic scene in Seinfeld where Jerry admonishes George for wearing sweatpants.

You're telling the world, "I give up. I can't compete in normal society, I'm miserable, so I might as well be comfortable."

This scene came to mind recently as I thought about people who trade in conspiracy theories. I think they are sending a signal rather similar to that of the sweatpants:

I give up. It's too hard to keep up with the complexities of modern society. I'm miserable and don't know who to believe, so I might as well be comfortable and adopt conspiracy theories.

Of course, this is not a denial that people sometimes conspire together for ill. However, your typical conspiracy theory typically throws prior probability and simpler explanations to the wind, and postulates the cooperation of many different people who would otherwise have little reason to cooperate. Conspiracy theories also tend to be unfalsifiable in that any evidence raised against them is incorporated as part of the conspiracy.

There are several ironies that come from conspiracy theories. First is the enhancement of tragedy for those affected. The awfulness of having your first grader murdered in his/her classroom, for example, is bad enough. But to then have people publicly accuse you of having faked their death, and harass you about it (as has happened with Sandy Hook), is a supremely cruel compounding of horror. Second, is that conspiracy theories are rather unhelpful in addressing the problem at hand. Simply put, when you wildly misdiagnose the problem your solutions will range somewhere between unhelpful and harmful. Finally, to bring us back to the title of this post, conspiracy theories give their adherents the illusion of knowledge and understanding. Moreover, in their attempt to reach the REAL truth, sincere adherents of conspiracy theories are actually manipulated by those who cynically foster the theories for gain.

I was already developing this metaphor and had started composing this post when current events added another to the genre. What kind of sweatpants does your mind have to be wearing in order to take this seriously, and what should we think about those who composed it and spread it? (See here for why it's total garbage.)

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Remember Planet Nibiru? It's (Not) Back!

Some people never learn. The Washington Post reports that a poor NASA scientist is having to field questions about a mystery planet known as Nibiru or Planet X, and predictions that it will cause catastrophe for Earth tomorrow (having failed to do so in September and October). According to the article,

Nibiru theories have by now become so abundant that if you spend long enough on YouTube or PlanetXNews.com you can find an apocalypse scheduled for just about any given day of the week.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, that's because this isn't the first time the fictitious planet has caused concern. In 2011 I highlighted the same hysteria. At the time, the prediction was for destruction in 2012, and it's the same scientist having to reassure people that this is not a thing. I don't pay as much attention to this kind of crap as I used to, but I figured I might as well document it again for blog posterity.

For more, see my previous post: 2012 Cosmophobia

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FIRM: The Misleading of Latter-day Saints by Latter-day Saints

Last week, while on vacation, my attention was called to an article in the Salt Lake Tribune: BYU and UVU scientists question research offered at a conference on the Book of Mormon. The article described the reaction of BYU and UVU scientists, as published in the BYU student newspaper, The Daily Universe, to a then-upcoming conference called the Firm Foundation Expo. In a word, they were horrified.

I've mentioned FIRM before. Although the organization, led by Rod Meldrum, is primarily interested in Book of Mormon geography, it pursues the subject through a young-earth creationist lens (which is required in order to make their ideas work). This kind of science-bending thinking often leads to the proliferation of nonsense, which is what the BYU and UVU scientists were reacting to. Specifically, they responded to Dean Sesson's "Universal Model" that posits that Earth is filled with water. I grumbled a little to myself and thought it might make for an interesting blog post, and then mostly forgot about it.

I'm late to the party, but last night I saw that Ardis Parshall covered the Firm Expo at her blog, Keepapitchinin. She went so that we wouldn't have to, although she ultimately gave up because she couldn't stomach any more.

Her comments are here: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Don't be intimidated; most of the posts are pretty short. However, if you don't read anything else, read the last part and her comments below it! But since I know you probably won't, I'll reproduce a few salient quotes after I share a few thoughts.

I try not to get too worked up over this stuff. After all, there is seemingly no end to the the kinds of nonsense people will push (and it sure seems like nonsense is the order of the day!), and my impression is that while many people may entertain wrong or crazy ideas, most of them don't take them too seriously [1]. Based on the program, it is clear that the FIRM Expo is fine example of crank magnetism -- which is the tendency of people with crank ideas to accumulate more crank ideas. Alternative science, alternative medicine, doomsday predictions, alternative economics, government nuttery, conspiracy theories...they're all represented. Hopefully the collective craziness is enough to warn most people that the Firm Expo is not a good source of information.

I'm sure that seeing that many crank-adherents concentrated in one place is depressing, but I think they are generally diluted to low-harm in the general population. That this kind of stuff takes place under the banner of more-faithful-than-you Mormonism is also depressing, but my general attitude toward people who think their purity of religion is better than mine (especially based on science) is to ignore them. Nevertheless, I salute Ardis for her effort and highlight some of her writing below.

My few hours at the FIRM Foundation Expo were a distressing mix of intellectual dismay at the continuous denial of the scientific method, and profound depression at the misuse of scripture – the misleading of Latter-day Saints by Latter-day Saints – that I could not bear any more of it.

To claim that you will always side with revelation against science when the two are in conflict implies that your understanding of both science and revelation is adequate – that you sufficiently understand the claims of science, and that you truly understand what revelation teaches. What I heard at this conference did not meet those criteria.

