The point here isn’t that homeopathy can’t have clinical outcomes, rather, that any outcome that occurs from homeopathy cannot be caused by the mechanisms that are claimed to be in effect. They defy the known laws of physics and generally, are just completely ridiculous.

If you’re not already familiar with this, brace yourself. People actually believe this. Here’s a Pie Cubed video to explain:

At the end of the video he says “Now I’m starting to talk like a psychologist, and I know nothing about that!” Let’s test that theory. Here’s the video.

For the lazy, when Feynman told mathematician John Tukey about this, Tukey could do the reverse — talk but not read. The reason was that Feynman would talk to himself in his head, while Tukey would see an image of a clock ticking over. Feynmann suggests this could be because people think differently, and if you’re having trouble getting a point across, it might be because what your saying is more difficult to translate into the other person’s favoured modality than it is your own.

I don’t know if he’s right about that latter point, but he’s certainly right about the rest. We have multiple cognitive “modules” in the brain which are specialised to different functions, and it’s possible to bring different modules to bear on a task. For example, our working memory, which is the cognitive process in use whenever you’re consciously “doing” something (like Feynman’s counting task) has a number of different components. I discuss these here. Each of these components has limitations, but your brain can use all the components at the same time.

When Feynman started counting in his head he was employing the phonological loop, and when counting lines in a book he’s using the visuo-spatial sketch pad. These are different “modules,” that’s why he could do both tasks at the same time. Talking uses the phonological loop, so when he tried that, he’s asking too much of the module (which in most people would be fully occupied by the counting) causing him to mess up on the task.

For Tukey, the reverse is true. He visualised a clock, occupying the visuo-spatial sketch pad but leaving the phonological loop free. So he could talk freely but as soon as he tried to read, he messed up.

Some experiments even take advantage of this fact, by having participants count out-loud as they perform some other task, so they occupy the phonological loop as they test some other cognitive module.

It’s also true that different people have different preferences in terms of how the process information, and cultural differences play a big role in this. So at the end of the video, Feynman was being a little unfair on himself when he said he knew nothing about psychology!

While I have some questions about materialism that no one has been able to answer, I don’t agree that the focus materialism is a form of idolatry. It’s just the framework into which all the other empirical data best fits. If another model came along that fit the data better, or data came along that did not fit the model, the prevailing paradigm would change. It would change slowly I’m sure, because paradigms do, but it would change. It’s a bit unfair to talk about current scientific models as if they are not works in progress — even if they slow, perhaps too slow, to change.

Since there’s a finite amount of time and money that can be invested into consciousness research, it makes more sense to start your investigations from the standpoint of the most supported, the most accepted and the most validated paradigm, which is the material model. So you start from here, you make assumptions from here and then test them. A difficult question then becomes, at what point do you know that you’ve exhausted all the avenues of this model, and should start looking to others?

Wallace says that a better way to study consciousness is to use our immediate experience, through our own observations, because this is a direct experience of consciousness, unlike second-hand self-report or brain imaging data. But I don’t see how this can answer the fundamental question – whether consciouness emerges from matter, as the materialistic view proposes, or whether matter emerges from consciousness, as the Buddhist and other views propose. How would introspection answer that?

Observing the mind might well let you understand it, it might show you, as Wallace describes, this blissful second “layer” of consciousness, which Wallace claims does not arise from matter. How is it possible to know this from introspection? If you answer “You have to experience it to know,” then that’s an argument to authority (to people who have already experienced it) and I won’t be convinced by that, but at the very least it’s testable and a million times better than “you must have faith.” That it takes years and years of meditation to test this hypothesis is somewhat inconvenient, but at least its falsifiable.

But let’s say I do experience it. How do I know it does not arise from matter? How can introspection separate something that does not arise from matter and never did, from something that does but has changed through years of mental training?

“At work, do you have an opportunity to do what you do best?”

This is the essence of the strengths movement. This line of thinking says that the way to become more productive and efficient at work, is to find ways to use your personal strengths. Likewise, the area in which we have the most potential to improve is, paradoxically, our strengths, as opposed to fixing our weaknesses.

Marcus gives an overview of this school of thought below, and presents some of the data behind it. I’ve also talked about this a bit.

• On football (soccer if you’re american) – Succumbs to narrative bias and tribalism, statistically impure, results are mostly random and more decided by the coin toss at the beginning of the game than anything that goes on within it.
• On economics – Constructs impressive looking but flawed mathematicam models based on incorrect premises.
• On wine - An atrocious drink that breaks the rule of successful consumer products. You wouldn’t go to a pub where every third beer tasted like piss, yet you’ll happily pay £4.50 for a glass of wine with a just over 50/50 chance of tasting good.

You can see the thread running through these points — if we were rational, the worlds most popular sport perhaps wouldn’t be so unpredictable, and the highest status drink would be the one with the highest consistency in quality, not the least. Yet we do find value in unpredictability, a point that Sutherland doesn’t give credit to in this talk.

The fact that anything can happen in a game of football is what makes it a better game for the underdog, it puts that hope into the game. Although I might have to check his premises on what he said about the game (upsets happen, but the richer team has always tended to win). Likewise, the utility in wine isn’t just in the taste, it’s in showing off how much you know about it and talking about how fruity, etc it is. It’s kind of like how the value of buying a lottery ticket isn’t just in the odds of winning, it’s the anticipation, checking the numbers, the dreaming.
Sutherland gives some interesting views on other topics too, like path dependency in supermarkets, why the English are so poor at learning a second language, and why things are harder to change on a collective as opposed to individual level.

Overall it’s a pretty thought provoking talk and recommended, particularly if you’re a football-loving wine-drinking economist!

Here’s Rory’s book, the Wiki Man:

And guess what? Remember that alien being from another dimension that he’s able to channel? Well what are the odds? He’s also a Trekkie!

I wonder whether Darryl got the alien into it? Or maybe Bashar deliberately sought out someone who was a trekkie because they’d be more likely to believe he was real and make the channeling process successful. This is a moot point, of course, since all of this is bullshit.

Here’s Anka, channelling the alien being from another dimension, Bashar, talking about Star Trek. You can tell that he’s actually channeling an alien spirit because he talks in a funny voice and puts his fingers together and starts rolling his ‘r’s.

Again, I need to stress here, that this isn’t a parody or a piss take. People actually see this and actually believe this is real, that an alien really is talking through him.

Brace yourself. Things are about to get weird:

I was particularly surprised by these two interesting facts on gaming in general:

• The average age of a gamer is 33 (makes sense — in the 80s, games were played almost exclusively by kids. How old are those kids now?)
• One month after the release of COD: Black Ops, the game had been played for 600 million hours. That’s 68,000 years.

There are a few problems with this research though, which I discussed here.

Do you agree? Tim talks more about his learning strategies in the Four Hour Chef:

Steven Pinker - Skirts the question a bit:

Michio Kaku – Rejects determinism, but seems to suggest that uncertainty or randomness is a form of free will:

Sam Harris – Says it’s an illusion:

Dan Dennett - It exists:

Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss – It’s an illusion, though it doesn’t make much difference:

This tricky condition is treated with a combination of painkillers, anaesthetics, physical therapy and psychotherapy, but there are better solutions in the pipeline. Here’s Elliot Krane to explain more.