Home Blog Page 30

The graveyard of skeptical projects suggests it’s funding, not talent, that we’re lacking

Jonathan Jarry
-
0
The graveyard of skeptical projects suggests it’s funding, not talent, that we’re lacking

Skepticism is not profitable. While entire industries have been built on the exploitation of our cognitive biases, advocates for skepticism struggle to eke out a living. A handful of magazines, started early enough that competition for eyeballs was more limited, have survived, but many other promising ventures aimed at instilling scientific skepticism succumbed to premature deaths.

These projects rarely get obituaries. Rather, they are felled by market forces and disappear in silence. We often learn about their demise by accident. I casually mentioned one of these projects to a journalist I interviewed for this article and she had no idea. “Bad Science Watch had to fold??” she asked, followed by a swear word that indicated the kind of surprised-not-surprised sentiment all-too-common these days. “It just slipped away like so many others….”

Skeptical communities are quick to celebrate their success stories: the people whose names everyone knows, the podcasts that have been around for a decade or two, the yearly events that still draw hundreds of people. Recognising triumph is important. But there is also value in shining a light on promising skeptical non-profits, YouTube channels, and websites which had to end because the money wasn’t there. To anyone interested in building a sustainable presence within skepticism, there are lessons to be learned about the limits of volunteerism, the expectations of charitable foundations, and who exactly cares about facts, truth, and journalism in this day and age.

We have the talent. But where is the money?

Quiet pandemic deaths

Bad Science Watch was an independent non-profit consumer watchdog in Canada whose aims was to advocate for good science and counter the kind of bad science that impacted the lives of Canadians. You can’t access its website anymore, because in the early days of the pandemic, donations dropped off and volunteers started leaving the organisation. Expenditures were greater than donations, so its executive director, Ryan Armstrong, decided to pull the plug. The actual projects pursued by Bad Science Watch were attractive to volunteers. But the day-to-day operations needed to keep the group afloat? Less so.

Armstrong graduated with a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering, and while he was in grad school, he came across an advert for a local event. It featured a chiropractor who was claiming to manage cancer through various alternative therapies. There were even radio adverts urging parents to bring their children to the chiropractor’s clinic if they had cancer. “I just found this so repulsive,” Armstrong tells me. In digging into chiropractic, he discovered that this was a well-funded machine whose regulatory college seemed lenient, to the detriment of the public. “It felt like I was unravelling an elaborate conspiracy of sorts.” He reached out to many journalists and was shocked to find they had no real interest in writing about a pseudoscientific practitioner claiming to help with cancer. He turned his attention to local advocacy groups and discovered Bad Science Watch.

He first joined as a contributor and later took over as its executive director, never receiving any money for it. One of the major accomplishments of Bad Science Watch was to systematically document unauthorised claims made by manufacturers of natural health products, a project which would go on to receive a fair amount of press coverage. But in 2020, as bills accumulated and Armstrong was injecting his own money into the organisation to keep it alive, he decided to shutter Bad Science Watch. He is now on “a bit of hiatus” from skepticism, working as a cybersecurity specialist.

The story of the quiet pandemic death of Bad Science Watch reminds me of another, south of the Canadian border: Sense About Science USA. An offshoot of the UK’s own Sense About Science, it was run by Trevor Butterworth in a tiny space at the back of a cookie store in Brooklyn in order to keep overheads to the barest of minimums. He didn’t get free cookies, but he negotiated for free espressos, he tells me with a smile. “I didn’t abuse that either because baristas need tips.” On the organisation’s website, under the header “New,” a post from 2020, the year the non-profit was shut down. Butterworth had big plans, he says, as well as intellectual backing and a growing influence in the media, but the funders had lost interest.

In 2014, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation was interested in issues of reproducibility in the sciences. The Arnolds were drawn to the AllTrials campaign, whose goal was to improve transparency in the clinical trials that were run so that negative findings were no longer buried to skew the literature in favour of pharmaceuticals. They wanted to fund an American arm of the campaign, and Butterworth was approached. A journalism graduate hailing from Ireland, Butterworth had always been interested in philosophical questions close to a skeptic’s heart: what do we mean by evidence? by validity? by truth? Looking for a job after graduation, he landed at the Center for Media and Public Affairs (then independent, now at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia), creating for them a daily website on media criticism in 1999. Essentially, fact-checking before fact-checking was cool. In what would turn out to be foreshadowing for Sense About Science USA, the funder for the project grew dissatisfied and pulled his money. A tiny project with minimal funding, Butterworth tells me, couldn’t exactly change America.

But when, years later, he would get funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to spearhead Sense About Science USA and work on the AllTrials campaign in the United States, Butterworth also saw it as a way to fold in the important work he had been involved in after leaving the Center for Media and Public Affairs. He had been in charge of STATS, a project to explain how statistics were used and abused in the news media. Now, Sense About Science USA could also run STATS and help journalists improve their numeracy. The organisation’s accomplishments include working with the Library of Congress and giving seminars “on both sides of the aisle” on the importance of data, as well as delivering workshops to journalists to look at stories through the eyes of a statistician. “We ran one in D.C. at the American Geophysical Union,” he says, “and they ended up booting us out because it went on way past closing. The journalists had so many questions!”

So why did Sense About Science USA quietly disappear? “We hadn’t delivered a wow on AllTrials,” Butterworth explains, “so they said, we’re not really interested in improving journalists’ understanding of statistics. How ironic, with COVID a few years away.” He has since learned that the kind of outcomes they were looking to achieve requires many more years and a lot more money. He looked for other sources of funding but couldn’t find anybody who wanted to invest in the infrastructure of a nonprofit, i.e. its basic operational costs. Going after an outcome is sexy, but paying rent and employees’ salaries isn’t. He got hired as a consultant on the side and put some of that money back into the organisation to keep it going, much like Ryan Armstrong had done for Bad Science Watch. But COVID hit and consultancies dried up. Sense About Science USA was silently buried in early 2020.

Skepticism as a public good

Unless you are involved in skeptical outreach in your spare time and do it for fun, money tends to become an issue. The fact that everyone at Bad Science Watch (including its director) was volunteering certainly kept costs down, but there were legal fees, accounting fees, web hosting, as well as the cost to remain registered as a nonprofit in Canada. When the results of their project on the unauthorised claims made for natural health products were ready to be publicised, they paid a public relations company a few hundred dollars for a press release. These kinds of expenses added up and Bad Science Watch was solely reliant on donations: no corporate funding, no ads. When major events like the COVID-19 pandemic shake up the economy, donations can stop and the organisations dependent on them face tough choices.

There is a different funding model, what legacy media has famously relied on: advertising. This was the model behind Truth or Fiction?, a fact-checking website which was briefly managed by Brooke Binkowski. It had started in 1999, funnily enough as the conservative answer to Snopes. When its founder died, his family sold the website to a company that acts as a platform for publishers. The company reached out to Binkowski after she was famously fired from Snopes. They wanted her to partner with them, manage Truth or Fiction?, and leave its conservative bias in the past. She hired two more people from Snopes and created a non-hierarchical newsroom to go about fact-checking the Internet.

