Coronavirus Crisis
Toward the end of his special report on the coronavirus crisis (“Coronavirus Crisis: Chaos, Counting, and Confronting Our Biases,” July/August 2020), Benjamin Radford, in mentioning the public’s blaming the media for misinformation, drops in the qualifier “—and often deservedly so—.”
This phrase is fatally imprecise. Does this qualifier include all media (e.g., the Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association, or the New York Times)? Is he talking about misinformation in general or merely pertaining to the coronavirus? Is he endorsing the “Fake News” movement? Are the “lamestream” media truly the “enemy of the people?” What verifiable evidence does he have that “the news media” are “often deservedly” criticized for misinformation by the general public?
Such an imprecise, inflammatory, and unsubstantiated phrase should never make its way into Skeptical Inquirer.
Karl Felsen
Guilderland, New York
Radford’s claim that “Both positions argue from a false certainty …” (“Coronavirus Crisis”) is as false applied to the pandemic as it is applied to climate change. It misses the distinction between certainty in knowing the exact magnitude of the threat (precision), and certainty in knowing that the threat is serious and in knowing what measures can reduce the seriousness (accuracy). For both the pandemic and climate change, the basic science is known, and we do have data. Italy and Spain showed the hazard of not quickly reacting strongly and its impact on the pandemic after reacting. We similarly are getting the data on the ill effects of increasing temperatures. We do know enough to act.
Testing is useful, because it is not feasible for everyone to isolate. Food, water, power, healthcare, and so on requires people. Testing provides an added level of control for exposure.
The claim that “We can never know alternative history …” is too sweeping. We cannot make exact predictions, but we can make estimates of trends. Uncertainty should not be used as an excuse to claim total ignorance and ignore reasonable actions.
Robert Clear
Berkeley, California
Benjamin Radford responds:
I thank Felsen for his comment and could not agree more. Indeed, I have written extensively about the difficulty in quantifying “the media.” In both my special report and here, space prohibits an in-depth examination of the nature of “the media,” but more can be found in my book Media Mythmakers: How Journalists, Activists, and Advertisers Mislead Us and in my CFI blog A Skeptic Reads the Newspaper, which routinely examines false and misleading information across a variety of media (see especially my 2014 post “The Myth of ‘The Media,’” available online at centerforinquiry.org/blog/the_myth_of_the_media/).
Clear seems to have misunderstood my reference to “false certainty,” which was not in the context of science but instead people underreacting or overreacting to the pandemic—that among those two groups, “both positions argue from a false certainty, a smugness that they know better than others do, that the Cassandras and Chicken Littles will get their comeuppance.” The certainty I refer to is the certainty of the convictions that anti-maskers and doomsday preppers have about the truth of their own beliefs, which is influenced by many factors, including confirmation bias and insular social media algorithms. There’s no implication that “we can never know alternative history” or that agnosticism is an appropriate response to COVID-19. As I wrote, “when it comes to life and death topics such as disease outbreaks, the medical community wisely adopts a better-safe-than-sorry approach” when faced with scientific uncertainty.
Can You Boost Immunity?
I’m a long-time subscriber. I expect and enjoy sharp criticism from you based on good evidence and clear thinking. Then I read Harriet Hall’s column on boosting the immune system, in which she seems to claim you can’t boost immunity, or if you do, it can be harmful (“How You Can Really Boost Your Immune System,” July/August 2020). Hall, a retired doctor, claims that efforts by health practitioners using “fake claims” that “exercise and a good diet” have “nothing specific to offer the immune system.” Dr. Hall backs up her claims by quoting extensively from what I can only imagine is her textbook from medical school. Since those enlightened days, science has made some progress in this area.
May I suggest that Dr. Hall read something published in the twenty-first century on this topic. How about an article in the most recent publication of Scientific American (July 2020) titled “How To Boost Your Immunity,” which recommends such “voodoo” practices as good diet, regular exercise, and certain supplements such as zinc, vitamin C, and vitamin D.
I am eighty years old and still teaching high school, with no plans to retire. I eat a good diet, exercise regularly, and take the above supplements. I have not taken a sick day for years.
Joe Robinson
Newport Beach, California
I greatly appreciated Dr. Hall’s timely and informative article. One sees many claims on the internet that “70% of the immune system is in the gut” along with advice on how to “strengthen” it. I‘d love to see a discussion of that either as a response to this letter or as the subject of a future column.
