Metamagical Themas, page 15
These are not easy questions to answer. They involve a paradox, a tangle in which the ideas being evaluated are also what the evaluations are based on. There is no easy answer here! There is no recourse but to common sense, that rock-bottom basis of all rationality. And unfortunately, we have no foolproof algorithm to uniquely characterize that deepest layer of irrationality,, nor are we likely to come up with one soon. The ability to use common sense-no matter how much light is shed on it by psychologists or philosophers-will probably forever remain a subjective art more than an objective science. Even when experimental epistemologists, in their centuries-long quest for artificial intelligence, have at last made a machine that thinks, its common sense will probably be just as instinctive and fallible and stubborn as ours. Thus at its core, rationality will always depend on inscrutables: the simple, the elegant, the intuitive. This weird paradox has existed throughout intellectual history, but in our information-rich times it seems particularly troublesome.
Despite these epistemological puzzles, which seem to be intimately connected with its very reason for existence, the Skeptical Inquirer is flourishing and provides a refreshing antidote to the jargon-laden journals of science, which often seem curiously irrelevant to the concerns of everyday life. In that one way, the Inquirer resembles the scandalous tabloids.
The list of topics covered in the seventeen issues that have appeared so far is remarkably diverse. Some topics have arisen only once, others have come up regularly and been discussed from various angles and at various depths. Some of the more commonly discussed topics are:
ESP (extra-sensory perception) * telekinesis (using mental power to influence events at a distance) * astrology * biorhythms * Bigfoot * the Loch Ness monster * UFO's (unidentified flying objects) * creationism * telepathy * remote viewing * clairvoyant detectives who allegedly solve crimes * the Bermuda (and other) triangles * "thoughtography" (using mental power to create images on film) * the supposed extraterrestrial origin of life on the earth * Carlos Castaneda's mystical sorcerer "Don Juan" * pyramid power * psychic surgery and faith healing * Scientology * predictions by famous "psychics" spooks and spirits and haunted houses * levitation * palmistry and mind reading * unorthodox anthropological theories * plant perception * perpetual-motion machines * water witching and other kinds of dowsing * bizarre cattle mutilations
When I contemplate the length of this list, I am quite astonished. Before I ever subscribed to the magazine, I had heard of almost all these items and was skeptical of most of them, but I had never seen a frontal assault mounted against so many paranormal claims at once. And I have only scratched the surface of the list of topics, because the ones listed above are regulars! Imagine how many topics are treated at shorter length.
There are quite a few frequent contributors to this iconoclastic journal, such as James Randi, who is truly prolific. Among others are aeronautics writer Philip J. Klass, UFO specialist James E. Oberg, writer Isaac Asimov, CSICOP's founder (and current director) Paul Kurtz, psychologist James Alcock, educator Elmer Kral, anthropologist Laurie Godfrey, science writer Robert Sheaffer, sociologist William Sims Bainbridge, and many others. And the magazine's editor, Kendrick Frazier, a free-lance science writer by trade, periodically issues eloquent and mordant commentaries.
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I know of no better way to impart the flavor of the magazine than to quote a few selections from articles. One of my favorite articles appeared in the second issue (Spring/Summer, 1977). It is by psychologist Ray Hyman (who, incidentally, like many other authors in the Skeptical Inquirer, is a talented magician) and is titled "Cold Reading: How to Convince Strangers that You Know All About Them".
It begins with a discussion of a course Hyman taught about the various ways people are manipulated. Hyman states:
I invited various manipulators to demonstrate their techniques-pitchmen, encyclopedia salesmen, hypnotists, advertising experts, evangelists, confidence men and a variety of individuals who dealt with personal problems. The techniques which we discussed, especially those concerned with helping people with their personal problems, seem to involve the client's tendency to find more meaning in any situation than is actually there. Students readily accepted this explanation when it was pointed out to them. But I did not feel that they fully realized just how pervasive and powerful this human tendency to make sense out of nonsense really is.
Then Hyman describes people's willingness to believe what others tell them about themselves. His "golden rule" is: "To be popular with your fellow man, tell him what he wants to hear. He wants to hear about himself. So tell him about himself. But not what you know to be true about him. Oh, no! Never tell him the truth. Rather, tell him what he would like to be true about himself!" As an example, Hyman cites the following passage (which, by an extraordinary coincidence, was written about none other than you, dear reader!):
Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, weary, and reserved. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. You pride yourself on being an independent thinker and do not accept others' opinions without satisfactory proof. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety, and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. Disciplined and controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside.
Your sexual adjustment has presented some problems for you. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a strong need for other people to like you and for them to admire you.
Pretty good fit, eh? Hyman comments:
The statements in this stock spiel were first used in 1948 by Bertram Forer in a classroom demonstration of personal validation. He obtained most of them from a newsstand astrology book. Forer's students, who thought the sketch was uniquely intended for them as a result of a personality test, gave the sketch an average rating of 4.26 on a scale of 0 (poor) to 5 (perfect). As many as 16 out of his 39 students (41 percent) rated it as a perfect fit to their personality. Only five gave it a rating below 4 (the worst being a rating of 2, meaning "average"). Almost 30 years later students give the same sketch an almost identical rating as a unique description of themselves.
