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I’ve recently been taking time to research mentalism. Mentalism is, in my opinion, the coolest area of magic. In mentalism, the magician (known as a mentalist), uses psychology and suggestion to create the illusion of mind reading, mind control, and extrasensory perception. That definitely beats card tricks. Think Criss Angel, Derren Brown, or “The Mentalist”.

Like all magic, it turns out that the secrets behind mentalism aren’t nearly as exciting as one would expect. One of the biggest secrets of mentalism is the use of psychological forces. In a psychological force, a mentalist will ask a person to think of something, perhaps a color, and then predict their response. However, as most people think in similar ways and share a common culture, many people will happen to think of the same thing when asked the same question. Let’s try this out. Don’t scroll down to far on this page or the experiment won’t work.

Please do each of the following things, and write your responses down.

Name a color.

Think of a number between 1 and 10.

Think of a pretty flower.

Think of a piece of furniture.

Think of a vegetable.

Look outside the nearest window and write the first object you see.

Now, here are the results a mentalist would predict:

Color: red

Number: 7

Flower: Rose

Furniture: Chair

Vegetable: carrot

Outside the window: tree

What do you think? Did it work? If it didn’t work, mentalists have methods of working around that.  But that’s for another post…

You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.

How’d I do? Does this describe you? It describes me too. Check out the Forer Effect:

http://www.skepdic.com/forer.html

http://www.psychometric-success.com/images/PC0201.gif

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (copyrighted, I don’t know how to type that little thing that symbolizes copyrighted-ness) is a personality test given to over two million people in the United States per year. If you are a high school student, your school probably uses it somehow to help you think about careers and college. The MBTI will break down your personality according to where you fall on 4 scales: (1) extraversion/introversion, (2) sensate/intuitive, (3) thinking/feeling, and (4) judging/perceiving. It all sounds very nice, and very scientific.

However, I’ve always been skeptical of the Myers-Briggs test. I have three reasons for this. First of all, I have taken the test multiple times, and each time I have gotten different results. Second, how is one supposed to accurately answer some of the questions on the test? I would think that your response to such questions as “often you prefer to read a book instead of going to a party”, would be highly influenced by your mood and the context. Also, wouldn’t it depend upon which book and which party were being considered?

The final reason I’m skeptical about the Myers-Briggs test is the Forer effect. The Forer effect refers to people’s tendency to rate vague statements that could apply to anyone as uniquely descriptive of them. This is why people often believe that they meet the description of “their sign” in astrology. In personality tests such as the Myers-Briggs test, I believe that the description one receives of their type is so vague that it could really apply to anyone. For a more thorough and referenced debunking of the Myers-Briggs test and description of the Forer effect, check out my main sources below.

http://www.skepdic.com/myersb.html

http://www.skepdic.com/forer.html

One of the things that I like to do in my free time is go to the bookstore (usually Borders or Barnes and Noble), drink enough coffee to kill a small lab rat, and study science textbooks. However, before I get started, I always make sure to carry out a very important mission. And I thought I would share that mission today, so that others may find the same sense of accomplishment in carrying it out that I do. The mission is as follows:

1.      Borders and Barnes and Noble, in either a misguided attempt at  scientific integrity or a selfish pursuit of profit, place books promoting “Intelligent Design” and criticizing evolutionary theory as false, in the science section. But as most readers probably know, intelligent design is not science; it is merely a collection of logical fallacies, religion, and pseudoscience.

2.      Go to the science section of one of the book stores, and find these books. They include The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design,  Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology, anything by Michael Behe, and more.

3.      Pick up these books. Using your hands.

4.      Kindly assist the store by moving the books to a more appropriate section. The three best, in my opinion, are “Religion”, “Fiction”, and “Science Fiction”, though you are welcome to select any section other than “Science”. In fact, placing them in the “Erotica” section would probably be quite interesting.

5.      Your mission is now complete.

Thoughts?

Brad Rybinski

It’s the ultimate vision of a dystopia: Parents can choose their child’s characteristics before they are born. Only the richest parents can afford this, so the rich children are always the smartest, best looking, and most charismatic. Schools cater to these students, and they grow up to be better in every possible way. They then make more money than their naturally produced counterparts, and the cycle continues. Feudalism has been revived; ones birth now determines ones future.