Richard Kogut
Merced, California
Harriet Hall replies:
Mr. Robinson says he read my column on boosting the immune system. His letter shows that either he failed to read it carefully or failed to understand it (probably both). My column explained why the measures claiming to boost the immune system can’t be expected to do any such thing. The most they might accomplish is to increase the level of one component of a fiendishly complex system. That has never been shown to improve outcomes and conceivably might do more harm than good. I explained how the immune system can harm the body. Has he never heard of autoimmune diseases? I explained that exercise and a good diet are important for health in general but do nothing specific to improve immune function. Perhaps Mr. Robinson doesn’t understand the meaning of the word specific. He could look it up in the dictionary. He accuses me of quoting from an old textbook. That is not only false but is a gratuitous insult. I didn’t stop learning when I graduated from medical school. My column offered up-to-date scientific information. Instead of citing scientific studies to support his disagreement, he asks me to read a magazine article. There is no evidence that the supplements he takes “boost” the immune system or improve health outcomes for people whose diet is adequate, and his confidence that they benefited him is just an unsubstantiated belief. He says he hasn’t taken a sick day for years, but he can’t know whether that has anything to do with his “immune boosting” efforts. If he is a regular reader of Skeptical Inquirer, he should have learned by now that anecdotes don’t count as “evidence.”
Chemistry Misinformation
Excellent article, “Is Chemistry a Force for Good or Evil?” by Dr. Peter Lantos (July/August 2020). Hope he sees fit to continue contributing, maybe even on my favorite peeve: “organic” foods.
James Divine
West Richland, Washington
Flat-Earthers
Glenn Blanch begins his review of Falling Flat by mentioning that there are “credible polls indicating that the level of acceptance of flat-earthery is about 1 percent in the United States” (July/August 2020).
I’m always intrigued by these polls because they so starkly contradict my own experience. Not only have I never personally encountered a flat-earther, but having discussed this with dozens of people now, I have yet to even find one within two degrees of separation from me. I’m careful not to claim that my own lived experience trumps representative polls, but it makes me wonder: How do pollsters account for inattentive, lazy, disinterested, or confused respondents? What about liars, bullshitters, or trolls (who together surely could push the 1 percent mark in the United States)? Is there any ridiculous opinion we can robustly find that significantly less than 1 percent of the population hold?
Flat-earthers seem to be everybody’s metaphor for whichever group they disagree with, because even your opponent on creationism can agree with you that those flat-earthers are ridiculous, so you can safely use the subject to illustrate your loyalty to scientific principles, as the creationist author seems to be doing in Falling Flat. I suspect flat-earthers are barely more than a debate tactic, a vanishingly tiny population.
Michael Jones
St. Louis, Missouri
In a conversation with a flat-earth advocate, I asked:
“So, the Earth is flat?” Yes.
“And it’s a disc rotating in space?” YES!
“So, what’s on the other side?”
I left him dithering.
James C. Starbird
Van Buren, Arkansas
Panda-Monium
Harriet Hall had me reaching for the reference book when she said that giant pandas are carnivores (Book Review, “Alternative Medicine: Placebos for Pets,” July/August 2020). I thank her for the opportunity to improve my knowledge and think it might be somewhat misleading to say that giant pandas are carnivores, although they are certainly carnivorans.
As most people know, giant pandas mainly eat bamboo shoots and so are described as herbivores. However, it is also true that they are classified as part of the taxonomic order Carnivora whose members are formally referred to as carnivorans and less formally, and perhaps less helpfully, as carnivores. Many carnivorans are meat eaters but some are omnivores and some, like the giant panda, are herbivores. Similarly, just as not all carnivorans are meat eaters, so not all meat eaters are carnivorans. Whales are carnivorous mammals, but they are members of the order Artiodactyla, an order that includes giraffes and camels.
All of which might go to show that, while pandas are black and white, English usage can be more of a grey (U.K.) or gray (U.S.) area.
Martin Stubbs
London, United Kingdom
Why Happier?
The letter-writers objecting to Mr. Vyse’s data about the greater happiness of religious people (“Who’s Happier?” Letters, July/August 2020) seem to be seeking hypotheses on how his assertion could possibly be true. As a nonbeliever living in the U.S. “Bible Belt” for decades, I have a simple explanation from direct observation.
Christian believers are virtually certain that someone who cares about them has everything under control and will eventually fix the world and give them eternal happiness. We nonbelievers, however, deal with either the certainty of chaos and entropy and death or the discomfort of facing the unknown—things that are widely accepted as traumatic for the human psyche.
In this view, it’s not at all surprising that Christians are happier, just as small children, blissfully ignorant of things such as taxes and arthritis, seem generally happier than adults.
Scott Bates
Hurley, Mississippi
Being a hated atheist in either an intensely Christian or Muslim society is a lot harder and a much more punishing life situation than is belonging to a community of believers who endlessly meet with one another to praise themselves and tell one another how happy and how fortunate they are to be believers. Religion necessarily leads to community and group self-praise. Lack of belief is mostly individual and usually is quite punishing, often even requiring the deviant to defend him- or herself emotionally as well as physically against the believers.
Believers do and always have frequently assaulted and killed nonbelievers as a kind of duty. Both Christians and Muslims have a long history of attacking, hurting, and killing unbelievers. It’s truly stupid to claim that religion makes people happier than does nonbelief. Of course it does. That’s what believers want to impose on those who don’t join with them in their collective self-praise.
There really is a war against nonbelievers, remember. And it is continuous, massive, and almost universal.
Joseph W. Burrell
Asheville, North Carolina