The roots of my disillusionment with 'official skeptics'

There were several contributing events, all similar in one point: 'official' skeptics prove to be so in name but not in actuality. This is one of the events, involving James Randi, whom I still admire.

James Randi had a long feud with Uri Geller regarding spoon bending. Now, I used to do a lot of spoon bending myself before I got a OXO Good Grips ice-cream scoop, but that's not the type of spoon bending that got Mssrs Randi and Geller at loggerheads.

Mr Geller claimed he had paranormal powers, which he demonstrated by bending spoons. Mr. Randi implied (for legal reasons he couldn't outright state) that Mr Geller was in fact using prestidigitation. (For a moment ignore the obvious question of why someone with paranormal powers would use them to bend eating utensils instead of, say, make a fortune on Wall St.) You'd think that Mr. Randi would explain how the trick is done, so that the audience could check whether Mr. Geller was in fact using that trick.

No. Mr. Randi invoked the Magician's Code and declined to explain how the trick is done. (FYI: you bend the spoon with finger pressure or against a table, takes a bit of practice to do it without other people noticing, and even with practice they will notice if they're looking for it.) So, here is Mr. Randi, allegedly a skeptic, asking his audience to accept on faith that there exists such a trick that Mr Geller could be using.

When Mr. Randi replicated his great feat of spoon bending, allegedly using a trick, Mr. Geller took advantage of Mr Randi's adherence to the Magician Code to say that Mr. Randi was in fact using his -- Randi's -- paranormal powers. All because Mr. Randi's argument relied on the audience's faith, not a testable proposition.

Now, that's ironic.

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Note: this vignette was part of the post "Fed up with 'trust us, we're experts' science," but it detracted from the point of that post so I separated it into its own post.

Fed up with "trust us, we're experts" science

Somehow in my lifetime we went from Feyman's idea of science requiring 'a belief in the fallibility of experts,' to a caste system where science experts must be trusted without question, and acolytes jump on anyone who dares ask anything.

The trigger event for this rant was the Mythbusters Breaking Bad Special. In particular, the test of the hydrofluoric acid disposal of a body in a bathtub that ends up with a big hole on the floor and ceiling of Jesse's home. (Season 1, Episode 2, "Cat's in the bag.")

(Big Breaking Bad fan here, and still grudgingly a fan of the Mythbusters.)

First off, the Mythbusters test the effect of the 100ml of hydrofluoric acid on a number of samples of the materials involved (meat, wood, drywall, iron, steel, linoleum), all of the same size. Yes, size, not appropriate mass computed from molar calculation. Apparently no one thought of asking a chemist (though one is present to run the experiment) about mass balance and stoichiometry. 

After they fail to dissolve these objects with the apparently arbitrarily chosen volume of hydrofluoric acid, the Mythbusters move on to replicate the scene in the show with a different solvent.

This is the point when I really lose it: they say that the solution to the body-disposal problem is to use sulfuric acid and a secret sauce.

A. Secret. Sauce.

Because knowledge should only be held by experts?! Say whaaa?

This is what science entertainment teaches its audience: if you're not an expert, you should not expect full information: "Trust us, we know what's going on, and you'll get to see the result on TV, so it's real." Of course this trains audiences to (a) accept TV as the authority on who's an expert; (b) believe in experts' statements without requiring proof or independent verification; and (c) think of science as something beyond the comprehension of the audience member, and therefore not to be questioned by him or her.

Yes, I get their legalistic "we're not here to teach people how to dispose of bodies," but it's ridiculous: acquiring the large quantities of acid necessary would be more suspicious than a number of other ways that can easily be found on the interwebs or on Bones or Dexter. Joe Pesci explains the traditional approach at the beginning of Casino: "dig the hole before you whack the guy, so you don't have to dig it with the body out in the open."