The money all came from ads, which was her intention, she tells me. She wanted an editorial firewall, with a plurality of ads (though nothing of a political nature). The problem with relying on ads, however, is that when the mood changes, you can end up on the chopping block. An advertiser, for example, can decide they don’t want their ad to run next to content that uses the word “immigration” or “abortion.” In the past few years, this list of keywords has often grown to include basically all of news. News is depressing and fewer advertisers want to be associated with it. When the company Binkowski was partnered with came to her in 2023 and told her they had lost a lot of money and the project wasn’t sustainable anymore, she chose to stay until the bitter end, wrapping up on-going stories before finally turning off the lights last fall.

I asked all three of them—Binkowski, Armstrong, and Butterworth—what lessons they have learned from their experiences and what words of advice they have for anyone trying to similarly build a sustainable project in the realm of skepticism and fighting back against misinformation. For Armstrong, former executive director of Bad Science Watch, the key is institutional backing. Here, he references my own place of work, the Office for Science and Society based at McGill University. As far as we know, we are the only university-based office dedicated not to scientific research but to helping the public separate sense from nonsense and to educating people on matters of critical thinking and scientific skepticism. Our office is sustainable because of a generous donation made by Lorne Trottier in 2011.

Armstrong recognises the value in doing this kind of work within a pre-existing institution. Although it limits the amount of advocacy you can do, many of Bad Science Watch’s pursuits could have been academic research projects, a path already blazed by people like Timothy Caulfield at the University of Alberta, who regularly publishes papers about the representation of stem cell clinics on Twitter and of homeopathy in academic journals. “It’s a public good,” Armstrong tells me about the work of promoting skepticism. “That makes it an easy sell to an institution.”

Trevor Butterworth agrees that it is a public good. “The whole point of the nonprofit world is that these are public goods that cannot be, for a variety of reasons, turned into market goods.” Friends of his told him that the service he was managing—where journalists could freely ask questions to a statistician in order to write more accurate stories involving data—surely was worth something to these journalists. They should pay for the service. But of course, news organisations and freelance journalists are not exactly overflowing with money. “If something is a public good,” Butterworth says, “treat it as such and fund it that way!” Instead, foundations often refuse to fund infrastructure and settle on financing sexy projects for a few years before moving on when these projects fail to significantly change the world. “The short-termism of so many foundations just dooms all of these projects, in my view.”

When nonprofits end up in front of foundations, they have to ask for a certain amount of money. But this creates a sudden death situation, whereby the wrong figure ends the discussion and the nonprofit usually doesn’t get to come back. Skeptics asking foundations for financing are thus faced with the problem of either asking for too much money and getting refused or asking for too little and setting themselves up for failure. Butterworth now knows that bringing AllTrials to the United States and effecting real change would have necessitated at minimum a ten-year campaign with a price tag of maybe 20 million dollars. To realise that, you need “pure luck,” he confesses, to get in front of the right rich person or the right head of a foundation. We are at the mercy of the wealthy.

In Butterworth’s personal experience, most nonprofits and the foundations of which they ask money don’t have any real-world experience in product development, a skill that would increase the chances of projects delivering on their promises. Foundations, he thinks, should stop hiring academics and instead recruit product developers with successful track records. These same foundations should also devote resources to creating the kinds of business services—human resources, marketing, communications support—that nonprofits will need to use but that foundations are rarely willing to finance.

Ryan Armstrong believes Bad Science Watch would have been in a better position if its operations and executive staff had been paid. That was the long-term goal. But even at their peak they were very far from that, and Armstrong himself admits that fundraising was not a skill he possessed. This contributes to the major asymmetry between the harm bad actors can do and the good that skeptical organisations can hope to achieve, especially when those of us at the wheel lack the business savviness of charlatans because we studied biology or English literature instead. “It’s very easy to get burnt out in the field,” he adds. “You put in an enormous amount of work and often it feels like the impact you’re having is only transient.”

Binkowski couldn’t agree more, as she feels exhausted and pessimistic these days, though still hopeful for an eventual turnaround. Her advice is not financial, but much more personal. “It’s very effective to get into people’s faces and say, ‘You’re a liar!’” she finally says after mulling over how depressing our era has become. “If you are forthright and you have authenticity and integrity, hold on to that. It’s very powerful. Be outraged. Stand up for each other. Stand up for the public. Write stuff down so you remember the truth.” These days, she is redirecting her energies into finishing her very first novel. It’s a fantasy book where purveyors of disinformation are actually performing a type of magic. Teaching people about critical thinking through fiction is certainly an underused strategy in our community.

The quiet deaths of so many of these pro-skepticism endeavours should alarm all of us. To the wealthy who watch as our world becomes an ever-noisier information chaos and wonder what to do, invest in talented skeptics. Allow them to build sustainable infrastructure. Give them time to bring large projects to fruition. Help finance truth-seeking. Without money, our battle has already been lost to entropy and wishful thinking.

The case of the Welsh Tidy Mouse: incredibly unlikely explanations are sometimes correct

Chris French
-
0
The case of the Welsh Tidy Mouse: incredibly unlikely explanations are sometimes correct

I always keep an eye on the news for any topical stories that I can include in public lectures to illustrate points I want to make. So you can imagine how delighted I was with the story of a cute little mouse in the Welsh market town of Builth Wells that had been videoed tidying up 75-year-old Rodney Holbrook’s workbench every night. Or maybe you can’t? It may not be immediately obvious what relevance this story has to my research interests but in fact it has relevance to two topics that fascinate me. You can read the full story from the BBC, who even provided a video of the “Welsh Tidy Mouse” in action. Unsurprisingly, the story went viral within hours.

So, how is this relevant to anomalistic psychology? Readers may recall that this is not the first time that a story about a houseproud mouse has gone viral. Back in 2019, 72-year-old Steve Mckears had been puzzled by the fact that on repeated occasions his untidy workbench was tidied up overnight even though Steve was making sure that his shed was securely locked when he finished work for the day. In Steve’s case, he did begin to wonder whether his shed might be haunted by some sort of anti-poltergeist – a spirit that, in contrast to traditional poltergeists, produced order from chaos. With the help of a neighbour, he set up a video camera and the truth was revealed. Steve had a tiny mouse to thank for keeping his shed tidy. You can also read about Steve’s mouse and watch the rodent in action via the BBC.

I like to show that video when I do my talk on the psychology of ghosts and hauntings for two reasons. First, it’s just so cute! Secondly (and a bit more seriously), it is a wonderful illustration of a very important principle that should be applied to all claims of alleged hauntings: just because you cannot think of a normal explanation for baffling events does not mean there isn’t one.

Before catching Mickey/Minnie in action, Steve himself was completely baffled by the situation. If a skeptic had suggested that maybe the explanation was a murine equivalent of Marie Kondo they would understandably have been laughed out of the room. But, thanks to Steve’s determination to solve the puzzle, we have irrefutable proof that that was indeed the correct explanation.

I describe this case in my forthcoming book, The Science of Weird Shit: Why Our Minds Conjure the Paranormal (to be published by MIT Press on 19 March 2024, but available now to pre-order – just saying!). I also reproduce a list of other obscure causes of physical effects (from Vic Tandy and Tony Lawrence, 1998, p. 360) that might lead someone to conclude that their house is haunted: “water hammer in pipes and radiators (noises), electrical faults (fires, phone calls, video problems), structural faults (draughts, cold spots, damp spots, noises), seismic activity (object movement/destruction, noises), […] and exotic organic phenomena (rats scratching, beetles ticking).” Of course, there are lots of other reasons why someone might come to believe that their house is haunted but allegedly inexplicable physical effects are certainly one major factor.