The conspiracist mindset somehow grasps the “truth” first, and then searches for data points to support the conclusion (whereas a scientist, who may well have a hunch to guide his initial research, reserves his conclusions until his observations are made and analyzed, and contraindications are addressed). That conspiracist mindset was on full display in the session about the origin of the Earth and its life: We were told first that the Earth is a sack of water, then were treated to a torrent of “data” supporting that conclusion – no coherence, no attempts to test the notion, but merely a flood of mishmash of sources: scripture taken out of context, somebody’s lawsuit about something, pictures and bits of text from sources that might have been reliable and might have been reported accurately but sometimes sounded as if they came from the Weekly World News for all the credibility they carried, rhetorical questions presented as evidence (“What if I told you that …” and “Have you ever thought about …”), and always – always – the scoffing at mainstream scientists for being wrong about this and that and not even looking for proof of this other thing.

Then there’s the bone-deep skepticism of “the world” as a place and a philosophy of deception and wickedness, and a confidence — exaggerated, in my view — that as the people of God we have all the answers to all of the great questions, and those answers do and must stand in opposition to the vain philosophies of men. That is, we simply know better … even, apparently about matters which God has not revealed. I think that generally unexamined belief runs very deep through Mormonism, although it is a byproduct, a misapplication, of Mormonism rather than anything intrinsic to it.

To declare that you will “stand with the Church” in a supposed science/revelation dispute, especially while failing to recognize that the Church has taken no stand, or that you will “stand by revelation” when you rely solely on a knee-jerk fundamentalism that doesn’t bear scrutiny, is no credit to the Church or to revelation.

Notes:
1. Lest someone accuse me, a Mormon, of writing that sentence without any sense of irony, I do see the irony. But that's a discussion for another day.

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The Story of John Taylor's Watch Seems Too Good to Let Go

I just returned from my summer vacation, part of which included a visit to Carthage Jail. When the sister missionary leading our tour told us that John Taylor's watch had stopped a bullet, I figured it was just one missionary repeating the traditional story. Later, in the bedroom where Joseph and Hyrum were killed, and John Taylor nearly-killed, we listened to an audio production that also told the traditional watch story. I realized that the issue of accuracy went beyond the missionary.

While John Taylor was recovering from his bullet wounds, received during the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith, his family noticed a small hole cut in his pocket and damage to the face of the watch. He and his family came to believe that his watch had stopped a bullet, which not only saved him from another (perhaps fatal) wound but also prevented him from falling out of the window. The story has become a prominent part of the story of the martyrdom, and serves as a faith-promoting miracle in church history. It can be found in church publications as recent as the 2011 John Taylor manual. The problem is that it probably isn't true.

Historian Glen M. Leonard was the director of the Church History Museum for twenty six years. In his book, Nauvoo: A Place of Peace, a People of Promise (published by Deseret Book in 2002), Leonard wrote that after John Taylor was shot in the leg,

He collapsed on the wide sill, denting the back of his vest pocket watch. The force shattered the glass cover of the timepiece against his ribs and pushed the internal gear pins against the enamel face, popping out a small segment later mistakenly identified as a bullet hole.

The reason for the alternative story, simply put, is that the damage to the watch is not consistent with a bullet hitting it. Consider that Hyrum's watch was much more damaged by a bullet that had passed part-way through his body. Other leading historians, such as Richard Bushman in Rough Stone Rolling, have followed Leonard's lead [1].

This information has been known for over a decade, and was featured in a 2010 BYU Education Week presentation that was reported in a Deseret News article, so why hasn't it penetrated the presentation at Carthage Jail (to say nothing of the average saint, or even the 2011 manual)? It's possible that I'm being too nit-picky, but how would you feel if you spent your mission repeating the story every day, only to find out later that it was known to be mistaken since you were at least 3 years old?

I am happy to report a couple of signs of progress. First, the new Institute manual, Foundations of the Restoration, omits the watch entirely in its treatment of the martyrdom.

As the conflict at the doorway increased, John Taylor tried to escape the room through a window. As he attempted to leap out of the window, he was shot in the thigh from the doorway and was also shot by someone outside. He fell to the floor, and while attempting to get under the bed next to the window, he was severely wounded by three more shots.

Second, and more importantly, an article published last April in the history section of the Church's website, John Taylor's Miracle, is devoted to the damage of Taylor's pocket watch. Although it bends over backwards to retain the miraculous in his survival, it does a nice job of gently putting the traditional story to rest--or at least legitimizing the alternative.

So now you don't have to cite some historian nobody cares about [2] when challenged on the revision of the pocket watch story. Instead you can cite the Church's own website. Maybe someone should tell the missionaries at Carthage [3].

Notes:

1. The LDS history blog Juvenile Instructor has a nice summary of the issue, with great references that I am too lazy to reproduce here.

2. You know what I mean.

3. I didn't raise the issue when I was there because I was afraid I would sound like a jerk, and it wasn't until I returned home that I found the Church article. However, given the number of people who tour the jail, I find it hard to believe that nobody has ever called them on it.

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A Paranormal Plug in the Deseret News

Oh, for heaven's sake. Daniel Peterson's latest column in the Deseret News, Defending the Faith: Rethinking materialism in science, advertises a new home for cranks and loons. As a casual observer (and an overall fan) of Peterson, this isn't terribly surprising. He has expressed affinity for Intelligent Design on several occasions, and he seems to relish taking on 'the establishment' as he perceives it. Simply by the title of the column you know it's going to take an aggrieved stance toward mainstream science, but he does one better by telling everyone about a group of open-minded scientists who are calling for revolution, and spreading their questionable (at best) assertions.

When I looked around the Open Sciences site, it didn't take long to find that it's a collection of people pushing all kinds of fringe ideas (parapsychology and psychic phenomena, mysteries of water, etc.) At least a few of them have a long history of, shall we say, original thinking. After this group of revolutionaries met a year ago, they issued a manifesto which serves as the foundation of Peterson's column. It's written in the classic style of minority scientists who think they don't get enough respect [1]. It notes that they are "internationally known [2]," vents their grievance at all the dogmatism, and collects names of people with PhD's in order to appear important.

