Paul Kurtz reminisces

Paul Kurtz, founder of CSICOP, has written a reminiscence about the early days of that organization. To put it into perspective, think of this:

Suppose there were a prominent creationist organization called "the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of Evolution." To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the founding of CSICOE, the founder wrote an essay reminiscing about the history of the Committee.

How do you think the "Skeptics" would respond if he were to write the following? (Which, by the way, I've patched together with sentences taken from Kurtz's essay.)

"It is well known that I am the culprit responsible for the founding of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of Evolution. Why did I do so? Because I was dismayed in 1976 by the rising tide of belief in evolution and the lack of adequate scientific examinations of these claims. I was distressed that my students accepted abiogenesis and other aspects of the theory of evolution without the benefit of a scientific critique.

It is within this cultural milieu as background that I decided to convene a special conference to discuss 'The New Irrationalisms: Evolution and Pseudoscience.' I invited many of the well-known critics of evolution to this opening session- Duane Gish, Michael Behe, and William Dembski among them. Historically, there have been many efforts to examine the claims of evolution, but most of these groups mainly attracted believers who were predisposed to accept evolution; the skeptics in their midst were few and far between. Thus CSICOE was the first body made up predominantly of skeptics, who were willing to investigate the alleged evolutionary phenomena.

There were a number of strategic issues that CSICOE had to address at its founding. First, what would be our approach to such phenomena? Would we simply be debunkers out to show by ridicule the folly of the claims that were made, or would we be serious investigators concerned with research into claims, dispassionate, open-minded inquirers? The answer was clear: Our chief focus would be on inquiry, not doubt. Where we had investigated a claim and found it wanting, we would express our doubt and perhaps even debunk it, but this would be only after careful investigation.

I should say that although most skeptics believed that there was considerable trickery afoot or self-deception in "evolution research," I was not certain whether evolution was true or not. My skeptical colleagues insisted that such phenomena were unlikely, but I decided to investigate for myself, to satisfy my own curiosity. I did this by teaching a course, 'Philosophy, Evolution, and Origins' at the university. My plan was to work closely with students on various experiments in order to test psychic and other claims. I repeated the course four times over eight years, and had over 250 students enroll. They conducted nearly 100 independent tests. The thing that absolutely stunned me was the fact that we never had positive results in any of the many tests conducted. I have never published these findings, for I did them basically to satisfy my desire (and that of my students) to ascertain whether anything paranormal could be uncovered."

By the way- let's also suppose that this creationist had made a career of writing for creationist magazines about his "crusade" against evolution, which he consistently described as an enemy of Christianity and as being a great threat to society.

How likely is it that the "Skeptics" would take his claims at face value? Would they accept that he was genuinely openminded and undecided about evolution at the time he founded CSICOE? Would they accept CSICOE as a genuine research organization, when it has so clearly stacked its membership and its rhetoric towards one side of the debate? And yet, Kurtz describes the founding of CSICOP in precisely those terms- I've done little other than to substitute "evolution" for "paranormal". Look closely at what Kurtz is saying:


* Just as creationists muddy the distinction between abiogenesis and evolution, Kurtz and his fellow skeptics routinely lump together Bigfoot, conspiracy theories, and other non-paranormal issues with psychics and astrology: "I was distressed that my students confused astrology with astronomy, accepted pyramid power, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, Kirlian photography, and psychic surgery without the benefit of a scientific critique." According to the Skeptic's Dictionary, "An event or perception is said to be paranormal if it involves forces or agencies that are beyond scientific explanation." You know, like psychic powers, or radiation before Einstein explained it. There's nothing paranormal about a giant ape, or a conspiracy, or for that matter extraterrestrials.

* Kurtz is not a scientist, and has zero published research papers. Nonetheless, he points to his own extensive "research" with his students as proof that paranormal phenomena don't exist. It would be nice if his "research" were subjected to peer review, or if he were even to describe what, exactly, their experiments consisted of. But, alas, Kurtz's work cannot be subjected to a scientific critique, because he won't tell us anything about it, at all, except that it disproved the paranormal.

* "Would we simply be debunkers out to show by ridicule the folly of the claims that were made, or would we be serious investigators concerned with research into claims, dispassionate, open-minded inquirers?" Why was this ever a matter for debate? Who took the position that CSICOP should ridicule claims before investigating them, and why are they in CSICOP, when their position is so clearly antithetical to critical thinking?

* Just like Michael Behe, Kurtz is willing to speak out of both sides of his mouth. On the one hand, he's trying to present himself as an open-minded investigator. On the other hand, he writes articles with titles like, "Two sources of unreason in democratic society: The paranormal and religion." (Annals of the NY Academy of Sciences 775: 493-504 1996) and "Humanists crusade against parapsychology", (Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 72 (4): 349-357 1978.)

