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Cheap talk skepticism: why we need to push back against those who are ‘just asking questions’

Aaron Rabinowitz
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Cheap talk skepticism: why we need to push back against those who are ‘just asking questions’

I wish I could open the new year with an optimistic article, but that’s just not where things sit at the start of 2021. The removal of Trump, whatever muddling through post-Brexit option is currently gaining traction, these are not signs we’ve turned a corner. They’re ventilators in a pandemic where we’ve yet to find a vaccine. The most dangerous public health risk of our time is epistemic in nature, it’s the virality of misinformation that continues to run rampant across poorly managed media.

There’s a deep irony to our epistemic crisis: we live at the peak of accessible knowledge, yet there’s so much anxiety about our ability to justify our beliefs. There’s no single cause for this epistemic crisis; it’s a perfect storm of society, psychology, and technology. Rapid social change brought about by technological and political upheaval lead to substantial polarisation, then the internet flooded our lives with the culture war and made everyone compulsive participants. Now social media entities have weaponised cultural conflict on a scale that would make Goebbels do a full Grinch smile.

Recognising that every crisis is also an opportunity, enterprising individuals have entered this dysfunctional marketplace of ideas and set up shop with a variety of pernicious wares. Skeptics are likely to already be familiar with the sorts of overt conspiracy theorising and woo that are running rampant in the poorly regulated corners of the internet, so I want to focus on a problem that’s endemic to the skeptic community: the rise of cheap talk skepticism.

We’re all intuitively familiar with the idea of “cheap talk”, but I want to make explicit the key features and how they manifest in some acts of superficial skepticism. ‘Cheap talk’ refers to talk where the person doing the talking is at little to no risk of suffering any serious consequences for their comments. Cheap talk is at the heart of such beloved internet personalities as virtue signalers, keyboard warriors, and sea-lions (as my good friend C. Thi pointed out). The last group are closest to my concern around cheap talk skepticism.

A sealion in front of greenish blue water with its mouth wide open

Cheap talk skepticism occurs when someone expresses skepticism in a way that comes at little cost to them, though it frequently comes at a significant cost to others. For example, if I express glib doubt about the personhood of another group of sentient beings, when my personhood is highly unlikely to be questioned, that would be cheap talk skepticism. Furthermore, if I received praise and positive reinforcement for my skeptical signaling, we could see that skepticism as effectively free of cost.

Skepticism, both as a broad perspective and with regard to specific issues, has traditionally come at substantial personal cost. Humans are generally a credulous species, our belief formation consisting of a mixed bag of heuristics with the thinnest veneer of rationality. That allows for quick and decisive belief formation, but it also arguably creates a hardwired animosity towards skeptics. Skeptics are seen as risking social instability with their skepticism about deeply held community beliefs. So, it’s no surprise that skepticism about things like the existence of god still comes with substantial social costs in supposedly secular nations, and the death penalty in others. For many, skeptics are most charitably seen as busy bodies who should really stay quiet during family meals.

In the age of the internet though, there’s an audience for mass produced skepticism, and the cost for producing that skepticism has dropped to almost nothing. At first glance, that could seem like a good thing. One might argue that the goal of Mill style liberalism, the sort that’s highly valued by free speech advocates, is to create a space where speech in general comes with little to no cost, since that will promote the greatest free exchange of ideas. While I sympathise with this principle in theory, the unfortunate reality is that talk is rarely free – it’s more a question of how much the cost is externalised or carried by the speaker. I’ve discussed before how radically unmoderated speech comes with substantial costs, but it’s not hard to understand how completely unfettered cheap talk skepticism could quickly spiral into dangerous conspiracies. The same rising distrust of institutions that is making space for more secularism is also making space for more anti-vaxxers, more Q-anoners, and as always more anti-Semites.

Cheap talk skepticism feeds on all the situational factors I’ve mentioned. It’s understandable that many people would respond to the overwhelming deluge of the information age by craving the skeptical freedom of suspending judgment. There is an undeniable joy in saying “I don’t know and neither do you, leave me alone” in response to the constant demands for verification that we all face. As Marsh recently wrote, we need a sympathetic approach to the way that human psychology makes us all vulnerable to cheap talk skepticism. We’re all drowning in a sea of information, it’s hard to judge people for grabbing any skeptical life preserver that comes along, even if it turns out to be attached to conspiracy theories.

If there is any room for criticism in this explosion of cheap talk skepticism, I believe it should be focused on the individuals with the platforms that allow them both the time for proper skepticism and the obligation to skepticism properly. In the parts of the skeptical world referred to as the Intellectual Dark Web, there has been rampant cheap talk skepticism around both Covid and the recent American election. Under the umbrella of “distrusting institutions”, there has been such an absurd amount of “just asking questions” that Sam Harris felt compelled to very publicly “turn in his IDW membership card”. Unfortunately, Harris neglected to explicitly criticise anyone by name, which makes is hard to determine if his criticism was meant just for the brothers Weinstein, or if he was including folks like Maajid Nawaz, who he has frequently promoted and who I’d argue has been one of the worst of the cheap talk skeptics.

For example, here’s Nawaz retweeting Team Trump Twitter sharing a video from OAN (One America News Network), an unreliable right wing “news” organization, which they claim is evidence of election tampering. Rather than emphasise the high likelihood that the video proves nothing of the sort, Maajid’s response is “I see what this looks like & I hope I’m wrong” followed by “sensible people should agree that this entire controversy needs to be resolved ASAP & urgently”. That tweet is not an isolated event either, here he is unknowingly sharing election fraud conspiracy materials from the explicitly antisemitic Red Elephants website. Here he is getting strung along by Trump’s reality tv shtick . Here he is citing Ted Cruz’s election denialism as proof that Nawaz was “right all along”. I could continue, but the pattern is obvious, and it’s not unique to Nawaz. This is deeply irresponsible, but the cost of cheap talk skepticism will be born by the American electorate and not by Nawaz, who has since circled back around to claim the OAN video produced a state audit, but not to point out that Georgia found no significant fraud of the sort that Team Trump and OAN were claiming.

Nawaz has also engaged in cheap talk skepticism around Covid conspiracy theories, favorably retweeting a thread by a guy who thinks Covid is caused by 5G and directly quoting his claim about “the myth of a pandemic”. Similar cheap talk skepticism towards Covid and the Covid vaccine has arisen from Brett Weinstein and unsurprisingly from James Lindsay, given his ongoing business relationship with conspiracy theorist Michael O’Fallon. James recently attended a Sovereign Nation conference and a conservative event in California with Covid lockdown skeptic Dave Rubin. Rubin has attended several anti-lockdown events and posted cancel bait tweets implying that he’s hosting dinner parties in violation of social distancing rules. Again, the cost of their skepticism is far less likely to be born by them than by medical workers and vulnerable individuals, like my aunt Sue who suffered a stroke while being treated for Covid. Society doesn’t even condone the desire that they should directly experience the consequences of their skepticism. We’re forced to hope that their cheap talk remains cheap.

Quality skepticism is research intensive. It’s not easy to do quality skepticism and still produce hot takes across a wide range of topics… Properly justified belief lags behind misinformation in the best of times. Cheap talk skepticism widens that gap by forcing skeptics to correct this internal misinformation alongside all the other forms of cheap talk.

Besides putting lives at risk by promoting a cavalier approach to a global health crisis, cheap talk skepticism externalises a social cost by driving quality skepticism out of the marketplace of ideas. Quality skepticism is research intensive. It’s not easy to do quality skepticism and still produce hot takes across a wide range of topics, which is something that public intellectuals are unfortunately pressured to do in order to stay relevant. Properly justified belief lags behind misinformation in the best of times. Cheap talk skepticism widens that gap by forcing skeptics to correct this sort of internal misinformation alongside all the other forms of cheap talk out there.