Before presenting their unorthodox ideas, the manifesto prepares the way with this statement.

Science is first and foremost a non-dogmatic, open-minded method of acquiring knowledge about nature through the observation, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena. Its methodology is not synonymous with materialism and should not be committed to any particular beliefs, dogmas, or ideologies.

Ah, classic. We all know that scientists should follow the evidence wherever it leads, and that dogmatism runs against the spirit of science. This kind of statement serves two purposes. First, to disarm critical scientists by appealing to their scientific values, and second, to help cultivate the appearance of unfair treatment by critics in the eyes of the public. It's not that the statement is wrong, per se, it's just incomplete. It's missing notions of skepticism, reproducibility, criticism, and so on.

Moving on, there are a variety of claims: we've got quantum mechanics (QM) and consciousness, near-death experiences, mediums who contact the dead, telekinesis, etc. Let me pause here to give you my rule of thumb on QM: you can dismiss out of hand anyone that uses QM to support new-age-type claims. I know that sounds dogmatic, but QM is strange stuff and is difficult to understand because it is heavily mathematical and contradicts our intuitions. Given the fact that new-age claims are not part of standard physics courses, it is much more likely that someone connecting QM to consciousness either doesn't understand QM, or has hijacked it in a way that is difficult to discern for non-physicists (of which I am one).

The manifesto continues:

Moreover, materialist theories fail to elucidate how brain could generate the mind, and they are unable to account for the empirical evidence alluded to in this manifesto. This failure tells us that it is now time to free ourselves from the shackles and blinders of the old materialist ideology, to enlarge our concept of the natural world, and to embrace a post-materialist paradigm.

Now it is certainly the case that we don't fully understand how consciousness works under currently understood physical principles (which is different than to say it CANNOT be understood eventually), but here is what our revolutionaries assert as a better view:

15. According to the post-materialist paradigm:

a) Mind represents an aspect of reality as primordial as the physical world. Mind is fundamental in the universe, i.e. it cannot be derived from matter and reduced to anything more basic.

b) There is a deep interconnectedness between mind and the physical world.

c) Mind (will/intention) can influence the state of the physical world, and operate in a nonlocal (or extended) fashion, i.e. it is not confined to specific points in space, such as brains and bodies, nor to specific points in time, such as the present. Since the mind may nonlocally influence the physical world, the intentions, emotions, and desires of an experimenter may not be completely isolated from experimental outcomes, even in controlled and blinded experimental designs.

d) Minds are apparently unbounded, and may unite in ways suggesting a unitary, One Mind that includes all individual, single minds.

There you go, folks! Materialism has failed to give a good explanation, so we can now say that mind is basically magic unmoored from the known laws of the universe.

I know there are still a lot of questions remaining within science, but I fail to see how positing that "mind is fundamental to the universe"--whatever that means--helps anything. I know that some of these statements bear a superficial resemblance to certain scriptures, but that doesn't guarantee that they really correspond to one another. And I know that to be a Mormon entails a certain amount of belief in things not borne out by science (yet?), but that doesn't mean we should run into the arms of the scientific fringe.


Notes:
1. Compare the manifesto with Dissent from Darwinism and the Global Warming Petition Project.
2. So am I, and I'm a nobody.

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BYU Fact-Checks Joseph Smith on Zacharias: How an Apocryphal Story Became Revealed Knowledge

As we are studying the New Testament in Sunday School this year, I was interested to see that Lesson 4 contains the following tidbit about John the Baptist and Herod's 'slaughter of the innocents'. After describing Joseph and Mary's flight to Egypt, as recorded in Matthew, the manual quotes Joseph Smith:

To protect John, “Zacharias caused [Elisabeth] to take him into the mountains, where he was raised on locusts and wild honey” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, sel. Joseph Fielding Smith [1976], 261).

A more full quotation is as follows:

When Herod’s edict went forth to destroy the young children, John was about six months older than Jesus, and came under this hellish edict, and Zacharias caused his mother to take him into the mountains, where he was raised on locusts and wild honey. When his father refused to disclose his hiding place, and being the officiating high priest at the Temple that year, was slain by Herod’s order, between the porch and the altar, as Jesus said.

In 2013 the Religious Studies Center at BYU published an interesting article, "The Confusing Case of Zacharias," by Lynne Hilton Wilson, which shows this story to be a spurious tradition from the second century A.D. You should read the whole thing, but the story can be told in a few steps.

1. Zechariah, son of Jehoiada, was a high priest serving in Solomon's temple and was stoned to death (2 Chronicles 24:21).

2. Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, was the minor prophet after whom the Old Testament book is named.

3. In Matthew 23:35, Jesus told the Pharisees that they were guilty of killing the prophets, including "Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar." Luke 11:51 records the same condemnation, but simply referred to "Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple."

4. Matthew seems to have mixed up which Zacharias was referenced.

5. The early-Christian document, "Protevangelium of James" embellished on the nativity narratives and connected the Zacharias referred to by Jesus with the father of John the Baptist by having him killed by the altar [1]. (In the process, the document transformed the father of John into the high priest. Also his blood turned to stone.)

6. In spite of its dubious origins, the story continued to circulate down through the centuries and was published multiple times in a variety of venues in the nineteenth century, including the Times and Seasons in Nauvoo. It was then incorporated into Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith by Joseph Fielding Smith.

7. Here we have a twist in the plot. It turns out that there is no evidence that Joseph actually wrote the statement quoted above. After laying out the evidence, Wilson writes:

Although we know of no evidence that Joseph Smith wrote, delegated, or approved the publication of this article referencing Zacharias, it still found its way into Joseph Fielding Smith’s compilation, Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, in 1938. The pertinent problem lies in the fact that these teachings became interpreted by many as instructions to the Church from the Prophet. As a result, several Latter-day Saint books have spread the story as if it were a restored truth—including Sunday School and institute manuals.