* For that matter, just look at the title of the conference at which he first proposed CSICOP: "The New Irrationalisms: Antiscience and Pseudoscience." Are we really to believe that he was undecided about the paranormal? Or that CSICOP was meant to be devoted to serious, open-minded scientific research?

Most problematic is the fact that when these kinds of statements are made by their own side, the "Skeptics" are unable to see any problem with them. In response to my earlier claim that Skeptics problematically blur the distinction between research and media advocacy, and gerrymander their interests to fit their agenda, I got the following response from Mikkel at factsforum.org:

"Well, most conspiracy theories share a common denominator with magical, paranormal, supernatural, religious and metaphysical claim. They are considered Absolute. That is what denotes Believers. They start with an Absolute and then 'fit' or invent the facts."

And this, of course, encapsulates the entire problem. "Skeptics" view the world as divided betwen themselves and capital-B "Believers." Why does Skeptical Inquirer deal with such a crazy-quilt of issues, rather than sticking to its avowed mission of investigating the paranormal? Because anyone who holds those opinions is a pathological Believer. It's reasonable for Skeptical Inquirer to lump them all in the same boat, because all the bad guys think alike anyway. And thus the "Skeptical" ideology is automatically self-reinforcing. Like Penn and Teller say: bigfoot is bullshit, UFO's are bullshit, and, by the way, global warming is bullshit too. Everything that Penn and Teller disagree with is bullshit, so it's perfectly natural for them to get a TV show on which to grind a diverse array of personal axes, having nothing in common except for the fact that Penn and Teller want to grind them. And, to the "Skeptics," the fact that "Skeptics" disagree with something marks it as part of the undifferentiated mass that the "Believers" believe in.

Don't believe me? Look at Barry Fagin's article "Skepticism and Politics" in the May/June 1997 issue of Skeptical Inquirer. It's pure propaganda, and predictably concludes that the only legitimate political belief for "Skeptics" to hold is libertarianism. The real question, though, is why is Skeptical Inquirer devoting space to a discussion of libertarianism at all? Shouldn't they be investigating the paranormal? The answer is simple: Paul Kurtz happens to be a libertarian. So, just as is the case with Penn and Teller, there's nothing unusual about Skeptical Inquirer promoting "skeptical" viewpoints on "skeptical" subjects, and "skeptical" is defined to fit Kurtz's pet issues.

Skepticism: what's the difference?

Carl Sagan once wrote an article on the non-existence of God, in which he asked what kind of universe we'd expect to see if God didn't exist. He described such a universe (which looked exactly like our own,) and then asked, if God really does exist, how is that any different from God not existing? It's a nice rhetorical technique, and today I'm going to do something similar with "skepticism."

What would a magazine look like, if it were genuinely devoted to spreading the ideas of critical thinking? That's not too hard to answer- just look at a good critical thinking textbook. They warn the reader about common fallacies that they could fall into, and draw examples from a range of fields- politics as much as the paranormal. They don't pathologize particular beliefs and speculate about "why people believe weird things," for two reasons. First, their focus is on methodology, not ideology: critical thinking lies in how you arrive at your beliefs, not in holding the right beliefs. Secondly, the entire point of a critical thinking textbook is to help the reader spot their own fallacies, not to help them feel superior to others.

What would an organization and its magazine look like, if it were genuinely devoted to investigating the paranormal? Again, you don't have to look far for a model: it would look like a scientific journal. Authors would be able to publish articles on the paranormal regardless of the conclusions they reach, so long as they followed the proper methodology. Authors with different points of view would scrutinize each other's work and engage in healthy debate. Many articles would analyze paranormal phenomena and come to only tenative and fragmentary conclusions. There would be little rehashing of old ground, unless there was something genuinely new to say.

What would an organization look like if it were a media advocacy group? Organizations like FAIR and Media Matters for America point out inaccuracies in the media, and provide arguments to prove their case. Other organizations frankly declare that they want less sex and violence on TV, for example. In each case, their mission is clear: they declare themselves to be media advocacy groups, and that's exactly what they are.

On the other hand, suppose the Skeptic subculture were driven not so much by a desire to advocate critical thinking and open-mindedness, nor to perform scientific research, nor to conduct media advocacy, so much as a desire to feel smarter than everyone else. We already have something of a model in creation science. Jack Chick's Big Daddy is just one example of a common motif in fundagelical urban legends: a Christian student humiliates an atheist professor. (Another variant has the professor saying "If God really exists, then he can miraculously keep this chalk from breaking when I drop it," only to have it bounce safely off his shoe. In each case, the professor flees the room in a panic, leaving the student to preach to the class.)

