How Reliable are Skeptical Websites?

There is a battle of opinion raging across the Internet. On the one side are the Paranormal Experts. On the other side are the Skeptics.

Paranormal television entertainment has been very popular the past few years. It’s relatively cheap to produce and when done well combines the kinds of elements that make television interesting (historical anecdotes, drama) and emotionally attractive (heart-ripping stories of loss, families struggling against evil, etc.). You can find shows about haunted buildings, cryptozoological creatures (especially Bigfoot and his relatives around the world), UFOs (and ancient alien visitations), and psychics who do read people.

The Skeptic community, about which I know only a smidgen, have taken up the cause of debunking these TV shows because they are so popular. Skeptics are the self-appointed “fourth estate” of populism. They position themselves between a credulous general public and any generally exciting group of people who make claims about … stuff.

There is a difference between being skeptical about things and being A Skeptic. The Skeptics take their inspiration from the great debunkers of the 20th century, including James Randi (a professional stage magician who has challenged self-styled psychics and other people claiming to have special abilities to prove their talents are real through credible scientific investigation).

There is also a difference between being a Believer and someone who does stuff for entertainment (or, perhaps I should say someone who does stuff for money). For example, some of the best-known evangelists of the 20th century made millions of dollars either through television or road-show revivals, often engaging in practices that were intensely scrutinized and criticized. Some of those folks went to jail after their schemes fell apart.

But just because one person or even a hundred people are fakers doesn’t mean everyone is a faker. If you’re going to be skeptical about other people’s claims, you should allow for the possibility that they might be telling the truth. On the other hand, if in your devotion to skepticism you have become accustomed to whipping out a standard portfolio of plausible explanations as the basis of your debunkery, you have departed the path of being skeptical and firmly entrenched yourself in the world of polemic misrepresentation.

The self-styled Skeptic Community — like many other informal groups — has its extremists and its leftists and its rightists — so you can’t say that if one Skeptic has fallen into faux debunkery they all have but I have to admit that, through my friendship with Dr. Atlantis, host of the Monster Talk podcast (our friendship began over 20 years ago), I have learned a little something (but certainly not a whole lot) about the Skeptic Community. I know they exist, I know they have at least one annual conference (TAM, or The Amazing Meeting), I know they have little niche specialties (like cryptozoology, psychic stuff, UFOs and aliens, etc.), and I know they don’t always agree on methods, motivations, and means.

To speak of “the Skeptic Community” as such may be a disservice to many deserving folk who try hard and remain aware of the pitfalls of doctrinalism. Doctrinalism creeps into every field of endeavor; it becomes the status quo that encapsulates and sustains popular opinion. For example, Newtonian Physics (also called Classical Mechanics) was, for a couple of centuries, the foundation of modern scientific exploration of the universe and its properties. Eventually new theories of physics were proposed that looked beyond Newtonian Physics. These new theories took time to win acceptance because doctrinalism had set in (and still runs through) the phyics community.

We all adhere to some form of doctrine. If you have no personal doctrine you have no personal beliefs — nothing is the foundation of your universe (the way you see and interpret things around you). When you are able to set aside your personal doctrinalism and evaluate a new idea, open to the possibility of being persuaded to accept the new idea, you are overcoming an innately conservative part of human nature. This is often a healthy choice, but sometimes being open to too many new ideas leads you down the wrong path.

That’s a lot of preamble, I know. But I need to explain that I am not challenging anything in particular about the doctrines of standard Skepticism. They may or may not be right. Nor am I challenging (or supporting) anything in particular about the doctrines of the Paranormalists. Both groups have their ideas and their arguments and they may be locked in ideological battle with each other for the next 10,000 years.

Still, I have seen (what for me is) an increase in references to skeptical Websites that make what I consider to be dubious attempts at debunkery. Debunkery is the art of refuting someone else’s argument or presentation. It does not necessarily have to prove anything although if you allege that someone is a fake you should back up that up with proof. Acceptable proof (in my book) would be something like a scientific investigation or test. Unacceptable proof is a litany of plausible explanations that you obviously fall back upon because you have had a conversation so many times you have (either consciously or subconsciously) refined your responses to an efficient selection of talking points.

Again, this happens to all of us, throughout all walks of life. The fact I have seen this on some Skeptic Websites doesn’t mean it’s not happening on Paranormal Websites (in fact, there is a whole lexicon of stock words and phrases you can expect to find on most paranormal Websites, so they have the same issue with their arguments).

