My first virtual excursion report is based on a Ken Tromby NCAS video. The title of the presentation is Houdini and the Spiritualists. Trembly is a trial lawyer who also shares a deep interest in magic and Houdini material. He discusses the life of Houdini and how he fell in love with magic at a very young age. Houdini was popularly known for the metamorphosis trick and largely took advantage of his crowds profiting off of their interest and gullibility, especially with the use of fake help from “spirits” that he would plaster on posters and use throughout his shows to help him magically “escape” this trick. This is interesting because at some point further into his career he ended up taking on the role of a debunker of spiritualistic work. Nonetheless, Houdini went on learning new tricks, and even accepting challenges from local groups where he would be able to showcase his record-setting escapist abilities earlier in his career. While traveling to perform in Germany, his mother died in 1913, and despite his awareness of the fraudulence associated with spiritualism, he attempted to contact her through visiting mediums. When this did not work he was finally sure that spiritualist work was fake and made it his mission to debunk fake spiritualist work. Notably, he was able to out Keeler the popular New York medium who had been giving false readings to his clients.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, differently than Houdini, is mentioned as another believer of the time. Doyle believed his wife could contact the dead and even attempted to contact Houdini's mother. Though this did not work, Houdini hid his disdain for Doyle's attempts to maintain their friendship. Houdini remained firm in his view that most spiritualists were fake and even felt that popular medium Marjorie, whose work was believed by various scientists, was a fraud. Overall, Houdini was firm in his views and made it his mission to out those who profited off of the public’s false beliefs.
Though this particular video was not created to prove or disprove any specific point, it did create a case for the statement Trembly makes that it is much easier to fool a room of scientists than a trained magician. This is essentially saying that someone on the inside of the tricks, such as Houdini, would certainly be able to catch fake spiritualism quicker than even some high-level scientists, simply because he used to use these tricks himself. This is especially apparent during the seance performed by the young Marjorie that I mentioned in my summary. Marjorie, aka Mina Crandon, was a famous flapper and medium who invited members of the Scientific American committee to one of her seances. At the time, there was a sort of competition with a large cash prize rewarded to any medium who could demonstrate the genuine spiritualistic phenomenon of contacting the dead. Houdini was present at the seance to ensure that she would not try to use any tricks, and to see once and for all if she was a genuine medium as she had gained so much popularity at the time. He went as far as tightly wrapping a band around his leg the day of the seance, and removing it just before the actual event so it would be extra sensitive to any touch or movement felt while they were sitting next to each other (because he sat directly next to her at the table during her attempt to contact the spirits). Despite Houdini's skepticism, and the fact that he did feel an extra movement coming from her while the alleged spirits were actively making things move, the majority of the scientific invitees still believed she did it and was deserving of the reward.
Houdini was not necessarily a non-believer but he exercised a trait found in many great scientists. He was skeptical and followed the scientific method of questioning until something was proven true. Despite having this mindset, however, Houdini truly did want to be proven wrong as he hoped he could one day contact his beloved Mother who had passed as well. Though he despised the fakes he very clearly was hopeful that it was possible and that someone out there might be a legitimate medium, so he kept visiting mediums and kept an eye on many of the notable spiritualists of the time very closely. Following the themes of pseudoscience that we have discussed this year, this example and the overall concept of spiritualism at the time represented the opposite of what Houdini stood for by the end of his career. The public was fooled by the glamorous trick of mediums and often blindly believed because it appeared to be happening before their eyes. Though mediums practicing spiritualism was not specifically pseudoscience, because it wasn't necessarily being marketed as science to begin with, it still resembled pseudoscience in the way it fooled the public at face value. The seances and readings would appeal to the interests of the client and create a scene so unexplainable, that they felt it had to be genuine magic and failed to question what they wanted to believe was true.
Andrew E. Love presented the NCAS video topic “Confirmation Bias and Other Ways to Be Wrong”. He begins the presentation with a simple marble experiment that demonstrates how chance plays a large part in the outcome of certain experiments that are contingent upon the person conducting it. From here, he segways into confirmation bias, which he defines as the idea that your current belief is getting reinforced because you are selecting data that confirms it, or you are getting new data and interpreting it in such a way that it supports your beliefs. When confirmation bias affects experiments or our general observations, we can end up in a feedback loop. This is the continuous cycle of our previous assumptions being reinforced over and over, and becoming ingrained into our minds in such a way that our beliefs and the evidence feed into each other.
Another way to be wrong that he brings up is by treating conclusions as evidence. The takeaway from this path to being wrong is that, although it is okay to reason based on previous evidence, it is not logical to use those conclusions as further evidence. Next, he goes into laundering confirmation bias through someone else's brain, which is what happens when our biases are the basis for someone else's conclusion. After this, he touches briefly on two major examples of malignant confirmation bias: toothmark confirmation, and post-hoc justification (believing an event is the cause of something else because it happened before). There is a plethora of ways that we are wrong daily, but even when we notice these wrongdoings people often use exceptions to preserve bias (an example of this is selective forgetting). Survivorship bias and illusion of control are 2 additional related ways to be wrong. Survivorship bias is about the importance of considering the data or entities that you are not seeing, and the illusion of control is the psychological belief that we can control our fates. Ways to be wrong are all around us, but when we learn to think like scientists and think critically, we can prevent them from occurring.
Love made many very convincing points throughout his presentation regarding the various ways that people can be wrong, but one of my main takeaways is that we all are guilty of doing these at one point or another. Nobody is right all of the time, no matter how hard we try to be. It can be especially challenging for us to be right when going down the wrong path can feel so easy. A clear example of this is confirmation bias and the feedback loops. As I mentioned before, confirmation bias is the idea that your current belief is getting reinforced because you are selecting data that confirms it, or you are getting new data and interpreting it in such a way that it supports your beliefs. This is a very common form of bias because it can affect people in almost any setting. The example used in the video was of a waiter in a restaurant claiming that people with mustaches always tip badly. Is there any scientific evidence or reasoning behind this? No. As a result of feedback loops, however, false assumptions can feed into creating the evidence that we want to see. In this scenario, this would occur if by chance every customer with a mustache the waiter has severed thus far tips very poorly. This belief on the waiter's part does not account however for the possible good tipping customers with mustaches that he is yet to get. Taking this a step further with what we know about survivorship bias, the waiter is not accounting for the mustached customers who are tipping the other waiters well. This good tipping can be happening, but it's just not happening to the main waiter. Under the guise of confirmation and survivorship bias, this information could thus be discounted from his evidence to ensure that his beliefs can remain without a doubt.
Aside from the ways of being wrong mentioned in the video, there are also various logical fallacies that we discussed in the past that overlap. One clear example of this is the anecdotal fallacy. This is used in the confirmation bias case with the waiter because he is basing his beliefs on his own isolated experience. Another example from this scenario is the continuum fallacy. Though this is more of a stretch under the circumstances, the waiter can be considered guilty of this fallacy if he is grouping the 2 separate categories of customers with mustaches and customers that tip badly. A way to break loops like this and prevent the use of logical fallacies, however, could be to write down your observations to ensure that you recall evidence correctly and are not counting forgotten data in your favor.
Last modified: 10 December 2023