Pseudo-Experts Peddling Pseudo-Expertise Online

It is something I'd noticed before but the practice of "skeptics" and other materialist ideologues to pretend that they have "math degrees" "science degrees" and, now, I suspect, "MDs" is rampant on comment threads.   Several times when I knew what the "expert" was saying was bosh I asked them some questions and found out that the person claiming that didn't even have a grasp of high school algebra.   I suspect this is something that is being encouraged by one or more of the pseudo-skeptical groups such as those that "edit" Wikipedia or ratfuck (sorry, no better word for it) such online resources as "Web of Trust".

There is evidence of this among the pseudo-skeptics.  At the 2005 James Randi cult's "Amazing Meeting" Randi conducted a workshop with Michael Shermer called "Communicating Skepticism to the Public."  During that session the participants were handed a manual that said, among other things,

“Becoming an expert is a pretty simple procedure; tell people you’re an expert. After you do that, all you have to do is maintain appearances and not give them a reason to believe you’re not.”  *

James Randi has no training as a scientist or, I believe, even a high school diploma.  As one of the more sleazy of the participants in the sTARBABY scandal, CSICOP's one and only "scientific investigation," he has had to confess his total incompetence in mathematics** that would be necessary for him to even read scientific research, never mind evaluate someone's competence.   I believe that Shermer has a degree in science of some kind but couldn't find any evidence that he's conducted research or published.  He's pretty much an opinionator, not a scientist.   It's pretty telling what his approach to science is if he would put his name on that kind of statement.

So, there are good reasons to suspect that the wider pseudo-skeptical-atheist online manifestation are taking up that advice and lying about their "expertise" to dupe the unaware and uninformed.  Which was pretty much the idea of pseudo-skepticism from the start.


*  Skeptics admire Randi’s belligerent style and his tireless activism in the skeptical cause. From 2003, he held an annual gathering of skeptics and atheists in Las Vegas called “The Amazing Meeting,” which was like a revivalist rally. Inspirational speakers included Richard Dawkins, Richard Wiseman and Michael Shermer. Participants were not just motivated but taught the tricks of the trade. For example, in the 2005 meeting, Randi and Shermer gave a seminar entitled “Communicating Skepticism to the Public: A Seminar on Promoting a Scientific View of the World.” Attendees were handed a manual that told them how to be a media skeptic: “Becoming an expert is a pretty simple procedure; tell people you’re an expert. After you do that, all you have to do is maintain appearances and not give them a reason to believe you’re not.”

In real science, becoming an expert requires qualifications and hard work, but as Randi and Shermer pointed out, the rules are different for skeptics. All you need is to form a club with like-minded people: “As head of your local skeptic club, you’re entitled to call yourself an authority. If your other two members agree to it, you can be the spokesperson too.”

Neither Randi nor Shermer are scientists, and their “scientific view of the world” is a fundamentalist belief system rather than science itself. For decades, skeptics have got away with deceit, dishonesty and ignorance by laying claim to the authority of science. Those who disagree with them were portayed as ignorant and irrational. But if skeptics want to be taken seriously, then they should be subject to the same kinds of quality control as genuine science. In the long term, the cause of science and reason will not be advanced by unscientific and irrational behaviour.

** And Randi was hardly the only sciency "skeptic" who proved that among the "skeptics"  "expert' and "authority" used as slogans aren't any guarantee of finding it in the contents.

 At this time Kurtz attempted to persuade Gauquelin to agree to the suppression of even my mild September 18 report. He also tried to dissuade Gauquelin from visiting me during the latter's April trip to San Diego. 
    He never told me any of this. Instead he pretended (as he had the previous year) that he might be willing to publish my report if KZA got to sum it all up afterward. And this is roughly how it was done eventually. 
    However, my challenge to call in outside refereeing (as Abell had promised in September-October 1976 Humanist) to determine the truth did not tempt the Committee. 
    During this period Randi would occasionally phone up for a friendly "just-happened-to-be-thinking-of-you" chat. l suspected he was trying to draw out of me statements of anger or of dissatisfaction. Despite his private rages Randi wished to make no public waves. When I asked him why, he repeated the tired old alibi that the occultist kooks would whoop it up if Kurtz fell. But he claimed that he had dressed down Kurtz (privately) in Washington in December. He stated without qualification that Gardner Hyman and he all supported my scientific position on the sTARBABY mess. (I knew, however, that he was telling all inquiring Fellows that a little old nonstatistician like himself just couldn't understand the problem.)