Another topic that I deal with at length in my book and discuss in public lectures is the psychology of coincidences. The nature of coincidences is centrally important in addressing a wide range of paranormal claims. To give but one example, consider the phenomenon of ostensibly precognitive dreams. It is not uncommon for people to report having a dream that appears to bear a striking correspondence to an event that takes place after the dream has occurred. Is it possible that dreams sometimes give us a psychic glimpse into the future? Maybe. But one obvious alternative, non-paranormal, explanation is that the correspondence may be nothing more than a coincidence.

If you are the person who has had such a dream, especially if you judge the probability of such a correspondence arising by chance to be astronomically unlikely, mere coincidence may appear to be a totally ridiculous explanation. Surely something more than blind chance is at work here? But think about it. There are around eight billion people on the planet. Even if each of us only remembered on average one dream per night that is around eight billion potential opportunities every night for someone to have such an ostensibly ‘precognitive’ dream. By the Law of Very Large Numbers, it would be really spooky if no one ever had such a dream!

We are not surprised that people sometimes win the jackpot in lotteries because we appreciate that so many people play lotteries that it is bound to happen. Exactly the same principle applies when considering precognitive dreams. If you were to have such a dream you might ask yourself, “What were the chances of me having that particular dream and then that corresponding event taking place in real life some time later?” If a reasonable estimate of that probability makes it clear that the answer is many millions to one, it is not surprising that a paranormal explanation may seem reasonable. But the wrong question is being asked in the first place. The correct question to ask is, “What are the chances of anybody anywhere having such a dream that matches a future event with such an unlikely degree of correspondence?”

So what is the connection between coincidence and the Welsh Tidy Mouse? Well, it turns out that Rodney Holbrook, of Welsh Tidy Mouse fame, is a friend of Steve Mckears, of ghost mouse fame! In fact, Rodney was the friendly neighbour who had set up the video camera to record Steve’s polter-mouse before he moved to Wales. What were the chances of that? Another nice example of an unlikely but true coincidence.

If you, like me, are also fascinated by the mathematics and psychology of coincidences, I would highly recommend David Hand’s excellent book, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles and Rare Events Happen All the Time (Corgi, 2015). Oh, and did I mention that there’s a chapter on this very topic in my own forthcoming book, The Science of Weird Shit: Why Our Minds Conjure the Paranormal?

The strange hinterland of the long-dead Baba Vanga and her annual psychic predictions

Mark Horne
-
0
The strange hinterland of the long-dead Baba Vanga and her annual psychic predictions

While we can’t know what 2024 has in store, there’s one group for whom the new year isn’t a time for extended hangovers, dry January, or counting the pennies after a festive splurge: it’s time for psychics to predict the future.

We’ve all heard of Nostradamus, whose predictions are wheeled out every year to fill space and attract eyeballs and clicks, alongside a slew of other psychics, tarot card readers, numerologists and astrologers, whose predictions tend to be more miss than hit at the end of the year, if only anyone was counting.

Nostradamus isn’t the only long-dead soothsayer in town. Many news outlets prefer to feature the late Bulgarian mystic commonly known as Baba Vanga – “Grandmother Vanga.” Although Baba Vanga died 27 years ago, she purportedly predicted events right up to the end of the world in 5079. However, there are three big problems with her predictions, two of which will be familiar to anyone who follows psychics’ annual predictions, and one which is very novel and specific to Baba Vanga.

Baba Vanga, born Vangeliya Pandeva Gushterova in 1911, lost her sight in her early teens before developing a reputation for soothsaying during the Second World War. Such was her fame that she was – apparently – even consulted by Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Reports of her alarming predictions for 2024 include a massive economic crisis, biological weapons, increased terrorist attacks in Europe, an assassination attempt on Putin, cyber attacks, alien visitations, and terrifying weather events. On the plus side, apparently there will be new treatments for dementia and cancer.

The first problem with her predictions is obvious from the above list: in the past fifty years terrorist attacks have become so common that the Wikipedia page listing them now has a separate page for each year since 1970. Whether 2024 sees an increase – and let’s hope it does not – will be down to how you count, so that could be a win either way. Cyber attacks and extreme weather cause regular disruption, and – despite what alt-med folk tell us – there are significant developments in cancer treatment every year these days, so all such predictions are essentially guaranteed hits.

What of the more specific predictions? While we can’t say until the end of 2024 whether there will be developments in nation-state use of biological weapons, or proof of extraterrestrial visitation, we can look back at previous years. This leads us to the second problem: the more specific and unlikely the predictions, the less accurate they get. Baba Vanga’s predictions for 2023 included a change in the world’s orbit, a bioweapon atrocity, that babies will be born in laboratories to parents’ designs, and that there would be a major nuclear disaster. None of these things happened.

The only prediction for 2023 that’s regularly touted as a hit is that a major solar storm would cause a catastrophe. While there was a significant amount of solar activity and flares in late 2023, they didn’t cause chaos and were nothing like as big as the Carrington Event of the 19th Century. In fact, 2023’s biggest flare was only the biggest in six years, and solar storms run in an 11-year cycle, so predicting an increase in solar storms is about as impressive as predicting a year ending in a zero once a decade.

The third, unique problem with Baba Vanga may already have become evident to any readers who follow the links in this article to her predictions. The authors of these articles pepper their copy with phrases like “apparently” and “it is said that”, because, as Gergana Krasteva notes in this Metro article, Baba Vanga was only semi-literate, and so “she did not record her prophecies, her followers wrote them down”.

Obviously if a psychic has genuine powers then it doesn’t matter whether they can read or write. What does matter is that there does not appear to be any authoritative document from which the predictions can be drawn. As The Independent’s Ariana Baio noted in 2022:

Many of Baba Vanga’s prophecies are hearsay because she did not write down anything. Nearly all of her predictions from… 2000-onward cannot be corroborated.

Where, then, are newspapers taking these predictions from? Jeff Yates, writing as ‘The Viral Inspector’ in the now-defunct Montreal Métro, expressed his suspicions about the effects of the lack of an authoritative source document in 2016:

This makes it easy for those who want to attribute all kinds of predictions to [Vanga]. Since there is no written proof of her predictions, we can make Ms. Vanga say whatever we want.

Translated from the original French using Google Translate

This, of course, would explain why Baba Vanga can both predict that Europe will cease to exist in 2016, and yet Europe will be the target for increased terror attacks in 2024, and why World War 3 can have started in 2010, and yet also have started in 2023. Whether it is one person or many behind the predictions that Yates describes as an “internet urban legend” doesn’t really matter: Baba Vanga can say mutually contradictory things, because it is certainly questionable as to whether Baba Vanga ever said any of them at all, and new predictions can be created fresh, as the situation requires.

Antoineta Maskruchka, writing in 2010 in Bulgarian newspaper 24 Chasa, tracked down Baba Vanga’s former associates and neighbours to see what they thought of their old friend’s apocalyptic predictions. They were all firm believers in her powers – and also quite confident that she had never made such predictions. Boyka Kostadinova, who was a friend of Baba Vanga for five decades, said:

…we have not heard her talk about the end of the world. Let anyone who has heard, tell them. But now it’s easy, Vanga is gone… They put all kinds of nonsense in her mouth.

