Zeigen

A year ago, I wrote this post attempting to debunk the superstition that deaths come in threes.

With the passing of Ed MacMahon on Tuesday, along with Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson today, I’ve seen this superstition resurface. Yet my arguments from a year ago still stand.

I’d also like to add this refutation: Dom DeLuise died alone.

Take this list from Wikipedia of celebrities who died in May. I’d argue that Dom was the “most famous” of all the names listed there, but please feel free to assert differently if you disagree. So, where are the other two, if deaths do indeed come in threes?

We can repeat the exercise for other months.

RIP, Ed, Farrah, Michael and Dom. Please don’t cheapen their memory repeating a baseless superstition that tries to find a pattern where none exists.

UPDATE June 28th: Billy Mays has also passed away today, breaking the pattern for even the current three.

Henry IV Part One, Act III, Scene 1:

Owen Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

Henry “Hotspur” Percy: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?

Here, Hotspur neatly refutes his cousin-by-marriage Glendower’s pretentious brag with a fine skeptic’s rebuttal. I was reminded of this exchange from this case from last month: A so-called tantrik employer of black magic claimed to be able to kill any man with a curse within three minutes, and the challenge was taken up on live TV.

Read this Mark Morford column about the 1959 Dyatlov Pass accident. (I’m waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Oh, done? Great!)

Unexplained things happen all the time. We humans work hard to try to understand the universe, but the universe is vast and our minds are only so good at figuring things out.

But just because something is unexplained, why is that taken (as Mark seems to) as proof of the supernatural?

Doubtless we will never know what happened to those hapless nine hikers back in 1959. But here’s one thing I’m sure of: It wasn’t aliens. I’m also sure it wasn’t bigfoot, a yeti, the abominable snowman, vampires, ghosts, telepathic reindeer, telekinetic yaks, or any of a dozen other proposed paranormal theories.

As Carl Sagan argued in Cosmos, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The only evidence in Dyatlov is that something happened we don’t yet understand.

I like a good science fiction novel or movie as much as the next guy, and as interesting and exciting as it would be for supernatural things to be real, at this point, we all can be very certain that none of that stuff is real.

Why?

Because if any of this baloney were genuine, don’t you think, with all the cameras we have — video cameras, closed circuit cameras, cell phone cameras, satellite cameras — someone would have recorded some genuine proof by now? Just how is it that vampires (plus ghosts, psychic powers, and all the rest) have managed to go undetected for so long?

There are many plausible non-supernatural explanations for what happened at the Dyatlov Pass, including exaggeration by those reporting the incident, solar flares, an avalanche, altitude sickness in one or more of the hikers, and so on. Will we ever know the truth? Most likely never. But one cannot take a genuinely mysterious event, such as this one, and present it as “proof” of the supernatural — that’s too far a jump.

I’ll believe in psychic powers, ghosts or other aspects of the supernatural when there is reliable documentation of something supernatural that actually happened, rather than lack of knowledge of what did happen.

With the news yesterday of the untimely passing of Heath Ledger, I’ve heard several people remark on the frequently-expressed belief that deaths (like sneezes?) come in threes. Since Suzanne Pleshette recently succumbed to cancer (on January 17), some wondered who will be the “third” actor/actress to die. Others who were familiar with Brad Renfro’s death (on January 15) expressed instead the idea that Heath’s overdose was the completion of a series of three.

I have to wonder about this superstition. On one hand, it’s not falsifiable. People die all the time. Since the belief doesn’t express a timeframe for how close in succession the deaths have to occur, eventually three people in a related field will die, and the “prophecy” of death coming in threes will be fulfilled.

Any belief that isn’t falsifiable contributes nothing. Suppose ten musicians were to die in quick succession starting next week. Adherents to this belief would group them into three groups of three deaths, then posit after the tenth that two more musicians would die — and eventually (once we wait long enough) indeed two more would. So the prediction has come true! But the actual number of people dying doesn’t change the superstition (they’d believe the same thing even if the number was two, eight, nine, ten, or twenty), and the superstition doesn’t actually predict anything — just that over time people do, in fact, die.

Secondly, who or what is the agent that enforces the trio of deaths? If I learn about two bloggers who die, does that knowledge somehow make me more likely to get into an accident? Is there a grim reaper with a quota of three who (like in the movie series Final Destination) sets up a fatal chain of events for arbitrary professions?

Monitoring a list of recent deaths to see if the number is divisible by three turns up the quite predictable result that the number is only divisible by three about a third of the time.

In conclusion, this belief is an example of selective perception; You tend to remember the times when there was a grouping of three seemingly-related deaths in a short period of time, which reinforces the belief, but tend to forget the times when there wasn’t a pattern.

As I’ve said before, our brains are remarkably good similarity detectors (whereas computers are excellent difference detectors; this is why captchas work), so we often find ourselves picking out plausible-seeming patterns to events that ultimately are chaotic and unpredictable.

And on a personal note, I thought Heath was a gifted actor with a great career in front of him, and I was saddened to hear the news of his death.

You may well have seen e-mails or articles along these lines:

Don’t delete this just because it looks weird. Believe it or not, you can read it.

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to rsreeach at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit plcae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig, huh.

