(257) Tue 24 Jun 97 18:23 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Another Shermer review St: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ @EID:85d8 22d892e0 @MSGID: 1:278/15 00186e84 Looking for logic in the weirdest of places 04/24/97 The Boston Globe Michael Shermer's "Why People Believe Weird Things" is being published at a particularly appropriate moment, but these days what moment wouldn't be appropriate for such a book? It seems that more and more of us are willing to entertain the most fantastic notions. Alien abductions. Past-life regression. Satanic child abuse. Near-death experiences. Crystal energy. Channelers. Pyramid power. ESP. Apocalyptic visions. Shermer teaches at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and is the publisher of Skeptic magazine and director of the Skeptics Society. He's been a frequent guest on TV shows such as "Oprah" and "Unsolved Mysteries" on which he's cast a trained scientific eye on an array of "extraordinary" phenomena. On TV and in print his demeanor is low-key, polite, methodical, unemotional, whether he's debunking the claims of a bogus psychic or pointing out flaws in creationist thinking. According to Shermer, the biggest reason people believe weird things is that they want to because it feels good: It's comforting, consoling. Even skeptics, he writes, are not immune "to the frequently asked question, `What is your position on life after death?' My standard response is, `I'm for it, of course.' The fact that I'm for life after death doesn't mean I'm going to get it. But who wouldn't want it? And that's the point. It is a very human response to believe in things that make us feel better." So he sympathizes with those who want to believe, but has no qualms about lambasting charlatans who prey on them. He recalls appearing on a TV show with a psychic who claimed he could communicate with the dead and proceeded to "get in touch" with recently deceased relations of several people in the studio audience. Later Shermer explained in detail to these people how the psychic operated, how he'd fooled them. They were unimpressed. They wanted to believe they'd communicated with the dead. He writes, "One woman glared at me and told me it was `inappropriate' to destroy these people's hopes during their time of grief." Shermer ranges all across the spectrum of weird stuff, from psychic telephone hot lines to theories of racial supremacy. He writes extensively about both evolution deniers (creationists) and Holocaust deniers, and finds similarities in the flawed reasoning of the two ideologies, starting with the ease and certainty with which both dismiss so much existing knowledge and evidence. (When Pope John Paul II accepted evolution, a spokesman for the Christian right responded, "The pope is just an influential person; he's not a scientist. There is not scientific evidence for evolution. All the real solid evidence supports creation.") In the wake of the Heaven's Gate debacle there's been a lot of speculation about how and why so many intelligent, well-educated people could allow themselves to be misled by an obvious lunatic. Were they mentally ill? Emotionally unstrung? Brainwashed? Drugged? Lobotomized? Shermer doesn't write about the Heaven's Gate cult specifically, although he does address the cult phenomenon in a chapter on "Ayn Rand, Objectivism and the Cult of Personality." But in another chapter titled "How Thinking Goes Wrong," he lays out in detail 25 flawed ways of thinking that enable people to believe all sorts of bizarre things, if they want to. Some appear to fit the Heaven's Gate situation: the tendency to assume, falsely, that a heretic must be right; the urge to oversimplify reality in order to establish the illusion of certainty and control in a complicated world; the willingness to accept boldly issued statements, no matter how bizarre; the tendency of theory to distort the perception of reality. Shermer's book deserves a wide audience, perhaps especially among readers who think they're too smart to believe weird things. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, liar extrordinaire! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 10/3 12/12 24/888 102/2 106/2000 112/2715 124/1 130/1 1008 133/2 SEEN-BY: 140/23 143/1 147/34 2021 154/222 167/166 170/400 202/1207 1919 SEEN-BY: 213/213 218/2 801 890 900 901 907 244/1500 267/200 270/101 275/429 SEEN-BY: 280/1 169 282/1 62 310/666 323/107 343/600 346/250 356/18 371/42 SEEN-BY: 377/86 382/92 387/5 396/1 45 690/660 730/2 2401/0 2442/0 3603/420 SEEN-BY: 3612/41 300 3615/50 3619/25 3632/21 3651/9 3652/1 3667/1 3674/1 SEEN-BY: 3828/2 5100/8 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 396/1 218/907 801 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ (258) Tue 24 Jun 97 18:23 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Bloomberg on Shermer St: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ @EID:279a 22d892e0 @MSGID: 1:278/15 00186e7e Skeptic looks at reasons people believe bizarre things Byline: David Bloomberg 06/22/97 The State Journal-Register Springfield, IL Michael Shermer was abducted by aliens. He still remembers it quite clearly and describes it in detail in his new book, "Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of our Time," (W.H. Freeman and Company, $22.95) Shermer was in a bike race across the continental U.S. at the time, and the alien spacecraft pulled alongside him, the aliens forced him into the craft, and he lost 90 minutes of time. What sets Shermer's story apart from the usual run of such tales is that the teller is the publisher of "Skeptic" magazine -- a publication normally given to debunking alien abduction fables. Not to worry, though. Shermer's purpose in recounting his own abduction is to provide the explanation that goes with it. When Shermer was "abducted," he had not slept for 83 hours and was hallucinating. The "aliens" were his race support crew, and the spacecraft was the motor- home they used as his rolling base. He wanted so badly to win this race that he refused to sleep until they forced him to do so, thus "losing" the 90 minutes. Shermer admits that not all such experiences can be explained by extreme stress, but if it can happen under these circumstances, he asks, which choice is more likely -- that other people with similar experiences are really being kidnapped by creatures from another planet, or that their experiences are triggered by some other altered state and/or unusual circumstances? Other similar anecdotes and case studies, along with descriptions of many of Shermer's appearances on television shows ranging from Unsolved Mysteries to Donahue, add a measure of humor and insight to this exhaustively researched and serious book. Central Illinois even makes an appearance. The tale of the "Phantom Gasser of Mattoon" is a classic case of mass hysteria that dates from 1944. It began with a single report by a woman who said a stranger entered her bedroom and anesthetized her legs with a spray gas. The story sparked a panic that grew to 25 reported cases in less than two weeks, and husbands were soon standing guard with loaded guns to fend off this fiend. The panic ended almost as quickly as it began and left the police complaining about wild imaginations and an utter lack of evidence. Shermer links the Medieval mass hysteria of witch crazes to the more current ones of "repressed memories" and satanic cults, and the similarities are frightening. He reminds us that simply learning about history isn't good enough -- we must learn what motivated those historical acts, and why people were willing to believe those "weird things." Shermer came to his skeptical stance after he tried other approaches and they failed him. He was a born-again Christian who believed evolution untrue until he had the wonder of science shown to him in college. He was a bike racer who used a variety of "therapies" to try to get an edge -- everything from enemas to megavitamins -- yet he never found anything that actually worked. He is now a skeptic, and it's a position he has embraced wholeheartedly. In addition to publishing "Skeptic" magazine, he also is the director of the Skeptics Society and teaches the history of science at Occidental College, in California. His book, while not exhaustive, looks at a wide range topics where he feels a skeptical perspective is vital. Some are quite general, such as an examination of 25 ways that thinking can go wrong. Others are more tightly focused, such as a section on the personalities and backgrounds of Holocaust revisionists -- those who claim the Holocaust didn't happen, that it wasn't approved by the upper ranks of the Nazi command, or that there were no gas chambers. He compares these topics to see what they have in common with each other and how such problems should be faced. His ultimate question is: What is the scientific evidence for a claim? If there is no such evidence, then why believe it? Shermer suggests there are several possible answers. Some beliefs are comforting and make people feel good; some provide for immediate gratification; some provide simple answers to an often complicated world; and some provide a "meaning" that science does not seem to give. Finally, Shermer says, the overriding reason people believe