(The secret sauce is hydrogen peroxide, another chemical that would really raise eyebrows -- FBI and DHS eyebrows -- if purchased in quantity, since it is used for improvised explosive devices. Also, really really really temperamental chemical.)

Then I remembered the Mythbusters had done this before, in the thermite episode, for which they blurred the names of the igniter reagents. FYI,  to ignite thermite you drop glycerol on a mound of potassium permanganate on top of the thermite; though you can simply use a long-neck torch, like they did on, oh irony, Breaking Bad.

When I was a kid, I liked chemistry almost as much as electronics, and this is the kind of thing we got to play with before the world became full of Sitzpinkler. Do they even sell chemistry sets for children anymore? If not, where is the next generation of chemists and chemical engineers going to come from? Chemistry can be dangerous, but bringing up an entire generation ignorant of it is terminally stupid. But I digress...

Back to the main problem: It has become acceptable to make the argument that the audience should trust the experts on faith, since the technical stuff is either too difficult or too dangerous or too easily misused by the non-initiated.

This kind of thinking is more dangerous to science than 10 Tomás de Torquemadas. Because this is the kind of thinking that creates 10,000 Torquemadas, all convinced that they are the paladins of science and all ready to auto-da-fé those whom the experts deem to be the enemies of Science™. Thus quelling dissent and killing the basis of all progress in science.

A lot of people will line up for this; after all there are many people who like the idea and image of science. As long as they don't have to learn any, of course.

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Note: edited on Nov 21st to remove unnecessary detour about "skeptics."

Thoughts inspired by a science joke

Another day, another science joke. Not a very funny one, but enlightening.

When I say "science joke," I mean one that involves a modicum of science knowledge. Which makes this yet another post against the scientistologists that are all in favor of science as long as they don't have to learn any. They like the idea and the image of science, but are not willing to do the work necessary to learn it.

Last sunday I tweeted: According to my alarm clock, the computer & phone spent two hours moving at almost 90% of speed of light. That's one explanation.

Since that was the end of Daylight Savings Time, what that tweet says is that clocks which get a synchronization signal from the internet were one hour behind those that I have to reset manually. The twist is that I calculated what speed would compress time 1:2, $v = 0.8660254 c$, and included that in the joke.

(By the way, this time compression is an example of the twins "paradox," which is not paradoxical at all.)

As for the people who "love science" (as long as they don't have to learn any), well, many of them have a vague notion that I was referring to relativity, but no idea whether the 90% number was right, wrong, or random. Science is something they believe in, without actually knowing any of the details.

More and more people are falling into this trap of believing in science as opposed to actually learning it. That is a very bad trend in a technology-dependent society.

Twitter valuation is a bet on network value

No, I don't think Twitter is prima facie over-valued.

The following graphic from the WSJ (reproduced here because deep linking is discouraged) has been making the rounds, generally in support of the idea that Twitter's valuation is yet another finance mistake:

But here's the funny thing. Note how both LinkedIn and Twitter are apparently over-priced, and suddenly an alternative explanation appears: the market understands that, while right now the revenue models of these companies are not good, there is value in their networks that, either directly through advertising and other attention-monetizing strategies, or indirectly via the information value of the network, will eventually be captured. (Even if that requires a change of management, which sometimes it does.)

It's a bet on the future value of networks and their associated preference and communication data.*

As I mentioned in my post about the Skype acquisition, these companies are not just some black-box generators of revenue. In particular Twitter's resources include:

• Knowledge of the network to a level of detail that can be closed off to outsiders.
• Personnel and technology that allow for exploitation of the knowledge in the network; inasmuch as the data and technology have unique features, the personnel and the resources are partially locked into the company and are assets to be taken into account in valuation.
• An installed base that serves as a barrier to entry to competitors trying to build their network.

So, not being privy to the financial details, I cannot say whether the valuation is right or wrong, but I can certainly say that people who pass judgment on that valuation based on last year's revenue are terminally myopic. Sadly even people whom I respect seem to fall for this trap.