Translated from original Bulgarian using Google Translate

Others who knew Baba Vanga mention that she rarely spoke of politics, which is the theme of many of her supposed predictions.

Eli Goreva, who knew Vanga for nearly 30 years, noted that Vanga’s supposedly accurate predictions about 9/11, the Kursk submarine disaster, and the election of Barack Obama all appeared after her death, and that the promulgators of these predictions never made clear when Vanga gave them these prophecies.

Vanga’s friend, Peter Bakov, added a direct contradiction to the widely circulating claims of World War 3 that are attributed to Vanga:

“I asked her, but she kept telling me: “Don’t be afraid, son, it’s okay. There will be no Third World War.”

Translated from original Bulgarian using Google Translate

Maskruchka suggests that the spread online was instigated in 2008 by “cousins” (possibly cousins of Baba Vanga, though the limitations of auto-translation begin to tell here) who circulated a list of her predictions on Russian websites, which were subsequently picked up in Russian, Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian and American media.

Language barriers present a brick wall to me at this point, but I’ve not found any more comprehensive lists online of her predictions than ones like this, which do not feature the multiple predictions per year that would be needed to pad out this genre of news article. Multiple predictions whose provenance remain lost in mystery, but which seem unlikely to have originated from a certain Bulgarian prophet, before she died back in 1996. Indeed as far as I can establish, it seems entirely plausible that Baba Vanga made no yearly predictions at all.

The story of Phineas Gage’s accident is well-known; what happened to him afterwards is not

Kat Ford
-
0
The story of Phineas Gage’s accident is well-known; what happened to him afterwards is not

Anyone lucky enough to have been in the room for the recording of InKredulous at QED will have witnessed the moment Andy Wilson learned that the story of Phineas Gage is pretty well known. If you weren’t there, have a listen to the recently released episode, it’s just one of many excellent moments in Andy’s skeptical panel show.

One thing that occurred to me while watching the live recording was that while many people have heard of Phineas Gage, very few people seem to know the full story. This is probably the most famous case study in clinical neuroscience, it’s a story familiar to psychology students the world over yet it is often repeated full of inaccuracies, speculation, and embellishment. So what is the true story of Phineas Gage?

As a quick refresher, here is the first and most famous part of the story.

In 1848 Phineas Gage, aged around 25 years old, was a railway worker for the Rutland and Burlington railroad, working near the town of Cavendish Vermont. His job included, among other duties, blasting rock to clear the way for new train lines. The process of blasting rocks involved creating holes in rocks or in the ground which would then be filled with blasting powder followed by an inert mixture. The contents of the hole would be tamped down to ensure that when the blasting powder ignited, the full force of the blast would go into the rock.

On 13th September 1848, while Phineas was tamping down the powdery contents of one hole with a tamping rod, the blasting powder ignited. The resulting blast was so powerful, it propelled the 6kg, one-metre-long iron rod through Phineas’ skull and into the air, before landing, according to some reports, 25 meters (80 feet) away.

Despite the power of the blast, Gage lost consciousness only temporarily, if at all (again, not all reports agree on this point). Despite his extreme and gruesome injury, Phineas was able to walk, with some assistance, to an ox-cart, which he rode into the center of Cavendish, where he met and greeted Dr Harlow. The notes Dr Harlow made detailing the first time he met Phineas are available to read online and I thoroughly recommend reading them, if you have a strong stomach.

Suffice to say, Phineas suffered extensive trauma to his brain and had lost a sizable chunk of his left frontal lobe, and, as the story goes, his personality completely changed. This is where most people’s knowledge of what might be the most famous case study in neuro-psychology ends. Those who do learn of what happened to Gage after the accident often learn myths; textbooks are full of inaccurate and embellished accounts of Phineas’ life after the accident that made his name synonymous with brain injury. But this is, in my opinion, where the story gets really interesting.

When I first heard the story, like many others I was told that Gage’s life after the accident was one of vagrancy, alcoholism and “base behavior” (to my 16-year-old mind, I was pretty sure this was code for bum sex. Copious bum sex. Bum sex with men no less!). He gambled, got into fist fights, swore, spat in the street, and stopped taking care of his health, hygiene, and appearance. This once intelligent, respectable and popular man became unrecognisable; a slovenly, impulsive, reckless hooligan who a Freudian might describe as being driven by pure Id. One account describes him as “a child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man”.

Some versions of the story claim that Phineas Gage, forever changed and rendered unable to hold down a job of any sort, resorted to traveling the USA with his iron rod, charging people to come see the man who survived having 6kg of iron rip through his skull. Some accounts have Phineas becoming one of P. T. Barnum’s human attractions. Yet others report that Phineas returned to his family, unable to care for himself, he wasted away physically and mentally.

Whatever the details of this oft-told tale, the intended message is clear: the remarkable and tragic case of Phineas Gage illustrates the importance of the frontal lobe. This evolutionarily-recent portion of brain is clearly the seat of consciousness! Of executive functioning! It’s that lump of neurons sitting just above your eyebrows that separates us from our poop-flinging chimpanzee cousins! Or at least, that’s what we want to believe.

A little time ago, I decided to brush up on my knowledge of Phineas, and found evidence that while he did undergo some personality changes after having a portion of his frontal lobe forcefully evicted from his skull at a fair rate of knots, those changes were nowhere near as extensive as they are often said to have been. Not only that, while there are kernels of truth in the story recounted above, there is strong evidence that Phineas made a remarkable recovery.

According to firsthand accounts from Dr Harlow, the physician who first treated Phineas, the immediate aftermath of the accident was “stormy”. Upon first meeting Dr Harlow, Phineas was coherent and genial, but over the course of the following four weeks, Phineas’ health began to decline, with Phineas seemingly being close to death on several occasions. However, this decline appears to be due to the wound he sustained in the accident becoming infected, and not the direct result of losing brain matter.

In those first months after the accident, Phineas was indeed a changed man. When he was recovered enough to speak to his old colleagues, they remarked that he was “no longer Gage”, but instead was humourless, short tempered, and rude. While one may be tempted to suggest that these changes were the direct result of Phineas being deprived of a sizable chunk of his prefrontal cortex, I can’t help but wonder exactly how charming even the most affable among us would be less than a year after suffering a violent and spontaneous high-speed lobotomy leading to infections and seizures.

When looking at contemporaneous accounts of Phineas in the months after his accident, it is all but impossible to tease apart which changes were due directly to the loss of brain tissue and damage done in the process of trying to fish bits of broken skull out of Phineas’ brain, how much was due to damage caused by infection, how much may have been due to steps taken to treat the infection, and how much was due to psychological trauma undoubtedly caused by the whole ordeal.

These issues in drawing simple lines of cause and effect aside, there is evidence that whatever changes did occur to Phineas’ personality, they were neither as extreme nor as permanent as many believe.

Records detailing the next phase of Phineas’ life are patchy, but it does appear that Phineas was indeed no longer able to continue working as a railway foreman and it does appear that he traveled around the US with his tamping rod. However, he was not traveling around as a one man “freak show” to be gawped at, but instead delivered lectures about his injuries, and he may well have even organised his own travels and venues for his lectures. There is also some evidence that Phineas did indeed make contact with P T Barnum, but one thing we can be sure of is that Phineas did not spend the rest of his life as a traveling curiosity.