Indeed, her footnote #2 lists its use by a number of LDS authors--some of whom are big names (e.g. McConkie, Millet, Matthews, Skousen), and it does appear in several Church publications. In the January 1995 Ensign, for example, it was listed as one of the insights about the Bible given to us as revealed knowledge through Joseph Smith.

This all makes my title tongue-in-cheek, since it turns out that Joseph Smith probably had nothing to do with the teaching. How ironic, though, that a centuries-old apocryphal story became 'revealed' knowledge. Given its widespread and authoritative distribution, it probably has a lot of years to live still.

Notes:
1. Translations available here. The murder of Zacharias happens toward the end.

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Blessed Are the Nerds

My Saturday web surfing alerted me to a small controversy over the role of nerds in American culture. National Review's July cover story was a piece by Charles C. W. Cooke attacking scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson and America's sanctimonious nerds. To the extent that the piece is a reminder that smart people can fall prey to their own biases and that data alone cannot drive decisions, I suppose it is a useful commentary. But I have to say that, to my eye, the whole piece drips of bitterness and projection.

One part insecure hipsterism, one part unwarranted condescension, the two defining characteristics of self-professed nerds are (a) the belief that one can discover all of the secrets of human experience through differential equations and (b) the unlovely tendency to presume themselves to be smarter than everybody else in the world. Prominent examples include MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, Rachel Maddow, Steve Kornacki, and Chris Hayes; Vox’s Ezra Klein, Dylan Matthews, and Matt Yglesias; the sabermetrician Nate Silver; the economist Paul Krugman; the atheist Richard Dawkins; former vice president Al Gore; celebrity scientist Bill Nye; and, really, anybody who conforms to the Left’s social and moral precepts while wearing glasses and babbling about statistics.

No condescension here! You might also notice that all of the nerds mentioned come from the Left [1]. I guess that makes sense on the article's own terms because Cooke asserts that "First and foremost, then, “nerd” has become a political designation." That the word had been redefined to carry primarily political meaning was news to me, but since I only moderately identified with the term in the first place, I don't have much investment in the definition. Someone should inform high school students, though.

How smug are the nerds?

These are the people who insisted until they were blue in the face that George W. Bush was a “theocrat” eternally hostile toward “evidence,” and that, despite all information to the contrary, Attorney General Ashcroft had covered up the Spirit of Justice statue at the Department of Justice because he was a prude. These are the people who will explain to other human beings without any irony that they are part of the “reality-based community,” and who want you to know how aw-shucks excited they are to look through the new jobs numbers.

I can see how calling yourself "reality-based" might be off-putting. On the other hand, maybe it should be pointed out that the term was coined by a Bush aide (thought to be Karl Rove) as a term of derision.

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Given the history, is it any wonder that "reality-based community" has been adopted by nerds as a term of honor?

Cooke's piece has come in for criticism, but I guess you would expect that from those jerk-nerds of the Left. Personally, I liked this bit from Andrew Leonard at Salon:

Cooke argues that leftists are embracing the nerd-designation because it says to the world what they are not: “… which is southern, politically conservative, culturally traditional, religious in some sense, patriotic, driven by principle rather than the pivot tables of Microsoft Excel, and in any way attached to the past.”

Oh NO! Cooke dares attack nerdish chart-love! That really stings. But you know what? It’s not the fault of liberal nerds that Ken Hamm’s Creation Museum, which claims that dinosaurs were wiped out in a flood 4300 years ago, is in the South. And for better or worse, it’s not the fault of liberal nerds that large swathes of Republican politicians in the South have lined up behind the breath-taking rejection of the scientific method that is symbolized by the Creation Museum.

I might also add that those are some gratuitous assertions on Cooke's part.

Cooke ridicules nerd identification as a fad adopted by posers.

“Ignorance,” a popular Tyson meme holds, “is a virus. Once it starts spreading, it can only be cured by reason. For the sake of humanity, we must be that cure.” This rather unspecific message is a call to arms, aimed at those who believe wholeheartedly they are included in the elect “we.” Thus do we see unexceptional liberal-arts students lecturing other people about things they don’t understand themselves and terming the dissenters “flat-earthers.” Thus do we see people who have never in their lives read a single academic paper clinging to the mantle of “science” as might Albert Einstein. Thus do we see residents of Brooklyn who are unable to tell you at what temperature water boils rolling their eyes at Bjørn Lomborg or Roger Pielke Jr. because he disagrees with Harry Reid on climate change.

This is interesting. My wife's education was in the liberal arts, so I guess she isn't allowed to assert the value of childhood vaccination to her stay-at-home-mom peers. But more interesting is that Cooke chose to pit Bjørn Lomborg or Roger Pielke Jr. against Harry Reid. Really? I think what Cooke meant to say was "rolling their eyes at Bjørn Lomborg or Roger Pielke Jr. because he disagrees with many climate scientists and economists, whose work has informed Harry Reid's views." You see, nerds would know that Lomborg and Pielke's reputations have very little to do with what Harry Reid thinks. (As an aside, Cooke seems to have taken Pielke's departure from Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight as a personal slight. In searching the web for information about Pielke, I found this note by Cooke lamenting the terrible vitriol of the Left. It's not the Left's fault Cooke apparently crushed on a guy that has gained a reputation for distortion.)

