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Gullible Skeptics

There seems to be a pretty huge straw-man leap in saying that the primary responses are:
A) There's some 'energy' causing this.
B) It didn't really happen.

I would assume that the most common response from a skeptic would actually be "Hmm, I wonder if they're giving things inadvertently through subtle body and facial cues?" Or perhaps "Hmm, I wonder if the person running the 'exercise' is doing something to clue in the person looking for the 'door'?"

As others have mentioned, if the "real" explanation for some instances of dowsing is "good at noticing features in the landscape that indicate water", this is a fairly unremarkable claim. If a dowser wants to demonstrate that, seems like its on them to come up with tests to do so. Why should anyone else be obliged to look at those claims any more deeply than "Um...OK, that's nice?"
 
Is this just something we're doomed to always have to do? Everyone year or so we someone comes on this board and drops some stupid think piece about "Skeptics not being skeptical of skepticism" that says nothing and means nothing beyond "I want to believe in Woo Excuse #253"
 
Cat Not Included said:
There seems to be a pretty huge straw-man leap in saying that the primary responses are:
A) There's some 'energy' causing this.
B) It didn't really happen.

I would assume that the most common response from a skeptic would actually be "Hmm, I wonder if they're giving things inadvertently through subtle body and facial cues?" Or perhaps "Hmm, I wonder if the person running the 'exercise' is doing something to clue in the person looking for the 'door'?"

As others have mentioned, if the "real" explanation for some instances of dowsing is "good at noticing features in the landscape that indicate water", this is a fairly unremarkable claim. If a dowser wants to demonstrate that, seems like its on them to come up with tests to do so. Why should anyone else be obliged to look at those claims any more deeply than "Um...OK, that's nice?"
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Frankly, I'm not even sure I understand what he is trying to say. He says the gullible believers say they find the door using mind energy and that the gullible skeptics say that isn't what is happening. He says they are clearly not using mind energy. But he says the skeptics are wrong for taking their claim about energy literally. He never gets around to saying what the correct response should be.

When they say it is mind energy, should we take that to just be some kind of metaphor like the religious scriptures he mentions? If so, what is the metaphorical reading of the claim about mind energy?

The phenomenon of finding the doors actually happened (assuming his anecdote is true and accurate). Uri Geller does actually bend spoons and make the compass needle move around. The magician did actually find your card. The questions is whether this was done by a paranormal means as they claim or by some mundane method.

If I follow correctly, I think his complaint is that skeptics too often seek to disprove the paranormal explanation rather than seek to prove the correct explanation. That is why he makes the rather odd statement about it being easy to disprove a negative. Something odd happened. Proving it obviously wasn't something paranormal is easy, but proving how it was actually done is difficult.

Skeptics obviously seek to test whether paranormal claims are true or not. People make those claims, and they claim they are true. They establish a hypothesis. Now test that hypothesis. If it tests false, that is the end of that hypothesis. You can move on to another hypothesis if you want, but the paranormal claim has been disproven.

If people make claims that appear to be false, there is an obvious interest for skeptics in proving whether those claims are true or false. Whether there is an interest by skeptics in proving how the trick or phenomenon was done is really a matter of personal interest rather than skeptical interest.

I find it odd that he uses Randi as an example because Randi more often did what he claims skeptics don't do. Instead of proving that it can't be paranormal, he often showed how it was done or could have been done. Here is how to make it look like you bend a spoon with your mind. Here is video of Geller palming a magnet. Here are the radio transmissions to Popoff.

In cases where Randi suspected but could not prove a method, he showed how it was probably done and attempt a test that would exclude that method. He is probably turning the phonebook pages by blowing on them, lets test it with some lightweight Styrofoam to eliminate that possibility. Don't let Geller use his own props on the Tonight Show. And so on. Those types of tests do not explicitly confirm the hypothesized method, but they also pretty much do.
 
Norman Alexander said:
The other point Randi pointed out about dowsing is that most geographies have water tables below them to a certain extent and at varying depths. So it would actually be hard to miss them.
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That is something the writer of the article seems to overlook. Water often is not in small pockets or streams. There is usually a water table. You can drill anywhere and eventually hit water. That is why dowsers think they are doing something special.

If they claim to detect water with diving rods, it is not unreasonable to test whether they detect water with diving rods. They do not. That does not mean that they can't find a place for a well (especially if any place will do).

The author proposed pitting a dowser against a hydraulic engineer. He did not propose how that test would be done. I don't know exactly what a hydraulic engineer does in terms of wells. They probably are not "sensitive" to water (which is the gullible folk ontology), but they use "knowledge" of water. I expect they consider a number considerations like groundwater sustainability to ensure the well won't run dry after a few years, difficulty in drilling through rocks and hard surfaces and depth, possible contamination, long term maintenance, distance from the use site, and cost. Different hydraulic engineers may select different locations based on their weight of those various factors. Ther is no single "correct" answer.