Well, I think the above text (when you unscramble it) is making too big a claim that “it doesn’t matter” what order the interior letters of a word are in, and that you can read such passages “without a problem.”

There are certainly quite a few other sites that have talked about this claim:

• An actual Cambridge researcher’s rebuttal and analysis
• Snopes
• A UI analogy
• A discussion at a design site called SimpleBits

The easiest way I can think of to show the claim is dubious is to have you test yourself. Here are three sentences I scrambled using a quick program I wrote to randomize the interiors of words:

• Docotr Sumgnid Fuerd neevr desimailcd reguioils idaes needlslsey.
• Riandeg tihs txet is claetniry pbosilse — hevweor, i’ts aslo cmuotpe innevtise.
• Enre’yveos potohn tdrpooeos mriuclsoulay elxedopd cetmpelloy utesirnsed.

Clearly, the longer the word, the harder it is to unscramble it. The shorter words in this article’s title are easy to decode, but the longer words in the three example sentences, especially less frequently used words like “disclaimed” or “compute” or “photon,” are probably not immediately recognizable.

Now you try it!

Want the original version of my three scrambled sentences? Keep reading.

(more…)

I admire greatly the life of Carl Sagan. His “Cosmos” series is a wonder, and he dedicated his life to fighting pseudo-science and popularizing science. While I’m not cut out to be a school teacher, I respect those who are (including my sisters-in-law Kelly and Erin). I’ve worked as a trainer, and it has always seemed to me that educating, mentoring and debunking is a very high calling in life.

In the November/December 2003 Skeptical Inquirer, an article written by Carl’s wife, Ann Druyan, gave me a lot to think about:

“Congress cut off federal fnding for SETI years ago. I was with Carl when he went into Senator William Proxmire’s office after Proxmire had given the Golden Fleece Award to the SETI program. Carl sat down with him. I didn’t say a word. I was just a witness. And I just watched Carl. I was inspired by him, by not only the breadth of his knowledge but his patience, his lack of arrogance, his willingness to hear the other person out. Senator Proxmire did a complete turnabout as a result of that meeting.

“And there were other instances of Carl’s remarkable persuasiveness. One was a great story of a so-called “creation scientist” who watched Carl testify at a hearing about creationism in schools. Carl testified for about four hours. It was somewhere in the South, I can’t remember where. And six months later a letter came from the “creation scientist” expert who had also testified that day, saying that he had given up his daytime job and realized the error of what he was doing. It was only because Carl was so patient and so willing to hear the other person out. He did it with such kindness and then, very gently but without compromising, laid out all the things that were wrong with what this guy thought was true. That is a lesson that I wish that all of us in our effort to promote skepticism could learn, because I know that very often the anger that I feel when confronting this kind of thinking makes me want to start cutting off the other person. But to do so is to abandon all hope of changing minds.”

As a former high school and college debater, in my experience Dr. Druyan is right: It’s very hard to convince anyone with harshness, derision, or ridicule.

While I don’t have the training or expertise that Carl had, or the time to put together a site such as Snopes (one of my favorites), or the resources to make a television show such as Penn & Teller’s Showtime series “Bullshit,” or Adam and Jamie’s “Mythbusters,” I will from time to time try to do some debunking of my own here.

To begin, I’d like to discuss a claim that I hear repeated quite often: That we only use 10% of our brains.

Many times, the source of this claim is someone who is trying to sell something that will help you “unlock” the other 90% of your brain, or someone (such as a fortune teller or medium) who claims that they have special powers due to using their whole brain.

In short, there is no science behind this claim. I have three arguments:

1. MRIs and other brain scans reveal that all of us use almost all of our brains throughout the day. It’s true that at any given moment, not all of the neurons in our brain are firing (and perhaps that’s the source of this claim). But it’s not true that a significant portion of our brains is continuously fallow.
2. Patients who undergo brain trauma (such as a piercing accident or non-fatal gunshot wound) almost always suffer from some signficant loss of function. When there is brain damage (from, say, years of being a boxer, or a disease) similarly you can witness the effect. If 90% of the brain were not needed, there would be far more cases of strokes, anuerysms, and brain damage having no effect. The myth doesn’t reconcile with the reality we witness.
3. Simple evolution: Having recently witnessed the birth of my son, I can tell you first-hand that the biggest cause of difficulty during birth is due to the size of the infant’s head going through the birth canal. The birth process would be so much easier if the brain were 90% smaller and the head could be correspondingly reduced in size. Also, think how much of our day-to-day expenditure of calories is solely to keep our heart pumping in order to power the brain with oxygen. Why would there be all this difficulty and energy associated with something that was 90% unused? The selection pressure on having smaller heads and smaller brains would be signficant, because if only 10% was needed, there would be a giant advantage to having a smaller brain. But, the reality is that we succeed by having big brains, and by using all or mostly all of it.

Was that convincing? Hopefully so. Now I see Snopes’ page debunking this claim. Hmm, that’s a pretty good article. Clearly I need to do some homework for my own debunking efforts.

Next time you hear someone make this claim, perhaps now you will gently, and with respect, give them your own counter-arguments. Be proud that you use 100% of your brain!