Of course, the creationists have a problem. They want to feel smarter than everyone else, but their strategy is to embrace a dogma which is totally out of kilter with reality. A much better strategy is to embrace a dogma which is largely correct. Of course, being right doesn't make you a critical thinker: thumping your chest and asserting "the earth is round" doesn't test your skepticism at all. But if you're really concerned with the methodology of critical thinking, that puts a damper on feeling smarter than everyone else, because when you think critically you realize that you oftentimes can't reach a definitive conclusion on important issues, and you can never reach a state in which you no longer have to scrutinize your own belies. Substituting ideology for methodology lets you use some of your pre-existing beliefs as the touchstone of truth, so that you can pretend that you've already arrived at your goal.

When people aren't honest about their objectives, their mission starts to get fuzzy. When Michael Behe speaks to universities, he declares that he's just a scientist, and is more than willing to leave the question of "Who is the Designer?" to the theologians. When he speaks to churches, he talks about how his research will convert people to Christianity. The Institute for Creation Research is ostensibly a scientific institution, but when they're challenged on the loyalty oath which they demand of their "researchers," they reply that they're an advocacy group. Similarly, one expects pseudo-skeptics to claim to be devoted critical thinking in general, but one might find that mysteriously they focus on the paranormal at the expense of media criticism. No problem- they can just declare that they're really a paranormal research institute. If challenged on the fact that they only publish people who agree with their ideology, they can declare that they were really devoted to media advocacy all along.

Naturally, this strategy of substituting ideology for methodology depends on making sure that the ideology is hard to challenge. Genuine research involves attacking the most difficult and unresolved problems, but we would expect pseudo-skeptics to avoid genuinely unresolved paranormal issues like strange rains of fish from the sky, giant pinwheels of light in the oceans, hydrometeors, etc. Instead, it would be in their best interests to stick to rehashing issues that are already well-debunked (Ogopogo, for example,) no matter how unimportant they may be. If your self-image depends on setting up your ideology as a touchstone of truth, it pays to pick your battles well.

We also expect a certain fuzziness of definitions, in addition to the aforementioned "mission creep." Pseudo-skeptics would claim to be interested in the "paranormal," but their real interests would be gerrymandered to fit their ideology. Thus the Loch Ness monster would be "paranormal," because they can prove it doesn't exist. Coelocanths and the colossal squid aren't "paranormal," because they aren't demonstrably false. Conspiracy theories aren't really paranormal at all, but one would expect pseudo-skeptics to spend a lot of time attacking them, since it's in their interest to pick enemies that they can make look silly. And the term "conspiracy theory" can itself be gerrymandered to fit their ideology: Iran-Contra and Watergate don't count as "conspiracies," while the Illuminati and JFK do. Whether these conspiracy theories are correct is beside the point: like Ogopogo, the more ridiculous the claims appear to "skeptics," the more attractive they would be to the self-proclaimed investigators of the "paranormal", despite the fact that no one claims that JFK was shot by a Sasquatch.

If the entire point of pseudo-skepticism were to feel smarter than other people, then we would expect a lot of pathologizing of dissent, just as "Big Daddy" portrays the atheist professor as a contemptible figure. Again, ideology would trump methodology: the mere fact that someone disagrees with the "skeptics" would be enough to mark them as being fundamentally different and inferior. Much ink would be spilled on asking why people disagree with "skeptical" ideology, and establishing a difference between "skeptics" and a chimerical group of "true believers." Instead of a focus on "watch out, here's a fallacy that can slip you up," we would see endless analyses of why those other people, the "true believers," believe "weird things." And, of course, one would expect pseudo-skeptics to declare themselves to be "Skeptics," and to appropriate that term as a general term or members of their movement, thereby blurring the lines between ideology, methodology, and advocacy while simultaneously flattering themselves and emphasising that they are a group apart from everyone else.

It's obvious that my "hypothetical" example is really a description of the modern "Skeptic" movement as I see it. And maybe they're really motivated by a desire to feel smarter than everyone else, and maybe they aren't. But, as Sagan would say, the question is this:

If Skeptics aren't driven by a desire to feel smarter than everyone else, how is the current situation any different than if they were?

What's wrong with internet fora?

Back in the early days of the Internet, cyber-libertarians declared that since people were free to make their own rules online, all online problems would magically resolve themselves as a thousand electronic communities evolved whatever rules worked for them.

