Metamagical Themas, page 17
In a way, therefore, to try to pursue the nature of ultimate truth is to enter a bottomless pit, filled with circular vipers of self-reference. One could liken CSICOP's job to that of the American Civil Liberties Union, which gets itself in all sorts of tangled loops because of its stance of defending radical belief systems. For instance, in an odd twist, its director, a former concentration camp inmate, found himself defending the rights of neo-Nazis to march down the streets of highly Jewish Skokie, Illinois, parading their banners advocating the extermination of all "inferior races". And what was worse for him was that as a consequence of his actions, the ACLU lost a significant portion of its membership. Patrick Henry spoke of "defending to the death your right to say it"-but does "it" include anything? Recipes for how to murder people? How to build atomic bombs? How to destroy the free press? Governments also face this sticky kind of issue. Can a government dedicated to liberty afford to let an organization dedicated to that government's downfall flourish?
It always seems refreshing to see how magazines, in their letters columns, willingly publish letters highly critical of them. I say "seems", because often those letters are printed in pairs, both raking the magazine over the coals but from opposite directions. For example, a right-wing critic and a left-wing critic both chastise the magazine for leaning too far the wrong way. The upshot is of course that the magazine doesn't even have to say a thing in its own defense, for it is a kind of cliche that if you manage to offend both parties in a disagreement, you certainly must be essentially right! That is, the truth is supposedly always in the middle-a dangerous fallacy.
Raymond Smullyan, in his book This Book Needs No Title, provides a perfect example of the kind of thing I am talking about. It is a story about two boys fighting over a piece of cake. Billy says he wants it all, Sammy says they should divide it equally. An adult comes along and asks what's wrong. The boys explain, and the adult says, "You should compromise-Billy gets three quarters, Sammy one quarter." This kind of story sounds ridiculous, yet it is repeated over and over in the world, with loudmouths and bullies pushing around meeker and fairer and kinder people. The "middle position" is calculated by averaging all claims together, outrageous ones as well as sensible ones, and the louder any claim, the more it will count. Politically savvy people learn this early and make it their credo; idealists learn it late and refuse to accept it. The idealists are like Sammy, and they always get the short end of the stick.
Magazines often gain rather than lose by printing what amounts to severe criticism. This holds even if the critical letter is not matched by an equally critical letter from the other side, because if a magazine prints letters critical of it, it appears open-minded and willing to listen to criticism. Thus the opposition is co-opted and undercut.
Another problem is that by shouting loud enough, advocates of any viewpoint can gain public attention. Sometimes the loudness comes from the large number of adherents of a particular point of view, sometimes it comes from the eloquence or charisma of a single individual, and sometimes it comes from the high status of one individual. A particularly salient example of this sort of thing is provided by the behavior of the Nixon "team" during the Watergate affair. There, they had the ability to manipulate the press and the public simply because they were in power. What no private individual would ever have been able to get away with for a second was done with the greatest of ease by the Nixon people. They shamelessly changed the rules as they wished, and for a long time got away with it.
What does all this have to do with the Skeptical Inquirer? Plenty. Amidst the tumult and the shouting, where does the truth lie? What voices should one listen to? How can one tell which are credible and which are not? It might seem that the serious matters of life have precious little to do with the validity of horoscopes, the probability of reincarnation, or the existence of Bigfoot, but I maintain that susceptibility to bad arguments in one domain opens the door to being manipulated in another domain. A critical mind is critical on all fronts simultaneously, and it is vital to train people to be critical at an early stage.
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The most serious piece of mail I received as a result of this column was from Marcello Truzzi, founder of the Zetetic Scholar. Truzzi wrote me as follows (somewhat excerpted):
I was greatly disturbed and disappointed to read your column because of its serious distortions about the character of the `schism' in CSICOP and the position and history of the Zetetic Scholar. Your article conveys the clear impression that Zetetic Scholar is somehow more sympathetic to pseudo-science, is more 'relativist' and 'unjudgmental'. That is completely untrue ....
I think you completely missed the issue between CSICOP and CSAR [Truzzi's Center for Scientific Anomalies Research-the organization behind Zetetic Scholar]. The term 'skeptic' has become unfortunately equated with disbelief rather than its proper meaning of nonbelief. That is, skepticism means the raising of doubts and the urging of inquiry. Zetetic Scholar very much stands for doubt and inquiry .... I view much of CSICOP activity as obstructing inquiry because it has prejudged many areas of inquiry by labeling them pseudo-scientific prior to serious inquiry. In other words, it is not judgment that I wish to avoid-quite the contrary-but prejudgment.
The major problem is that CSICOP, in its fervor to debunk, has tended to lump the nonsense of the National Enquirer with the serious scientific research programs of what I call 'protosciences' (that is, serious but maverick scientists trying to play by the rules of science and get their claims properly tested and examined). By scoffing at all claims of the paranormal, CSICOP inhibits (through mockery) serious work on anomalies....
Zetetic Scholar tries to bring together protoscientific proponents and responsible critics into rational dialogue .... The purpose is to advance science.