In 1852, Phineas moved to Chile where he worked as a stagecoach driver on the Santiago-Valparaiso run, a 13-hour journey covering 110 miles. This was a job which undoubtedly required high levels of cognitive and motor skill. The roads were rough, winding and treacherous, driving horses through such conditions would have been no easy task. Furthermore, a stagecoach takes passengers, which means that Phineas would have needed to handle luggage, take passenger fares, give change, and keep his coach running to schedule. All this on top of being responsible for caring for and feeding the horses. This doesn’t sound like a job for an individual who has lost all independence and is no longer capable of resisting impulses or engaging in social niceties.

In 1859, Phineas moved closer to his family who were then living in San Francisco and worked on a farm for a while. In early 1860, it appears that Phineas suffered a series of seizures which increased in severity and lead to his death in May 1860, almost 12 years after the accident that likely shortened his life and made his name live on in textbooks, classrooms and blog posts across the internet.

As fascinating as the well-known part of Phineas Gage’s story is, I think the second half of Phineas’ story is more remarkable, and just as worth telling as the first. While the tale of his injury has a pleasingly simplistic narrative, with a clear story of cause and effect, by ignoring or editorialising the story of Phineas’ life after his accident, we miss out an incredible illustration of how plastic the human brain is. What’s more, we play into the myth that brains can be easily carved up into functional zones, and we forget what a remarkably resilient person Phineas Gage must have been.

Five persistent myths about caring for houseplants, and why they’re wrong

Alice Howarth
-
0
Five persistent myths about caring for houseplants, and why they’re wrong

At the start of the pandemic – when I was told to work from home instead of going to the lab where I worked every day – I found myself getting demotivated. Understandable really; it was a big upheaval, and very stressful for all of us. I was getting fed up of staring at the same four walls, and ultimately decided I would try to make the place feel a bit brighter. Like many people, I decided to buy a bunch of houseplants.

I already had one houseplant, a gift from friends when I first moved into my current home. But when I’d been working in the lab it was very easy to walk past it every single day as I left in the morning or arrived home in the evening, and not think twice about what it needed. It had lost a lot of leaves and it was looking pretty scabby.

Now, though, I was home every day so I could pay more attention to it. I trimmed the dead leaves, I put it in fresh soil, I actually watered it when it needed it and it started to thrive and grow new leaves. And, of course, that felt good; I’d nurtured something into good health at a time when the world felt very unstable and scary.

So I bought a few more house plants to brighten up the place. And a few more. And a few more. Pretty soon I, like many millennials, had my own mini jungle. I learned about how to care for different types of plants. That my Boston fern likes a lot more water and light than I initially realised and goes crispy and brown when it’s not getting enough. That my Pilea peperomioides will climb towards the light looking like a plant from an alien planet instead of being cute and stocky like the ones I see in photos on Instagram. That spider plants are the devil that grow more new plants than you can ever know what to do with until they entirely take over your home.

One night, I even settled into an evening with a glass of wine in front of my computer watching a live webinar on how to care for my aforementioned tricky Boston fern. Shut up, I’m autistic and a millennial – of course this became a special interest for a while.

But the more I learned about caring for my jungle of house plants, the more I realised that there are a bunch of recommendations and beliefs that just aren’t based in the science. Growing living things is, of course, a science. And we do know lots about how plants grow and what they need to thrive from botanists who research these things. But that doesn’t mean that us amateurs won’t end up believing strange things when our plants are behaving oddly.

We’ve talked in this magazine before about some of the lack of science around reusing coffee grounds or dish water for plants so I won’t touch on those. But aside from that – here are my top five house plant myths….

Myth 1: Misting

I came across the idea of misting quite early on in my houseplant journey. That’s because I have a lot of prayer plants. The Calathea genus of plants, also known as prayer plants, are mostly found in tropical climates where there is a lot of humidity. And I have plenty of these plants because they are pet friendly, and I have two dogs. They also look pretty cool and have a neat quirk in that they open out their leaves in the morning and lift them up at night.

Two side-by-side images of a Calathea lancifolia plant. On the left, in the day, the leaves are almost horizontal, radiating out from the centre of the plant. On the right, at night, they have bunched up and most are pointing more vertically upwards. Source: Alice Howarth
Alice’s Calathea lancifolia plant at morning and night

When you start looking up how to look after these tropical plants, though, you find out that plants from tropical climates need humidity. So the recommendation is always to spritz them with a mist of water. Pretty misting spray bottles are available in all the trinket shops and if you’re a plant lover you will surely be gifted a misting bottle – in fact I’ve gifted them myself. Turns out they’re a bit of a waste.

Botanist James Wong was skeptical of the value of misting but he also noted that there hadn’t really been any research on it. So he conducted an experiment in his living room and found that (at least in his living room) any increased humidity created by misting was gone within thirty minutes. You’d need to be misting pretty constantly to give your tropical plants an environment similar to that of a topical climate. Still, all my Calathea’s seem pretty happy without any misting as long as they get all the other things they need. Which brings me to…

Myth 2: If your plant is doing badly you just need to water it more

Most people I know forget to water their plants. So, it’s easy to see why people think the solution to a sick plant is to water it more. Scientifically we know plants have a range of needs and there are many other reasons plants might look a little sickly – we might have put them in an area with insufficient light, or an area with too much direct light. They might be infested with insects or infected with fungus. Or they might need some fertiliser.

But what’s the downside of watering a sick plant? Well, plants are just as easily damaged by overwatering. When we overwater our plants we risk root rot. The soil doesn’t get chance to dry out and the roots start to break down. This can be even more damaging than under watering.

One way to prevent this is to water your plants in a different way – instead of taking a watering can to your house plants, take your houseplants to the sink. You can run water through the soil and allow the water to drain out of the drainage hole in the bottom of the pot. Once the water has finished running through you can take your plant back to its decorative pot cover safe in the knowledge it won’t be left sitting in the water that collects in the decorative pot if you over water it in situ.

But there is another reason plants can get root rot and that comes from…

Myth 3: Bigger is always better

If you keep plants you might have heard of root binding. This is what happens to plants when they outgrow the pot they’re living in. The root mass gets so significant that there’s just no space in the pot for more growth and the roots get compacted down. So, when a plant outgrows its pot, you need to move it to a bigger one. But that doesn’t mean lobbing your plant in a massive pot will allow it to grow and grow and grow.

A pot too big can cause damage to our plants as there is so much soil that it stays waterlogged when we wet it. If there is too much soil for the roots, the water doesn’t get absorbed out and the soil never gets dry. The roots stay sitting in damp conditions and start to rot.

This might all seem very complicated, which might lead you to think – plants are hard work. Why don’t I get one of those easy to care for plants like a cactus or succulent? Which brings me to…

Myth 4: Cacti and succulent plants are SO easy to care for

In my friend circle I am known as the plant nurse. I have learned how to bring a very sick plant back to life. But I have killed so. many. succulents. While they can do quite well without too much water, they do need watering from time to time and they need lots of sunlight and can get root rot from over watering. They’re also a little less expressive than other houseplants – other plants might get yellow or crispy leaves when they need something, or they might wilt when they’re thirsty. But the changes in succulents and cacti are subtler and harder to read. I’ve had cacti trundle along quite happily looking completely normal until the day they are suddenly irreversibly sick.