Skeptics have actually done an equivalence of what the author proposes. I don't recall the source; a skeptics website or magazine. I was many years ago.

A dowser claimed that he had been working for something like 20 years finding things like sewage and gas pipes on people's yards so they did not have to pay for more expensive tests (most cities provide this service for free now, call before you dig). A skeptic group was interested in examining this claim and set up a test and brought in somebody like a city engineer who could use maps and metal detectors and whatever tools to find the pipes and determine if the dowser was accurate.

The dowser was remarkably accurate. But how accurate when there appear to be some area where pipes are unlikely and possibly others that are more likely. They asked the engineer about this. He said with his knowledge and experience he usually knows close to where the pipes would be.

They decided to test the engineer on places where he did not know where the pipes were. No maps or tools. Just look around and guess. He was as accurate or slightly more than the dowser.

Skeptics have done almost exactly what he has said skeptics don't do.
 
Thermal said:
Applying actual scepticism to the claimed Invisible Door experiment:

1: Chance. Only two tries is almost certainly going to give a wonky result. If you flip a coin and it comes up heads both times, should you assume the further odds of coming up heads are 100%?

2. Door locator responding to unintended nonverbal cues.

3. Of course, fakery/use of confederates has to be considered. Actually, the claimed setup suggests it may be more likely than not.

The author said they "ran out of time" to test further. What, we're they contestants on The Amazing Race? It would take less than a minute to choose the subject and send them out of the room, have the group leader choose a 'door', and callthe subject back in to 'find' it. Funny that they made time and room available to set this up but could only do this twice. Not enough time, you see.

To have run out of time for experimentation that takes basically no time after it is set up sounds strongly like the first two Door Finders were in on the setup.
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His proposition is that skeptics only seek to disprove an obvious invalid explanation and never look for the truth. They are so gullible entertaining nonsense that they never even consider looking for a reasonable explanation.

But then he gives an example that is absurd. It appears people find a door through people with mind energy after two tests. Here come the skeptics: We need very rare and expensive highly sensitive energy quantum particle detector machines operated by professors of physics to capture the possible energy differentials between two people standing together and compare that to relative small energy transference detected in neurological magnetic resonance imaging.

A skeptic is not going to do that. I get his general idea that a skeptic would prove the paranormal hypothesis false rather than the another hypothesis true. But his strawman is ridiculous.

A skeptic would not just deny, but would want a test that is secure, controlled, randomized, and double-blind. A skeptic isn't going to think they have to prove energy levels with rare expensive equipment and a team of scholars.

A skeptic would address the basic problems of the very uncontrolled experiment. Get rid of the possibility of collaboration. Make sure the seeker can't hear or know the door people. Teacher must also be isolated.

Randomize. Maybe the teacher explained by example. Alice will be here like she is out of the room. You other 9 people make a circle. Bill And Susan think like a door and the rest think like a wall. Then Alice here would come in a choose with three attempts.

Now we will do it. Tom will of out of the room and be the seeker. The others will choose the doors. They obviously don't choose Bill or Susan because they were used in the demonstration. And Jennifer is too obvious because she is dating Tom. Pick two other people. Get into a circle and of course Bill and Susan and Jennifer are not next to each other. Tom comes in and follows the same reason as the group. Can't be Bill or Susan or Jennifer. That eliminates the two doors on either side of those three people, eliminating 6 of the 9 doors. That leaves 3 doors left with 3 chances. Probability of success is 100% despite looking like some paranormal occurrence.
 
DevilsAdvocate said:
Frankly, I'm not even sure I understand what he is trying to say. He says the gullible believers say they find the door using mind energy and that the gullible skeptics say that isn't what is happening. He says they are clearly not using mind energy. But he says the skeptics are wrong for taking their claim about energy literally. He never gets around to saying what the correct response should be.

When they say it is mind energy, should we take that to just be some kind of metaphor like the religious scriptures he mentions? If so, what is the metaphorical reading of the claim about mind energy?

The phenomenon of finding the doors actually happened (assuming his anecdote is true and accurate). Uri Geller does actually bend spoons and make the compass needle move around. The magician did actually find your card. The questions is whether this was done by a paranormal means as they claim or by some mundane method.

If I follow correctly, I think his complaint is that skeptics too often seek to disprove the paranormal explanation rather than seek to prove the correct explanation. That is why he makes the rather odd statement about it being easy to disprove a negative. Something odd happened. Proving it obviously wasn't something paranormal is easy, but proving how it was actually done is difficult.


