Back in April of 2019 (pre-Covid), we were in Tucson, AZ to get out of Colorado’s seemingly endless winter and to celebrate my birthday. One of the treats was to visit the Kitt Peak Observatory, an array of optical and radio telescopes. I learned quite a bit.
- It’s very cold in the Arizona desert at night. Dress appropriately.
- Even if you’ve not been pulled over by a cop in ten years, that is not a good way to project the future.*
- Large telescopes deliver images much like the early days of PC’s, mostly one color and subject to interpretation.
- Power of suggestion is everything needed to justify the exorbitant cost of two Kitt Peak tickets. The following day we got email copies of the images we had seen, with two problems: They were colorized, and they were not what we saw. This is the same strategy Disney uses when you visit them, to take a photo of you and Mickey where you are smiling big, so that later you will forget how miserable you were when you posed for that stupid photo. I was cold and disappointed as we looked through one of their smaller scopes.
Power of suggestion had, I think, a lot to do with another aspect of that visit. We sat on the mountaintop to observe the sunset, and were told to watch for a green flash in the closing moments.
The green flash and green ray are meteorological optical phenomena that sometimes occur transiently around the moment of sunset or sunrise. When the conditions are right, a distinct green spot is briefly visible above the Sun‘s upper limb; the green appearance usually lasts for no more than two seconds. Rarely, the green flash can resemble a green ray shooting up from the sunset or sunrise point.
We saw it that evening! In the years since I’ve seen many sunrises and sunsets, and each time hope to see the green flash. It does not happen. Was it just power of suggestion?
On my phone, I rotate photos we have taken over the years, all of nature. Recently the photo above appeared, and behold right there in the photo is a green flash! Sadly, it does not translate on WordPress. You cannot see it above. But take my word for it, as it is visible on my iPhone and … if you look hard enough …I suggest to you that you will see it.
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I just got done reading Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, by Leonard Mlodinow. It’s OK, nothing shocking. The author recounts a lot of psychological tests that have been done on unsuspecting subjects over time, and one thought comes to mind: If you find yourself in an experimental group in one of your psych classes, beware! The experiment is not about what they say it is about. They are trying to trick you into revealing some other attitude or behavior, like racism, sexism, or susceptibility to advertising. If you know that going in, you can f*** with them.
Here’s a passage from the book (page 208), however, that I flagged:
“And when people don’t want to accept something, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, and American Meteorological Society, and a thousand unanimous scientific studies can all converge on a single conclusion, and people will still find a reason to disbelieve. That’s exactly what happened in the case of the inconvenient and costly issue of global climate change. The organizations I named above, plus a thousand academic articles on the topic, were unanimous in concluding that human activity is responsible, yet in the United States more than half the people have managed to convince themselves that the science of global warming is not yet settled.”
¡Ay, caramba! Where to begin. Well, first, 97% is not “unanimous”, and anyway, the origin of that number, the supposed 97% consensus, is from University of Queensland’s John Cook. It turned out to be false. Wildly so. He cooked the books. He skimmed abstracts of thousands of scientific papers, and generalized their conclusions without reading them. “Generalized” is a gracious word here. He made shit up.
Using the same methodology as Cook in reading the abstracts of the same thousands of scientific papers, University of Delaware professor David Legates and others, writing in Science & Education, found that just 0.3 percent — not 97 per cent — of the papers Cook examined explicitly endorsed his position, the rest were inferred by Cook, or misstated. That’s an overstatement of a factor of 3,233/1.
Others have done the same legwork, and come up with higher numbers of those who believe in Climate Change than Legates, but that’s not the point. Sloppy science is sloppy science, and yet it gets widely published! John Cook acted as if he was ordered and paid to come up with 97% number, and he obliged.
But enough about Cook. What about author Leonard Mlodinow? What to make of his assertion? He was lazy, sloppy, did no homework, and trusted authority figures in the media and politics. This is the exact opposite behavior that one would expect from a self-proclaimed “scientist” in the field of psychology. For some, anyway.
I know how it works. Mlodinow is going along with the supposed consensus that states that the emperor is fully clothed. He would not know what to say if a child were to tell him he is completely wrong.
