Greta Christina's Blog

My Trip to the Circus: Albert Hofmann and LSD

Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD, has died at the ripe old age of 102. So in honor of him, now seems like a good time to talk about my experiences with the drug he created.

I took LSD a lot in college, and for a year or two after. Quite a lot. For a while, I was taking it almost every week; and for most of my college years, I was taking it about once a month or so. And after I'd been taking it for a while, I was taking moderately hefty doses. You don't get a physical tolerance to LSD -- but you can get a sort of psychological tolerance to it. After I'd been taking it for a while, a hit or two would give me a light, fun trip -- but if I wanted the experience of taking my mind into a radically unfamiliar place, I'd take five, seven, even ten hits.

And for the most part, it was a great experience. Kind of an important experience, too. I had a couple of bad trips (especially early on, before I'd figured out the "don't take seriously the crazy shit your mind comes up with when it's tripping" principle)... but on the whole, LSD was a positive, happy part of my life that shaped me in ways I feel good about. Partly it was just fun and entertaining, like fascinating and hilarious movies in my brain. But I actually got some important insights out of it as well: insights that have stayed with me long after I stopped taking the drug.

I could gas on about this subject for hours. But I realize that there's little in this life more tedious than listening to other people describe their drug experiences. So the main thing I want to say is this: Taking LSD is what gave me the awareness -- not just the intellectual concept, but the immediate, visceral experience -- of just how much of my perception and intuition was about how my brain worked, and how little of it was about how the world worked. There is nothing quite so humbling as putting a chemical into your body -- a chemical measured in millionths of a gram -- and having everything you see and feel and know be radically altered, to the point of being unrecognizable.

So in a lot of ways, taking LSD was the beginning of my skepticism. It was the beginning of my awareness that my brain could fool me, that my brain had its own agenda, and I couldn't automatically trust what it was saying.

Now, the downside is that, in a lot of other ways, it was the total opposite. Many of my stupider woo beliefs came directly out of "insights" I had when I was on LSD or other hallucinogens. The idea that mystical forces were guiding the Tarot cards when I shuffled them. The idea that subatomic particles must have free will, since their behavior isn't predictable. The idea that every person on Earth was in exactly the right place, doing exactly what they were intended to be doing by the great World-Soul. (A pretty Calvinist idea when you think about it, although at the time I would have rejected that suggestion hotly.) I had drug hallucinations that I took very, very seriously, and believed to be accurate perceptions even after the drug faded. (I was, for instance, convinced for an embarrassingly long time that, when I was under the influence of LSD, I could make rosebuds bloom into roses, simply through the force of my concentrated drug-enhanced will. Loki, have mercy.)

So while I'm overall positive about my LSD experiences, I feel that I should acknowledge this side of them as well. I am strongly of the opinion that a lot of the more fuzzy, uncritical, poorly- thought- out ideas of the hippie and post-hippie movement (New Age woo and otherwise) were the result of an entire generation being unclear on the "don't take seriously the crazy shit your mind comes up with when it's tripping" concept.

But you know? All that stuff eventually faded. And what I was left with -- along with a lot of warm, happy, hilarious memories of profound and wildly entertaining times shared with friends -- was the deeply- ingrained, vividly- understood awareness that my perception and intuition did not necessarily represent reality. It was the beginning of my skepticism. And it was the beginning of the end of my solipsism. In a lot of ways, it was the beginning of my adult compassion: my relativism, my understanding that other people saw reality differently than I did and that this didn't automatically mean that they were stupid and wrong. It was the beginning of my borderline- obsessive, sometimes irritating dedication to seeing things, as much as possible, from other people's points of view.

And for that, I'm grateful.

Thanks, Albert.

(Tip of the hat to Susie Bright, both for the news and for the "everyone tell your LSD experiences" meme. Also for this unbelievably hilarious video. Video below the fold.)

Photo of Albert Hofmann by Stefan Pangritz, copyright CC-BY-SA.

