Mass Media Funk is a commentary on mass media stories about the scientific, the paranormal, the supernatural, and anything else that yanks at my eyebrows.
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February 10, 2005. What happens when a delusional (but not unintelligent) person evaluates another groups' delusions? Find out by reading THE NEW CHILDREN - ARE THEY REALLY INDIGOS? by P.M.H. Atwater, L.H.D., Ph.D. (Hon.) She thinks the Indigo children should be explained in terms of near-death experiences and has a couple of books you can buy to explore her theory. Atwater, L.H.D. (whatever is an L.H.D.? A doctor of Loose Haranguing? Lilliputian Homeopathy? Licensed Homeopathic Doctor?), has sent out a press release about the new movie on the Indigo kids, "Indigo." Here it is for your entertainment (stick with it to the end):
February 8, 2005. Science under the Schwarzenegger administration: The great state of California has sent out the first batch of doctor's licenses to practitioners of naturopathic medicine. Last year our legislature passed the Naturopathic Doctors Act and we now license as "doctors" those who call themselves naturopathic doctors. And our state now has a Bureau of Naturopathic Medicine and an advisory committee. So much for shrinking the size of government. The doctors of naturopathy may not call themselves physicians, however. But they can now legally perform physical exams, make diagnoses, order lab tests, and prescribe therapies such as eat organic and "don't eat wheat or dairy products." Not all naturopaths are happy with the new system because to get a license you have to have a degree from an accredited school of naturopathy, where you learn about nutrition and natural remedies. That is, you don't learn about pharmaceuticals and you don't learn about surgery. You don't have to learn about the latest research in medicine. In any case, a group calling itself the Coalition for Natural Health, which apparently represents a bunch of unlicensed naturopaths, is angry about not being able to call themselves 'doctor' any more, according to Dorsey Griffith of the Sacramento Bee. Physicians shouldn't be too worried about the increased competition, as the state expects to issue only about 2000 licenses this year. February 4, 2005. Science under the Bush administration: According to Shankar Vedantam of the Washington Post,
Officials at the EPA responded by claiming that Tinsley doesn't understand the science and limitations of mercury control. Two staff members affirmed Tinsley's claim as to how the process worked to establish the protocols. February 3, 2005. St. Nate announces the first issue of The Skeptic's Circle, a blog "which will collect posts that examine urban legends, pseudohistory, bad science, quackery and other areas where critical thinking should be applied throughout the blogosphere." February 2, 2005. A survey of 1,000 cancer patients in fourteen European countries found that about one-third are using complementary and alternative therapies. "Herbs are used the most, followed by homeopathy and vitamin and mineral supplements, according to European Oncology Nursing Society members. Given their popularity, governments should rethink the way these treatments are regulated, they said. " According to BBC News, usage rates varied from less than 15% of patients in Greece to nearly 75% in Italy. At least Europeans have the choice of conventional or alternative medicine. In Zimbabwe, according to AllAfrica.com, conventional doctors are leaving the country in such numbers that many people have only one choice: the local witchdoctor. "There are now fewer than 900 doctors to serve a population of 11.5 million. The World Health Organisation estimates that the country needs an absolute minimum of 2,000 doctors to provide only a basic health service." February 1, 2005. Some schools don't have to worry about intelligent design in their biology classes: they just ignore evolution altogether. According to an article by Cordelia Dean in today's New York Times, in school districts around the country, "even when evolution is in the curriculum it may not be in the classroom, according to researchers who follow the issue." January 31, 2005. A sheet of paper covered in doodles was found on Tony Blair's desk at the Davos World Economic Forum. Graphologists did an analysis and concluded that the Prime Minister is "struggling to concentrate," "not a natural leader," and "stressed and tense." The doodles were actually the work of Bill Gates, who shared a table with Blair. Read all about it and see the doodles for yourself. January 17, 2005. In its premiere at 10 pm Monday January 3rd, NBC's "Medium", starring Patricia Arquette as a "research medium" who helps police solve crimes, averaged 16.1 million viewers. A research medium is a psychic detective. "Medium" is said to be based on the work of Allison DuBois. On her website, DuBois says
In other words, she is cut from the same cloth as psychics John Edward, George Anderson, Laurie Campbell, James Van Praagh, and a host of other "grief counselors" who offer their services to the grieving and the bewildered, for a fee of course. And like Edward, Anderson, and Campbell, DuBois has been tested by Gary Schwartz and declared by him to be a bona fide psychic. "There is no question this is not a fraud - some people really can do this, and Allison is one of them," declared Schwartz. "Many people claim to do this, and there are clearly frauds out there. Allison was repeatedly tested and passed every test. As a scientist, I approach all this as an agnostic - I don't believe it; I don't disbelieve it. After testing her under conditions that ruled out the possibility of fraud, I came to the conclusion she's the real deal." According to Carla McClain of the Arizona Daily Star:
One reason we should distrust Schwartz's evaluation of anyone's psychic ability is his persistent revelation that he has little or no understanding of how subjective validation works. Notice how he has interpreted DuBois's statement "I don't walk alone" to mean "confined to a wheelchair." The reason DuBois and others like her seem to have psychic powers is because their statements, phrases, words, even utterances of nothing more than initials, are given meaning by others. In a classic experiment that has been repeated many times in many different contexts, Bertran Forer gave a personality test to his students, ignored their answers, and gave each student an "evaluation" he had taken from a newsstand astrology column. He asked his students to evaluate the evaluation from 0 to 5, with "5" meaning the recipient felt the evaluation was an "excellent" assessment and "4" meaning the assessment was "good." The class average evaluation was 4.26. That was in 1948. The test has been repeated hundreds of time with psychology students and the average is still around 4.2. We might translate this to mean that it is quite common for people to be given strings of statements that are not based on any knowledge of the person and yet they commonly rate the statements as something like 80% accurate. Similar experiments have been done with phony biorhythm charts, graphology readings, astrological charts, and who knows what else. In his book The Afterlife Experiments, Schwartz describes the Herculean efforts he went through to understand cold reading. He knows that many tricksters use cold reading to defraud others by pretending to know secrets about them and he wanted to make sure than none of the psychics he tested was a fraud. However, in his zeal to understand cold reading, he overlooked the most essential element in the process: the way subjective validation functions in the evaluation of any reading. Forer and others have been able to get a high rating of accuracy for phony readings without cold reading at all. Schwartz has been so diligent to make sure his subjects weren't cheating that he overlooked the obvious: the high ratings given psychic readings were probably due to subjective validation. Ruling out cold reading and cheating, while important, are actually irrelevant to an accurate assessment of rater bias. McClain continues:
Schwartz asserts that a 73% accuracy rating by a "sitter" - the one for whom a reading is done - is "extraordinarily high accuracy." However, without a control, Schwartz has no way of knowing whether the English lady's rating of DuBois's reading is extraordinarily high or just average. Why didn't Schwartz send the English lady several readings, one by DuBois and several others by skeptics who think they could drum up a list of statements for a woman in England who wants to contact her deceased husband. Had the English lady rated DuBois as 73% accurate and all the others as very low in accuracy, Schwartz might have a case for crowing about her "extraordinarily high accuracy." When he rates her as among the best of the best, he is simply comparing her to other mediums he has tested and evaluated in the same way: without adequate controls and without an understanding of how subjective validation works. McClain goes on:
Schwartz loves to throw in the obvious misses, as proof of what? No psychic is 100% accurate. Rather than take the obvious errors as signs that the psychic is not psychic, Schwartz takes it as evidence in support of the genuineness of the medium. Ian Rowland, in his book The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading, calls this the win-win gambit. Again, Schwartz has nothing to compare Chopra's rating to. For all Schwartz knows, there might be 10,000 phony readings that Chopra would rate at 75% or higher. He was only given one to rate. Schwartz seems to think it doesn't matter that Chopra is a believer and a highly motivated sitter. He would want the medium to succeed, not only to verify his own personal beliefs but because he wants to make contact with his dead father. At the very least, one would expect a competent investigator to take into account the motivation of the sitter when having a sitter do a rating of a reading. I've read and studied Schwartz's Afterlife Experiments and have concluded that the only evidence that he would take to be convincing data that "the living soul hypothesis" - as he calls belief in dead people talking - is false would be if there were nobody who could speak lists of initials, names, things, and the like and there were nobody who could hear or see any such list and be able to make any sense out of the items or find any connection between them or any significance to them. Since neither of these conditions is likely to ever occur, I deem it highly unlikely that Schwartz will ever find any reason to give up his belief in mediums. And as long as Schwartz continues to have a professorship at a university and the support of an academic institution, it is highly likely that mediums like Allison DuBois will seek him out for validation. Let me give an example of how Schwartz works. In one session, John Edward recited the following:
This list of items was validated by one of Schwartz's sitters. To validate is not the same as to confirm that messages have truly come from a spirit. It means that the sitter in a reading can find meaning here, can connect the dots, so to speak. The ability to validate depends on several factors. The sitter must be willing to validate. The stronger the desire to make contact, the harder the sitter will work to find meaning and connections in the medium's items. There may also be another mechanism at work here: the desire to please the medium. This may be due partly to the consideration that by pleasing the medium, the odds increase that the medium will make contact. But it may also have to do with a strange phenomenon that occurs in settings where a person gives up control of the situation to another, as in hypnosis or when being asked to assist a magician do a trick. There is sometimes a kind of loss of self in those situations, and combined with a desire to please, a kind of submission to the will of another up to a point. If such a mechanism is at work in psychic readings, the sitter may acquiesce to the suggestions or items thrown out by the medium, not because they are true or truly significant, but out of a desire to please. This fact should impact the design of experiments in such a way that the experimenter always checks factual claims made by sitters. Schwartz sometimes checks factual claims and sometimes he doesn't. But even though the concern with factual accuracy is important in verifying the success of the medium, one should not lose sight of the importance of the studies that have been done on how the human mind works when it comes to making sense out of and giving significance to disparate data presented to it. The overall effect of subjective validation would show up in the way the sitters rate the accuracy of the mediums' claims. There might well be a rater bias towards any reading done face to face or where the sitter can hear the medium do the reading (even if they are not visible to one another). To eliminate this kind of bias, Schwartz, in one experiment, had the readings done from remote locations, so that the sitter wasn't present and didn't hear what the medium was saying during the readings. Schwartz is aware that sitters might be biased in their ratings and might give higher ratings of accuracy to items than they deserve, so he asked the sitters to rate down rather than up. Schwartz also has a procedure in some of his experiments and presents a challenge several times to the reader (or any skeptic) to see if they can connect the dots for a given reading. If he or the other experimenters can't, or if subjects he calls "controls" in one experiment can't, he takes that as strong evidence that the data is sitter-specific. He often works up what he calls conditional probability calculations, where he shows that the odds of several contingent conditions being related are millions or billions or trillions to one and he takes this as strong evidence that the data is sitter-specific. The problem with this method is that the rest of us don't have the interest in contacting the dead that the sitter does, but if even if we do, we don't have any reason to believe that the items for one sitter would apply to us. Some sitters not only have a stronger will to succeed with the reading, but they are better suited for readings because of factors such as how many dead friends and relatives they have, which would be related to such things as age and size of extended family, whether one is a sociable type or not, being a gay male at a time when many gay males were dying of AIDS, and so on. Schwartz seemed particularly impressed by the above quote from a John Edward reading because he couldn't relate much of it to his own life. Ray Hyman has done a pretty good job of connecting the dots of this passage in his life.
I can also connect these dots pretty well. I was born in the month of May and my father, who was stocky and often compared to a gentle bear, died about 30 years ago of the Big H: a heart attack. Henry was one of my high school buddies. Maybe Henry's dead and is with my dad. Or maybe my dad is trying to let me know it's him by bringing up the name of good friend from my youth. Of course, Hyman and I are both teachers and have been surrounded by books for most of our adult lives. Ray and I have published books and this reference would be our fathers' way of letting us know that they know what we've been up to these past many years. Schwartz relates the teaching and books to "literature and education." I'm sure it could be related to several other things as well, such as libraries, bookstores, any kind of school, visiting anyone with a library (such as a lawyer or doctor), and so on. Schwartz asserts that "the probability of getting just this pattern of hits is on the order of a million to one." How he knows this is not revealed. But my guess is that the odds are more favorable than he thinks. If there is a dead person, the odds are that the person is male, and if male a good guess would be older rather than younger, and if older, a father rather than a son. To throw out the notion that one senses a father figure does not seem to defy all odds, especially when the sitter recognizes her husband, not her father, as a father figure. I wouldn't call the father image very specific. Nor would I call it correct. I'd call it common. (This point is more obvious in a reading with feedback from the sitter. If