Debunking Denialism

Defending science against the forces of irrationality.

Category Archives: Miscellaneous

The Astonishing Quackery of the Natural Birth Movement

2 Comments Posted by on August 21, 2016

Orgasmic birth nonsense

There are few large areas in modern life that has not been infested by pseudoscience and quackery. From quantum woo and fake bleach ‘treatments’ for autism to genocide denial and conspiracy theories about mass shootings, it seems to be all around us.

One of the greatest achievements of modern medicine is reducing maternal mortality during childbirth. This has, to a large degree, been due to increased understanding about pathogens and how they are spread as well as how to handle incidents during childbirth with medical competence. Yet birth has not escaped the long reach of pseudoscientific nonsense.

Homebirth

Some people who reject the modern world that science has built and prefer to have a planned homebirth. Compared with hospital births of the same risk, planned homebirth triples neonatal mortality rates and 10x increased the risk of a 5 minute Apgar score of 0.

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The Pseudoscientific Disaster of Forced Anal Examinations

2 Comments Posted by on July 31, 2016

Dignity debased

Many governments criminalize homosexuality and consensual same-sex sexual behavior. At the time of this writing, it is illegal in over 70 countries according to the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA). This is typically due to religious extremism and scientific ignorance. Many religious scriptures and societies are notoriously anti-gay and some of these societies invent invalid and pseudoscientific ideas about the nature, origin and content of homosexuality, as well as supposed “spiritual harms” and fake “cures”.

Governments who criminalize homosexuality has to have a system for detecting gay men to give the appearance of legitimacy. Besides the usual techniques (such as surveillance, interrogation, and urging people to report their family, friends and relatives to the police) some of them have invented pseudoscientific methods for “detecting homosexuality” through anal examinations of the gross morphology of the anus or anal tone. It is essentially based on the same myth as virginity tests, which is the notion that penetration makes you have a loose vagina or anus. This is not true because tightness is largely under the control of the autonomous nervous system and depend on how relaxed and sexually aroused you are.

Due to the nature of these examinations and the risk to the person being subjected to it, it is typically done by force and without informed consent. Needless to say, forced anal examinations are based on pseudoscience and violates many ethical, legal and moral principles. This post surveys the arguments and evidence discussed in the paper called Statement on Anal Examinations in Cases of Alleged Homosexuality by the Independent Forensic Expert Group. More information about forced anal examinations and the eight countries where it happens can be found in this news item from International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims or this Human Rights Watch primer and this Human Rights Watch report. Cached version of the paper and the report can be found here and here.

Eight scientific reasons for why forced anal examinations do not work

So what are the scientific reasons for why forced anal examinations do not tell you anything reliable about anal tone or consensual, same-sex anal sex? Why should it be considered pseudoscience? Here are eight distinct reasons:

(1) There is no standardized and quantitative method for doing anal examinations of anal tone or appearance.

(2) There is no evidence that this method is valid, i.e. that certain level of anal tone or appearance is associated with receptive, same-sex anal sex.

(3) There is a certain degree of normal variability in anal features between individuals and examinations, which makes it hard to make claims about clinical relevant deviations.

(4) There is no evidence of interrater reliability i.e. that different examiners reach the same results and same interpretation of the results. Different examiners can differ in size of fingers, amount of lube used, penetration depth or the ability to digitally sense tone.

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Mailbag: Comment Spam, Geoengineering and Chemtrails

2 Comments Posted by on April 8, 2016

mailbag letter

It is time for another entry in the mailbag series where I answer feedback email from readers and others. If you want to send me a question, comment or any other kind of feedback, please do so using the contact form on the about page.

A really annoying aspect of combating pseudoscientific nonsense on the Internet is that within a relatively short time period, a skeptic soon starts to know more about a specific denialist claim than the denialists themselves. This is because the denialist, of course, just knows what he or she knows, but the skeptic is exposed to many denialists that put forward different patches of the same conspiracy theory or claim in question. Since there is no independent way to support pseudoscientific nonsense (no repair mechanism), it mutates as it is spread around the Internet. Together with the fact that very few new arguments are used by denialists (since they often just recycle old claims), this means that, sometimes, the crank or quack makes a claim that is just incoherent and the skeptic is forced to figure out which precise claim the denialist was referring to. Sometimes, this is just a matter of confusing some minor detail, but in other cases there is so much disconnect between the original pseudoscientific argument and the way it is delivered by a crank on the Internet. Most of the time, it is somewhere in between.

