Tomtomkent
23rd April 2011, 04:30 AM
Heya, I'm planning to try my hand at blogging with a sceptical nature, any feedback on the following would be welcome, to test the waters before committing to a blogger account...
When I was a kid, I had a problem. Or, as far as I was concerned, everybody else had a problem with me, and it was this: I liked Doctor Who. Worse than that, I liked Doctor Who when it was not on television, and the last memory most my classmates had of it was Sylvester McCoy being chased by Bertie Bassets evil doppelgänger. Now on it's own that was not an issue. People how ever made some strange and wondrous predictions extrapolated from that data. They assumed, for example, that if I liked Doctor Who I must not be aware it is just a television show. I must think it is real! I must believe in aliens and monsters and little green men. My classmates on the other hand lived in “reality” and knew full well that what was on television was just fiction. Right?
Wrong! At least one of my classmates insisted that an actor from a well known soap opera could not have been addicted to alcohol because his character seemed so nice. If a celebrity was in the news, in those naïve teenaged day, some of my classmates would refer to their only frame of reference, the way the actor was portrayed on screen, playing a character. Now it galled me a bit, because the idea simply did not fit the data at all. Science fiction fans, far from the assumed wisdom of our peers, are the least likely people in the world to mistake our favourite shows for reality.
You are hard pushed to find a Doctor Who fan, a proper card carrying, book buying, Dapol figure owning fan, who does not have a favourite writer on the show. Seriously. I love Robert Holmes, for the likes of The Deadly Assassin, or The Mind Robber. Although ask me back then and I would have said Ian Briggs for the Curse of Fenric, or Terrence Dicks for just about everything ever. We have favourite directors. Designers (Raymond Cusick for the Daleks thanks, obvious I know, but it's timeless), even producers, musicians, and lets not forget Thespians. Doctor Who fans are not just aware that the show is fiction, they are aware who made the fiction.
I am sure that there are folks out there who know all that stuff about Eastenders, Corrie or the Bill too. But they weren't the ones who assumed I sat there wondering how messages from the future could be beamed back to the magic glowing box in my living room.
There is a big point here, that has a real impact on the grown up world we live in, and work in, and yes, perform science in: People don't just make assumptions about what shows you watch on TV. They make assumptions about big important issues, and little fiddly annoying issues with out even realising that they are doing it. Now I don't have to tell you that. You are as sceptical as me, and it probably drives you as far around the wall as I do. On the internet it becomes a hundred times worse.
You see, on the internet you don't have a person there talking to you. You have words on a screen, a page of text. As you read it you have to try and put emphasis and emotion into it, to work out what tone is meant by the writer. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes less so. Very few of us write in the same way we speak in a conversation. We write how we speak when we are given a prepared speech perhaps, but in our natural pacing or vocabulary. There is at least one user over in the Skeptoid.com discussion threads who thinks I am an ultra right wing pawn of the elitist government responsible for crushing the..er...something or other of the masses for some reason. I forget exactly what, but it has something to do with the church and philosophers, and psychologists keeping people sick by not treating the physical causes of their psychiatric ailments. It gets complicated and boils down to the fact that I, among others, asked what evidence certain claims were based on.
The assumption there was “If you disagree with me factually you must disagree with me ethically”. Now I don't think Psychologists deliberately keep people ill, nor that psychology is a world view pretending to be a science. Even if I did, should I agree blindly with out evidence? What exactly is “sceptical” about just saying “yes!” with out looking at any evidence? It is always tempting to dismiss, for example, creationism out of hand simply because I don't believe in god and can safely assume the science supporting the “God gone done it” theory to be flawed and bodged (with the tail end of the third law of thermodynamics cut off and dumped in a ditch somewhere). But I don't. I read the “evidence” and point out the flaws in the methodology and data. Because a) science is based on raw data, and good science is about producing evidence free of bias or comment. We put aside our personal beliefs and prejudices then do our best (through the likes of double blinding) to remove the possibility of bias or prejudice getting into our work.
And b), because we are “sceptical” not “in denial”. We must hold the same single standard to our own work as we would others. If we tell people it is all about the data we should look at the data no matter who gives it to us, with out making the same assumptions that get on my nelly. There is that oft repeated quote “that which is proven with out evidence can be proven false with out evidence.” The inverse is also true. If we want to show a theory is wrong we do it through showing why the data is wrong. Otherwise we are just scrabbling in the dirt with the people who blame god, fairies, magic or conspiracies.
The reason we dislike pseudo-science claims that footpads, diets, wheat grass juice or water filters have amazing powers may or may not be because we find the practices unethical or outright nasty. But that is not the grounds we fight it on. We can't assume that the people who buy them are thick or easily confused. We show them the evidence that the products are not doing anything. We show them why anonymous personal testimony (no matter who the writer claims to be) is not good evidence and why we go to the research papers and clinical trial.