Born or Learned? Sexuality, Science, and Party Lines

When I first came out into the gay community, one of the most common party lines going around was, "Gay parents aren't any more likely to have gay kids than straight parents." Some of the big political battles being fought at the time had to do with gay parenting, and the community was trying to reassure/ convince the straight world that it was "safe" for gay people to have and raise kids, that our kids wouldn't be any more likely to be gay than anyone else's. (Of course, many of us personally thought, "So what if our kids turn out gay? There's nothing wrong with being gay, so why does it matter?" But we knew the straight world didn't feel that way. Hence, the line.)

Not too long after that, I started hearing the party line, "Being gay isn't a choice -- we're born that way." Again, this was used in political discussions and debates, as a way of putting anti-gay discrimination in the same civil rights camp as racist or sexist discrimination... and as a way of gaining sympathy. Now, this would seem to be in direct contradiction with the "Gay parents aren't any more likely to have gay kids" line. If people are born gay, doesn't that mean it's genetic, and doesn't that mean gay parents are more likely to have gay kids? But in fact, these two party lines overlapped. I heard them both at the same time for quite a while... and I never heard a good explanation for why they weren't contradictory. (Please see addendum at the end of this post for clarification of this point.)

Then I started hearing the strict constructionist line. "Sexual orientation is a social construct," it said. "Our sexuality is formed by our culture. All that 'we're born that way' stuff -- that's biological determinism, rigid, limiting, a denial of the fluid nature of sexuality and sexual identity." (I am embarrassed to admit that I bought and sold this line myself for quite some time, in a pretty hard-line way... solely because I liked the idea.)

And now... well, now it's kind of a mess. Some in the queer community say, "it's genetic," and argue that this is a core foundation of our fight for acceptance. Others fear that the "genetic" argument will lead to eugenics, parents aborting their gay fetuses, the genocide of our community. The constructionist line about rigidity and determinism still gets a fair amount of play. And more and more I'm starting to hear the combination theory: sexual orientation is shaped partly by genetics, partly by environment, and may be shaped differently for different people.

And in all of these debates and party lines, here's what I never heard very much of:

Evidence to support the theory.

Or, to be more precise: Solid evidence to support the theory. Carefully gathered evidence. Evidence that wasn't just anecdotal, that wasn't just personal experience.

The line of the day -- and the debates in our community surrounding it -- always seemed to be based primarily on personal feeling and political expedience. I'd occasionally hear mention of twin studies or gay sheep or something... but that was the exception, not the rule. And the line has shifted around over the years, based not on new evidence, but on shifting political needs, and shifting ways that our community has defined itself.

I am profoundly disturbed by the ease with which many in the queer community are willing to dismiss the emerging science behind this question. Yes, of course, scientists are biased, and the research they do often reflects their biases. But flawed as it is, science is still the best method we have for getting at the truth of this question (and any other question about physical reality). Double-blinding, control groups, randomization of samples, replication of experiments, peer review: all of this has one purpose. The scientific method is deliberately designed to filter out bias and preconception, as much as is humanly possible.

It's far from perfect. No reputable scientist would tell you otherwise. Among other things, it often takes time for this filtering process to happen. And it completely sucks when the filtering process is happening on your back: when you're the one being put in a mental institution, for instance, because scientists haven't yet figured out that homosexuality isn't a mental illness. But when you look at the history of science over time, you see a consistent pattern of culturally biased science eventually being dropped in the face of a preponderance of evidence.

And if you're concerned about bias affecting science, I think it's important to remember that many of the scientists researching this question are themselves gay or gay-positive. We can no longer assume that scientists are "them," malevolent or ignorant straight people examining us like freakish specimens. Many of them are us... and if they're not, they're our allies. Yes, science often reflects current cultural biases... but right now, the current cultural biases are a lot more gay-positive than they used to be. And that's even more true among highly educated groups such as the scientific community.