Here’s something else I noted in this silly time-wasting book: Mlodinow cites the work of psychologist David Dunning in some other matters unrelated here. Does that name ring a bell? As in “Dunning-Kruger”? To refresh memories, the Dunning-Kruger effect is “… a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities.” Better and more crudely stated, it means that stupid people cannot know they are stupid because … they are stupid.
I’m not saying anything personal about Mlodinow, who never mentons Kruger. The DK Effect is something we all need to be aware of. Am I part of it? Do I need a green flash of modesty and self-awareness? Of course. We all do. Of course, Mlodinow does not need the green flash. As his words show, he’s got it all figured out.
The book Subliminal… has in invisible ink on the cover, not kidding, a suggestion: “Pssst … Hey There. Yes: You, Sexy. Buy This Book Now. You Know You Want it.” I would do the same trick but change the words to “Pssst … walk on by. The guy don’t know shit. “
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*I walked out of our Tucson apartment that evening having changed into long pants, accidentally leaving my wallet and cash behind. As I told my wife, “It’s been ten years since I got a ticket. We’ll be fine.” Driving back in to Tucson from Kitt peak, tired as I could be, I was of course pulled over by a young motorcycle cop for doing 47 in a 35. I explained to the officer what had happened, but his hands were tied. He pointedly asked if I’d been drinking, twice, and I had not. It was April 19th. My birthday is April 20th.
He sat on his motorcycle and did a search for wants and warrants, past citations, parking ticket, and I was all clean. The fine for speeding was going to be like $240, and there was yet another $200+ fine for failure to carry my license, which entailed a court appearance the following day as well. I suppose it helped that I was never rude, never denied what I had done, and simply waited patiently for the outcome. He said “Drive safely on your way home, Mark, and happy birthday!” There were no citations issued.
Piece of Mindful 
Mark, good piece. Something came to mind as I was reading this – laugh tracks or music added to TV or film to create the right “subliminal” effect. A few examples: Star Wars when it was screened without the soundtrack – written by John Williams – a pop classical masterpiece – assuming it was just him- anyhow – it was supposedly panned by the “focus group” who watched the first print. I have seen brief excepts of it, it does look like hoky space animation without the great soundtrack.
Another example is watching Seinfeld without the laugh track or canned laughter from the audience. I have seen a few of these on youtube, and some “funny” scenes are downright creepy without the background giggles or wacky sounds they added to segue between scenes. Monty Python is similar in that I can’t imagine what it would be like without the laugh track – which oddly seems completely appropriate with most of their skits.
My point is the music and laughter adds the power of suggestion, as you suggested.
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Seinfeld, the story goes, refused to use a laugh track. I tend to believe that as he is such a comedy purist. He still works the clubs in New York City d3veloping new material.
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Sure, he says they didn’t use a laugh track – but they used a lot of background music cutting between scences.
Also I think that is incorrect, this is the quick google search result, they did use one, or a “live audience” – same difference.
According to one of the co-creators (Seinfeld himself) on a Reddit AMA, Seinfeld had both a laugh track and a live audience. Much of the show was filmed in front of a live audience. Some scenes weren’t able to be filmed in front of a crowd, however, and those scenes featured a laugh track.
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$einfeld is a $ purist, pure and simple. OK comedian, not great.
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Well Larry David managed to make Curb Your Enthusiasm work without a laugh track. He co created Seinfeld of course.
I think they only annoy me if they’re horribly overdone, and if the show is unfunny. Then they seem desperate, phony and off-putting. But Seinfeld was pretty funny usually so the laugh track didn’t jump out and call attention to itself. Great piece by the way Mark, funny and lots of interesting points.
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A lot has to do with how they film it. Curb Your Enthusiasm, like 30 Rock, was shot in “single camera” setting without a studio audience. For each take the camera gets action, cuts, moves, and gets a reaction. I am reminded of a 30 Rock shot where Liz Lemon broke the fourth wall, and mentioned her clothing as Jack Donahue’s face was on camera. When it came back to her she was wearing a neck scarf that had been added between cuts, deliberately.
