SJA #24 - 19 November 2018 - Alchemy & Offense

Alchemy
I’m skipping right over the akashic record in the skeptic’s online dictionary and getting right to alchemy. The akashic record was part of the theosophical movement, a mystical gnostic thing from the 19th century. It’s a bit of spiritual mumbo jumbo about how all human experience and knowledge is contained in some sort of spiritual realm. It’s not really different from other spiritual or supernatural nonsense, except in that it honestly looks a lot like a celestial filing system.

Seriously. They … they talk about it like it’s an actual set of records. Tablets, or microfilm… Obviously they mean it metaphorically, but come on. Anyway, I haven’t seen references to the akashic records around, though maybe that’s just me, and it really fits in with any other kind of supernatural otherworldly stuff or gaining access to special knowledge through mystical means. Basically, just plain false.

So, alchemy! The popular conception of alchemy is of the attempt to turn lead into gold (and other “base” metals into other “precious” metals, but lead into gold is the popular one), and the skeptic’s dictionary falls for this one hard. They open with the mysticism, and eventually get around to mentioning an alchemist who contributed something to real knowledge (Paracelsus, in the 16th century).

Alchemy is a pseudoscience. It is a bunch of mystical nonsense about the transformation of one material into another and creating magical potions to do wondrous, impossible things. But that’s not what it was.

It’s really easy to see the connection between alchemy and chemistry. Alchemist. Chemist. Alchemy was the ancient world’s fumbling, hesitant steps toward a genuine understanding of physical materials and their chemical properties. Yes, it came bundled with a lot of nonsense; that’s what you expect. It was hampered by the fact that storing, transmitting, sharing knowledge was difficult and incredibly expensive. There were individuals scattered all over the place, working entirely alone, pursuing false leads, making discoveries, all in almost complete ignorance of what everyone else was doing.

Like everything else, the discovery of cheap paper and the development of the printing press revolutionized alchemy. It took a few hundred years, but the mystical and religious horseshit was pared away and we were left with chemistry, a solid foundation of genuine knowledge about materials and their interactions. The elixir of life, the philosopher’s stone, the four elements (and the elusive quintessence), those all stuck around in alchemy while chemistry joined the rest of the world in the light of day, doing things that actually worked.

I think it’s helpful to remember that ancient people weren’t stupid and the things they were doing … in some ways what they were doing then is exactly what we’re doing now. The ancient alchemists were early scientists, struggling, alone, in the dark. They were also early mystical dipshits doing stupid, dangerous things and fooling themselves into believing nonsense. The people haven’t really changed; some are better at deluding themselves and others have a better knack for honesty.

What’s really changed is the method, the way we talk to one another and cooperate. We all record information and share it, we talk and argue, we work together. Mysticism, religion, faith, for all it looks like a community, always boils down to solitary individuals, talking only to themselves, thinking they’re talking to something else. A scientist in the lab, no matter how lonely they look, truly is part of a global community, is never working alone.

Alchemy today is nothing but magical potions, supernatural elements, impossible dreams, and the denial of science and medicine. Once upon a time, alchemy was a difficult, mostly blind, sometimes dangerously misguided, but ultimately noble quest for greater understanding.

• Alchemy at the skeptic's online dictionary
• Alchemy at wikipedia

Offense
It’s not about offense. It was never about offense.

Riley Dennis, a phenomenal youtuber, recently had a video about people being offended, how the term is used in defense and … offense on both the right and the left. Riley speaks mostly about her personal experience being attacked by people claiming she’s a snowflake and how she tries to use different terms to better communicate what she’s really trying to say. I really recommend the video in particular and her whole channel. She’s pretty goddamn awesome.

That video inspired me to talk about this in my own way. This has been rolling around in my head for a while. I read an article, years ago, which I’ve never since been able to find. I wish I could, because it had a really great line in it that, obviously, I have to paraphrase because I can’t find the damn article. “Offense was the greatest own goal the left ever scored.” And the author was really correct there. Unfortunately, I don’t think we could do anything else. It was the only way to move the conversation forward.

Take a look at what SJWs get “offended” about vs what fundagelicals and trolls get “offended” about. I don’t know if you can hear it, but I’m putting quotes around “offended” up there, because I want to indicate that “offended” probably isn’t the right word. I also put quotes around it in that last sentence, but that’s because I was talking about my use of the word rather than actually using the word. Ah, philosophy. USE MENTION ERROR.