So, how do we tell between cheap talk skepticism and the real thing? As usual, it’s not easy. When you’re engaging with a skeptics’ argument, we somehow have to include questions like: Does the skeptic genuinely have skin in the game, even if it’s just in terms of reputation? Does the skeptic circle back around and update their skepticism on the subject? Do they make explicit the potential costs of their skepticism and discuss ways to avoid externalising that cost? Is their framing catastrophising or contextualising?

These are hard questions, which is why I’m not especially optimistic that we’ve seen the peak of cheap talk skepticism. We’re all epistemically exhausted and the crisis is just coming to a middle. That said, if 2021 turns out to be an epistemic bonanza, I promise to come back and eat my skeptical words.

I’ll get the Covid vaccine – here’s why I’m telling you, and why you should tell everyone too

Matthew Reynolds
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I’ll get the Covid vaccine – here’s why I’m telling you, and why you should tell everyone too

I’ll be getting vaccinated. I don’t yet know which vaccine it’ll be, and it won’t be soon (I’m well down the priority queue), but I’ll be rolling up my sleeve for the first Covid-19 vaccine that is offered to me.

If you’re going to get the jab too, tell your friends. If you want to understand why I felt the need to declare it and ask you to do likewise, read on, but I don’t mind if you stop here.

The modern anti-vaccine movement has been simmering away in the English-speaking world since Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 fraudulent paper linking the excellent MMR vaccine to Autism. This started a ball rolling that has since seen bogus suspicion thrown at all vaccines, reducing uptake leading to needless illness and death. Today, anti-vaccine leaders around the globe are more networked than ever, including across language barriers. And they have a plan.

People who are anti-vax or vaccine hesitant are just like you or I. They’re your brother, your mum, your nan, your neighbour, or that person you meet on the dog walk whose name you don’t know but having chatted with them for years it’s gotten to the point where it’s embarrassing to ask now. My point is that anti-vaxxers are just as worthy of kindness, respect, and compassion as you are – they’re certainly not stupid or selfish. If someone is spreading anti-vax ideas, it is because they have been convinced by them; they truly believe that vaccines are harmful, and so spreading that ‘truth’ is therefore good. It happens that they are incorrect and causing real-world harm, but very few anti-vax people are doing it for nefarious reasons. Remember that, always.

I also don’t want to imply that there cannot be legitimate worries about vaccines, but in countries with well-functioning regulatory systems, vaccines are thoroughly scrutinised before approval (and indefinitely beyond too). Taking Covid-19 as an example, concerns commonly surround the unprecedented speed of Covid-19 vaccine development – not an unreasonable worry on the face of it, but if you share that concern there are good explainers out there which should ease your mind. I currently have reservations about the Sputnik V vaccine, but that is because it was deployed for general use in some countries after testing on only 76 people, and Phase 3 trials (which typically precede approval) are only happening now.

Anti-Vaccine leaders and activists recognised early on that a Covid-19 vaccine will probably come along sooner or later, and they have been preparing for it. From the start, rumours were floated among and by them; the BBC even debunked some of those rumours back in the heady days of May 2020.

In October, the National Vaccine Information Center (don’t let the name fool you) held a private online conference with the world’s foremost anti-vax leaders. Thankfully for us, The Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) was able to get in, and so were able to give us a glimpse inside.

The cover of the anti-vaxx playbook from the CCDH. The top third of the book is yellow with the title in black across the top. The bottom two thirds is grey. There is a large image overlaying the front with a yellow hand holding a mobile phone. On the screen of the phone is a vaccine bottle with an illuminati style pyramid with an eye on it and spewing out from the phone are lots of little white skull outlines and Facebook thumbs down icons.

The CCDH has produced The Anti-Vax Playbook to tell us all about the conference proceedings, and the current thoughts and strategies revealed and discussed by the anti-vax movement’s leading lights. Best of all, the Playbook has practical advice for normal people to help counter the anti-vax schemes. The Playbook is around 50 pages long and is well worth a read, but I’ll summarise some of the key messages for us laypeople.

Covid-19 is seen as a golden opportunity to be exploited for the anti-vaccine cause, with opportunities to team up in common cause with opponents of lockdowns and facemasks. The pandemic has people feeling vulnerable, and more interested in knowing about vaccines than possibly at any other time in living memory. The anti-vax movement is driving a maximum effort to capitalise on this. The core ideas that Anti-Vax leaders are promoting for their followers to spread are, broadly, that we have nothing to fear from Covid-19, that the vaccine for Covid-19 will be dangerous, and that advocates of vaccination are untrustworthy and should be ignored.

The millions of unique anti-vax messages circulating vary immensely, but almost all promote at least one of these ideas. If a person can be convinced of any of these things, the others follow relatively easily.

Particular effort is being made to target anti-vax messages at demographics such as parents or minority ethnic communities. The Playbook specifically details a drive to promote Vaccine hesitancy in African American communities, including highlighting past grievously racist medical misdeeds in the same breath as Covid-19 vaccines, to imply equivalence or intent. This seems to me particularly cynical, piggybacking on the mood of Black Lives Matter to sow contempt for the seriousness of Covid-19, and distrust for its vaccines within communities that are often among the hardest hit by the virus and so have the most to gain from effective vaccines.

As skeptics – and as human beings – we are instinctively drawn to the idea that a good rebuttal can nip misinformation in the bud. Sadly, in digital spaces where algorithms promote “engagement”, direct rebuttal often backfires: rebuttals provoke comments and arguments, which lead to platforms prioritising or promoting the conversation, effectively amplifying the initial post and spreading its misinformation to more people. Fortunately, there are some tools and practices that can be effective in countering this:

We can all play an active role in helping achieve Covid-19 vaccination coverage by limiting the spread of misplaced vaccine fear.

  • If someone you know is spreading misinformation, chat to them privately. This won’t spread the misinformation further, and humans still trust people they know and like – algorithms won’t change that any time soon. To help you out, the playbook concisely debunks the most prominent anti-vax arguments under each of the three main categories.
  • Spread pro-vaccine messages yourself, in whatever ways you want. This can speak to people who are on the fence about vaccines. Fight fear with hope!
  • Tell people you’re going to get the Covid-19 vaccine when you can. Going overboard and writing an article is optional.

Getting safe, effective vaccines into billions of arms globally is the only responsible route for us all to be able to hug our loved ones again. Tens of thousands of people have worked (and continue to work!) tirelessly on the vaccines part, and a further legion are now overcoming the next obstacles in making worldwide rollouts happen. We can all play an active role in helping achieve adequate Covid-19 vaccination coverage by limiting the ability of misplaced vaccine fear to dilute their success.

The Outbrain drain: why newspaper sites have run thousands of scam ads

Michael Marshall
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The Outbrain drain: why newspaper sites have run thousands of scam ads

It has been a tough couple of decades for the newspaper industry. The last twenty years have ushered in a shift in expectations from readers – from a world in which it felt natural to pay today for someone to explain to you what happened yesterday, to an environment where readers expect news to be immediate, accurate and, perhaps most problematically of all, free.

The print circulation figures for the biggest newspapers in the UK make for sobering reading: across the ten most read newspapers, readership has dropped by 55% since 2000. The Daily Mirror, which sold 2.2m copies per day in 2000, now sells just over half a million copies per day; the Daily Express has fared little better, falling from 1m copies per day in 2000 to just 320,000 per day in 2019.

