Qualification: The skeptic’s dictionary
Author: Robert Todd Carroll
Editor: John Wiley and sons
Price: $ 14.
Robert Todd Carroll is part of a growing band of non-scientists (he teaches philosophy) who believe they are qualified to tell us what we should and shouldn’t believe scientifically. The fact that he has no scientific qualifications, no training, no professional experience, does not deter Carroll from his belief that he is an authority on this subject and, in The Skeptic’s Dictionary, he sets out to tell ordinary people what we can and what we can do. we can not. Think legitimately.
This phony guru stance should be warning enough of what’s to come, but once he gets excited about his topic, Carroll’s inhibitions wears off completely and he veers from dogmatic to absurd in a hilarious display of scientific ignorance. and prejudices. From a mountain of mistakes and misunderstandings, here are some of his most entertaining mistakes.
Acupuncture Carroll says; “Scientific research … has failed to show that acupuncture is effective against any disease.” Except for scientific research that has shown acupuncture to be effective against some diseases and that was published in peer-reviewed scientific journals more than a decade ago, such as Dundee, JW, 1988, in Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Dundee, JW, 1987, in British Journal of Anesthesia, 59, p 1322. And Fry, ENS, 1986, in Anesthesia41: 661-2. If Carroll had made the slightest attempt to search the scientific literature, he would have found these and many other references to well-conducted double-blind trials in which patients experienced measurable benefits compared to the placebo group.
Cryptozoology The Skeptic’s Dictionary tells us that; “Since cryptozoologists spend most of their energy trying to establish the existence of creatures, rather than examining real animals, they are more akin to ISP researchers than zoologists. However, experience in Zoology is a necessity for work in cryptozoology, according to Dr. Bernard Heuvelmans, who coined the term … “If he had read Dr. Heuvelmans book, Carroll would have learned that the discovery of new species is normal science and many would they discover every year. The new species number in the hundreds among insects and dozens among small mammals and reptiles. The discovery of unknown large mammals and reptiles is unusual, but it is certainly not unknown or even rare. In 2002, for example, respected primatologist Dr. Shelly Williams of the prestigious Jane Goodall Institute in Maryland, tracked down and came face-to-face with a previously unknown species of great ape at Bili in the Congo, deep in the African jungle. The creatures are about 6 feet tall and weigh up to 225 pounds. Dr. Williams reported in New Scientist: “All of a sudden, four ran out of the bushes towards me. These guys were huge and they were coming to kill. As soon as they saw my face, they stopped and disappeared.”
Dermo-optic perception Carroll says; “Dermo-optic perception (PDO) is the supposed ability to ‘see’ without using the eyes. PDO is a conjurer’s trick, often involving elaborate rituals with blindfolds, but always leaving a path (usually by the side of the nose), which allows for a clear vision “. The scientific vision; Dr. Yvonne Duplessis was appointed chair of a committee to investigate dermo-optic sensitivity. Their conclusion is: “Controlled studies indicate support for the theory of dermo-optic sensitivity and perception.” Dr. Duplessis’s experiments have even led to a possible perfectly natural explanation. In his conclusions, he says: “Thus, these different methods show that the thermal sensations induced by visible colors are not subjective, as is generally accepted, and that infrared radiation, located in the far infrared range. they act on all parts of the body. This gives us possible reasons to conclude that also during ordinary visual perception of colored surfaces, the human eye reacts not only to the rays of the visible spectrum, but also to the infrared radiation emitted by these surfaces ”. More simply, Dr. Duplessis’s experiments seem to show that colored surfaces reflect energy in the form of heat and light and that the eye (like other parts of the human body) is to some extent sensitive to heat and light, a much more simple. explanation that Carroll’s unfounded inventions.
Aliens (UFOs, flying saucers) Carroll says that “Edward U. Condon was the head of a scientific research team that was hired by the University of Colorado to examine the UFO problem. His report concluded that ‘nothing has emerged from the study of UFOs in the last 21 years I have added to scientific knowledge … a more extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will move on with it. ‘” Carroll adds: “So far … nothing has been positively identified as an alien spacecraft in a way required by common sense and science. That is, there has been no recurring identical UFO experience and there is no physical evidence to support one. UFO overflight or landing “. If Carroll had bothered to read Condon’s report, he would have found this conclusion from Dr. Condon regarding the photographs identified in the report as “Case 46”; This is one of the few UFO reports in which all investigated geometric, psychological and physical factors appear to be consistent with the claim that a disk-shaped, silver, metallic, flying object, tens of meters in diameter and evidently artificial, flew in full view of two witnesses. It is perfectly true that Edward Condon concluded that “a more extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified,” but the reason he gave is that it is not possible to fruitfully study a phenomenon that occurs at random. He and his team did NOT emphatically conclude that “there is no physical evidence in support of a UFO flyby or landing” – that’s Carroll’s conclusion alone, and is based purely on ignorance of the actual facts as stated in Dr. Condon’s postponement.