Many people worry that this is where genetic engineering, the relatively new (around 40 years old) technology that allows novel genes to be inserted into organisms, will eventually lead humanity. However, those people are wrong. Without further ado, here are the reasons why designer babies will never become a reality.

1.      Most of the traits parents would seek to influence, such as intelligence and height, are polygenic. That means that they are the result of multiple (and in the case of intelligence and height: many, many) genes interacting in an extremely complex fashion. Thus there are many genes that would need to be changed in a very precise manner to have any chance of affecting an embryo’s eventual height, intelligence, or any other desired characteristic.

2.      Genes have multiple effects in the body, and a positive effect in one way often elicits a negative effect in another. For instance, the human genome contains a gene that may cause a 10 point boost in IQ if it is present. However, this same gene also increases ones risk of developing a terrible disease, known as torsion dystonia, by 10%. As torsion dystonia confines its victims to wheelchairs and causes uncontrollable muscle spasms, the risk of inserting this intelligence gene is probably not worth the potential benefit. Also, in a more general sense, the data suggests that the greater ones intelligence, the more likely one is to suffer mental illness or cancer, and shorter people definitely live longer.

3.      Certain traits are often valued because of their novelty. Beauty for instance, is often extremely socially relative. Suppose all parents started to design their daughters to be naturally thin. Being slightly overweight would then likely become attractive, as all other young girls would be naturally skinny.

4.      Nurture/the environment. This isn’t the post where I want to get into the whole nature/nurture debate, but obviously ones environment has an effect on any of the traits one would seek to influence with genetic enhancement.

For a similar arguement and slightly different perspective on this, see this article by Steven Pinker:

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2003/jun/05/research.highereducation

Thoughts?

Brad Rybinski

Wikipedia…  Everybody knows about it.  Millions of people use it every day.  If you search for nearly anything on Google or any of the other large search engines, a Wikipedia article is bound to be included within the first few pages of results.  At first glance, these articles appear to be reliable and easy to understand. However, thousands of people are outspokenly against this online encyclopedia.  As a high school student, my teachers are constantly reminding me of the “terror” of Wikipedia, and how it “destroys all the credibility of research”. But is Wikipedia really that unreliable?  And honestly, can’t people make practical use of Wikipedia?  I’ve done a little exploring, and I’ve come to a few conclusions of my own on these matters…

When arguing against Wikipedia’s reliability, the first thing people bring up is that “you can change anything in any article.”  The idea is to try to convince you that the sources are erratic or untrustworthy because random people might be filling the pages with crazy ranting, opinions, or otherwise nonsensical vandalism.  The truth is that this really can’t happen that often.  Honestly, how many people spend their free time parading around the millions of Wikipedia articles, sinisterly typing in their insane ramblings and cackling over their genius plans to destroy Wikipedia?  Not many.  I’m not saying that there aren’t people that do this, but I personally would much rather spend my Saturday nights doing something a little more fun.  Still, let’s assume that someone really did concoct a villainous scheme to destroy Wikipedia.  I decided to attempt this very act, and proceeded to create a Wikipedia account to enable editing of articles from my computer.  The first thing I did was try big, obvious changes to the more visited articles.  I wrote in things like, “the Nazis won WWII”, “Bob Dylan was the 40^th president”, and other random and wrong information.  As I expected, these additions were immediately reverted back to their original statements.  I also quickly discovered that there were indeed nut-jobs that perused the multitude of Wikipedia articles to make changes.  They were, however, devotees to the upholding of Wikipedia’s accuracy.  My changes were detected so rapidly, it was as if there a sacred order of Wikipedia Watchmen, ready to pounce on a false entry.  It is a mystery to me as to why so many people are hell-bent on making sure that I won’t change their dearest facts, but they clearly are.  I looked a little more into the process of editing and learned that the website automatically makes a record of all changes, no matter how minor, that are made.  Also, the editor must state a reason for their revision.  The better the description of the revision, the less likely it is that someone will flag the revision, resulting in a reversion to its original form (or at least, I found, a better reason will buy a little more time until the faulty revision’s eventual demise).

I had expected to be unable to make the obvious changes so I decided to make more subtle ones.  I looked up my hometown in the Wikipedia search and there was (of course) an article.  Who could care about a little article on a town of fewer than 6,000 people?  I changed one word.  One little date that was interjected into the article’s jumble of facts.  Sure enough, the date had been changed back to its correct form by the end of the day.  This is relatively solid evidence (at least to me) against Wikipedia’s publicized ineptitude toward countering vandalism.  After all, I had only changed the said date by 1 year, fully documented believable reasons for the change, and had made the change with a “fresh” Wikipedia account (as Wikipedia catches you for vandalism, it revokes your privileges rather quickly).  Surprisingly, my mischievous actions were discovered not by a person, but by a computer.  Anti-vandalism programs are the unsung heroes of Wikipedia maintenance.  They act somewhat as a Guardian of Wikipedia, crushing any stray defacement unable to be found by human eyes.  All in all, if you set out to destroy Wikipedia’s basic accuracy, you will (and I mean will) eventually be stopped.

So why, you might ask, does it seem so hard to make revisions to Wikipedia? Isn’t that one of its advertised “bonuses”?  The truth is that I hadn’t been making revisions at all.  All my “editing” had been petty vandalism.  I undertook a third task and tried to find something wrong in Wikipedia and correct it.  This was very difficult to accomplish.  A hidden truth about the encyclopedia is that almost all incorrect information either becomes flagged (labeled as incorrect) or changed within about a month.  A lot of this has to with how well the source information for each fact is cited.  That’s another good thing about Wikipedia.  You need to match every paragraph to another credible online source for it to stay on the site.  Whether or not the source is credible is a whole other argument, but we shall stick to Wikipedia’s own credibility for now.  It took me about an hour to find something wrong with Wikipedia.  I ended up changing the term “Indians” to the more accepted term “Native Americans”.  This seemed a meager effort, but it proved the best I could do to help Wikipedia.

As of December 2, 2008, there were 2,643,922 articles in English on Wikipedia.  That seems like a big number.  Do we really need all those articles?  Is it too easy to make an article?  To answer these I tried to write an article.  I gave up within minutes.  It is more of an undertaking than you might think, and is just like writing a research paper with an overly detailed bibliography.  You can’t just start writing.  As I mentioned earlier, every single statement, picture, or statistic you put in an article needs to be connected to another online source for your article to be even considered (by computer sorting) for insertion into the encyclopedia.  If you don’t cite your sources, your facts will (again, will) be flagged as untrustworthy.

The previous thought leads to another one:  Can we use Wikipedia for practical purposes?  My conclusion is that yes; we can.  Not only do Wikipedia articles offer a basic understanding of (usually) notable facts, they offer organized links to other sources.  These are often “acceptable” sources that can be used to formulate a good paper or project.  If you need to write about something about which you know nothing at all, start with Wikipedia.  After you read their concise version of the topic, click on some of the sources.  You never know.  They could be perfect for your needs.

After my research, I have become a proponent of Wikipedia, and its place in our ever-expanding world of information.  That is perfectly fine if you disagree.  I would love to hear your insight on this issue.  Keep in mind that I found all of the “facts” in this article somewhere in Wikipedia, and with only an afternoon of research. If you find anything in here that is blatantly wrong, make like Wikipedia and tell me!  Also, feel free to try the little experiments described.  As I did, you might find that Wikipedia is a lot different than the institutionalized world makes it out to be.

For more info, go to en.wikipedia.org .  If you dislike Wikipedia, you will pleased to know that there is an article on “Criticism of Wikipedia” (it is, ironically, four times larger than the Wikipedia article on “Wikipedia”)

        (The above article was graciously contributed by)    -GTW

Popular culture, even when it comes to what everyone has been taught about Thanksgiving in elementary school, is often dead wrong. Consider the following statements about Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims.

1.       The Pilgrims held the first Thanksgiving.

2.       The Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock.

3.       The Pilgrims were Puritians.

4.       The first Thanksgiving feast included corn, turkey, and cranberries.

None of these statements are true. That is, according to the following two sites:

http://hnn.us/articles/406.html  and http://hnn.us/articles/1126.html .

Still, while none of the statements listed above are true, perhaps the so called “debunkers” are not entirely accurate. Consider this, which claims to “debunk the debunkers”: http://hnn.us/articles/15002.html .

With all these different views on the accuracy of Thanksgiving, who is to say what really happened? Thoughts?

Brad Rybinski