weird things is that people are always looking for a better life and are often all too willing to believe unrealistic claims that promise to help them to achieve it easily or quickly. Whether it's a cult that promises you a free pass to the next level of existence by hitching a ride on a comet or an alternative health fair telling people they can get magical cures for their terminal diseases, the evidence that people still believe weird things is all around us, and this book is a good read for anybody who wants a primer on why they persist. --- David Bloomberg is founding chairman of the Rational Examination Association of Lincoln Land (REALL). He can be reached via e-mail at (chairman@reall.org). -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 10/3 12/12 24/888 102/2 106/2000 112/2715 124/1 130/1 1008 133/2 SEEN-BY: 140/23 143/1 147/34 2021 154/222 167/166 170/400 202/1207 1919 SEEN-BY: 213/213 218/2 801 890 900 901 907 244/1500 267/200 270/101 275/429 SEEN-BY: 280/1 169 282/1 62 310/666 323/107 343/600 346/250 356/18 371/42 SEEN-BY: 377/86 382/92 387/5 396/1 45 690/660 730/2 2401/0 2442/0 3603/420 SEEN-BY: 3612/41 300 3615/50 3619/25 3632/21 3651/9 3652/1 3667/1 3674/1 SEEN-BY: 3828/2 5100/8 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 396/1 218/907 801 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ (260) Tue 24 Jun 97 18:23 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: M. Shermer, pro skeptic St: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ @EID:2111 22d892e0 @MSGID: 1:278/15 00186e80 Skepticism is well advised on pseudoscience 06/10/97 The Orange County Register Michael Shermer knows to the day when he became a professional skeptic. It was Aug. 6, Day 3 of the 1983 ultra-marathon bicycle Race Across America. On the punishing climb up to Loveland Pass, Colo., he reflected on all the New Age therapies he had tried and decided they were a bunch of hooey. The nutritionist in his support crew had been feeding him megavitamin doses. "I dutifully put the vitamins in my mouth," he writes, "and then spit them out up the road when my nutritionist wasn't looking." After the race, Shermer says, "I discovered that the nutritionist's Ph.D. was to be awarded by a nonaccredited nutrition school and, worse, I was the subject of his doctoral dissertation!" Shermer now teaches the history of science and technology at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and he's also the founder of the Skeptics Society and editor of its quarterly magazine, Skeptic. He's woven his own recollections and his work for the magazine into a new book, "Why People Believe Weird Things." He doesn't have a formal definition of "weird," though his examples in this book include psychic and paranormal phenomena, alien abductions, assorted witch crazes (including recovered-memory accusations), creation "science" and Holocaust denials. But he has a pretty good working definition of skepticism: the habit of questioning the validity of a particular claim by calling for evidence to prove or disprove it. Shermer proffers a checklist of how and why thinking can go wrong. In science, theory influences observation; for instance, Columbus thought he was in Asia when he arrived in the West Indies, so he identified cinnamon, coconuts and Chinese rhubarb among the plants he found. The observer changes what's observed; that's true in quantum mechanics and in psychology and anthropology, too. Pseudoscientific thinking relies on anecdotes in lieu of controlled experiments, adopts scientific-sounding language in contexts where it has no precise meaning, substitutes bold claims for evidence. "Heresy does not equal correctness," Shermer notes. "They laughed at Copernicus," true, but they laughed at the Marx Brothers, too; being laughed at doesn't prove you are right. People who are having difficulty getting their claims accepted often take consolation in the words of Arthur Schopenhauer, who said, "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third is it accepted as self-evident." Wrong. Lots of new, true science is accepted without either ridicule or violent opposition. And even Schopenhauer did not maintain the converse of his position, that if something is ridiculed or opposed it is therefore true. Shermer has a cautionary word for people who trust in psychic advice, especially the kind offered for $3.95 a minute on a 900 number. A friend of his who works as a magician and mentalist staffs one such hotline. The "psychic" gets 60 cents a minute, or $36 an hour for himself _ and $201 an hour for the company. "The goal," he said, "is to keep callers on the long long enough to turn a good profit but not so long that they refuse to pay the phone bill." His friend's record for a single call is $793.95. Shermer equips you with a valuable antidote to the waves of irrationality that comes drifting in your windows or onto your television set. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 10/3 12/12 24/888 102/2 106/2000 112/2715 124/1 130/1 1008 133/2 SEEN-BY: 140/23 143/1 147/34 2021 154/222 167/166 170/400 202/1207 1919 SEEN-BY: 213/213 218/2 801 890 900 901 907 244/1500 267/200 270/101 275/429 SEEN-BY: 280/1 169 282/1 62 310/666 323/107 343/600 346/250 356/18 371/42 SEEN-BY: 377/86 382/92 387/5 396/1 45 690/660 730/2 2401/0 2442/0 3603/420 SEEN-BY: 3612/41 300 3615/50 3619/25 3632/21 3651/9 3652/1 3667/1 3674/1 SEEN-BY: 3828/2 5100/8 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 396/1 218/907 801 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ (261) Tue 24 Jun 97 18:23 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Millenial Mumbo Jumbo St: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ @EID:a079 22d892e0 @MSGID: 1:278/15 00186e82 Millennial Mumbo Jumbo 04/27/97 Los Angeles Times HYSTORIES: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media. By Elaine Showalter . Columbia University Press: 244 pp., $24.95 WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS: Pseudoscience, Superstition and Other Confusions of Our Time. By Michael Shermer . W.H. Freeman & Co.: 306 pp., $22.95 Headlong passion was always said to be female, while men, even as they lost their heads, were supposed to be cool. Throughout history, men have been the accusers, diagnosticians and judges, women the witches, patients and victims. Today, allegations of satanic abuse, extraterrestrial abduction, multiple personality and chronic fatigue tend to come from women too. What is new is that, curiously, many of these charges come from feminists apparently more committed to unearthing evidence of their own frailty than to claiming their human powers. Elaine Showalter, Avalon Foundation professor of the humanities and a professor of English at Princeton University, a historian of medicine and one of America's distinguished feminist literary critics, will have none of what she calls today's "psychological plagues." "As we approach our own millennium, " she writes, "the epidemic of hysterical disorders, imaginary illnesses, and hypnotically induced pseudo-memories that have flooded the media seem to be reaching a high-water mark." Such delusions merge with the conspiracy theories, religious revivals and mass paranoia traditional in America, especially at century's close, when Heaven's Gate swings open for many of the credulous. As the mass suicide in Rancho Santa Fe shows, such fads are not harmless: "The hysterical epidemics of the 1990s," Showalter writes, " . . . do damage: in distracting us from the real problems and crises of modern society, in undermining a respect for evidence and truth, and in helping support an atmosphere of conspiracy and suspicion. They prevent us from claiming our full humanity as free and responsible beings." For criticizing the literature of recovered memory to an audience of other feminists, Showalter writes that she has been accused of washing "our dirty linen, so to speak, in front of men." Just so, the feminist psychologist Carol Tavris, who has written comparable criticism, was accused in three full pages in the New York Times of joining "the side of the molesters, rapists, pedophiles and other misogynists." Such love-it-or-leave-it Manichaeism of cultivators of victimhood is a sign of shoddy thinking and panic, not of clearheadedness and confidence. Showalter writes boldly and valuably when she points out that to believe in women's equality, you are required to believe that huge proportions of women have been routinely and systematically subjected to sexual abuse. Showalter displays both the strengths and the weaknesses of her profession. She is adept at scrutinizing texts, "cultural narratives of hysteria," which, with academia's penchant for labored puns and neologisms, she calls "hystories." Drawing on philosopher Ian Hacking's critique of multiple personality and on various journalists' critiques of Gulf War syndrome, chronic fatigue and other "hystories," she amasses many good reasons to cast a skeptical eye on them. She is less thorough, though, in accounting for them or tracing their origins. She does not systematically compare American paranoias with French, Italian or Latin American. She writes interestingly on the case histories of Charcot, Freud and Lacan and the dramas of Ibsen and others, but these anatomies