That drop-off in circulation understandably caused a significant chasm in the accounts of many newspapers, and it’s a gulf that digital subscriptions has not come close to closing. The financial gap has been exacerbated by the death of the paid classified ad – a formerly reliable source of income for newspapers, classifieds vanished almost overnight with the rise of free listings sites like Craigslist and Gumtree. In 2000, classified adverts (including job listings, second hand car ads, and private sales) made up 40% of newspaper industry ad revenue; by 2012, that had fallen to 18% – an estimated drop of around $15 billion. With pressure to create more and more content for less and less money, it’s little surprise that the media has had to make some compromises in pursuit of making ends meet.  

One of those compromises has seen some newspapers’ online presence employing clickbait tactics to maximise the eyes on their site – as a glance at the Mail Online’s infamous (and commercially successful) ‘sidebar of shame’ will show. Alongside the mix of paparazzi shots and the breathless reporting on celebrity social media posts, the Mail runs sponsored content: pieces paid for and written by external sources, presented so as to resemble ‘real’ Mail Online stories. These pieces can reportedly bring in as much as £60k per article, so it’s little surprise that the Mail integrates them liberally into the section of their site their editor described as “the crack cocaine of journalism”.

The Mail Online model is not the only news platform to integrate original content with paid-for sponsored content, however – other papers have turned to content aggregator companies like OutBrain, Taboola and RevContent to plug paid-for content into their site, with seemingly no editorial oversight. The theory, according to the aggregators, is that by understanding who your readers are, their content aggregation plugins can serve readers content that they might like… or, at least, that they might be persuaded to click on, earning the newspaper a fractional amount of advertising revenue, which the aggregators take a cut of.

On its own that’s nothing particularly scary – the whole point of advertising has always been to convince consumers to try something they might not otherwise have considered, and the whole point of digital advertising has been to persuade users to click through to read more about whatever product or service is being promoted. Where this is carried out by the newspaper itself, it’s relatively innocuous; where ads are being served automatically and algorithmically by an aggregator platform the newspaper has almost no control over, and where different ads are served to different users, making transparency tricky… well, things get a little murkier.

Take, for example, a selection of ads that appeared on a single story in the Daily Star recently, mixed among stories from Daily Star journalists as part of Outbrain’s ‘Smartfeed’.

Some were pretty innocuous, such as this clickbaity but clearly-labelled advert for the online discount site ‘Honey’, which directed users straight to an article on Honey’s website:

Image of a black man with natural hair - he has his laptop on his lap and is smiling. Behind him on the wall is the word "PayPal" the headline below reads "PayPal Users Swear By This Money Saving Trick ..." Beneath in lighter grey, smaller text reads "(Sponsored - Honey)".

Similarly, the three separate ads that appeared on this one single article all directing readers to the website of ‘Naked Wines’ were clearly labelled and not particularly misleading:

Ad 1: A white woman wearing a snood and her hair in a ponytail looks down at two bottles of wine. The headline reads "Why You Should Stop Drinking £5 Wine" and beneath in smaller light grey text "(Sponsored - Naked W..." Ad 2: A white woman with curly ginger hair and a red top holds a glass of red wine in one hand, the other hand is held out in a stop signal. The headline reads "Most wine drinkers in the UK don't know these 5 simple Dos and Don'ts....", beneath in small, light grey text reads "(Sponsored - Naked Wines)" Ad 3: A white woman with long, dark hair stands in a supermarket reading the back of a bottle of white wine, the headline reads "Why You Should Stop Drinking £5 Supermarket Wine" - below in small, light grey text reads "(Sponsored - Naked Wines)"

There are the kind of ads you might expect to see in the pages of a mainstream newspaper – they are explicit about what and who they are advertising, and when you click through you go to the site of that particular brand. You could readily imagine a world where the ad buyer for these companies called up the Daily Star’s commercial department to buy the ad space for their ads.

But that’s not how those ads came to be on the Star’s site: they were part of Outbrain’s plugin, and it was Outbrain who chose to accept the ads and when to show them. It’s highly unlikely that the Star even had sign-off on what ads were served to their readers – and that is a major problem, because it is the Daily Star’s brand name and reputation that these ads are trading off, not Outbrain’s.

That may not be much of a risk when it comes to wine and discount codes, but the ads served up by the Outbrain Smartfeed did not stop there. The first large ad on the page was this one, ostensibly paid for by music and culture website Popdust:

A photo of raw steak on brown paper with a sharp knife beside it and a sprig of thyme on top. The headline reads "Our Editors Tried HelloFresh And Gousto: There Was A Clear Winner" and beneath in small, light grey text "(Sponsored - Popdust)"

This ad took readers to an article titled “Our Editors Tried HelloFresh and Gousto: There was a Clear Winner”, where the authors described a taste testing of two meal-delivery services, to see which was best:

The PopDust website with the article headlined "Our Editors Tried HelloFresh and Gousto: There was a Clear Winner". The article is listed "Sponsored" and the image shows a HelloFresh box next to a plain brown box labelled "Other Meal Kits".

Despite being structured as a review, this article is in fact another piece of sponsored content – in this case, HelloFresh paid Popdust to run an advert which reads like an impartial review, and then HelloFresh or Popdust paid for Outbrain to place that advert into the pages of a national newspaper. Unlike the Naked Wines and Honey ads, which led readers directly to the website of the companies who paid for the advertising, this advert sold readers the illusion of independent review.

The Outbrain ads in the Star article get worse. This prominently-placed advert with the grammatically-mangled clickbait title “Arthritis or Joint Pain? Doctor Says Do This First Thing…” was too small to display the full name of the company who paid for it, but on closer inspection that company is Jupiter Labs.

An image of a woman holding one knee, a drawing of the knee joint over lays her knee. The headline reads "Arthritis or Joint Pain? Doctor Says Do This First Thing…" and below in a smaller font "(Sponsored - Jupiter L..."

Readers might be forgiven for missing that, however, as the advert doesn’t lead to the website of Jupiter Labs, it leads to a site ostensibly called “Joint Fuel” at the confusingly-titled URL lifestylemag.co. Despite appearing like an article, right down to having a profile picture of the “Editorial Staff” writer who authored it, this is article simply an advert:

A webpage with the heading "JOINTFUEL". An "article" has the headline "Doctor Struggles to Relieve 80 Year Old Grandmothers Arthritis, So She Turns to Turmeric, Here's What Happens...". To the right is a large banner ad that reads "For a limited time, you can save up to 40% when you purchase a mutipack of JointFuel360."

Every mention of the product name, as well as the prominent advert to the right and even the website header image itself, contains an affiliate marketing link tracking users who click through to buy the product, JointFuel360 – an overpriced turmeric supplement whose medical claims are not remotely backed by evidence.

This whole site, in fact, is nothing but an example of Affiliate Marketing – a technique I’ve described previously, the worst end of which involves web developers creating bogus sites in order to persuade customers to use their referral link to buy whichever product they’re looking to push. In this case, the advert is a fake customer testimonial from ‘Iris’, a grandma in her 80s who just needs you to understand that she would be in agony and unable to walk (as, she claims, all of her friends are)… if it weren’t for the £40-per-month turmeric supplements she’s taking.