My position is not a relativist one. I believe science does progress and is cumulative. But I do believe that skepticism must extend to all claims, including orthodox ones. Thus, before I condemn fortune tellers as doing social evil, I think the effects of their use need to be compared to the orthodox practitioners -psychiatrists and clinical psychologists. The simple fact is that much nonsense goes on within science that is at least as pseudo-scientific as anything going on in what we usually term pseudo-sciences ....
I do not believe in most paranormal claims, but I refuse to close the door on discussion of them. The simple fact is that I think I have more confidence in science than, say, Martin Gardner does. For example, Martin resigned as a consulting editor for Zetetic Scholar when he was told that I planned to publish a 'stimulus' article asking for a reconsideration of the views of Velikovsky. [Immanuel Velikovsky is best known for his fantastic, fiery visions of the. evolution of the solar system and, among other things, a theory claiming that the earth, up until quite recently (in astronomical terms), was spinning in the other direction! He claimed that his views reconciled science and the Bible, and he published many books, perhaps the most famous of which is called Worlds in Collision. ] Martin was invited to comment, as were many critics of Velikovsky. But Martin felt that even considering Velikovsky seriously in Zetetic Scholar gave Velikovsky undeserved legitimacy, so Martin resigned. I happen to think Velikovsky is dead wrong, but I also think that he has not been given due process by his critics. I have confidence that honest discourse will reveal the errors and virtues (if any) in any esoteric scientific claim. I see nothing to be afraid of. I have full confidence in science as a self-correcting system. Some on CSICOP, like Martin, do not.
This is only a small portion of Truzzi's letter, but it gets the idea across. All in all, Truzzi emphasized that his magazine serves a different purpose from the Skeptical Inquirer, and that I had not made it sufficiently clear what that purpose really is. I hope that readers can now understand what it is. My reply to Truzzi follows (also somewhat shortened).
I have thought quite a bit about the issues you raise, and about the difference in tone, outlook, purpose, vision, etc., between Zetetic Scholar and the Skeptical Inquirer. I find myself more sympathetic than you are to the cause of out-and-out debunking. I am impatient with, and in fact rather hostile towards, the immense amount of nonsense that gets given a lot of undue credit because of human irrationality. It is like not dealing with someone very unpleasant in a group of people because you've been trained to be very tolerant and polite. But eventually there comes a point where somebody gets up and lets the unpleasant person `have it'-verbally or physically or however-maybe just escorts them out-and everyone then is relieved to be rid of the nuisance, even though they themselves didn't have the courage to do it.
Admittedly, it's just an analogy, but to me, Velikovsky is just such an obnoxious person. And there are loads more. I simply don't feel they should be accorded so much respect. One shouldn't bend over backwards to be polite to genuinely offensive parties. I happen to feel that much of parapsychology has been afforded too much credibility. I feel that ESP and so on are incompatible with science for very fundamental reasons. In other words, I feel that they are so unlikely to be the case that people who spend their time investigating them really do not understand science well. And so I am impatient with them. Instead of welcoming them into scientific organizations, I would like to see them kicked out.
Now this doesn't mean that I feel that debating about the reasons I find ESP (etc.) incompatible with science at a very deep level is worthless. Quite to the contrary: coming to understand how to sift the true from the false is exceedingly subtle and important. But that doesn't mean that all pretenders to truth should be accorded respect.
It's a terribly complex issue. None of us sees the full truth on it. I am sorry if I did you a disservice by describing your magazine as I did. I have nothing against your magazine in principle, except that I find its open-mindedness so open that it gets boring, long-winded, and wishy-washy. Sometimes it reminds me of the senators and representatives who, during Watergate, seemed endlessly dense, and either unable or unwilling to get the simple point: that Nixon was guilty, on many counts. And that was it. It was very simple. And yet Nixon and company did manage to obscure the obvious for many months, thanks to fuzzy-minded people who somehow couldn't 'snap' into something that was very black-and-white. They insisted on seeing it in endless shades of gray. And in a way I think that's what you're up to, in your magazine, a lot of the time: seeing endless shades of gray where it's black and white.
There is a legitimate, indeed, very deep question, as to when that moment of 'obviousness', that moment of 'snapping' or 'clicking', comes about. Certainly I'd be the first to say that that's as deep a question as one can ask. But that's a question about the nature of truth, evidence, perception, categories, and so forth and so on. It's not a question about parapsychology or Velikovsky et a!. If yours were a magazine about the nature of objectivity, I'd have no quarrel with it. I'd love to see such a magazine. But it's really largely a magazine that helps to lend credibility to a lot of pseudo-scientists. Not to say that everyone who writes for it is a pseudo-scientist! Not at all! But my view is that there is such a thing as being too open-minded. I am not open-minded about the earth being flat, about whether Hitler is alive today, about claims by people to have squared the circle, or to have proven special relativity wrong. I am also not open-minded with respect to the paranormal. And I think it is wrong to be open-minded with respect to these things, just as I think it is wrong to be open-minded about whether or not the Nazis killed six million Jews in World War II.
