The Guardian reported the interesting story of self-proclaimed psychic, Patricia Putt, and her attempt to take home 1 million dollars from the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). While many “psychics” have tried to take home the top prize, which would be a scientific stamp of approval to their claims of esp or other super powers, not a single one has ever passed the preliminary round of testing.

The same can be said of Ms. Putt:

Did we make history last week? Is Mrs Putt now preparing to face that final challenge? The chosen readings were compared with the actual readings by Richard Wiseman and Mrs Putt together, with several observers present and the whole procedure recorded. The first volunteer did not choose the reading that had been produced for her. Neither did the second. Or the third. By chance alone, the most likely outcome was for one hit out of ten. Unfortunately for Mrs Putt, every single volunteer chose a reading that had not been written for them. It looks like JREF’s million dollars are safe for the time being.

To her credit, Ms. Putt declined to make any excuses for her failure, at least not until a day later. Many of her predecessors have done the same before her, complaining that the JREF tests are unfair, rigged, or influenced by James Randi’s own powers. As with all JREF challenges, Ms. Putt agreed beforehand to the testing procedures as outlined by JREF staff, and she certified that they were a fair way to demonstrate her psychic powers to the world.

Later, in an email to JREF, Ms. Putt explained her failure:

“With them [the volunteers] being bound from head to foot like black mummies, they themselves felt tied so were not really free to link with Spirit making my work a great deal more difficult.”

Of course, Ms. Putt never spoke with any of the volunteers in her test, and the guardian reporter was correct to point out that she must have picked up on their sense of “being tied” using her extrasensory gifts.

Or not.

The regulator ruled that an episode of The Montel Williams Show on ITV2 on 11 February breached rules on offensive material and potentially harming viewers by suggesting psychics could give life-changing advice.

I would suspect that Sylvia’s bad advice was both life-changing for the Hornbeck family, as well as harmful. Imagine if some quack told you that your son had been murdered. If you were to believe that “prediction” and then your son were to be found, what would you do to minimize your cognitive dissonance? Would you deny the living, breathing fact that you child was still alive, or would you perhaps question the validity of your favorite psychic’s claims that he or she had super powers?

In Britain, apparently, you can’t go around and make silly claims like that. At least, not without having a regulator call you on it. See, we could learn something from our British cousins!

Herein lies the critical flaw of science when studying the creation of our world. Science cannot observe and therefore cannot test the creation, nor can scientists examine any of the so-called “Big Bang” scenarios. These singular events are far beyond any application of the scientific method. Since they happen but once, they can never be reproduced or observed by any scientist.

Observation and reproduction of studies and experiments are essential to the scientific method. Therefore, because the creation and associated theories cannot be observed or tested, responsible scientists will avoid aggressive assaults upon that which they cannot test by present methodology.

[emphasis added]

Again, this writer is probably well-meaning, and most likely educated. But as in previous instances, this is another great example of why we absolutely must improve science education – not only in Alabama, but throughout the US.

In this instance, the writer’s argument suffers from two fatal errors. First, he conflates Darwin’s Theory of Evolution with cosmology, and in particular “Big Bang” theories in Physics. Evolution makes no claims whatsoever concerning the origin of the universe. Instead, it’s simply a coherent, tested, and testable biological theory about how species change and adapt over time. For nearly 150 years, it has been the unifying theory of biology, and while biology and physics are indeed both sciences, Evolution only has cosmological importance if it violates your religious comfort zone. Scientifically Evolution and Cosmology are apples and oranges.

The second fatal flaw in the writer’s argument is the misunderstanding of the notion of historical sciences. Different sciences can be placed on a continuum ranging from experimental sciences to historical sciences. Physics is largely an experimental science, as is chemistry and psychology, and these would sit near the “experimental end of the continuum. Toward the far end, we have sciences that are largely historical in nature, such as paleontology and astronomy. Within the philosophy of science, it’s well understood that many sciences have aspects that are experimental and those that are historical. In all these cases, however, the methods and rigor used by all scientists, even those who use mathematical models and known physical properties of the universe to describe the conditions at one ten-billionth of a second after the Big Bang, are valid scientific methods.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to examine critical thinking and I’d like to get your input as well. For starters, I’ll just take on the term “Critical Thinking” itself. In later posts, I’ll cover how critical thinking is related to science and effective argumentation.