A particularly delicious feature is the thirteen-point recipe that Hyman gives for becoming a cold reader. Among his tips are these: "Use the technique of 'fishing' (getting the subject to tell you about himself or herself, then rephrasing it and feeding it back); always give the impression that you know more than you are saying; don't be afraid to flatter your subject every chance you get." This cynical recipe for becoming a character reader is presented by Hyman in considerable detail, presumably not to convert readers of the article into charlatans and fakers, but to show them the attitude of the tricksters who do such manipulations. Hyman asks:
Why does it work so well? It does not help to say that people are gullible or suggestible. Nor can we dismiss it by implying that some individuals are just not sufficiently discriminating or lack sufficient intelligence to see through it. Indeed, one can argue that it requires a certain degree of intelligence on the part of a client for the reading to work well .... We have to bring our knowledge and expectations to bear in order to comprehend anything in our world. In most ordinary situations, this use of context and memory enables us to correctly interpret statements and supply the necessary inferences to do this. But this powerful mechanism can go astray in situations where there is no actual message being conveyed. Instead of picking up random noise, we still manage to find meaning in the situation. So the same system that enables us to creatively find meanings and to make new discoveries also makes us extremely vulnerable to exploitation by all sorts of manipulators. In the case of the cold reading, the manipulator may be conscious of his deception; but often he too is a victim of personal validation.
Hyman knows what he's talking about. Many years ago, he was convinced for a time that he himself had genuine powers to read palms, until one day when he tried telling people the exact opposite of what their palms told him and saw that they still swallowed his line as much as ever! Then he began to suspect that the plasticity of the human mind-his own particularly-was doing some strange things.
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At the beginning of each issue of the Skeptical Inquirer is a feature called "News and Comment". It covers such things as the latest reports on current sensational claims, recently broadcast television shows for and against the paranormal, lawsuits of one sort or another, and so on. One of the most amusing items was the coverage in the Fall 1980 issue of the "Uri Awards", given out by James Randi (on April 1, of course) to various deserving souls who had done the most to promote gullibility and irrational beliefs. Each award consists of "a tastefully bent stainless-steel spoon with a very transparent, very flimsy base". Award winners were notified, Randi explained, by telepathy, and were "free to announce their winning in advance, by precognition, if they so desired". Awards were made in four categories: Academic ("to the scientist who says the dumbest thing about parapsychology"), Funding ("to the funding organization that awards the most money for the dumbest things in parapsychology"), Performance ("to the psychic who, with the least talent, takes in the most people"), and Media ("to the news_ Qrganization that supports the most outrageous claims of the paranormalists").
The nature of coincidences is a recurrent theme in discussions of the paranormal. I vividly remember a passage in a lovely book by Warren Weaver titled Lady Luck: The Theory of Probability, in which he points out that in many situations, the most likely outcome may well be a very unlikely event (as when you deal hands in bridge, where whatever hand you get is bound to be extraordinarily rare). A similar point is made in the following excerpt from a recent book by David Marks and Richard Kammann titled The Psychology of the Psychic (from which various excerpts were reprinted in one issue of the Skeptical Inquirer):
'Koestler's fallacy' refers to our general inability to see that unusual events are probable in the long run .... It is a simple deduction from probability theory that an event that is very improbable in a short run of observations becomes, nevertheless, highly probable somewhere in a long run of observations .... We. call it 'Koestler's fallacy' because Arthur Koestler is the author who best illustrates it and has tried to make it into a scientific revolution. Of course, the fallacy is not unique to Koestler but is widespread in the population, because there are several biases in human perception and judgment that contribute to this fallacy.
First, we notice and remember matches, especially oddmatches, whenever they occur. (Because a psychic anecdote first requires a match, and, second, an oddity between the match and our beliefs, we call these stories oddmatches. This is equivalent to the common expression, an "unexplained coincidence".) Second, we do not notice non-matches. Third, our failure to notice nonevents creates the short-run illusion that makes the oddmatch seem improbable. Fourth, we are poor at estimating combinations of events. Fifth, we overlook the principle of equivalent oddmatches, that one coincidence is as good as another as far as psychic theory is concerned.
