An interesting conversation...

This morning, I went to work early to move to a new office. The office is huge and all mine. Yay. Now I had some questions about the computer I would have over there, so I went to the IT people to ask them about transferring my files. That, of course, was the least interesting part of the conversation, but I was talking to Missy, one of the IT people, and she told me that she would have everything ready to go. Now Missy is a little strange. She talks the talk of the academic, but she does it compulsively. She is enormously well-read and cultured, but she assumes that you are up on computers like she is. I think she is kind of cute in her way, and there's a good chance that if I didn't suspect she was a lesbian (based on a comment she once made) she would have shot me down by now.

Anyway, we had this great conversation about the moral status of Bugs Bunny. It started when she made this slightly odd comment about how if she had one wish that it would be that her life should be a cartoon, not a comic strip. (Story arcs are bad news.) Cartoons like Loony Toons reset at the beginning of each story. Damage is undone, old grudges are reset, everything goes back to square one. But, I asked, could Wile E. Coyote be really said to have any type of free will or purpose in such a universe, even if he is reincarnated intact every time, ignorant every day that that Acme products don't work for shit? Experience is worth nothing in that set up. And what about the Creator? Is the cartoonist an evil god or a cruel sadist? And is Bugs Bunny Mel Blanc's prophet?

No, she said, Bugs Bunny is a trickster god.

Is it any wonder I think she's intriguing?

Anyway, I had a hunch. "OHMIGODAREYOUGOINGTODRAGONCON?"

Hell, yeah. She's going to Dragon.Com. Steampunk track and Goth Track. She sees all her friends and it's a great reunion, etc. etc. I excitedly told her that I was going to be spending time at the Skeptrack and the Science Track. And she looked at me.

I don't know if I like the skeptic community, she said. They're a bunch of people who like to think that they are always right.

Guilty, but I did not say that.

I had a hard time saying exactly what her quarrel with the skeptics was. It was partly attitude, I think. The best comparison that she made to skeptics (and she speaks at a rate of about 3 comparisons a minute) was that they were like old-school anthropologists studying to a tribe and dismissing tribal beliefs without understanding them. She talked about the tests that she and her friends did on themselves in college to see if the energy work they were doing was real, because they realized that they might be tricking themselves.

If there had been one around, I would have fallen into a chair just to fall out of it.

She explained two tests. The first was to take a friend out into a field, blindfold them, spin them around and then have them pick out their friends by pointing. How this is a test of energy work...I don't know. The other test they would do was that one energy worker would take a bunch of natural rocks (the phrase stuck in my head) and selectively "charge" some of them and not others. They'd come back into the room and the person would detect the charge. She didn't remember anyone getting any wrong.

Oh! So many possible questions/explanations that I did not have time to get into!

1) What are you testing for?

2) What's the success rate and under what conditions?

3) Test design. Were the "chargers" in the room when you were testing with the rocks? (I strongly doubt that these were double blinded.)

4) Blindfolds, I've heard from magicians, are crap.

5) Not remembering any misses sounds like confirmation bias.

Now, I am usually an armchair skeptic, though I wish I had more opportunities to actually do some tests. But where there are no protocols, there are no standards and no reliable results. I'd love to do some tests with these people. I told her, if they can do this then I want a piece of it. Because I want to get a Nobel Prize the easy way. I said that we'd talk about this more later.

HJ