The testimonial is filled with deeply manipulative language, and is aimed squarely at a population who is less likely to be internet savvy enough to recognise that this website is not kosher – right down to its fake 5-star Google Reviews:

A screenshot of "Google Reviews" including 5 star ones from "Edward Cleveland: I began taking JointFuel 4 months ago and I am happy to report it is working. It took several weeks to truly notice a difference but I'm glad that I stuck with it" and one from "Sisto C: Top product, take it over 4 months, never had any complaints again, have my old life without pain, without surgery back. Thanks that you exist"

Indeed, “Lifestyle Mag” isn’t a real website, it is merely a domain name that sounds like it might be a legit website. Searching Google for all live pages on the domain, the only pages contained on the site are the JointFuel ad and two other ads from 2018: one for a product that claims to be able to unblock drains, and the other for a bag of herbs it claims can remove mould. Those, too, are filled with affiliate links and fake customer testimonials.

A screenshot of "Lifestyle Magazine" website. An article headed "The $13 Device That Is Saving Millions Of British People Thousands In Plumbing Fees" - there is a stock image of a man working on a u bend with a wrench, beneath the image reads "Judy Segal, 34, is a role model to her three daughters. Exhausted from working at the diner, she picks her children up from daycare and band practice and tries to prepare a serviceable dinner before she goes to school at night"

These practices aren’t new – the most unscrupulous elements of affiliate marketing have been around online for a long time. What is genuinely shocking, however, is to see these affiliate scams promoted from the pages of national newspapers. But because these ads aren’t booked via the newspaper directly, and because Outbrain seem either to not know enough or not care enough to screen out scams from their advertising, this single article on the Daily Star’s website was riddled with worryingly misleading ads.

There was the ad telling you to “Do This Every Time You Start Up Your PC”, which claimed to be an advert for a review site called Security Savers Online:

An image of a finger on a delete key from a computer keyboard with the headline "Do This Every Time You Start Up Your PC" and below "(Sponsored - Security ..."

In reality it was an affiliate marketing site touting an antivirus software, with every page of the site being a verbatim republication of blogs from the antivirus website, presented as if they were expert reviews from an independent internet security site.

An article listed as an "Advertisement" on the website "Security Savers" with the headline "Millions of Windows Users Are Keeping Their PC Healthy Using This One Simple Trick... (And It's Free!)"

There was the ad declaring: “Self Adjusting Glasses Take United Kingdom by Storm”, leading to “Protech News”:

A pair of glasses heald towards the sun on a countryside backdrop with the headline "Self Adjusting Glasses Take United Kingdom by Storm" "(Sponsored - protech...."

Protech News is another site set up to give the illusion of independence, while declaring the remarkable properties of a set of multi-lens spectacles that can be focused using a small dial built into the frame.

An article on Protech News allegedly written by George, a "retired accountant and freelance writer. He has a huge whiskey collection and loves smoking cuban cigars. George is addicted to nature and enjoys long hikes with his wife Christine and their dog Robby". The article is eaded "These Self-Adjusting Glasses Will Do Wonders For Your Eyesight!" and has a stock image of a white haired white man reading a newspaper and adjusting his black framed glasses.

The review even goes so far as to claim it is authored by a retired accountant called George Lane, who “has a huge whisky collection” and who “enjoys long hikes with his wife Christine and their dog Robby”. Despite George being a retired accountant, he’s writing for a site called ProTech, which has only one page on it – this advert – and is registered to the UAE.

Still, a whisky-drinking, cigar-smoking retirement in the United Arab Emirates must have gotten boring for George Lane, as less than a fortnight after publishing this piece he’d deleted the ProTech website entirely and upped sticks – presumably with wife Christine and dog Robby in tow – to move to New York, setting up his new spectacles-flogging website, Vision Focus:

An article on Vision Focus allegedly written by George, a "retired accountant and freelance writer. He has a huge whiskey collection and loves smoking cuban cigars. George is addicted to nature and enjoys long hikes with his wife Christine and their dog Robby". The article is eaded "These Self-Adjusting Glasses Will Do Wonders For Your Eyesight!" and has a stock image of a white haired white man reading a newspaper and adjusting his black framed glasses.

Most worrying of all of the scams displayed by Outbrain on that Daily Star article were those featuring medical claims, like this ad, which urged readers: “If You Have An Enlarged Prostate, Do This Immediately (Genius!)”.

A stylised depiction of a prostate with the heading "If You Have An Enlarged Prostate, Do This Immediately (Genius!)". "(Sponsored - www.your-health-today.com)"

The ad claimed once again to be directing Daily Star readers to an independent website – this time named “Your Health Today”, before delivering them to an affiliate-linked fake site making medical claims about a supplement pill which “fights the root cause of [benign prostatic hyperplasia] and may assist with enlarged prostates without any modern medicine or procedures.”

Article on "My Health Easy" headed "Try This To Help Shrink Enlarged Prostate (Watch Video)" with a stock image of a white-haired white woman wearing a lab coat and stethoscope.

This site, actively promoted by ads on the Daily Star website, urged readers who were worried about their enlarged prostate to “understand what and why big pharma companies don’t want you to know”, before trying to sell them a product called “Prostate 911”, retailing at $69 for a month’s supply.

Every single one of the ads I’ve featured here, as well as ads for walk-in baths, pension services, will-writing services and reverse-mortgages, were served up by the Outbrain Smartfeed plugin on a single article in the Daily Star. This article wasn’t special, and it wasn’t an exception: this is the norm for sites which use content aggregators to serve sponsored content into their pages. I could have picked almost any other article from the Daily Star site, or almost any article from the Mirror Online, Daily Express, or countless local news sites across the UK.

Many of the ads I found linked to websites that strongly look to be scams, making exaggerated and deeply misleading claims in order to lure readers into using their affiliate link, gaining the affiliate marketers a kickback. Many of the ads link to sites that are mocked up to feign independence, featuring fake testimonials and reviews of dubious authorship. Some of these sites exist one day and are gone the next – certainly not the kind of sites I’d be comfortable sharing my credit card details with.

The subject matter of many of these ads is also very telling: miraculous arthritis-cure pills, pills for enlarged prostates, reading glasses, walk-in baths, dubious antivirus software – these are products that target an older generation who are less likely to be internet savvy, and are more likely to be taken advantage of by people looking to sell them products they don’t need or that don’t work.

And all of this is served up by Outbrain’s all-pervasive Smartbrain feed, plugged directly into the websites of countless respectable and authoritative newspapers who are so starved of revenue they have come to turn a blind eye to how their platform, their reputation and their readers are being exploited.

In the quest for new sources of income and new ways to make ends meet, news companies understandably must find ways to make compromises, but in my opinion, Outbrain – along with Taboola, and Revcontent, and the other content aggregators out there – are facilitating dubious and outright dodgy products that take readers for a ride, and that is a compromise too far.

Start 2021 the right way: scrap those plans to go on a diet

Pixie Turner
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Start 2021 the right way: scrap those plans to go on a diet

‘New Year New Me’ is a statement that truly divides the population. While one half is on board, the other half scream back, “You’re fine the way you are!” Whichever camp you fall into, January 1st can feel like a monumental day; a day for change. It’s the level up from “diet starts Monday”.

As a nutrition professional, I’m not a fan of that sentiment, for a number of reasons.

When it comes to New Year’s resolutions, the statistics don’t look good. According to research by Richard Wiseman, 88% of New Year’s resolutions fail. According to a YouGov survey, only 4% of survey participants reported that they stuck to all their resolutions in 2018, while 24% kept some but not all of their resolutions.

When it comes to sticking by resolutions, it’s not looking good. Why is this? A lot of people I come across have quite strong black-and-white thinking patterns. Either you stick to your goal 100% or you’ve failed. There’s no room for nuance, no in-between. It’s incredibly disheartening, and allows one barrier to derail you completely.

