Need help combating wooism at work

[patnray]

Every other month we have a major staff meeting. Each meeting starts with a half hour program prepared by 2 members of the staff. Recent programs have included some drivel about the totem pole of personalities and a lecture from a chiropractor about how all muscle pain starts in the back. At the end of each meeting two people are selected to prepare a program for the next meeting. I'm "it" for the next meeting (Oct. 27th). I'm looking for a short video or a speaker (we're in San Jose, CA) to counter the recent spate of woo woo topics. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. We have no budget for this, although I can "pass the hat" to raise a small amount if needed.

[hgc]

That's funny. Pass the hat to fund giving previous presenters a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

:p

[Mark A. Siefert]

I would talk to your immediate supervisor and express your concern that work time is being spent listening to unproductive drivel and that these meeting would be better spent reviewing policies or discussing important, work-related matters.

Of course, that would all depend on how approachable your boss is, and if they go to a chiropractor.

[apoger]

I suggest printing out optical illusions and presenting them to the crowd. Illusions are entertaining and fun! This creates a clear demonstration that we are easily decieved, and that we can decieve ourselves. This way you can plant the seeds of skepticism without being arrogant or intrusive.

My favorite illusions are:

http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelson/checkershadow_illusion.html

and

http://object.qpalzm.com/fun/snakes/

[Dragon]

Send out a questionnaire in advance of the meeting asking their views on astrology and including a request to supply their exact date and time of birth.
Invent some suitable name (say, Cassandra Starchild) for an astrologer you claim to know, and then on the day of your presentation hand everyone their own personalised horoscope. When all the woos have told you how accurate and wonderful their horoscope is - ask one of them to read theirs aloud...
You should know the rest.

[Dr Adequate]

Originally posted by Dragon
Send out a questionnaire in advance of the meeting asking their views on astrology and including a request to supply their exact date and time of birth.
Invent some suitable name (say, Cassandra Starchild) for an astrologer you claim to know, and then on the day of your presentation hand everyone their own personalised horoscope. When all the woos have told you how accurate and wonderful their horoscope is - ask one of them to read theirs aloud...
You should know the rest.
For the convenience of your co-workers, please bring your own tar and feathers.

[patnray]

Originally posted by hgc
That's funny. Pass the hat to fund giving previous presenters a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

:p
Yes. I'm glad you appreciate the irony.

Unfortunately both my immediate supervisor and several others in authority visit chiropractors and believe in the validity of astrology, the latest quack diet fads, etc.

The presentations always have some relevance to work: how to prevent back injury (allegedly), how to get different personalities to work as a team, etc.

I like the illusions. Perhaps I can put together a power point presentation using them. Followed by the astrology demo...

Any other ideas?

[Dr Adequate]

How about graphology instead of astrology? Some businesses actually use it to select between candidates, which is disgusting, and which gives you your work-related link.

[Dragon]

Originally posted by Dr Adequate
How about graphology instead of astrology? Some businesses actually use it to select between candidates, which is disgusting, and which gives you your work-related link. Good idea - especially if his supervisor is into astrology. They might even make the connection themselves ...

[The Cats Venm]

If you are planning to directly contradict and attempt to correct things said in previous presentations, make sure that you are careful to only disagree with specific elements that are flawed, and not the entire thing on principle, since wooism is often wrapped and disguised in truth.

The same thing goes for combating woo in general, try to separate the good from the bad, and go after the bad.

If you only object to parts of the woo rather than all of it, it may be easier to get your message across and not be looked at as ‘a poor sport', 'not a team player', 'a grumpy sceptic', or all those other accusations launched when peoples beliefs are threatened.

Good luck.

[MRC_Hans]

Originally posted by patnray
*snip*
Unfortunately both my immediate supervisor and several others in authority visit chiropractors and believe in the validity of astrology, the latest quack diet fads, etc.

*snip*You need a new job. Or make the astrology demo, then you WILL need a new job :D .

Seriously, I think the optical illusion thing is a good idea. Make a spin on frauds and cons in general, then move over to how we sometimes get conned because we are really very subjective observers which can be demonstrated by the facts that we can't even trust our own vision, insert optical illusion demo here. Sum up about how we must always seek to verify to avoyd being conned, both in business and privately.

You might plant the seed of doubt in someone, or at least you will have tried .... without risking your job ;).

