This one hits two topics we’ve been discussing lately:
– Reckless disregard for the truth
The example comes from a dubious claim promoted by Stanford professor and media star Robert Sapolsky, investigated in this post sent to us by Adam Strandberg:
I [Strandberg] work on metabolism and have some interest in neurons, so I have on several occasions run into the claim that chess grandmasters burn 6000 calories per day during tournaments. I found this implausible and decided to investigate where it came from. While I am not the first person on the internet to express skepticism of such a large number, nobody seems to have worked out the precise source of the claim. I assumed when I dug into it that I would find a specific methodological error. But while methods enter the story, the real problem is that the number was completely made up.
Statistics that come out of nohwere, huh? Strandberg gives the scoop:
As far as I can tell, the “patient zero” that caused this claim to become so widespread is this 2019 ESPN article:
Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Based on breathing rates (which triple during competition), blood pressure (which elevates) and muscle contractions before, during and after major tournaments, Sapolsky suggests that grandmasters’ stress responses to chess are on par with what elite athletes experience.
This story was then picked up by many outlets, such as CNBC, Men’s Health, Inc, GQ, Marginal Revolution, and Joe Rogan.
On the plus side, some of the Marginal Revolution commenters called B.S. on this one.
Strandberg does some digging:
The earliest reference I could find to the 6000 calories number was in Sapolsky’s 2009 Class Day Speech at Stanford 10 years before the ESPN article, with no caveats:
So you got two humans, and they’re taking part in some human ritual, they’re sitting there silently at a table, they make no eye contact, they’re still, except every now and then, one of them does nothing more taxing than lifting an arm and pushing a little piece of wood, and if it’s the right wood and the right chess grandmaster is in the middle of a tournament, they are going through six to seven thousand calories a day, thinking. Turning on a massive physiological stress response, simply with thought…
Not just 6000, but “six to seven thousand calories”!
Strandberg summarizes:
A grad student took physiological measurements of 11 ordinary chess players (not grandmasters). They reported in a summary in a chess magazine that the maximum chest movement rate they measured in a 10 second period was almost three times that of an average measurement from a different study. Robert Sapolsky then cited this thesis in his popular book, dropping the distinction between maximum and average to give a 3X breathing rate. He later took the 3X number and multiplied that by 2000 calories per day to get the number 6000, adding the “grandmaster” rhetorical fluorish along the way. He spread this fact through his own talks at Stanford and through interviews with journalists, who accurately repeated him. When questioned about the source of the number, he then claimed on multiple occasions that the number actually came from someone else, and that journalists had distorted his argument.
Suffice it to say this is unbecoming of such an esteemed professor.
Ahhhh, but that’s the sort of behavior that gets you esteemed, it’s what gets you on NPR, Ted etc! Big claims with no evidence. Sure, big claims with evidence would be even better, but, in the absence of evidence, big claims with made-up evidence will do just fine. Sapolsky also seems very genial, so nothing ends up being his fault.
Maybe next time Freakonomics or Sean Carroll or Joe Rogan or Andrew Huberman or some other fount of gullible masculinity interviews Sapolsky, they could try asking him about all this. I don’t think anything useful would come from such an interrogation, though. My guess is that Sapolsky would engage his genial manner, the interviewers would immediately fold, and then that would be it.
Kind of like when they do features on health benefits of cold showers or mind-body healing. Whatever. It’s all good. As long as some professor at a prestigious university is getting fawning press, we’re all winners, right?
What harm is done?
Who cares? So what if some fake statistics gets passed around through the news and social media? Why should we be bothered (other than the usual reason)? I can’t answer for everybody on this one; I’ll just say that I see this kind of thing as a sort of debasing of the currency of discourse. Part of this is a simple crowding out: the NPR and ESPN segments devoted to this crap, the episodes of Freakonomics and Sean Carroll and all the rest, represent time that could’ve been spent on real science. But also it degrades the notion of science itself. All sorts of people–NPR listeners, Andrew Huberman listeners, the students at Stanford’s Class Day–are told that this stuff is science. And now look what we have at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: reliance on discredited fraudulent research and citations of fake papers.
