I Have the Power...Bracelet

Oh, so many absurdities.  What is it about our civilization that seems to force at least a marginal percentage of the population into complete ignorance of empirical value?  What is it that has us put any level of trust into unsubstantiated claims - admittedly unsubstantiated claims?  There's a reason the psychic hotline commercials flash the words For entertainment purposes only at the bottom of your television screen.  There is a reason that the overpriced bottles of water you buy at your local homeopathic shops can never make any actual medical claims (and should be forced to read, "Very expensive pee inside.").  But what is the reason for the lack of disclaimer in the human brain that should say, "Hey, just because athletes are wearing this, doesn't mean it has any real-life relevance.  Maybe, just maybe, they're being paid to promote the product like the incredibly, unusually hot woman at the bar who keeps ordering the same drink and keeps talking to random guys about how good it is.."

In this particular sense, I'm talking about something I noticed back in 2008, and apparently I was a year behind the trend, per usual.  The trend is called the Power Balance bracelet, and packs within it some of the most unbelievably unsubstantiated, and at times, impossible, claims I've heard since I was first introduced to Astrology as a teenager.  These claims are also admittedly unsubstantiated by the makers of the product, which you can read about here in an article from Yahoo! Sports from January of this year.

The claims in particular is that these bracelets have the ability to interact with the body's natural energy to increase balance, speed, endurance, flexibility, strength (by 500%), and from something I read about a while ago, I heard they're also known to cause Spidey-Sense.  Now keep in mind, I'm not talking about the power bracelet worn by Link in The Legend of Zelda, I'm talking about a real life item here, that actually claims to have similar powers of magic and mystery, while interacting with an energy field just as magical and mysterious.  Even the great and powerful Shaquille O'Neal swears by them, citing they're the secret to his success.  Though, I don't remember him doing anything of note since I was a kid (and by "of note" I don't mean Shaq-Fu) and Power Bracelets have only been out since 2007.  Are they retroactive?  Do they posses the power of reverse time travel on top of all of their mystical powers?

The Evidence
Just briefly, for the sake of argument, let's examine the evidence in favor of the Power Balance bracelet.  The first piece of evidence is that the makers say the bracelets give you powers.  The last piece of evidence is that paid spokespersons say they give you powers.  Since both of these are merely unproven conjecture, let's move on to the evidence against the bracelets.  A study was performed by the Independent Investigations Group (IIG) in 2010 which used actual scientific methods - imagine that - to determine the effects of the bracelets vs that of placebo.  Four bracelets were used in the experiment, with only one of them being an authentic Power Balance bracelet.  All four were wrapped in tape so that none of the participants, nor the scorekeepers of the event, knew which person was wearing the authentic one.  According to the athletic trial results, in each trial, the results of placebo were exactly the same as the results of the bracelet. Zero statistical significance.  Conclusion A: Power Balance bracelets are placebo and nothing more.

Next, researchers at RMIT's School of Health and Sciences duplicated the above experiment, finding the same result.  Something to note: These researchers were chiropractors.  If you have people as low in the field of pseudoscience such as chiropractors saying that your product is bunk and has no empirical truth to it, that really says something.  Conclusion B: Power Balance bracelets are placebo and nothing more.

The website's own videos, before being removed earlier this year, showed videos of people stretching without, then with the power bracelet on their wrists.  One person would stretch a few times, then apply the bracelet, and stretch again, showing increased flexibility.  Problem A: There's no way of actually knowing if the person was stretching to their fullest extent in the first place.  Problem B: We have no time scale as reference.  Problem C: A person always becomes slightly more flexible from one stretch to another.  This is why it's called stretching in the first place.  This shows intent to provide misleading experimental results, and to me, in what I refer to as the d factor, counts as negative evidence, as deceptive experimental presentation not only demonstrates the ineffectiveness of the product, but that the producers of the conclusions know the product are completely aware.  Conclusion C: Power Balance bracelets are placebo and nothing more; and their product is knowingly deceptive (d=3x10^-4).

A Deeper Concern
What you're looking at in a Power Bracelet is a silicone version of a power crystal.  Yet, even after the company was forced to recant any and all claims that power crystals improve your performance in any way, people still buy them.  People still sell them in airports.  People can still by them on websites for ovarian cancer, which is deeply troubling to me, as it doesn't take a marketing genius to see the implications of that.  You can still buy them online for the same price they were before they were forced to admit their product was absolute hokum, and people still buy them.  Their projected sales in 2011 aren't that far off from their $30 million in sales the previous year.  Now, we all know definitively that the power of this product is entirely a work of fiction, but - I can't stress this enough - people are still buying them!

The company can legally no longer use the term "performance technology" in their ads or their packaging.  The company can legally no longer claim that their product increases performance of any kind beyond that of placebo.  The company had to, at its own expense, release a series of ads correcting previous claims of the bracelet increasing a person's strength, flexibility, or performance.  They can legally no longer say the bracelets are designed to work with the body's natural energy field.  Plus, they legally had to offer full refunds, with postage, to each and every person who had ever purchased their product.  The makers of the product were forced to publicly denounce their own product in front of the world to drive the point home that their product is for entertainment purposes only.  What more do you need?

This is indicative of a much deeper problem than just one product.  This is, itself, the entire reason I write this blog: People will continue to believe things, even at their expense, no matter the lack of evidence, or even the contrary evidence to the affects of a product, entity, or practice.  I understand that people these days have a level of mistrust toward science, and are therefore always looking for alternatives.  This is one of the reasons for the vast disconnect between science and the general populace.  Science is hard to follow in many ways for someone who doesn't maintain an interest.  "How can those physicists and cosmologists know the age of the universe when they weren't there?" someone may ask; although, if they read a little deeper and followed the fields with a level of interest, they would actually see how simple it is for them to know using very easy step by step processes.  They may also say that organizations such as the FDA are unreliable for certain reasons.  While I will admit there are conflicts of interest.  I don't understand for the life of me why most of it is made up of pharmaceutical executives (those who've only worked on the financial and monetary side of medical science) instead of the scientists who actually produce the medicines in the first place (those who may actually know what they're talking about and have a substantiated authority on matters of medicine).  However, this does not make the FDA untrustworthy in the long run.  In fact, I would venture to say that if even the FDA won't approve something, that says something about the value of the product itself (I refer you back to the Chiropractor point I made before regarding the magic bracelets).

I understand the distrust toward modern science, but it is entirely unsubstantiated and based on misunderstandings and disconnects.  Scientists are here to help people and make the world a better place.  If we weren't, we wouldn't have gone into our various fields, which, on average, have very limited earning potential.  Therefore, if the entirety of modern science is telling you that you're just throwing money down the drain by purchasing a product, then why would you not listen and at least investigate a little?  The claims made by power bracelets are no more absurd than the claims made by astrologers, psychics, homeopathic retailers; and I think most people know that none of those fields are worth the paper their professions' names are written on.  Why, then, do people still continue to visit the astrologer, the psychic, the homeopathic doctor, and the chiropractor?  Is it a pure lack of critical thinking, or are people really just that lazy that they'll just believe what they're told by any quack with a website (because they won't give just anybody one of those)?  I personally believe the latter.

Laziness is not a trait unknown to humans.  Let's face it: Many people would rather drive four blocks to the convenience store than walk it, even though it's only a few blocks away, and the walk might actually be beneficial to you and to the environment.  But that's not the laziness I'm talking about.  I'm referring to intellectual laziness, when combined for a desire for power and an unwillingness to do anything to gain it, this causes people to resort to believing crazy claims in the hopes that they can get that one hour workout in five minutes; they can see into the future to see what they should be doing in the present; they can burn a candle and speak a few archaic words and they'll somehow get rich; and worse than any of it, they'll actually believe a single word written in The Secret.  This creates a need for faith in people which is ultimately destructive to them.  These people will pump as much money as they can into crazy products, churches, sprititualists, "advisers", and other entities in order to obtain something without having to work for it.  Combine this physical laziness with intellectual laziness, and you have someone who would rather go broke than not subscribe faith into every shortcut that is offered to them, no matter how absurd it sounds, and no matter how unsubstantiated it is.  Just believing what they're told and having faith is easier than reading a little bit about such claims.

Intellectual laziness is a trait that is so common among people that it sort of hurts to think about - which is coincidental of me to say, because looking at so many people in this country, one would assume that thinking must be painful or at least incredibly straining.  Yes, it is easier to just believe what you're told than to compare all of the available evidence and come to your own educated conclusions.  Yes, just thinking that everything happens because it happens, is a lot easier than questioning why and how things happen.  It's much easier to just walk down the sidewalk without thinking about it at all, instead of thinking of all of the physical principles you're applying when walking, not to mention what's happening under your feet at the subatomic level with every step you take.  Many people don't find this interesting, and I think the only reason for this is because it all seems too daunting.  The big words; the hard equations; the imagination; the scientific method and process; it's all so much harder.  Yet, you'll notice that when you read one book on science, you have to read another, and another, and another, until you're a sponge soaking up information and you're doing your own experiments at home, in time, based after your own original hypotheses.  The problem is that most people don't take that first step because of a laziness that is brought about by fear - the fear that they may not be able to understand it.  But the more you read, the easier it all becomes, until you're up at 5:00 AM conclusively disproving the young earth creation story using the speed of light with one hand, and eating your Cheerios with the other (read about this here on August 1).

Just that one boost could be the difference between a life of ignorance and a life of scientific inquiry and success.  But most never receive that boost.  Their parents never encourage it, or they never get over the fear of feeling stupid, or they didn't have the best teachers, or any number of reasons.  Maybe they grew up in a cult and never had access to scientific papers.  Who am I to judge?  What I can do is say that this first step is something that we, as a society, need to start concerning ourselves with.  People need to see just how cool the universe is before they can develop an interest.  If that scientific interest were to be developed in more people, we would see psychics, astrologers, and Power Bracelets diminished within just a generation or two.  And how great of a world would that be?

Thanks for reading.  Next week, I'll be posting a few experiments I performed with face-to-face psychics and telepsychics a few years ago that were quite fun to perform, and should be very fun to read.  And on the first of the month, I'll be introducing a new feature to the blog called Monthly Arguments Against Evolution, where I'll be choosing one particular argument against the theory of evolution to burn to the ground on a monthly basis.  Keep smiling and always be skeptical.

Psychics Never Seem to Know When They're Not Psychic

 

"I realize that there is no concrete scientific evidence for psychic abilities (at least no evidence that's available to the public). However, has this stopped the US government and many local police forces around the nation from employing psychics? No, it hasn't. This has been going on for decades. Even China has what they call 'remote viewers'. I realize that our government isn't always good and ethical, but they (collectively) are very intelligent. Would they continue to waste money on psychics if they determined that such powers did not exist? I doubt it. 

There is a lot of information that they withhold from the public. I doubt that we'll ever know the full story behind 9/11. Did President Bush play a role in it? We may never know. Did aliens really crash land in Roswell? We may never know. Do true psychic powers (which can only be supernatural) really exist? We don't know that either, but we can make some logical inferences based on the government's activities.

Yes, I know that the psychic phone friends and the tarot card readers on the street corners are almost all phonies, but this does not mean that all psychics are.

Skepticism is a useful tool in distinguishing fact from fiction, but I encourage all of you to avoid the trap of denialism."

I happened across this query on Yahoo! Answers just last week and it got me thinking about a few things.  The first was that I was confused as to how this person managed to confuse skepticism with denialism.  Denialism is a matter wherein a person denies the validity of an event or an entity despite the amounts of evidence in favor of the phenomena.  Good examples of this would be the holocaust, evolution, germ theory, and others.  Skepticism on the other hand is the complete opposite.  Skepticism is ordering levels of acceptance based on the amount of evidence in favor or in contrary to a particular phenomena, and coming to the conclusion that there is not enough evidence to support a hypothesis, or none at all, in many cases.  Good examples of this would be alien abduction, special creationism, astrology, ghosts, chiropractic medicine, homeopathic medicine, dolphin therapy, and in this case, psychics.  So, let us never confuse skepticism with denial, as they are certainly two very different things, opposite one another.

The second thought that came to mind was something I've often wondered in the past: just how much money to state and local governments put into hiring psychics, and to what effectiveness do psychics solve crimes?  I haven't been a "believer" in psychics since I reached the age of reason, just like I haven't been a "believer" in vampires since that age, but I wondered if my skepticism could be put to the test by the hard numbers. And can I find hard numbers without having to rely on statistics, of which I'm foremost skeptical?  Hard numbers and statistics are two very different things, of course, so how hard can it be?  I could utilize the gift that is the Freedom of Information Act to find the dollar amount the federal government, and at least my own state government puts into special crime investigation, and within that, I could find the hard dollar amount that went into psychics.  Finding the amount of crimes that were solved with the help of psychics, and how large a role the psychics played in solving said crimes would be a whole different matter, and would involve some personal investigation of my own.  Damn it!

Before I get to the topic, however, here are the subjects I will not be discussing in this blog: The "we only use 10% of our brain" argument.  I will not bring this up because this is actually a myth - a commonly accepted myth, for whatever reason, which, with the slightest bit of research on something as trivial as Google, can be immediately dispelled and debunked.  If we only used 10% of our brains we would be vegetables, if even that.  I also will not discuss telekinesis, as that is a subject for another time, and a whole other volume of hokum. I will also not discuss Peter Venkman's research into the paranormal, but I still think Ghostbusters was a pretty awesome movie.  This blog will deal with extrasensory perception, precognition, parasense, a sixth sense, and other related subjects.

Stargate Atlantis?
I happened to find one source of a program that I found a little bit disturbing, not because of the nature of the program, but how long it went on without any conclusive results, and how expensive it was.  The operation I'm talking about is the federal government's Stargate Project.  Don't confuse this with Crazy Ronnie's Star Wars Initiative, mind you, but this was equally as insane.  The Stargate Project was started in the early 1970s to experiment on the value of remote viewing.  For those out of the loop, remote viewing is a form of ESP, and is the ability to use paranormal means to seek impressions about distant, unseen places or targets.  From the 1970's to 1995, the US government spend twenty-million dollars per year funding this research, and in over two decades of applying the phenomena to rigorous scientific research, not one bit of conclusive evidence was reached to add to the validity of remote viewing phenomenon.

The studies that were done were certainly conflicting.  Dare I take us back to my argument against statistics, but this is yet another example of how easily manipulated they are, and how they do not under any circumstances function as stand-alone scientific evidence because of their insurmountable amounts of variables.  I need bring to your attention no more example than these conflicting conclusions.  Just before the operation closed, a  report was run buy the American Institutes for Research (AIR) which had a council primarily of two members, Professor Jessica Utts and Dr. Ray Hymen.  The reports were performed based on the collected data of the man who took over Stargate in 1985, Dr. Edwin C. May, who was a long-time government employee working in programs dealing with precognition and ESP, and whose education is in Low Energy, Experimental Nuclear Physics.

Professor Jessica Utts' study found that subjects who claimed clairvoyance were correct about certain information at a rate of 5% to 15% above chance, citing statistically significance.  In her side of the report to the AIR, she all but claimed these numbers to be proof of the existence of ESP and precognition.  On the other hand, the information collected by Dr. Hyman was entirely different.  According to the Hyman's data, remote viewers were correct about information only 20% of the time.  Being wrong about information 80% of the time is hardly above chance in my opinion, and apparently in his as well.  He responded to Professor Utts' results, saying her claim of evidence of precognition is entirely premature, and that "present findings have yet to be independently replicated."  He also argued that the subjects' reports included large amounts of irrelevant information, and when the subjects' reports were on target, the information supplied was often vague and completely general in nature, much like ancient prophesies, which can be applied to just about anything.  These are two very conflicting results based on the same data.  I think what worries me even more is that Professor Utts is a long-time proponent of significant changes in collegiate level statistics education, arguing that the current curricula does a horrible job in teaching students how to properly interpret statistical results.  She also argues that classes don't spend enough time on the misconception that correlative studies show causation.  Although I most certainly agree with that second part, as anyone who read my last paper knows, I'm not so sure that she actually understands what she's saying.  Either that, or she's learned a lesson since 1995, and is blaming her education for the public embarrassment that should have been her side of the AIR report.

