Skeptic – by Michael Shermer

‘Viewing the world with a rational eye’

This book is a taste of what it means to be a ‘skeptic’. Put simply, it means not believing everything you see, hear or read. It means putting all new claims through a series of questions and examinations in order to find the truth, not just the opinions of fringe thinkers.

The book covers a whole bunch of short essays on a wide range of ideas – out of the hundred or so in the book, we pick our favorites three or four each to discuss and talk about the approach you should take for viewing the world as a ‘skeptic’.

Skeptic A book by Michael Shermer:-

 baloney detection:-

Baloney detection kit, When he challenges beliefs, people say ‘why should I trust you?’ Shermer says you should not

Questions by Shermer:-

1. How reliable is the source of the claim?
2. Does the source make similar claims? Pseudo scientists have a habit of going well beyond the facts
3. Have the claims been verified by another source?
4. How does the claim fit with how we know the world works?
5. Has anyone gone out of the way to disprove the claim, or has only confirmatory evidence been sought? Confirmation bias?

 More baloney detection:-

The 911:-

10th anniversary of 911 attacks. .The 911 conspiracist is working hard to publicize their claims of scientific validity. Richard Gage is the founder of the organization Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth.

Gage had the following points, why it is a conspiracy 

1. Explosive devices were carefully and secretly planted in the world trade center buildings.

• You cannot secretly prep controlled demolition of a building that contains 50,000 workers, plus extensive security systems and guards working around the clock.
• They say steel melts at 2777 degrees but jet fuel burns at 1517 degrees F.
• But steel loses 50% of its strength at 1500 degrees
• Once one is failed, others also fail

2. No steel-frame building collapsed before 911 due to fire

• Gravity increases the force of a falling object by a factor of 30 for a single collapsing floor, and collapsing buildings have nowhere to go but straight down

3. What about the almost free-fall collapse of the twin tower?

• The key is the ‘almost’ modifier
• The 80,000 tons of structural steel slowed down the collapse of the twin towers to about 2/3 of free fall
• The core collapsed at about 40% of free-fall speed

4. What about the explosive squibs twenty stories below the collapse point, and those heavy metal objects flying hundreds of feet through the air?

• During the collapse, one half a million cubic feet of air was pushed outwards at the rate of 12 floors per second creating a hurricane wind that blew out the windows and the smoke from the fires.

5. What caused building 7 to collapse?

• Fire-fighters reported seeing structural deformations of building 7 hours before its collapse
• WTC1 damaged the lower portions of building 7

6. What about those accounts of explosions in the twin towers?

• Only 10 out of 5000 firefighters believed bombs were involved
• Many things cause office explosions during the fire
• Cleaning, HVAC equipment, hydraulic pistons, tires

7. What about the free-fall collapse of building 7?

• Freefall collapse does not mean any resistance, it means no net resistance
• Those collapsing beams cling to the walls and function as levers
• You had downward gravity, the upward force of structure and variable leveraged downward forces due to connections to other parts of the building
• The leveraging forces may briefly have accelerated parts of building 7

 smart people believe weird things:-

• They are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived, for non-smart reasons.
• The facts of the world come through the colored filters of the theories, hypothesis, hunches biases and prejudices we have accumulated in our lifetime.

 Deconstructing the dead – crossing over to expose the tricks of popular spirit mediums:-

• We are story seeking, storytelling animals. Like all other animals, we evolved to connect the dots between events to discern meaningful patterns for survival
• Sometimes the patterns are real, sometimes they are illusions

  On crossing over, the dude will say things like:-

“I am getting  George over here” Generalisations will lead to a hit in big crowd . Read someone cold. Nothing about them. I am getting a “Warm reading. Utilizing principles of psychology that applies to everyone. Going through causes of death in rapid-fire. Hot reading, mediums obtain information ahead of time.

Why ET has not phoned in(drake equation):-

• In 1961 there was a formula raised by Frank Drake for estimating the number of technological civilizations that are in our galaxy

 N = R x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L

R is the rate of formation of suitable stars

Fp – a fraction of the stars with planets

Ne – is the number of Earth-like planets in the solar system

Fl – is the fraction of planets with life

Fi – is the fraction of planets with intelligent life

Fc – is the fraction of planets with communicating technology

L is the lifetime of communicating civilizations.

 We have a good idea of the rate of stellar formation, and we are confident that a significant number of stars have planets and many have Earth-like planets

• But the rest of the equation’s components are just speculation by astronomers
• There is a lot of uncertainty with L, the lifetime of communicating technological civilizations
• We have very little data to estimate this number
• Some say 10, some say 10 million, with a mean of about 50,000 years
• Using L with 50,000 years, which is conservative, and a few other conservative numbers, we land at 4,000 galactic civilizations
• Which is lower than Carl Sagans million ETIS
• But Shermer, compute L looking at previous civilizations on Earth, where we have gone through about 60 civilizations. The average lifespan on this database is 420 years. These assumptions go along way to saying why ET has not phoned in.
• This equates to 3.35 civilizations in our galaxy.

Iclone:-

1. A human clone is no less unique in its personhood than the identical twin
2. Has the same rights
3. Same dignity

 quantum quackery:-

About the documentary, ‘what the bleep do we know?’

• The films central tenant is that we create our own reality through consciousness and quantum mechanics
• They talk about  how the material world around us is nothing but possible movements of consciousness
• I am choosing my moment to moment experience
• Heisenberg said atoms are not things, only tendencies

 Heisenberg principle, which states that the more precisely you know a particle’s position, the less precisely you know its speed, and vice versa.

• Try to relate the micro-world to the macro world, like consciousness

 Or the double-slit experiment:-

• At the quantum level, if you do not look at a particle, it appears to be in more than one place at once, behaving like a wave
• If you observe the wave, it all of a sudden collapses into a particle at a position
• They take this to the macro level, if no one is observing the particle, then it is actually in many places at once
• They try and show that our neurons in thought create or impact the particle. But there is a book by University of Colorado physicist, who demonstrates for a system to be quantum behavior, the mass, speed, and distance, must multiply to be similar to planks constant
• So at the neuron level, or particle level, this is not possible.

• I challenge you to leap off a 20 story building and consciously choose the experience of passing safely through the ground tendencies

 Japenese researcher Masura Emoto, author of “The Message of Water “Shows how thoughts change the structure of things. If you tape ‘love to it’ the water are amazing crystals. If you play Elvis Heartbreak Hotel, the crystals split into two.

sham scam:-

• Self-help actualization movement is an 8.5 billion dollar business. Does it work?
• Tony Robbins teaches you to work across burning coals that gives experience in the belief
• You can change, grow or stretch into ways you never thought possible.

Book by Steve Salerno ‘Sham: how the self-help movement made America helpless’ 

The motivation has a momentary boost of inspiration but after a few weeks, the buyers are repeat customers.SHAM says if your life does not improve it is your fault. The gurus insist that we are all victims of our demonic inner children produced by traumatic past events. We have negative tapes we replay over and over our minds. Redemption comes from empowering yourself with new life scripts . Supplied by one day seminarists for 500$ or Tony Robbins 7K date with destiny. Although there are many testimonials, there is no peer-reviewed scientific research that proves they work. According to SHAM, over a million people who do the course, there will be a bunch who do well.

Skeptic book summary:-

The book Skeptic by Michael Shermer is a description of the building failure and the pre-messaging of fire-fighters around the 9/11 attack. The author speaks on the reality and the structural failure of WTC.