Open source woo

Congratulations go this week to Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, who has accepted the post of the president of JREF. A more worthy person would be hard to name, considering that the outgoing president is James Randi himself. Randi will stay on as founder and chairman.

I've been staying right out of the whole ridiculousness surrounding "The One", a talent show screening on Australian TV which aims to further the career of the most convincing bullshit artists psychics that go up in front of the cameras. Personally, I found the whole discussion around this show rather refreshing, in an Australian kind of way: The standard joke seemed to be, "Won't they already know the winner if they're truly psychic?"

Never mind that this kinda misrepresents what psychics actually claim to do. For example, a clairaudient doesn't normally claim to be able to see into the future, unless they're Sylvia Browne.

Plus it also removes part of the fun. Watching these con artists psychics going at each other in the hope of winning has been, at least in the snippets that I've seen, hilarious.

I haven't actually been watching it, mostly because it's on on Monday nights when I've been out of the house.

However, I have been reading the week by week updates in SWIFT, and I can tell you that it's actually quite impressive the attention that the JREF have been giving it, although to be honest, Richard Saunders, the token skeptic on the judging panel is quite well known around skeptical circles, both within Australia and abroad. And you know, from what I've seen, Saunders is both erudite and charismatic, has a sense of humour and appears to be approachable. If perhaps a little too quiet to nail a regular spot on TV as a "celeb".

The other judge is a lady by the name of Stacey Demarco who from what I can tell is a stereotypical, credulous, shoot-ones-mouth-off, cliché-spouting, doggerel-delivering, card-carrying woo merchant and certifiable loon. Demarco is smack bang on course to get her fifteen minutes of fame, and calls herself a 'metaphysician'.

You know, before I saw this festering pustule of a TV show, I'd never heard of such occupations as 'medical intuitives'. Nor had I head the term 'psychometry' used outside of recruitment. But now, I'm convinced.

Convinced that people will believe absolutely anything.

After this week's SWIFT, I somehow found myself directed to a site where Saunders was interviewed by someone for a podcast named Lia Ramses where she attempts the Galileo Gambit, invokes Dean Radin's work, and comes out with this:

Soon, the topic of conversation turns to "The One" and after some banter, in which Richard reminds the listeners that the failure rate of contestants exceeded 90%, Ramses asks Richard how he thinks She found the "lost boy" in episode one, given that he doesn't believe she used remote viewing. Richard gives the only logical answer "she went in the right direction and there the little boy was". It's got to be hard to dispute that kind of logic given that no other "psychic" contestant went in that direction and only one other found the boy, after covering most of the available area within the time limit.

(Thanks to Thinking is Real)

After having a bit of a read, I found myself looking around the Ghost Radio site and found a seething wasp's nest of woo. I'm not sure what was more frightening - that fact that the owners of this site believe anything, or that I now have evidence that suggests that there are simply no bounds to human gullibility.

Crop circles, crystal skulls, homeopathy, reiki, there really isn't anything that won't sell. Gullibility is way hip, and there doesn't appear to be anything that you or I can do about it. Particularly in light of the (frankly frightening) revelation that while Richard Saunders will continue to be known as the "the skeptic", Stacey Demarco is guaranteed a spot on the celebrity C-list for the rest of her life.

In order to test my new hypothesis, I dreamed up a great test: Why not build a mill to create the silliest woo imaginable, and then see if it sells?

I think that those of us who are only even slightly creative could come up with some absolute whoppers.

I see this project as having three parts:

1. A wiki or an online forum where the most insane woo ideas can be kicked around until they're ready to be sold to the general public.


2. A website where the "phony" woo (OK, you come up with a better adjective) can then be sold to paying punters.


3. After selling the woo, and covering expenses, any profits left over (and I'm fairly convinced there will be) can be donated to a charity to be nominated. I vote JREF, myself.