But more to the point: What other options are being offered? How else do we propose to answer this question? Or any other question about the possible causes of human behavior? If answering it based on science is subject to bias, then isn't answering it based on our own feelings and instincts even more subject to bias? How can we accuse scientists of bias in their attempts to answer this question -- and use that accusation as a reason to dismiss the science -- when our own responses to the question have been so thinly based on evidence, and so heavily based on personal preference and political expedience?

Unless you're going to go with the hard-core deconstructionist argument that there is no reality and all of our perceptions and experiences are 100% socially constructed, then you have to accept that the question, "Is sexual orientation genetically determined, learned, or a combination of both -- and if a combination, how much of each, and how do they work together?"... well, it's a question with an answer. It's not a matter of opinion. And it's exactly the kind of question that science is designed to answer: a question of cause and effect in the physical world.

I'm not a scientist myself. But I've been following this question in the science blogs for a little while now. And as best I can tell, here's the current scientific thinking on this question:

1) Sexual orientation is probably determined by some combination of genetics and environment (with in utero environment being another possible factor). (Here, btw, is a good summary of the current scientific research on this topic, and how it evolved.)

2) We really don't know yet. The research is in the early stages. It's probably a combination of genetics and environment... but we really don't know that for sure, and we don't know which factor is more influential, or how they work together, or whether different people are shaped more by one factor and others by the other. We just don't know.

But I've said it before, and I will say it again: We should not be thinking about this question on the basis of which answer we would like to be true. We should not be thinking about this question on the basis of which answer we find most politically useful. We should be thinking about this question on the basis of which answer is true. We should be thinking about this question on the basis of which answer is best supported by the evidence.

If we don't, then we are no better than the creationists, refusing to accept evolution because it screws up their view of the world. We are no better than the 17th century Catholic Church, refusing to accept that the Earth revolves around the Sun because it contradicted their theology. We are no better than the Bush administration, refusing to recognize clear warnings about Iraq and Katrina and global warming because it got in the way of their ideological happy thoughts. We are no better than the "Biology for Christian Schools" textbook, which states on Page 1 that, ""If [scientific] conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them."

If we expect the straight world to accept the reality of our community, the reality that our lives and relationships and families are as healthy and stable as any other, then we ourselves need to be a committed part of the reality-based community. And we therefore need to accept the reality of the causes of our orientation... whatever that reality turns out to be.

So why don't we try a different angle for a while. Maybe something like this:

"We don't really know what causes sexual orientation. And we don't think it matters. It's probably a combination of genetics and environment, but until more research is done, we don't really know for sure. And we don't think it matters. It's an interesting question, one many people are curious about -- but it doesn't really matter. Homosexuality doesn't harm anybody, and it doesn't harm society, and our relationships are as healthy and stable and valid as anybody else's... and it isn't anybody's business but our own.

"We deserve rights and recognition because we are human beings and citizens: as much as racial minorities, whose skin color is inborn, and as much as religious minorities, whose religion or lack thereof is learned. The 'born versus learned' question is a fascinating one, with many possible implications about human consciousness generally. But it has absolutely no bearing on questions like job discrimination, or adoption of children by same-sex couples, or whether we should be able to marry. We don't yet know the answer to this question... but for any practical, political, social, or moral purposes, it absolutely does not matter."

*****

Addendum: As several commenters to this post have pointed out, it is actually possible for a trait (such as sexual orientation) to be genetically caused or influenced, and still not be any more likely for parents with that trait to have kids with it than parents without it. Fair point, and worth knowing. But I think my basic point about party lines, and the prioritization of political expedience over scientific evidence,still stands. After all, we didn't know that in the early '90s. Geneticists may have known it, I don't know -- but lay people in the queer community definitely didn't. And yet we were still willing to repeat both tropes: the "we're born that way" trope and the "gay parents aren't any more likely than straight parents to have gay kids" trope.