Of course, I do not know the exact amount of control that went into these experiments, nor do I know if either of these groups collecting and interpreting the date were following the strict guidelines of the scientific method to begin with.  I do know that Dr. Edwin May was, and still is, a proponent of psychic phenomenon, so it would be hard for me to say that the experiments performed, or the data collected and interpreted between 1985 and 1995 were unbiased and approached with skepticism the way they should have been.  In other words, statistical evidence for psychic phenomena exists, but it was bias to begin with.  According to the report itself, "Information provided was inconsistent, inaccurate in regards to specifics, and required substantial subjective interpretation."  As for hard evidence, still, absolutely no evidence whatsoever for the validity of psychic phenomena exists.  Total dollar amount for the Stargate Project: based on the information provided, the full cost of the project was $400 million dollars, and surely more, as the total cost of the project after it was transferred to the CIA in 1995 is not provided.  For additional information on Stargate and the AIR's conclusions visit here: http://psiland.free.fr/dossiers/parapsy/psi_defense/remote.pdf


Otherwise, private research is done all of the time from private funding, most of these exercises take place at universities, such as Washington University's $5 million grant of recent, which resulted in the same failure as the government's remote viewing project.  However, there has been one study that may show evidence for the existence of psychic phenomena.

Is This Your Porn?
Professor Emeritus Daryl Bem (psychology) at Cornell University recently published a paper called "Feeling the Future" in the magazine The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  A former stage magician, Bem has a long interest in the study of psychic phenomenon, having specialized in mentalism.  He was apparently a skeptic up until the point when he ran into noted parapsychologist Charles Hornorton at a convention hosted by the Parapsychological Association.  Bem soon began work on the empirical side of attempting to prove psychic phenomena, and to provide controlled evidence that can be replicated by independent researchers. 

Bem's experiment was as such: He put a computer screens in front of 100 students - fifty male and fifty-female - on either side was a curtain.  Behind one curtain would be a blank wall, and behind another would be an image.  Many of the images were erotic in nature, but not all of them.  The point was, obviously, to get the students to choose the screen on which was the erotic image.  Bem hypothesized that the group would be able to identify the correct screen roughly 50% of the time, as would say the laws of chance (1 of 2 options = 50% chance of success), however, that those shown the erotic images would have a higher hit rate.  I'm already blown by what Mr. Bem is considering to be a control in this experiment, but I'll digress.

Of the 100 sessions in Bem's experiment, those shown non-erotic images chose the correct curtain 48.8 percent of the time - well within the bounds of chance.  Those shown erotic imagery, however, scored a hit rate of 53.1 percent.  According to Bem, this was a substantial difference, but may I remind you that even statistically, this is not a significant difference, and scientifically, 53.1 percent is still well within the bounds of probability and chance - only a marginal percent higher than 50%.  If the results would have stated somewhere around 60%, I would be interested.  If the results showed somewhere in the area of 70%, I would actually be quite amazed and I would want to replicate the experiment myself.  If the results were 80%-90%, I would bow down and tell Mr. Bem that he very well may have stumbled upon evidence of ESP and precognition.  However, 53.7% is hardly impressive, and as I said before, well within the boundary of chance.  Why was there a difference between the two groups?  Also mere chance, as variables would dictate, if you were to show one half of the group two blank computer screens, you would probably see the same, if not a greater difference.  However, this would be called a control, and I see no evidence of one here.  Another point to ponder: This research carried over the course of eight years, with the experiment being replicated nine times, so I must wonder how many of those experiments differed in percentage, as we seem only to be receiving the average percentages.  What were the results of each individual test?  Was it conclusive 100% of the time that students overwhelmingly chose the proper computer containing the erotic image against those who were tested without the erotic images?  What were the percentage of students who chose the blank screen in each experiment?  Were there more women than men who chose any of the above results?  Where is this information?  You would think it would be important, at least for a scientist, which a psychologist plainly is not.  Especially this one, it would appear.