In order to preserve the element of surprise, the wiki/online forum should ideally be password protected and users should join by invitation only. Although I do like the open source thing where absolutely anyone can modify an idea, but this kinda kills off the surprise thing.

The wiki/online forum should be able to cover stuff like design and feedback right through to production and logistics.

The website, on the other hand, should be littered with all sorts of disclaimers, so that if a potential buyer goes deaf, dumb and blind, they should still be able to know that "this product has not been scientifically tested" and "we cannot vouch for the accuracy of our claims" etc. After all, we shouldn't be leaving ourselves open to claims of hypocrisy or unethical behaviour.

(I may be a hypocrite, but I sure as hell don't speak for anyone else who may wish to join this worthy cause.)

The products should be kinda cool, though. I know more people who buy decks of tarot cards for the pretty pictures than because they're into tarot readings.

They would also have to be funny.

Lastly, the website should have a clever name - one that if you think about a little, makes it crystal clear that there is mischief afoot.

Oh, and there should be an awards night where the most ludicrous idea gets presented with something like a golden dowsing rod. Or something.

I think that this is a sensational idea. Who's in, and how do we get this underway?

What is religion, really?

"Well that's easy isn't it?" my good buddy "Roger" asks rhetorically, who I used to call "Bob" on this blog, but occasionally, I get another reader named Bob who reads my blog, so I've changed his name. "Religion is where you have this central supernatural premise and you structure your life around that."

"But Roger," I say, "What about Confucianism?"

He scoffs, "It's not a religion. It's a code of ethics."

Now Roger might be on to something, but I tend to view this sort of thing a bit differently. When I read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, I had a real problem with his view of what religion is. Essentially, it's a belief system underpinned by some kind of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo.

The problem with this definition, is that according to Dawkins, we should now view such spiritual pursuits as acupuncture and feng shui as religions. You can, of course see the problem that I have with this, particularly when this definition excludes Confucianism, which doesn't really have much in the way of metaphysics.

So I'm casting my mind back to when I was a kid, and I asked someone something about what religion was. It might have been my dad. I'm not really sure.

Anyway, the person who I asked responded with this:

"Religion is a bunch of teachings. You know how there's Christianity? It's called that, because it's the teachings of this guy called 'Jesus Christ'. Buddhism is the teachings of this bloke named 'Buddha'. Confucianism is named after 'Confucius'. And so on."

"What about Islam?" I remember asking.

"It used to be called 'Mohammedanism'. The teachings of Mohammed."

So over time, religion has registered more with me as a code of ethics. I've largely viewed the fairy godfather thing as optional.

So how did the metaphysical aspect of religion take centre stage? I'd rather like to hear the answer to this one, because the whole point of religion, at least from what I can grasp is to impose a code of ethics on people. Sure, there's this almost Santa Claus-esque, "Scare the bejesus out of them and they'll obey," quality to it, but a lot of what's discussed in the major religious texts are fairly much just plain ordinary ethics.

Christ talks about doing unto others what you would have them doing unto you. Mohammed made the point that unarmed enemies are innocent, and therefore should not be harmed. In The Analects, Confucius discusses something similar to Christ, which was recorded by Mencius a good 550 years BC.

On the whole, if you take out the metaphysical stuff and the stuff which is clearly self-interested farting, you are actually left with a rather hefty code of ethics.

This is where the more smart-arsed of you lot are going to say, "Hey Dikkii. Don't the professional bodies representing acupuncturists and feng shui exponents publish codes of ethics for their members?"

They might, but if you're going to trivialise this by that reference, why don't we expand the discussion and call financial planning and medicine religions? After all, the AMA and the FPA have their own codes of ethics?

Of course, this would be silly. The ethics that I'm referring to are more generalised than professional ethics. What Buddha, Vyasa, Paul of Tarsus and the like are trying to convey in their writings is how one should live one's life. And they're using the tried and tested carrot and stick approach - do A and be rewarded. Do B and be punished.

