This is a fasten-your-seat-belt ride all the way from the Planck Epoch to the dawning of consciousness, the consciousness that the world has come about through a cascade of physical phenomena.
In fascinating detail, covering quantum theory and geomorphology, Baggott provides a very readable account of the advent of mass, light, stars and mammals. In the case of mass, he observes, of quantum fields, that, “until very recently, these were inventions, needed to make the theories work… It’s important for us to understand the nature of these fields… because the Higgs field… is responsible for the origin of mass in the universe”.
This well-illustrated journey from the Big Bang to yesterday takes us through a range of fields, from particle physics and cosmology to chemistry and genetics. The text begins to totter when we reach the chapter on the coming of consciousness: “Unfortunately, the study of consciousness is the only discipline I’ve come across that is structured principally in terms of its problems. So we have the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, the ‘mind-body’ problem… and many more”. This is a peculiar remark to make: that study is not a discipline, and draws on many fields, just as his account of stars and planets does. It is also regrettable, given the general clarity of his writing, that Baggott sporadically flops into cheery banter about pop culture and blurts out things like this: “But hey, let’s think positively. Unsolved problems are in many ways more fascinating”. They usually are.
The final chapter is disappointing, although trying to account for consciousness is hardly an easy task. Baggott has brought us all the way from specks to species, and it might have been better to leave it there, and hand over, with our gratitude, to another tour guide. While there is some discussion of sociality and language, there is no real consideration of perception and memory.
The book’s main virtue is its steady, principled presentation of the best available theories on how we got here, and it will grace any bookshelf.
As an avid reader of Paulos’s books since the 1990s – such as Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences, and Beyond Numeracy: An Uncommon Dictionary of Mathematics – I was keen to read his latest work. In this typically playful offering, he toys, in various mathematical ways, with the very idea of biography, giving away only scraps of his own life story in what is a short but beguiling account.
Paulos discusses a host of questions: How can simple arithmetic put life-long habits into perspective? How can higher-dimensional geometry help us to see why we’re all peculiar? How can we find the curve of best fit that captures the path our lives have taken? None of these matters is addressed in a technical way, but the relaxed approach should attract more people to enjoy the insights of mathematics.
There is plenty here for skeptics too, in relation to biographies: confirmation bias, statistical misunderstandings, mortality rates, and why your friends are likely to be more popular than you are, even if you’re not a skeptic.
This fluent interweaving of personal reflection and abstract thinking is warmly recommended.
On 5 October 2017, I, along with four other memory researchers, read out an essay on memory in front of an audience at the Wellcome Collection Reading Room in London. The following week, the essays were broadcast on Radio 3. Mine went out on 10 October 2017 and can be listened to here. Part 1 of the full text is reproduced below and Part 2 will be reproduced in my next column.
What is your very earliest memory? As a psychologist with a particular interest in memory, this is a question that I have often pondered for myself – and I’m still not sure that I can answer it. When I try to mentally time-travel back to my childhood, several images appear in my mind’s eye. I can picture a reading book we used in school when I was learning to read, featuring Old Lob the farmer and I can even remember the pictures of some of the animals on his farm – Dobbin the horse, Mr Dan the dog, and especially Percy the bad chick. I am sure other memories predate that one though – mental images of things like the gas fire we used to have in my bedroom, Peter my much-loved one-eyed toy Panda, and the stairs in my Grandma’s house. But they are just images and they seem to be a pretty random selection. Unlike my more recent memories, there is no narrative structure, no sense that first this happened and then that happened. As appears to be typical for everyone, these fleeting images are hard to date, so I suspect I’ll never be able to confidently choose just one as my first real memory.
Some people, however, claim to be able to clearly remember events from the first year or two of life, including remembering actually being born. Indeed, some go even further and claim that they can remember life in the womb. We can be fairly sure that such apparent memories are almost certainly false memories, no matter how real they may feel. All of the evidence strongly supports the idea that it is simply not possible to encode accurate and detailed autobiographical memories in the first year or two of life, probably because the brain is simply not mature enough to do so. Also, at that age we do not have the language skills that are thought to be necessary to produce the narrative structure that characterises later memories.
One very famous account of a false memory from early life is provided by none other than the famous Swiss developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget. “I was sitting in my pram,” he recalled, “which my nurse was pushing in the Champs Elysées, when a man tried to kidnap me. I was held in by the strap fastened around me while my nurse bravely tried to stand between me and the thief. She received various scratches, and I can still see vaguely those on her face. Then a crowd gathered, a policeman with a short cloak and a white baton came up, and the man took to his heels. I can still see the whole scene, and can even place it near the tube station.”