The term “Critical Thinking” starts with the word “Critical”, which has more than one definition. The most common definition of critical is negative. For example, if I wanted to find fault with your poor fashion choices as you shop at WalMart, I might be said to be critical of your coffee-stained wife-beater and flip-flops. This isn’t the same sense of the word critical (and, by the way, if that’s how you dress at WalMart, please stop).

Thinking, on the other hand, is a verb – and it is the act of applying mental effort or reason to something. Thinking isn’t the same as day-dreaming or wishing. When you are thinking, you are purposefully exerting effort, and your attention, to reason about a specific object, problem or goal.

So there you have it: Critical Thinking is essentially the process of skillfully applying your mental effort or reasoning to something. Indeed, when we talk about critical thinking being something rare, we’re really saying that critical thinking skills are apparently rare. So, in the general vernacular, there is already a consensus that critical thinking is a skill.

And that makes it something that you can learn or improve through practice and exercise.

One issue with critical thinking – as with all thinking – is that it’s invisible. You could well be the most clever, most critical thinker on the planet, but nobody would know it in the absence of some observable evidence of those skills. I’d like to suggest that critical thinking skills are certainly worth learning and practicing, but more than that, we have to become good at implementing those skills in our writing, speech and decision making. This is the part of the topic that fascinates me: how we go from a set of thinking skills to a set of real-life actions that would lead others to suspect that you possess those skills.

Let me know what you think about this.

In the movie Expelled, Ben Stein gives a compelling argument for Intelligent Design.

Having not seen the film yet, I can’t really comment on how compelling his argument actually was, but I suspect that it wasn’t a compelling scientific argument. If you follow the Intelligent Design controversy at all, then you’re probably well aware that ID lacks all the hallmark features of a true scientific theory. The two most critical components that ID lacks are the requirement that the theory be potentially falsifiable (ID is not), and that it leads to testable hypotheses (ID doesn’t make any).

Interestingly, I see many who mistakenly claim (as I’ve heard Stein claim in the Expelled trailers) that the “scientific community” (interestingly, not individuals, but the community as a whole) have an almost religious belief in Evolution, which is absurd for anyone wanting to call themselves a real scientist. Indeed, this would be equivalent to saying that the religious community has faith because of the results of careful experimentation.

No, as I’ve written before, scientists don’t believe in Evolution – they accept it provisionally as good theory. If Evolution were really such bad science, maybe as some in the ID community would like it to be, then it would not withstand the internal pressure of real scientists who really test it. So far, the testable hypotheses that Evolution has made have supported it. One of the implications of Evolution, unknown even in Darwin’s time, was that the Earth has to be much older than Darwin originally believed. We now have confirmation from multiple independent sources that point to a very old earth, unless you would prefer to reject several distinct branches of science. Evolution also predicts the relative orderliness in the fossil record – and the discovery of just one counter example would completely destroy the theory. Interestingly, Evolution also predicts the genetic differences found between humans and other major primates. The recent discovery that the human chromosome 2 is a fusion of two distinct chromosomes found in the great ape species not only accounts for the the observation that humans have 23 chromosome pairs and the apes have 24, but also supports the notion of a common ancestor. If the genetics worked out any other way – then it would be reason enough to toss the theory in the bin.

The principle issue I have with ID is that, since it isn’t really science, members of the ID community have attempted to get it into our public school science classes through the tactic of redefining science itself. I think scientists take issue with that, and rightly so. Again, the equally absurd tactic would be to force churches to teach Evolution in sunday school classes by successfully redefining what the tenants of christianity are.

Nope – the Expelled hype aside, it all comes down to this: Evolution isn’t “special” in a scientific sense. It makes predictions that can be tested, and if those tests fail, then the theory will be discarded for something better. I can guarantee, however, that ID isn’t a viable alternative, since, well, it isn’t really a theory in the scientific sense of the word. And THAT’S what matters to scientists.