An excellent example of people not noticing non-events is provided by the failed predictions of famed psychics (such as Jeane Dixon). Most people never go back to see how the events bore out the predictions. The Skeptical Inquirer, however, has a tradition of going back and checking. As each year concludes, it prints a number of predictions made by various psychics for that year and evaluates their track records. In the Fall 1980 issue, the editors took the predictions of 100 "top psychics", tabulated them, listed the top twelve in order of frequency, and left it to the reader to assess the accuracy of psychic visions of the future. The No. I prediction for 1979 (made by 86 psychics) was "Longer lives will be had for almost everyone as aging is brought under control." No. 2 (85 psychics) was "There will be a major breakthrough in cancer, which will almost totally wipe out the disease." No. 3 (also 85 psychics) was "There will be an astonishing spiritual rebirth and a return to the old values." And so on. No. 6 (81 psychics) was "Contact will be made with aliens from space who will give us incredible knowledge." The last four, interestingly, all involved celebrities: Frank Sinatra was supposed to become seriously ill, Edward Kennedy to become a presidential candidate, Burt Reynolds to marry, and Princess Grace to return to this country to resume a movie career. Hmm ...
There is something pathetic, even desperate, about these predictions. One sees only too clearly the similarity of the tabloids (which feature these predictions) to the equally popular television shows like Fantasy Island and Star Trek. The common denominator is escape from reality. This point is well made in an article by William Sims Bainbridge in the Fall 1979 issue, on television pseudo-documentaries on the occult and pseudo-science. He characterizes those shows as resembling entertainment shows in which fact and fantasy are not clearly distinguised. His name for this is "wishfulfillment fantasy".
Perhaps a key to why so much fantasy is splashed across the tabloids and splattered across our living-room screens lies here. Perhaps we all have a desire to dilute reality with fantasy, to make reality seem simpler and more aligned with what we wish it were. Perhaps for us all, the path of least resistance is to allow reality and fantasy to run together like watercolors, blurring our vision but making life more pastel-like: in a word, softer. Yet at the same time, perhaps all of us have the potential capacity and even the desire to sift sense from nonsense, if only we are introduced to the distinction in a sufficiently vivid and compelling manner.
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But how can this be done? In the "News and Comment" section of the Spring 1980 issue, there was an item about a lively anti-pseudo-science traveling comedy lecture act by one "Captain Ray of Light"-actually Douglas F. Stalker, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Delaware. The article quotes Stalker on his "comical debunking show" (directed at astrology, biorhythms, numerology, UFO's, pyramid power, psychic claims, and the like) as follows:
For years I lectured against them in a serious way, with direct charges at their silly theories. These direct attacks didn't change many minds, and so I decided to take an indirect approach. If you can't beat them, join them. And so I did, in a manner of speaking. I constructed some plainly preposterous pseudosciences of my own and showed that they were just like astrology and the others. I also explained how you could construct more of these silly theories. By working from the inside out, more students came to see how pseudo these pseudosciences are .... And that is the audience I try to reach: the upcoming group of citizens. My show reaches them in the right way, too. It leaves a lasting impression; it wins friends and changes minds.
I am delighted to report that Stalker welcomes new bookings. He can be reached at the Department of Philosophy, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware 19711.
One of the points Stalker makes is that no matter how eloquent a lecture may be, it simply does not have the power to convince that experience does. This point has been beautifully demonstrated in a study made by Barry Singer and Victor A. Benassi of the Psychology Department of California
State University at Long Beach. These two investigators set out to determine the effect on first-year psychology students of seemingly paranormal effects created in the classroom by an exotically dressed magician. Their findings were reported in the Winter 1980/81 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer in a piece titled "Fooling Some of the People All of the Time".
In two of the classes, the performer (Craig Reynolds) was introduced as a graduate student "interested in the psychology of paranormal or psychic abilities, [who has] been working on developing a presentation of his psychic abilities". The instructor also explicitly stated, "I'm not convinced personally of Craig's or anyone else's psychic abilities." In two other classes, Craig was introduced as a graduate student "interested in the psychology of magic and stage trickery, [who has] been working on developing a presentation of his magic act". The authors emphasize that all the stunts
Craig performed are "easy amateur tricks that have been practiced for centuries and are even explained in children's books of magic". After the act, the students were asked to report their reactions. Singer and Benassi received two jolts from the reports. They write:
First . . . . in both the "magic" and the "psychic" classes, about two-thirds of the students clearly believed Craig was psychic. Only a few students seemed to believe the instructor's description of Craig as a magician, in the two classes where he was introduced as such. Secondly, psychic belief was not only prevalent; it was strong and loaded with emotion. A number of students covered their papers with exorcism terms and exhortations against the Devil. In the psychic condition, 18 percent of the students explicitly expressed fright and emotional disturbance. Most expressed awe and amazement.
We were present at two of Craig's performances and witnessed some extreme behavior. By the time Craig was halfway through the "bending" chant [part of a stunt where he bent a stainless-steel rod], the class was in a terribly excited state. Students sat rigidly in their chairs, eyes glazed and mouths open, chanting together. When the rod bent, they gasped and murmured. After class was dismissed, they typically sat still in their chairs, staring vacantly or shaking their heads, or rushed excitedly up to Craig, asking him how they could develop such powers. We felt we were observing an extraordinarily powerful behavioral effect. If Craig had asked the students at the end of his act to tear off their clothes, throw him money, and start a new cult, we believe some would have responded enthusiastically. Obviously, something was going on here that we didn't understand.