Cooke also calls out progressives for themselves believing some unscientific things:

Progressives not only believe all sorts of unscientific things — that Medicaid, the VA, and Head Start work; that school choice does not; that abortion carries with it few important medical questions; that GM crops make the world worse; that one can attribute every hurricane, wildfire, and heat wave to “climate change”; that it’s feasible that renewable energy will take over from fossil fuels anytime soon — but also do their level best to block investigation into any area that they consider too delicate.

First of all, I thought we were talking about nerds, not progressives in general. Second, just this last week Chris Mooney at that lefty magazine Mother Jones highlighted a video of Neil deGrasse Tyson--the man Cooke chose as his nerd symbol--telling anti-GMO folks to "chill out." Also, nerds would not simplistically attribute every hurricane, wildfire, or heat wave to climate change. Rather, they would bend over backwards to explain that climate change will statistically increase the frequency and severity. Unfortunately such efforts seem to be lost on Cooke and his non-nerds and, for their part, they like to use every snow storm or regional cold snap as an opportunity to remind everyone that Al Gore was wrong [2]. What is it with them and Al Gore?

Look, if conservatives like Cooke are losing out to the nerds, it's mostly their own fault. In the wake of the Great Recession and the election of Barack Obama, the Right has run to the fever swamps, leaving behind (or actively expelling) politicians and commentators who refuse to follow (i.e. "RINOs"). If you've lost the nerds, maybe that should tell you something.


Notes:
1. More or less.

2. I did a quick search to see if Cooke had ever done something like that. He had. Granted he was more nuanced in his commentary than most, but I took an interest in this claim: "The 1990 IPCC Report promised an increase in sea level of around 120 millimeters [or 12 cm] by 2014." A nerd might have a copy of the 1990 IPCC report and bother to look up what it said. Would it surprise you if the only justification I can find for Cooke's statement is an uncharitable reading of a graph? What the report actually says is, "Under the Business-as-Usual scenario, the best estimate is that, for the year 2030, global sea level would be 18cm higher than today. Given the stated range of uncertainty in the contributing factors, the rise could be as little as 8cm or as high as 29cm."

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Scientists: Bigfoot Still Missing

University of Oxford scientists have published--in a peer-reviewed journal--results of DNA tests for 'anomalous primates' (i.e. Bigfoot). They put out a call for people to send in hair samples and received 57. Actually, not all of the samples were hair, so after they discarded those and others from which DNA could not be extracted, they were left with 30 samples. They sequenced the mitochondrial DNA of the remaining samples and compared the sequences to those in databases. They found polar bear, horse, raccoon, porcupine, dog, and even one human. None of the results came back as not-quite-human. It wasn't a total waste of time though, because a couple of samples from the Himalayas came back as polar bear, suggesting a hybrid species of bears.

The authors conclude:

While it is important to bear in mind that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and this survey cannot refute the existence of anomalous primates, neither has it found any evidence in support. Rather than persisting in the view that they have been ‘rejected by science’, advocates in the cryptozoology community have more work to do in order to produce convincing evidence for anomalous primates and now have the means to do so.

I think that's a diplomatic way of saying put up or shut up.

Notes:
Source: Sykes, Proc. R. Soc. B 22 August 2014 vol. 281 no. 1789

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2012 Cosmophobia

December is upon us, so it's a good time to take a quick look at why some people think that the world may end a year from now. For several years there have been claims on the Internet that a planet--Nibiru or Planet X--will collide with Earth (or make a catastrophic near-miss) in December of 2012. This planet allegedly orbits the sun every 3600 years, and that the collision coincides with the end of the Mayan calendar is just a bonus.

NASA has some nice material on this, especially the "Ask an Astrobiologist" web-page. Whether you are concerned about this yourself, or are just interested in what types of things people get themselves worked up over, head on over and read the Q&A. The short version is that no such planet exists.

You'll also find these two videos.





To put an LDS twist on this, some people think Nibiru or Planet X could be implicated in this statement by Joseph Smith:

There will be wars and rumors of wars, signs in the heavens above and on the earth beneath, the sun turned into darkness and the moon to blood, earthquakes in divers places, the seas heaving beyond their bounds; then will appear one grand sign of the Son of Man in heaven. But what will the world do? They will say it is a planet, a comet, &c. But the Son of Man will come as the sign of the coming of the Son of Man, which will be as the light of the morning cometh out of the east [History of The Church, 5:336-37].

Whatever Joseph's statement means, I think it's pretty safe to say that it has nothing to do with Nibiru or Planet X...since no such planet exists.


And just for fun, I'll end with Robert Frost's poem, "Fire and Ice."

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

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John A. Widtsoe on Prophecy

Recent events reminded me of this gem from Elder John A. Widtsoe, published in the November 1944 Improvement Era. The issue under consideration was astrology and the article closed with this penultimate paragraph.

Latter-day Saints do not believe in any system that makes man a creature of unknown, unintelligent forces, which destroy human free agency. They do not believe in any system that opens the future to human eyes, and, therefore, destroys the incentive for toil and progress. Patriarchs state possible human destiny, under conditions of obedience to God's law. Prophets do the same in behalf of the Church. There is no fortunetelling in the Church of Christ. The attempts at particular prophecy, as to time and place, have usually failed.

Is it just me, or do you also sometimes wish that Elder Widtsoe was alive today?

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Church Radio Deals Dose of Skepticism

A recent episode of "Legacy," a production of the Church's radio channel, featured a discussion of some prominent Mormon myths and urban legends by several members of the Historical Department. They discussed some of the reasons these myths survive (people want to feel part of something momentous, the stories vindicate belief, etc.) and urged people to be more skeptical about such circulating stories. I thought it made for a nice lesson in critical thinking. The fact that it came from people in the Church's Historical Department on a Church-sponsored program was an added bonus!

Below I summarize the myths covered in the hour-long program. Several of these myths were new to me, and a few of them were still categorized as true in my mind.