you get no positive response on the father figure, the medium can insist on the image and give the impression that the sitter isn't trying hard enough. Or, the medium can change directions and hope for a better response, with initials for example, or two names, one male and one female, and see what response that generates.) Schwartz dismisses the possibility that Edward was simply guessing, but I think the main issue isn't whether Edward is guessing. He could be passing on things that are going through his mind, but that wouldn't mean they necessarily came from outside his mind, either telepathically from the sitter or from the spirit world. He and many other "good" mediums might be people with very active imaginations, who generate words and images that originate in their own brains. What they do may be similar to dreaming out loud. But the focus shouldn't be just on the medium and whether he or she is guessing or cheating; the focus should be on the sitter. Again, the focus shouldn't be on whether the sitter is cheating, but on the dynamics of subjective validation. Schwartz says almost nothing about this well known psychological factor, except to dismiss the charge of cold reading on the part of the mediums on the ground that they are not using the standard tricks of magicians and mentalists. To which we reply: Cold reading may sometimes be tricky, but it doesn't have to involve trickery. update: February 1, 2005. It was announced today that "Medium" will be back for a second season, having averaged over 15 million viewers per episode so far. update: May 1, 2006. Allison DuBois has had a falling out with Schwartz. For four years, Schwartz tested DuBois in his lab. He came out with a book last October called The Truth About Medium: Extraordinary Experiments with the real Allison DuBois of NBC's Medium and other Remarkable Psychics. There used to be photo of DuBois with Schwartz and his psychic buddy Laurie Campbell on DuBois's website. Not any more. There is now an "editorial" lambasting Schwartz for his duplicity. DuBois writes:
As DuBois found out the hard way, Gary Schwartz does not do science the way it is supposed to be done. For example, in 2001 he and Linda Russek published a paper in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research entitled "Evidence of Anomalous Information Retrieval Between Two Research Mediums: Telepathy, Network Memory Resonance, and Continuance of Consciousness." The actual experiment used three sitters but only the results with sitter George Dalzell (GD) were reported in the published paper. No explanation is given as to why two-thirds of the data disappeared. (He omits inclusion of all his data in other published studies, as well.) The medium was Laurie Campbell. She was blind to the selection and identities of the sitters, but GD knew who Laurie was and knew that she might be a reader. He is also a medium who had a book coming out on the evidence for the continued existence of his "dear friend" with the unusual name of Michael who had died. In any case, Dalzell said he asked four ghosts ("departed hypothesized co-investigators") to come to the reading. Part of the success of the reading would be judged by how many of these ghosts were identified by Campbell. They concluded that all four made contact with Campbell: Michael (dear friend), Alice (an aunt), Bob (father), Jerry (close friend). One problem with the design was that Dalzell confirmed that he'd invited just these four ghosts after the reading. Schwartz writes: "It is unfortunate we did not think to have GD write down the names of the people invited 24 hours before the reading, and have this document notarized." To add insult to injury, all the data that dazzles Schwartz is validated by GD himself. 10 Feb 2005 "I thought Patricia was too liberal," admits the Arizona-based DuBois. "I mean, I have a gun, I have put people on death row. I wanted to make sure that was something that didn't bother her. But she assured me that she believed some people may have that coming." From the January 31, 2005 People Magazine article titled "She Sees Dead People", subtitled "Allison DuBois says her visions have helped solve crimes. Now they have inspired the hit TV show Medium": [After a couple of paragraphs of quotes from un-named law enforcement sources about how DuBois won them over] "Yet neither DuBois nor police will share details of the cases, for fear of endangering investigations or prompting appeals. The Texas Rangers declined to even confirm they worked with DuBois. The use of mediums, says DuBois, is far from an acccepted practice-and, many would add rightly so." [followed by a one sentence quote from Michael Shermer and "Others". But Gary Schwartz then gets half a paragraph.] Prompting appeals? PROMPTING APPEALS?!!!!. Isn't DuBois the first psychic to make such claims? Don't most just claim they help find missing persons and dead bodies? Has any other hack ever claimed to put someone on death row before? Her final quote from the People article. It made me laugh out loud, and that's no small feat considering I was so appalled by what came before it. "Dealing with skeptics, it turns out, is easier than dealing with dead people-all you do is ignore them. "There are some people who will never believe me, and I don't care," says DuBois. "Because in the end, they will all die, and then they'll find out the truth". LC reply: She sounds like a real sweetheart.
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