User rob t. - Skeptic Exchange

Are daily multivitamins useful?

2009-12-20T15:28:09Z

What's the current medical consensus on daily multivitamins? Are they effective for kids? For adults?

Answer by Rob T. for What Skeptical iPhone App would you like to see?

2010-01-29T19:46:50Z

How about a James Randi Soundboard App? ;)

Can data show if H1N1 vaccine was truly effective?

2009-12-14T16:28:23Z

When the H1N1 flu season is over, will there be any hard data to show the efficacy of the vaccine?

Without that, there's really no scientific way (or is there?) to tell whether the people who remained healthy did so because:

the vaccine was effective or...
the flu wasn't "all that bad".

Why is there no mating season for humans?

2010-01-06T19:58:40Z

Most mammals have a specific mating season during the year where the females are fertile, but in normal human females, it's any month of the year. What evolutionary pressures would cause such a switch? Or is the converse - that there was no longer any evolutionary pressure to maintain such a system, and so mutations deviating from a mating season were not selected away?

What is the Placebo Effect?

2009-12-16T03:59:56Z

What is the placebo effect? Why is it important in medicine? How is it controlled in pharmaceutical trials?

Answer by Rob T. for Parents, do you uphold the santa myth?

2009-12-22T14:24:47Z

I'll answer your questions directly, and then explain myself:

Yes, we pretend that Santa visits our kids (8 and 6). I think the 8-year old might have it sussed, but I'm not sure.
We take them to the mall to meet Santa, I think we've done letters before, we leave cookies (which are partially eaten the next morning), the whole thing.
Whether I will lie directly depends on the question. See below for more discussion.
I will continue the myth as long as it takes for them to find their way out of it.
We also do the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy
My parents and my wife's parents also did these myths with us.
When I found out they were fiction, it wasn't a big deal - I had mostly figured it out anyway. I did not mind.

The best commentary I've ever seen on this topic comes from Dale McGowan, author of Parenting Beyond Belief and its companion book, Raising Freethinkers.

He uses it mainly as a springboard to atheism, but it's really about critical thinking, and so it applies in many areas.

I'm pulling from his blog post (and book excerpt) called Santa Claus – The Ultimate Dry Run below, but you should visit the site to read the whole thing - I just didn't want to copy so much down here, but it makes a better narrative with all the pieces intact on his site.

I began to see the Santa paradigm as an unmissable opportunity – the ultimate dry run for a developing inquiring mind.

My boy was eight years old when he started in with the classic interrogation.

With questions of belief, you have three choices: feed the child a confirmation, feed the child a disconfirmation – or teach the child to fish.

I avoided both lying and setting myself up as a godlike authority, determined as I was to let him sort this one out himself. And when at last, at the age of nine..., he asked me point blank if Santa was real – I demurred, just a bit, one last time.

“What do you think?” I said.

“Well…I think all the moms and dads are Santa.” He smiled at me. “Am I right?”

I smiled back. It was the first time he’d asked me directly, and I told him he was right.

“So,” I asked, “how do you feel about that?”

He shrugged. “That’s fine. Actually, it’s good. The world kind of… I don’t know…makes sense again.”

That’s my boy. He wasn’t betrayed, he wasn’t angry, he wasn’t bereft of hope. He was relieved.

I plan to handle this the same way as Dale. If a child asks "Is Santa real?" that's not the time to spill the beans. They have not formulated their own answer yet. Let them ask deeper questions, like "What does he do at apartments with no chimneys?", and always put it back on the child, "What do you think?".

Notice that in Dale's tale, his son finally gave his own hypothesis for Santa. Once he has his own formulated idea, it's OK to answer. Before that, though, you're just handing down a pronouncement.

Some people are of the mindset that you should never lie to your kids, and would take issue with Dale's statement that "I avoided...lying", given that he's been lying all along.

But when you do that - when you never lie to your kids - when you always have the answers - you set your kids up to believe that authority figures always tell the truth. In this way, not only can Santa be used as a springboard to atheism, but to critical thinking in general.

Adults everywhere are making false claims from a position (or apparent position) of authority ("The doctor on TV said that the homeopathic pills work great!"). A child who simply gets all the facts from parents will not be as ready to question statements from other authorities.

Sorry for the long-winded answer. In a nutshell, yeah, we do Santa, and see no conflict between that and a skeptical/humanist worldview.