1. False: On 9/11 a missionary zone conference at the World Trade Center was miraculously cancelled.

Truth: No such zone conference existed.

2. False: The Mormon Battalion made the longest march in history.

Truth: Myth can be attributed to a hyperbolic statement by one of the leaders.

3. False: Those involved in the murder of Joseph Smith met terrible fates.

Truth: Most of them went on to lead normal and successful lives.

4. False: Brigham Young directed that large shafts be incorporated into the Salt Lake temple. Later, they were found to be just the right size for elevators.

Truth: The interior of the temple was designed after Brigham Young was dead. Although the design did include such shafts, that was because they were specifically intended for elevators.

5. False: According to a Church leader (usually Boyd K. Packer), today's youth were generals in war in heaven, and will be treated with hushed awe for having living during the presidency of Gordon B. Hinckley.

Truth: The Church has specifically repudiated this rumor.

6. False: Members of the Mormon Battalion discovered gold in California, initiating the gold rush.

Truth: Although some former members of the Battalion were present, they were not the discoverers.

7. False: John Taylor's pocket watch saved his life by stopping a bullet.

Truth: Although the watch was damaged and John Taylor thought it had stopped a bullet, the damage is not consistent with a bullet.

8. False: Angry about polygamy, Emma Smith pushed Eliza R. Snow down the stairs.

Truth: The story originated in an anti-Mormon publication and appears to conflate two separate stories.

9. False: Women in Kirtland ground up their fine china to help decorate the walls of the Kirtland Temple.

Truth: Broken dishes and cookware (i.e. garbage) were collected and recycled for decorative use.

10. False: A Japaneese bomber in WWII tried to bomb the temple in Hawaii, but the bomb would not release. He later found out what the temple was, joined the Church, and eventually became a General Authority.

Truth: Neither of the two Japaneese members who have been General Authorities were bombers for the Japaneese army. One was from Hawaii and fought for the U.S. and the other was a child at the time. The origin of the story cannot otherwise be determined.

11. False: Brigham Young wanted the tower of the St. George temple changed, but the residents of St. George refused. After Brigham Young died, lighting struck the tower and it burned down and had to be replaced. Thus, Brigham got his way.

Truth: The origin of this story was a joke told at a fireside. Brigham didn't like the construction of the tower, but did not demand a change. If he had, there is every reason to believe the builders in St. George would have complied. However, the tower was struck by lighting and eventually replaced.

12. False: The White Horse Prophecy

Truth: Joseph F. Smith and other leaders specifically repudiated this alleged prophecy of Joseph Smith.

13. Pioneers were building a meeting house, but didn't know how to build the roof. An immigrant shipbuilder advised them how to build the roof by using plans for a ship and turning them upside down.

Truth: There were plenty of skilled carpenters and written resources on how to build roofs.

If this one sounds familiar, it is probably because Elder L. Tom Perry told essentially the same story about the building of the Manti temple in the October 2009 General Conference. One possible source for Elder Perry's story is the book, Before Zion: An Account of the 7th Handcart Company, which attributes the story to Sanpete County tradition. Although this particular version of the story was not specifically addressed in the program, the general discussion casts doubt on it. Further, the architect for the Manti temple was William H. Folsom, who had worked closely with Truman O. Angell (both men served for a time as Church Architect) and had also served as the architect for the Tabernacle, as well as other significant projects. The idea that he would farm out the design of the temple roof to a group of people who didn't know anything about building roofs seems highly doubtful on its face.

14. False: Most of the pioneers pushed handcarts.

Truth: Although the handcart has become an icon symbolizing the pioneer trek west, only a fraction of the pioneers came in handcart companies. Further, although trek re-enactments by youth throughout the Church often have a point were the boys are taken away for the Mormon Battalian, leaving the girls to push handcarts by themselves, there is no historical connection between the Mormon Battalion and the handcart companies. The Mormon Battalion was formed 10 years before the handcart pioneers crossed the plains. It is recommended that leaders inform trek re-enactment participants that their experience is based on a composite of pioneer history.


(H/T, BCC.)

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Making Hash of Science, Religion, and Politics

In cryptography a "one way hash function" is a mathematical operation or algorithm that is easy to do, but difficult to undo. For example, one can multiply two prime numbers together quite easily. However, given only the result, it is difficult to figure out which two prime numbers were multiplied together, especially when the number is large. In fact if the the number is large enough, supercomputers may take years to figure it out.

Today I was reading a little essay on FactCheck.org, "Health Care and the 'One Way Hash'" that used the concept of a "one way hash" as an analogy for the kind of work they do--trying to get past sound bites to the more complicated reality. Credit for the analogy actually goes to Julian Sanchez at the Cato Institute, whom they quote:

Sanchez: The talking point on one side is just complex enough that it's both intelligible—even somewhat intuitive—to the layman and sounds as though it might qualify as some kind of insight. (If it seems too obvious, perhaps paradoxically, we’ll tend to assume everyone on the other side thought of it themselves and had some good reason to reject it.)[*] The rebuttal, by contrast, may require explaining a whole series of preliminary concepts before it's really possible to explain why the talking point is wrong. So the setup is "snappy, intuitively appealing argument without obvious problems" vs. "rebuttal I probably don't have time to read, let alone analyze closely."

Upon reading this I immediately thought of the many anti-Mormon or creationist arguments I've encountered that are so wrong-headed that I've hardly known where to begin.

Sanchez's original post is about our need to rely on qualified authorities when making judgments about technical issues. He points out that legitimate authorities often have to contend with "one hash arguments," and that lay people are therefore likely to be misled if they ignore the authorities and try to judge the issues for themselves. And it turns out that the paragraph quoted above was about the "one hash arguments" of Intelligent Design proponents.