The only problem with this exciting memory, as Piaget himself later realised, is that none of this ever happened. At the time, the family had been so grateful to the nurse for her courageous actions, they had even given her an expensive watch as a reward. The tale was often recounted at family gatherings. Years later, tormented by guilt, the nurse had written to the family confessing that she had made the whole thing up.
False Memories Feel Real
Such false memories feel subjectively just the same as memories for events that really did take place. It is just that the events in question either never took place at all or else were so different to the way you remember them as to bear little resemblance to what really happended.
Let me be clear. I am not saying that all memories of childhood are false memories. The problem is that, in the absence of independent evidence, it is simply impossible to say which memories are more or less accurate reflections of events which really did occur, which are distorted versions of what really happened, and which, like Piaget’s, are entirely false. Contrary to what many people believe, memory does not accurately record every detail of every experience you’ve ever had. Instead, remembering is a reconstructive process.
Think of a holiday that you have been on. Think of some specific event that happened on that holiday. Try to remember a scene from that event as clearly as you can and picture it in your mind’s eye. Now, ask yourself this question: Can you see yourself in your mental image? Many people, though not all, report that it seems to them as if they are watching the scene from the vantage point of an outside observer, clearly demonstrating that this memory is not simply a mental replay of what they experienced through their own eyes at the time.
Furthermore, memories are always fragmentary and incomplete. We tend to remember the general gist of what happened but forget many specific details. We often unconsciously and automatically fill in any gaps in memory with what we think we must have seen, rather than what we actually did see. A nice illustration of this is to ask people how the four is represented on most clocks and watches with Roman numerals on them. The vast majority of people will reply “IV”. The correct answer is “IIII”. In all other contexts, the number four really is represented as “IV” – but not on most clocks and watches.
For most of us, most of the time, it does not matter too much if our childhood memories are more or less accurate or not. If we have what appear to be fairly clear memories of childhood episodes, that will be enough to satisfy us that those pictures in our minds are reflections of things that really did happen to us – especially if no one ever challenges their veracity.
A Modern Witch Hunt
False memories of childhood can have extremely serious and damaging consequence
Sometimes, however, false memories of childhood can have extremely serious and damaging consequences. Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, particularly in the USA but in many countries around the world including the UK, vulnerable people entered into therapy in the hope that this would help them to deal with a wide range of troubling but fairly common psychological problems – such as anxiety, depression, eating disorders or problems with relationships. When they entered therapy, they had no memories of ever being the victim of childhood sexual abuse. By the time their treatment had ended, they were convinced that they had been so abused – typically by their own parents. What is more, they had detailed and horrific memories of their abuse. In some cases, the alleged abuse was particularly extreme. It was claimed by some, for example, that they had been victims of ritualised Satanic abuse. These rituals, often described in graphic detail, were said to involve the sacrifice of animals and babies, cannibalism, rape, and every sexual perversion imaginable. The consequences were that families were torn apart, alleged victims were tormented by nightmarish memories that had replaced those of relatively normal childhoods, and alleged abusers were arrested and sometimes sent to prison.
The central question was, of course, were these apparent memories recovered during therapy accurate reflections of real events – or were they completely false memories of events that had never happened at all? Psychologists were – and to some extent still are – divided in their opinions on this question. Those clinical psychologists who favoured a psychoanalytic approach to the question found it easy to believe that these recovered memories were probably memories for real events. They accepted the psychoanalytic notion of repression – the idea that when someone suffers a trauma, an automatic psychological defence mechanism kicks in that pushes the memory for that trauma deep into the unconscious mind where it can no longer be accessed by the conscious mind. Psychoanalysts believe that such repressed memories can still have a damaging effect, however, leading to the types of psychological problems in later life that might lead to someone seeking the assistance of a therapist.
Whereas there is no compelling evidence in support of the psychoanalytic notion of repression, there is a vast amount of evidence to support the notion of false memories.
In sharp contrast, experimental psychologists typically doubt the validity of the very concept of repression. They point out that traumatic experiences are far more likely to be remembered than forgotten. After all, no one ever forgot being held in a concentration camp. If repression is a myth, albeit a widely believed myth much loved by writers of fiction, it follows that most, possibly all, memories “recovered” during psychotherapy are in fact false memories.
Whereas there is no compelling evidence in support of the psychoanalytic notion of repression, there is a vast amount of evidence to support the notion of false memories. Statements supporting the dangers of false memories arising during therapy can be found in official pronouncements by numerous national professional psychological and psychiatric associations around the world.
This is the deceptively simple question I ask at the beginning of every episode of the Haunted podcast. The show features ghost stories that have come to me through social media. I interview the person who had the experience and, with the help of sceptically-minded experts, offer possible reasons for what they saw.