This was the case for a reader comment left by someone calling themselves Jennie. It was left on a Facebook post about the deceptive tactics used by alleged psychics, but it had to do with something completely different, namely chemtrails and geoengineering:

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Mailbag, Miscellaneous ,

Newcomb’s Paradox, One-Boxing and the Marginal Utility of Money

2 Comments Posted by on April 5, 2016

Newcomb's paradox

A very intelligent artificial intelligence (AI) presents you with two boxes: box A is transparent and box B is painted with a thick coat of black paint. Box A always contain 1k USD. Box B can either contain 1M USD or nothing. Do you choose to take both boxes, or just box B? Before you select your option, there is an added complication: before you get to pick, the AI has made a very, very accurate prediction about your choice. If you decide to pick just box B, you’ll get 1M USD if the prediction was correct, and 0 if it was wrong. If you decide to pick both and the prediction was accurate, you 1k. If you pick both and the AI was wrong, you get 1M+1k.

So what do you choose? The problem might seem intuitively obvious for most people. The major problem is that a considerable proportion of people thinks it is obvious that you just take box B, whereas another sizable proportion think that you should take both boxes. How can that be? This tricky situation is known as Newcomb’s paradox (or problem) and was initially put forward by philosopher Robert Nozick in the late 1960s.

The standard payoff matrix

So let us create a 2×2 payoff matrix showing what amount of money you get from choosing the different options together with the different predictions made by the AI. Making a payoff matrix is an effective way to get a general overview of the consequences of different combinations of choices in game theory (or in everyday life). Both this and the alternative payoff matrix below comes from the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Casual Decision Theory.

                                 AI prediction
                           One-boxing    Two-boxing
          --------------|-------------|--------------|
Your      One-boxing    |     1M      |       0      |
Choice    --------------|-------------|--------------|
          Two-boxing    |    1M+1k    |       1k     |
          --------------|-------------|--------------|

So should you one-box (only take box B), or two-box (take both box A and box B)?

The conflict

Well, the central issue here is that the Newcomb’s paradox attempts to provoke a conflict between two decision principles.

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How to Catch a Serial Killer

6 Comments Posted by on December 7, 2015

ResearchBlogging.org

How are serial killers caught?

Crime shows and police procedure dramas (like Criminal Minds and Law and Order) that flood our television experience give the appearance that serial killers are caught by the use of criminal profiling and sophisticated forensic tools such as fingerprint analysis, DNA technology, digital tracking, blood spatter analysis, ballistic comparisons and many more. But how much of it is real? Are criminal profiling and forensic science really responsible for capturing most serial killers?

White, Lester, Gentile and Rosenbleeth (2011) investigates this question by studying 200 serial killers. They found that although forensic evidence was often key in getting a conviction, no serial killer was captured by the use of forensic evidence or criminal profiling. Instead, the reason serial killers were caught was traditional police work and communication with the public.

What is a serial killer?

For the purpose of this paper, a serial killer is defined as:

a person who has killed at least three people at different locations with a ‘cooling off’ period between the killings”

Special accommodations were made for a minority of repeated killers who killed at home (Gacy and Dahmer) or at a hospital (angel of death). This is different from a mass killer or mass shooter who, depending on definition, kills 3-4 people in the same general location and time.

What was the sample size and how was the sample selected?

A total of 200 serial killers were included in this study. Facts about the serial killers in the sample was taken from “newspaper reports, true crime books, and encyclopedias” and then “referenced with other sources”. The identity of these “other sources” are left unspecified.

What role did criminal profiling / forensic science play in catching serial killers?

None of the serial killers were identified or captured by criminal profiling or forensic science alone. Not a single one. The authors write:

Interestingly, not one serial killer in the present study, albeit limited to 200 subjects, was captured by forensic evidence alone, without the help of the public or the investigative acumen of the police by interviewing the public.

It should be noted, however, that forensic science such as DNA evidence, often played a crucial role in attaining a conviction against the serial killers in this sample. Thus, in contrast to police procedural dramas such as Criminal Minds, criminal profiling and forensic evidence plays a minor role in identifying and finding serial killers.