Answer by Rob T. for Is it reasonable to be both a skeptic and a theist?

2009-12-17T04:47:28Z

I think the decision whether someone's belief is "reasonable" if they're also a skeptic would really depend on their particular brand of belief.

If said skeptic believes that the Earth and man were created in their current form 6,000 years ago, then no, that's not reasonable. They are not being scientific and skeptical about the mountains of evidence that the Earth has been around far far longer.

However, if a skeptic wants to believe that God caused the Big Bang and also set the rules of the universe to allow for the eventual creation of stars and planets and life, then that is actually reasonable. What happened before the Big Bang is beyond science - it is (at least currently) unobservable, unmeasurable, and unknowable.

Answer by Rob T. for "Masking" symptons in alternative medicine

2009-12-16T03:51:11Z

Even your basic pain medications do not stop the cause of the pain - they just prevent you from feeling the pain. Anesthetics during surgery work the same way. Cold medicines, fever reducers, most of the medications we take (especially over-the-counter ones) do nothing but mask the symptoms so that we can continue to function while our bodies make us better on their own.

For example, hydrocodone is often used as a cough suppressant in cases where the patient cannot get sufficient sleep because of coughing fits:

Hydrocodone is a narcotic cough suppressant (antitussive) that works on certain centers in the brain to stop the urge to cough... These products do not cure or shorten the length of the common cold and may cause serious side effects. To decrease the risk for serious side effects, carefully follow all dosage directions.

It's not curing anything, just making life liveable.

The statement that modern medicine fails at "treating the entire problem" is actually a true statement by the alt-med practitioners (at least in the case of the common cold), and the consumer is then allowed to draw their own incorrect conclusion that alternative medicines DO treat the entire problem. Unfortunately for alt-med practitioners, they do not have evidence on their side showing any efficacy of their products beyond the placebo effect.

Answer by Rob T. for What are the best sources (blogs?) for up to the moment atheist thought and news?

2009-12-16T03:33:47Z

Of those sites that I follow in my RSS feed, the two that update the most, and seem to have the most active commenting groups, would be these:

Hemant Mehta's Friendly Atheist. True to his blog's name, he takes a softer approach than some (see below) in many respects, but still is no pushover.
PZ Myers's Pharyngula. If you don't mind the posts about squids, octopuses, and the like, you will not find anyone more outspoken and prolific as PZ.

From there, these guys will link to other atheist blogs frequently, so you can build your feed list that way.

Answer by Rob T. for False Dichotomy Logical Fallacy

2009-12-15T03:13:08Z

A false dichotomy is when a speaker implies (or directly states) that there are only two possible options for consideration, and these options are mutually exclusive (only one or the other can occur) and collectively exhaustive (no other options exist).

The argument then follows that if you can disprove even one tiny aspect of argument (A), it follows that argument (B) must therefore be true, as there is no other possibility.

The classic example pits Intelligent Design proponents against evolution. They attack evolution from the standpoint of needing to prove only that there is something wrong with current evolution theory, and then Intelligent Design would become the de facto "winner".

This was evident in the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover (Pennsylvania) case in the United States. The US District Judge (John E. Jones III), however, was not fooled:

[Intelligent Design] is at bottom premised upon a false dichotomy, namely, that to the extent evolutionary theory is discredited, ID is confirmed. (5:41 (Pennock)). This argument is not brought to this Court anew, and in fact, the same argument, termed "contrived dualism" in McLean, was employed by creationists in the 1980's to support "creation science." The court in McLean noted the "fallacious pedagogy of the two model approach" and that "[i]n efforts to establish 'evidence' in support of creation science, the defendants relied upon the same false premise as the two model approach . . . all evidence which criticized evolutionary theory was proof in support of creation science." McLean, 529 F. Supp. at 1267, 1269. We do not find this false dichotomy any more availing to justify ID today than it was to justify creation science two decades ago.

Answer by Rob T. for Is organic produce safer?

2009-12-14T19:47:35Z

What I've seen (at acsh.org and mayoclinic.com -- search for "organic" -- and others) basically says there's no hard evidence of any benefit of organics.

Organic proponents can find certain studies here and there that seem to indicate the organics are better, but it's not conclusive. There are plenty of other studies out there that show no difference in nutritional content or pesticide content.

The best advice I've seen from experts who have studied it is just to buy what you like best. If the organic tastes better (and based on 100 different factors, it might), then get organic. If the commercial tastes better, then get commercial.