Anyway, I love the analogy and I think I may start making use of it. FactCheck concludes with advice that applies beyond public policy.

Keep this in mind the next time you see what looks like a knock-down, one-sentence argument for your favorite public policy option. If it looks like a pretty obvious (but not too obvious) argument, there’s a decent chance that you’ve just found yourself a one way hash.

I think that goes for arguments both for and against.


* You would think that some arguments would be too obvious, but apparently not. Skeptics of global warming, for example, say all kinds of things that seem so obvious that, if they were true, you would wonder how mainstream scientists could be so stupid and still survive into adulthood.

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Quackery Roundup: Oprah and Chiropractic

Newsweek takes Oprah Winfrey to the woodshed for the various quacks and quackery that have been promoted on her show. There have been complaints about Oprah on science/skeptic blogs and podcasts for a while now, so it's nice to see more mainstream criticism of some of the empty and potentially dangerous advice given on the show. Although the diet and fitness tips are apparently generally good, be very skeptical of the medical advice--especially promises of easy solutions or revolutionary methods.

Meanwhile there is an ongoing legal skirmish in the U.K. over chiropractic. A New Scientist opinion piece, "What you should know about chiropractic," briefly reviews the origins of chiropractic and the controversy surrounding it. I'm willing to grant that there may be a legitimate place for chiropractic in health care when it hews closely to mainstream medicine. Unfortunately, many chiropracters make claims beyond the evidence and actually steer people away from effective treatment. As an example, chiropracters are historically--and apparently still commonly--anti-vaccination.

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Vital Force Discovered?

This week I was on an airplane, absent-mindedly browsing the SkyMall magazine, when I noticed an amazing device. It's called Aculife, and it is a variation--well, technically a complete re-definition--of acupuncture. It stimulates and helps to unblock qi by delivering mild electrical pulses. But it doesn't just stimulate qi, it can detect it and let you know where the blockages are! I repeat, it can measure qi! That proves that qi exists!

(Click image to enlarge.)

A number of things about the ad caught my attention.

1. It includes a handy (pun) diagram of qi points on the hand. This represents a mixing of pseudosciences. My understanding is that traditional qi points are located all over the body. For convenience, it looks like they've mixed reflexology (which maps the whole body onto the hand or foot) with acupuncture.

2. The map itself is interesting. The heart, liver, and kidneys are depicted in multiple places. And for some reason, the anus is out on the tip of the thumb (?!), along with fatigue, bronchitis, and insomnia--nowhere near the intestines, inflamed colon, diarrhea, or hemorrhoids. True, the spine is represented along the side of the thumb, but it's in the opposite orientation to the anus that you would expect.

3. "The best way to find out if Aculife is right for you and your health is to try it."

4. ...except if you are "pregnant, have a pacemaker, or suffer from malignant tumors, excessive bleeding or tuberculosis." I guess those things have nothing to do with blocked qi.

5. But wait, over at the base of the thumb is "breast tumor." So I guess as long as the tumor is not malignant, it's alright to use Aculife.

6. "FDA Approved" -- Well, okay, that probably just means that the electrical stimulation won't hurt you, not that this actually can be used to diagnose and treat disease.

7. "Diagnose and heal yourself and your family." Oh.

In summary, this is total garbage and if it doesn't technically break any laws governing advertising or medical claims, it should.

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The Global Cooling Myth

One of the charges that you may hear, which is intended to cast doubt on the reliability of climatologists and global warming, is that in the 1970s scientists were warning about global cooling and an impending ice age. This turns out to be mostly a myth.

Last September the American Meteorological Society (AMS) published an article in their bulletin called, "The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus" (pdf), that explains the basis for this myth. The short version is that there had been some cooling since 1940 (see below). Climate science (which looks at long-term trends, not short-term weather) was a relatively immature science and some scientists were grappling with how aerosols could be responsible for the cooling. At the same time, other scientists were beginning to understand the pattern of long-term ice age fluctuations and predicted that on a geological time scale (i.e. thousands to tens of thousands of years), and ignoring human activities, the Earth should be heading for another ice age.

These factors combined with unusually severe winters in 1972 and 1973 and other fears of food shortages and so forth, and resulted in some hype in the mainstream media and increased public consciousness. In actuality, the effect of anthropogenic CO2 emissions was also being considered by scientists and there were already predictions of a warming trend. In fact a 1965 report by the President's Science Advisory Committee noted recent data on CO2 emissions and expressed concern about the potential for its warming effect on the climate.

The article points out that references to global cooling doom from the 1970s are usually drawn from popular publications such as Newsweek rather than the scientific literature of the time. In fact the authors did a literature search and categorized scientific publications according to whether they supported cooling, warming, or remained neutral. The following figure summarizes their results (click to enlarge):

Fig. 1. The number of papers classified as predicting, implying, or providing supporting evidence for future global cooling, warming, and neutral categories as defined in the text and listed in Table 1. During the period from 1965 through 1979, our literature survey found 7 cooling, 20 neutral, and 44 warming papers.

These data suggest that the notion that climate scientists (as a group) were warning of impending cooling only to reverse course and push warming, is false.

To finish, here is the global mean temperature from 1880 to 2007. The 1940s cooling is evident, as well as the overall warming trend.

Source: NOAA, Climate of 2007 Annual Report

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National Myth-Making

Discover Magazine has an article online, "The Man Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Pyramid," that reports on some hills in Bosnia that are becoming a national myth (in all the meanings of the word). The short version is that a guy with no relevant credentials thinks that some hills in Bosnia are actually ancient pyramids built before the ice age, that the purported ancient civilization that built them was more advanced (whatever that means) than we are...and the pseudoscience continues from there. It may even launch a New Age religion.

Of course this is driving actual geologists and archaeologists nuts. The story has been unfolding since 2005, and if this article is a reliable guide, Bosnia is really going in for it.

If so many prominent scientists hold that there are no Bosnian pyramids, why is Osmanagich’s project so successful? One reason is that at the time of his return to Bosnia in 2005, there was a knowledge vacuum unlike any the country had ever experienced before. The legions of archaeologists who would have challenged his theory before the 1992–1995 war, says Cambridge archaeologist Preston Miracle, were not around. In the prewar years, “archaeology in Bosnia was truly world-class,” he says. But by the time of the war, many of these leading scholars had died, and during the war many promising Bosnian archaeology students fled, settling into permanent positions at universities abroad. Today, many experts say, Bosnia’s real archaeological record is, at best, neglected—and at worst, endangered.

The pyramids are becoming a symbol of national pride as well as a source of tourism income. We may be watching the seeds of a future historical (heh, oxymoron) controversy taking root before our eyes.

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Magicians and Neuroscientists

I love a good magic show. Magicians and neuroscientists have teamed up to write a scientific paper. As described by the New York Times,

In a paper published [July 30] in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, a team of brain scientists and prominent magicians described how magic tricks, both simple and spectacular, take advantage of glitches in how the brain constructs a model of the outside world from moment to moment, or what we think of as objective reality.

The paper, Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research, is available to read for free. The paper is an outgrowth of a conference last year, of which some videos are also available for viewing. A few specific tricks are explained, but the discussion is mostly about general principles.

Incidentally, if you spend any time paying attention to the skeptics movement, you'll find the involvement of magicians. James Randi, one of the authors of the paper, is particularly prominent. Their expertise in deception, as part of their craft, gives them insight into evaluating paranormal claims. After all, they do make their living by appearing to do or know impossible things.

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Joseph and the Third Option

Over at the FAIR Blog, in a post titled Seer or Pious Fraud,
Keller discusses the issue of how we should view Joseph Smith's pre-plates treasure seeking. I am not going to pass judgment here, but I want to round out his discussion a little bit.

I think the title and the post presents a false dichotomy: that either Joseph genuinely could see treasures, or he was lying. Anybody who spends some time reading or listening to material from the skeptical community (i.e. the community of people who promote science and fight pseudoscience and the paranormal) knows that there is at least one additional option: that people genuinely believe that they have powers, even though they do not.

It is not as simple as someone lying to themselves until they believe it, or even being crazy. Of course, nobody knows what is in a person's heart. However, there are still people who use methods of divination (such as dowsing) to find water or other objects. There are probably some mediums who genuinely think that they can communicate with the dead. There are probably some people that genuinely think Ouija boards can give them messages. And, to use a non-paranormal example, there are people who believe that facilitated communication works.

None of this requires a person to consciously generate falsehoods; they need only fall prey to ordinary human psychology. A few successes--or apparent successes--can go a long way to convince people that some genuine power is at work, even in the face of many failures, which can be explained away. Even if the person does not initially believe that they actually have any powers, others might convince them otherwise. For example, a mentalist who demonstrates the apparent ability to communicate with the dead, and explains that it is a trick based on psychological techniques, may have audience members convinced that there really was something supernatural involved and that the performer does not appreciate their true power. (You don't have to dig too deep into the skeptical literature to find such stories.) Such a performer could become a victim of their own success.

I recently saw a book at my local library that explains how to find things using a pendulum. It is entirely conceivable that an honest and open-minded person might read the book, try it out, and become convinced that it works. Although such methods fail in the face of repeated tests under controlled conditions, those tested usually do not lose belief in their ability--and most practitioners would never be tested under such conditions anyway. As an exercise, consider the video below that I found by doing a simple search. Must I either accept that the man has true powers or decide that he is a liar?

As I said, I am not going to pass judgment on Joseph here, and in my opinion the production of the Book of Mormon does move things into another level of debate with higher stakes, but one need not attribute deceit to Joseph in order to reject the authenticity of his pre-plates (and maybe even some post-plates) activities.

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Believing Weird Things

I've been reading Why People Believe Weird Things on part of my work commute. On two separate occasions, I've been asked by co-workers what I was reading. Showing them the book, I half-expect them to say, "Aren't you one of those people?"

The final chapter is "Why Smart People Believe Weird Things." Shermer's criteria for a claim being weird is if it is (i) not accepted by most people in a field of study, (ii) logically impossible or highly unlikely, and/or (iii) supported only by anecdotal or uncorroborated evidence. His summary for why smart people believe such things is,

[S]mart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

I couldn't help but think of the claim that, for Mormons, higher education correlates with religiosity. I guess we are in a no-win situation; if we aren't stupid we are good at justification. But there is some truth here, because Mormons are generally the first to admit that their basis for belief is not solely--or even primarily--a rational one.

And so we go to a deeper question: Are non-rational beliefs illegitimate? That's a discussion for another day, but I'll conclude with an interesting quote from Martin Gardner, as quoted by Shermer (p. 275-76).

Skeptics and scientists are not immune. Martin Gardner--one of the founders of the modern skeptical movement and slayer of all manner of weird beliefs--classifies himself as a philosophical theist or, a broader term, a fideist. Gardener explains,

Fideism refers to believing something on the basis of faith, or emotional reasons rather than intellectual reasons. As a fideist I don't think there are any arguments that prove the existence of God or the immortality of the soul. More than that I think the better arguments are on the side of the atheists. So it is a case of quixotic emotional belief that really is against the evidence. If you have strong emotional reasons for metaphysical belief and it's not sharply contradicted by science or logical reasoning, you have a right to make a leap of faith if it provides sufficient satisfaction.

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