The Amazing Meeting: Day One
January 27, 2006

Thursday: When Skeptics Shout

Okay, it's late and we're starting tomorrow at the ungodly (<---------get it! Heheheheeheheh. I know. It wasn't that funny. Shoot me. I'm running on caffeine fumes here) hour of 7:30 in the AM, so I've got time for just some quick impressions of the day. I'll try to expand these later, but for now:

Today is actually just the "Pre-Meeting" Workshop on Information and Disinformation. It was presented by Chip Denman, a statistics professor out of M.D. and Jamy (Jaime) Ian Swiss, a magician out of... well, whatever magical place spawns magicians. Chip led off with some wonderful examples of how our visual systems betray us, how we don't always see what we think we see and say what we mean to say. That wacky little million year old grey matter sitting between our ears co-opted a variety of systems and functions to adapt to an environment where social interaction and threat assessment was key to survival. The ways we trick others, and get tricked ourselves, directly flows from this.

The most vivid examples of this came when Jamy zinged us with his masterful illusions. As an aside, about three hours ago had the wonderful opportunity to actually see Jamy do a live show to a small audience of us skeptics. His slight of hand card dances left you going "How the @#$@#$@# did he do that?" Jamy's good, so his earlier illusions performed during the workshop, while simple, were vivid effective in demonstrating how the "flaws" that Chip pointed out with his theoretical constructs were knowingly exploited, for fun, by illusionists.

Back to theory, Chip followed Jamy's performance (not something I'd care to do) with some less exciting but far more common illusions that crop up when graphs and charts display information that really means nothin'. We waded into the flaws of bar charts, pie charts, and and trend lines. I hear the gentleman on a Firefox browser from the Midwest go "Booorrrringggg!" In one sense it was -- heaven knows bar graphs aren't that interesting. But, and here's where the argument happened -- and get that many skeptics and free thinkers in a room together and damnit if you aren't going to get a really good and really loud argument -- with the Hard Science Freethinkers on one side and the Soft Science Skeptics on the other.

What that argument consisted of, how it played out, and how many chairs were thrown, is going to have to wait until sometime tomorrow, because Uncle Jody's going to bed. Christopher Hitchens is speaking in the morning, and he's really going to cause a fight.

Posted by Jody at January 27, 2006 12:50 AM

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