What pleases me when I do that thing all podcasters do – feverishly scour the reviews on iTunes – is that the show seems to be enjoyed in equal measure by sceptics and believers. It’s not an easy trick to pull off. We live in an age more attuned than ever to the power of words. In the fields of race-relations, gender politics and trans-activism, we see examples of the emotive force of a single word, but, until I made Haunted, I hadn’t fully considered the divisive, incendiary impact of the word ‘ghost’.
In our increasingly unshockable world where awful things fill our social-media feeds until we become jaded and immune, punch drunk from horror, the statement “I have seen a ghost” still has the power to elicit real shock. Those words can silence a room and forever change the way we see someone. Imagine how you, as a sceptic, would react if your friend or partner became convinced they had seen the dead come back to life.
Terminology & Ontology
‘Ghost’ is a dirty word.
So, right now, I’m going to do my best to reclaim it, because I believe we need to reboot the terms of the debate. We’ve been locked in a binary shouting match with sceptics on one side, armed with a convincing battery of scientific explanations, and, on the other side, paranormalists fuelled by the adrenaline rush of late nights in haunted locations and the conviction they have seen something science cannot explain.
And into the cracks caused by this seismic rift, fall the sort of people I found myself talking to on Haunted. Ordinary folk who assumed ghosts don’t exist but then saw something that gives them doubt. Aware of the social stigma of telling people about their experience, they kept it to themselves.
Human beings need ghosts … (they are) the supernatural equivalent of Japanese knotweed.
It’s people like this that make me realise the sceptic community is highly skilled at explaining how strange phenomena occur, but sometimes less interested in why. In the battle to prove that ghosts don’t exist, it is easy to overlook the thing that is staring us in the face: they clearly do. By which, I mean that people do experience things which they think are ghosts and, as soon as they take the step of believing, the ghost becomes real to them. It starts to have a tangible effect on their life. It, in short, exists.
It’s often remarked upon that paranormal experiences have followed certain patterns throughout history. Believers cite this as evidence that ghosts are real whilst sceptics see it as the contagion of belief; each ‘ghost’ the echo of its antecedents. What I think it proves more than anything though is how very much human beings need ghosts; how deeply rooted and hard to shift they are in our psyche. The supernatural equivalent of Japanese knotweed.
Despite the concerted efforts of sceptics, we as a species, are unable to consign ghosts to the scrapheap of redundant belief. There are many people who don’t believe in God but do believe in ghosts, and there are many more who do not believe in ghosts but wouldn’t dare to spend the night in a ‘haunted’ house, because, deep down, a tiny bit of them does believe, just enough to get scared.
A Sign of the Times?
(are ghosts) a collective longing for magic, hope and comfort in a world that feels bleak and cruel?
There is a clearly a renaissance in supernatural interest at the moment. There’s a resurgence in exorcisms in both the Christian and Islamic faiths; horror films rule at the cinema; the ghost story is an acceptable literary form again, and podcasts like mine, Lore, The Black Tapes and Haunted Places have brought creepy tales to a digital audience keen to tingle their spines on their daily commute.
From a sceptic point of view, it would be easy to see this ‘ghost-boom’ as a sign of the times: irrationality and naked belief triumphing over science and rationalism; in-keeping with the anti-expert narrative that arguably brought us Trump and Brexit. However, it’s possible to read it as a sign of the times in a different way; as not an extension or symptom of the irrational chaos of a world run by a dangerous Reality TV star with his finger on the nuclear button, but a response to it; a collective longing for magic, hope and comfort in a world that feels bleak and cruel.
Because, at the heart of the thorny, divisive issue of ghost belief lies the paradox that something so redolent with death is also deeply comforting. Ghost stories, by exposing us to the exhilaration of terror in a contained way, reinforce the security of our own existence. And ghost sightings can bring comfort too. By far the most moving episode we made of Haunted featured bereaved people who felt they had been contacted by the spirits of their loved ones. These were people unexploited by ambulance-chasing psychics, who simply took joy from the idea that they could have a connection with the person they loved. This might take the form of something as simple as a picture falling off a shelf at the moment they thought of the person, but, through the filter of grief, it became proof of contact. From either a sceptic or a believer’s perspective, these ghosts were therapeutic vehicles for dealing with grief. Real or imagined, they brought tangible comfort.
If we expand that to society at large, we can make a case that ghosts are our defence against humankind’s greatest enemy: death. They’re our way of processing the horrific thought that one day we, and all we love, will no longer exist. As such, they are not irritating superstition, but cultural and social necessity.
The sceptic and paranormal investigator Hayley Stevens, who acted as one of our experts on Season 1 of Haunted, wrote a very moving blog about how the death of her mother changed her attitude to ghosts. In her bereaved state, the inexplicable flickering of a lamp in her house implied a presence and sparked an internal conflict between her sceptic head and her broken heart, which craved the person she missed. In bereavement, the debate about the existence of ghosts is no longer abstract.