The problem was a few of them got carried away: Buddha's central message was not, find nirvana or be endlessly reincarnated. Christ's was not, "Love me or go to Hell" although He did say this a bit in passing. Christ might have had His bad days where He thought everyone was fucked, but He was a moody bastard and prone to this sort of thing. Really, this was something that was blown out of perspective by later chroniclers in the same way that the media will seize on controversial stuff because it sells.

Buddha was all about finding peace. Christ (in His better moods) kept coming back to people being excellent to each other.

Tarsus is a real prick at this sort of thing. You know, the more I read the letters that Tarsus wrote, the more that I think that the guy was seriously pathological verging on paranoid - let's face it, the fact that he was a misogynist homophobe was just the tip of the iceberg. He was unafraid to just make shit up and he'd do this blatantly in order to get his point across.

John the Evangelist (who may or may not also have been John the Apostle) doesn't fare much better, although the Gospel according to John is seriously the most sabotaged piece of holy writing that I have had the bad grace to come across. Which is kinda weird, because when Christian apologists reference stuff from the gospels, nine times out of ten (in my humble opinion), they'll go straight to John to reference it. John is the only gospel to really bignote John the Apostle ("the apostle whom Jesus lurved"), and is also the only real attempt to explain the trinity model.

I should point out here that I'm using biblical references because they're the ones that I know best. I don't really know much about the qur'an, the mahabharata and the kama sutra except in passing only. But the end result is the same, except for the kama sutra. (It was porn then - and it really hasn't changed over the years.)

I have digressed, but the central point is clear - amongst the fire and brimstone, heavenly virgins awaiting martyrs, expectant mothers holding off births in the hope that their child is a reincarnated lama - the central messages of these religions has been completely lost. And that is a short bunch of tips to live your life as a better person. The metaphysical part remains incidental, and so it should.

This brings me up to a couple of things that I noticed when I read The Da Vinci Code, originally. Dan Brown got a lot of stuff way wrong when he originally wrote this, but there were a few things that he hinted at, or discussed explicitly which make some sense. And I might just point out, again, that while this is specifically biblical, it could relate to any holy text out there:

1. It's not just commentators like Leonardo da Vinci who are capable of inserting injokes into Christian history

This is pretty clear from the outset. There are some obvious errors which are dead giveways for this. Matthew Levi and Luke the Gentile are pretty darn skeptical about the virgin birth. So much so, that they preface their accounts of the virgin birth with conflicting genealogies of Jesus... on Joseph of Nazareth's side!!! Levi and The Gentile have cleverly inserted their own commentary regarding the claims of a virgin birth - and it can be summed up in one word: "rubbish!"

The other theory is that the bits about the virgin birth were pious frauds inserted later on. Again, someone, if not Levi or The Gentile were clearly having a good chuckle in leaving Nazareth's genealogies in. You've just gotta laugh, dont you?

This second one makes more sense - Brown writes that Christ's divinity was in doubt until the Council of Nicaea, and given the much later date of the (finalised) gospels, what's a little bit of pious fraud here and there? And if you were serious about the virgin birth, wouldn't you erase the genealogy bits? Someone had a sense of humour.

2. Patriarchal religions expose the worst aspects of male bonding

Really, you get a bunch of blokes together, they're going to come out with stories about how good/powerful their dads are sooner or later. Christ was surrounded by a bunch of guys who were either family, former outcasts or notorious two-faced toadies like Simon Peter. So of course, when He comes out with stuff like, "My Father will smash everyone," this is the signal to change the subject over to fishing or carpentry.

We only remember Christ's words on this stuff, because He was the alpha male, but it would be interesting to know what went undocumented from the mouths of His mates. Judas Iscariot, James The Brother Of Jesus and John The Apostle are the only ones in the group who appear capable of following orders.

Someone who would be interesting would be the aforementioned Peter. Peter himself was nearly as much of a sexist as Tarsus, and was a treacherous hard-arse to boot.

