Psychic fails to predict her utter failure

This isn’t surprising, but it is an excellent example of what not to do if you’re trying to win fame and fortune as a psychic. It should hopefully serve as an object lesson for why one needs to consider the simpler solution when someone claims special knowledge, but honestly, I don’t expect it will change anyone’s mind — some people appear to be hard-wired to simply accept special claims uncritically.

A woman visited a rural farmhouse in Houston, Texas, and evidently smelled something foul and decomposing, and spotted a bunch of blood on the porch. She made the conclusion that the residents were mass-murderers and reported a tip to police that via her psychic powers, she’d determined that there were dozens of chopped-up bodies buried nearby. Turns out the blood was from the family’s daughter’s boyfriend having attempted suicide, and the smell from a freezer that’d failed allowing the meat within to go rotten.

So not only was the tip unhelpful, it was all a waste of time and energy. “There’s no validity to the report,” one law enforcement official confirmed.

Police cannot simply ignore a lead or tip even if it comes from a psychic — after all, just because a person claims to be psychic doesn’t mean that he or she is not involved in a crime. Suspects in criminal cases who have inside knowledge of crimes sometimes try to pretend that the information they have came from psychics.

I don’t suspect this particular “psychic” was involved in any of the events that transpired at the homestead, mostly because she was so spectacularly wrong on everything. I suspect this woman saw these few clues and via her superpower of overactive imagination, lept to a conclusion that did not follow from the evidence.

I can probably also ascribe a motive to her — psychics are big money. A really good pretender could earn a hundred thousand bucks for four hours “work”. All you need is a few lucky hits under your belt (and who doesn’t make wild predictions that occasionally come true?), and a shameless PR engine at your back, and you too could be on the path to insane riches by claiming to have special knowledge about how this universe works.

This particular story has the happy ending that not a single person was murdered at this ranch, and this so-called psychic failed miserably to springboard a lucky guess into a profitable career of lying to and/or cold-reading people. But even if she was absolutely correct on all the details, with the number of people in this world and the number of them that have made at least a few guesses about wildly improbable events, is it any sort of surprise that people will get one or even a few of these wildly improbable guesses totally and completely correct?

If you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. If you hear a psychic prediction, think “prior knowledge” not “special knowledge”.

Update: Hilarious. Reuters reported “Up to 30 Bodies Found Near Houston, Some Children”. Then corrected themselves. Meaning they reported, uncritically, exactly what the psychic claimed.

A few podcasts from this weekend on skepticism and atheism










The war on drugs has failed, empirically.

The multi-billion-dollar industry that is the War On Drugs, which has imprisoned countless people for simple possession and spurred development of for-profit prisons across America, “has failed”, according to a report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy.

The major players in the war are, of course, circling their wagons:

The office of White House drug tsar Gil Kerlikowske rejected the panel’s recommendations.

“Drug addiction is a disease that can be successfully prevented and treated,” said a spokesman for the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

“Making drugs more available – as this report suggests – will make it harder to keep our communities healthy and safe.”

The government of Mexico, where more than 34,000 people have died in drug-related violence since a crackdown on the cartels began in December 2006, was also critical.

Legalisation would be an “insufficient and inefficient” step given the international nature of the illegal drugs trade, said National Security spokesman Alejandro Poire.

“Legalisation won’t stop organised crime, nor its rivalries and violence,” he said.

“To think organised crime in Mexico means drug-trafficking overlooks the other crimes committed such as kidnapping, extortion and robbery.”

Because Al Capone was able to build an empire of kidnapping, extortion and robbery without black-market hooch, I’m certain. How many of these arguments were used verbatim to justify prohibition? How many of the arrests were of kingpins, rather than for simple possession — and how many of the “drug trafficking” arrests were of people possessing small stockpiles that may have been intended for personal use? Seriously, I hear about people being arrested for growing one or two pot plants and the media plays it up like they’re drug kingpins. It’s ridiculous nonsense, and it has to stop.