Perhaps sceptics need to be careful what they wish for in seeking to stamp out irrational belief and dissolve ghostly shadows under the powerful floodlights of reason. There is much good work to be done by offering people scientific, rational explanations for their ghostly experiences. These explanations can serve the brilliant purpose of combatting fear – either that a house is haunted or that the person themselves is mentally ill. But, sometimes we do need ghosts. They are a necessary buffer between life and death, and a world without them, an entirely sceptic universe, with every corner, nook and cranny illuminated and nowhere for the dead to hide, or for us to hide from death – that is a frightening idea.
I’ll end with another question then: not “do ghosts exist”, but can we exist without them?
Danny Robins is a writer, broadcaster and journalist. He writes scripts for TV and Radio and presents the Haunted podcast.
I first learned to be a skeptic in high school. Pause. Modify. I think I was always naturally a skeptic – or, as my mother frequently put it, “Everything I say, you always give me an argument.” But in high school there were two occasions where basic principles about how to be one presented themselves.
By the time of these two incidents, we had already read (in eighth grade, when I was 12-13) Isaac Asimov’s The Human Body: Its Structure and Operation. I have not reread it since, but as I recall it was more than just a guide to human anatomy; I think I came away from it with some basic idea of how medical treatments were tested. And I’m practically certain it was where – in 1966 – I read about developing antibiotic resistance for the first time. I remember concluding that the thing to do was to not take antibiotics unless it was absolutely necessary. If only other people had done the same …
The second incident was in 11th grade history class. The subject that year was American history, and as you might expect the (American) Civil War loomed large. At some point in the discussion, Anne raised her hand in outrage. “That’s not what happened!” she protested, and proceeded to give an entirely different account of the events the teacher had just been discussing. She was upset, as you would be if you believed any teacher was dispensing falsehoods.
Anne had grown up in Texas. We were in New York. There it is: even in 1970, more than a century later, the two sides had a different set of facts about what happened. It was an impressive – if unintended – lesson about points of view, received wisdom, and cultural differences in what you are taught.
It was an impressive – if unintended – lesson about points of view, received wisdom, and cultural differences in what you are taught.
The first incident was a year earlier, and it was intentional. We had a new teacher for tenth grade history – that is, not just new to us but new to the school, which had hired several new and younger teachers (one of them the teacher of that American history class) that year. She was smart, funny, and possessed of an attractive voice, all good qualities in a teacher. She was also unorthodox in a school where some of the teachers appeared to have been teaching the same class for so long that even their jokes had become part of their standard annual lesson plan.
Our first homework assignment was this: read Josephine Tey’s 1951 novel, The Daughter of Time, and summarise the evidence for and against the theory that Richard III killed the princes in the tower. I had read others of Tey’s novels, but not that one, which was that decade’s exoneration of Richard. Tey’s usual detective began studying the matter as something to do while he was trapped in the hospital while recuperating from an injury. (Because his investigation was piqued by an image of the portrait in the National Gallery, years later as an adult it was one of the first things I went to see in London.) By the end of the book, he is convinced that the guilty party is Henry VII.
The point – and the reason this teacher was one of the few I liked and respected at that age – was to help us understand the nature of evidence and how “knowledge” is constructed, and to get us to think critically about the quality of the case that’s being made. That the book we used was also entertaining was a bonus, of course.
Tey’s conclusion was undeniably sympathetic to Richard, and you could make the argument that the book should have been paired with an anti-Richard tome. But Tey – and I have reread this book since – was, I think, pretty even-handed about presenting the case, examining the most often-cited contemporary sources and attempting to apply the first principles of investigation. Where she couldn’t really play fair was with respect to her characters: she needed us to like her series detective, Alan Grant, and believe in his acumen and investigative ability. Allowing doubt about Grant’s conclusions would undercut all the rest of the novels he appears in. In 1990, I read, the Crime Writers Association voted The Daughter of Time the greatest mystery novel of all time.
Today, this sort of experiment in understanding how knowledge is curated is available for free at a second’s notice to everyone: just go to Wikipedia, pick a contentious issue, and study the Talk page. Yes, that community can get bogged down in minutiae. The site’s community of editors is so famous for this that there’s a page listing their biggest controversies – and another for its lamest edit wars. And yet, these are all decisions that every editorial board has had to make, but for the first time these decisions are being made in the open, rather than in secret, and we can audit them and understand how the sausage is made. The lessons I learned in an exclusive high school are now much easier for everyone to access.