Remember that even organics have pesticides on them -- it's just that they can only use certain ones, and that "natural ≠ safe".

Answer by Rob T. for What is the best general skeptical blog?

2009-12-14T05:41:13Z

After thinking about this one for a while, I have to give it to Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy site, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/.

Sure, it's got a lot of astronomy on it, so if you're not into that stuff, you'll have some noise to sift through to get to the skeptical pieces, but Phil has his ear to the ground on lots of different skeptical topics. When something hot is happening in Skeptical Blog Land™, you can rest assured that Phil will pick it up, and usually link to the epicenter of the discussion, wherever it's taking place.

Basically, if I could only read ONE skeptical blog, I'd read his, and I wouldn't feel like I was going to miss out on anything.

Answer by Rob T. for Do the Holmes Family Have Psychic Abilities?

2009-12-13T19:59:15Z

Looks to me like there was condensation on parts of the lens. It is northern Ireland, after all, not the warmest, driest place on the planet.

Answer by Rob T. for Special pleading Logical Fallacy

2009-12-12T07:07:30Z

Special pleading (also called ad-hoc reasoning) is when negative test results are dismissed by the introduction of new factors into the test - factors that caused the failure.

Many of the claimants who try to win US$1,000,000 from the James Randi Educational Foundation by proving their paranormal abilities resort to special pleading when they fail to pass the preliminary test.

The most recent example was Connie Sonne, who underwent her preliminary test at TAM7 in 2009. She failed to dowse the locations of certain randomly chosen cards.

At first, there was no special pleading (quotes from http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=148178)...

She repeatedly said that she was treated very fairly by the JREF. She said that we were honest and honorable. She said that the test was fair. She said the test was fair AFTER she failed the test.

But then (emphasis mine)...

The reason she gave me for failing was that the entities that talk through her did not feel that it was time to show the world of their existence, or the truth.

That's textbook special pleading. Something uncontrollable and untestable caused her abilities to fail.

James Randi described another case where a dowser, after failing, tried to blame the gold foil in the books in the library they were using for the test, despite the fact that during the unblinded dowsing test beforehand (in the same room) everything worked just fine.

Answer by Rob T. for Argument from final Consequences Logical Fallacy

2009-12-12T07:03:24Z

The New England Skeptical Society wrote up a great document about the Top 20 Logical Fallacies at http://www.theskepticsguide.org/resources/logicalfallacies.aspx. For Agrument from Final Consequences, they wrote:

Such arguments (also called teleological) are based on a reversal of cause and effect, because they argue that something is caused by the ultimate effect that it has, or purpose that is serves. For example: God must exist, because otherwise life would have no meaning.

Answer by Rob T. for What are the best Skeptic podcasts?

2009-12-12T06:25:46Z

The Skeptic Zone

Website: http://www.skepticzone.tv/ (RSS / iTunes links available there)

Australia's biggest skeptical podcast, hosted by Richard Saunders and Stefan Sojka, along with Dr. Rachael Dunlop, Kylie Sturgess, Eran Segev, and many others.

Our backgrounds combine expertise in education, medicine, psychology, music, media, science, technology, broadcasting, lecturing and even pop-culture! Which is why the show is jam-packed with news, views, interviews - and social commentary live-recorded in a skeptical pub!

The Skeptic Zone's reporters comment...

...on local, national and international issues. Popular features include 'Dr Rachie Reports' on health and pseudoscience matters, The Round-Up, The Grain of Salt, international travel and interviews and the popular Think Tank.

The format can vary from week to week, depending on the topics they want to cover, but it usually has three to five different segments, and the hosts and reporters have a good dry sense of humor that makes the time fly by when you're listening.

Their target episode length is about an hour - some run short, but they quite often run long, causing SZ to give SGU a run for its money as the Longest Skeptical Podcast Worth Listening To.

Comment by Rob T.

2010-01-22T13:28:25Z

It's not fatal? As of 2010-Jan-22, the WHO is reporting over 14,000 deaths worldwide confirmed from H1N1. who.int/csr/don/2010_01_22/en/index.html And what's the basis for your assertion that, if it were non-fatal, vaccine efficacy could never be measured?

Comment by Rob T.

2009-12-23T05:49:58Z

If you have it, a reference link for that lacquer tree leaf story would be a great addition to your answer.