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A thread. Ten years ago, critical thinking peaked. The organised skepticism movement was successfully imported from USA to UK (mainly by me) and the UK media was getting pretty good at not giving platforms to quacks.
You’d get the odd exception. Wacky stuff was easily dealt with. We protested when Selfridges in London opened a ‘psychics’ booth; when Vanessa Feltz had ‘past lives’ on her show, that sort of credulous stuff. But also big stuff.
Projects were started, long campaigns by Good Thinking Soc et al to get NHS to stop funding homeopathy. Those campaigns are bearing fruit literally today - Bristol finally announced it will no longer fund homeopathy. But, there’s a ‘meanwhile’.
Meanwhile, the organised skepticism movement collapsed. Bunch of reasons for this, one of which was the winding down of James Randi’s charity after the identity theft controversy and his semi-retirement, but also because of social justice.
Turned out the male-dominated movement had a bunch of sexists in it. There was an early Me Too type thing, bunch of the biggest names turned out to be sex pests, others turned out to be racists, anti feminists or other types of wankers.
So for a good few years now there hasn’t really been any useful community or place to go if you see something that’s clearly quackery, or if you’ve read some Sagan and want to find other critical thinkers.
So as quackery has its new cycle (as it always does, everything has a cycle, read HG Wells’ Tono Bungay to see how not new any of this ‘wellness’ trend is), there isn’t a solid wall of defence to meet it.
There aren’t any famous skeptics whose attention is enough to make editors think “oh whoops did we print harmful nonsense?”. Which is not itself a bad thing, that was always dodgy ground, but there is nothing to replace it.
Partly this is because the claims themselves have changed. Loads more untestable claims. Years ago you could say “I can bend spoons with my mind!” and Randi or Wiseman etc could test that and you’d look stupid because no, you can’t bend spoons with your mind.
But the big claims now are not spoon powers. They’re conspiracy theories or belief-led wellness solutions. Uri Gellar and Sylvia Browne have been replaced with Alex Jones and Gwyneth Paltrow.
And they don’t espouse testable claims (or when they do, there is nowhere to go to test them, nowhere to publish the results, no Randi’s million dollar challenge PR stunt (google it). The concept of ‘testable claim’ itself is out of vogue.
Partly because of identity politics, it’s more difficult to challenge beliefs in 2018 than it used to be. Beliefs are tied to identity and identity is tied to distress, and it’s not ideal to cause distress. This is another reason skepticism didn’t go mainstream.
I used to argue the toss with other skeptics when they’d be extremely sarcastic at eg cancer patients who bought into alt med. They’d tweet things like “well if you believe that then I have this magic rock to sell you”. It doesn’t help, it’s just distressing.
The wellness movement exploits distress, selling quack cures for problems which might exist in the future, or exist now but aren’t curable. But it does it under the guise of kindness, so attacking those who fall for it just looks cruel.
So where are we now? We have a growing and increasingly dangerous conspiracy theory and wellness culture (these things are closely related, ‘govt and big pharma’ are the enemy of wellness solutions, it’s not coincidence that Alex Jones sells health supplements).
We no longer have a critical thinking community or leaders as capable of getting headlines as Jones or Paltrow or Peterson are. And we can’t use the old tactics of mocking silly beliefs, because belief is now identity.
What do I mean by ‘belief is identity’? Let’s look at chronic lyme disease. It doesn’t exist. It’s made up. Pure quackery. There is no such thing as chronic lyme disease. And yet I can show you thousands of sufferers. They have an identity: Lyme Warriors.
The disease they have google-diagnosed themselves with (or found a quack) has become an identity. And so the self-worth and community of Lyme Warriors relies on not only a fake disease being real, but on the patient continuing to have it. Lose the diagnosis, lose the identity.
This reinforces the individual diagnosis, it often becomes the dominant force in the person’s life, because there is now An Enemy (doctors who say it’s not a real disease, Big Pharma who refuse to research a cure, sometimes conspiracy theories about keeping them ill, etc).
So you can’t just go ‘here’s an explanation of Diagnosis By Exclusion, here’s some studies showing chronic lyme isn’t real, here’s some material on critical thinking’ because none of that fills the identity gap. It takes everything away.
Those Lyme Warriors (almost all women) still have the symptoms, are still dismissed and ignored by doctors, still have poor quality of life. So yes they will stick to their community and identity, because the alternative can be worse.
But along with this new generation of quackery-as-identity communities, there is also a new generation of producers and journalists who weren’t around when Randi took Jose Alvarez around Australia to fool the media. They didn’t see Storm.
They take all claims as equal. To reiterate, no modern culture of ‘testable claim’. It’s down to two individuals from ‘opposing sides’ to debate it out. And if one ‘side’ has the stronger identity politics behind it, that’s the one the producers and editors end up in thrall to.
So a bunch of us old skeptic activists are going “huh? This again? Didn’t we debunk this ten years ago? Why is the @Guardian suddenly falling for quackery again?”. And this time we don’t have any infrastructure to protest it. I’ve just got this thread. Doubt it’ll work.
And now some FURTHER READING, woo! Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World. A little dated but still the best primer on critical thinking. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0345409469/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_AIEABb3C31A14
James Randi’s Flim Flam is cheap as chips on Kindle, also a bit dated but essential background on testable claims https://www.amazon.co.uk/Flim-Flam-Psychics-Unicorns-Other-Delusions-ebook/dp/B004X6U5DY
There are other books of this ilk but many of the authors turned out to be the aforementioned sex pests, so let’s not go there.
On women and why alternative medicine fills the gap actual medicine created, it’s me, your humble tweeter: https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/health-inequality-promotes-alternatives-goop-1-5542200
On chronic lyme, follow @LymeScience who is an invaluable resource
And final word also goes to my own work because I just sweated over this hot thread, the aforementioned Storm, which never gets old.
Now go away and debunk something
WAIT come back I’m not actually done. Need to acknowledge that skeptics also fell afoul of ‘beliefs as identity’, lots of ‘I’m a Skeptic therefore always right’ nonsense which is best illustrated by the horrorshow that was the Atheism+ movement.
Again, not a coincidence that ‘new atheism’ was populated by aggressive, often anti-feminist men. Identity politics has a critical thinking problem and critical thinking has an identity politics problem. All movements do. Not all are about intellectual superiority though.
Okay now I’m done. Let’s see what my mentions are li…oh dear god
Revisiting this thread to add this account of exactly what I describe: illness/symptoms as identity https://twitter.com/lymescience/status/1039894459834687488?s=21