The teacher who assigned Tey was widely admired and liked by her many hundreds of students over the years. Indirectly, she’s left her imprint on millions of TV watchers: one of her sons is Joss Whedon.
It’s rare to find yourself watching a lecture you’re convinced will be responsible for someone’s death; it’s rarer still to be watching it in an audience alongside some of the very people you fear are most at risk from the lethal advice on offer. Yet, that’s precisely the situation in which I found myself recently.
In August, Liverpool’s Holiday Inn hotel was the setting for “Censored for Curing Cancer”, a talk by American chiropractor and naturopath, Patrick Vickers. Vickers runs the Northern Baja Clinic in the jurisdiction of Mexico’s lax regulations, and slickly marketed to cancer patients around the world for its ability to “cure advanced terminal cancer”.
And so it was that 70 people, including a distressingly-high number of cancer sufferers and survivors, heard Vickers extoll the abilities of ‘Advanced Gerson Therapy’ to cure cancer. Among the whole audience, it seemed that only me and my two colleagues, from the Merseyside Skeptics Society, brought anything other than an eye of unquestioning acceptance.
It’s hard to put into words just how dangerous Vickers’ unqualified opinions on cancer actually were. He is a follower of Max Gerson, the Polish naturopath who, Vickers claims, had “the most consistent rate of curing advanced terminal cancer to this day”. This is just one of the many points on which Gerson’s modern-day disciples stand in direct opposition to medical science.
That’s not to suggest that Gerson’s miracle cure was merely confined to cancer: the Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweizer was apparently convinced that his ‘severely advanced’ diabetes had been cured by Gerson in just 6 weeks (Vickers: “That’s standard. Severely advanced diabetes, 6-8 weeks, maybe 12 in this day and age. Patients are off their drugs and they no longer have diabetes.”). That we have only the word of Gerson and Schweizer on this miracle cure, and the similarly miraculous cure of Schweizer’s wife’s ‘terminal tuberculosis’, perhaps explains why the majority of the medical establishment haven’t yet abandoned evidence-based medicine to become Advanced Gerson acolytes.
Gerson ‘Therapy’
Though long since recognised to have no benefit in the treatment of cancer, Gerson Therapy remains one of the most common pseudomedical treatments for the disease today – a fact which is tragically evidenced by the pilgrimage of patients to clinics like Vickers’ Northern Baja centre in Mexico, and the frequent media reports of fundraising events to help those Gerson patients meet the spiralling costs of their treatment.
The therapy itself is based around a gruelling and ultra-restrictive diet, with the patient consuming 20lbs of raw organic vegetables per day, juiced into a thick sludge which is to be drunk on the hour, every hour, from 8am until 8pm. Naturally, this means an extensive stay in an expensive clinic (Vickers’ own establishment charges nearly $18,000 for the three-week stay most patients ‘require’) in order to learn how to prepare so meticulous a diet.
If the constant juicing (and inevitably subsequent bathroom adjacency) weren’t inconvenient enough, patients are expected to endure a minimum of five coffee enemas every day, along with a regime of supplement pills administered in doses that border on the downright dangerous. As Vickers boasted during his presentation: “If a medical doctor learned how much potassium we give patients every day, they’d be frantic”. Topping off the programme is a range of pseudoscientific adjuvant therapies: ozone therapy, pancreatic enzymes, vitamin C megadosing, laetrile (derived from apricot kernels and containing cyanide), and hydrotherapeutic immersion in a mix of water and hydrogen peroxide (a.k.a. bleach).
Here was someone with no medical expertise instructing ‘advanced stage’ cancer patients to eschew proven medical treatment, and on top of that to avoid having a scan that could check how quickly their untreated cancer was progressing.
The Gerson regime is as extreme in its proscriptions as it is in its prescriptions: all sodium is strictly prohibited, as is all meat (Vickers: “If you eat meat on the Gerson diet, you will die”) and all forms of exercise (Vickers: “If you do any exercise on the Gerson diet, you won’t heal”). Most damning of all, Vickers explained that patients are encouraged not have any hospital scans for six months. Here was someone with no medical expertise instructing ‘advanced stage’ cancer patients to eschew proven medical treatment, and on top of that to avoid having a scan that could check how quickly their untreated cancer was progressing. The danger to patients couldn’t be more starkly illustrated.
Dying to Live
Whenever we see a single treatment claimed to cure multiple diseases with entirely different pathologies, with nothing but the testimony of those promoting the therapy to back up those claims, scrutiny and skepticism are reasonable responses. When the treatment is promoted via scaremongering about modern life and modern medicine, scrutiny and skepticism become essential.