are only loosely connected to an analysis of social trends. Showalter is on strong ground when she draws on a considerable body of refutations in dissecting today's fads. She points out that between 1922 and 1972, according to the standard psychological literature, only 50 cases of multiple personality disorder were diagnosed in America; between 1973 and 1990, about 20,000 were diagnosed. What might be going on? Waves of hysteria-- or the circulation of unwarranted "hystories," to use Showalter's ungainly neologism--reflect the return of the repressed. But why in the United States? Today's cults involve "the projection of sexual fantasy and real or imagined guilt." Puritan heritage lives! Abstractly, she hopes feminism can "resist regression into victimization, infantilization or revenge." Most of all, and rightly, she regards with favor the much-scorned Enlightenment, knowing that to cede reason to those who reason badly is always mistaken. * * * In a brisker style and with less theoretical ambition, Michael Shermer, a onetime born-again Christian who is now the editor of Skeptic magazine and a specialist in debating popular cranks, has written a valuable primer debunking many of the crackpot obsessions of our time--alien abductions, creationist science, Holocaust refutal, the statistics-bespangled racism of the bell curve and pseudoscientific theology among them. In the spirit of longtime debunker and Skeptic patron saint Martin Gardner, columnist for Scientific American, Shermer catalogs the misunderstandings of science that run rife among people still eager to cash in on science's prestige. From close observation, he shows a pattern in the formulas with which misunderstanders explain away inconvenient facts. "Why People Believe Weird Things" is studded with tales of close encounters with irrationalists of many stripes. Shermer has walked across hot coals, confronted creationist Duane T. Gish, pointed out the inconsistencies of Nazi apologist David Irving and lived to tell the tales. The book is more interesting than the title. Shermer's answer to the question- -why do people believe in weird things--is simple: It is because people are irrational that they believe weird things. Although he has a degree in psychology, Shermer is concerned not so much with inner compulsions but with the identifiable characteristics of erroneous reasoning. Do the similarities of many "eyewitness" accounts of, say, alien visitations support the claim that they must be real? Shermer offers a cultural explanation for these apparently spontaneous versions. The witnesses live, after all, in a tightly coordinated culture, amid positive feedback loops, where breathless first-person narratives are steadily shaped into bestsellers, talk show material and scripts to be pumped out into a credulous populace. What indeed is spontaneity when a whole culture is at work retelling the stories that have been pumped into circulation? Our public opinion pool, in short, is tainted. Garbage in; garbage out. No stranger to his own credulity, Shermer offers a harrowing tale of the time when, exhausted during a long-distance bicycle race in Nebraska, he hallucinated that his crew turned into murderous extraterrestrials and mistook the lights on their motor home for the spaceship's beacon. The will to believe is a staple of the human condition, but in recent centuries, it comes equipped with a certain peculiarity. Credulity likes to wear the cosmetics of sophistication. There is a scientific gloss on what would otherwise look like plain mumbo-jumbo. Append the word "science" or the suffix "-ology" to a root term and your fancy picks up prestige points. The cult of fascination with charts, graphs, measurements and meters bespeaks an age when the irrational pays tribute to science by borrowing its vocabulary. Shermer's directly written book is the perfect handbook to thrust on anyone you know who has been lured into the comforting paranoias that circulate amid the premillennial jitters. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, whatta' liar! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 10/3 12/12 24/888 102/2 106/2000 112/2715 124/1 130/1 1008 133/2 SEEN-BY: 140/23 143/1 147/34 2021 154/222 167/166 170/400 202/1207 1919 SEEN-BY: 213/213 218/2 801 890 900 901 907 244/1500 267/200 270/101 275/429 SEEN-BY: 280/1 169 282/1 62 310/666 323/107 343/600 346/250 356/18 371/42 SEEN-BY: 377/86 382/92 387/5 396/1 45 690/660 730/2 2401/0 2442/0 3603/420 SEEN-BY: 3612/41 300 3615/50 3619/25 3632/21 3651/9 3652/1 3667/1 3674/1 SEEN-BY: 3828/2 5100/8 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 396/1 218/907 801