The other common mistake with cacti is popping them in a terrarium. Terrariums are for creating humidity and cacti are from climates that are famously very dry. Terrariums are not a good place for a cactus.

Myth 5: You must not keep house plants in the bedroom

This is a persistent myth. I remember as a child being told I wasn’t allowed a plant in the bedroom. And it made sense. We all know that plants take in carbon dioxide in the day and release oxygen. But at night they take in oxygen and release carbon dioxide. So, we are told, if we want to breathe well why we sleep, we need to avoid house plants in the bedroom.

Even some light questioning on this should expose the errors in this thinking. Many of us share our rooms with another human or our furry friends. I typically share my bedroom my partner and two dogs. There’s four of us sharing the air in the room without any cause for concern. Plants don’t generate nearly enough carbon dioxide to cause problems in our bedrooms. Plus, the houses we live in aren’t tightly sealed – the air is circulating all the time.

Why are we prone to believing these house plant myths? Well, I think it comes down to wanting to do the right thing. Here we have a living organism that we care about and feel responsible for, and when it gets sick we feel like we did something wrong and want to do the right thing to keep it well. So we look for advice, and we might change a handful of things all at once in the hope that something helps make our plant happy again, and when it does we confirm to ourselves that the magic solution worked and keep at it. We don’t question which of the things we tried is actually responsible. And after all, it doesn’t really matter if it’s something as simple as spritzing the air a few times a week.

G marks the Spot: when it comes to celebrity endorsements, the truth is still out there

Paula Blair
-
0
G marks the Spot: when it comes to celebrity endorsements, the truth is still out there

As recently reported by Michael Marshall on Skeptics with a K and in The Skeptic, actor and goddess-amongst-us Gillian Anderson has taken a slightly Goop direction by founding G Spot, a brand of ‘functional’ soft drinks she’s begun marketing off the back of her role in Netflix’s teen-focused comedy Sex Education.

For those of us with living memory of the twentieth century (hello), Anderson remains synonymous with her first and most enduring big role as Special Agent Dana Scully in The X-Files (1993–2018), a medical doctor initially sent to ‘debunk’ investigations into the paranormal conducted by Special Agent Fox ‘Spooky’ Mulder (David Duchovny). The characters’ skeptic/believer dichotomy has long been projected onto the actors, and provides grounding as to why many of us might be doubly dismayed at Anderson and G Spot’s claims that their drinks are supported with science, as Scully set that same evidentiary standard for Mulder’s hypotheses across eleven seasons and two movies.

However, Mulder and Scully’s archetypes aren’t as clear cut as their brief character descriptions suggest, and avid viewers (hello again) will know that Scully the scientist skeptic is also a practising catholic with blind religious faith, whereas Mulder – although it is never overtly confirmed because he won’t acknowledge it – is indicated as the show progresses to be an atheist or agnostic of Jewish heritage. Indeed, Mulder’s driving force is that he wants to believe. He seeks evidence and sees it in a different way from his partner. The problem is that viewers can be blinkered to such nuances.

Now, it’s a radical idea, but celebrities – including famous actors – are people. And people are fallible. Actors who populate our screens – and Anderson has been on our screens regularly for thirty years as both a North American and a Brit – have more clout than most to sell us something, because the thing they’re most often selling is themselves as someone else. Some of them get quite good at it. So good, in fact, that many in the general public cannot separate the someone else from the unknown-to-us actual humans actors are.

Anderson and Duchovny have said in interviews over the years that they are often approached by fans expecting them to be just like Scully and Mulder, yet they hold the opposite beliefs to the characters they play, with Duchovny thinking accounts of alien abduction belong firmly in the realm of science fiction, while Anderson has described herself as ‘spiritual’ and open to accepting paranormal and supernatural phenomena. This kind of issue emerges frequently in star studies dating back more than a century, but it is becoming harder to distinguish between people and personae in the muddied waters of social media marketing from stars’ own profiles.

When Anderson first came to fame in 1993, we were still on Web 1.0. In my later teens in the early 2000s I was a member of the show’s official website forums, as well as a millennial communicating with friends across the IT classroom via MSN instant messenger. In my small way, I was contributing to the rise of user-generated content that became known as Web 2.0, and that I suspect was in part driven by such fan forums for cult shows that attracted nerdy, tech-savvy audiences. After twenty years of such content bloating the internet, celebrities are well in on it too, with many, including Anderson, using their social media platforms and collaborations with career-influencers to guarantee sales of their own products to their existing following – a reminder that little on the internet is truly free, not even access to our heroes’ ‘real’ lives.

While the G Spot promotions almost reach Carry On levels of sexual innuendo, the website appears to take a more robust approach to listing ingredients and claims. From this it seems that Anderson channeling her current sexually charged role as ‘shag specialist’ Dr Jean Milburn is dovetailing with Anderson’s perceived grounding in skepticism. These two core elements of characterisation have been running parallel throughout her career.

Before Milburn came the voracious and fluid sexual appetite of sharp-minded Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson in BBC’s The Fall (2013–16), while Lily Bart in The House of Mirth (dir. Terrence Davies, 2000) and Lady Deadlock in Bleak House (BBC, 2005) – like Dana Scully – possess more intellect than is socially acceptable while burning with stifled sexual potency roiling tantalisingly just under the surface. This isn’t simply a fan projection; there are episodes where Scully is revealed to have been a wild-child (as Anderson was), and others where she rebels against her chaste routine with Mulder.

Anderson’s built-up potency even managed to confuse us momentarily about Margaret Thatcher when she played the former UK Prime Minister in The Crown (Netflix, 2020), so core has sexuality become to her actor persona.

Jean Milburn being framed as a highly qualified and experienced ‘sexpert’ draws these parallel characteristics firmly together and solidifies Anderson’s star persona, which she proclaims in her Instagram bio (see screenshot above taken on 30 November 2023). Not only does she market her drinks with a wink over their health claims, but she also presents her ‘real’ self in conflation with her most recent popular character.

On the surface, the Netflix Sex Education product tie-in with the ‘arouse’ drink is what it is, but with three decades of characters exuding intellectual authority and/or sexual potency, it has a longer and deeper legacy than what’s printed on the can. When Marshall said Anderson as its founder is G Spot, what amounts to Anderson is an awful lot of cultural currency of which Milburn is only the most recent culmination.

A concern is that given the deep associations fueling any claims to expertise, viewers and fans could be all the more inclined to trust promises carried by the cheeky knowing/unknowing fun of the contrived G Spot marketing in which ‘real’ Anderson acts as if she’s fed up playing the sex kitten when she’s never owned it more. As always, we must follow the caution taught by The X-Files to trust no one and dig ever deeper.

Just about every episode of The X-Files reveals a tension between what we think we have experienced and what may have actually happened. What celebrities tell us, via whichever medium, and no matter how plausible, is often as much of a performance as any fiction they act in, regardless of how authentic they intend it to be.

Like any of us, actors are only experts on anything up to a point. Anderson clearly has fun in the marketing of G Spot, and seems to genuinely trust in these products she’s come up with that aim to find the middle ground between wholesome wellness elixirs and tasty soft drinks. But unfortunately, like any influencing behaviour, what she’s selling behind the veneer could, at worst, do harm over time, while at best leaving folk out of pocket for no more nutritional value than the shop’s own more affordable cream soda.