As with other fake claims we’ve discussed over the years, this 6000 calories thing is big if true. Just as it would be big if true if they faked the moon landing, or if I found a chunk of the True Cross in my backyard, or if I came across a proof that pi is a rational number, or if someone were to demonstrate that elderly-related words caused slower walking, or . . . all sorts of things.
Good on Strandberg to track down the claim, and the mistaken reasoning underlying it, and the way that the Stanford professor promoted the fake number and then misrepresented the story. I’m reminded a bit of the dubious claims of mind-body healing that Nick Brown and I investigated: it wasn’t just a single experiment presented misleadingly, it was an entire literature that was being garbled. There’s a paper trail, if you care to follow it.
Can this guy do good science?
I can’t be sure, but maybe the answer is yes. Stephen Pinker describes Sapolsky as “a great scientist and writer.” I don’t really care about the “great writer” part–if you’re purportedly writing nonfiction but you’re actually making things up, then your writing skill is kind of irrelevant if we want to evaluate your work on scientific grounds–but it’s possible that on the days that Sapolsky is doing science, rather than bullshitting, he’s doing good science. It’s hard for me to say. The fact that he won lots of awards does not imply in itself that he did good science–unfortunately, there are lots of award-winning scientists who have ultimately made no useful contributions to scientific understanding–; on the other hand, the awards are evidence that somebody thought he was doing good work.
Looking at Sapolsky’s wikipedia page, it seems that his scientific contributions, such as they are, have come from observing animal behavior. And his mistakes with the 6000 calories thing–setting aside the immorality of claiming any implications to “grandmasters” and of blaming journalists for his own b.s.–come from some combination of complete innumeracy and a willingness to say things that are false but sound impressive.
Can a great scientist be completely innumerate? I think so. There are many mental skills and abilities, and it seems plausible to me that you could be a complete idiot when it comes to math (getting that 6000 calories number by imagining that a chess player playing one game is tripling his normal caloric expenditure over an entire 24-hour period) and still be excellent at other aspects of science, such as the ability to sit very quietly in the woods taking careful observations of baboons.
One reason I say this is that I’m kind of the opposite: I’m really good at math but I’d be absolute shit at that baboon thing, partly because I can’t sit still to save my life and partly because I don’t really understand animals so I don’t think I’d take any useful observations. If I can contribute to science even while having no patience and no understanding of animals, it seems reasonable to assume that someone else can contribute to science even while having no understanding of what it means to take averages or multiply.
What gives me more concern about Sapolsky is not so much his inability to think in quantitative terms as his extreme overconfidence in that domain. How hard would it have been for him to say, “I read some research that people are under stress when playing competitive chess–their hormone levels change, their pulse rate goes up, etc.–but I can’t say how many more calories they consume, I’ll leave that one to the experts”? But noooo, he has do the stupid thing and say that silly overconfident 6000 calories thing.
But . . . had Sapolsky been open about his innumeracy–or even just willing to contract out his numerical statements to a qualified colleague–that could well have hurt him professionally. Suppose he’d come up with something like, “There’s some evidence that chess players experience physical stress while playing . . . the best estimate is that this increases caloric load by 20% during a game . . . also in a tournament a player might be too nervous to eat well, leading to temporary physical deterioration . . .” OK, that’s not gonna get you on ESPN, indeed they might not even ask you to deliver the Class Day speech at your university.
So:
1. Conditional on being willing to bullshit, many people have positive career incentives to do so.
2. Unless you’re a real psycho, it can be easier to bullshit if you don’t know what you’re talking about, which gives people who are willing to bullshit a positive incentive to maintain their ignorance–or, in Sapolsky’s case, innumeracy. It gives you a kind of plausible deniability whereby you can portray yourself not as a calculating deceiver but rather as a head-in-the-clouds big thinker–the kind of person who can be featured on Freakonomics, Marginal Revolution, Carroll, Rogan, and all the rest. Ignorance and innumeracy serve as a sort of buffer state to protect your reputation.
But . . . is it truly ignorance if you have to work so hard to maintain it?
