Talking to the media, a cautionary tale

by Massimo Pigliucci

So, a few days ago I and other members of New York City Skeptics, including Julia, were approached by an affable young journalist named Jonathan Liu, who writes for the New York Observer. He asked if he could join one of our meetup discussion groups — which happened to focus on the question of whether there is something special and unique about humans when compared to other animals — as well as our Drinking Skeptically event. He also followed up with both Julia and me asking us a number of questions via email about skepticism and our personal take on it.

We were all pretty pleased with the experience until the article actually came out. What follows is a brief analysis of Mr. Liu’s writing, to give you a flavor of how a journalist can easily distort things to suit whatever agenda he has, for whatever reason he happens to have it.

Liu starts out by writing: “It's a well-trod truism of folk science that you can’t prove a negative. But can you build a popular movement — or at least a well-received dinner party — around one?”

Well, it may be a truism of folk science, but it is wrong. There are plenty of situations where proving a negative is very easy. Not only both logic and mathematics abound with proof of the impossibility of X (where X can be a conjecture, theorem or whatever), but there is a number of empirical negatives that are also easily provable. For instance, if I claim that I do not have a million dollars in my bank account, it is child's play to verify my (negative) statement in a matter of minutes.

But never mind that. Contra Liu, the skeptical movement isn’t built around proving negatives. It is built around the positive value of critical thinking (which you would think journalists would make their own), and the simple Humean idea that “a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”

The reporter then mentioned that I was sitting in the middle of the dinner table, at the “Da Vincian midpoint” (as in The Last Supper), while managing to get my name misspelled throughout the article (Pigulucci), despite our email correspondence, which included the correct spelling. I guess the Observer is short in the editorial and fact checking departments these days.

After having spent an inane amount of time complaining about the neighborhood of the restaurant (Kips Bay, midtown east Manhattan), and commenting on a cast I was wearing because of a recent surgery (and even on the exact type of pain killers I was using) — all clearly relevant to the issue at hand, Liu described me as approaching the Platonic ideal, “or at least the Wachowskian archetype,”** of a modern epistemologist of science. Okay, I can live with that.

Liu must have been desperately searching for mythological figures to analogize me with, because immediately afterward I was compared to Jesus (!!), who apparently used to gesticulate like an Italian (Liu did not disclose the source of this phenomenal piece of historical information, probably reserving it for another sensational article in the Observer).

Why the parallel with Jesus? Because apparently the people participating at the dinner discussion were (almost) my “disciples,” and Pigulucci [sic] “finds the idea of God and believers in God — not to mention homeopathy — insipid, violently ignorant and begging for forcible conversion.” Actually, I find those ideas anything but insipid, since they affect the lives of millions; though they are indeed the result of ignorance, but the phrase “violently ignorant” is a category mistake (ignorance is not the sort of thing that can be violent, though it can lead to violent actions). As for forcibly converting homeopaths, or Christians, I haven’t the foggiest notion of where Mr. Liu got that one from. Perhaps Jesus told him.

The Observer piece then continues by labeling New York City Skeptics as a cult. Now a cult is often defined as “a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister.” Hmm, let’s see. Well, NYCS is indeed a small group, and it probably isn’t impossible to find someone somewhere who considers our activities “strange” (though “sinister” would be pushing it). At least as strange as New Yorkers might find a group of people getting together for dinner and talking about things they are interested in — that is, not at all. But “having religious beliefs”? By what sort of distorted conception of religious belief does what Mr. Liu observed that night qualify as such? We are not told, though inquiring minds (apparently not those of Liu’s editors) wish to know.

For Liu “Skepticism starts with the feeling of being under siege by the nonthinking. It becomes Skepticism with the faith that there must be people out there who think like you do — that is, who think.” Well, that’s actually close to the mark, except that we like to think that we go by evidence not faith. But just as my spirits (metaphorically speaking) were beginning to lift a bit, I learned from Mr. Liu that skepticism has recently turned “[in]to something like a distinct, aggressive and almost messianic mentality.” Distinct, yes. Aggressive, maybe, though nothing compared to the aggressiveness of fundamentalists and homeopaths. Messianic? Here we go again with the projected Jesus complex!

Finally, perhaps remembering that the Observer allegedly caters to New Yorkers interested in the cultural activities of their city, Liu ends by asking (rhetorically): “how often does an enlightened New Yorker really have to come up against the messy particulars of superstition unless he’s somewhat titillated by seeking them out?”

Had he done his homework, he would have found out the answer quite readily: until the very same week of the meetup, New Yorkers had been treated to an inane message of the anti-vaccination movement, displayed in full colors on the CBS billboard in Times Square. But that’s a fact that was much less interesting to Mr. Liu than the type of earring I wear (a black diamond, if you need to know).

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** I had to look this up. I assume he meant it as in the Wachowski Brothers’ use of archetypal figures in the movie The Matrix. Right...