In 2017, the most popular New Year’s resolution was to lose weight and eat healthier. Once the year was up, however, only 9% of people reported feeling that they were successful in the goals they had set for themselves.

We also don’t consider that what we want and what our bodies want might not be the same thing. I think there can be a certain expectation that the body will simply play ball with whatever drastic or exciting venture we have planned for it. Even now, one of the most common New Year’s resolutions is to lose weight. But what if your body doesn’t really want that to happen? It might, but there’s no guarantee.

A glass of water

When it comes to January and diets, we can set ourselves up for failure without even trying. We know in advance that January 1st is coming, and what to expect, and our thinking can enter what is colloquially known as a ‘last supper’ mentality. You know that a period of restriction is coming up, so there can be a desire, or perceived need even, to enjoy the abundance while it lasts. A day of this here and there isn’t a problem in the slightest – many of us do this on Christmas Day as that meal is so special, and not one we’ll likely have again for a year. It’s understandable to want to make the most out of it. But when this mindset remains over several weeks, possibly even the whole of December, it can take away some of the enjoyment. You can get a taste of it right now: try drinking as much water as you can. The first few sips when you’re thirsty are delicious, then the more you drink it becomes boring, then even uncomfortable. By the end the experience is ruined because you’ve gone too far. We can do the exact same thing with food.

The answer isn’t to start dieting at Christmas either, in case you’re thinking “I should have started earlier”. In 2018, a double blinded trial of 272 adults found that dieting behaviours around Christmas time prevented 0.37kg of weight gain. That’s less than a can of beans. Worth it? I don’t think so.

Decades of research has demonstrated that diets are very effective in the short-term, but when we look at years rather than months, the data is incredibly disappointing. For a select few (usually the most vocal online), diets seem to do the job, but for the majority any lost weight is usually regained within a year or two [1-5].

With all this in mind, I propose something different: why not make this the year where you say enough with the list of foods you can and cannot eat, and enough of someone who’s never met you telling you what to do with your body? Instead of looking outwards, practice looking inwards, at what your body is asking for. What does hunger feel like for you? What prevents you from being able to consistently recognise and respond to what your body is asking you? Is it sleep deprivation, alcohol, distractions, work? What do you need for a meal to be really satisfying? Not just reaching physical fullness but proper satisfaction – that feeling where you finish a meal feeling great and not needing anything else?

Research shows that this interoceptive awareness is associated with health benefits, and when matched against a dieting programme, those who looked inwards rather than outwards had better physical and mental health outcomes. This is still an emerging field of research, but according to initial studies participants experienced improvements in cholesterol levels, blood lipid levels, blood pressure, depression, and body appreciation, and started eating a greater variety of foods.

Perhaps it’s an idea worth considering, rather than yet another diet that’s likely to fail. And if that’s not your cup of tea, how about making your New Year’s resolution going to therapy, if you can afford it? I think the world would probably be a better place if we all went to therapy.

References

  1. Wing RR, Phelan S. Long-term weight loss maintenance. Am J Clin Nutr. 2005;82(1):222S-225S. doi:10.1093/ajcn/82.1.222S
  2. Howard B V., Manson JE, Stefanick ML, et al. Low-Fat Dietary Pattern and Weight Change Over 7 Years. JAMA. 2006;295(1):39. doi:10.1001/jama.295.1.39
  3. Methods for voluntary weight loss and control. NIH Technology Assessment Conference Panel. Ann Intern Med. 1992;116(11):942-949. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1580453. Accessed June 8, 2018.
  4. Mann T, Tomiyama AJ, Westling E, Lew A-M, Samuels B, Chatman J. Medicare’s search for effective obesity treatments: Diets are not the answer. Am Psychol. 2007;62(3):220-233. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.62.3.220
  5. French SA, Jeffery RW, Forster JL. Dieting status and its relationship to weight, dietary intake, and physical activity changes over two years in a working population. Obes Res. 1994;2(2):135-144. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16355486. Accessed June 7, 2018.

How to spot medical misinformation in a pandemic: our top 10 tips

Brian Eggo
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How to spot medical misinformation in a pandemic: our top 10 tips

The internet has revolutionized society in ways that could scarcely have been imagined just a few decades ago. There’s a vast ocean of information to dive into and explore – and it’s only a click away. Unfortunately, that ocean is badly polluted, and the sewage continues to pour in.

It therefore puts us in a difficult position when it comes to figuring out what we should believe, and how that informs our actions, particularly when it comes to matters of health.

That polluted ocean is populated with a plethora of predators, and some well-meaning but hopelessly deluded parasites. They’re all hoping you’ll eschew ‘mainstream medicine’ and invest your faith, and money, in their products.

The good news is that there’s nothing new about the selling of snake-oil, and the warning signs can be relatively easily spotted in most cases. The bad news is that we’re in the middle of a global pandemic, so we’re scared, we’re grieving, and we’re desperate. Add to that some information overload and we have a perfect cocktail of confusion to lead you to making bad decisions.

As a remedy, we prescribe a healthy dose of (scientific) skepticism and critical thinking skills. To help you on your way, here’s our top-ten tips for spotting questionable health claims:

1: Ponder prior plausibility

A glass of water with a thought bubble above it containing a wave in the ocean. The text reads "Ponder Prior Plausibility".

When it comes to any proposed medical intervention there should be some form of mechanism in action. Evaluating the likelihood of that mechanism against what we know about how the world works can be telling. Homeopathy, for example, relies on a method of repeated dilution of an (alleged) active ingredient to the point where barely any molecules remain, or sometimes none with the more “potent” remedies. The concept of the diluted water having some kind of “memory” defies common sense. Another example is the concept of qi (or chi), which underpins most of Traditional Chinese Medicine. It is described as “the natural energy of the universe”. This energy, and the meridians it is claimed to flow through in human bodies, has never been detected. Of course, this doesn’t mean we close the door completely to such possible interventions, but the evidence required to prove that they actually work has to be cast-iron. Currently, for homeopathy and TCM, it is far from that.

2: Be cautious of conspiratorial convictions

A drawing of Bill Gates with two vats of corona virus - the text reads "Be cautious of conspiratorial convictions"

The bad news about nefarious conspiracies is that sometimes they do happen. For an example of a medical conspiracy you need look no further than the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. That doesn’t however mean that everything bad that happens in the world is the result of such a thing, and the larger the scale of the conspiracy theory the less likely it is to be true. Unfortunately, the pattern-seeking nature of the human mind can go into overdrive and make connections where they don’t exist. For some extra credit on this topic, read up a little on Hyperactive Agency Detection. In the case of Covid-19, conspiracies such as it being a man-made biological weapon, or a ploy by Bill Gates to put trackers in our bodies via vaccinations are conveniently free of credible evidence, yet we have centuries’ worth of evidence of the transmission and spread of viruses.

3: Give panaceas a pass

A bottle labelled "Cures what ails ya!" and a list of things it cures including "acne, bad breath, covid19, cancer" - the text reads "give panaceas a pass"

In simplest possible terms, cure-all’s cure nothing. The longer the list of conditions that something claims to treat, the less likely it is to do anything.

It should set off your skeptical spider senses even more if an alternative health treatment which has been around for a long time is proclaimed as a cure for a new disease.

For an example of this, have a look at conspiracy theorists’ pin-up boy Alex Jones’ peddling of colloidal silver for Covid-19.

4: Beware of biases

"Beware of biases" - mermaids on a rock sing in algorithms while holding on to social media icons.

The human brain is amazing, but flawed: “We are emotional, semi-rational creatures, plagued with a host of biases, mental shortcuts, and errors in thinking” – Dr Steve Novella, The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe.