Remember Clarke’s Law: Any sufficiently crappy research is indistinguishable from fraud.
P.S. Some searching on Sapolsky turned up this. The man seems to have a positive attraction to junk science. I’m starting to think he has to work pretty hard to avoid the boundaries of reason. But don’t worry–all this posting counts approximately zero compared to the reputation of Stanford (also here) and the combined audiences of NPR, Ted, Freakonomics, Rogan, etc. I think the only way skeptics such as ourselves could appear on such shows would be if go all-in on climate change denial or we declare that we have haunted radios.
If you are ever inclined to write it, I would instantly buy a book about this pipeline of academic to popular science junk author and that whole industrial complex that has been developing over the last decades. Those books are so remarkably streamlined, down to the title pattern which is always “Short Main Title: Longer Subtitle”, like “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will” and countless others.
“Can a great scientist be completely innumerate? I think so.” I don’t remember a lot of math in The Origin of Species.”
John:
The Origin of Species may have no math, but it’s hard for me to believe that Darwin would’ve said that a chess player would expend three times his usual daily energy during a tournament. In any case, I do think that a great scientist can be completely innumerate. If that great scientist pretends to a numeracy he does not have, that’s a serious flaw, but he could still be a great scientist with a serious flaw!
From Darwin’s autobiography:
> During the three years which I spent at Cambridge my time was wasted, as far as the academical studies were concerned, as completely as at Edinburgh and at school. I attempted mathematics, and even went during the summer of 1828 with a private tutor (a very dull man) to Barmouth, but I got on very slowly. The work was repugnant to me, chiefly from my not being able to see any meaning in the early steps in algebra. This impatience was very foolish, and in after years I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics, for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense.
Not much math, but a respect for the subject.
Andrew,
I think Darwin one of the all time greats, so I was just giving an example to support what you wrote.
And the math was sometimes wrong. In one case, at least, by a whole lot. Lord Kelvin spotted the error.
I meant to include the link. https://www.athro.com/evo/elephs.html
You know who _does_ burn 6000 calories per day, though? The guy the coolies hired to beat them while they tow barges up the Yellow River.
I think Phil won the internet today
+1
Lol!
Chess players can burn 6000 calories per day, for sure. Spend eight hours doing a hard bike ride, then come home and play some chess. Or, conceivably you could play chess while jogging on a treadmill; do it all day, there’s your 6000 calories.
But the idea that chess players could burn 6000 calories per day _just_ by sitting in a chair playing chess is kinda nuts.
That said, it’s definitely true that playing chess can raise your heart rate. I experience that myself. There’s a chess YouTuber names Eric Rosen — an International Master — who used to show his heart rate while playing online chess (maybe he still does, I dunno, I don’t watch his videos very often), and in tense situations his heart rate is often over 150 bpm and can be substantially higher. Here’s a video in which he’s playing against Danil Dubov, one of the strongest grandmasters, and both of them are nearly out of time on their clocks (although they are playing with an ‘increment’, meaning that after each move they get additional time on the clock, I think one second in this case): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83mLVVuHfEg Rosen’s heart rate goes to 170.
I’m not sure where I would draw the line at what is beyond the realm of plausibility. There are surely chess players who burn more than 3000 calories in a day at a tournament, since there are big males with active metabolisms who burn that much in a typical workday. I might bet against someone having a 4000-calorie day just by playing chess, but I wouldn’t bet the farm. Somewhere around 4500-5000 is where I’d say Nah, there’s no way. But when I say “no way”, do I _really_ mean “no way”? Would I offer someone 99:1 odds that nobody can reach 5000 calories just by playing in a chess tournament? I dunno.
Anyway the claim is bullshit. But I do wonder what the right answer is.
The first thing is to recognize, as you do indirectly, that 6000 calories is not the right metric here. There are large males who burn 3000 calories if they lie in bed all day, and there are petite women who don’t burn 3000 calories even if they do substantial cardio. Getting to 6000 is very different for one vs the other.
