I don’t get to listen to the radio much during the day but I was driving around today and was able to pick up a little bit of Larry Mantel’s Air Talk on KPCC (one of the local public radio stations in L.A.). I cannot listen to commercial radio because the ads make me crazy […]
Written by randomfool on January 3rd, 2007 with
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I don’t get to listen to the radio much during the day but I was driving around today and was able to pick up a little bit of Larry Mantel’s Air Talk on KPCC (one of the local public radio stations in L.A.). I cannot listen to commercial radio because the ads make me crazy (how can those people talk so fast and manage to be sooooo annoying!?!?!?). I don’t have satellite radio yet, but my wife does and it is awesome, but I have an older car and I just don’t want that ugly device hanging off my dash. I’ll just wait until I get a new car with integrated satellite radio and, hopefully by then, the inevitable consolidation in the industry among Sirius and XM. I also generally dislike talk radio, including sports talk radio. I used to listen to a lot of sports talk radio but I just really don’t care what the general public thinks about most things, including sports. Plus, once Jim Rome syndicated his show, I really lost interest. (I seriously don’t want to listen to the clones from Indianapolis.)
Anyway, the only radio I ever seem to listen to anymore is National Public Radio. And, despite my general distaste for talk radio in particular (again…don’t care what the general public thinks about most things), I am kind of surprised that I like AirTalk. The topics are usually very interesting and I am always floored by Larry Mantel himself because he seems to have an amazing grasp of issues and arguments on such a wide range of topics. He must read a lot. Today’s guest was someone I had heard of before but had never spent the time to learn more about, Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society. His topic for today was the top science and skeptic stories of 2006. I didn’t really know anything about the Sketptics Society before listening to the show but, being the impulse shopper that I am, as of this afternoon I am a member and I have a subscription to Skeptic magazine. Anyway, they talked about conspiracy theories and how it is easy to find a conspiracy in just about anything, the prime case currently being 9/11. You can string together just about any random collection of facts and back-fill a story to it. In essence, this is the determinism that Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes in his book, Fooled by Randomness. (I couldn’t stay in my car and listen to the whole thing because I was on the way to a dentist appointment but I did send a text message to KPCC to ask if Larry or Michael had read Taleb’s book but couldn’t hear if they talked about it–I am such a dork!) They also talked about Airborne, that mix of vitamins that you can buy at Trader Joe’s which supposedly helps protect against contracting the common cold. As it turns out there is actually no scientific proof that it or any other remedy for the common cold with the possible limited exception of Vitamin C, yet they estimate that the company that makes Airborne does over $200 million a year in business. Why? Because we are programmed to find patterns in randomness. And, when we are sick and take Airborne, we think it is helping when, in fact, any positive benefit is far more likely to be purely random than it is to have a cause-and-effect relationship with taking Airborne. Fascinating stuff. KPCC offers podcasts of AirTalk if you are interested.
I’ve been looking for something like this for a while as skepticism comes very naturally to me and I am getting bored and annoyed with BusinessWeek since they decided to become a “lifestyle” magazine. I’ve only been a member of the organization for a few hours now so I am probably not the best choice to describe them, but it seems like they promote the asking of questions and demand evidence before they believe something which I wholeheartedly agree with (limited only by my further skepticism of scientific methods misunderstanding randomness, but let’s not get carried away).
From the Skeptics Society website, I found this interesting paragraph:
Some people believe that skepticism is the rejection of new ideas, or worse, they confuse “skeptic” with “cynic” and think that skeptics are a bunch of grumpy curmudgeons unwilling to accept any claim that challenges the status quo. This is wrong. Skepticism is a provisional approach to claims. It is the application of reason to any and all ideas — no sacred cows allowed. In other words, skepticism is a method, not a position. Ideally, skeptics do not go into an investigation closed to the possibility that a phenomenon might be real or that a claim might be true. When we say we are “skeptical,” we mean that we must see compelling evidence before we believe.
Very interesting and right up my alley, although I most certainly am a cynic, it doesn’t seem like being a cynic and a skeptic are mutually exclusive. Plus, Julia Sweeney is involved in the organization and her play (now available on CD), Letting Go of God was one of the more productive uses of a couple of hours and a drive up to L.A. I am looking forward to my first issue of Skeptic and to spending more time digging into this interesting organization.
Written by randomfool on January 3rd, 2007 with
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Read more articles on General Folly and Randomness.
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