What leads me to write all this is a truly random visit to Dr. Karen Stollznow’s debunking articles on her Website (they were originally published in Skeptic Magazine). Who is Karen Stollznow? Well, you can read about her on her Website. I only just heard about her (I think) today when I saw Daniel Loxton retweet one of her Tweets. I learned of Daniel from my friend Dr. Atlantis and followed Daniel’s Twitter account. He strikes me as a level-headed, fair-minded individual who — while obviously remaining unconvinced about many cryptid claims — acts like he would love to find scientifically verified proof that Bigfoot exists.

When Mr. Loxton shares a link to a Website I am about 50% likely to click on it and see what he thought was interesting. When he engages with his fellow Skeptics on Twitter, I occasionally check them out to see who they are and what roles they take on in the Skeptic community. And that is how I came across Karen Stollznow. For all I know she is the Grand High Muckety Muck of Skepticism and I am about to incite all sorts of vitriolic recriminations from hardended fans and believers. I hope not.

Reading Karen’s debunkery articles actually made me think of some of my own debunkery in the search engine optimization field. I write the SEO Theory blog and I sometimes find myself rolling my eyes at what I perceive to be the utter nonsense that people engaged in Internet marketing tend to believe and share. I often call it that, too (along with “total crap”, “ridiculous garbage”, and maybe a few other choice words). I can be vitriolic, too, although it’s rarely my intention to do that. It’s just that you see the same flawed thinking over and over again and eventually you just want to line these people up against the wall and slap some sense into them…but I digress.

My point is that I recognize the style of trite, complacent, unscientific debunkery because I have caught myself engaging in it from time to time. And I must say that I was rather surprised to find that kind of debunkery on Karen’s Website. Here are a few examples:

Kids of the Cloth

Her first article takes on populist child preachers and faith healers. To read this article and nothing else, one might conclude that all these kids are being raised by unscrupulous parents who only care about the money they can make. That is NOT what the article says, but it doesn’t leave room for the possibility that there may indeed be some truly gifted children who are doing God’s work (although many Skeptics are unapologetic atheists, one does not have to be an atheist to be a Skeptic). Are there such kids out there? I don’t know. I haven’t tried to look.

Although the article looks in detail at the career of one such child star of the revival circuit who eventually documented his own fakery (on film) in the early 1970s, it mentions other names of once well-known child preachers, as well as some recent additions to the corps. A credentialed scientist and researcher, Karen Stollznow mentions that there have been about 500 of these kids over the past few centuries — as best as can be determined by careful research, I presume — and that the phenomenon is by no means limited to religious groups. She specifically calls out some of the “reality” shows that feature children.

The criticisms are plausible and obviously backed up by verifiable facts. Nonetheless, she hasn’t disproven the idea that a child may be doing God’s work. Rather, the article cites no such proof and makes no such claim but it does conclude with a very stark admonition and warning:

Child preaching should be considered a form of child abuse because these kids are robbed of their child- hood. They are exploited by their parents for fame and fortune, as demonstrated by Marjoe’s experiences. It comes as no surprise that prodigy preachers are often the children of preachers. They are trained to parrot scripts and mimic the language and gestures of adult preachers. These kids are not compelled to preach by the Holy Spirit. They are groomed for God.

I am inclined to agree that if someone is taking their child around the country or the world, putting on shows, selling tickets, and otherwise raking in tons of money, they probably are not trying to do God’s work. But a casual reader can come away from this article convinced that all such children must be fakes.

People love to challenge ideas by looking for flaws in them. For example, if we propose that a child may indeed be selected to do God’s work, disbelievers might ask, “Why does God need to use a child to do his work?” This is a disarming question designed to make God look like a child abuser, which really ignores the whole point of “what is God’s work”?

God’s work might consist of nothing more than living your life as a normal child, filled with love and awe for God, and treating other people with respect. That alone is asking a lot of a child but if there is a child whose heart is filled with that kind of love 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, then who is to say that God doesn’t have a hand in blessing that personal with a gentle spirit?

You cannot disprove the existence of God with clever questions any more than you can prove God exists by putting a child on a stage and claiming s/he is doing God’s work. Technically, God’s work can be anything that demonstrates God’s love, and doesn’t have to include anything outside of a normal daily routine. But let’s move on.