The right way to think about this problem, like all problems, is to nondimensionalize the problem. What fraction of their basal metabolic rate do chess players burn during an intense tournament? That would immediately get rid of the scale problem. Then, if they lie in bed all day they’re at 1.0 and we can talk about how much increase they can do from chess in a chair.
Next we need to admit that there’s no hard cutoff for “impossible”. Is 1.1 possible, of course, even likely. Most people are probably at 1.1 or 1.2 going about their basic day. Is 2.0 possible? I certainly wouldn’t rule it out, but for a person with typical 2000 cal/day basal rate that’s now about your 4000 amount, so we agree provided we are thinking of an average kind of baseline. Is 10.0 possible?? No, your body just can’t process that. I doubt even Tour de France cyclists do 10.0 or maybe a few of them just get there. That’d be 20,000 calories for a cyclist whose basal rate is 2000. A quick web search suggests 6000 is more typical for tour de france cyclists. so maybe there are a few doing 8000 or 9000, but no-one is doing 20000
Phil:
“Chess players can burn 6000 calories per day, for sure. Spend eight hours doing a hard bike ride, then come home and play some chess.”
Yeah, I was thinking about that when writing my post. Play Turing round-the-house chess all day without a break, and burn those calories!
Anyone with any interest in this topic should read this article: https://www.stlpr.org/arts/2015-01-21/on-chess-physical-fitness-becomes-increasingly-important-for-top-level-players
If we were being charitable, we could see this as another example of the Dunning-Kruger effect — the cognitive bias where someone with low ability in a specific area tends to overestimate their own competence. We see this a lot in the Bay Area, where someone who’s done well in one company suddenly thinks that they’re competent to give advice on just about anything.
Dunning-Kruger-Stanford effect.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is just a misinterpretation of regression to the mean.
I think there’s another dimension to this example that hasn’t been mentioned. Exercise for the purpose of weight loss is a very big thing in our society. For many, there’s a moralistic attitude associated with it, including “no pain, no gain”. And then, along comes a guy who says that you can lose even more weight by sitting and thinking, especially if you’re a really good, really intense thinker, like a chess grandmaster. It challenges some of the stereotypes the audience may have, but only mildly, and it valorizes sitting and using your brain, which reinforces other biases listeners may have.
Peter:
Good point. I hadn’t thought of that.
I see what you mean, but there’s another spin on this. Perhaps he’s trying to point out the problems with putting too much emphasis on exercise as a weight loss miracle cure. It is true, that even regular exercise compared to a sedentary behavior barely adds anything in terms of calorie expenditure. So, in a sense it’s true that most calories are spent by just existing, via basal metabolic rate, just not 6K.
BTW, I hate that term ‘burning’ calories. We don’t burn anything. It is exhaled. The difference in weight of CO2 in our breath is how we lose weight.
We don’t burn wood. The weight “lost” by the log is in the smoke.
Also water vapor.
It’s one of the components of the smoke (for a broad definition of smoke as the mixture of gases and aerosols).
I think a related aspect would be the desire to equate mental sports like chess (I’ve heard similar arguments made about poker, although not in regards to calories burned) to ‘standard’ sports like football, basketball, etc. If it turns out that chess is an intensely physical exercise, it helps to legitimize calling it a sport.
What I find funny, is that I just read a fairly convincing “big if true” claim in the opposite direction: hard thinking doesn’t burn much more energy than daydreaming because the brain is constantly exerting most of its energy to be prepared to respond. The link to Quanta is here .
“Maintaining what are known as membrane potentials — stable voltages across a neuron’s membrane that ensure that the cell is primed to fire when called upon — is known to account for at least half of the brain’s total energy budget.”
“The difference in weight of CO2 in our breath is how we lose weight.”
Well, yes, it is the increased mass of CO2 we exhale (also usually accompanied by increased water loss in breath or, to a lesser extent, perspiration) that results in weight loss. But the CO2 itself is available to be exhaled because we have increased our oxidation of carbohydrates or fatty acids. The term calories, strictly speaking, refers to the energy released through those oxidation processes.