Hans

[RamblingOnwards]

we can't even trust our own vision, insert optical illusion demo here.

Or card tricks are also inoffensive. You might also consider a 'unreliability of the human memory' demonstration, getting people to recall the exact order of card manipulations, or standing behind a screen and see how many people can recall the colour of your shirt.

[Soapy Sam]

Besides being vaguely "work related", what is the supposed function of these half hour sessions? "Team building?" or just a warm up relaxation period. Or is the intent to let staff members tell colleagues where they stand on some issues?

This is work. It should be clearly useful to work , (not just a revenge blow of your own).
Anything that stresses "Thinking outside the box", "Lateral thinking", "The shock of the new" etc- any view that challenges cosy well worn ways of thought is apt to be seen as "positive" (whatever that means).

You must be perceived as attempting a positive shake-up of established views, if you are not to be seen as a troublemaker.


Shock and awe. Rattle them. Make them sit up and wonder.

You need more than just questions. You need counter-intuitive examples. How many people in the room? Enough to make it probable two share a birthday? Now how likely was that?

Are their birth months clustered? If not, according to astrology, some of them are in the wrong job. Who?

How many of them know which direction sunrise is in? Take a compass. Most people think it's always in the east. Prove them wrong. Do they even know which way their office window faces?

Do they know what latitude or longitude they are on? Do ANY of them have the slightest idea where they are? Or are the whole lot lost in space?

Which ocean is at the east end of the Panama Canal? Are you sure? Take a map.



The whole point of the talk might be "Check your Facts". Keep hitting them with "Are you sure?" Did you check? WHERE did you check? Stress accuracy over hearsay and objectivity over opinion. No one can object to that. Make the point that our most cherished beliefs may be wrong, in life and in business. We owe it to ourselves, our families and our clients to get it right. Which requires paying attention and thinking critically.

[patnray]

Thanks for all the suggestions. As much as we want to directly contradict the last speaker (the chiropractor), we know we have to be indirect and subtle for political reasons.

We would prefer a guest speaker or video. Do any of you know of a video that touches on these topics in a half hour or less? As much as I'd like to use one of Penn and Teller's Bulls**t shows, it wouldn't be a good choice for this audience...

[BPSCG]

Jeeze, this is really trying to square the circle...

You're a skeptic with woo bosses who would not look kindly on a skeptical presentation.

And your goal is to do a skeptical presentation that will not hack them off.

I'm thinking your best/safest bet might be to put together some boring, innocuous piece that has everyone looking at their watches after about five minutes so they'll never bother you with this kind of garbage again.

Or maybe get someone from your local fire or police department to come and talk about building safety and security or something like that.

How can you stand working there? At least where I work, whenever I hear woo woo from one of my colleagues, I can go on a rant at them, then return, refreshed, to my desk.

[BPSCG]

How about contacting your local medical society for guest speakers? Ask them if they could send someone with good orthopedic knowledge to talk about office ergonomics, with particular reference to back problems. If there's a Q&A period, someone could "innocently" ask about chiropractic.

[Grendel]

I was in this exact situation once and lucked upon an effective approach. Here's what you do... bring in a compatriot, someone from outside the company, and Hollywood him up to look dead. Wheel him in to your meeting for your presentation, while he makes sure to mimic death convincingly. Explain your intent to not only speak with the dead -something any TV yahoo can do -but to have the dead speak in return! Your ringer should actually respond to your questions verbally, and then return immediately to, um, death. It sounds as if you'll be preaching largely to the choir, who will sing your praises, while the doubters will remain quiet, secretly admiring your brazenness.

Here's the clincher.... for your grand finale bring him back to life! That's right, fold in a little mumbo jumbo, and have your ringer get right up off the gurney and walk around the room, sort of like Mel Brooks and Peter Boyle in a similar schtick. Again, the bleeversd will marvel, while the doubters will likely want to run you for local political office. Your superiors, sensing a divided audience, won't quite know what to do, in other words, nothing with them will have changed.

This little scam worked wonders for me at the Reagan White House.*







*Bold-faced lie.

[thaiboxerken]

Penn&Teller's Bullsh*& is out on video.

You can also check out www.skeptic.org they have video lectures that might be a little less blunt.

