Revenge of the Listener Feedback

by Brian Dunning
May 12, 2009

Sometimes getting my email is like Sigourney Weaver running down the corridor and suddenly finding herself smack in the middle of a whole room full of alien eggs. I'll sit here frozen for minutes, holding my breath as the long list of highlighted unread subject lines all stare at me; I'm too terrified to click anywhere, and my heart pounds. I know that each of those emails contains a beastly, spidery, vicious personal attack. I try to tiptoe away quietly and maybe they won't see me, but if I make the slightest move, the little ping sound stops me cold. So, eventually, each week, I do as I now do for you: I bust out my flamethrower and spray the whole room.

This week's first victim is Richard Freeman from Exeter, England, who made a comment on my episode about orang pendek, an ape species known only to cryptozoologists:

I'm a qualified zoologist and former zookeeper. I've worked with animals all over the world and taken expeditions into poorly explored areas. Twice i have been to Sumatra and interviewed not only native witnesses by Debbie Martyr a western scientis and head of the Indonesian tiger conservation group. She has seen orang-pendek four times in the jungle. It's both easy and spinless to to say eyewitnesses are liars or mistaken from your comfy armchair. Try having enough back bone to go and look for cryptids befor shooting off your big mouth.

Beware the old fallacy that skepticism is not appropriate unless you've personally sampled the pseudoscience. This is the same comment you hear from people selling all manner of snake oil: "Try it before you slam it." Well, Richard, I'm not going to try a coffee enema just to find out whether it gives me super health, and I'm not going to spend a small fortune searching the jungles of Sumatra for an implausible creature, nor am I going to break into Area 51 to see if I can find any aliens. (I already gave the reasons orang pendek is unlikely in the episode, and am not going to repeat them here.)

Richard Freeman is a prominent enough cryptozoologist that he actually has his own Wikipedia page. He is the Zoological Director of the Centre for Fortean Zoology, a UK nonprofit dedicated to cryptozoology. Orang Pendek is not the only implausible beast he believes in: He's also hunted the Loch Ness Monster, rumored giant snakes in Thailand and Guyana, a Gambian "dragon", the Almas in Russia, something called the Mongolian Deathworm, and a race of pygmies with red faces. How many such creatures has he, or any other cryptozoologist, ever actually discovered? Zero. Well, Richard, here's something else I'm going to say to you from my comfy armchair: There is actually real work to be done in the field of zoology, that benefits animals that really do exist. Try doing some of that. Maybe you can actually have a useful, positive impact on the world.

"Pindar" from Holland, who has contributed all sorts of colorful perspectives to the Skeptoid.com episode comments, seems to have discovered my deep, dark secret:

Study the higher ranks of Freemasonry and you will see what the eye on this website is for as well as the Dragons named on the DVD. They are very telling for who has eyes to see.

He's referring to the "skeptical eye" on the Skeptoid album art, and the dragon logo on my Here Be Dragons video. Evidently he feels that I chose them because I must be a Freemason, and gain some advantage by promoting the symbols. You know, I'm not even going to deny that, Pindar; I'm just going to let you wonder and stew and brood about it, and imagine what conspiracy plots I'm planning against you.

In Freemasonry, the eye represents the all-seeing eye of God, and symbolizes how he's watching over us; so clearly, if you know me at all, this is an idea I'm always trying to promote. The dragon, however, doesn't seem to be a Masonic symbol at all. No dragon symbol appears in any of the encyclopedias of Freemasonry, and none of the half-dozen or so Masons I spoke with have heard of it. But Pindar says you must go to the "higher ranks" of Freemasonry to find it. Like all conspiracy guys, Pindar knows more than the experts. He's probably read on the Internet that the dragon symbolizes eternal power, or that St. George's slaying of the dragon represents the triumph over evil, or that leaders of the American Revolution sometimes met in a Boston pub called the Green Dragon Tavern, which was purchased by a local Freemason lodge for its meeting spaces. Well, Pindar, now we know about you, so you'd better grow eyes on the back of your head.

William from Vancouver, BC had a comment typical of those that continue pouring in on my episode about organic food, the basic point of which was that while there's nothing wrong with so-called organic crops, there's also nothing wrong with conventional crops, despite the ongoing smear campaign by organic proponents.