Now, onto a greater problem with this experiment.  In his own words, "The remarkable finding is that their psychological responses are observed to occur about 2-3 seconds prior to the appearance of the picture, even before the computer has decided whether to present a non-arousing or an arousing picture."

Yet, a half a year later, the study has yet to be replicated independently, which would indicate little more than a fluke result.  I also have not seen the entirety of the results to see if he managed to somehow score a difference between precognition (knowing what is coming) and anticipation (expecting something may come), nor have I seen what the orders of the photos were, which would well explain the anticipation.

With two highly-publicized studies, we see absolutely no evidence at all for precognition, and other studies not worth mentioning, over the past, fifty years, have come to the same results: Excited non-skeptics of precognition being met with a chorus of, "Here's what you did wrong."  I suspect that no results in the future will prove anything further from this trend.  So, why with such a lack of evidence for precognition, to police departments across the United States, Great Britain and Australia continue to pump worthwhile state money into such a worthless practice?  Why are television shows abundant on the topic of psychic investigators?

Roadhouse Blues
Why is it that Patrick Swayze is dead right now?  Living in Minneapolis, one of the suburbs of my fair city is called Edina.  Edina is the home one of the "real life ghost mediums" who acted as, among many others, an inspiration of The Ghost Whisperer.  Her name is is Echo Bodine.  Her books have sold substantially well and she currently does live readings with the accompaniment of a keyboardist.  The subject at hand is not Echo, however, but her brother, Michael Bodine, who my poor fiancee must deal with every time he saunters into her store to sign his literary nonsense.

Michael was the personal psychic of many stars including Lewis Black (that one surprises me) and Melanie Griffith, but most notably, Patrick Swayze, who died in 2009 of pancreatic cancer.  I in no way intend any disrespect to Swayze or his family in this piece, nor do I intend to make light of pancreatic cancer, which is one of the deadliest forms of cancer known to date.  However, that being said, why was Patrick Swayze dead at 57?  The average lifespan - though at a very embarrassingly tied with Cuba at 36th in the world, underneath islands that most people have never heard of - is 75.6-years-old for men.  Fifty-seven seems to be a pretty early age of death, not only for a man who was, admittedly, in pretty impeccable physical shape for most of his life, but more notably, had a psychic by his side to tell him what the future held for him.  Swayze could have easily detected his cancer early enough to cure it, had his psychic informed him, or had he known about it.  But how could he not?  I don't want to hear another psychic explain, "It doesn't work that way," I want to hear just one give me a real answer as to why psychics can detect some things but not others.  And if it's in a heirarchy of importance, I would think pancreatic cancer would be up there.  And considering what Swayze paid this man, I think most certainly Swayze's family is entitled to a refund.

This may be a bit of a tongue and cheek example, but it's the dominant example.  Therefore, why, again, are our state and federal government paying to hire these people?  Why are our tax dollars being spent to fund hokum, with a statistical success rate of 1 in 17, though, I'm still skeptical of statistics, even when they work in my favor.  You must realize that 1 in 17 is far lower than the rate of chance, and it's far, far lower than the success rates of our best detectives, who rely on investigation and evidence to solve crimes, instead of superstitious nonsense.

In Summation
What are we doing funding this type of investigation and research?  How many times do results need to be found inconclusive?  How many years is it going to take to develop proof of something that is allegedly so common?  Let's go back to chance for a moment, maybe a statistical expert out there can conclude how it could be that after hundreds of years of investigation and experimentation, absolutely no hard evidence has ever been found that precognition, or any sort of psychic ability for that matter?  It was only months after Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was released that hard evidence started to turn up.  It was only half a century after the standard model was developed that all but one of the particles it predicted have been found.  Speaking of...where is that elusive Higgs boson anyway?  I guess that's a topic for a later date.

For our federal government or state governments to spend a dime on psychics or psychic research is, in this man's opinion, a violation of the separation of church and state, as to date, psychic activity is nothing more than primitive superstition, and not hard, empirical fact.  I suspect that will never change.  For those who disagree, by all means, take those millions of dollars that James Randi has had up for years for anyone who can provide proof of psychic ability.  Hell, I'll offer a few grand myself.

Thanks for reading,
The Smiling Skeptic
C. Allen Thompson