All of our cognitive shortcomings are further fuelled by social media algorithms which are considerably more likely to push content in your direction which fits your worldview. With this in mind, some self-reflection and humility about your own shortcomings will serve you well.

Be extra cautious of claims which fit comfortably with your worldview.

5: Practice prudence with Presidential proclamations

A megaphone shouting in graphs with the text "practice prudence with presidential proclamations"

Many countries across the world have varied their approach to tackling Covid-19. Some are due to factors such as population density, cultural norms, or infrastructure. It’s no surprise however that some of the worst hit countries are those where the leaders don’t pay appropriate attention to the advice of the scientific community. Examples include Donald Trump’s promotion of hydroxychloroquine, Jair Bolsonaro’s recent proclamations about nitazoxanide, or the Chinese Government’s continued pushing of TCM – most notably the especially cruel use of bear bile and other animal products for Covid-19 cures. Whatever your politics, it never hurts to question your Government’s wisdom!

6: Providently peruse problematic premature press

"Providently peruse problematic premature press" - a news paper claims a miracle cure

Science communication is difficult, and there’s a conflict of interest between accurately reflecting findings, and garnering public interest. In addition, accuracy is diluted as the conclusions of a study become a press release, then a news story, (with independently written attention-grabbing headline). Currently this is exacerbated by the unprecedented thirst we have for new data in the middle of a pandemic, with many preprints getting press attention before they go through peer review. As such, you should be extra cautious about what you read. It’s prudent to delve behind the headlines and go to the source, and to wait and see what the rest of the scientific community has to say about it before making a judgment.

7: Filter for foolish fallacies

"Filter for foolish fallacies" - a ship floating above water with sales labelled "nature, ancient wisdom, popularity and authority" the ship is called The Fallacy.

Without delving too much into philosophy, logical fallacies are errors in reasoning that undermine the logic of an argument. Pseudoscientific claims of alternative medicine proponents almost always fall into some of these. For example:

  • The argument from authority: When ‘real’ doctors (or other experts) are used to try and support fringe beliefs. Examples include the two Doctors who misrepresented statistics to try and argue that Covid-19 had spread further than expected, and therefore wasn’t as serious as first thought, or the well-known descent of multiple Nobel Prize winning Linus Pauling into unfounded claims of the benefits of vitamin C megadosing.
  • The argument from popularity: Most commonly used when there’s no rigorous data to prove something works, the alt-med proponent will fall back to patient testimonies, or cite the fact that many people use their product so it must be good. Check out Homeopathy UK’s twitter feed for frequent examples.
  • The appeal to ancient wisdom: In simple terms, saying that a medical intervention has been used for thousands of years is frequently seen as a plus. It should however always ring alarm bells. Pre-scientific era medicine was not known for its effectiveness, and such an argument should not be compelling. Traditional Chinese Medicine is certainly one of the worst culprits here.
  • The appeal to nature: This is used in two ways. Firstly, there’s a sentiment that things which are ‘natural’ are always good for you, despite the fact that the world is teeming with incredibly dangerous flora and fauna. On the flipside, it’s also used to denigrate modern medicine, or anything which requires some form of scientific intervention to produce. Neither are good arguments.

Look out carefully for these and others when evaluating any medical intervention.

8: Critique claims carefully

"Critique claims carefully" - an angler fish holds a pill in place of its light and says "it boosts your immune system"

Medical treatments will generally fall into one of three areas: prevention, cure, or treatment. A claim to cure anything (particularly a virus like Sars-Cov-2) should always set off alarm bells as it’s highly unlikely. If you hear [miracle cure x] kills [disease y] in a petri dish it sounds impressive, but is almost entirely meaningless (napalm will kill cancer cells for example, but we wouldn’t recommend it for your tumour). Claims to treat or mitigate the effects of a disease are more common. We’re learning more and more about how to treat severe cases of Covid-19, but still have a long way to go. Anything that claims to be able to treat it right now should be met with the utmost of skepticism. In terms of prevention, don’t be fooled by alt-med claims of ‘boosting your immune system’ – it almost always shows a lack of understanding about what the immune system does. That being said, vaccines will ‘train’ your immune system, which is kind a ‘boost’ of some sort, and this still remains our best hope for keeping Covid-19 at bay. A general rule of thumb to apply here is that the more dramatic the claim, the less likely it is to be true.

9: Be pharma-logical

"Be pharma-logical" a drawing of a man in the water with a shark fin strapped to his head which reads "big pharma"

There’s a constant campaign by proponents of alternative medicine to try and discredit mainstream medical practices. Any time you see the term ‘Big Pharma’ being used, it’s usually paired with an attempt to sell some snake oil, or perhaps talk you out of vaccinating your children.

Let’s be very clear though, pharmaceutical companies are consistently awful – read Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma for more on the subject. That shouldn’t however fool you into thinking that everything they do is bad, or that the alternative medicine on offer would be of any use. Be reasonable and balanced in your approach.

10: Separate pseudoscience from science

"Separate pseudoscience from science" a series of graphs spell out "bullshit"

Pseudoscience is akin to a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It has the look and feel of legitimate science; There are actual studies. Published in journals. Peer reviewed. In the case of medical interventions, there are legitimate health professionals who genuinely believe and actively promote them. Fortunately there are almost always some red flags that can be spotted with a little investigation, and points 1-9 above will help you along the way with that. For some quick assistance, check out the Skeptoid podcast’s episode on How to spot pseudoscience, or for a deeper dive, read the The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe.

In conclusion

The waters are murky, but a little bit of critical thinking will provide some much-needed illumination. Be careful what you believe, and look out for your family and friends too.

All the drawings from the piece above are collected together under the heading "How to spot medical misinformation in a pandemic". Each image is part of a large seascape with a person rowing a small boat heading towards the lighthouse which lights up the heading.

We all need good hand hygiene, but antibacterial soap is a waste of time

Alice Howarth
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We all need good hand hygiene, but antibacterial soap is a waste of time

Pre-Covid-times, we’d had the same hand-soap in the kitchen for months. It’s not like you go through hand-soap that often, you only use a pump or two at a time and since my partner and I both work, we would do most of our handwashing either at work or in the bathroom, rather than in the kitchen. So, we’d had the same kitchen hand-soap for ages.

But then Covid happened, and we were suddenly home a lot more and washing our hands a lot more frequently throughout the day. We started to get through that bottle of hand-soap much more quickly. When we ran out, my partner picked up a new bottle – I assumed I had no real preference on hand-soap, as long as it gets my hands clean – but, apparently, I was wrong. My partner picked the antibacterial hand-soap. It turns out I have unnecessarily strong feelings on antibacterial hand-soap.

I’ve always thought antibacterial hand-soap was a waste. The important part of cleaning your hands, isn’t what you use to clean them – any old soap will do – but actually that you properly use friction on the skin to manually disrupt any grime and bugs on the surface. That’s why, all the way back in March when the recommendation was to carry on as usual, but wash our hands more frequently, we started to see those instruction posters explaining how exactly to wash our hands.

Handwashing specifically as a way to minimise disease transmission has been around for a long time – in the 1840s Ignaz Semmelweis introduced a practice of physician handwashing between the morgue and delivery rooms and cut the mortality rate during labour dramatically providing evidence of some sort of transmission of disease long before we really understood germ theory. In those days physicians used chlorinated lime to clean their hands and of course, now, hand hygiene is an essential part of health care. But we also know it reduces transmission of diseases in a community setting as well as in health care and there are now guidelines from the World Health Organisation, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, and the NHS on how and when to wash your hands.