So really, is it a surprise that the early Christian church owes it's very livelihood to sexist pigs like Tarsus and Peter?

And why wouldn't they beef up the metaphysical aspect to further their own agendas while the ethics message - the core message vanishes amongst the whizbang special effects that seems to typify Christianity these days?

So back to my original point.

Would it be fair to say that where there's the faintest hint of something supernatural, the original ethical message gets completely forgotten? I asked Roger to suppose that if we viewed religion as the ethical bit and considered the supernatural side of things to be incidental might this change his view of what a religion is?

"No." said Roger. "A religion is just as much shaped by it's subsequent practitioners as by it's original crafters. Confucius' work has largely remained untouched by a dogmatic hierarchy. Plus, he didn't see the need to muddy the message with even the vaguest hint of metaphysics.

"Really, if you're inclined towards religion, isn't hard-core ethics just the slightest bit unsexy?"

I'm not sure if I agree with him. What do you think?

The ethics of what we eat

I was prompted by a recent post over at Action Skeptics to pull out my copy of The Ethics Of What We Eat (also published as The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter) by Peter Singer and Jim Mason and re-read it.

Akusai was on the warpath over some misguided PETA members on the campus of his uni, and really let them have it.

I must admit that I don't think terribly highly of PETA - to me they're nearly as irresponsible as Sea Shepherd although this is probably unfair on PETA.

But when it comes to animal welfare, I like to think that I at least try to do what I think is the right thing. Which is where this book is actually pretty good.

I really liked the way that this book broke down all the different ethical issues in what people eat - Singer and Mason really do kinda just put the issues out there and let you make your mind up, even though you just know that they're leaning towards vegetarianism.

And you know, this was a great read, I thought personally. So much so, that this blogger is attempting to go organic. Well, at least with regards to vegetables.

Organic meat is so unbelievably expensive.

Anyway, Singer and Mason's ("S&M" - Heehee) book is a genuinely good read, but there were a few things that I didn't really get the first time that I read it.

Now I do.

Here's a couple of criticisms I had:

1. Fruitarianism

One of S&M's key gripes is that where something has the ability to feel pain, one shouldn't be killing them. This is fair enough, but at no point do they examine the question of killing species that cannot feel pain. This in my opinion is quite arbitrary, as it becomes a bit "speciesist". Animals do feel pain. Does this make them more worthy of not killing than plants on this basis? Particularly if humane killing methods exist - and they do, as S&M point out throughout.

Thus, where the opportunity to discuss the ethics of fruitarianism exists, and it does, S&M pointedly refuse to make any mention of it. I say pointedly, because I refuse to believe that S&M merely forgot to address the issue. In addition, the pair of them would most certainly be aware of the concept.

Fruitarianism seeks to avoid harming living plants (which cannot feel pain, natch) by only eating nuts and fruit which have fallen from the tree. The fact that they devote zero space to it is a major deficiency.

2. Comparisons of land use and greenhouse gas emissions

S&M's analysis uses good examples of where land use for grazing compared to crops yields less. However, while they consider land use for growing the food, they do not consider land use for fertiliser requirements.

Likewise, where they are quick to target cattle for methane and CO2 emissions, I don't recall coming across the emissions from crop farming equipment compared to grazing cattle.

3. The ethics of veganism

Oh this section made me mad.

The worst part about it was that S&M don't appear to be even convinced by their own arguments. All the way through, for example, they keep qualifying a vegan diet as being a "well planned vegan diet".

Anyone who has ever tried to cook vegan food will tell you that it is easier to learn brain surgery than to construct a balanced vegan diet.

In reality, it's exceedingly easy for omnivores to have a balanced diet. It is frustratingly difficult for vegans to do this.

On top of this, their suggestion that veganism is ethical on the basis that humans can choose to be vegans, is truly breathtaking irrelevance.

