There is definitely something to be said for holding a science
meeting in Las Vegas, especially when the subject of the meeting is
skepticism about pseudoscience and the paranormal. When I took a break
from listening to the scholarly papers on people’s gullibility and the
psychological basis for the belief in weird stuff, I strolled through
the ubiquitous casinos and saw, yup, people believe in things (like the
possibility of beating the house) for which there is little to no basis
in reality.
The (almost) annual "Amazing Meeting"
is put on by the James Randi Educational Foundation. Randi, of course, is the magician who has
put his expertise in and knowledge about illusion and fooling people to
good use in debunking claims of the paranormal, most famously showing that Uri Geller was not
bending spoons with his thoughts:
In that fine tradition, psychology
researcher Richard Wiseman has
posted YouTube videos of how “magic” card tricks work, and at the conference
last weekend persuaded the magician Teller (the silent half of Penn
& Teller) to explain how “mentalists” (appear to) bend spoons.
My small contribution was a talk arguing that skeptics should not
count on the press to enlist in their debunking crusade, something that
also extends to the fight between evolution and creationism. So as not
to bore you with the whole 30-minute speech, let me just say that my
basic argument was that people believe weird things because of emotion,
something no number of magazine and newspaper stories on the solidity
of the science behind evolution (or the lack of evidence for
homeopathy, psychic phenomena et al, as I also discussed in a column
last year), is going to change. Add to
that the public’s antipathy toward the press, and there’s no way the
press can help the skeptics’ cause.
I’ll write more about the meeting eventually, but for now I can’t
get something out of my mind. Penn and Teller did a q&a with the
audience the day before Teller alone spilled the beans on spoon
bending, and one question yielded a surprising answer. Someone asked
Penn whether he still believed that man-made climate change is bunk, as
he has said more than once. Penn's basic answer was: I loathe
everything about Al Gore, so since Gore has been crusading against
climate change it must be garbage.
Now, Penn & Teller’s terrific “Bull****,” now beginning its
sixth season on Showtime, has
debunked psychics such as John Edward,
feng shui, acupuncture and other forms of pseudoscience and the
paranormal. But here was Penn, a great friend to the skeptic community,
basically saying, don’t bother me with scientific evidence, I’m going
to make up my mind about global warming based on my disdain for Al
Gore. (Both Penn and Teller are well-known libertarians and supporters
of the libertarian Cato Institute, which has been one of the leaders in
spreading doubt about global warming.) Which just goes to show, not
even the most hard-nosed empiricists and skeptics are immune from the
power of emotion to make us believe stupid things.
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