While the act of scrubbing is important when washing your hands – we do know that soap is also helpful. Soap contains surfactants that help to lift the oils from your skin and remove dirt and grime but it also acts as a lubricant to make scrubbing more comfortable. Scrubbing your hands with plain water is enough to help reduce transmission of some illnesses, even if adding soap makes it even better. Once you’ve washed your hands thoroughly for the duration of Happy Birthday sung twice over, then it’s also important that you thoroughly rinse your hands – the soap that lifted the oils, grime and germs from your skin needs removing so those germs don’t settle back down. It’s also important that you dry your hands well because germs pass more easily to and from wet surfaces. There’s no real evidence that paper towels are better than hand dryers, the important thing is to completely dry your hands before you touch anything again.

With all the guidance on how important it is to wash your hands, especially during the Covid pandemic, it’s really easy to assume that if using soap and water is good, then using extra special soap is even better. Shops sell antibacterial soaps, and while most people recognise that Sars-Cov-2 is a virus that won’t be affected by antibacterial agents, it’s easy to assume that it can’t hurt to get an “extra thorough” soap. And antibacterial soap isn’t usually more expensive than regular soap – so this isn’t a case of people wasting their money.

But that doesn’t mean using antibacterial soap is actually better.

A person with black skin and black nail varnish washes their hands in a sink.

Antibacterial soaps contain extra chemicals that are thought to actively kill bacteria. Many contain a chemical called triclosan, which was developed in the 1960s and used in hospital soaps, before it went on sale for use to consumers in the 1990s. In 2017 the FDA concluded that manufacturers of triclosan containing soaps hadn’t done enough to prove that their products were more effective than regular soap.

On top of this, there are rising concerns that repeated exposure to antimicrobial agents could be causing an increase in antimicrobial resistance which is contributing to a rise in “superbugs” that are difficult to treat. There isn’t enough evidence to suggest that antibacterial soaps are contributing to this – but there is evidence that they might.

There are some health concerns associated with Triclosan; mostly this boils down to an increased risk of contact dermatitis, or skin irritation, but some other concerns have been reported and again, manufacturers haven’t done enough to show that these soaps are safe for long term, repeated use. So, the FDA decided to prevent the marketing of soaps containing triclosan and some other antibacterial chemicals and have clarified that using regular soap is more than enough to clean your hands, reduce disease transmission and help reduce antimicrobial resistance. 

With all this said, I think it’s probably reasonable to say that using antibacterial soap is mostly harmless for most people and it’s not like the stuff is extortionately expensive, but it might irritate your skin, could cause problems if you’re using a lot of it regularly for a long period of time and it’s not any better than regular soap.

I’ll keep using the bottle of antibacterial soap we have until it’s gone, but I will continue to roll my eyes when people insist on buying it – and at least now I have an article to point them to when I tell them it’s a waste.

As a final point, I realised I’d written this entire article without actually checking the ingredient antibacterial soap that we have in the kitchen. So, as a diligent skeptic, I checked it to see which antibacterial agent was in this antibacterial soap that I own. It turns out that the “active” ingredient is… tea tree.

Christmas as we know it is appropriated, co-opted, bastardised… and thoroughly magical

Paul Duncan McGarrity
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Christmas as we know it is appropriated, co-opted, bastardised… and thoroughly magical

If you are looking for it, Christmas can certainly provide plenty of opportunities to be skeptical. Be it rampant consumerism, insistence that this is a ‘jolly’ time of year for everyone, or even the understanding that there are some dangerous psychopaths out there who wait until after the Queen’s speech to open their presents.

Arguments could be made that not a single piece of festive tradition hasn’t been appropriated, co-opted, bastardised or straight up stolen from a bunch of pagan beliefs. Christmas as we know it is a mishmash of religious land grabs and crafty politics.

Arguments could be made that not a single piece of festive tradition hasn’t been appropriated, co-opted, bastardised or straight up stolen from a bunch of pagan beliefs. Christmas as we know it is a mishmash of religious land grabs and crafty politics.

Take good old Saint Nick. You may have heard the myth that Coca Cola turned his suit red, or you might know about the various problematic sidekicks he has in other parts of the world (yes Zwarte Piet, I’m talking to you). What you might not know is that the historical basis for the North Pole’s most famous resident is a 3rd/4th century bishop from modern day Turkey.

Saint Nicholas of Myra (for it is he) is a busy boy. Apart from inspiring the judgemental global delivery man with an unregulated surveillance system that we know and love, he also has a tidy side-line in patron sainting. Among those under his charge are children (on brand), archers (a bit left field) and repentant thieves (convenient for someone who breaks into homes on the regular).

As with many saints he’s also got a few miracles under his belt as well, including the delightful tale of resurrecting three children who had been murdered by a butcher and were about to be offered out as ‘pork’ (why this wasn’t dropped into ‘Miracle on 34th Street’ I will never know). However, this is where things get a little murky.

Not much is know of the verifiable historical biography of St Nick, but it has been pointed out that some of the stories attached to his name bare striking similarities to those told about Apollonius of Tyana, a first century Greek philosopher and contemporary of the birthday boy Jesus Henry Christ.

It isn’t unusual for this sort of reincorporation of pagan stories to be seen in early Christianity, in fact parallels can even be drawn between Apollonius and the story of Jesus’s life. As the cult of Christianity was developing, it was vying for followers with many other emerging beliefs. For example, the cult of Mithras was also popular at the time and could be seen as a direct rival to the early Christians.

Mithra sacrificing the bill (100-200 BCE), from the Borghése collection bought in 1807 by the Louvre. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mithra_sacrifiant_le_Taureau-005.JPG
Mithra sacrificing the bill (100-200 BCE), from the Borghése collection bought in 1807 by the Louvre.

While no one knows exactly what they believed, the surviving iconography would not look out of place on any half decent heavy metal album cover. Slaying bulls, being born out of a rock, lion headed people! It’s a shame that Christianity won out and suppressed the worship of Mithras in the 4th century, at the very least the Sistine Chapel would’ve looked absolutely kickass!

With the context of these competing cults the fact that Christmas is even celebrated on December 25th could be seen as nought but a savvy bit of marketing.

One of the most popular festivals of the Roman empire was the Saturnalia, honouring the god Saturn. As a time of feasting (tick), gift giving (tick), candle lighting (tick) and the occasional morale standard being lowered (tick, tick, tick!) – there are clear influences on the Christian celebration.

It should also come as no surprise that this festival landed in the bleakest part of winter, towards the back end of December. It’s almost like humans are predisposed to having a knees-up when they are trying to ignore how cold and wet it is outside. By celebrating Christmas at the same time of year the early Christians may have been hoping to win over new followers through the positive associations with a market leader in good time paganism.

One of the most interesting elements of the Saturnalia was the tradition of slaves being given licences to do and say what they wanted during the festivities as well as having table service provided to them by their masters. I am convinced that this is the basis for the modern office Christmas party.

One of the most interesting elements of the Saturnalia was the tradition of slaves being given licences to do and say what they wanted during the festivities as well as having table service provided to them by their masters. While there is no research that backs me up on this, I am convinced that this is the basis for the modern office Christmas party. I can’t get beyond the idea of an inebriated Gaulish warrior pigeon-holing a Roman Senator for an hour, ranting about tech issues with the latest abacus before spinning off towards the dance floor because ‘this lyre tune is my jam!’.

Like I said, if you were so inclined, there is a lot to be skeptical about when it comes to Christmas… but, personally, this year I won’t be looking. Not now I’ve walked down darkened streets, past hedges and houses covered in lights.

