CSICON: Island of Reason in a Sea of Madness

October 31, 2024

We attended this conference in Las Vegas in late October — a gathering of about 650 humanist/atheist/skeptical science oriented rationalists.

We’d been to Vegas about 25 years before. In comparison it was almost staid and stodgy then. Now the glitz has metastasized into a phantasmagoria. The conference was at “Horseshoe,” a brobdingnagian hotel/casino/mall. On the street I saw two near-naked gals (didn’t pause to investigate; not my type). Inside, legions of people glued grimly to slot machines didn’t seem to be having fun. I felt like an E.T. there.

We happily met up with Robyn Blumner, heroic head of the Center for Inquiry, running this event, and sponsor of Secular Rescue (a program we fund, saving atheist activists from persecution in Muslim countries). And Matt Cravatta, who does the work. Robyn we hadn’t seen in person since 2018; Matt never before.

Exiting our first workshop we encountered physicist Michael Albrow, who talked with my poet wife about his forthcoming book. During that, I spotted Abhijit Chanda, who’d given a talk at our local humanist society debunking “alternative medicine” — by zoom from India! So the four of us joined for lunch. Albrow spoke of his work on dark matter and dark energy. When asked, he said he knew of Heidi Newberg, who also works on that — and lives just blocks from us. Whom we’d once run into in Beijing. Small world?

That workshop was titled “Asking Good Questions” — helpful insights for making difficult conversations less so. Basically by being nonconfrontational, listening, enabling the other to explain themselves and probing what might change their view. (I applied this later, engaging with a woman I’d overheard saying something I disagreed with.)

That evening featured Brian Cox, British physicist and rock musician (yes — with chart-topping albums). He started from Einstein’s insight that space and time are not separate things, but one, spacetime. But what’s it made of? Physicists are groping toward seeing it as something even more fundamental. Cox also spoke of the “black hole information paradox” — radiating energy, black holes ultimately shrink to nothing, annihilating what information was originally there. Where does it go? Cox suggested that a black hole’s interior and exterior are really the same. I didn’t get it (nor most of his talk).

Massimo Pigliucchi addressed how to fight pseudoscience. Citing Brandolini’s law — it takes more energy to refute bullshit than to produce it. And the brain’s cognitive biases don’t help. However, they can be overcome, not just by giving people facts, but rather (echoing the “Good Questions” workshop) through the Socratic method of asking questions, establishing trust and rapport — treating people not as enemies but as needing help.

In a similar vein, Melanie Trecek-King spoke on why we fall for misinformation. Because of our biases, emotions, personal identities. We’re not blank slates, but shaped by pattern searching, intuitive thinking, personal experiences, and received wisdom. She quoted physicist Richard Feynman: “You must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”

And David McRaney’s talk was “How Minds Change.” He said we are subject to “naive realism” — the intuition that we see the world as it really is. But in fact our brains photoshop it, disambiguating what we see. As with The Dress. Which some saw as black-&-blue, others as white-&-gold. Why? Because the lighting conditions required our brains to disambiguate. And experience — prior degree of exposure to natural light — make our brains differ in how that’s done. Something similar actually obtains when it comes to public issues, experiences shaping one’s brain to respond in a way that feels true.

Steve Novella’s talk was titled “When Skeptics Disagree.” It’s rarely simply about facts, but ideologies too. He polled the audience on several contentious issues. Notably, no one raised their hands opposing GMOs. His main focus was on sex and gender, saying it’s not just anatomy and genetics, the brain counts, and gender identity seems to be a neurological trait.

But a later speaker, Jerry Coyne, disputed the now widespread idea that sex is not binary but a spectrum, insisting that biological sex is defined by the type of gametes (eggs versus sperm) one’s anatomy is organized to produce — thus indeed binary with only very rare exceptions. And he saw no evidence for gender identity “brain modules.” Novella later responded that they were talking past each other. (It’s obvious that despite anatomical/genetic dimorphism, something about brains makes identity and behavior not so simple.)

Coyne also rejected the common trope that race is just a “social construct;” he put it in terms of ethnicity and populations, which do have many genetic differences, often evolutionarily adaptive to their local environments. That’s why 23andMe can identify one’s origins.

Several speakers addressed the “wellness” and longevity craze, actually the most powerful consumer force today, but they deemed it full of bull. Likewise the idea of the “manosphere.” And the fallacy of “naturalness” (much in nature can kill you). “Influencer” health tips are likely to be bad for you. Many hucksters out there — Gwyneth Paltrow a particular villain. And mainstream news media isn’t much help; distrusted for good reason, often in fact promoting health bunk, because that’s what readers seem to want, and journalists don’t actually know better. Other major institutions (like the WHO) now give “alternative medicine” a veneer of legitimacy. It’s reducing U.S. life expectancy.

Richard Saunders spoke about “psychic detectives.” Another thing news media often falls for. There’s no evidence that a “seer” has ever actually helped solve a case. Later, in a “mind reading” performance, Banachek kept insisting he has no “psychic powers.”

Michael Mann talked about the climate crisis, saying it’s not too late to act. But if America doesn’t lead, no one else will. And it’s anti-science forces that really threaten humanity. (I think the real problem is getting people to make sacrifices today for the benefit of hypothetical future people.)

Dan Simons showed an “invisible gorilla” video. With viewers instructed to focus on some action, blinding them to something else major. Asked who’d seen the video before, many hands went up. “You didn’t,” Simons said. Then, “how many saw the gorilla?” Many hands again. And — “how many saw the elephant?” Nobody. It was indeed a different version.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson gave the keynote performance, a barnburner. Truth a key theme. One point mentioned was how people went ballistic when traces of the chemical herbicide glyphosate were found in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Tyson noted that you’d have to eat 400 pints for it to kill you. But you’d die first from the sugar in 20 pints!

There was much more. Yes, an island of reason in a sea of madness. Tyson queried, “Is the country losing its mind?” One thing attendees weren’t polled on was Trump support. I’m pretty sure no hands would have gone up.