Neither 30 Rock nor Curb used laugh tracks, as the humor comes from the writing and characters and it either works or it does not. Seinfeld was shot the older way, multi-camera and blocking, but Seinfeld did insist on genuine audience laughs. For non-studio shots, where no audience is present, I assume they used laugh tracks, but don’t know. Maybe they showed the footage to a live audience for a real reaction. I kind of doubt it.
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I didn’t know, or forgot, the 97% number was based on a survey of abstracts.. I assume he lists the papers somewhere? So anybody could do their own check on that, at least sample them, if they wanted to see if it’s fair.
Of course it’s a silly point anyway, accurate or not, since it just plays on public misunderstanding about the nature of institutional science. The implication of the claim to the lay public is supposed to be something like “thousands of independent, skeptical scientists have independently scrutinized this and all reached the same uncoerced, freely made conclusion!”
The lay public isn’t aware that “normal science,” in Kuhn’s sense, BEGINS from “consensus,” ie a paradigm or framing, assumes it to be true, and then “fills in the blanks,” conducting thousands of micro experiments that don’t make any grand claims or try to prove it disprove the grand theory – but whose results are presented or interpreted in light of the grand frame.
That’s my guess anyway is that if I dug through those abstracts, they would be mostly of micro effects of this or that element or variable, what happens to x gas under these conditions, whatever. And then somewhere in the conclusion they throw in “this may be a contributing factor to manmade global warming (see the papers x, y and z by grand poobahs a, b and c who established this dogma), and therefore, more research is needed..”
And that’s how “normal science” proceeds, and as Kuhn said, it does produce all sorts of “interesting” data, regardless of whether the larger paradigm survives in the long run or not, or is true if we had access to absolute revealed truth or something. And can lead to stumbling on new finds by chance, surprising results, that can lead to new experiments. At least if there’s ANY genuine intellectual curiosity in the field and they don’t threaten the rice bowls of any grand poobahs too much..
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The Cook effort, and I don’t know why people are circumspect to just say so, was a hit job. He was commissioned to come up with that 97% number, as were several others. It’s all been disassembled, or dare I say, debunked. Like everything about Climate Change, it is all about perception management. The idea behind it was to seal an impression in the mind of the general public that work had been done in the area, that it was solid and reliable and using the scientific method, and that people need not think about it or look into it themselves. And when crap like this is Tweeted out by the President of the United States, it solidifies the impression. That’s all it was, a psyop.
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I don’t doubt that, I just never paid much attention to the original study since the media talking point was such transparent and blatant perception management, as you say.. I just mean it sounds like it would be easy enough for anyone to check his work, based on his methodology.. but sort of pointless for the above reasons.
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That’s a very good outline of modern science. I agree, you can nibble along the edges, but not challenge the “giants” or so called Gods of science.
I want to ask also, is there some significance to this 97% number? Now Miles is claiming he is censored by the top search engines controlling 97% of searches! How he got that number I know not.
As far as the Trump attempted “assassination” my first reaction is auto-hoax. Because anyone who is paying attention to this stuff knows it’s completely impossible, if not pointless, to try and shoot a president. You’d obviously be stopped before you got within a mile of him with a gun. And then somehow you’d have to know his exact schedule, etc etc. in other words it’s an incredibly improbable event, so you know if the news is talking about it it was staged.
I thought of new term to counter the trend in artificial intelligence. I’d like to say Marks commenters have “real intelligence” – not artificial. And real is always better than artificial. I’m tempted to tell people I’m RI.
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Thanks for confirming my rough sketch as generally accurate. I was hoping you’d comment on it since you have direct personal experience and I’m limited to reading about it and being an outside observer.
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I am reading Life The Movie by Gabler … at first I didn’t think I would appreciate a rich Jew from the Hamptons writing about us common folk. I’m on page 43 and have so far affixed six Post It™ notes. Looks like it is going to be a good one.
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Reply below –
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Very glad to hear that.. the whole discussion promoted me to order one of his earlier books, An Empire of Their Own, about the Jewish founders of Hollywood, and how they shaped the American dream and mythology of the times, on down to the present. So I’ve just started that one myself.
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