Anywho, what SJWs are “offended” by, in no particular order:

• people using racist dog-whistles
• people using racist slurs
• people committing racist hate crimes
• people using sexist dog-whistles
• people using sexist slurs
• people committing sexist hate crimes
• people using homophobic dog-whistles
• people using homophobic slurs
• people committing homophobic hate crimes
• people using transphobic dog-whistles
• people using transphobic slurs
• people committing transphobic hate crimes
• people using dog-whistles against religious minorities
• people using slurs against religious minorities
• people committing hate crimes against religious minorities
• people harassing, stalking, doxxing, abusing, attacking, raping, or murdering other people

Things right-wingers get “offended” by, in no particular order:

• people not saying merry christmas
• coffee cups not having merry christmas on them
• not being allowed to use the government to promote their religion
• not being allowed to use the government to stop other people practicing their religion
• being called racist
• being called homophobic
• being called transphobic
• being called anti-semitic
• being called islamophobic
• being called xenophobic
• being called sexist
• being called a harasser, abuser, doxxer, rapist
• being called jerks
• being asked to be kind
• being asked to be polite
• being asked to leave other people the fuck alone

Amanda Marcotte had an article recently and she’s written a book about how the right has gone into full-on troll mode. They don’t care about facts or truth, or even about doing the right thing or making the world a better place, even for themselves. All they care about is winning, about “owning the libs”. They’re driven by hatred and anger, by self-righteousness and fear.

They’re offended. They’re offended all the damn time. They’re offended and upset that they’re losing their power and privilege. They’re incredibly upset that they’re no longer able to get away with the things they used to get away with. Like putting their religion in a special place and using the power of government to protect it. Like not having to think, ever, about the fact that they’re white and not everyone in the world is white. Like not having to think about the fact that they’re men and not everyone is a man. They’re used to just being in the center of everything and having the world set up for them, for their assumptions, and never having to think about anything or work to fit their desires into the way the world functions.

The left isn’t offended. The left has never been offended. It’s never been about offense. It’s about oppression. On the left you have people who have had to fight for their damn lives. Queer folk, trans folk, people of color, women, the disabled, immigrants, native americans, jews and muslims and hindus and every other religious group… Every single group of people who aren’t rich, straight, cis, white, christian men. They’re not crying because you were mean, they’re fighting to get equal pay for equal work, they’re fighting for the right to stability, to not get fired or evicted by a bigot, they’re fighting so they don’t have to fear violence in the street, they’re fighting for all the things middle class white folks take for granted every day.

They’re not upset that you hurt their feelings, they’re worried you’re going to kill them.

Take a look at those lists. The left are “offended” by attacks on the basic humanity of people who don’t have power. The right are *offended* by attacks on their privilege.

It’s not about offense. It’s never been about offense. Offense is for people with privilege. Offense is for when you have a toy and you’re worried someone’s going to take it away. This is about oppression. Oppression is when you’re one step away from starvation and you’re worried someone’s going to take your food away.

In a way, talking about offense was an own goal. It let the right latch onto this narrative and call the left a bunch of spoiled children while acting like the worst brats in existence. But… it was necessary. We had to talk about offense, because it’s the only thing the privileged could understand. White people don’t get followed around in stores by suspicious clerks, straight people don’t get harassed or attacked on the street, cis people don’t live every damn day with the pain of a body that isn’t right, christians don’t have to worry about an asshole in a MAGA kicking down the door and hosing their temple down with bullets.

The privileged don’t understand oppression. Sometimes it’s possible to explain it to them, to get them to take the tiny step from “people treat you differently because you’re poor and that’s wrong” to “people treat you differently because you’re black/gay/a woman and that’s wrong”. That’s often difficult because they’ve been fed lies for so damn long about how minorities aren’t being treated worse, but actually have more privilege than WASPs. They honestly believe that black people don’t have to pay for college, that women get jobs more easily, that being Jewish means you’re rich.

White people also used to think that black schools were better than white schools in segregation, and they were upset about that. Different era, same lies, same racism. Same hatred all around.

Talking about offense is a good first step, but we need to keep going. We need to talk about oppression and why people on the left aren’t upset about being insulted, they’re afraid because bigots are attacking their humanity. And attacking someone’s humanity is followed, as we’ve been seeing more and more in Trump’s America, by attacking them with guns, knives, fists, cars. Dog-whistles and slurs lead to murder and genocide. That’s what people on the left are fighting against.

• Riley Dennis's Youtube video on being offended
• Amanda Marcotte's Salon article: Conservatives Have Gone Fully Fact Free
• Amanda Marcotte's book at amazon.com: Troll Nation

Homeopathy is Nonsense.