My point is, that Navigator is focused only on the final endpoint of the process and is ignoring the more fundamental underlying process that feeds the increased exhalation of CO2. So, in that sense, it _is_ about burning fuels and the concomitant liberation of chemical energy.
I would say it’s possible to be a good scientist in some areas despite not having any sense at all of physical quantities, which strikes me as more a physics or engineering aspect. But this is a case of where that lack can lead one astray. It seems to me that Sapolsky has engaged in the following chain of reasoning: 1) Tournament chess is stressful (absolutely true!) 2) Stress, which is a purely mental state, has physiological effects (also true, and intriguing) 3) Mind-body connection, wow (uh-oh, getting into trouble) 4) How much, well let’s throw some numbers around to make an estimate, 3x this, 2000 calories = 6000 calories. AMAZING (where he gone off the rails into complete nonsense).
The problem is, for this last step, it’s indeed as other have noted, a failure of not knowing what you don’t know. And yes, if you’re very humble and reserved, you won’t get on major media. Thus I don’t know where to go about that. How to create an incentive to correct this? Maybe a kind of slick research “MythBusters” show?
I’ve taken a class by sapolsky on primate behavior, and it was absolutely fascinating. From my limited knowledge it was all aligned with the current science in the field and his own research was careful and deliberate- I remember how detailed the controls had to be in the behaviour experiments precisely because of the attention to the fact that the slightest change in environment can skew the results. It’s in stark contrast to this overstatement pf s dubious claim.
This was an elective in a AI master, so I am not in any position to evaluate his science in its own field, I can only say that when it came to animal experiments he went to great detail to acknowledge how careful one has to be to get proper results.
That’s good to hear!
I really like Sean carrols books. Whats he done wrong?
Marc:
I can’t comment on Sean Carroll’s books. My problem is that he does completely credulous interviews of promoters of junk science.
Thanks for the answer
Andrew–
You’ve commented on Carroll’s interview of Ellen Langer. Has there been more than one interview by Carroll of a promoter of junk science that you found credulous?
Gregory:
Yes, he uncritcally interviewed Sapolsky. That’s why I mentioned him in this post!
Carroll’s behaviour lines up with Andrew’s cross-promotion concern, but he’s a different species of offender from Ariely, Langer, Sapolsky, Wansink, and the rest.
• He doesn’t peddle shaky claims of his own. Carroll’s published work is vanilla physics and philosophy; no fabricated data, no charisma-powered social priming, no ego-depletion graphs.
• His Mindscape policy is “platform without push-back”. When Sapolsky came on in episode 134 (15 Feb 2021) or Langer in episode 279 (17 Jun 2024), Carroll let them run. Only months later—in AMA episodes that reach a much smaller slice of the audience—did he say he still rejects hard incompatibilism and remains unconvinced by Langer’s mind-over-metabolism results. That lag makes the corrections close to invisible. But there’s a difference between platforming and being gullible. Why he platforms is unclear.
• The harm is therefore secondary amplification, not primary manufacture. Listeners hear the same breathless claims they would get from NPR or Rogan, but with Carroll’s “I’m a physicist, I’m careful” halo over the top. That is exactly the enabling Andrew’s worried about, but the moral culpability is lower than Wansink-style data dredging.
So I’d label Carrol facilitator, not celebrity junk-science producer. The fix is trivial: a 90-second pre-roll noting replication status before each episode featuring controversial work, or a follow-up debate in the same feed. If he refuses that minimal duty of care, the deplorable tag starts to fit; until then, he belongs in a grey zone, not the Ariely–Wansink Hall of Shame.
Brett
My acquaintance and neighbor, U.S chess champion Walter Browne (1949-2015), literally vibrated over the board. Many of his opponents complained about it, but it didn’t violate any rules of the game. I don’t know how many calories he burned during tournaments, but if anyone approached 6,000 it was him.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/sports/walter-shawn-browne-chess-grandmaster-dies-at-66.html
Nice to have a former contender for the World Championship weigh in…especially from beyond the grave!
