Skeptical Saturday! Quirkology by Richard Wiseman – 3.5 Stars

Not all skeptical books have to be about meaty, serious topics of seriousness, right? Richard Wiseman, a psychology professor in England, likes to conduct all kinds of weird experiments which on the face of them make little to no sense but, once you dig a little bit deeper, fill you with awesome. This book is, in essence, a collection of the results of these studies.

Probably the part of this book which you might have heard about before is the bit where he conducted an international test to figure out what is the greatest joke in the world.* The results of this were made into a one-hour documentary on the Discovery Channel featuring Wiseman and comedian Lewis Black. Black really took the piss out of the methodology here and how you could even discern such a thing. In fairness to Wiseman, he was kind of aware of this from the beginning and was also well aware that the “world’s funniest joke” was a real stinker.** The point here wasn’t even so much that the study would be meaningful but, really, that such a study could be done in the first place.

A few of the other things Wiseman looks at:

• Are there really more more marine biologists named Dr. Fish than you’d expect there to be by random chance? (quick answer: yes, as the psychologist Wiseman can tell you)
• What’s the best kind of pick-up line to use at a bar?
• Do people in love have a skewed sense of time? (Wiseman has a really… interesting way of figuring this out)
• If you pump subsonic noise into a classical music concert, will it, like, totally freak the audience out, maaaaan?

Wiseman is best known to the skeptical community for debunking Rupert Sheldrake’s suggestion that dogs psychically anticipate when their masters are about to return home. A lot of skeptics, myself included, don’t particularly care for the term “debunk”, as it implies that our minds are made up about the subject beforehand. It was possible, after all, granted only just barely possible, that dogs have heretofore unknown psychic powers. In any case, Wiseman’s study, in spite of what Sheldrake said about it, was pretty conclusive. It also puts Wiseman in a fairly strange situation, as his willingness to engage with folks like Sheldrake provides folks with fringe-y beliefs access to actual science (most scientists would not give this kind of thing a second thought) but on the other hand the fact that he follows the rigors of science even when it forces him to come to the conclusion that these peoples’ beliefs are false causes those people to lump him in as part of a grand anti-woo conspiracy. Where folks like this ought to be praising Wiseman for bothering to pay attention to him, they heap scorn on him that dismissive scientists don’t get.

Wiseman has another book that came out recently which is much more strongly skeptic-related, although it has still yet to find an American publisher. This is slightly disconcerting, but admittedly quite a bit less so than a decade ago. After all, nowadays he can just post it on Kindle and cut out the middleman entirely. I highly recommend all of his books, but especially this one. It’s quirky, it’s sciencey, and it’s a lot of fun.

*No, the answer is not “our last President.**

**Syndicated columnist and Mister Language Guy Dave Barry almost succeeded in trolling this whole thing, by the by, by encouraging his readers to vote in this study for his own joke, a joke which, as you might have expected if you know anything about Barry, included prominent use of the word “weasel”.

***BLOOOOOOOOOOOOPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEER

SKEPTICAL Saturdays! Bad Science by Ben Goldacre – 3.5 Stars

So… for the time being I think I’m going to do a little of Column A and a little of Column B on Saturdays. That was the monkey rodeo option. AHAHAHAHA I HAVE DEFEATED YOU WITH MY CUNNING AND MONKEY RODEONESS.

Recently I reviewed a couple of other skeptical tomes, Flim-Flam and Why People Believe Weird Things, and one criticism I had (particularly with the former book) was that while the basic ideas inside of the books were solid, the actual case studies were a bit on the outdated side. If you’re new to the skeptic game, you probably want to know what’s out there now that is full of woo, not what was silly and debunked in the 1970s or even the 1990s. Bad Science delivers on that.

This is an English book written by an English guy who writes for an English newspaper, and so at first glance you might think that some of the information therein isn’t quite topical. Sadly, you would be wrong. Homeopathy in particular is a particular thing that is starting to sweep into our own drug stores. I just saw them with my own eyes at the local Bartell Drugs. Sure, they are made of sugar and basically nothing else, so they can’t cause any actual harm. I guess that puts it ahead of wrapping people up in plastic and putting their head in a cardboard box for 9 hours*. That doesn’t mean people should actually be using them, though, and this book does a really nice job of explaining exactly how there’s no possible freaking way they can work, how they in practice don’t actually work, and how astronomically stupid it is to believe that they work.

The other really salient part of this book, at least in my opinion, is the coverage on the anti-vax scare. Just today I overheard a conversation a couple of co-workers were having where they were concerned that one of their kids might have the whooping cough. The good news is, they weren’t, but the fact of the matter is that this is not a concern we ought to be having at all in 2012. Sadly, because a number of people have been misled by people I really have no choice but to call charlatans into thinking that there is a link between vaccinations and autism, we fall below herd immunity in parts of the country and kids get this or other deadly diseases.

If I have any criticism of the book – what keeps it below the coveted 4 stars – it’s that it’s really presented with the person who is already inclined to be skeptical in mind. Okay, that’s not really a criticism, that’s just an angle. The deal is though, these things are such softball subjects for dyed in the wool skeptics that books like Why People Believe Weird Things is probably still a better “first book” for that crowd, and for someone completely new to skepticism, Goldacre’s righteous indignation and ridicule is probably going to turn them off.

Still, it’s a very good second or third book, and there are very good reasons to have books out there to remind the empirically minded that they are not, in fact, completely alone in this world. Goldacre is a smart and witty guy** and this shows through. So long as you aren’t one of the parties being made fun of, you’ll likely enjoy the book.

*Oh, how I wish I had just made this up.

**Smart enough to have been on a couple episodes of QI, in fact***, and to give Stephen Fry a bit of a hard time for not being skeptical enough on top of that.

***In fairness to the fairness, Jeremy Clarkson has also been on tyhat show several times.