As it turns out, Internet debate fora are, with vanishingly few exceptions, run as dictatorships. And within the limits of the medium, those dictators wield something approaching absolute power. In fora where people exist solely as their words, moderators can silence people completely, or retroactively alter their words without any sign of tampering. In theory, they could even ban a user and keep his avatar going as their puppet, turning a critic into a literal mouthpiece of the party line, and no one would be the wiser.

Predictably, the results are less than satisfactory. In general, users have told me that while they think the mods and admins of their messageboard are nastily corrupt, there's no point in leaving because nowhere else would be much better. So, they tough it out in order to stick around with their fellow users, despite the abuses of the mods.

The frustrating thing is that it's so easy to change all that. Mysteriously, popular messageboard engines are programmed to give moderators powers for which there is no legitimate purpose. A few tweaks to the code, and 75% of moderator abuses disappear, and most of the rest will vanish if users stand up for clearly defined standards.

Messageboards are a pink-collar hobby.

Suppose I complain to a waitress about her grumpy behavior. She replies that she's grumpy because she works long hours at a difficult job for low pay in order to put her kids through school.

She has my sympathies. She's clearly doing the best she can with a difficult set of circumstances.

Suppose I complain to a moderator about her grumpy behavior. She replies that she's grumpy because she's working long hours at a difficult job for no pay.

Excuse me? Being a moderator is a hobby. Any quasi-intelligent person will change their hobby if they don't like it. And yet, I can't tell you how many moderators have justified their behavior to me by whining about how hard it is to be a moderator.

The fact of the matter is that messageboards are a service industry. If you become a moderator, your hobby is to serve the users by providing a congenial environment for discussion. Unfortunately, the enormous power given to moderators tinges the whole situation with echoes of the Stanford prison experiment. Moderators get it into their heads that they're the mature adults who have to discipline the users, who are unruly children.

Don't believe me? Just tell a moderator that you consider yourself to be their equal, and want to work with them, adult-to-adult, to make the messageboard a better place. See what happens.

Editing without a trace

There are legitimate reasons why a moderator might need to edit a user's post. But there is never any legitimate reason whatsoever for a moderator to edit a user's post, and not announce that he has done so. Nevertheless, I know of one messageboard where the users had to fight long and hard to get the rules changed so that any edit had to be accompanied by a notice saying "This post edited by such-and-such moderator on such-and-such date."

I know of one creationist messageboard where this kind of editing was taken to ludicrous heights. If the mods saw any message which questioned creationism in the slightest, they would ban the user and silently edit the message into a ringing endorsement of creation science. They even edited messages by young-earth creationists who were asking about creationism simply because they wanted to learn more about it! Ridiculous though that may sound, remember: whoever programmed the messageboard software had a choice, and they chose to let admins do that kind of thing whenever they please.

Secret parking tickets

Only in the most brutally repressive states can you imagine being exiled for revealing that you were charged with a misdemeanor. And yet, messageboards in general have a policy that no user may reveal any official messages or warnings that they receive via private message.

In one case, I asked a moderator for an official rules clarification, which she gave me. Later, I quoted her clarification in public, and was immediately threatened with banning if I ever revealed an official communication again. One might naively think that the moderators have an interest in making sure that everyone plays by the rules, and thus would want official clarifications of the rules to be available to all. (In case you're wondering, I asked her whether moderators could be stripped of their duties if they were caught lying in an online discussion. In reply, she stated outright that moderators could lie freely in debates without fear of punishment.)

At another messageboard, moderators responded to my criticisms by declaring that I had violated the rules, and that I would be banned if I didn't admit my guilt and promise to be good. When I asked them to specify precisely which rules I had broken, they refused to do so, saying only that on a particular date I had received a private message which had specified the rules I had broken. Of course, they were lying, and the message contained no such thing. I could have easily proven it by posting the contents of the message- but that would have given them an immediate pretext to ban me.

The most ridiculous thing about all this secrecy is that moderators consistently justify it by pretending that official communiques contain deeply personal revelations, given in the strictest confidence to people whom they don't even like. The fact is that there is no legitimate reason whatsoever why users can't reveal anything that mods tell them in their official capacity, and it's silly to pretend otherwise. Perhaps we need a rule like the U.N.: no agreement is binding unless it is conducted in public.

The ostrakon

Unfortunately I don't remember what brilliant soul thought of the ostrakon. An ostrakon is a special forum for "banned" users, who are forbidden to post anywhere else.

An ostrakon serves all the legitimate functions of normal banning, but removes most of the abuses. If a troll is creating trouble, just send him to the ostrakon. Then nobody has to deal with him unless they choose to. And if someone wants to criticise the mods, they can't silence him by banning him, since anyone who thought he had a valid point is free to continue the discussion in the ostrakon.