And Randi wasn't the only "expert" in pseudo-skepticism who was forced to admit their incompetence.   In his examination of the sTARBABY scandal, Richard Kammann said:

- George Abell sensibly wrote Paul Kurtz saying the Gauquelins had won that round, and he suggested getting on with the new test on American athletes. Rawlins used this "smoking gun" letter as proof that the trio knew the true situation right from the start, but the case is not strong. Abell specifically asks in the letter what Zelen saw in the data. Meanwhile, as I described in Part 1, Zelen fancied he saw two anomalies in the data that suggested a biased sample. In my "subjective validation" scenario, Zelen's erroneous statistics became the starting point for the trio's private belief that the Gauquelins had probably cheated. By the time the paper got to print, Zelen's skeptical approach had replaced Abell's; although the trio did not openly accuse the Gauquelins of fraud, they smothered the victory under a blanket of bogus side issues, partly achieved by deleting the favorable Mars results for female champions.

Against an "innocent goofs" theory, the trio was warned before publication that their statistics were wrong, once by Michel Gauquelin and once by Elizabeth Scott, Professor of Statistics at Stanford University. (Rawlins was not consulted.) Even worse, after the paper came out, neither Scott nor Gauquelin could get space in The Humanist for a reply.

- After reading the Rawlins expose in Fate magazine, I was only sure of one thing--if any part of his story were true, I could count on Gardner, Hyman, Randi and Frazier to set the record straight. It was a very long time before I gave up that belief.

CSICOP's first reply was to circulate some photocopied old letters to show (ad hominem) that Rawlins was a habitual troublemaker. Two months later, CSICOP mailed out two privately authored white papers, without taking an official stance.

In "The Status of the Mars Effect," Abell, Kurtz and Zelen simply re-hashed all the statistical errors that Rawlins (Gauquelin, Scott, Hyman, Tarkington) had protested. I did not see this, however, until I had spent hours analyzing four years of published statistics--the errors were even worse than Rawlins had stated, but most Fellows would never learn this.

- The Klass letter started a long and exasperating exchange in which he talked about everything but the statistical errors and the real cover-up. He kept me busy for a while answering irrelevant questions, while periodically attacking my objectivity, intelligence or integrity. From time to time, he threatened to expose my cover-up of scientific evidence he imagined he had uncovered. After he regularly ignored all my serious answers and questions, I nicknamed him T.B. Diago--the best defense is a good offense. He eventually fell back on the traditional Council stance--he didn't understand statistics.

Around March, Zetetic Scholar featured a review of Mars and CSICOP with a lead article by Patrick Curry who not only agreed with Rawlins and me about the Zelen test fiasco, but presented a good case for more bungling in the U.S. champions test. But Council had already adopted the line that ZS editor Marcello Truzzi was on a "vendetta" kick. Ad hominem be thy name.

I will point out that the passages are from Dennis Rawlins, one of the founding members of CSICOP, one of its "Councilors" until his ouster as a result of too much competence in statistics and too much honesty and Richard Kammann, a member of CSICOP who couldn't believe Rawlins' accusations until he went over the evidence and found, if anything, that Rawlins' understated the catastrophe.

None of the "skeptics" involved, who disgraced themselves, not even Abell and Zelen, whose professional competence as scientists didn't keep them from making some rather obvious and absurd errors in statistical analysis IN THEIR OWN FIELD, suffered any loss of "credibility" among the "Skeptics" cult.  Few of the "skeptical" scientists among the CSICOP "Fellows" resigned at the disgraceful behavior of Paul Kurtz and co. including such luminaries as Carl Sagan.   Such is the reliability of the "expertise" peddled by the pseudo-skeptics.

Update:  I found out that all of the numbers of the "Zetetic Scholar" are posted online, including the March issue mentioned above that goes into even more depth over the sTARBABY scandal.   I haven't read it yet, hope to soon, but here it is for anyone who wants to read more about how the "skeptics" conduct science.