Vickers was certainly not shy in outlining what he believed to be the dangers of modern living, decrying modern technology (“I can’t tell you how many cancers come in related to cellphone and computer use alone”), denouncing genetics (“The whole genetic theory [of cancer] is a fraud. The BRCA gene? They’re coming up with more and more genes – ‘it’s genetic’, ‘this disease is genetic’. It’s not, folks.”) and starkly warning about the perceived paucity of the modern diet (“Today, I can take a 55-year-old person, across the board, and they’re already showing signs of severe osteoporosis … their bodies are so depleted from five decades of eating horribly deficient foods”).
If his pseudoscientific opinions on the causes of cancer weren’t sufficiently dangerous, Vickers’ disdain for conventional cancer treatment was downright galling. Cancer, we were told, is getting harder to cure specifically because of modern medicine. After all, “Gerson never had to deal with all the pharmaceutical drugs, and never had to deal with chemotherapy.” Far from being a crucial tool in slowing the growth of tumours, chemotherapy was disparaged as being an impediment to the Gerson cure. As Vickers explained: “If [patients] come to us having had chemotherapy, it takes at least 3-6 months to detoxify them from that… This is a two-year therapy to cure fully. If you’ve had chemo, forget about it, it’ll take even longer.”
Vickers’ advice wasn’t merely hypothetical, either – during the Q&A, on multiple occasions he offered direct medical instruction to the patients in the audience, in spite of the severity of their conditions and his own lack of medical expertise:
Audience member: “Would Gerson Therapy work if you’re on medication?” Vickers: “You’ll be weaned off the medication”.
Audience member with bone cancer: “I’m on Tamoxifen”. Vickers: “You’re going to have to get off that”.
Audience member: “Can I ask you what your take is on conventional treatment?” Vickers: “It’s incompatible with Gerson therapy… Do you know what chemotherapy is created from? It’s mustard gas, used in biological warfare, to kill people… Once they’ve done the chemotherapy and the radiation, it comes back ten times more aggressive than it was before they got the chemotherapy”.
Audience member: “We’ve been offered an immunotherapy trial.” Vickers: “They’re always coming out with trials. All these trials, they’re just gonna do trials forever, it’ll never ever cure cancer.”
Almost as shocking as his disregard for the safety of cancer patients was his disregard for their privacy: at one point Vickers related the story of a celebrity he was currently treating, who had decided to combine Gerson therapy with immunotherapy:
“With the immunotherapy that they’re giving him his tumours melted away, but what do you think is happening on the inside of that body? It’s being terribly depleted… My guess is it’s gonna last for about a year, he’s gonna do well for about a year and then he’s just gonna go like *that*.”
Vickers indicated with a hand gesture that he felt the patient’s condition would rapidly decline after a year. I have afforded the patient the respect of anonymity in this report; Vickers afforded no such courtesy when he told the story on stage.
It’s your own fault
While listening to Vickers spread dangerous misinformation to a room filled with cancer patients was tough, tougher still was hearing the enthusiastic agreement of the audience. There was the lady who was distressed about whether she would still be able to do Gerson Therapy despite being unable to take a coffee enema due to the surgery to treat her bowel cancer (Vickers: ‘You can, once you’ve healed a little, but typically if you have a bag you don’t do well’).
Then there was father who explained that he cured his son’s autism with Gerson Therapy, but wanted to know why he himself found holding in a coffee enema for the required fifteen minutes to be too uncomfortable to bear, while his son ‘could go as long as you liked’. It’s hard not to wonder whether the father was too invested in the ‘cure’ to countenance the possibility that his still-autistic son might struggle to articulate how uncomfortable and distressing he found the enema to be.
And then there are perhaps the most heartbreaking cases of all: the cancer patients who have tried the Gerson Diet only to see their cancer continue to progress; those who are now adamant they understand what they did wrong and how they can follow the protocol better in future. You see, for even the most true-believer of Gerson practitioners, the complexity of the regime can be its own defence against the inconvenient truth of disease progression: as Vickers made clear during his lecture, “If you don’t go with the diet for even a single day, you won’t make it”.
Or, to put it another way, if the disease continues to progress, it’s your own fault: it’s because you didn’t follow the rules, you didn’t stick to the programme, you did something wrong. The more complicated and uncomfortable the program, the bigger the risk that patients will slip up even once – thus the greater impetus to impress upon the sick and the dying the need to spend tens of thousands of pounds at expensive clinics to learn how to do the treatment “correctly”, and the greater scope for victim-blaming when the tragic inevitability comes to pass.
This, sadly, is so often the reality of the wellness industry’s approach to a deadly disease: extreme promises backed by grand conspiracy, with no real accountability. From the outside, it is grim; when sat among the very people most at risk from the rhetoric, it is downright grotesque.