To be fair, they do admit that a vegan diet is deficient in vitamin B12, but they view this as a minor trifle. I found this to be irritating given that a few chapters prior they considered the issue of turkeys requiring artificial insemination due to oversized breasts (i.e. they can't have sex) to be a major issue.

But if they really were being fair and not continually qualifying vegan diets with the "well-planned" line, they would have to acknowledge that most vegans normally also require iron, calcium and maybe zinc supplements frequently as well. Possibly even omega-3 too.

----------------

Yeah, so that's it. On the whole, it really is a good read, but some parts are pretty light on for detail, which is not what you'd expect from possibly the world's foremost ethicist and his journalist buddy.

And it's not going to make me a vegetarian (or a vegan for that matter) but it's still largely good reading.

The day the music industry died

There are some industries that just make your blood boil with rage. Some are exploitative. Others just plain nasty. And some are morally and ethically bankrupt.

Some will happily sell out their own parents for a buck or two, before moving on to their siblings. Others will happily market to kiddies, the less able and true bleevers.

The worst will hypocritically defraud their employees while using hamfisted tactics to ensure that no one is defrauding them. And if no one is defrauding them, they will simply invent scenarios where such fraud is still being perpetrated.

But when it comes time at the end of one's career to sit up and declare to the saint who guards the entrance to retirement heaven that they've been diligent and ethical workers in the service of all things fair and good, there will just be some who, in an ideal world, should be on their way to retirement hell. And usually, it will be for having taken a flying leap and clearing that thin line for each and every single sin in the first three paragraphs by a country mile.

Yes, it's been a long time, but it's time I handed out another flogging to the music industry, an industry that is consistently setting the limbo bar lower and lower on ethical activity.

In this landmark case, a woman was fined USD $220,000 for sharing 24 songs. This will send her to the poorhouse. At the Sydney Morning Herald online, this blog post prompted 386 responses over the space of a weekend.

I suppose the first question is, just who, exactly, was she defrauding? This is the central question when it comes to this case.

Copyright infringement is based on the underlying principle that intellectual property, such as music, may only be played if you've paid for it. But let's be perfectly clear here, if you've paid for it, you still don't own it.

The rights to the music itself is still owned by the copyright holder. Which means that the CD you just bought can't be played over loudspeakers in shops, or podcast. You really only own a sort of licence to the software. And this is over-simplifying things quite a bit.

The whole thing is massively overcomplicated and it's really only the manufacturers who benefit. Really, it could should be simpler than this. If you have paid for it, it should then be yours to do whatever you like with it.

This includes uploading it to the net for everyone to access.

So somewhere along the way, someone has let the side down, and sold all of us out.

Let's go back to this case. 24 files were illegally shared. Who was being defrauded? The article doesn't say what Jammie Thomas was doing in this case, so let's just make it up and say that she was downloading and not uploading. (She was downloading, incidentally)

In this case, Thomas would have downloaded a file that would have been sitting there to download or not. The file itself doesn't move, it is only copied.

Would she have been depriving the entities who created and manufactured these files of any money? One would have to prove that by downloading these files, Thomas definitely didn't intend to pay for them.

Yet in none of these cases, as far as I can tell, are any of the plaintiffs/"victims" being asked to provide evidence of this. This is morally dubious - although legally, this may be enough to demonstrate a prima facie mens rea of dishonesty, whoever said the law was moral?

More importantly, where's the gap where the stolen goods were and aren't any longer? For theft to exist, surely someone should actually be deprived of something?

Oh, OK, so that missing thing is the right to benefit financially from something. This takes us back to the previous question - how do we know that our downloader didn't intend to pay for the downloaded files?

So now we've gone circular, let's look at the next item on the agenda.

What is the actual idea behind copyright?

Copyright is supposed to ensure that the creators of artistic works are adequately compensated for their efforts. The copyright itself may be sold and if it is, it’s usually to the record company in exchange for certain things, such as recording and marketing costs, all of which appear to be surreptitiously charged back to the performer eventually. Even if the performer doesn’t end up losing money.