Long Island Medium

Theresa Caputo is a New Yorker of Italian descent. She effuses warmth, energy, and stoic personality. She is the perfect star of almost any kind of television show. She just happens to claim to be a psychic medium. Karen Stollznow runs down the basic elements of the show (Theresa living her life and breaking into spontaneous “readings” when she meets random people). While I have never seen a child preacher in person (or even on TV, as best I can recall) I have seen Theresa’s TV show. It’s entertaining, much like Cake Boss or Dinner: Impossible, or maybe like Real Alien UFO Hunters of the Apocalypse (Hollywood — see me for film rights on that last one).

Is Theresa Captuo a real psychic? I dunno. How can you tell from a TV show whether someone is actually hearing details from the dead and departed? Oddly enough, just today I ran into a woman in a store who was traveling across country. She claimed to be a prophet from God and she told me that I had recently moved across the country for “work and comfort”. That’s pretty close (in fact, I barely said a word to the lady — she could not have known my personal history or inferred it from anything I said). Is she a prophet? I don’t know — that’s not enough time to apply the Biblical test of prophecy.

But what my experience tells me is that people do apparently talk to total strangers and reveal to them what they feel or believe may be a message from some other intelligence. That part of Theresa’s show seems plausible enough, but for all I know it could be staged. After all, even good science may restage a well-known experiment to demonstrate what we have learned about the universe. I remember my college Physics professor firing little metal balls across the classroom to demonstrate some (by now ancient) experiment that proves something about gravity, inertia, etc. In other words, staged or scripted re-enactment doesn’t invalidate anything although it should certainly be disclaimed as such if you present it on television.

The cable TV industry has taught us to believe that “reality show” stars have camera crews follow them around all day long, filming everything that happens, and then they just condense the “story” of the week down to a few key scenes (interspersed with some commentary from the stars) that explain everything. In reality, reality shows need your permission to use any footage of you. If you are standing in a store and someone with a camera crew comes up to talk to you, you have the right to talk to that person “off camera”. They have to get a release from you in order to use your footage as part of their entertainment. The only exceptions to this rule I have seen have been on police-based reality shows, where bystanders’ faces are blurred to protect their identities because the shows are essentially “reporting the news”.

One of the criticisms Dr. Stollznow aims at Theresa Caputo is as follows:

Of course, these are just cold readings of stereotypical subjects; usually older ladies who are asked, “Did your mother/father pass?” Obviously, she/he had, so Caputo proceeds to share a stock message, such as she “loves you”, he has “found peace” or he is telling you it’s time to “move on”. Alternatively, Caputo performs the same tricks for groups, like a kind of psychic Tupperware party. As believers, these people are pushovers, and with a larger pool of subjects she never fails to strike with questions like, “Did someone here lose a brother?” Making her task even easier still, she never guesses the name or the initials of the deceased. To “validate” contact, Caputo makes vague references that have the appearance of being specific; special songs, handwritten letters, and items of clothing and jewelry. Those read are interviewed afterwards, gushing that they are indebted to Caputo for helping them come to terms with the death of their loves ones.

This paragraph represents a great deal of thought and analysis, perhaps by an entire generation of historians, scientists, and other Skeptics who have observed psychic fakery in a thousand venues. There are parlor tricks you can learn (from stage magic handbooks, for example) that help you elicit critical information from people so that you can “read” them. These parlor tricks are a common gimmick used in movies and scripted TV dramas that present you with “psychics” who are eventually unmasked (or who disclaim themselves).

I don’t watch every episode of Long Island Medium but I have watched a few. It’s hard to say how generic Theresa gets with these readings. Sometimes she brings up details that (to my untrained eyes/ears) sound like they could not have been gleaned beforehand. But I have no way of knowing.

What we can say about the show is that it doesn’t prove Theresa’s claims to be a medium. What we can say about Karen’s article is that it doesn’t prove that Theresa’s claims are false. A little further on the article takes on a “skeptic challenge” in which Theresa converts one or more skeptics into believers using what may be a strategy that is sometimes called “sleight of hand” (magicians Penn and Teller love to explain this kind of stuff in detail).

Of course, when you have only 30 minutes (less time for commercials) to tell a story, you’re not going to include all the details of the story. If we judged the average news story on CNN or PBS by this kind of critical thinking we would have to charge all journalists with being frauds and amateurs because they don’t include all the details, the research, and the facts. They are (shamefully) just summarizing what happened for their audiences.

The lack of depth in a presentation doesn’t prove that flim-flammery is involved. On the other hand, you’re not going to prove many claims if you don’t provide an in-depth presentation loaded with verifiable facts and research. In fact, this is a criticism that is now being directed by more and more people at the immensely popular TED talks (where a featured speaker gives a 10-15 minute presentation to a large audience). TED talks are formulated to introduce people to new ideas, new ways of thinking. They are not scientific presentations intended to prove anything, so criticizing a “reality show” medium for not providing conclusive proof every week that, yes, the dead really were speaking to her in a bake shop (or wherever) doesn’t really even amount to effective debunking.