When she’s in her best eye-rolling form, there could be more benefit to health in going back to the source and watching replays of Scully slapping on the latex. In this fan’s opinion, that’s a better use of your time than risking being taken in by what a beloved actor’s long-constructed persona is trying to sell you ‘IRL’.

The substitute king ritual in Ancient Mesopotamia: an elegant solution to inevitable fate

Hadar Rubin
-
0
The substitute king ritual in Ancient Mesopotamia: an elegant solution to inevitable fate

According to the Greek playwright Sophocles, when king Laius and queen Jocasta of Thebes finally had a son, it was prophesied that he will kill his father. The child was abandoned, exposed to the elements, in an attempt to prevent the prophecy from being fulfilled. However, the child did not die and ended up being adopted by a different royal couple, not knowing they were not his biological parents. When the adopted prince learned of a prophecy according to which he will kill his father and marry his mother, he decided never to return to those he thought were his parents – and thus keep the prophecy from being fulfilled.

As many of us know, this scheme did not work: the child, named Oedipus, did indeed end up killing his biological father and marrying his biological mother. The prophecy was unavoidable, no matter the efforts made to divert it.

In many ancient societies, what we call “religion” was intertwined with daily life to the point of not being a category of its own; in some cases, the word itself did not exist. The basic cosmological and societal understandings were inseparable from invisible powers (sometimes, but not always, deities); the oracle in Delphi, which provided the prophecy to Oedipus and his parents, was a mouthpiece for the god Apollo; later, the worship of the gods in Ancient Rome was a part of civil life to the point that refusal to worship was considered a treasonous act.

The fulfillment or nonfulfillment of prophecies could have had a wider effect than simply on a person or persons; Oedipus shows us that there is never a way to prevent a prophecy from being fulfilled. It was said; it will happen. A fulfilled prophecy, even a bad one, is in line with the basic notions of society and its understanding of the world, while an unfulfilled prophecy may cause upset. By way of a crude metaphor, an unfulfilled prophecy can be equated with waking up one morning to discover that Pi = 3. The whole understanding of the world and of reality as we know them will be turned on its head.

The omen of the eclipse, and prophecised death

In Ancient Mesopotamia, when certain conditions were met during a celestial eclipse, they portended a threat to the ruler. Different indicators, such as the quadrant of the moon being hidden or the visibility of certain planets, were indicators of the geographical region under threat; after being identified, precautionary measures were taken.

The Ritual of the Substitute King is designed to protect the person of the king who sits on the throne, and involves temporarily enthroning a king who will take upon himself the evil or danger predicted for the king. This distinction is very important: the omen of the eclipse was considered to be pertaining to whomever sits on the throne; they were not threats to a specific person. For this reason, a substitute king was enthroned. He did not rule as the rightful king did, but his sitting on the throne caused the harms to befall him and not the true king. When the ritual was complete (usually after 100 days) and the danger was deemed to have passed, a great harm befell the substitute king – it was made sure that he will die. In this way a king was on the throne, and a king has died. The prophecy is fulfilled, but with no harm to the rightful king.

Rituals of status change

In chapter five of his book The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969), Victor Turner deals with the subject of liminality in rituals of status elevation and reversal. These are rituals in which the social or religious status of a person (or a group of persons) changes, permanently or temporarily.

An example for the first is the election of a new king in Gaboon [sic]. While the elect is not yet aware of his election, he is “attacked” by the whole village: he is cursed and abused, and sometimes even beaten. After this humiliation, he is crowned, and all his abusers show deference and pledge fealty. An example for the second is the Holi celebration is a specific village in India, when subordinates (workers, women, the marginalised) take the place of their superiors (bosses, husbands, the rich) for a few days. In the former case, the status change is permanent – the king serves until he dies. In the latter case, the status reversal is temporary – at the end of the holiday everyone returns to their previous positions in society.

Turner’s starting point is two sets of terms presented by Arnold van Gennep (1873-1957). In ritual, those terms are “separation”, “margin”, and “reaggregation”. In spatial dimensions, those terms are “preliminal” [sic], “liminal”, and “postliminal”. These two sets of terms are complimentary, and mostly align with each other. The margin is liminal; what comes before it is preliminal – the process of separation/disassociation with the previous (or “regular”) status/state of affairs; and the final stage is the postliminal, the reaggregation into the community with a changed status (the chosen king in Gaboon) or back to the “regular” state of affairs (the Holi celebration in India).

It is important to note that despite some of the prejudice in, and the age of the texts, principles and theories developed by these two giants of anthropology, ethnology and folklore are still very much relevant to our world and to the study of human cultures and religions. They are also very readable, even today – reading them (while remembering the context of their writing) can be very illuminating.

According to Turner, rituals of status reversal have, in fact, “the long-term effect of emphasising all the more trenchantly the social definitions of the group”. This is to mean that as soon as the social roles and statuses are back in place, they are more apparent (and might even be more forcefully enforced) than before. The completed ritual has the effect of stressing, not overthrowing, the principles of society’s hierarchy. At the end of the Ritual of the Substitute King, the king returns to his throne with no harm to his status – rather, in some ways he returns “victorious”, safe and relived, ready to take on his responsibilities anew. The social order is not harmed by having a substitute sit on the throne – in actuality, it is kept.

Appointing a sacrificial Substitute King

In the Ritual of the Substitute King, the rightful ruler separates himself from his status symbols as he leaves his role and his physical place (he no longer resides in his palace); his societal status is changed and he is even separated from his title, as he is now being referred to as “the farmer” (out of abundance of caution). He is in a marginal place – not the king, but not actually a farmer, and still in some kind of danger.

The substitute, customarily chosen from among criminals destined for capital punishment, also takes a marginal place and status: he is not truly the ruler, but he is also no longer a condemned person. In a letter written to King Esarhaddon from Mār-Ištar, his special agent in Babylonia, the latter writes about the death of a substitute. The substitute king and his wife were “decorated, treated, displayed, buried, and wailed over” – meaning they received all of the proper rites for a dead king (and queen – though the identity of the “wife” is unknown to us).

This is the end of the marginality for both king and substitute: the former returns to his rightful place, and the latter is put to death. While it may seem as if the status change was temporary for the king (who is being reaggregated into society) and permanent for the substitute (who dies), I wish to suggest that the executed substitute is also being reaggregated into society at the end of the ritual.

While imprisonment and execution are both ways to eliminate a person from society, dying in place of the king provides a valuable service; it is no longer a punishment for concrete or perceived crimes. Not only does the substitute live his last days in opulence, he also receives a royal funeral instead of a criminal’s. While crimes brought the substitute to his current position, he is, in a way, absolved of them as he provides such a great service “for king and country”. By dying in place of the king the substitute can change the context of his death in a very positive way – he turns it from elimination to reaggregation.

This can be seen in a very special occurrence: the substitute king spoke while on the throne. This is very unusual – and verboten; Plutarch describes a substitute not even replying when asked who he is. It seems that this specific substitute spoke in order to warn from a conspiracy to keep him on the throne (that it, a rebellion or a coup d’état were in the works). This substitute broke protocol and spoke up despite knowing that by so doing he condemned himself to certain death. When considered only through the lens of bodily self-preservation, this might seem like shooting oneself in the foot. However, some other points must be taken into consideration.