Unfortunately, the powers-that-be appear to have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, ratcheting up the laws and building bigger for-profit prisons, or even state prisons that are commissioned by cronies of the people in power. Even the argument that one can make a lot of money legalizing, standardizing and taxing recreational drugs (and thereby fund an underfunded medical system) evidently falls on deaf ears when the money isn’t going directly into certain people’s cronies’ pockets.

This is a humanitarian cause. The mere fact that these demonized recreational pharmaceuticals do a mere fraction as much damage as alcohol, yet alcohol is a cash cow for the government (especially in Canada, with its provincially-run liquor commissions), is proof enough that the current abolitionist situation is not one based on evidence. If there were the merest scintilla of evidence that drug prohibition was worth the body count both in deaths and in lives ruined for which it’s directly responsible, then I’d be all for it.

But there is of course no such evidence to be had.

White holes! (There’s a joke in there somewhere)


According to the linked io9 article:























The Politics of the Null Hypothesis







(But she does, by the by.)

How to solve AronRa’s phylogeny challenge

The solution to the challenge as presented in AronRa’s video is, of course, multifold.

– One, we create an open-source phylogeny display/explorer program. Something like this may already exist.

– Two, we create a wiki run either by paleobiologists or via a democratic system wherein every registered user gets to vote on every change, and use as the starting point the existing data collated by Palaeos and Tree of Life. The Palaeos wiki is a good example, but it depended too heavily on the contributions of the original contributor, and will likely take a long time to catch up to the depth of the original.

– Three, the data supplied on the wiki has a downloadable/editable database that can be incrementally synchronized between users via registered user accounts, so researchers might contribute suggestions for changes that are peer-reviewed by the people in charge.

The strength of the open format is that it does not depend on individual contributors — neither the proposed application nor the wiki falls apart if the single point of failure, the person involved, happens to either get a life or lose it. One does not have to take on the Sisyphean task of categorizing every creature in the world alone. And granted, like Wikipedia, the weakness is that some idiots will piss in the pool. The advantage is that it is peer-reviewed on the fly, live, by people with a vested interest in having a good, accurate primer for evolution and a usable database for phylogeny and the evidence thereof. All we’d need is to set up rules that trusted moderators could regulate, where uncited additions are discussed and either cited, or reverted, depending on how important that reference happens to be. Controversial pages could be stamped with specific scientists’ peer-review stamps and locked once a number of them agree on what the page should say, roughly.

We can get our shit together on this. We just have to learn to trust others to help us do the job.

(You thought I was going to try to answer AronRa’s REAL challenge, about “created kinds”? Heh. You must not know me very well!)

Pink is for girls, blue is for boys

Remember the ridiculous levels of outrage sparked by this image of J Crew’s president painting her son’s toenails pink? The outrage is being tempered somewhat by the passage of time, but it’s still got some steam left. From The Guardian: Are pink toys turning girls into passive princesses?




The same link between personal preferences and colour also shows up outside the lab. Students at the University of California, Berkeley – whose branding is blue and gold – show stronger preferences for those shades than the colours of UCB’s arch rival Stanford University (team colours red and white), and vice versa.

If this holds true for children’s toys, then it could simply be that girls like pink because the things they like (regardless of their colour) are pink, and there’s no underlying biological reason for the rampant pinkification of their toys.

I can’t help but be skeptical of evolutionary explanations for cultural conventions like “pink is for girls and blue is for boys”. The color preference studies are interesting, but they certainly don’t rise to the level of explaining why a self-perpetuating meme like gender assignment for colors might be scientifically provable. The null hypothesis, that color/gender conflation is simply cultural rather than evolutionary, holds in the absence of any actual scientific data. I believe that stating as though fact that pink causes passivity and “princess-like” behaviour in girls is pretty much stating that the association is entirely cultural. The fact that the color is not universally associated with females or femininity is good corroborating evidence that rather than being a genetic preference, it is a self-perpetuating cultural meme, probably one whose origin was a very long time ago.

How strawman arguments and shitty authors undermine #atheism




What nonsense.

We’re off to a running start.
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