My Controversial Diatribe Against “Skeptics”
A podcaster said I looked like “a high school wresting coach that’s been warned multiple times about long hugs” when I spoke at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism in 2016.
April 10, 2023. The backlash was immediate after I spoke at the 2016 Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism, which bills itself as a “celebration of science and critical thinking.” Although the conference had allotted me 10 minutes for questions, the stage manager, Jamy Ian Swiss, shooed me off the stage and took my Q&A time to rebuke me. After I published my talk on ScientificAmerican.com (under the headline “Dear “Skeptics”: Bash Homeopathy and Bigfoot Less, Mammograms and War More”), I was slammed by Jerry Coyne, Steven Pinker, Michael Shermer, Lawrence Krauss, David Gorski, Steven Novella and many others. The controversy was covered by Nature and other media. People still cite my diatribe, so I decided to publish an edited, updated version here on my free journal, which has no paywall.
I hate preaching to the converted. If you were Buddhists, I’d bash Buddhism. But you’re skeptics, so I have to bash skepticism.
I’m a science journalist. I don’t celebrate science, I criticize it, because science needs critics more than cheerleaders. I point out gaps between scientific hype and reality. That keeps me busy, because, as you know, most peer-reviewed scientific claims are wrong.
I’m a skeptic, but with a small S, not capital S. I don’t belong to skeptical societies. I don’t hang out with people who self-identify as capital-S Skeptics. Or Atheists. Or Rationalists.
When people like this get together, they become tribal. They pat each other on the back and tell each other how smart they are compared to those outside the tribe. But belonging to a tribe can make you dumber.
Here’s an example involving two idols of Capital-S Skepticism: biologist Richard Dawkins and physicist Lawrence Krauss. In his book A Universe from Nothing, Krauss claims that physics is answering the old question, Why is there something rather than nothing?
Krauss’s book doesn’t fulfill its title’s promise, not even close, but Dawkins loved it. He writes in the book’s afterword: “If On the Origin of Species was biology's deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see A Universe From Nothing as the equivalent from cosmology.”
Just to be clear: Dawkins is comparing Lawrence Krauss, a hack physicist, to Charles Darwin. Why would Dawkins say something so dumb? Because he hates religion so much that it impairs his scientific judgment. The author of The God Delusion succumbs to what you might call the science delusion.
The science delusion is common among Capital-S Skeptics. You don’t apply your skepticism equally. You are extremely critical of belief in God, ghosts, heaven, ESP, astrology, homeopathy and Bigfoot. You also attack disbelief in global warming, vaccines and genetically modified foods.
These beliefs and disbeliefs deserve criticism, but they are soft targets. When you attack these soft targets, you are criticizing people outside your tribe, who can ignore you. You end up preaching to the converted.
Meanwhile, you neglect hard targets. These are dubious and even harmful claims promoted by major scientists and institutions. In the rest of this talk, I’ll give you examples of hard targets from physics, medicine and biology. I’ll wrap up with a rant about war, the hardest target of all.
MULTIVERSES AND THE SINGULARITY
For decades, physicists like Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene and Leonard Susskind have touted string and multiverse theories as our deepest descriptions of reality. Here’s the problem: strings and multiverses can’t be experimentally detected. The theories aren’t falsifiable, which makes them pseudo-scientific, like astrology and Freudian psychoanalysis.
Some string and multiverse true believers, like Sean Carroll, have rejected falsifiability as a method for distinguishing science from pseudo-science. You’re losing the game, so you try to change the rules.
Physicists are even promoting the idea that our universe is a simulation created by super-intelligent aliens. Neil de Grasse Tyson says “the likelihood may be very high” that we’re in a simulation. Again, the simulation claim isn’t science, it’s a stoner thought experiment pretending to be science.
So is the Singularity, the idea that we’re on the verge of digitizing our psyches and uploading them into computers, where we can live forever. Powerful people tout the Singularity, but it is an apocalyptic cult, with science substituted for God. When high-status scientists promote flaky ideas like the Singularity and multiverse, they hurt science. They undermine its credibility on issues like global warming, evolution and vaccines.
OVERTESTED AND OVERTREATED FOR CANCER
Now let’s take a look at medicine, not the soft target of alternative medicine but the hard target of mainstream medicine. During debates over health-care reform, critics of socialized medicine often insist that American medicine is the best in the world. That is a lie.
We spend much more on health care per capita than any other nation but our health care stinks. The U.S. ranks 51st in life expectancy, below Cuba and Barbados, which spend a fraction of what we spend per capita. How could this happen? Perhaps because the U.S. health-care industry prioritizes profits over health.
Over the past half-century, physicians and hospitals have introduced increasingly sophisticated, expensive tests. They assure us that early detection of disease will lead to better health. But tests often do more harm than good. Analyses of mammograms, for breast cancer, and PSA (prostate specific antigen) tests, for prostate cancer, have found that they harm many more people than they save by leading to unnecessary treatment. Americans are over-tested and over-treated for cancer.
OVER-MEDICATION OF MENTAL ILLNESS
Mental-health care suffers from similar problems. Over the last few decades, American psychiatry has morphed into a marketing branch of Big Pharma. I started critiquing medications for mental illness decades ago, pointing out that antidepressants like Prozac are scarcely more effective than placebos.
In retrospect, my criticism was too mild. Psychiatric drugs help some people in the short term, but over time, in the aggregate, they make people sicker. Robert Whitaker reaches this conclusion in Anatomy of an Epidemic, a brilliant work of investigative journalism.
Whitaker documents the huge surge in prescriptions for psychiatric drugs since the late 1980s. The biggest increase has been among children. If the medications really work, rates of mental illness should decline. Right?
Instead, rates of mental disability have increased sharply, especially among children. Whitaker builds a strong case that medications are contributing to the epidemic. Whitaker and other scholars have continued criticizing excessive medication of mental illness and calling for reforms of psychiatry.
Given the flaws of mainstream medicine, especially when it comes to cancer and mental illness, can you blame people for turning to alternative medicine?
GENE-WHIZ SCIENCE
Another hard target that needs criticizing is behavioral genetics, which seeks the genes that make us tick. I call it gene-whiz science, because the media and the public love it. Over the past several decades, geneticists have announced the discovery of “genes for” virtually every trait or disorder. We’ve had the God gene, gay gene, alcoholism gene, warrior gene, high-IQ gene, schizophrenia gene and on and on.
None of these linkages of single genes to complex traits or disorders has been confirmed. But the media rarely report failures to corroborate gene-whiz claims. The public is thus left with the impression that gene-whiz research is valid.
Gene-whiz science reinforces an insidious form of biological determinism, which attributes social inequalities to innate biological factors. Racists and sexists cite bogus findings from behavioral genetics and a related field, evolutionary psychology, to support their sexist, racist claims.
WHAT ABOUT WAR?
The biological theory that really drives me nuts is the deep-roots theory of war. According to the theory, lethal group violence is in our genes. Its roots reach back millions of years, all the way to our common ancestor with chimpanzees.
The deep-roots theory is promoted by scientific heavy hitters like Harvard’s Steven Pinker, Richard Wrangham and Edward Wilson. Skeptic Michael Shermer tirelessly touts the theory, and the media love it, because it involves lurid stories about bloodthirsty chimps and Stone Age humans. But the evidence is overwhelming that war was a cultural innovation--like agriculture, religion, or slavery--that emerged less than 12,000 years ago.
I hate the deep-roots theory not only because it’s wrong, but also because it encourages fatalism toward war. War is our most urgent problem, more urgent than global warming, poverty, disease or political oppression. War makes these and other problems worse, directly or indirectly, by diverting resources away from their solution.
But war is a really hard target. Most people—most of you, probably--dismiss world peace as a pipe dream. Perhaps you believe the deep-roots theory. If war is ancient and innate, it must be inevitable, right? You might also think that religious fanaticism—and especially Muslim fanaticism--is the greatest threat to peace. That’s the claim of religion-bashers like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Jerry Coyne and the late, great warmonger Christopher Hitchens.
The United States, I submit, is the greatest threat to peace. [Update: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has not changed my mind on this point, as I hope to explain in a future column.] Since 9/11, U.S. wars in Afghanistan Iraq and elsewhere have killed more than 929,000 people, including over 387,000 civilians, many of them children. These are conservative estimates. Far from solving the problem of Muslim militancy, U.S. actions have made it worse.
The U.S. spends almost as much on what we disingenuously call defense as all other nations combined, and we are the leading innovator in and peddler of weapons. Many Americans have embraced their nation’s militarism. They flocked to see American Sniper, a film that celebrates a killer of women and children.
In the last century, prominent scientists spoke out against U.S. militarism and called for the end of war. Scientists like Einstein, Linus Pauling, and the great skeptic Carl Sagan. Where are their successors? Noam Chomsky is still bashing U.S. imperialism, but he’s in his nineties. He needs help! Far from criticizing militarism, some scholars, like economist Tyler Cowen, claim war is beneficial, because it spurs innovation. That’s like arguing for the economic benefits of cancer or slavery.
So, just to recap. I’m asking you skeptics to spend less time bashing soft targets like homeopathy and Bigfoot and more time bashing hard targets like multiverses, cancer tests, psychiatric drugs, biological determinism and war, the hardest target of all.
I don’t expect you to agree with my framing of these issues. All I ask is that you examine your own views skeptically. And ask yourself this: Shouldn’t ending war be a moral imperative, like ending slavery or the subjugation of women? How can we not end war?
Further Reading:
You can find links to my original article, as well as responses and my counter-responses, here, here and here. The following articles update claims I made in 2016:
The Cancer Industry: Hype vs. Reality