The article just goes through the motions of debunkery, cycling through well-worn arguments in too brief a fashion to be either convincing or sound. Sure, these readings could be that shallow but I wasn’t there and I don’t know what all was said. It’s entertainment to me, nothing more. I have no idea of what Theresa Caputo thinks of these shows.

You know, when Michelle Berry was found alive in Cleveland, OH, thousands of people railed against self-styled psychic Sylvia Browne, who had told Michelle’s mother Louwana Miller “she’s not alive” in 2004 (about a year before Louwana died). Oh, when Michelle was found alive the TV news broadcasters flooded the airwaves with quick summaries of the Montel Williams show where this occurred. Sylvia Browne got some other details wrong (like saying the abductor was young) but she got some details right (like saying there was only 1 abductor, not 3 as the police suspected — and describing him as “Cuban”, although technically he was from Puerto Rico — but most non-Hispanics seem to struggle with differentiating between Hispanic groups). She also told Louwana that she would only see her daughter again “on the other side”, which sadly turned out to be true.

While the story of Ariel Castro’s victimization of Michelle Berry and two other young women is horrifying and just makes your heart reach out to those families whose lives he tore apart, you have to question the criticism being directed at a self-styled psychic. We believe our scientists even when they are wrong; and yet we demonize people who claim to have incomplete information about things far off in time and space. That’s pretty cold.

Which is not to say that I believe Sylvia Browne was psychic. Ironically one could argue that she got more details right about Michelle Berry than usual: she attracted so much criticism that at least one attempt to analyze her revelations produced very unfavorable results. Of course, people can differ with some of the conclusions in that study but it’s hard to come away from the analysis thinking anything other than that — if Sylvia Browne was psychic — her convictions were much stronger than whatever signals she was tuned into.

But what does it mean to be “psychic”? If we assume for the sake of discussion that people’s consciousness (their souls or spirits) survive the body after physical death, and that they can sometimes communicate with sensitive living beings, then how reliable does the receipt of those communications have to be in order for someone to be “psyhic”?

You don’t hear well in real life, so why should you be expected to hear well when someone who is dead is talking to you across whatever? The basis for legitimate skepticism of psychic capabilities is that we don’t have a science that can verifiably validate these claims. That is, there is no class of established scientific principles (regarding life after death, non-physical communication between two intelligences, and sensitivity to extra-corporeal essences and communications) that allows us to determine if psychics can even exist, much less ferret out fakers from real psychics.

If psychic abilities do exist, though, then we would be reasonable to assume they probably fall into similar patterns of distribution in the population as other innate abilities. That is, I would expect to see graduating degrees of sensitivity in people rather than an Either/Or division of the Haves and Have Nots simply because so far in our experience Nature has favored such distributions. Furthermore, to differentiate between fakers and real psychics you have to devise tests that filter out personal conviction and simple delusion.

Delusional people can be examined and diagnosed by certified psychiatrists and psychologists — but did you know that many people in the hard sciences think of psychology as quackery? Never mind cold fusion, which has been an embarrassment to many of the same critics of the psychological and sociological fields of study. We can’t even agree on which sciences are real sciences. Human behavior is filled with many exceptions. Making sense of those exceptions has led to critical rebuke of the idea that “norms” exist. Nonetheless, we have established that human behavior (and the behavior of animals) can be studied and catalogued and organized.

Disbelief does not disprove anything any more than belief proves something.

Possessed Possessions

Next in the line of articles is a questioning of the motives and methods of John Zaffis, the “Haunted Collector”, who inevitably finds something to take home with him in every episode. I shudder to think what such skeptical thinking would have made of the Quinn Martin TV show from the 1960s, The F.B.I., or Police Story from the 1970s. These shows were supposed to be taken directly from law enforcement files (dressed up for dramatic presentation). Oddly enough, they always caught the bad guys.

And yet, in real life, bad guys sometimes get away. In fact, airplane hijacker D.B. Cooper is a frequent subject of conspiracy theory television shows, real life crime shows, and similar cable TV fare that competes with the paranormal programming the Skeptic community loves to argue with. Why does no one complain about how television law enforcement always wins?