In the second piece, Ed Brayton examines the film’s “central claim of persecution, that of Richard Sternberg” – who Shermer earlier says is, “portrayed in the film as a martyr for free speech”. Apparently, Sternberg was involved in the publication of a somewhat embarrassing paper while he worked as an unpaid research associate at the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum. Brayton goes into great detail about how Sternberg impropriety brought him distrust of his fellow scientists, and criticism and condemnation of his actions. Hardly the martyr, the record regarding Sternberg isn’t quite worthy of a feature film:

Here’s the bottom line: Richard Sternberg went to great lengths to sneak a substandard and inappropriate paper through the peer review procedures of the journal he was editing. His actions, unsurprisingly, caused a great deal of embarrassment to his colleagues and some of them were quite angry about it and wanted him fired. But despite a few harsh words contained in emails that he never saw prior to filing his OSC complaint, ultimately nothing discriminatory or retaliatory ever happened to Sternberg. To this day, he retains the same access to the collections at the NMNH that he had prior to this incident. The worst thing that happened to Sternberg was that his clearly unethical actions were met with the disapproval and criticism of his colleagues, which is a far cry from violating his civil liberties.

And the paper Sternberg snuck through peer-review? It’s the most famous pro-ID paper ever published because it’s the only one to ever appear in a peer-reviewed journal: The Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, which apparently has a circulation around 300 people. Maybe IDiots like Stein and Sternberg should do better science so they don’t have to use stealth to vanity publish in 2nd and 3rd tier journals.

WHO CARES IF SHE IS FAKE?! WHAT HARM IS SHE DOING?!?!?!?!

I almost let this slide, but couldn’t do that in good conscience.

You tell me:

Most famously, Sylvia tells Shawn Hornbeck’s parents that their child had been murdered. Oops, he’s alive and well. No harm there, right?

Also, in the wake of the Sago Mine disaster in West Virginia, Sylvia mistakenly claimed, on camera, that she knew the miners would be found alive. Oops again, they were really dead. Good thing there’s no harm in telling the dead miner’s families they would all be OK, right?

Also, and this is the kicker for me. She’s created her own religion corporation. I’m not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination, but I’d say it would take some astronomically-scaled balls to create a new religion. Her “Society of Novus Spiritus” is supposed to be based on Gnostic Christian teachings, which are, by most Christian definitions, heresy at the least. Couple that with the fact that all satellite Novus churches pay their “Mother church” a 10% cut of all donations they receive, and they require all their study groups to BUY their materials from Sylvia Brown Corp and the Novus Society. No harm asking people to pay for that spiritual bliss, right?

By the way, don’t take my word for it. Read the Novus Conditions of Acceptance Agreement and Required Study Materials pages yourself. Also, before you decide to join, make sure you sign that “Hold Harmless” agreement, which is essentially a blanket liability waiver in which you give up your right to hold any Novus Spiritus employee responsible for any and all liabilities or damages that could occur as a result of taking their special brand of kookiness seriously.

Yes folks, the answer to the question, “What’s the harm?” is this – it doesn’t matter because with Sylvia Brown, you have to both suspend reasonable disbelief as well as waive any and all liability anyway.

“I was just about to spread the butter when I noticed a fairly typical small hole in the bread surrounded by a burnt black ring. However, the direction and splatter patterns of the crumbs as well as the changing shades emanating outwards from this black hole were very clearly similar to the chaotic-dynamic non-linear patterns that one would expect following the big bang”. “It’s the beginning of the world” he added excitedly.

This follows on the heels of other, arguably less miraculous instances of finding an image of Christ trapped inside the rings of a tree, the Virgin Mary seared into a pancake, or a freshly crucified Jesus within a Yukon Gold potato.

Sources close to the almighty remain uncharacteristically skeptical of the apparition, however, saying:

The Lord quite regularly makes Himself known through cleverly disguised imagery within various foodstuffs or in other seemingly random patterns of light and shadow, but he would never endorse the Big Bang theory without first giving us a sign. This latest visitation is probably the work of demonic forces, or possibly just someone imagining something.

I’ve seen the toast, and it fills you with a sense of such beatific secularism that there’s no denying this is a sign from the universe that absolutely no divine intervention was required to create it.