When analysing distant (in time, place, or both) aspects of life, one must put aside one’s own notions of “right”, “wrong”, “sensible”, or other value-based judgements. When remembering this key point, together with viewing the matter via the lens offered by Turner, the apparent loyalty of the substitute is not simple, and is not simply to the king. When we consider the three stages of a ritual (separation, margin, reaggregation) we can see that by keeping himself in the margin (a substitute, not a king), the substitute guarantees his reaggregation into society. Unlike other condemned criminals, the substitute is absolved of his crimes by providing a great service. Warning the relevant persons of a possible coup d’état is not only loyalty to the king – it is also loyalty to oneself, or at least to one’s memory. The dice was cast, the chosen substitute will die. But he can now die in an honourable way; not preserving his life, but changing the context of his death in a very positive way.

Social stability through fate and prophetic inevitability

And then there’s another aspect. As Oedipus shows us, prophecies’ fulfillment is unavoidable. A predicted event may or may not come true; a prophecy must come true. And this is a problem. If a predicted, possible disaster does not come to pass, it could be seen as a relief: no king is harmed and life goes on as before. But if a prophecy is unfulfilled, something must be wrong with the world – or with our perception of it. An unharmed king might turn from a blessing to a crisis – a world shaking crisis of faith, which can affect every aspect of life.

A sudden death of a ruler is dangerous: it often causes political upheaval and instability. But a prophesied death, even if sudden, will not change the basic fabric of society. Like the Chinese “Mandate of Heaven”, the replacing of the head does not change the body of life – only its current circumstances.

The Ritual of the Substitute King creates a situation in which a king will die by way of status change and a period of liminality. By creating a situation which enforces the fulfillment of a prophecy, society preserves a primal aspect of life: the system of beliefs and worldview. The basis of the societal structure is “proven”, and thus preserved and strengthened. Even the person put to death in place of the king earns something in return for his life.

The Ritual of the Substitute King succeeds where Oedipus failed: the people of Ancient Mesopotamia found a way to let a prophecy come true without being harmed by it. Instead of running away like Oedipus did, the people of Mesopotamia confronted their problem and found a creative solution: by making sure the prophecy will come true they prevented the harm it would have brought to them.

Bibliography

  • Ambos, Claus. “Rites of Passage in Ancient Mesopotamia: Changing Status by Moving Through Space: Bit Rimki and the Ritual of the Substitute King”, in Approaching Rituals In Ancient Cultures. Rome: Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2013, pp. 39-54.
  • Parpola, Simo. Letters from Assyrian Scholars to Kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Kevelaer, Butzon & Bercker, 1970-1983.
  • Turner, Victor. “Humility and Hierarchy: The Liminality of Status Elevation and Reversal”. Chapter in The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1969, pp. 166-203.

The pseudoscientific treatments turning athletes and sports stars into influencers for woo

Elissar Gerges
-
0
The pseudoscientific treatments turning athletes and sports stars into influencers for woo

The term “snake oil” is used to describe modern pseudoscientific treatments and products that claim to offer different health benefits for a diverse set of medical conditions. Historically, the term arose in America in 1916, when Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil was promoted by the former cowboy as a universal remedy. The Pure Food and Drug Act revealed that the product is fraudulent and that, in fact, it was lacking any snake oil.

In the contemporary educated society of the 21st century, “snake oil” products persist, and they flourish within the domain of sports science, where marketing has superseded science. Companies target international events, high profile athletes, and other social media figures with a large number of followers to endorse a certain product, capitalising on brand association to increase sales even when evidence of product efficacy is lacking.

Despite the lack of scientific evidence, alternative therapies and pseudoscientific marketing are rife among athletes, some wrapped in colourful tape, others bearing cupping bruises, and more recently some using the Q-Collar and the TaoPatch. It is a common strategy for manufacturers to ‘demonstrate’ that their product works by getting a high-profile athlete or celebrity to endorse the product. The company implicitly affiliates its product with the success and fame of the athlete or celebrity.

The Olympics, for example, is a significant marketing opportunity that exposes viewers to a variety of sports-related pseudoscience and dubious products. The cupping trend is common among athletes, often among swimmers – such as Michael Phelps who was spotted with circular marks in the 2016 Olympics in Rio. Many athletes have followed suit, like Australian swimmer Kyle Chalmers, and Akira Namba of Team Japan in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, as well as celebrities such as The Rock, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Haily Baldwin, among others.

Cupping is a technique that has crossed numerous cultures. Like other alternative therapies, cupping is not an evidence-based practice. A 2020 meta-analysis review shows that clinical studies on cupping are highly biased, the specific physiological mechanisms that underpin the cupping therapy are unclear, and the quality of evidence is low. Most cupping proponents are drawn to the appeal to antiquity or appeal to ancient wisdom, the logical fallacy that a certain practice or product is good simply because it is traditional.

Other athletes are using the KT tape, also known as the kinesiology tape, which is often taped on shoulders, knees, thighs, ankles, or stomach. According to the company’s website, KT tape is designed to provide drug-free pain relief and support to muscles, ligaments, and tendons. However, the current evidence does not support this product for short-term pain relief, according to a 2021 study.

Despite the lack of plausibility that a drug-free tape applied to the surface of the skin could help resolve pain in a muscle or tendon, KT Tape was used in the 2020 Olympics by several athletes, such as Katrin Holtwick, Yuan Cao, and Anne Tuxen. The KT Tape company is the official sponsor of eight athletes across a range of sports – again, partnering with athletes has boosted the product’s profile and increased its sales, as the visibility created by athletes led to a significant increase in consumer usage. When people see an athlete using a specific product or therapy, they assume it is based on good science because athletics and health intersect, thus supporting the market of pseudoscience in sports.

When athletes post a photo of themselves on their verified social media accounts during cupping therapy or while exercising wearing KT tape, it increases the visibility of the product which in turn surges its popularity. This is referred to as the exposure effect. Consumers prefer products or practices that they are regularly exposed to and thus become familiar with. However, the familiarity principle is not correlated with a product’s efficacy. Due to the vast number of online followers and the physical fitness of athletes, even a casual reference to alternative therapies or pseudoscientific products could encourage viewers to use the product.

The human inclination for instant gratification also exacerbates this issue – we seek immediate results, including in our health and fitness endeavors, leading us to seek shortcuts over the sustained, consistent effort required for long-term fitness development.

This is not unique to the Olympics. Pseudoscience is pervasive in sports, specifically with pain management products and recovery strategies which are highly subjective: Blood Flow Restriction (BFR) training, cryotherapy, acupuncture, nasal strips, and hydration treatments to list a few. There are many research studies on cryotherapy, cupping, nutritional supplements, energy bracelets, hydrotherapy, or kinesiology tape, but quantity does not mean quality. Despite the vast number of studies, compelling evidence is lacking.

An athlete or celebrity wearing or endorsing a product says nothing about its efficacy. As consumers, we are overloaded with media content and unchecked information. Be skeptical of unfalsifiable claims, vague language, over-reliance on anecdotes, lack of peer review, conflict of interest, and in-house research funded and conducted by the same company promoting the product.

It is unfortunate, but sometimes athletes are simply walking advertisements for medical pseudoscience.

1...293031...152Page 30 of 152

Expert skeptical analysis of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and claims of the paranormal.

[email protected]

About

Categories

Shop