[Skep]

I’d say that attempting to rebut the nonsense you have been subjected to head on will not be productive. Your colleagues aren’t going to change their minds in 30 min and your woo woo boss will just make life hard for you.

I think a different tack might be in order. Although it might be fun to do the Astrology debunking, there isn’t a good business reason to do it. However, you may wish to give an introduction to critical thinking. There are a couple of areas of critical thinking especially well suited to your purpose.

One area you might want to look into is the psychology of judgment and decision making, which includes the study of judgment traps, sort of like optical illusions but for other types of judgments. An example would be overconfidence. Studies have shown that there are circumstances where a person’s confidence rating of an answer was virtually unrelated to its accuracy. Another common area we fall down in is probability. For instance, which of the following coin toss sequences is more likely to occur: HHHHHHHH or HTHHTTHT*

I think that you could give a short quiz with some judgment traps and the follow up explanations as an introduction to how your mind can fool you into believing things that aren’t. An excellent book on the subject is Scott Plous’ “The psychology of judgment and decision making� It is readable and has plenty of research based and real-world examples. It is also readily adaptable to your business related lecture.

Other books on critical thinking “How we know what isn’t so� by Thomas Gilovich; “How to think about weird things� by Schick and Vaughn.

Alternately, you could give a talk on the psychology of influence, which is how people and organizations get us to buy products, services and ideas. The book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion� by Robert B. Cialdini is a fabulous book. He combines research and real world examples into a very readable and easily followed examination of the surprisingly simple things that sway our judgment.

The things that persuade us can also be psychological traps. For instance, one way we decide if something is worthwhile is by price. If we don’t have any information about a product’s worth, we may decide that the most expensive must be the best. In an example in the book, a store employee accidentally marked some slow moving merchandise way up instead of discounting it. The merchandise finally started to sell because people perceived its quality and value as being higher. There are a number of ways you could work this book's insight into a business presentation.

*Because each coin toss is an independent event, any exact order is just as likely as any other given the same number of tosses. The coin doesn’t care what the last toss was or what the next one will be. However, the second example seems more random and thus we perceive it as more likely.

PS, there is an upcoming meeting of the Bay Area Skeptics on Oct. 6th in Berkeley. I’m not a member, nor do I play on TV, but this seems like an event where you could ask around for some resources… http://www.baskeptics.org/ ...and perhaps get a hold of someone with academic credentials to make your presentation seem that much more awe inspiring.

[Soapy Sam]

Or you could read them a chapter from Sun Tsu's "The Art of War", then demonstrate it's applicability in a business context by pulling out a katana and cutting their silly heads off.

[Skep]

Originally posted by Soapy Sam
Or you could read them a chapter from Sun Tsu's "The Art of War", then demonstrate it's applicability in a business context by pulling out a katana and cutting their silly heads off.

Using a katana really wouldn't be a good example of clear thinking since Sun Tzu was Chinese, and as such, wouldn't likely endorse the use of Japanese Samurai swords in business meetings.

[apoger]

Or you could read them a chapter from Sun Tsu's "The Art of War",


Sun Tsu would tell you that "Battles are won before they are fought".

Hence, you preparations prior to the meeting will determine your success.

[Ashles]

For instance, which of the following coin toss sequences is more likely to occur: HHHHHHHH or HTHHTTHT*
This reminds me exactly of an argument I had with a work colleague a couple of years ago. Whilst he admitted that the lottery was random he said he could guarantee certain numbers wouldn't come up.
"What?" I asked.
"Well 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, won't come up" he confidently predicted.
I asked him to pick a series of 'random' numbers and predicted, equally confidently, that these wouldn't come up either.
Turns out we were both right. Neither series came up
What are the odds of that?

Well about 13,983,814 in 13,983,816.

Any discussions about probability would be useful in a business environment, simply because it is so counter-intuitive a lot of the time.

I love how roulette wheels list the previous numbers that have come up, as though that could help you predict the next number.

[Skep]

Originally posted by Ashles
I love how roulette wheels list the previous numbers that have come up, as though that could help you predict the next number.

Ahh, that brings up a faint memory of a statisticians joke:

A roulette wheel comes up with black 30 times in a row. The statistician says, "The wheel looks like it is unbalanced, so black will probably come up next, again." The gambler says, "It's red's turn."

--Or something like that...