I don’t know if spirits haunt objects. I’m not sure I care. As paranormal TV shows go this one is less entertaining for me than some others. I don’t watch it very often at all. One of the criticisms directed at Mr. Zaffis is that he always takes the stuff back to his museum, stating that “taking these items because they are ‘haunted’ amounts to a form of theft”. An unusual market in supposedly haunted items is also discussed (not really related to the show, but leading up to the criticism of the show in a sort of “guilty by connection” argument).

What I think is most interesting in this article is that apparently someone associated with the show alleged (privately) that the show producers sometimes staged effects to mislead the cast. Hence, if you cannot impugn the sincerity of the believers, it may help to impugn the process of the television show. But does that prove or disprove anything about whether artifacts may be possessed or haunted? Of course not. We remain without any credible scientific evidence one way or another. The article concludes with the very strident: “‘Haunted’ objects seem to only be haunted by stereotypes, memories and a belief in the paranormal.”

Hard to say. This is debunkery that fails to prove or disprove anything relevant to the topic. That someone is willing to sell you a fake Brooklyn Bridge doesn’t mean there is no Brooklyn Bridge. By the way — did you know that the London Bridge was sold in 1962 to an Arizona developer who moved it to Lake Havasu? He used it to draw people to a new city he built there. So don’t allow yourself to disbelieve in the buying and selling of bridges just because no one has bought and sold the real Brooklyn Bridge.

Can TV Shows Really Tell the Truth?

In 2011 I interviewed Tolkien scholar Michael Drout, who mentioned that a producer for a television show tried to convince him to say on screen that J.R.R. Tolkien took “orcs” from the Latin word orcus. Officially, Tolkien scholars have not formed a consensus on the probable origin of Tolkien’s name for bad guy troops. Such a consensus may never be formed, especially as people who personally knew and discussed The Lord of the Rings with Tolkien gradually die and become inaccessible to further research.

Television documentaries are often criticized by scientists and historians for condensing, sometimes even changing or omitting important information. The documentary film-makers may be under pressure to produce good entertainment; perhaps they have been taught to make entertainment more important than education. Maybe there is a mix in this as in all other things, with some documentaries being more complete and reliable than others.

I cringe every time I see Cake Boss because the cakes are made by big guys who don’t seem to wash their hands (on screen). I assume, however, that the bakery is operated according to appropriate health codes and that there are signs in all the restrooms that say, “Employees must wash their hands before returning to work”. I certainly hope so. I am sure the people making the cakes wash their hands but I would have to force myself to eat one of those big display cakes.

Television is not the best medium for science. When you produce completely honest, accurate, detailed television you get C-SPAN and you hear all the coughing, see all the long quiet interludes, and you know — if you have ever attended a conference, a hearing, or even traffic court — that real life is long, boring, and oppressive when you’re doing something you don’t want to do or it’s long and intermittently boring and exciting when you’re doing something you DO want to do.

Riding the ski lift isn’t as much fun for people as throwing themselves down the sides of dangerous mountains covered with deadly pine trees at 60 miles per hour. Climbing the stairs is not as much fun as throwing yourself off a perfectly good tower (with a rope attached to your body). I have done one of these things. Actually, I’ve done most of them. If I were to make a reality show of my life, I would definitely edit out the boring moments.

If I were to make a television show intended to teach people a lesson about something, I would not leave the audience hanging.

So the debunkery directed at the paranormal shows — while well-intentioned — fails to fairly concede that the medium defines some of the limitations of the shows. Maybe it’s all fake. Maybe there is something really going on. We cannot tell from simply watching the shows what is real and what is fake; which, of course, is why people who have studied these matters in more depth feel compelled to say something.

But when you set out to debunk someone else’s presentation, you should be clear on whether you are just summarizing your arguments (as Karen Stollznow does on her Website) or whether you are trying to dis/prove something. If you are not clear about that then you are treating your audience no better than the things you seek to debunk.

The average visitor to any given Website is inexpert in whatever that Website specializes in. People will take what you say at face value if they have not already formed their own opinions, and if your arguments are plausible. But plausibility can be just as fake and quackish as outright fraud and hoaksterism.

At the end of the day you cannot judge the reliability of all Skeptic Websites in general on the basis of just a few examples, but one should definitely take all Websites that purport to explain things with a grain of salt. Skepticism must keep itself honest with honest self-directed skepticism. It doesn’t matter if you’re part of the Skeptic community or just someone who tries to debunk egregious claims in your own specific field of expertise; if you’re just debunking things with a litany of plausible explanations you are really just spinning your idealogical wheels and hoping that no one calls you out on the parlor trick.