The ostrakon could potentially have beneficial effects even when the moderators aren't corrupt. Decisions to ban are often controversial, but anyone who would miss a banned user is free to do so in the ostrakon.

Remember, too, that much of the force of banning as a punishment comes from the fact that the banned user is immediately cut off from the community. If he's sent to an ostrakon, he can announce that he's moving to a different messageboard, and people are free to meet him there if they wish. For that matter, simply letting people give a single goodbye message upon being banned would serve the same purpose- but the moderators' illusion of authority rests on the idea that everyone they ban is a reprehensible troll, who has no right to speak and whom no one would want to follow.

Extend the ignore list to moderators

One of the perks of being a moderator is that no one can put you on their ignore list. Mods justify this by saying that users need to be able to hear comments made by the mods in their official capacity. That would be more convincing if they didn't spend so much time stressing that there's a difference between comments made when they have their "[Moderator hat ON]" and when they have their "[/Moderator hat OFF]". There's no reason why official comments from a moderator couldn't be made to circumvent the ignore list. For that matter, you could do it without reprogramming vBulletin. A moderator could have two accounts, for example "MrBinky" for when he's speaking as a user, and "MrBinkyMOD" for when he's speaking as a moderator. "MrBinky" can be ignored like everyone else, but "MrBinkyMOD" cannot.

The other argument presented against my proposal is that anyone who wants to put a mod on their ignore list must be some kind of weakling, since they are free to just skip over the mod's posts. Horse hockey- if that's the way you see it, then you shouldn't have an ignore list at all. If it's legitimate to have an ignore list at all, then no one should be exempt from it. (And if you don't believe in ignore lists, then I firmly hope that someone writes a virus that randomly inserts "YOU SUCK! HAHAHAHAHAHA!" into every webpage you ever read. After all, you're free to skip over those parts, if you don't like them.)

The hidden subtext here is that the moderators don't believe that there's any legitimate reason for someone to want to ignore a moderator. Like I said, there's a touch of the prison experiment here. The moderators assume that they're the mature, intelligent people, because after all, they're moderators. Maybe someone would want to ignore a user. But a moderator? Never.

I could provide some examples of moderators who deserve to be ignored, but that would be beside the point. Nobody has to justify their ignore list. There is no God-given right to impose yourself on people who don't want to listen to you, and they don't need to justify themselves to you in order to be left alone. And if you're going to have an ignore list at all, then no one deserves to be exempt from it.

What now?

Internet messageboards have a lot of potential, and there's no reason why we have to empower a bunch of jerks to spoil them for us. Write Jelsoft and demand that the next version of vBulletin incorporate features that make it harder to refuse. And most of all, stand up for your rights and roundly ridicule any mod who pretends that official moderator notices are deeply personal love letters.

A crisis of non-skepticism... at CSICOP

I used to claim that I could pick up any issue of a creationist publication, chosen at random, and find an article that I could not only debunk, but demonstrate to be self-evidently silly, if only its readers had stopped to think. I'm beginning to feel the same way about Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic. It's not like I even scour them cover-to-cover looking for pseudo-skepticism. I skim Skeptic on occasion when I go to the grocery store, and inevitably find grist for this blog.

Here we have an article by Howard Gabennesch from Skeptical Inquirer. Bear in mind that this is an article written by a university professor, vetted by the editors of CSICOP, and not only that, the editors were so proud of it that they put it front-and-center on their webpage.

Gabennesch decries a widespread lack of skepticism in his field, sociology:

Amazon.com lists more than 2,000 titles on critical thinking. Haven't we largely ironed out the conceptual fundamentals by now?

Apparently not. Here are some indicators from my discipline of sociology that illustrate some of the work that needs to be done. I draw these examples from four mainstream, college-level introductory sociology textbooks, three of which are best-sellers in a crowded market. As is true in virtually all such texts, the preface and promotional material of each book explicitly assure instructors and students that the book attaches much importance to critical thinking.

But when we look at Gabennesch's examples, we find that in fully half of his examples he provides no critique whatsoever of the writers' methodology. His claims that they are unskeptical quite literally rest on nothing more than the fact that they dare to disagree with him. Is Gabennesch scraping the bottom of the barrel to prove his point, or does he just not realize that "skepticism" means something other than "agreeing with Gabennesch"?

Of course, the pathologization of dissent is par for the course for these people. Gabennesch wants to pretend that he's not just another guy with an opinion, so he wraps himself in the flag of "Skepticism." Naturally, anyone who disagrees with a Skeptic must be practicing badthink. And if you want to get published front and center by CSICOP... now you know what to do.