Summer holidays are a great excuse to dodge deadlines and this year was no exception. When I should have been penning this column I was shamelessly sunning myself by the pool wading through my reading list. One of the books was the rather provocative Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Hariri. This is the wrong section of The Skeptic to review the work, so I’ll leave that to others. Hariri is a historian, apparently a very good one. However here he’s turned his considerable analytical skills not to the past but to the future. And he makes some very frightening and plausible predictions. From the Industrial Revolution the advancement of technology has always threatened traditional jobs. For example machines can almost always perform better than humans in tasks such as harvesting crops, assembling cars and printing newspapers. Jobs that machines do better have simply withered away. As a consumer society we have embraced the fruits of mass production whilst not always appreciating the consequences. We march to the relentless drum of progress. The newest iPhone or Amazon Echo is the next must have gadget, Facebook is everywhere and Google has become a verb. But it is these companies and others like them, that will radically change the future of employment. And they will change it with AI.
The driverless car, for example, is very close to a practical reality. In the US there are currently 1.7 million people employed driving trucks. Every single one of those hauliers could be out of a job in the space of a few years. Price Waterhouse Cooper1 published a report in March this year suggesting that AI and robots could threaten up to 30 percent of UK jobs within a little over a decade. The headline says “The risks appear highest in sectors such as transportation and storage (56%), manufacturing (46%) and wholesale and retail (44%), but lower in sectors like health and social work (17%)”.
What about law? Given that most of my colleagues jealously hang onto ancient horsehair wigs and have only just given up the use of a pen and quill surely my chosen profession is safe? The robot judge from Futurama is science fiction. You can’t automate an advocate and a jury of 12 men and women doesn’t usually include C3PO and R2D2. But it seems even law is not immune from advances.
A recent study2 published in PeerJ Computer Science set out not only to analyse the Judgements of the European Court of Human Rights but to predict them as well. The techniques used are beyond my understanding as a lawyer but it seems to boil down to natural language processing and machine learning algorithms. The researchers analysed hundreds of decided cases from the court dealing with particular breaches of articles 3, 6 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Those are the articles prohibiting torture, guaranteeing the right to a fair trial and guaranteeing a right to respect for family life. The computer ‘read’ only the facts section of the judgements, which in essence set out the nature of the complaint and the alleged violation of the article concerned. From that analysis, the computer then produced its own decision as to whether there had been a violation or not. In effect, it listened to the arguments and came to its own conclusion. In a staggering 79% (on average) of cases it reached the same conclusion as the European Court of Human Rights. A number of clearly well qualified computer scientists (and a law professor from my alma mater, Sheffield University) contributed to the research. But it is no coincidence that the lead author of the paper is employed by Amazon.com.
Now I appreciate that the phrase ‘legal questions in plain English’ may sound like an oxymoron
Other deep learning programs are already used by law practices in the US. Ross Intelligence3 has been up and running for around 2 years now. Described as the world’s first artificially intelligent lawyer at first blush it seems like a search engine. Ross ‘practices’ as an insolvency and bankruptcy lawyer, and if the US jurisdiction is anything like the UK’s that’s a particularly complex area of law to practice in. A bankruptcy attorney would undoubtedly spend an awful lot of time researching precedents, checking whether legislation has been updated and reading practice directions. It may be that I’m a bit slow but in my area of crime I can spend hours researching the law in order to draft advices and skeleton arguments. Ross has the capability to do this far quicker. I normally use Westlaw, an online library, for research which operates using keywords in much the same way Google works. Ross however is rather more sophisticated as he (it?) can be asked legal questions in plain English. Now I appreciate that the phrase ‘legal questions in plain English’ may sound like an oxymoron but it really is a huge leap forward in natural language recognition. Ross will check every relevant case and every relevant statute in its vast database. It gives results with a high degree of confidence and it’s already making a difference to billable hours for the US firms. Is it putting lawyers out of business though? Well, not quite. Ross seems to be very good at the grunt work, the important behind the scenes research necessary to mount a case. He will certainly make a legal practice more efficient. However he can’t appear in court, he’s probably not very good at conferences with clients and he almost certainly can’t negotiate with other parties in legal proceedings.
Other more prosaic developments are showing that algorithms can do at least some of the work of lawyers. A 19 year old Stanford University student, Joshua Browder has developed the website DoNotPay.co.uk4. Offering rather more useful advice than certain Freemen of the Land websites I could mention, his site enables the general public to fill out a few basic details about a parking fine and then generates the relevant paperwork to challenge the ticket. His site has a success rate of around 64%, it’s saved the public millions and it’s free. That alone will worry some lawyers or perhaps more the Parking Firms.
The programs I’ve mentioned are only a handful of those available. They aren’t true AI but they do have the capacity to do a lot of the work already done by lawyers and we are simply going to have to adapt to it. I’ll comfort myself with the thought that in my favourite dystopian future, Judge Dredd was at least human.