How are serial killers caught?

So if criminal profiling and/or forensic evidence does not play a leading role in identifying and capturing serial killers, how are they captured?

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Miscellaneous, Science Explained , ,

The Poisonous M&Ms Analogy Metastasizes to the Syrian Refugee Crisis

4 Comments Posted by on November 27, 2015

Syrian refugees are not M&Ms

Most people understand that unfair generalizations about e.g. ethnic and sexual minorities are unreasonable. Yet some people attempt to give their bigoted generalizations a thin veneer of supposed intellectual credibility in order to desperately cling to their flawed and simplistic worldview. One such attempt that exploded onto Internet forums and social media in the middle of 2014 is the so-called Poisonous M&Ms analogy.

Now, with the help of politicians, authors, bloggers and other commentators, this nonsense has metastasized to the Syrian refugee crisis. People who are fleeing for their lives from terror and dictatorship are being likened to potentially dangerous pieces of candy in order to make cheap rhetorical points. However, these points crumble at a slightest hint of critical analysis.

What is the “Poisonous M&Ms” analogy and why is it fatally flawed?

The basic “argument” goes something like this:

You say that I am overgeneralizing about [group X]?

Imagine a bowl of M&Ms. 10% of them are poisoned. Go ahead, eat a handful of them. After all, they are not all poisonous!

The idea expressed above is this: just as it makes sense to not want to eat M&Ms if some of them are poisoned, it is also allegedly reasonable to make sweeping generalizations about group X. In reality, of course, it is just a clever intuition pump crafted to deflect criticism of bullshit overgeneralizations that have little to no empirical merit.

It does not require a lot of thought to find major flaws in this analogy: it has no specificity and can be applied to any group (including the group making the generalizations to begin with), it uses non-empirical base rates, the correct base rates is never factored into the analysis, it uses an irrational risk analysis that assumes that zero risk is possible and has several other flaws that was discussed in the original post linked above (that also shows some examples of this analogy being applied to African-Americans by members of the white supremacist website Stormfront).

How the Poisonous M&Ms Analogy has Metastasized

During the past few weeks, this analogy has been picked up by well-known politicians, political commentators and others. Here are a few examples to show the broad influence it has gotten:

Mike Huckabee: On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” (Nov 17th), Huckabee compared Syrian refugees to peanuts: “If you bought a five-pound bag of peanuts and there were about ten peanuts that were deadly poisonous, would you feed them to your kids? The answer is no.”

Although not using specifically M&Ms, Huckabee deployed a version of this flawed analogy to Syrian refugees. As many have pointed out already, his base rate is way off target and both peanuts and guys named Mike have killed more people in the U.S. than refugees or Salafi jihadists have.

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How Online Casinos Deceive You Into Playing

Comments Off on How Online Casinos Deceive You Into Playing Posted by on September 19, 2015

Online Casino

How do online casinos continue to profit millions of dollars per year? What statistical, psychological and marketing tactics do they use to convince people to give up their hard-earned money for a few moments on slots with flashing lights and music? They do this by exploiting human cognitive biases, the neurobiology of reward, clever marketing tactics and the widespread ignorance of statistics.

This post will examine the mathematics, cognitive psychology, neuroscience and advertisement behind how many online casinos get people to play their salary and sometimes their entire saving away. In the end, the only way to win is not to play. If you visit Las Vegas, spend your money on good food, exciting activities and entertaining shows.

Gambler’s ruin: players can never reliably beat the casino regardless of betting system

A lot of gamblers think that they have found a betting system that allows them to get an edge over the house. The trouble is that no such betting system actually exists. This is because casinos have engineered their system to always give the house an edge over the player. A common betting system is known as the martingale system. It is based on the idea that if you lose, you double your bet. If you win, you are back over break even and reduce the bet down to the baseline again. However, simple mathematics shows that this is not a sustainable system. If you start by betting $5, then it only requires 10 losses before you are forced to bet $5120. On the 11th loss, it is $10240. Most gamblers do not have this kind of money, and will soon run out. Furthermore, a lot of casinos have a maximum limit for bets, so you cannot apply this system beyond a certain amount.

All other betting systems have similar flaws.