I am open-minded, to some extent, about questions of ape language, dolphin language, and so on. I haven't reached any final, firm conclusion there. But I don't see that being debated in Zetetic Scholar (or in the Skeptical Inquirer).
My viewpoint is that the Skeptical Inquirer is doing a service to the masses of the country, albeit indirectly, by publishing articles that have flair and dash and whose purpose is to combat the huge waves of nonsense that we are forced to swim in all the time. Of course most people will never read the Skeptical Inquirer themselves, but many teachers will, and will be much better equipped thereby to refute kids who come up and tell them about precognitive dreams and bent keys or magically fixed watches or you name it.
I feel that the Skeptical Inquirer is playing the role of the chief prosecutor, in some sense, of the paranormal, and Zetetic Scholar is a member of the jury who refuses, absolutely refuses, to make a decision until more evidence is in. And after more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more evidence is in and this character still refuses to go one way or another, then one gets impatient.
Professor Truzzi was very kind to me in his reply, and subsequently even invited me to serve on the board of CSAR. I had to decline because of time constraints, but I appreciate his-I hate to say this-open-mindedness. Part of his reply is worth repeating:
You seem to have the idea that I am reluctant to make a decision about many extraordinary claims. That really is not the case. I want to make decisions and am emotionally inclined to the same impatience as you have. Most of my pro-paranormal friends see me as a die-hard skeptic. But hard-line debunkers like Martin Gardner see me as wishy-washy or naive. So I get it from both sides, I assure you.
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I have quite a bit of sympathy for what Professor Truzzi is attempting to do, in a way. What bothers me is that all the vexing problems that he is attempting to be neutral on have their counterparts one level up, on the "meta-level", so to speak. That is, for every debate in science itself, there is an isomorphic debate in the methodology of science, and one could go on up the ladder of "meta"s, running and yet never advancing, like a hamster on a treadmill. Nixon exploited this principle very astutely in the Watergate days, smoking up the air with so many technical procedural and meta-procedural (etc.) questions that the main issues were completely forgotten about for a long time while people tried to sort out the mess that his smokescreen had created. This kind of technique need not be conscious on, the part of politicians or scientists-it can emerge as an unconscious consequence of simple emotional commitment to an idea or hope.
It seems to me that object level and meta-level are hopelessly tangled here, just as in the Gödelian knot, and the only solution is to cut the knot cleanly and get rid of it. Otherwise you can wallow forever in the mess. Can cardboard pyramids really sharpen razor blades placed underneath them? How many weeks must one wait before one gives up? And what if, after you've given up, a friend claims it really works if you put a fried egg at each corner of the pyramid? Will you then go back and try that as earnestly as you tried the original idea? Will you ever simply reject a claim out of hand?
Where does one draw the line? Where is the borderline between open-mindedness and stupidity? Or between closed-mindedness and stupidity? Where is the optimum balance? That is such a deep question that I could not hope to answer it. Professor Truzzi's position and my own lie at different points along a spectrum. We have both arrived at our positions not by pristine logic, but as a result of many complex interacting intuitions about the world and about minds and knowledge. There is certainly no way to prove that my position is righter than his, or vice versa. But even if we have no adequate theory to formalize such decisions, we nonetheless are all walking instantiations of such decision-making beings, and we make decisions for which we could not formally account in a million years. Such decisions include all decisions of taste, whether in food, music, art, or science. We have to live with the fact that we do not yet know how we make such decisions, but that does not mean we have to wallow in indecisiveness in the meantime. And anything that helps to make our quick decisions more informed while not impairing their quickness is of tremendous importance. I view the Skeptical Inquirer as serving that purpose, and I heartily recommend it to my readers.
6 On Number Numbness
May, 1982
THE renowned cosmogonist Professor Bignumska, lecturing on the future of the universe, had just stated that in about a billion years, according to her calculations, the earth would fall into the sun in a fiery death. In the back of the auditorium a tremulous voice piped up: "Excuse me, Professor, but h-h-how long did you say it would be?" Professor Bignumska calmly replied, "About a billion years." A sigh of relief was heard. "Whew! For a minute there, I thought you'd said a million years."
John F. Kennedy enjoyed relating the following anecdote about a famous French soldier, Marshal Lyautey. One day the marshal asked his gardener to plant a row of trees of a certain rare variety in his garden the next morning. The gardener said he would gladly do so, but he cautioned the marshal that trees of this size take a century to grow to full size. "In that case," replied Lyautey, "plant them this afternoon."
In both of these stories, a time in the distant future is related to a time closer at hand in a startling manner. In the second story, we think to ourselves: Over a century, what possible difference could a day make? And yet we are charmed by the marshal's sense of urgency. Every day counts, he seems to be saying, and particularly so when there are thousands and thousands of them. I have always loved this story, but the other one, when I first heard it a few thousand days ago, struck me as uproarious. The idea that one could take such large numbers so personally, that one could sense doomsday so much more clearly if it were a mere million years away rather than a far-off billion years-hilarious! Who could possibly have such a gut-level reaction to the difference between two huge numbers?