1. If you want to cure a symptom, take something that causes those symptoms.
2. Don't do that.

It cannot be said enough. Homeopathy is complete and utter crap. There is nothing to it at all. Not in the slightest. The evidence tells us that homeopathy does nothing at all. You don't even need to consider the "theory" of homeopathy given that it doesn't do anything, but a quick glance at the "theory" confirms that it's the completest horse crap. Do not consider homeopathy if you're sick. Go to an actual doctor. Homeopaths are at best fools, and at worst outright frauds. They should be ashamed, they should quit and do anything else, or they should die in a fire. They actively make the world a worse place by practicing their credulous nonsense.

At the turn of the 19th century, a German physician was curious about the claimed benefits of tea made from a certain bark to cure an intermittent fever. Being skeptical, he decided to investigate. Good for him! Unfortunately everything he did after that was entirely incorrect. He only tested the tea on one person, he only did so once, and he didn't go on to study his hypothesis. He drank the tea, suffered an allergic reaction, and came up with the homeopathy. Homeopaths claim that if you want to cure a disease, you should ingest poison¹. Poison? Yes. Homeopaths believe that inducing the symptoms of illness is how you cure illness. To cure a fever, induce a fever.

It shouldn't take much thought to understand that making your condition worse is stupid. Idiotic. Asinine. Perhaps the worst idea ever. Homeopaths realized very quickly that murdering all their patients would be a bad business practice, so they introduced the second principle of homeopathy. Since giving your patients poison is a bad idea, don't give them poison! Homeopaths began diluting their "remedies" with the intent of delivering as little poison as possible. Of course, they had to justify a remedy being effective despite being present only in very small quantities². The resulting theory is nothing short of mysticism.

Homeopaths believe that water has a memory. Wooo! Water somehow remembers the stuff it's been in contact with, retains, through some utterly mysterious and inexplicable fashion, the healing properties of the poison, and thus you can safely discard the poison. Add poison to water. Dilute a thousand times. Shake. Dilute a thousand times. Shake. Dilute a thousand times. Shake. Hand patient a bottle of pure water and charge him for "medicine". The shaking is very important. If you don't shake the "remedy", or if you do it wrong, you might not end up with medicine!

Question: What allows water to remember being in contact with pesticide and only retain the healing qualities of the pesticide and not the part that's deadly poison? What allows water to remember being in contact with pesticide, but forget the fact that fish have been shitting in it for a billion years?

And all this doesn't even get into the even more transparently nonsensical notion of transmitting homeopathy over the phone. I wish I were kidding. Jacques Benveniste, French quack, seriously argued (and made money thereby) that if he shook his magic potion at his phone while you held your water near your phone that the mystical homeopathic energies would transmit over the phone lines. And why not? Once you're going to believe one bit of nonsense you might as well go whole hog!

There really isn't any need to go into the theory or practices of homeopathy in depth. First because it's so easy to show how stupid it all is. Second because, as I said, the evidence all shows that homeopathy, if you're lucky, does absolutely nothing. There's no reason to investigate a theory or hypothesis about a phenomenon that doesn't exist. That's why the first step in investigating paranormal phenomena is never to look into the proposed mechanism for the phenomenon, but always to find out if it actually happens. Hint: It doesn't.



1 - I am entirely serious. I am not exaggerating. There are remedies that require the patient to ingest pesticide. Fortunately, the dilutions involved mean that the best you can hope for is that you don't get any of the so-called remedy.

2 - Modern homeopathy requires dilutions so extreme that there can be not a single molecule of the original material left.

Is SETI Pseudoscience?

In one of the episodes of the podcast Rationally Speaking, Julia Galef and Massimo Pigliucci* cover a topic that he covered in his book, Nonsense on Stilts: is the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) a pseudoscience?

Massimo's book is about various forms of woo and mysticism and how they cloak themselves in the language of science to ward off criticism. I don't know if he's in the book, but Deepak Chopra is one of the worst offenders in this regard. He uses scientific buzzwords, usually from quantum mechanics, to sell his brand of "alternative medicine"**. When pressed, he admits that he's just speaking metaphorically and doesn't mean to imply that his quackery is based on the actual meaning of those words. However, when challenged on the mystical woosense of it, he reverts to using the scientific language, saying it's not mysticism, it's SCIENCE! Fuck Deepak Chopra.

Anyway, Massimo places SETI in a murky gray area on the edges of pseudoscience. It is a scientific enterprise: it follows all the rules of science and is done by scientists (astronomers), and doesn't ever pretend to be more than it is. However, it lacks any data confirming its hypothesis (that there is more than one technological civilization in the universe) and one of the attributes that is generally held to make an enterprise scientific; falsifiability.

For example: what would falsify evolution? As myth puts in the mouth of JBS Haldane, "Rabbits in the precambrian". The theory of evolution predicts that more complex forms arise from simpler forms, and not the other way around, and not without precursors. Thus rabbits in the precambrian, far more complex than their time allowed and without precursors, would violate the theory and require a new explanation. Or, more simply, what would violate gravity? A heavy thing floating. What would falsify the god hypothesis?

SETI isn't falsifiable. It's rather akin to the god question, or Russell's teapot; the only way to prove there's no life anywhere in the universe is to search the entire universe simultaneously. However, it's in a gray area because it's a question with a definite answer and there's no reason to believe that there is or is not life; we have absolutely no evidence. That said, none of the SETI scientists claims that their hypothesis is true, merely that it's worth investigating.

If the hypothesis isn't falsiable, is it testable? Absolutely. That's what they're doing now; they're scanning the sky for signals. If they got a signal, it would confirm the hypothesis in a heartbeat. But they've been at it for 60 years with no answer. What if they scan for another 500 years with no answer; would that still not confirm a lack of life? There would still be no negative, there. Julia raises a good point here; if you search for long enough and get no answer, that's fairly good evidence that there isn't life out there, and the longer you search without an answer, the stronger the evidence gets that we're alone. Of course, life may be incredibly rare and we might just miss a rare broadcast (our broadcast from the moon only went out once... so much for that).

One of the arguments people make in favor of SETI is essentially the Drake Equation. No matter how improbable intelligent life is, the universe is so incomprehensibly big that there must be an incredibly large number of other civilizations. In fact, the Fermi Paradox shows up in a few science fiction books***: if there are so many civilizations out there, why haven't we found them? Massimo argues that the principle of mediocrity is very flawed. The principle says that there's nothing special about us (we're not unique), if one advanced civilization exists and isn't special, that means there must be more (or, even with low probability, a large volume of space and time guarantees it will happen many times). To which Massimo replies, "Skateboarding is a normal behavior here, does that mean it happens everywhere?" There's no reason to suspect that our civilization is unique, because we also have evidence of a unique phenomenon. The universe only happened once. All we have is evidence of a technological civilization. We can't assume anything else, not that we're unique, not that we're common, nothing.

They spent some time discussing the Drake Equation and raised some good points: the complete lack of evidence we have about life and planets in the rest of the galaxy goes double for most of the equation. We just don't know anything about it. They also raised a really good argument against anything about SETI; nothing has changed about it in the fifty years it's been in existence. That is pretty damning. Even if they're not gaining new evidence about the existence of life themselves, the many developments in the last five decades in physics and astronomy really, really should have influenced the theory and work of SETI.

Though they spent a lot of time discussing the likelihood of life on other planets, they didn't really raise any significant objections to SETI that convinced me it borders on pseudoscience. Since Massimo is a philosopher of science, I expected he would have spent more time talking about the conflict between its evidence-based nature and the fact that it is, in all practical ways, unfalsifiable. Instead it was a long discussion of our absolute ignorance of extrasolar conditions. Maybe he didn't want to spoil too much of his book. :) I think it's a fully scientific endeavor, but one whose scope is so broad and the odds so slim that it will never achieve its goal. However, the discovery of standard candles occurred by accident, so who knows what SETI will come up with? The act of systematically scanning the sky with radio telescopes is a good thing in itself. Of course, I say that about all science, so what do I know?

If you're curious, my personal stance on extraterrestrial life is that I think it's common. Not necessarily intelligent life, but life in general. I base this on the thermodynamics that makes chemical bonding prolific, and complexity inevitable. I also suspect that our current estimates of the goldilocks zone where life can exist is too conservative. I don't have any evidence, of course; this is all just cherished private suspicions. The complete absence of evidence on conditions outside of our solar system means that I must be, officially, agnostic.

Also for the curious, NASA's estimate for the answer to the Drake Equation: 2.3. That is to say there are either two or three civilizations capable of broadcasting in the galaxy. And we're one of them.


* Quick rules for a Rationally Speaking drinking game:
Drink whenever Julia complains about common misconceptions about reason or skepticism.
Drink whenever Massimo says, "and so on and so forth".
Drink whenever one of them says, "Well, it depends on what you mean by..."
Finish your drink if Julia disparages the value of philosophy.

** What's it an alternative to? Medicine.

*** Like Variable Star, put together in notes by Heinlein and written by Spider Robinson. Good book, clearly the separate work of two great writers.