I’ve wandered by these gaudy oases so many times that they barely register. The same was true this year when I saw the first decorations of the season, in this case a bush covered in multicoloured LEDs. I made an internal note that I’d need to start thinking about buying presents and went to carry on walking.

But this year there is one significant difference in how this scene played out and it took the form of my one-year-old who happened to be sat on my shoulders at the time. There is nothing quite like the sudden and excited head slapping of a toddler to stop you dead in your tracks.

I took him down to see what the matter was and my partner and I were greeted with a face that can only be described as ‘Oh I’m sorry guys, are we just going to pretend that this is normal now? The plant is FLASHING COLOURS AT ME!’

That moment and the five minutes that followed where we pointed out all of the colours we could see (a little too loudly apparently as the owner of the house came out to check we weren’t unrepentant thieves or archers) made Christmas and all its nonsense untouchable.

For our kid there will be sooty footprints on the carpet on Christmas morning, Rudolph will munch the carrot he leaves out, a jolly fat man from the North Pole will creep into his room and that will be FINE and above all else for a few weeks of the year the bushes of London will sprout lights.

I’ll tell him the other stuff one day, but right now, all the magic is real.

Merry Christmas everyone

Are you skeptical about free will? Prove it!

Aaron Rabinowitz
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Are you skeptical about free will? Prove it!

Free will persists as a philosophical problem that frequently spills over into public discourse. While it often serves as a punchline, the mainstreaming of pop psychology and systemic analysis has raised genuine doubts in many that they are truly in control of their own actions. That debate has largely focused on the possibility of free will in a deterministic universe, and the implications that has for what we make of our lives.

Personally, I’ve argued that free will is impossible, because everything in the universe comes down to luck – nothing that happens is under our control in the kind of robust way needed to support our natural intuitions about moral responsibility. Rather than rehash those arguments, however, I want to talk about two related questions that continue to vex me:

  1. Can I (or anyone) genuinely internalise the belief that I don’t have free will?
  2. Can I prove to myself and others that I have genuinely internalised the ‘no free will’ view?

Let’s start with question one. What does it mean to fully internalise a belief like “I lack free will”, rather than simply paying lip service to that belief? Thomas Nagel, to whom I owe the vast majority of my limited understanding on these issues, explains it in terms of the subjective point of view versus the objective point of view. The subjective point of view is the one we experience every day, where folks generally report a sense of control over their actions; the objective point of view, sometimes called the view from nowhere, is the one that we sometimes try to get ourselves into when we engage in a range of projects like moral or scientific analysis. From the objective point of view, our behaviour is just more effects in the endless chains of cause and effect stretching back to whatever cosmologists decide is the beginning of the universe.

Nagel is skeptical that we can ever fully replace the subjective point of view with the objective point of view when it comes to free will, even as we become more and more intellectually convinced by the evidence that the objective point of view gives a sufficient account of our behaviour. He argues that our psychology will always require seeing ourselves and some others as more than simply “portions of the world”.

While I fully endorse Nagel’s philosophical argument against free will, I part ways with him on the psychological necessity of belief in free will. I believe Nagel prematurely forecloses the possibility that we could truly do away with our subjective experience of ourselves as free agents and replace it fully with the objective perspective that we’re radically interconnected to a deterministic universe. He presents no evidence that this is impossible.

In contrast, strains of Daoism and Buddhism, which agree that free will is an illusion and advocate for internalising the objective perspective, present a variety of practices for dismantling the subjective perspective and cultivating the objective perspective in its place. Of course, Nagel can deny that any of these practices are psychologically successful, but that is an empirical claim in need of evidence.

Let me turn then to question two and the problem of evidence. What evidence could support the claim that I have successfully internalised the objective perspective and no longer experience myself as having free will? That might seem like a silly question; shouldn’t I just be able to introspect and see if belief in free will is amongst the set of beliefs I hold? How is it any different from internalizing the belief that 2+2=4?

The reason it’s different is that introspection is fallible, and it’s more fallible for some kinds of beliefs and experiences than others. If introspection were infallible, we’d have to accept the “sensation” of acting freely as sufficient to prove we have free will. If we’re going to try to deny that free will exists, we’re going to have to acknowledge we could be wrong about a lot of what is going on inside our own minds.

In case of free will, the burden of proof is fairly high, given the claim amounts to a pretty fundamental rewriting of perspective. Given the low stakes and general consensus (Twitter wars notwithstanding) I can reasonably infer that my experience of believing 2+2=4 tracks my actual beliefs on the subject. The same cannot be said for such a hotly contested and counterintuitive claim as the rejection of my own free will. If someone claimed to achieve enlightenment, you’d want substantial evidence, and fully internalising the objective perspective about free will shares several qualities with various accounts of enlightenment, such as increased non-attachment and equanimity.

A statue of a man deep in thought

I’ll be honest up front, when it comes to trying to prove that I no longer believe in my own free will, the options would be grim even if the burden of proof wasn’t high. I have my fallible introspection, in which I, like Hume, can find nothing that looks to me like an independent self capable of sustaining free will. When I look inside I see a chaos of forces that I barely understand much less feel is under my robust control. That may just be me, as much of philosophy is just philosophers telling on themselves, but I get the impression that’s not the case here. Nor do I think mindfulness or psychological work fundamentally replaces the chaos with order and control. It’s more like it helps me be okay with the reality I experience. I don’t have the “feeling” of freedom some folks talk about when I ask them about their experiences around this issue. However, I also have no way to show any of that to anyone, and so can’t expect anyone else to be convinced based solely on my self-reporting.

Turning from introspection to externally observable behaviours provides little help. As far as I can see, there’s no necessary connection between belief or lack of belief in free will and any set of behaviours. Much like saying “I don’t believe in free will” provides little guarantee of the internal reality of my beliefs, acting in various ways and then saying “I acted that way because I don’t believe in free will” carries little weight to those not already convinced.

This is not the same as saying that belief or lack of belief in free will has zero impact on people’s behavior. Rather, it’s acknowledging that there is no easy one to one connection between any particular behaviour and belief or lack of belief in free will. There is substantial research that reported beliefs about free will correlate with a variety other beliefs and behaviours. I personally have experienced shifts in my behaviour as I’ve worked to internalise the objective perspective towards free will, but I can’t hope to isolate the influence of that one belief shift. At best, I can tell a somewhat convincing narrative about how rejecting belief in free will leads to increased humility and compassion, and then point to behaviours that seem to embody those values, but there is no way to externally verify that narrative. Furthermore, in an age when it’s seen as cool in some quarters to deny free will, folks may reasonably worry that my narrative is as much performance art as honest analysis of my own beliefs and behaviors.

I’m left in a rather perplexing position. I believe strongly that I have managed to internalise the objective perspective on free will, enough so that I’ve long since forgotten what it feels like to believe in free will. If there is some subconscious part of me that still clings to the illusion of free will, I can’t find it. Without evidence that it exists, persistent claims that it does and that it still controls my behavior start to feel like gaslighting. I find the persistent insinuation just as unpleasant as theists telling me that I’m not really an atheist because deep down I secretly still believe in god. Yet I’ve had fellow philosophers insist emphatically that I still believe I have free will and I’m just mouthing words to the contrary. I’m baffled how they can have such certainty about the internal state of my mind, when I can’t even manage that, despite a lack of argument or evidence.

Ultimately, these considerations are just another reminder for me of how little I can confidently say about my own mind, which just reinforces to me how I can’t possibly be the person in charge.

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