Carl Jung Carroll says; “[Jung’s] The notion of synchronicity is that there is an acausal principle that links events that have a similar meaning by their coincidence in time rather than sequentially … What evidence is there for synchronicity? None. “Carroll carefully omits to mention that the synchronicity theory was proposed not only by Jung but together with Wolfgang Pauli, who was a professor of Theoretical Physics at Princeton, a member of the Niels Bohr team that laid the foundations of Quantum Theory, and who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945. Therefore, there is a reasonable probability that the creator of the synchronicity theory knew a little more about science than Carroll. Asking “what evidence is there?” Specifically proposed to account for previously inexplicable evidence is a question that even Homer Simpson would be ashamed to ask.
Hidden statistics Carroll says; “Legions of parapsychologists, led by generals like Charles Tart and Dean Radin, have also appealed to statistical anomalies as evidence of ESP.” But, “the skeptics are not impressed with the hidden statistics that affirm improbabilities of what has already happened.” Carroll’s scientific illiteracy finally comes to light here. Even your fellow ‘skeptics’ at CSICOP would hesitate to claim that science can only quote statistics on probability in relation to events that have not yet happened! Probability theory deals with the mathematical calculation of the chances of an event occurring, regardless of whether the event has taken place or not. The probability that a coin tossed will come up heads is 50-50 or P = 0.5. This is just as true for a coin that has already been tossed as it is for one that has not yet been tossed. If someone threw 100 heads in a row after declaring their intention for this to happen beforehand, then the chances of such a series occurring normally are so high that they warrant scientific investigation to try to determine a cause other than chance. In the case of the experiments reported by Dean Radin in the respected physics journal Fundamentals of Physics, the odds that the results obtained in the Princeton Engineering Laboratory will occur by chance are one in 10 to the power of 35. For Carroll, ignoring improbabilities of this magnitude is not to be “skeptical”, it is to deny it.
Remote view Carroll says; “The CIA and the US Army thought enough of remote viewing to spend millions of taxpayer dollars investigating a program known as ‘Stargate.’ Carroll disdains such trials due to the inaccuracy of some statements made by the subjects but, scientifically, the question is not how consistently accurate remote viewing is, but does it exist at all? There is unequivocal evidence that it does. A recently declassified CIA document details a remarkably accurate example, under controlled conditions, of remote viewing of a top-secret Russian base by Pat Price in 1974. Although Price made many incorrect guesses about the target he was able to produce, with astonishing precision, drawings of engineering grade of a single 150 foot tall gantry crane with six foot tall wheels heading into an underground entrance. The existence of this massive structure, exactly as described, was later confirmed through satellite photographs.
Spontaneous human combustion Carroll says; “While no one has witnessed the SHC, investigators and storytellers have attributed several fire-related deaths to the SHC.” The slightest investigation would have revealed to Carroll that many cases of possible SHC were independently witnessed by reliable people. In some cases, the victims themselves survived to tell of their experiences. The cases include London Fire Brigade Commander John Stacey and his team of firefighters, who arrived at the scene of a burning man within 5 minutes of receiving an emergency call, and the case of Agnes Phillips, who It burst into flames in a car parked in a Sydney suburb in 1998 and was pulled out by a passerby. Many more similar examples of ignorance and prejudice could be cited from the Skeptic’s Dictionary, but they would do little good. It is already very clear that Carroll’s book is not a dictionary, but a private agenda, and that he himself is not a skeptic but an instinctive reactionary to the new, the unexpected, the ambiguous and the anomalous.
Robert Todd Carroll is a perfect example of the phenomenon of pseudoskepticism. Some academic professionals who are meticulously factual in their normal professional lives suddenly throw off all reasoned restraint when it comes to the so-called “debunking” of what they consider to be new age nonsense and feel justified in doing so many careless and inaccurate statements as they please because they mistakenly imagine that they are defending science against weirdos. The reality is that your irrational reaction arises from your own inability to deal scientifically with the new and ambivalent, even when (as in the case of dermo-optic perception) there is probably a simple natural explanation, or when (as in the case of the new Congo primate) is simply unexpected and previously unknown to science.
This book is a stark warning to every student of science, logic, and philosophy of what can happen when an otherwise rational person embarks on a personal crusade motivated by his own self-deceptive biases.
