The Skeptic podcast, bringing you the best of the magazine’s expert analysis of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and claims of the paranormal since its relaunch as online news source in September 2020.
I have been on this quiet crusade against my own, and others’, use of AI. People have started to call me out on it by saying, “Why do you hate ChatGPT so much?” That question made me reflect on and interrogate what exactly I’m resisting. I noticed a belief I hold that AI has conservatism baked into every aspect of it.
My reluctance isn’t technophobic, I understand the power and potential of artificial intelligence, and to a degree recognise it as an extraordinary human achievement. I just find it ironic that the same humans who helped create this super-intelligent computer are the ones encouraging its use to minimise human involvement.
I believe that AI’s widespread use, especially unquestioningly welcoming it into our lives, reinforces a worldview that prioritises efficiency over nuance. In recent months, especially as I’ve watched more people around me lean on this tool, I can’t help but see its usage promote values that align disturbingly well with conservative populism – namely deference to authority, suspicion of intellectualism and individualism masquerading as empowerment.
When I try to explain this to people, I realise how conspiratorial I sound. As if I’m muttering, “This is what they want you to do,” while clutching a tinfoil hat. The ‘they’ in question is a capitalist system that rewards conformity and thrives on our desire to feel efficient and in control.
Using academia as an example, AI tools can locate articles and summarise complex texts in seconds, and what begins as a time-saving convenience quickly becomes a shortcut that bypasses the intellectual labour of learning.
I’m not proud to admit that when ChatGPT launched during my final year at university, overwhelmed by a challenging essay, I let ChatGPT write large chunks of it. I told myself it was a pragmatic choice to avoid failure. However, despite many claims that AI democratises information, I learned far less from that assignment than from the ones I struggled through myself.
What I did learn is how seductive anti-intellectualist sentiment can be when masked by language of efficiency. I could have asked my professor for help, but instead I chose the easy route, and in doing so inadvertently aligned my thinking with a mindset I believed I opposed.
It’s common for people to say they remember/learn better with writing. Image from StockSnap via Pixabay
This is where the political dimension of AI use became obvious to me. The mindset that often accompanies reliance on AI means relying on a single, centralised ‘intelligence’ to simplify complexity, rather than the more complex prospect of wrestling with conflicting viewpoints. With conservatism, and more extremely, authoritarianism, complexity is traded for clarity. The idea of “cutting through the noise” and “telling it like it is” is all over the alt-right sphere – it’s basically page one of the alt-right grifter manual.
I am no longer seeing it as much of a leap between the likes of Joe Rogan appealing to the uncomplicated everyman and the simplification and shrinking of nuance and humanity in AI. When we let AI think for us, even in small ways, we begin to erode our capacity for the messy hard work of independent thought, which leaves us open to the quick, simple fixes that the alt-right promises.
We are seeing within this right wing a rebranding of (especially the young) people on the right as more down-to-earth, ‘real’ people, speaking the common sense left behind by the rise of progressive politics. This rebrand relies on an attitude that dismiss academics as elitist and celebrates “common sense” over expertise. AI amplifies the cultural drift toward simplicity, suspicion, and submission to authority.
I think we should be cautious of the use AI for all the so-called menial thinking tasks it supposedly frees us from. I’ve seen people in my life use it for meal plans, travel itineraries, career and even moral advice. You could argue these are low-stakes uses, but they signal a willingness to outsource not just tasks, but judgement.
The paradox of right-wing rhetoric promoting ‘free thinking’ and ‘your own research’ while just parroting the same talking point is just as present in AI. It makes you think you’re making life easier, but instead it is actually decreasing your ability to make hard decisions.
We are all exhausted. Late capitalism demands constant self-optimisation, and it’s no wonder people want tools that make life easier. However, this time-saving efficiency mindset mirrors the conservative influencers that promote the importance of strict discipline and manicured, time-optimised routines aimed at squeezing maximum productivity from every day. They push the idea that output and personal growth are morally virtuous. And AI fits perfectly into that narrative, flattening individuality under the guise of self-improvement.
The irony is that with alt-right neoliberal individualism – which encourages you to see yourself less as a person and more of a project – you think only about yourself, while losing everything about yourself that makes you unique.
I can’t help but feel that every question outsourced to AI that could be thought through for yourself becomes a small step towards a gradual withdrawal from the process of living our lives. We no longer trust ourselves to make small decisions. We’re encouraged to believe that algorithms know us better than we know ourselves.
Most of the AI content online that is targeted my way features a smug young man in his bedroom, speaking on behalf of a tech company. He tells me my life is a mess, and I need an AI assistant to make every decision for me. I don’t believe these companies are directly malicious – rather they are just eager to monetise the human impulse to feel less overwhelmed. However, I do think they do so without considering long-term consequences of pushing a belief that thinking for yourself is wasteful, that slowing down is a liability, and that your intuition is an obstacle to efficiency.
The end goal, I feel, might be that the ideal human is an effortless productivity machine. The less you think, the more you can do.
AI promises a freedom from burden, but the more we depend on it, the more we become entangled in a system that thrives on disconnection. Conservative capitalism doesn’t want you to think collectively. It wants you atomised, hyper-productive, and too distracted with individualism to notice the structures holding you in place.
Conservatism, at its root, needs you to stop thinking for yourself and simultaneously to only think about yourself. And AI is such a powerful tool in allowing you to do both.
It is our responsibility to use AI as a tool for learning, not a shortcut for doing. The stakes are higher than grades or grocery lists. The more we abandon the difficult, time-consuming work of thinking critically and collaboratively, the more vulnerable we become – to authoritarianism, to populism, and to losing what makes us human in the first place.
You shouldn’t believe, at face value, anything you see on the internet. This has always been true, to some degree; fakery and deception have always flourished in the digital anonymity of the internet. Initially, that meant having a healthy skepticism of anything text based – no matter how solemnly the person swore they were a hot girl or a high-ranking military insider, you’d have been sensible to take that with a pinch of salt. Of course, not everyone took that rubric on board, which led to the proliferation of victims of catfishing romance scams and QAnon conspiracy rabbitholes. On the internet, as the old adage went, nobody knows you’re a dog.
For a while, at least, there were some indicators that could offer a little reassurance of authenticity. In the days where it took a powerful machine and a graphic design degree to operate photoshop beyond obvious levels of manipulation, photos were a fairly reliable form of corroborating evidence. Or, at least, they were a sign that your scammer was willing to put in the work to try to fool you, when most weren’t. ‘Pics or it didn’t happen’ was enough to reasonably dismiss the would-be leg-pullers and digital fantasists.
That’s not to say that every photo could be trusted; it’s not even to say that every photo without any sign of digital manipulation could be trusted. Because on the internet, there’s more than one way to skin a lolcat, and long before the first one ever met its first zero and made a baby byte, propagandists had already worked out the value of taking a very real image and attaching it to a very fake story, as a means of adding unearned legitimacy.
Inevitably, the costs of faking images fell and the skill needed to manipulate, or even create from scratch, pictorial proof became a matter of perfecting prompts to an AI tool. And so our ability to trust the images we are presented online was washed away (along with several litres of AI-wasted water).
As for video footage – moving images, associated audio, hearing things directly from the horse’s mouth – that lasted for as long as Moore’s law took to allow those photo-fakery tools to convincingly tackle video. At the moment, we’re at least 90% of the way towards AI videos so convincing even the scrupulously skeptical can’t reliably spot the difference – especially when taken out of the “can you spot if this video is faked” context and placed into a feed alongside the various things Facebook wants you to see, that is, anything but the friends and pages you actively want to see.
That said, we don’t need deep fakes and ultra-convincing AI to fool people with videos – we can simply, once again, take a real video and pretend it’s something it definitely isn’t. For example, if you visit the TikTok page of @FlatEarthAntarctica, you’ll see (at time of writing) 75 video snippets proving that the earth is not actually an oblate spheroid. Of those 75, seven feature a British speaker with a familiar face, putting forward what the TikTok account labels as evidence that “All pilots know the earth is flat”.
TikToker @flatearthantarctica’s deceptively edited video of my flat earth lecture
@FlatEarthAntarctica is so pleased with their clip of me presenting the argument that pilots know the world isn’t round, that they shared it not once, or twice, or three times, but on four separate occasions. The 20-second clip of me indicating that pilots don’t have to course-correct ‘down’ around the curve of the earth makes up 5% of the TikTok accounts output, accumulating 1.1 million views across the four clips.
That’s nothing compared to another clip the account presents, which features 23 seconds of my explanation that flat earth proponents believe that, on a spinning globe, it ought to be possible to hover above the ground in a stationary helicopter, while you wait for the earth’s rotation to bring your destination to you. That “irrefutable flat earth proof” has been viewed 1.9 million times.
Not to miss out on the engagement, over on Facebook the flat earth account “Masasa Ngonie (Truth Society)” – something of a clearing house for other people’s flat earth content – shared the helicopter clip with their followers. Twice. According to Facebook, to date it has had more than 2.7 million views on the platform.
In case it wasn’t obvious, these videos are not evidence that I have abandoned my skeptical senses and embraced the flat earth worldview. In actuality, these 20 second clips are taken from a 1 hour 45 minute lecture I gave at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, in November 2019.
In it, I explain – as I have in over 100 similar lectures – the history of the flat earth movement, from the days of Samuel Rowbotham’s “Zetetic Astronomy” pamphlet, to those same arguments resurfacing in Eric Dubay’s hugely influential “200 proofs the earth is not a spinning ball” in 2016.
The clips that have gone viral on TikTok and Facebook are from 21 minutes into the lecture, as I recount 10 of Eric Dubay’s 200 proofs. Specifically, I say:
“They say what about experts? They say if you speak to a pilot about when their plane is traveling at a cruising altitude, and they travel in a straight line. They say if a plane was genuinely travelling in a straight line, which is what pilots say is happening, if the world was curved and that was happening what you’d see is this: the plane would take off, and it would fly in a straight line off into space. So they say the only way for a plane to stay at a consistent altitude above a curved surface is if the pilot continually points the nose down to stop it flying off into space. But when you talk to pilots, they say there’s never a point in the journey where they have to start pointing the nose down towards the ground again and correct their course downwards. And this they say is because the earth isn’t curved, it’s actually flat, and when they travel, they travel in a flat line. They say what about the movement of things through the air…”
Emphasised in bold is the section selectively clipped by the flat earth engagement channels, conveniently omitting the opener, where it is clear that I am citing arguments flat earthers have made (in fact, arguments from Eric Dubay’s book, referenced by his own numbering). As for the helicopter clip, here’s the relevant section of the transcript:
“They say if a helicopter was genuinely on an earth that was traveling at a thousand miles an hour to the west, the second the helicopter lifted off the ground to hover over the same spot, the ground would move beneath it at a thousand miles an hour. And so to travel in a helicopter, all you need to do is lift up and wait for your destination to get to you, and then land again. But they say that isn’t how helicopters work, because they say the world isn’t spinning, it’s stationary, it’s flat, as the Bible tells us. They say, this is genuinely argument 113, that if the world is spherical, countries in the southern hemisphere like Australia like Brazil, they’d be upside down and people would fall off. This is the level of sophistication of their arguments.”
Once again, the selective editing omits “They say” at the start, and the end where I highlight the supposed Biblical grounding of the argument, as well as its reference in Eric Dubay’s video.
One would hope that so crude and obvious an editing job wouldn’t persuade anyone that my lecture debunking flat earth arguments was actually a sincere attempt to put forth the truth of the flat earth worldview… but as the comments made clear, a huge number of people took this video at face value. “Do these people even know how flight works”, says one commenter. “Has anybody told him that gravity exist (sic)” asks another. And “AND THIS IS WHY HE NOT A ROCKET SCIENTIST (sic)”, proclaims a third.
Over on Facebook, one commenter adds “Wow he dont know how it works 🤣 the helicopter spins with the earth as anything inside the atmosphere does..” while another commenter asks: “Maybe, just hear me out…….. the atmosphere is moving at the same speed as the ground. Does that make sense to you????”. Unsurprisingly, it does make sense to me – it’s the point I made later in the lecture the clip is misleadingly cut from:
While it is annoying to be selectively quoted out of context by pro flat earth accounts, it is ultimately harmless to me – but it does illustrate how easy it is for malicious actors to comb through footage in order to mischaracterise it, to push their agenda. Given the whole context of the lecture, and how far into the lecture these clips are taken from, it is impossible for the originator of these clips to have misrepresented me by accident – they have essentially mined the only minute and a half from a 105-minute lecture, which could be presented as in their favour.
The deception was evidently intentional, and it’s easy to see why – 3.7m views on TikTok, and 2.7m views on Facebook. Conservatively, editing four 20 second clips likely earned the originator several hundred of dollars in ad revenue. Meanwhile, the tens of thousands of commenters who shared their opinions on my intellect and my apparent failure to grasp of physics only fuelled that fire, their outrage and smug pomposity converting directly to money in the pocket of the accounts who shared the clips.
Now, more than ever, digital media literacy is of paramount importance. When you see a video on the internet, never take it at face value – especially if it provokes an emotion in you, even if that emotion is the need to highlight how stupid and idiotic the person in the clip seems to be, and how much smarter you are than them. Because, in all likelihood, rather than being the ultra-smart skeptic, you’re just falling into an engagement farmer’s lucrative trap.
As any regular users of the platform knows, Facebook advertising has become notoriously laden with pseudoscientific products making exaggerated claims. Most recently, my feed has been filled with ads for a company called Water2, showing two canisters connected beneath a sink, with sticky notes reading: “The BEST way to filter FLUORIDE and CHLORINE… Reduces 98.4% of Fluoride, 95.28% of Chlorine.”
Sponsored Facebook post showing Water2 canisters installed under a sink.
The Water2 water filters claim that, when hooked into your water supply, they’ll remove chlorine and fluoride from your water. In fact, this was an ad for the Water2 Fluoride Filter Add-On, which (as the name suggests) is an add-on product to the existing Water2 2.0 Starter Kit. If you don’t have a Water2 2.0 Starter Kit filter already, you can buy it bundled with the new Fluoride Filter for £228… or if you act now, just £199. Each filter lasts for a year, at which point it’s a £99 annual cost for a replacement capsule.
The Starter Kits seem to be popular, as small text box on the product page informs us “400+ Bought Today”. It appears to say the same thing regardless of when you visit the site – of the half dozen times I checked the site, the sales were consistently at “400+ Bought Today”. Even when I deliberately checked the site at 12.01am.
Perhaps there’s a daily midnight rush on water filters.
Screenshot of the Water2 website
Water2 explain the supposed benefit of their filtration kit:
We chlorinate our water across nearly every water system to disinfect and kill bacteria such as e.coli (definitely don’t want that) but that chlorine shouldn’t be there when we drink through that grim chemical smell.
The chemical smell of chlorine can be immediately offputting for drinkers and we see our customers transform their water immediately after installing their Water2.
Chlorine is a issue smelt and tasted by millions. But there are other contaminants that have also been found in isolated areas. Microplastics may be an emerging threat. Their presence has gone beyond plastic bottles, food and tap and they are now being found in human blood.
Lead piping still remains. Lead piping is still present in an estimated 25% of homes, despite it being illegal to be installed in new homes.
Elsewhere they explain that their regular 2.0 kit consists of a high-grade activated carbon filter made from coconut shells, which water passes through before entering their proprietary “ultrafiltration module”, which apparently has pores no wider than 0.1 microns. This, they claim, will therefore filter out 99.99% of microplastics, 99.99% of bacteria, 99.99% of parasites, 99.99% of cryptosporidium, 99.99% of asbestos, 99.99% of E. coli, 95.28% of chlorine, and 30-50% of lead.
In the UK, it is true that we do indeed use chlorine as a disinfectant in the water supply, in order to kill off bacteria. But is it the case that millions of UK tap water drinkers smell and taste chlorine in their drinking water routinely – enough at least to justify an expensive water filtration system? Not according to the Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI), a public body formed in 1990 to provide independent reassurance that public water supplies in England and Wales are safe and drinking water quality is acceptable to consumers (our sewage-laden beaches and rivers fall outside of their jurisdiction, to be clear).
The DWI audits water companies and test drinking water, and have powers of enforcement if any drinking water samples fail their tests. As you might imagine, the DWI has information available on the chlorine levels in the drinking waters of England and Wales. There’s a page dedicated to it on their website. There is even a six-minute episode of the DWI’s podcast “On Tap” all about chlorine, where the DWI’s Principle Inspector, Ashley Parker, tells host Lydia that the chlorine levels allowed in our drinking water are quite safe, and that the level of chlorine in tap water in England and Wales is far lower than other countries, like the US. Our tap water typically contains around 0.5mg or less per litre, and no more than 1mg per litre – well below the WHO stated safety level of 5mg per litre.
While chlorine levels in our drinking water are clearly safe, people might sometimes notice a slight taste of chlorine, due to occasional maintenance works on water pipes, which might mean a little more chlorine gets through to the tap rather than being filtered out earlier. The DWI advises that, if you notice a new or strong taste of chlorine, you should contact the water company immediately, as it might be a sign that something is wrong. Still, if you happen to be particularly sensitive to the taste of chlorine at minute levels, you might think a water filter isn’t a terrible idea – it’s up to you whether you think the cost of having one fitted to your pipes is worthwhile.
What about the other pollutants on the Water2 filter list? 99.99% of bacteria, 99.99% of parasites, 99.99% of cryptosporidium and 99.99% of E. coli. This list inevitably implies that UK drinking water is otherwise filled or plagued with their presence – which, again, is not the case. According to the DWI:
Water companies must assess the risk of Cryptosporidium in its water sources, and design and continuously operate a water treatment process to remove the parasite or render it inactive. This is a regulatory requirement, and failure to comply is an offence.
If there is Cryptosporidium in your tap water, that’s a matter for the authorities, not a reason to splash out on an expensive water filter. Similarly, our drinking water by regulation has to be free from E. coli, and when it comes to bacteria, we use chlorine to get rid of before it got to your tap – that’s why the chlorine is there. The good news is that in each of the last three years of available results, 99.98% of samples tested passed the test for absence of microbiology, 99.96% had an absence of unwanted chemicals, and 100% of all samples were free from traces of pesticides. In 2020, of 134,730 samples taken, and traces of E. coli were found in just 11.
Equally, when it comes to other measures, 99.6% of samples met the standards for levels of lead, 99.83% met the standard for iron, and 99.86% met the standards for taste. We have very clean, safe drinking water here in England and Wales – and the same can doubtless be said for Scotland and Northern Ireland, whose waters are evaluated by their relevant regulatory bodies.
On the subject of lead, it’s not a huge reassurance that Water2 claims to remove 30-50% of lead levels, given how problematic lead contamination is. If there are levels of lead in your tap water, the solution isn’t a filter that reduces it by a third, it’s to have your pipes examined.
Water2 talks of removing 99.99% of asbestos from drinking water, which, once again, implies that there’s an abundance of asbestos in drinking water that must therefore pose a threat to our health. It is true that there are some asbestos fibres in drinking water – the UK government cites the WHO’s assessment that “the concentration of which varies between non-detectable and one million fibres per litre” – but studies have shown that there’s no evidence it causes harm. Asbestos is harmful when inhaled, because of the effects on the interior of the lungs, but that doesn’t then automatically mean it’s just as harmful when ingested in minute amounts. According to the report:
Although well studied, there has been little convincing evidence of the carcinogenicity of ingested asbestos in epidemiological studies of populations with drinking water supplies containing high concentrations of asbestos. Moreover in extensive studies in laboratory species, asbestos has not consistently increased the incidence of tumours of the gastrointestinal tract. There is therefore no consistent evidence that ingested asbestos is hazardous to health and thus it was concluded that there was no need to establish a health-based guideline value for asbestos in drinking water.
On their site, Water2 somewhat glosses over these issues, saying: “We are always told the UK has amazing water, but what about the times where this isn’t true? Over 100,000 homes now opt for a Water2 filter.”
It may well be the case that 100,000 homes opted to buy Water2’s water filter, but that isn’t evidence that they did so because their water quality wasn’t amazing – it may well be because they saw an ad telling them that, without a water filter, they’ll be ingesting E. coli and asbestos. That 100,000 figure is interesting, however, given they claim to sell more than 400 units per day… and they’ve been selling them for more than 250 days.
Prominently on the Water2 homepage is a map of the the UK on their homepage, alongside the text:
We’re always told about how great our water is, but here are cases where it’s not.
Whilst the UK has a relatively high sample pass rate, there are still issues up and down the country relating to bacteria, burst pipes, microplastics and much more. Just look at your area!
Screenshot of Water2’s interactive map of ‘water quality issues’
Each of the points on their clickable graphic (reproduced here) links to one of 13 tap water issues faced by residents around the UK, suggesting that the UK’s tap water supply is inherently unsafe. However, of the 13 highlighted incidents, one relates to an issue where fuel from a backup generator for a pumping station spilled into the water supply, giving the water an oily taste. It is unclear how effective the Water2 filter would have been in coping with this, but it was also an isolated incident that the water supplier was mandated to fix swiftly and provide alternative supply during the outage – it is hardly justification for an expensive home filtration system.
Worse still, three of the 13 highlighted issues (a 2022 incident from Severn Trent Water, and 2023 incidents from Trent Water and Bristol Water) related to periods where the water supply was disrupted due to leaks and outages. How a water filtration system is meant to be beneficial in the absence of a water supply is something Water2 doesn’t explain.
The remaining nine incidents in the list are indeed cases of water contamination… which were identified by the DWI or other regulators, and in some cases resulted in fines for the water companies. These are not examples of the routine need for water filters. The whole map feels uncomfortably like opportunism and scaremongering.
According to their website, Water2 was founded in 2020 by Charles Robinson, a philosophy student who “dropped out of university to work with his professors to fix the UK’s tap water crisis”. Again, it’s important to ask: what tap water crisis? The UK’s tap water supply is clean, safe and well regulated, and even the incidents highlighted by Water2 aren’t compelling cases for an expensive at-home solution. It is almost as if the motivation here is not safety, but marketing… or, as Robinson explains:
I started thinking about water filters in 2020 and realised something: it was a really blurred category. I could only name one brand, but how many water brands can you think of? At least ten.
This is not Robinson’s first business – he founded Gelcard, a company that was set up in April 2020 to offer “The Premium Hand Sanitiser Experience”. A month into the pandemic – at a time when hand sanitiser was at the top of our mind, even if stocks on supermarket shelves were selling out – Gelcard was “dedicated to hygiene innovation through brand collaboration and user experience obsession”. They sell – or possibly used to sell – single-dose hand sanitiser in credit card-sized disposable pouches… and, a few years ago, Robinson was explaining the need to deal with microplastics in the water supply.
Robinson isn’t in the water business alone. According to the Water2 homepage:
Bear Grylls, officially customer #8420, invested in Water2 earlier this year. The survival hero personally funded and co-led the development of Pod 2.0. Regularly sitting in on product meetings and supporting growth, he’s a hands-on Co-Owner determined to change how the World drinks.
To illustrate how hands-on in the business Bear Grylls is, Water2 features him holding and pointing to what is presumably a box of Water2 filters, while drenched in water. It is unclear whether Bear in the photo is still wet from the time he baptised his friend and accused rapist Russell Brand.
Screenshot of Water2’s description of their Co-Owner and customer number 8,420, Bear Grylls
Grylls, who once sated his thirst by squeezing the juice out of elephant dung and slurping it down, made the comments while working with Water2 — a UK company that sells £129 filters that has previously got itself in hot water after being sanctioned by the Advertising Standards Authority.
Unsurprisingly, Water2 and Gelcard have been sanctioned for their advertising in the past. In May 2024, they sent out an email to their marketing list with the subject line “UPDATE: It’s gotten worse”, the body of which read:
100 people have fallen ill in Devon now. We can’t standby [sic] and watch this happen. […] We have made Water2 just £99 today. USE CODE: URGENT at checkout […] Every home in the UK needs a water filter. We have built a 30,000+ strong community of people brave enough to oppose UK tap water. This event is it, the day where everyone understands that we were right all along. UK tap water is broken. Please protect yourself with a filter. Again, just £99 with the code URGENT Stay safe and please drink filtered water. We’ll speak soon. Team Water2.
The ASA examined the ad and concluded “the urgent tone and alarmist language conveyed the impression that drinking unfiltered tap water was a health risk”, which they felt was “likely to cause fear and distress that was not justified”.
It’s not the only ad of Water2’s to wind them in hot water, filtered or otherwise. A quick search of the Facebook Ad Library shows that in March 2024, Water2 had an ad removed by Facebook for failing to declare it was a paid for ad. The ad is titled “A shocking Truth” and featured the text:
“UK tap water is broken… ❌ Forever chemicals ❌ Microplastics ❌ Lead ❌ Chlorine ❌ Hormones. All swimming around in our water.”
Accompanying the ad is a video of Charles Robinson himself, explaining that “in the last couple of weeks, everyone’s been talking about this photo”… referring to the photo released of Kate Middleton with her children around the time of her cancer diagnosis. That is the photo Charles chose to use in his water filter advert. The video continues:
everyone’s been talking about this photo, and about how maybe we can’t trust the royal family, and they’ve been covering up different health issues. It’s got me thinking… do the royal family drink the same tap water that we’re told is the best in the world? So I thought let me do some research, and the results I found are actually shocking.
Charles then highlights a Telegraph article about how Barack Obama was told not to drink the tap water at Buckingham Palace, and a Daily Express article about how the royal family prefer bottle water to tap water, and therefore if those in power and the billionaires don’t drink tap water, you should buy a water filter… from Water2.
I have no reason to think that Water2 filters don’t filter water perfectly well – if you want to drink filtered water because you prefer it, that’s a choice you’re welcome to make. However, in my opinion, their marketing practices are not so clean and clear – from questionable partnerships with celebrity endorsements, to nodding towards conspiracies and billionaire coverups, to scaremongering about the alleged dangers of drinking tap water.
Tap water in the UK is some of the cleanest and safest in the world, and no amount of trawling by Water2 for news of water supply issues should scare you into thinking you need to fit an expensive filter for the good of your health.
This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 5, Issue 5, from 1991.
Many nice, intelligent middle class people have no religious beliefs, but are strangely protective of other people’s. ‘But don’t you respect other people’s beliefs?’ they say, ‘Surely if illusions bring comfort you shouldn’t interfere?’ When Marx called religion ‘opium’ he didn’t mean it in a pejorative sense, he meant it was something like valium. His remark is always quoted out of context – what he said was ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people’.
The spiritualist church in Homsey looks like a superior scout hut. The sign outside lists the ten precepts of Christian spiritualism, including the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, personal responsibility, the continuance of the human spirit, retribution after death, but the possibility of progress for everyone. Inside the atmosphere is warm, with many potted plants, pictures by Margaret W. Tarrant, wood-effect wallpaper and a carpeted sanctuary. The congregation on a Sunday evening is small. There is a low murmur of conversation. Somehow, it is easier to relax in a roomful of strangers than it is to meditate, for the good of one’s health, alone in one’s room. No one can deny that religions have social benefits, even if it’s only tea afterwards. A man comes out of the vestry and installs himself behind the lectern. He seems about 55, moustached, tieless. He speaks with an accent which could be Polish. He announces a hymn (Blest are the Poor in Heart) and sets off singing, after a count of three in a wavering tenor. There is no organ, and we are led, informally, by a girl in the congregation with a strong tuneful voice.
The officiator introduces the medium, a lady of about 60 in trousers and a mauve and jade cardigan. The only divergence from ordinariness is the ankh hanging from her necklace. Her introductory talk sketches in the beliefs of spiritualism (newcomers are asked to raise their hands). The afterlife sounds like this one, only better. The spirits have everything they want. The body is a ‘physical coat’ that we wear on the ‘earth plane’. After death we will meet ‘loved ones who have passed’. The spirit world, not this one, is the real world (which seems counter-intuitive).
The old-fashioned homeliness of her address is attractive, there is no New Age jargon. Spiritualists are divided about reincarnation, but personally she believes it. We come here to receive lessons. (But if everything that happens to us in this life is a corrective lesson based on our past life, how do our lessons intersect with everybody else’s? And if we deserve people’s bad actions towards us, how can the perpetrators be punished? It sounds like an administrative nightmare for someone). There are seven planes of existence but ‘ordinary people like us’ end up in the third plane, Summerland.’ There is nothing ethereal about it, our spiritual bodies will seem solid. (This is having your dualism and eating it!).
It’s time for the clairvoyance: ‘Don’t think about what you want me to tell you, because that will block me.’ A collection plate is passed round. Briskly, the performance starts. ‘I want to come to you,’ she points to two middle aged women who had confessed to being newcomers. The first two names she mentions, Charlie and Frank, are not claimed. They are the names of two of my uncles, both dead. I am tempted to claim them, but too shy. ‘A lady called Dolly who is what you call dead. Do you take Dolly, please? The dark-haired woman who is dignified and soft-spoken, denies knowing Dolly. An Annie ‘a big lady, big here, you know what I mean’ is also not recognised. ‘That’s what I’m hearing. She’s saying you have burned your bridges, but not to regret.’ She then offers them three anniversaries, which could be of a wedding, a birthday, a ‘passing’. For two she just names a month; for the third she names June 12, and gets the response ‘yes’. This sets the pattern for her interactions with the congregation. She uses stereotyped gestures rather like sign language. The dead are behind her. She points to parts of her body to indicate ailments (There’s a lady called Florrie, can you take her? She passed with her heart, but I’m getting that she kept going till the end’.)
She turns to ‘listen’ to the spirits. Names are dateable, the spirits who bring messages to an elderly lady in the front row are Martha, Ethel, Gladys. After casting around for a name that is recognised, she gives a sentence or two of banal advice, in the Russell Grant class. Her benign folksiness has been replaced by a much more aggressive manner. She wants the answer ‘yes’. She closes each encounter by offering three ‘anniversaries’, a technique which ensures a hit (who can think of a month of the year which doesn’t have a sister’s cousin’s niece’s birthday in it?).
‘I’d like to come to you, the newcomer lady at the back there’. She tells me to uncross my legs, because ‘I’m full of wires’. Do I know the name of Slater? I say yes (I know a Lizzie Slater). She then talks about grandparents, one from each side of the family (none called Slater). I smile and say ‘Yes, I see’ a lot, trying not to give away too much. My grandparents tell me not to change my career or course of study, as I was thinking of doing (I wasn’t). ‘And post that letter! I don’t recognise the names Kathy or Anne, but I am told to ‘hold on to them’ and ask my mother. Links with America are suggested, and it’s predicted I will go there in the next three years (I really must post that letter to my friend in Ecuador, where I am going in the summer. Does South America count?)
A dark-skinned man sitting alone is singled out (‘I keep getting Singapore’). All his family who are in spirit are surrounding him with loving thoughts and one of them is wearing a beautiful sari. They tell him he plans to travel to many countries. ‘Not exactly’ he says. A youngish pretty woman in a fringed suede miniskirt is asked if Dad is in spirit. She says she doesn’t know. The medium sees a great cold gap between her father and mother. ‘I have to tell you that he is in spirit. The name Taylor isn’t recognised, but it is rapidly changed to a man who used to make tailor-made costumes, who brings the message ‘Don’t let your head be turned by flattery’. The medium picks out a lady, ‘Or is it a gentleman?’ at the back. Another newcomer. Unruffled, this woman consistently denies that any of her friends or relatives had anything wrong with their eyes, though the same questions are asked more than once: ‘It’s your mother, then? I’m not going to take it back’. The spirits tell her that ‘all is taken care of, all will be well. Does that make sense? Nothing makes sense to me – Iam just the telephone’.
When a man can’t place an Arthur with lung trouble, the medium explains ‘there are so many coming, I get confused’. He is told: ‘Don’t be sorry. You did the right thing. They will come back and apologise’. The officiator gets up and thanks the medium for her clairvoyance, reads some notices (healing is on Tuesdays and Fridays at 6pm) and offers tea for those who want to stay. We stand and sing a moving and beautiful hymn called ‘O Love that Wilt Not Let Me Go’ The two women who initially denied knowing Charlie, Frank, Dolly and Annie precede me out of the building. Once outside, the dark-haired woman bursts into tears, saying in a broken voice ‘I’ve never-never…’ I assume that she has been bereaved, and is crying because she has never had a message from the dead person. The implications of Marx’s famous ‘opium’ remark are further changed by the rest of the passage:
‘The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that demands illusions.’
I don’t respect people’s beliefs, I respect people. I respect people too much to respect their beliefs. I want them to really have what they want, not an illusion, because an illusion is fragile, and in any case doesn’t deliver the goods. Quite Justifiably people want to be reunited with their loved ones; want eternal life, youth, health and beauty. They can’t have these things, but they could at least have a functioning National Health Service.
Nice middle-class people are also fond of saying that ‘we’ need a sense of mystery, of wonder. There are things we need more: enough to eat, love and affection, a just society.
Technologies and philosophy are critical elements in teaching and learning in schools. At a time of so much concern over artificial intelligence, robotics and other emerging technologies, it is pertinent to explore how machines can transform, enhance or hamper doing philosophy with children in Africa. Our ‘questionstorm’ project in Nigeria can highlight this intersection, and its impact on teaching and learning in the region.
I came about the term questionstorm in an attempt to step down doing philosophy for and with children in primary schools in Nigeria. Unlike in Europe, philosophy for children is not offered in schools in Nigeria and in most parts of the continent. While I am committed to fostering philosophical inquiry and critical thinking in primary and secondary schools in the region, I am exploring ways to realise this project and make philosophy for children fun and entertaining for elementary schoolers.
I studied philosophy for my first and second degrees, but until recently I was not fascinated by the idea of doing philosophy with children. I did not find P4C appealing, because I thought philosophy was for adults only; that children were too young to engage in philosophical inquiry. But I was mistaken.
I rediscovered philosophy, this time for children, in my efforts to fix what I thought was wrong with the school system in Nigeria. The educational system puts too much emphasis on memorisation and rote learning, on reading and reproducing what other people, teachers and authors have thought or written. Learning is largely passive and teacher centered. Schooling is more of a cut-and-paste, memorise-and-reproduce process. Schools mainly turn out students and learners who cannot reason on their own, exert their independent minds, think outside the box, or think with others.
There is a lack of critical thinking or inquiry-based learning in schools and, by extension, in Nigerian society. Meanwhile, the national policy on education aims to foster critical and reflective thinking in primary schools, but there is no subject in primary or secondary schools that encourages inquiry-based learning. To change how children think and learn, how they are taught and educated, philosophy for children is operationalised as questionstorm.
Questionstorm entails asking and generating questions in all areas of human endeavour. The intelligence of students is tested and measured not in the production or reproduction of answers, but in challenging assumptions and existing knowledge, in interrogating and disputing issues and experiences. Knowledge is assessed based on the ability and capacity to exert and express curiosity and inquisitiveness. Children are taught to think in terms of questions.
At elementary schools, students are learning to form words and construct sentences. So in philosophy for children lessons, they are taught formation of words and phrases that could be used to interrogate ideas. Then they are taught to use these words and phrases to ask simple or complex questions, general and specific, referential, conditional, rhetoric questions – in the past, present, or future, in the negative or positive forms.
In addition, students are taught some questional approaches, including question-to-question, question-to-answer, and quiz-questional approaches. In question-to-question approach, students are taught to reply to questions with questions. In everyday life it is considered rude or impolite to respond to questions with questions, but in philosophy for children, this habit is a mark of intelligence, and knowledge.
Students are made to understand that some questions are vague or not sensible, and questions could be asked to seek clarifications. For example. Who is sitting in the garden? In response, someone could ask: “Which garden?”, or “Are you sure someone is sitting in the garden?”.
In the question-to-answer approach, children are taught to respond to answers with questions. For instance, to this answer: “He lives in Malta”, one could ask: “Why does he live in Malta?”, “In which part of Malta does he live?”, “How long has he lived there?”, and “Are you sure he lives in Malta?”.
Students are made to understand that some answers may be vague, wrong, incorrect or mistaken. And questions could be asked to correct, seek clarity or better comprehension. The goal is to train children to think in terms of questions, not answers, when they find themselves in situations where they are asked questions or are provided with answers. In carrying out these exercises, teachers or instructors are encouraged to provide students hints or helpful tips to help the generation of questions. Students can use their computers and laptops to generate questions in response to questions, and questions in response to answers.
Furthermore, there is a quiz questional approach. This is a form of question-to-answer approach, but in this case there is a right or ‘correct’ question. And students are trained to generate the right question. Teachers and instructors provide core and peripheral hints to enable students to ask the right questions. This approach proceeds as follows: an answer or a response is provided, and students are told to guess the correct question. The quiz questional approach is the mechanism for organising critical thinking competitions for students and pupils.
These exercises have illustrated that students think and can think in terms of questions; that students can be coexaminers and co interrogators of issues and experiences. That intelligence can be measured based on expressed critical and interrogative capacities.
In conclusion, philosophy for children is delivered as a questionstorm, an exercise in inquiry, interrogation and examination of issues. Technologies constitute enhancers and enablers of philosophical abilities. Machines facilitate autonomy in the exercise of curiosity and inquisitiveness. Technological applications help students inquire, probe, practice and apply with relative freedom the various questional approaches. They foster an exercise of critical thinking sentiments in ways that guarantee some agency and independence, freeing children from undue control by teachers, parents and guardians.
However, access to technology is uneven. Digital divide applies within and across regions. Some children are more technologically advantaged than others. Many schools lack power, internet access, and computers or tablets. While some children live and school in rural areas where there is limited technological access and connection, others live and study in urban areas where children have a better access to technologies.
This digital divide implies some thinking, questioning, and interrogative difference; some variation in abilities and capacities to technoquestionstorm and philosophically inquire. How African governments and people manage this gap, their ability to narrow it, will determine the transformative impact and possibilities of philosophy for children in the region in the years ahead.
The Skeptic podcast, bringing you the best of the magazine’s expert analysis of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and claims of the paranormal since its relaunch as online news source in September 2020.
Since the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949, China has maintained a fundamentally hostile stance toward religion, rooted in the promotion of state atheism and Marxist ideology. This has manifested in systematic campaigns of persecution against religious groups that the government perceives as threatening, such as Falun Gong – subject to mass arrests, torture, and forced labour since 1999 – and Uyghur Muslims, who face mass detention, surveillance, forced assimilation, and severe restrictions on religious practice. Even for religious communities deemed more tolerable, such as officially recognised Buddhist or Christian groups, the state insists on strict control, exemplified by its attempts to designate Catholic bishops and, most prominently, to assert authority over the succession of Tibetan lamas.
The Chinese government’s hostile approach to religion has led to many tragic stories, with one of the most poignant being the case of Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, a six-year-old boy recognised by the Dalai Lama in 1995 as the 11th Panchen Lama – a key figure in Tibetan Buddhism. Just days after his recognition, Chinese authorities forcibly disappeared Gedhun and his family, and they have not been seen or heard from since, making Gedhun one of the world’s youngest political prisoners. In a calculated effort to assert control over Tibetan Buddhism and undermine the Dalai Lama’s influence, the government then named its own Panchen Lama, Gyaincain Norbu, attempting to legitimise his authority with orchestrated trips abroad and public appearances. However, Tibetan Buddhists widely reject his status, remaining unconvinced of his legitimacy and steadfast in their support for the missing Gedhun Choekyi Nyima.
Tensions are mounting as the Dalai Lama approaches his 90th birthday this weekend, with widespread concern that the Chinese government may attempt to manipulate the selection of his successor in much the same way it did with the Panchen Lama. The apprehension is rooted in China’s repeated assertions that it holds the exclusive right to approve the reincarnation of Tibetan religious leaders, including the Dalai Lama, and its demonstrated willingness to install its own candidates to legitimise its control over Tibetan Buddhism. This has led many Tibetans and international observers to fear that, following the Dalai Lama’s death, Beijing could use its influence to appoint a successor who would serve its political interests.
In response to these concerns, the Dalai Lama has taken the unprecedented step of declaring in his most recent book, Voice for the Voiceless, that his successor will be born outside China – in what he calls the “free world” – to prevent the Chinese government from controlling the next Dalai Lama. On Wednesday, he elaborated further on his succession plan as part of events around his birthday on July 6th, signalling a clear rejection of Beijing’s claims over the process. Previously, the Dalai Lama had raised the possibility that the institution of the Dalai Lama itself could end with him, a move that would be aimed at preventing the office from being co-opted by Chinese authorities and preserving the integrity of Tibetan spiritual tradition.
The debate over the Dalai Lama’s succession is rooted in a long-standing dispute about the proper method for recognising his reincarnation. Historically, Tibetan Buddhists have relied on a process guided by spiritual signs, oracles, visions and tests to identify a child with precocious spiritual knowledge who is believed to be the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation; this method is led by senior monks and oracles and is considered sacred and authoritative within Tibetan tradition.
In contrast, the Chinese government asserts that the 1793 “Imperially Approved Ordinance for Better Governance of Tibet” mandates the use of the Golden Urn – a ceremonial lottery where names of candidates are drawn from a golden urn, with final approval required from Beijing – to ensure state control over the process. While the Golden Urn has been used for some Dalai Lamas and Panchen Lamas since the late 18th century, it was often bypassed when spiritual signs were considered unequivocal, and Tibetan Buddhists generally reject the idea that the Chinese state has the right to dictate the process.
Many Western governments have taken significant steps to support Tibetan claims, openly criticising China’s intent to use the Golden Urn and expressing disdain for Beijing’s interference in what they view as a spiritual and internal matter for Tibetan Buddhists. As skeptics, we can certainly sympathise with the Tibetan people as the oppressed group, recognising their right to preserve their own traditions and resist external imposition. However, at its core, this is a dispute that requires taking sides in what is, frankly, an absurd debate. The entire controversy hinges on the assumption that the Dalai Lama will be reincarnated – a metaphysical proposition that simply does not make sense. While the political and human rights issues at stake are real and important, the underlying premise of the succession – the belief in reincarnation – remains an extraordinary claim that lacks empirical foundation.
At first glance, the Tibetan method of identifying the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation appears more credible than the Golden Urn lottery. Rather than leaving the selection to chance – a process that ought to be dismissed as mere superstition akin to ancient oracles – the Tibetan approach involves a seemingly rigorous, multi-layered investigation: senior monks subject candidates to tests of spiritual knowledge and recognition of personal items from the previous Dalai Lama. This process gives the impression of empirical grounding, as the chosen child often demonstrates remarkable familiarity with the life and possessions of his predecessor, which might suggest a deeper, if not mystical, connection.
The phenomenon of children claiming to remember past lives is precisely the sort of thing that psychiatrist Ian Stevenson investigated in great detail throughout his career, gathering thousands of cases worldwide where young children described details of allegedly past lives, sometimes with birthmarks or behaviours that eerily matched those of deceased individuals. However, skeptics have long debunked such claims, pointing out that many cases rely on confirmation bias, unreliable testimony, or even outright fraud, with children sometimes being coached or influenced by family members eager to believe in reincarnation – and perhaps make a buck.
Tibetan methods for identifying the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation, such as asking children to choose objects belonging to the previous Dalai Lama, are open to similar objections; senior monks could subtly – or not so subtly – guide children toward the “correct” choice, or children could be influenced by the ideomotor effect, unconsciously responding to subtle and unconscious cues from those around them. This is one reason the Chinese eventually favoured the Golden Urn, as a supposedly more transparent way to avoid corruption – though, of course, that method is not without its own problems.
The only way to even begin to consider the Tibetan methods as remotely reliable would be to conduct a rigorously blinded trial, but, as you might expect, the monks are not exactly following double-blind protocols or peer-reviewed scientific procedures – they are simply repeating practices rooted in medieval tradition.
Even if we were to grant that a child can identify objects or recall details about the Dalai Lama’s life that seem otherwise inexplicable, this still does not resolve the fundamental philosophical problems with the idea of reincarnation. The core issue is personal identity: our sense of self is most reliably grounded in the continuity of our bodies and conscious experiences, and many philosophers argue that bodily continuity is the superior criterion for identity because the body is unique and cannot be duplicated; identity follows the body in a way that is both observable and verifiable. In contrast, psychological continuity – such as memories or character traits – can be ambiguous and even duplicated, as seen in cases where more than one child claims to be the reincarnation of the same individual; if we accept such claims, it would imply – on account of transitivity – that the children are not separate persons, which is absurd.
Crucially, neurological evidence – like the fact that injuries to specific brain regions can dramatically alter personality, memory, and even fundamental aspects of consciousness – shows that our minds are not separate from our brains. This supports the idea that the mind depends entirely on the brain and body, and there is no independent “soul” that could survive death or transfer to another body.
There’s also the classic “growing population” puzzle that tends to crop up in any discussion of reincarnation. When the current Dalai Lama was born in 1935, the world’s population was about 2 billion; by the time his successor is chosen, there will be over 8 billion people on the planet. So, where did all these new souls come from? Are we to imagine a cosmic waiting room, packed with spiritual newcomers, all jostling for a chance at a human birth?
This objection is a favourite among skeptics and armchair philosophers, and it does highlight the oddity of trying to square reincarnation with demographic reality. However, in fairness, reincarnationists have developed a variety of creative explanations: some propose that souls migrate from other realms or life forms, while others suggest that new souls are continuously created. Whatever the solution, though, it is plainly ad-hoc and seemingly desperate, amounting to a far-fetched patch rather than a genuinely convincing way forward.
The Dalai Lama deserves real credit for his modernizing stance and openness to science, as shown by his willingness to engage in dialogue with scientists, encourage scientific education among monks, and even state that Buddhist beliefs should yield to scientific evidence if conclusively disproven. This is a refreshing contrast to many religious leaders and has helped foster a more nuanced conversation between Buddhism and modern science.
However, it’s important to recognise that many in the West have hyped the Dalai Lama far beyond what is warranted, sometimes casting him as a beacon of modernity when, in reality, he remains deeply rooted in traditional beliefs and practices. Yes, Buddhism has its merits – it is often less dogmatic and historically less violent than the Abrahamic faiths, and as Robert Wright points out in Why Buddhism Is True, it offers valuable insights into moral psychology. But at the end of the day, Buddhism is still layered with irrational elements, especially regarding metaphysical claims like reincarnation. When these irrational beliefs become entangled with politics, the results can be tragic, as seen in the 1995 kidnapping of the Panchen Lama.
I sincerely hope the Tibetan people achieve their liberation, but I also hope that, as their political consciousness matures, they will look to rational principles for guidance – rather than relying on ancient superstitions about souls migrating from one body to another.