Just read posts that say “you burn 1-2 calories per minute just by breathing” and “heavy breathing burns 5-8 calories per minute”. This would equate to 2,160 to 9,360 calories (respectively) per day for just breathing! What the authors failed to include in these statements was the activity engaged in while breathing. Even while sitting you burn calories for activities other than breathing. Incomplete (or inaccurate) statements or statements taken out context can make a HUGE difference and result in a ridiculous caloric burn rate estimates for chess grandmasters. Sapolsky and the news media should have known better.
A bigger problem with Sapolsky is that he mainly tells a lot of stories about influences on behavior, and then concludes that we have no free will. It is illogical. Everyone agrees that behavior has influences.
I spend a fair bit of time interacting with media and the broader attention economy while working in an analytical role in the finance industry.
The incentives facing a public intellectual are almost wholly insalubrious to rigorous thinking.
I’m not sure if the situation today is worse than in, say, Darwin’s time. Perhaps there were just as many garbage public intellectuals back then, but history has forgotten them.
But I’m quite confident that the “marketplace of ideas” will never police rigor in thinking. There must be some sort of other gatekeeping mechanism.
Hi Andrew,
Long time reader of this blog, commenting for the first time.
I am positively enamored with Sapolsky. His lecture series on behavioral biology is easily one of the best lecture series that I have had the pleasure to watch. Likewise, the amount of history and knowledge he eschews in his weekly interviews is always enlightening.
So, yes, I am biased. Regarding the Calories, he makes up a number and then says “don’t quote me on it”. I know personally, when I am learning something, I would rather a professor tell me something (with qualification that it is a guess), than to say nothing on the matter.
I am curious what percentage of untruth to truth percent do you (and others) think is beneficial for the world? (In a non academic journal setting)
Note too that the truths we know now, will also turn out to be incorrect in ways for future generations and researchers to figure out. Exactitude should not be required in all things all the time (I am strawman-ing both my point and yours).
Cheers
Joe:
1. Sapolsky’s contributions may well be a net plus in this world. Promoting fake science is only part of what he does, and I could believe that his positive scientific contributions outweigh the damage he does with his promotion of junk.
2. You write, “Regarding the Calories, he makes up a number and then says ‘don’t quote me on it.'” But that’s not what happened! He made up the 6000 calories number and was happy to be quoted on it. Then, years later, when people called him on it, he tried to wriggle out of it by inaccurately blaming others for the fake number.
Joe: When you write “Likewise, the amount of history and knowledge he eschews in his weekly interviews is always enlightening.”, I don’t think “eschews” was the word you wanted there. It’s an especially unfortunate mistake in the context of this post.
The problem is that a 6,000 calories number is very unreasonably high if one has a feel for the magnitude of the amount involved. It’s a bit like reporting a heat wave and saying temperatures will reach 300 degrees Fahrenheit.
I’ll pass on developing a theory of net value here, it’s too complicated. Many brilliant scientists promoted racism, sexism, etc, for example.
I was a grad student in the Biology Department at Stanford when Sapolsky was a 30-something Assistant Professor. He taught part of a class I took and lectured on the mammalian stress response, glucacorticoids and physiological and psychological stress. His lab work at the time was with rats, and his field work was with the baboons. His lectures on the subject were both spellbinding and very exciting science, clever integrations of biochemistry, physiology, behaviour, and ecology. It sounds to me as though he fell victim to another danger all are susceptible to but that particularly endangers Stanford professors: If enough people tell you enough times for long enough that you are a genius, there is a real risk that you will start to believe them.
Just to put it in perspective, Michael Phelps reportedly ate and presumably burned 8 to 10 thousand calories a day when training and competing. The idea that a chess players would burn 60% or more of what a competitive swimmer would, defies logic. Also, you could lose weight just by hyperventilating or watching scary movies that raise your stress, if that were a significant effect on that order of magnitude.
Jonathan:
Just imagine if Phelps had been playing tournament-level chess at the same time. Then he would’ve been burning between 12,000 and 14,000 calories a day!
Alan Turing’s combination of chess and running, along with the later sport of chessboxing, would seem to impose extreme strain on people’s bodies already. This leaves only the less hardy athletes to pursue mere sprinting or boxing.
I don’t think Shermer actually believes he had a haunted radio. The “Had it happened to someone else” paragraph gives his outside-view take on the general phenomena. He’s just giving his account of being on the other side for once of a phenomena he can’t explain other than through sheer unlikely chance resonating with something personally meaningful.
When it comes to Sapolsky though, the first thing I think about is how he titled a book “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” after Barry Marshall did the research to win a Nobel showing ulcers are caused by bacteria rather than Sapolsky’s culprit of chronic stress.
Wonks:
I have no idea what Shermer actually believes, but this is a what he said about that radio: “[T]he eerie conjunction of these deeply evocative events gave [Jennifer] the distinct feeling that her grandfather was there and that the music was his gift of approval. I have to admit, it rocked me back on my heels and shook my skepticism to its core as well.”
If something as commonplace as an intermittently functioning electric appliance was enough to shake his skepticism to its core, this suggests to me that he’s not much of a skeptic. If a broken radio is enough to shake his skepticism, he should check out the Shroud of Turin or that Loch Ness monster photo–those will send him absolutely over the edge!
Another evidence for Shermer’s lack of skepticism is his endorsement of a book by Dan Ariely, that psychologist who keeps getting involved in fraudulent research through no fault of his own.
I think that’s being very disingenuous. Reading the anecdote, putting it as just a broken radio is really missing the point. The important thing is the social context. About to get married, lonely wife, radio from important person to said wife. Accident that raises the emotional importance of this radio as a memento. Substantial futile effort spent on getting said radio to work as a wedding gift. Then after the spooky event the new wife initiates by suggesting a ghostly origin. What’s Shermer to do, start an argument about it?
This isn’t comparable to monster photos or shrouds. This is a guy given an extremely powerful emotional reason to accept a certain conclusion. It says nothing about skepticism in a context more conducive to rational thought.
Zhou:
This general issue has come up before:
Anyway, all my remarks on this topic, including the above post and the above comment, are entirely sincere. I get that the radio was an emotional thing for him. I’ve had lots of emotional experiences in my life, and there’s no reason to expect them to be rationally thought out. And if Shermer had said, “At an emotional level, this really moved me, despite my realizing that an intermittent electrical appliance is no big deal in itself,” then I’d say, sure, that’s a reasonable skeptical response. It “rocked him back on his heels”–fair enough. My problem is where he says that it “shook his skepticism to its core.”
I’m not saying Shermer should start an argument with his wife, for Chrissake! I’m just saying that I sincerely think his skepticism is pretty shallow it can be shaken by something as commonplace as an intermittent electric appliance. Say what you want about the Shroud of Turin and the Loch Ness monster, at least they’re unusual.
Also, again, what kind of skeptic endorses a book by Dan Ariely?
To me, all of this is consistent with Shermer being not so much a skeptic as a publicity-seeker who has attached himself to the “skeptic” label.
I don’t know that this should shock us. The religious world presumably has quite a number of Elmer Gantry types who have religious careers but who do not actually have religious faith, so it should be no surprise that the reverse can happen in communities of skeptics.
Okay, apologies for a poor choice of words – what I meant is that I don’t think you’re being fair because in the statement you are focusing on the wrong thing. I really do think the emotional context is important here and I’m not satisfied by the implication you make that therefore, Shermer should find the shroud and nessie more convincing.
It’s not the degree of unusualness of the incident itself that is the deciding factor. It’s that agreeing with the wife = satisfying her emotional need to not feel lonely and his emotional need for their wedding to be approved. It’s that elevating this incident to a vague-supernatural event in their memory makes their marriage feel more special and grounds their marital love more deeply. It’s natural for a person in this situation to experience a cognitive dissonance between how they identify themselves as a skeptic and their need to be a good husband, for this to resolve in a not-very-well-thought-out direction. I don’t think it speaks to the shallowness of his skepticism to adopt a silly belief at such an emotionally charged time. Maybe we should be cautious of his opinion on Nessie if it turns out his wife’s dad died while giving Nessie tours though.
Shermer’s other activities might be dumb as hell, sure, and your conclusion about him wanting to draw attention more than anything might be accurate. But all I’m really getting from the radio anecdote is that the guy really loves his wife and is willing to let subjectivity overwhelm rationality for it.
Saying “it rocked me back on my heels and shook my skepticism to its core” is not the same as saying “I now believe in ghosts, because a ghost haunted my wife’s radio”. Rather, I would characterize his skepticism (however insubstantial, since he endorsed Ariely) as being challenged in a way it hasn’t been challenged before, because (as Don LaFontaine used to announce) this time it’s personal.
Wonks:
I agree that Shermer’s statement is not equivalent to a statement of belief in ghosts. He’s just open to the idea. Your summary is reasonable, and it’s consistent with my point that Shermer’s statement provides evidence of the shallowness of his much-vaunted skepticism.
Again, given how familiar we all are of the stereotype of the Elmer Gantry-style non-believing cleric grifter, I don’t think we should be surprised to see some non-skeptical professional skeptics out there too.
He wrote the following a few months later:
Ever since the column appeared in Scientific American I’ve been deluged with letters. A few grumpy skeptics chided me for lowering my skeptical shields, most notably for my closing line: “And if we are to take seriously the scientific credo to keep an open mind and remain agnostic when the evidence is indecisive or the riddle unsolved, we should not shut the doors of perception when they may be opened to us to marvel in the mysterious.” I was simply trying to be a little poetic in my interpretation, which I qualified by noting “The emotional interpretations of such anomalous events grant them significance regardless of their causal account.”
https://michaelshermer.com/articles/do-anomalies-prove-gods-existence/#more-5889
Wonks:
I look forward to a future column where Shermer waxes poetic about the work of Dan Ariely.
Regarding his shtick about how we should “keep an open mind”: I discussed that general point a few years ago in a post entitled, We should be open-minded, but not selectively open-minded.
In short: if you’re gonna be open-minded, be open-minded for reals. If you’re gonna an intermittent electric appliance seriously as possible evidence for the supernatural (and, again, Shermer wrote that it “shook his skepticism to its core,” which sounds like a real statement, not just a “poetic interpretation”) than, yeah, I think the Shroud of Turin should shake your skepticism too. And if you’re gonna promote the writings of Dan Ariely, that researcher who through no fault of his own keeps ending up as a coauthor on fraudulent studies, then, yeah, there’s a whole world of supernatural claims to be endorsing. The special thing here is that Ariely is not just a scholar with the bad luck to keep getting involved with junk science; he’s also a media celebrity. That’s a great skeptical principle: don’t take supernatural claims seriously, unless they come from someone with a network TV show and a Ted talk.
I should note that I am not the just-plain “Anonymous” who wrote about Shermer’s follow-up, and I wasn’t aware of that until now. I do think his follow-up supports my interpretation though.
He claims he got lots of letters as a result of the original article. Has he gotten many about blurbing Ariely in the wake of Ariely’s fall from grace? I would expect far fewer.
The more I think about that radio story, the stranger it seems to me. I don’t begrudge anyone wanting to feel a connection to dead loved one. But, what is the ghost supposedly doing? What does it actually mean to haunt a radio? A haunted house is a house with a ghost in it. Is the ghost living in the radio? And how does it play any music from a bad radio? Is it providing power via ectoplasm somehow? If so, how does it then tune to the correct station? It can’t simply be using the radio as a speaker, because then it could just as well say “Hi, congratulations from The Great Beyond”.
The general modern “urban fantasy” story take on ghosts is that it’s very hard for them to do things in the physical world. They can sometimes manage small physical effects, like moving some air to make a noise, or briefly becoming visible. Or completely disrupt appliances which rely on electrical fields (maybe a smart ghost could try to use this effect to communicate in Morse code). Under these rules, I could see maybe a ghost who once owned a radio might be able to move a power switch which had a quirk to it – e.g., it’s finicky, don’t move it straight forward as one would tend to do, make sure to move it to the side also and jiggle it a little. Still, I’d think the ghost would want to hang around, that strikes me as such a frustrating situation (“ok, I can move this switch a little, what pattern can I do …”).