So musicians (and other creators) get shafted, eventually.

If a musician doesn’t use a record company, they’re a lot better off morally, but they don’t usually sell. Mainly because there’s a lack of several things:

1. Marketing. Record companies exist to market ready-made product. And not a lot else.
2. Recording. Record companies can fund recording facilities and provide a red carpet to skilled personnel that would normally not be available to mug wannabes.
3. Distribution. An area under threat by the internet. Regardless, record companies do this.
4. Payola. We know that record companies still do this. Denial only makes you look silly.

But here’s the thing. Do musicians need any of the above?

1. Marketing. Musicians like to get their product across to as wide an audience as possible. Apart from the musician’s own megalomania and vanity, is there any reason why this desire needs to be satisfied?
2. Recording. Is there any reason why a one-stop access point to the personnel and facilities above is required? Wouldn’t this kind of arrangement be considered anti-competitive in any other industry? Why can’t musicians arrange this sort of thing themselves? Wouldn’t it be better if musicians sourced their finance through commercial arrangements outside the music industry, as they’d be arguably better off?
3. Distribution. It’s the 21st century, people.
4. Payola. Really, payola is just a kind of marketing. So is it required, as I pointed out when I looked at marketing?

I’m now going to throw the baby out with the bathwater by suggesting a fifth one?

5. Compensation. Music and other artforms are hobbies. What specifically is being compensated for that doesn’t exist in other hobbies? Should musicians, for example, be compensated at all? Given that record companies own the rights in quite a lot of instances and still claw costs back from musicians, isn’t it a complete and utter lie to suggest that musicians are actually even getting compensated?

So it is looking increasingly bad for record companies. On the one hand, they do actively market the goods they sell, and should probably expect to be paid for this.

On the other hand, when what is being marketed heavily is the Britneys and Justins of the world, aren’t we rewarding general rubbish by even contemplating paying for any of this in the first place?

The world would certainly be a better place if corporate juggernauts like the Pussycat Dolls had no chance of recouping their marketing costs by selling CDs to kids. They’d be forced to tour instead and make their money the old-fashioned way.

And as for struggling up and coming musicians, shouldn’t they work a day job and practise their hobby at night, like every other hobbyist out there?

And this goes for creators of other artforms as well, although the effects of file sharing will be less.

I’d like to go all the way and lump musicians into the same basket as other entities in the music industry. Really, I would. It’s just that you can’t make a case that they’re as consistently evil as the record companies themselves, no matter how hard you try.

However, by frequently doing deals where their rights are assigned to record companies, they’re almost complicit.

Musicians should just sell their wares. If it gets copied, this is all well and good. There really isn’t a case that can be made where copyright holders get preferential treatment over anyone else selling round plastic discs that have stuff on them.

One big-name act has actively embraced this philosophy, and has recently made the announcement that it will now "sell" its next album online. It won’t even come with Digital Rights Management, it will just be regular, glorious MP3 files. The best part is that these particular musicians have even gone so far as to make paying for the download completely optional, and the end user can choose how much they pay, if they pay at all.

In this article in The Times Online hysterically titled “The Day The Music Industry Died” it is pointed out that Radiohead’s strategy is not even new. However, they’re the biggest band to have tried it to date. Hell, the Brian Jonestown Massacre has made their entire back catalogue available as downloads in Ogg Vorbis format for years.

The best part, though, about this strategy, though is that it cuts out the record companies all together. You have to love that.

We are at the dawn of a new era. One where one group of social parasites – artists, or at least recording artists - is forced into legitimacy and another – record companies – is wiped from the face of the earth.

I would be savouring and enjoying this, however, it will all come just too late for Jammie Thomas. And this is really upsetting.

Disclosure – this blogger is a musician in his spare time while he works a day job. So there.