There's gold in those networks and the nerds who can analyze them.

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* A bet not dissimilar to that of Google trying to build their own social network with Google Plus and all the actions they take in other properties like YouTube trying to nudge people into using the social media affordances of Google Plus instead of the older comments and video responses (now discontinued, get your linkage on G+).

My phone is just as smart as you guys!

Dunning-Kruger Effect, the internet is your multiplier.

Anyone can search for anything, which makes knowing what to search for and how to interpret the results more important than ever. The comoditization of information increases the value of knowledge.

Early on in the most recent episode of The Big Bang Theory (season 7, episode 5, "The Workplace Proximity" *), Amy, Bernadette, and Penny are in Penny's apartment drinking wine and talking about Amy's temporary move to Caltech:

Amy: "I'm leading a study to see if deficiency of the monoamine oxydase enzyme leads to paralyzing fear in monkeys"

[Bernadette lets slip that she might have done that research with death row convicts, which she quickly denies because it would have been unethical.]

Penny: "Not many people know this, but the monoamine oxydase [mispronounced as "oxidize"] enzyme was discovered by a woman, Mary Bernheim.

[Bernadette and Amy are stunned.]

Penny: "That's right. My phone is just as smart as you guys."

And this captures a common confusion between knowledge and information. Note the pathologies illustrated in that vignette:

1. Who discovered MAO is irrelevant for the work Amy will be doing. Like Penny, many people pluck some vaguely related fact from the internet to interject into a discussion, in the illusion that they will appear knowledgeable. This behavior is becoming more and more common, especially with smartphones, but knowledge is a lot more than a simple collection of facts.

2. Penny searches for MAO because someone else brought up the topic. Without a framework of knowledge to integrate facts, people who depend on search don't know what to search for. In other words, the input for a meaningful search requires knowledge.

3. Even if Penny found useful MAO information, for example the mechanism by which it catalyzes the oxidation of monoamines and affects mood, she wouldn't be able to interpret the biochemistry and neuroscience involved. In other words the output of the search only gets meaning through knowledge.

Yes, I understand it's a joke. But this attitude that learning substantive material is passé, made unnecessary by the existence of search engines — an attitude that sadly can be found even among educators — is corrupting, corrosive, and counterproductive.

Without knowledge, information is useless. More people making knowledge-poor searches leads to more random facts being flung haphazardly into discussions; this makes having the knowledge to select and interpret the important facts more valuable than before.

Knowledge is power, the power to use information. Pity so few people know that.

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* Even though the general arc of the show has become a soap opera, there are still some good jokes in each episode, and the final joke in this one is among the best.

Digging too deeply into a Heisenberg (Physics not crystal meth) joke

Some days ago I saw and retweeted this joke:

Police officer: "Sir, do you realize you were going 67.58 MPH?
Werner Heisenberg: "Oh great. Now I'm lost."

Ok, it's a funny joke, provided you have a passing acquaintance with basic physics.

But here's my problem: a lot of people who kinda-sorta understand that joke have no idea what's really behind it. And that's a problem I've had for a while now with the "science fanclub that cannot do basic science" as I call them. (The people who think that Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman is a physics book and like to watch soap opera biographies of scientists, heavy on the drama, light on the actual science.)

[Added later] My problem with these people is that they perceive science as something that comes from authority and must not be questioned or further investigated by others. For example, they "know" that the position and the velocity of an elementary particle cannot be jointly determined with arbitrary precision; but when pressed about how they know that, they say something about "Cosmos" or mention a Richard Dawkins book (which of course would not cover this); they behave as acolytes to those they recognize as high priests of science, who – presumably – are anointed by a Council of Wise Ones. That's precisely the opposite of what gave science its success, the idea that anyone can question received wisdom and experiment or observation are the ultimate arbiters of correctness. [End of addition.]

A simplified form of Heisenberg's inequality, good enough for our purposes, is

$\qquad \Delta p \, \Delta x \ge h $

Going by orders of magnitude alone, assuming that the mass of Heisenberg plus car is in the order of 1000 kg, and noting that the speed is given to a precision of 0.01 mi/h, an order of magnitude of 10 m/s, with $h \approx 10^{-34}$ Js, we get a $\Delta x$ of the order of

$\qquad \Delta x  \approx \frac{ 10^{-34} }{10 000} = 10^{-38}$ m.

That's a lot of precision to consider oneself lost. For comparison, the width of a typical human hair is in the order of 10-100 micrometers, or $10^{-5}$ to $10^{-4}$ m.

Yes, these numbers show how stupid it would be to use Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle for macroscopic observations. That's the joke; the fact that many members of the science-fanclub have no idea of the magnitudes involved but like to lord their science-fandom over others is part of my irritation.

I see this all the time in my job, with people who can't write Bayes's formula talking loudly about graphical models (should really be graphal models, BTW, since they are based on graphs, not graphics).

For better presentations, avoid most presentation advice

If you want to become a better presenter, you probably should avoid most advice about presentations.

Yes, here I am, an educator, apparently telling people to avoid sources of knowledge. The problem is that much presentation advice is not a source of knowledge; more like a source of sophistry that helps perpetuate some of the worst problems with presentations.

As an avid reader of books, articles, and blog posts about presentations, I identified a few pathologies from the mass of material available:

1. Presentationism. This is what I call the tendency of people who do presentation training or information design training to focus on the style and delivery of the presentation instead of the substantive material that the presentation is about. This is a form of professional deformation, but one that can become a serious obstacle to understanding the real value of presentation skills: usually that of changing the audience's mind, unless the presentation is being done for entertainment, legal, or other purposes.

2. Perfectionism. The idea that all presentations have to be done to the standard of excellence and that all presenters should put as much effort as needed into preparing, rehearsing, delivering, and clarifying every presentation. In reality there are many people who have to do presentations with minimal resources, for whom the time and effort required to create a better presentation represent a net loss of value.

3. Ideological purity. Instead of choosing the best tool for a given presentation, many authors are strict ideologues: the presentation should conform to their choice of tool and styles. This affects some famous authors in information design and presentation techniques, and has led to pointless arguments about which tool is better, tout court. Like arguing whether a hammer or a drill is a better tool, independently of the project, and equally pointless. This creates a subordinate problem:

4. Subject matter and audience independence. According to a plurality of authors, Einstein presenting to an audience of Princeton scientists and the Frito-Lay head of sales for northeast Kentucky reporting on the penetration of new chip varieties to a group of mid-level executives should prepare and deliver their presentations in about the same manner, with similar presentation support (typically, though not always, slides), and about the same effort. To be clear, these authors don't suggest that the substance of the presentation should be the same, but rather that the process of preparing and delivering these presentations and the style and design of the materials should be the same.

5. The "tricks and tips" distraction. Many authors offer only tricks and tips, which may be good or bad, but in general create a false sense of learning: the problem with most bad presentations is systemic, not something that a tip will solve. Similarly, a lot of authors use cherry-picked results from psychology to support their approach. As a general rule, unless you can read the original source and determine whether the result applies to your circumstances, it's better to ignore this.


So, what is someone who wants to become a better presenter to do? I've written about it (note the "most" in the title above, which is not "all" on purpose), and here are three further recommendations:

- James Humes's Speak like Churchill, Stand like Lincoln is a short, well thought-out book on public speaking.

- Edward Tufte's books, courses, and web site, despite a bit of ideological purity, are possibly the best source for people for whom getting complex messages across to their audience is important and worth the effort.

- Don Norman's critique of Tufte makes a good counterpoint piece for ET's works.

Above all, think critically about the advice being given; ask "does this make sense in my case?" Even the best advice has exceptions.