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Flawed Chemtrails Paper by Herndon Retracted

1 Comment Posted by on September 5, 2015

Retracted chemtrails paper

Chemtrails is a pseudoscientific conspiracy theory based on the notion that the government is secretly releasing mind-controlling chemicals that sterilize people from airplanes. In reality, it is a combination of water vapor and airplane exhausts. It is bad for the environment, but it is not even close to the fantasies put forward by conspiracy theorists. This is obvious from the realization that world population has increased from ~3 billion in the late 1950s to ~7 billion in the early 2010s, despite increased airplane traffic all over the world. In a similar fashion, the Flynn effect suggests that IQs are increasing by 3 points per decade. So the predictions made by the chemtrails conspiracy theory is refuted on all levels.

However, pseudoscientific cranks almost never let reality come in the way of a tantalizing conspiracy theory that appeal to their own biases and they make up increasingly bizarre and convoluted ideas as they go along. On 11th August 2015, the nuclear chemist J. Marvin Herndon got a paper that promoted chemtrails conspiracy theory published in an obscure journal called International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2014 impact factor 2.063 according to their own website).

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Climate Change Denialism, Miscellaneous , , , , ,

Srebrenica Genocide Denial

9 Comments Posted by on July 11, 2015

Srebrenica Genocide

The Srebrenica genocide involved the mass murder of 8000 people and forced deportation of around 25 000-30 000 people carried out by the Army of Republika Srpska around the town of Srebrenica (today part of Bosnia and Herzegovina) during the Bosnian War (1992-1995). According to former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, this was the “the worst [crime] on European soil since the Second World War.” Several military personnel, police officers and politicians have been indicted and convicted of genocide, abetting genocide or other war crimes. Two of the masterminds behind this genocide, Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, are currently being prosecuted by The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Although it has been exactly 20 years on the day since the start of the genocide in Srebrenica, dark forces are gathering on the horizon. Just with the Holocaust and the Nanking Massacre, there are people who deny that the genocide at Srebrenica ever took place. These are primarily Serbian nationalists such as Milorad Dodik (president of Republika Srpska) and Tomislav Nikolić (President of Serbia) and leftist pseudo-intellectuals (such as writer Diana Johnstone and the Living Marxism magazine). Unbelievably, Srebrenica genocide denial has even been espoused by Swedish university professors, such as Kjell Magnusson (associated professor in sociology) and Lennart Palm (professor of history). Even more disturbingly and in an ironic twist of tragedy, Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer appears to reject the genocide status for the Srebrenica massacre according to an interview published (29 June, 2015) in the Serbian newspaper Politika.

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The Reality of False Confessions

3 Comments Posted by on January 31, 2015

ResearchBlogging.org

False confessions

Confessions have a powerful ability to sway the minds of judges and jurors. Yet there are many documented examples of manipulative tactics used by law enforcement personnel to elicit false confessions from people who are not guilty of the crime they are accused of. Defenders of these techniques fail to realize that law enforcement cannot reliable distinguish between a true and false confession, the safeguards already in place do not protect people from making false confessions and people can be made to readily confess to crimes they did not commit. Even judges and jurors are not able to resist the psychological influence of confessions, even when they are legally proven to be coerced. Even worse, false confessions taint other evidence and even make trained professionals change their previous correct interpretations of evidence. Kassin (2008) demolishes some of these myths about confessional evidence.

Fact #1: Law enforcement cannot reliable distinguish truth from lies

One of the most popular police manuals, Criminal Interrogations and Confessions, promote the idea that law enforcement can ask suspects a list of questions, study their behavioral responses and make decisions about the truth status of the claims made by the suspect with a high degree of accuracy. Proponents claim that this method is correct in 85% of cases. However, that study had no means of gauging the actual truth of the criminal cases tested and no control group was used. Furthermore, research has shown that the alleged signs of deception (such as being nervous, not looking the interrogator in the eyes) are not supported by empirical and training in these methods does not provide a considerable increase accuracy for detecting deception above the average 54% baseline of laypeople (which, of course, means that they are only marginally better than flipping a fair coin). To add insult to injury, people trained in this method have been shown to be less accurate and more confident, betraying an increasing susceptibility to confirmation bias. When this study methodology was replicated with trained law enforcement, the results were largely the same.

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