Read The Omnivore's Dilemma by Micheal Pollan for an unbiased view of the organic versus corporate monopoly grown foods. Brian is basically an uninformed apologist for big agro-business. I would not be surprised if he is pulling a salary from Monsanto or Cargill.

That's right, William, you found out Monsanto's dirty little secret: They found an uninformed apologist, then paid him a salary for two and a half years to have him put out over 150 podcast episodes on wide ranging topics, as a cover, just so they could sneak in one little episode about organic food myths, basically amounting to little more than one blog entry among millions on the web. Hope they got their money's worth. I congratulate you on your detective work.

And that's a fine false dichotomy you state: "organic versus corporate monopoly grown foods". Look up virtually any large organic producer: More often than not, you'll find they're owned by your same "corporate monopolies". Organics are an important market segment; there's hardly a food producer in the world that hasn't gotten on that bandwagon. Indeed, the food companies largely created that market segment. If you're saying stuff like "organic versus corporate monopoly grown foods", you're thinking exactly what the advertising agencies are paid to make you think. Oh, and thank you for introducing me to what "unbiased" means.

Leonard, a chiropractor who is a friend of a friend, offered the following regarding my episode on chiropractic:

The Staten, Lipitor being promoted as reducing heart attack deaths by 50% is one example of crooked science. Two patients per hundred on Lipitor over 31/2 years died and three of the control group died per 100. 2 instead of 3 translates into a 50% number! 25% had side effects using Lipitor. Billions of dollars are spent on Stains world wide... I am sure your critical and sceptical approach could do a much more scientific discussion of this and other medical "Dragons". Otherwise it appears you are on a witch hunt against Chiropractic... How do I get my critical thinking on this subject reviewed to see if I am in error? Evidence does not seem to be scientific proof for medical procedures in my way of thinking.

We had a lengthy email exchange, but this paragraph sums up his position pretty well. He's a nice guy, but he's a denier of modern medicine, and he feels that failings of evidence-based medicine constitute support for chiropractic. That's like saying Person A is in jail, so what does that tell us about Person B? Obviously, nothing at all. Leonard doesn't go around flaunting the magic-based claims of chiropractic's "innate intelligence" energy fields; he just figures it must be true because he sees problems in medical science. Thus, he draws a false dichotomy: If I don't join the ranks of those who deny medical science, I must be on a witchhunt against chiropractic. Well, Leonard, the two don't have anything to do with each other. Certainly medical science is not perfect, but then again, nobody's claiming that it is. Chiropractic is a very different story. It does incorporate some elements of conventional physical therapy, but the rest of it is completely made-up hooey based on a belief in mystical New Age energy fields that cannot be either detected or described.

I find Leonard's closing comment particularly telling: Evidence does not seem to be scientific proof for medical procedures. This is pretty common among alternative practitioners. It's called a "special pleading". It implies that some higher power, not detectable to science, governs the human body and it's thus immune to failures evidenced by scientific testing. A special pleading can be used to defend any supernatural claim. If an appeal to an undetectable higher power is the best evidence they've got, you have good reason to be skeptical.

Leonard also brings up a valid point about the misuse of statistics. The difference in risk between 2% and 3% is not 50%; it's 1%, which is hardly any difference at all. It's easy to shock someone with a big number like "50% greater risk" because the number 3 is 50% higher than the number 2. When you phrase it like that, people hear the 50% part and are terrified, when in fact the risk is 3%. Always be skeptical of the way marketers use statistics.

I always like to end these episodes on a high note. Paul, currently stationed in Sadr City, Iraq, tells the following tale:

I am a soldier currently serving in Iraq and I just wanted to say how much I love your podcast. We don't get regular access to the internet so I take any opportunity I can to snag as many episodes as possible when I can. Sitting in an uncomfortable, hot, stuffy tank all night watching for IED emplacers we will sometimes hook our iPods up to the internal coms to pass the time. We're not supposed to but what can you do? Anyway, I had mine on random and your podcast came up. Not wanting my skepticism to be known amongst my unit, I tried to skip ahead but I dropped the iPod into the bowels of the tank where I had little hope of reaching it. Strangely the other crew members loved it. We listened to a few more episodes before I finally fished my iPod out of the gun turret. From the 24 M1A2 Tank crew from 2nd platoon, Delta Company, 2nd of the 5th Cav, thanks for making that long boring night a little more enjoyable.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning