Gullibility bracelets, what's the harm?

I'm a Johny-come-lately to this story, just about every newspaper and skeptical blog has covered the Power Balance bracelet fad started by the brothers, Troy and Josh Rodarmel. My first reaction was to call the brothers scam artists and worse. But, just think about it, what a boon for skeptics and bullshit busters - the scientific illiterati exposing their gullibility on the wrist for all to see!


OK, that's a bit over the top. But still, it's quite amusing to observe and see just who is wearing the silly bracelets. As far as health scams go, the bracelets are fairly harmless. To my knowledge, no one is wearing the bracelets and as a result foregoing cancer treatment. What's the harm if some old folk wear them and due to the placebo effect believe that they're experiencing fewer aches and pains? No one will be bankrupted by buying them, especially with counterfeit bracelets costing less than candy bars flooding the market.

Well, I believe the harm comes when children are involved. I see more and more disabled children wearing these things, believing their balance and coordination have improved. For many children with cerebral palsy and their parents, improved balance and coordination are crucial for better functioning and even for better career prospects. Improved balance and coordination is the false promise of Power Balance bracelets. These children and parents have typically had many disappointments in their lives, these bracelets will be more.

Other areas of concern with children, are the false ideas they gain about science and how the body works. Parents (adults) may be satisfied with placebo induced illusions of improved power and coordination, but do they really want their children to believe that holograms can manipulate non-existing energy to produce mysterious improvements in the body?

I am not going into the scientific detail of why Power Balance bracelets are a scam, there are many other blogs doing that. One excellent post is by Brian Dunning in Skepticblog, entititled Power Balance: Magical energy bracelets or nonsense?

The only reward ... schadenfreude?

I've alluded in a previous post to the futility of exposing quackery and nonsense. I cannot recall a single instance of someone engaging in quackery or pseudoscientific activities recanting or apologizing for misleading his or her followers. Quacks and charlatans, accepting that they are honest and well-meaning (debatable), are subject to sunken costs and unlikely to recant.

Their faithful followers are subject to confirmation bias, the placebo effect, the sunken cost fallacy, gullibility, anti-science attitudes, being misled by celebrities and so forth. The net result is that one is often just preaching to the converted and hoping that some undecided people will be swayed. The only doubtful reward may be schadenfreude.

The post hoc fallacy, World Youth Fest and Egypt

When pushed into a corner about the 100 million rand wasted at the recent World Beer and Condom Fest, sorry, World Festival of Youth and Students, Andile Lungisa claimed that the Fest had been instrumental in freeing Tunisia, Egypt and South Sudan. From News24:

Lungisa said that Egyptian youth who had attended the festival in Pretoria in December, had recently been "at the forefront of the Egyptian revolt".

"I'm not saying we started the protests, but before the festival there were no protests in Egypt. After the festival, there were. Draw your own conclusions," Lungisa told the media.

That was of course a classic post hoc ergo propter hoc error. From Skeptic's Dictionary:

"The post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this therefore because of this) fallacy is based upon the mistaken notion that simply because one thing happens after another, the first event was a cause of the second event."

Lungisa'a remarkable assertion was implausible, but not totally impossible (very little is). He offered no evidence, however. He could not even indicate how many Tunisians, Egyptians or Sudanese youth, if any, attended. Two thousand Zimbabweans attended, following Lungisa's reasoning, why is Mugabe still in power?

Resurrecting Occam's Donkey

Occam's Donkey has been dormant for about eight months. Why? Futility?

Well, as the ex-pilot (Randy Quaid) yelled at the aliens in Independence Day before he destroyed their ship:

"Hello boys! I'm baaack!!!"

To the quacks and charlatans out there,

Hi guys, I'm baaack!

Not that they're likely to quake in their boots, they know as well as I do that gullibility reigns and that a fool is still born every minute.

Keep NLP out of education

The following was adapted from a comment I made on Training Zone, see my previous post:

The UK (and South Africa) has just been through the Brain Gym in education debacle. I believe that the legitimate role of neuroscience in education suffered as a result. Because of its unfortunate and pretentious title, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is (falsely) associated with neuroscience. I note that Andy Bradbury recognises this issue on his website, where he declares that "The name is a major pain." Elsewhere he indicates that NLP cannot be a pseudoscience because it never claimed to be a science in the first place. I, however (I think most people do), believe that if something looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. Lay people (parents, teachers, managers) can often not distinguish between science and pseudocience (or art if you prefer) to the detriment of the former and the advantage of the latter.

I have read the report quoted by Garry Platt, “Neuro-linguistic programming and learning: teacher case studies on the impact of NLP in education.” This added to my concern. At least two of the authors seem to have a vested interest in NLP (Churches and Tosey). They have links with the University of Surrey group, most of whom according to Dave Snowden in the Wikipedia discussion pages on NLP, have NLP consultancies. Are there conflicts of interest?

The report consists of a literature study, which I do not now have time to peruse. The conclusion from the literature study states: "It was also clear from the literature that contrary to some popular opinion, there have been a number of academic publications on NLP that are supportive of its use in schools and education in general." For the moment I have to take that at face value.

The rest of the research consists of anecdotal "evidence" from teachers who have, or are using NLP in their classrooms. The authors conclude from the teacher anecdotes that " ... the impact of NLP is supported, or at least the perception of its effectiveness is supported." To my mind teacher anecdotes cannot provide scientific support for NLP and teacher perceptions of effectiveness are without value. Teachers who use NLP may themselves have a vested interest (also sunken cost fallacy) and are subject to confirmation bias.

While the authors of the report recognize that their evidence will be questioned, they suggest that NLP be taught to teachers because there should be a balance between evaluation and innovation. I wonder, however, how much nonsense have been introduced into education (and business) in the name of innovation? The one thing, in my opinion, that education does not need is another ill-considered fad.

Nonsense in management theories

This from an interview by Mike Levy with Prof. John Antonakis on the lack of science in some management theories. It's from Training Zone and registration (free) is needed to access. I place some selected quotations, the interviewer's comments in double quotes, Antonakis's in single quotes and italics:

"A man who criticises the basis of Myers Briggs, 'emotional intelligence', NLP and 'good to great' had better be sure of his facts. Professor John Antonakis is sure that he is. Catapulted into the media last year by his paper published in one of the most prestigious scientific journals, 'Science' - where he showed that little children could predict election outcomes merely on looking at the faces of politicians, the author of ‘The Nature of Leadership’ is able to defend his corner as a passionate advocate of evidence-based work on leadership. ... Antonakis, who is professor of organisational behaviour at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, is not afraid to take on what he sees as the vested interests in supplying what techniques with dubious provenance."

According to Prof. Antonakis: 'There are too many snake-oil merchants in the guise of consultants, trainers and management gurus, ... Very little of what they claim is supported by hard evidence; most of which has been totally ignored by those making a lot of money by selling models and techniques that simply don’t work.'

"The absence of evidence (or evidence which proves otherwise) also leads Antonakis to cast grave doubts on cherished models and systems including Myers Briggs and NLP. A recent paper by Antonakis states: 'There are hundreds of methods or approaches like neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), whose proponents claim to be useful for predicting leadership or for developing leadership skills. Alas, NLP continues to persist in the world of practice even though [research] psychologists stopped taking this construct seriously a while back.' He is equally critical of work produced by Goleman and others on 'emotional intelligence' and methods to test it. 'The evidence simply isn’t there.' "

"Antonakis' critical gaze also falls on the whole area of leadership traits – what personality types can be predicted to make effective leaders? He gives two examples of popular models that have little or no validity: the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI), and the DISC personality model. Says Antonakis, 'I could not identify any research on this (DISC) model, though plenty of claims about its validity are on the internet. As with the HBDI, this model does not have the requisite research behind it to be used in industrial settings.' "

The comments (mainly on NLP) are also very illuminating and well worth the read. Prof. Antonakis's views are absolutely in line with many of my views, as expressed in this blog. For what it's worth, he's an ex-South African.

Dilbert on gut based decision making

From Dilbert by Scott Adams.

Unforeseen disasters: salience and availability heuristic

Sonja from Narrative Lab blogged on a disaster that hasn't happened yet and Jonah Lehrer from Frontal Cortex on one that has happened. In both cases salience played a role in lack of action and poorly planned action respectively.

Sonja pointed out the role of salience in:

"A community living next the the "dirtiest dam in the world" seem to care less about getting involved in finding solutions for this issue, but that same community has one of the largest and most active neighbourhood crime watch volunteer groups I've come across."

To give a little perspective, this is what the particular dam's water looks like:


Lehrer pointed out the same process in the BP oil disaster:

"Because those rigs are so far offshore - outta sight outta mind - we haven't prepared for the possibility of this epic disaster. As a result, the unlikely event becomes inconceivable - this is the availability heuristic at work - and the inherent riskiness of a situation is underestimated."

Which brings to the fore the dilemma that the cognitive "blindness" brought about by our cognitive limitations (lack of salience and the availability heuristic) could leave us vulnerable to situations that science, engineering and technology can't solve. Said Adam Frank from NPR Blogs:

"In the old culture failure was impossible because, somehow, we could grab some duct tape and MacGyver our way back into business. The new culture must understand that limits and feedbacks express a kind of planetological wisdom that we are wise to work within rather than try and push aside.

As a technological society we have evolved to the point that we are, literally, playing in much deeper waters. At these scales we must understand that failure is very much an option."

Tips for learning retention

Donald Clark Plan B has one of his useful posts that restates well-known (but often neglected) learning principles. It is worth reading, but I follow his advise and summarize it for my own benefit.

Ebbinghaus Curve.

He starts with a classical Ebbinghaus "forgetting curve" that we all learned about in Psychology 101 and then adds:

"The real solution, to this massive problem of forgetfulness, is spaced practice, little and often, the regular rehearsal and practice of the knowledge/skill over a period of time to elaborate and allow deep processing to fix long-term memories. If we get this right, increases on the productivity of learning can be enormous."

Here are some of his tips for for implementation (get the details from his blog post):

1. Self-rehearsal, rehearse the work yourself on a set schedule.
2. Take notes, and rehearse.
3. Blog about it, and respond to comments
4. Repetition, mindfully.
5. Delayed assessment, by the teacher at different intervals.
6. Record material, and make recordings accessible to learners.
7. Games pedagogy, present and assess in games format.
8. Spaced e-learning (ties in with #6).
9. Mobile technology, use cell phones to drip feed information.
10. Less long holidays (not as applicable in South Africa where we do not have the long summer holiday.

Some of these may be difficult to implement at school level, with limited resources and the high work load of teachers. Collaboration may be helpful.

Neanderthals among us

Some interesting thoughts and ethical dilemmas from Ursula Goodenough at NPR Blogs. She links two interesting developments in genetics, to whit the claims by Craig Venter's company to have artificially synthesized a functional bacterial chromosome and by Svante Pääbo’s laboratory to have produced a first draft of the Neanderthal genome. Goodenough points out that:

"Hence it is now formally feasible, albeit not yet remotely practicable, to synthesize artificial Neanderthal chromosomes, insert copies into enucleated human eggs, and recruit volunteers to give birth to a Homo species that has been extinct for 30,000 years."

There are enough ethical dilemmas here to keep a troop of philosophers busy for years. Imagine a human mother giving birth to a Neanderthal infant and that Neanderthal having to grow up in human society.

Pääbo also estimates that most human genomes contain one to four percent of Neanderthal-derived DNA sequences, meaning there was interbreeding. The next time someone calls you a Neanderthal, they may be closer than you think!

(Quack)busting romance

From Dilbert by Scott Adamns.

A jaundiced view of management

Source unknown. Thank you to Cas for sending this to me. I do not really know any organization quite as bad as this, but read Bob Sutton's The No Ass Hole Rule for some good examples.

Dilbert on bullshitting and (lack of) leadership

From Dilbert by Scott Adams.

CP Conference 2010 - More brain profiling nonsense

Please, not whole brain learning and brain profiling again! A paper on IQ and EQ (sigh!) turns out to be the outdated, and thoroughly discredited, ideas of whole brain learning and brain profiling. The presenter (whom I'll leave anonymous), presented as if his own research, a concoction of whole brain learning, brain profiling and Gardner's multiple intelligences. For good measure he threw in Goleman's views of emotional intelligence (the less scientific version of EI) and Rosenthal and Jacobson's research on the influence of teacher expectations on learners' performance (the Pygmalion Effect).

The only aspect of his approach that was new to me, was his attempts to localize each of Gardner's intelligences to specific brain quadrants. These brain quadrants do not make anatomical sense and localization of higher level functions is contrary to current views of brain organization.

On being challenged about the pseudoscientific nature of his approach, his predicatable response was that his approach worked. To questions about possible confirmation bias, he had no answer.

Some of my previous (extensive) posts on some of these issues were:

Left brain, right brain, whole brain:

Mind myth 2: Left brain right brain.

Brain profiling:

Mind myth 5: Brain profiling.
"Genetic" brain profiling in rugby.

Multiple intelligences and learning styles:

Mind myth 7: Learning styles and multiple intelligences

CP Conference 2010 - Dr. I.P. Desai: Inclusive Education

It's CP Conference time again, this year held in Durban and organized by the A.M. Moolla Spes Nova School. I find it hard to believe that a year has passed since the previous conference, which I (with the Gauteng Cerebral Palsy Association) organized.

The Jimmy Craig Memorial Lecture was by Dr. I.P. Desai, retired professor in Education from the University of Melbourne, Australia. It dealt with inclusive education. A somewhat jaded topic by now, but in South African circumstances still topical. Dr. Desai's conclusion from literature and experience - inclusive education works where the necessary support is given to teachers and learners with disabilities. Nothing new there.

A question I had - is there a publication bias in this field that prevents negative findings from being published? From past literature reviews this seemed to me to be the case - the evidence for the effectiveness of inclusive education seemed just too good to be true (I'm not arguing with the principle and that it's mostly the right thing to do). While it is hard to question the philosophy of and necessity for inclusive education, the difficulties in implementation seem to be glossed over. Dr. Desai agreed that such a publication bias may exist. Moral imperatives and political correctness may sometimes have precedence over scientific evidence (my interpretation, not his).