Footnotes: 1 https://www.pwc.co.uk/economic-services/ukeo/pwcukeo-section-4-automation-march-2017-v2.pdf 2 Aletras etal (2016), Predicting judicial decisions of the European Court of Human Rights: a Natural Language Processing perspective. PeerJ Comput. Sci. 2:e93; DOI 10.7717/peerj-cs.93.
J K ROWLING RECENTLY apologised for a tweet in which she had criticised Donald Trump for apparently deliberately ignoring a disabled child’s attempts to shake his hand during a visit to the White House. The enraged author had tweeted, “Trump imitated a disabled reporter. Now he pretends not to see a child in a wheelchair, as though frightened he might catch his condition. This monster of narcissism values only himself and his pale reflections. The disabled, minorities, transgender people, the poor, women (unless related to him by ties of blood, and therefore his creations) are treated with contempt, because they do not resemble Trump.”
The boy’s mother then made it clear that in fact the president had not snubbed the boy and Rowling found herself on the receiving end of much criticism. She responded by apologising as follows, “Multiple sources have informed me that that was not a full or accurate representation of their interaction. I very clearly projected my own sensitivities around the issue of disabled people being overlooked or ignored onto the images I saw and if that caused any distress to the boy or his family, I apologise unreservedly.” Note that Rowling pointedly did not apologise to President Trump himself, of whom, it is believed, she is not a great fan. Even so, it cannot have been easy for Rowling to so publicly eat humble pie and take back her accusation having learned that it was untrue. I greatly respect her for doing so and only wish that others, upon learning that they had helped to spread fake news, would react in the same way – not least, of course, President Trump himself.
I know from my own experience that it is frighteningly easy to retweet fake news that chimes with one’s preconceptions. As it happens, I share J K Rowling’s attitudes towards the US President. Thus, when I recently saw a tweet which implied that he had expressed the view that “nobody knows how balloons work” it seemed momentarily plausible to me that the famously scientifically illiterate @POTUS may indeed have expressed such a claim. I retweeted. It was quickly pointed out me by other Twitter users that this was fake news and I tweeted that this was the case as soon as I could. Even so, inevitably lots of my followers retweeted my original inaccurate retweet – and every time they did, I felt very guilty.
I had committed the same sin a few months earlier in retweeting an image that implied that Theresa May had once held some very bigoted views with respect to the LGBT community. That idea chimed with my idea of the kind of person our prime minister is. Now, I actually don’t know what Mrs May’s views are on such matters, but I was quickly informed that the tweet that I had foolishly retweeted was fake. Of course, I should have realised this in the first place. One simple test that I had failed to apply was to ask myself one very simple question: If this news was true, wouldn’t we already know about it? Of course, with breaking news stories that test would not work, but this was supposed to be a story about her views from many years ago.
These days it is very difficult to decide whether an image on the internet is real or doctored simply by looking at it. This was demonstrated empirically in a recent study by researchers at the University of Warwick (Nightingale, Wade, & Watson, 2017). Over 700 volunteers attempted to say whether images presented online were originals or had been manipulated in some way (e.g., by adding objects in or removing them, or by introducing inconsistency in shadows). The overall result was that, although respondents showed some ability to spot fakes, it was very limited.
It has never been the case that “the camera never lies” (as psychical researchers should know) but it has never been more untrue than it is today when relatively cheap software can allow those with the inclination to create fake images that are very convincing. I recall on one occasion appearing on daytime TV to provide a sceptical perspective on a number of ghost photos sent in by viewers. With respect to one particular image, I waxed lyrical and convincingly regarding the phenomenon of pareidolia which can lead to the illusory perception of faces in random patterns of light and shade – only to receive an email after the show telling me that the ghostly image had, in fact, been produced by an app that allows you to place a ghostly image wherever you like in any image!
As I was preparing this column, I saw a tweet from Hayley Stevens being rightly suspicious of an image that was doing the rounds on Twitter. It was a group photograph of members of the Conservative party sitting, smiling happily for the camera. Behind them, hung on the wall and dominating the background, was Edvard Munch’s famous painting, The Scream. Hayley asked, “Is this for real? I feel this is too good to be real.” She was right to be suspicious. A few seconds on Wikipedia revealed that there are four versions of the painting, three in Norway and one owned by a US businessman. So it was unlikely that a couple of dozen prominent Tories had all been transported to pose in front of one of them. But you couldn’t help wishing that it was for real.
Reference:
Nightingale, S. J., Wade, K. A., & Watson, D. G. (2017). Can people identify original and manipulated photos of real-world scenes? Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications. 2:30 DOI 10.1186/s41235-017-0067-2