Because if we make those assumptions, people will make assumptions about us. And that can be outright dangerous.
When I was a kid, I had a problem. Or, as far as I was concerned, everybody else had a problem with me, and it was this: I liked Doctor Who. Worse than that, I liked Doctor Who when it was not on television, and the last memory most my classmates had of it was Sylvester McCoy being chased by Bertie Bassets evil doppelgänger. Now on it's own that was not an issue. People how ever made some strange and wondrous predictions extrapolated from that data. They assumed, for example, that if I liked Doctor Who I must not be aware it is just a television show. I must think it is real! I must believe in aliens and monsters and little green men. My classmates on the other hand lived in “reality” and knew full well that what was on television was just fiction. Right?
Wrong! At least one of my classmates insisted that an actor from a well known soap opera could not have been addicted to alcohol because his character seemed so nice. If a celebrity was in the news, in those naïve teenaged day, some of my classmates would refer to their only frame of reference, the way the actor was portrayed on screen, playing a character. Now it galled me a bit, because the idea simply did not fit the data at all. Science fiction fans, far from the assumed wisdom of our peers, are the least likely people in the world to mistake our favourite shows for reality.
You are hard pushed to find a Doctor Who fan, a proper card carrying, book buying, Dapol figure owning fan, who does not have a favourite writer on the show. Seriously. I love Robert Holmes, for the likes of The Deadly Assassin, or The Mind Robber. Although ask me back then and I would have said Ian Briggs for the Curse of Fenric, or Terrence Dicks for just about everything ever. We have favourite directors. Designers (Raymond Cusick for the Daleks thanks, obvious I know, but it's timeless), even producers, musicians, and lets not forget Thespians. Doctor Who fans are not just aware that the show is fiction, they are aware who made the fiction.
I am sure that there are folks out there who know all that stuff about Eastenders, Corrie or the Bill too. But they weren't the ones who assumed I sat there wondering how messages from the future could be beamed back to the magic glowing box in my living room.
There is a big point here, that has a real impact on the grown up world we live in, and work in, and yes, perform science in: People don't just make assumptions about what shows you watch on TV. They make assumptions about big important issues, and little fiddly annoying issues with out even realising that they are doing it. Now I don't have to tell you that. You are as sceptical as me, and it probably drives you as far around the wall as I do. On the internet it becomes a hundred times worse.
You see, on the internet you don't have a person there talking to you. You have words on a screen, a page of text. As you read it you have to try and put emphasis and emotion into it, to work out what tone is meant by the writer. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes less so. Very few of us write in the same way we speak in a conversation. We write how we speak when we are given a prepared speech perhaps, but in our natural pacing or vocabulary. There is at least one user over in the Skeptoid.com discussion threads who thinks I am an ultra right wing pawn of the elitist government responsible for crushing the..er...something or other of the masses for some reason. I forget exactly what, but it has something to do with the church and philosophers, and psychologists keeping people sick by not treating the physical causes of their psychiatric ailments. It gets complicated and boils down to the fact that I, among others, asked what evidence certain claims were based on.
The assumption there was “If you disagree with me factually you must disagree with me ethically”. Now I don't think Psychologists deliberately keep people ill, nor that psychology is a world view pretending to be a science. Even if I did, should I agree blindly with out evidence? What exactly is “sceptical” about just saying “yes!” with out looking at any evidence? It is always tempting to dismiss, for example, creationism out of hand simply because I don't believe in god and can safely assume the science supporting the “God gone done it” theory to be flawed and bodged (with the tail end of the third law of thermodynamics cut off and dumped in a ditch somewhere). But I don't. I read the “evidence” and point out the flaws in the methodology and data. Because a) science is based on raw data, and good science is about producing evidence free of bias or comment. We put aside our personal beliefs and prejudices then do our best (through the likes of double blinding) to remove the possibility of bias or prejudice getting into our work.
And b), because we are “sceptical” not “in denial”. We must hold the same single standard to our own work as we would others. If we tell people it is all about the data we should look at the data no matter who gives it to us, with out making the same assumptions that get on my nelly. There is that oft repeated quote “that which is proven with out evidence can be proven false with out evidence.” The inverse is also true. If we want to show a theory is wrong we do it through showing why the data is wrong. Otherwise we are just scrabbling in the dirt with the people who blame god, fairies, magic or conspiracies.
The reason we dislike pseudo-science claims that footpads, diets, wheat grass juice or water filters have amazing powers may or may not be because we find the practices unethical or outright nasty. But that is not the grounds we fight it on. We can't assume that the people who buy them are thick or easily confused. We show them the evidence that the products are not doing anything. We show them why anonymous personal testimony (no matter who the writer claims to be) is not good evidence and why we go to the research papers and clinical trial.
Because if we make those assumptions, people will make assumptions about us. And that can be outright dangerous.