...snip....
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That reminds me of one of the challenges that Randi "lost". Arthur Lintgen who could identify recordings on LPs of classical music performed by orchestras by only looking at the record. Randi has said he was very dubious of the claim but noted Lintgen wasn't claiming a paranormal explanation. When tested he proved his ability to do as he claimed.

DevilsAdvocate said:
...snip...

I find it odd that he uses Randi as an example because Randi more often did what he claims skeptics don't do. Instead of proving that it can't be paranormal, he often showed how it was done or could have been done. Here is how to make it look like you bend a spoon with your mind. Here is video of Geller palming a magnet. Here are the radio transmissions to Popoff. ...snip..
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As Randi said of Geller “..if Geller bends spoons with divine powers, then he’s doing it the hard way...”

Just as note - Randi often didn't say "that's how it was done" because 1) The person may have produced a new method to achieve their claim 2) He was aware of the legal minefield he could get into by stating "you are a fraud because this is how you did it".
 
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DevilsAdvocate said:
His proposition is that skeptics only seek to disprove an obvious invalid explanation and never look for the truth. They are so gullible entertaining nonsense that they never even consider looking for a reasonable explanation.

But then he gives an example that is absurd. It appears people find a door through people with mind energy after two tests. Here come the skeptics: We need very rare and expensive highly sensitive energy quantum particle detector machines operated by professors of physics to capture the possible energy differentials between two people standing together and compare that to relative small energy transference detected in neurological magnetic resonance imaging.

A skeptic is not going to do that. I get his general idea that a skeptic would prove the paranormal hypothesis false rather than the another hypothesis true. But his strawman is ridiculous.

A skeptic would not just deny, but would want a test that is secure, controlled, randomized, and double-blind. A skeptic isn't going to think they have to prove energy levels with rare expensive equipment and a team of scholars.

A skeptic would address the basic problems of the very uncontrolled experiment. Get rid of the possibility of collaboration. Make sure the seeker can't hear or know the door people. Teacher must also be isolated.

Randomize. Maybe the teacher explained by example. Alice will be here like she is out of the room. You other 9 people make a circle. Bill And Susan think like a door and the rest think like a wall. Then Alice here would come in a choose with three attempts.

Now we will do it. Tom will of out of the room and be the seeker. The others will choose the doors. They obviously don't choose Bill or Susan because they were used in the demonstration. And Jennifer is too obvious because she is dating Tom. Pick two other people. Get into a circle and of course Bill and Susan and Jennifer are not next to each other. Tom comes in and follows the same reason as the group. Can't be Bill or Susan or Jennifer. That eliminates the two doors on either side of those three people, eliminating 6 of the 9 doors. That leaves 3 doors left with 3 chances. Probability of success is 100% despite looking like some paranormal occurrence.
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I don't think the OP is quite saying that he thinks a skeptic would demand a sensitive energy physics experiment. I think the OP is saying that the ability to detect extremely subtle energies already precludes "people can sense the energy" as being a reasonable explanation.

He's then going on to say, however, that since "people can't sense energy" is already not a valid explanation, most skeptics would just deny the incident happened at all. I don't think this is accurate.

There certainly ARE situations where "that didn't happen" is a reasonable enough explanation or first guess. When someone describes a "clearly" supernatural incident that there's not an obvious explanation from their childhood, "you may have confabulated that, or misremembered it" is a very possible explanation. Human memories are really unreliable. There's generally no way we can get any info to make a reasonable speculation at what happened, if something happened at all, so there's really no point in pursuing it any further than that.

In a similar way, even if something is recent, if a person says "how could this happen?", unless there's more evidence or detail, we can't even verify that it DID happen, much less have anything to investigate for HOW it happened. At that point "cool story" and some wild speculation is about all you can get.

In the example given, of the "wall and doors" acting exercise, that sounds like something that might reasonably be a psychological thing (reading body language). It certainly sounds like something a stage magician could do as a trick. So...there's not much to investigate, but there's no reason to deny it happened at all.

I think he's then also saying that, by extension, just because the 'water memory' explanation of homeopathy is bunk, we shouldn't discount homeopathy - perhaps there is some other more valid explanation of why it works, and that a 'skeptic' is simply being close-minded by refusing to examine them. But I think that's putting the ball in the wrong court - there's no reason to try to figure out WHY something works before you've figured out if it works at all, and as far as we can tell:
A) there's no evidence that homeopathy works better than a placebo at all.
B) the explanation given for 'why' it works is total nonsense.

Proving that a claim is even valid is the responsibility of the person making a claim, and you aren't being close-minded for not considering at detail a claim with no evidence behind it. If lots of people were miraculously recovering from diseases after getting homeopathic treatments, you can bet the doctors and scientists would be trying to figure out how!
 
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