"Everything happens for a reason": Atheism and Learning from Mistakes

I'm not sure when I started noticing this turn of phrase. But I think it was during one of our Project Runway marathons. When designers lose a challenge and get kicked off the show, roughly half of them say something along these lines:

"Obviously I'm disappointed... but I think everything happens for a reason."

And it's driving me nuts. Not just when I'm watching Project Runway... but all the time. Whether it's presented in conventional theistic terms -- God has a plan for us all -- or in more vague, woo terms -- X happened because it was meant to happen, it happened to teach me a lesson, I guess the universe is trying to tell me something -- it still drives me nuts. (I think it drives me especially nuts because I used to believe it myself, and I'm always more irritated with irrational beliefs that I used to hold myself.)

I mean, in the most literal sense of the words, of course everything happens for a reason -- if by "for a reason" you mean "as a result of cause and effect." Earthquakes happen because of shifting plates in the earth; I got pneumonia because I got bacteria in my lungs at a time when I was physically vulnerable; designers get kicked off Project Runway because the judges don't like their designs. And since every effect has its own cause, you can trace that chain of cause and effect almost as far back as you like, until you run out of either knowledge or patience.

But that's clearly not what people mean when they say that everything happens for a reason. They mean that everything happens for a purpose. They mean that everything that happens has intention behind it. They mean that earthquakes and illnesses and getting kicked off reality shows are part of a plan, either a conscious plan of God or an unconscious plan of some vague Fate or World-Soul or Universe... a plan to teach us lessons, or to point our lives in new and fruitful directions, or to give us things we need and don't find it easy to accept.

And it bugs me.

It bugs me for the obvious reason: I think it's mistaken, and I think it's a mistaken idea that does more harm than good -- if for no other reason, simply because it is mistaken.

But it also bugs me because I think it hinders the learning process. It gets in the way of learning from your mistakes. It's not like every bad thing that happens to you is a result of your mistakes, of course. But if you think that every bad thing that happens to you happens because it serves some larger purpose, how are you going to figure out which bad things are things you could have avoided, and could avoid in the future? How are you going to have a clear perspective on which parts of your life are things that you caused, which are things that other people caused, and which are just accidents that nobody could have any control over?

And it's so unnecessary. I understand that "Everything happens for a reason" is often a way of saying, "This happened so I could learn from it." But it's completely possible to learn from our mistakes and failures and pain, without believing that someone or something made those mistakes and failures and pains happen, on purpose, in order to teach us a lesson. In fact, it's not just possible -- it's easier. What with the clearer perspective on cause and effect, and all.

More on all that in a bit. I think there are a few basic processes driving this kind of thinking, and I want to take a quick look at them all so I can take them apart.

1. False perception of intention. The human mind has evolved -- for very good evolutionary reasons -- to see intention, even when no intention exists. Michael Shermer talks about this in How We Believe. Example: When shown triangles moving about on a screen, people tend to describe the action as the triangles "chasing" each other or otherwise acting with intention... when in fact the pattern was completely random.

2. Rationalization. Saying that "everything happens for a reason" can be a great way to evade responsibility when the "everything" that happened is, in fact, your fault. "Yes, I didn't study and I flunked chemistry and now I can't go to medical school... but everything happens for a reason. I guess I wasn't meant to go to medical school. I guess I was meant to repair VWs and grow marijuana."

3. Saving face. This is a lot like rationalization, except that it's less about making a good excuse that you yourself can believe, and more about not wanting to look like a loser in front of others.

4. Wanting to find meaning. This one I have more sympathy with than any of the others (although I actually have at least some sympathy with all of them). Believing that everything happens for a reason is a way to make the lousy things that happen in your life feel like they have some meaning. If you can convince yourself that there's some Greater Purpose to getting laid off and your car breaking down... well, some people find that more comforting than thinking that Sometimes Shit Happens, with no purpose or function. (I sure don't, but that's another post.)

So let's take a look at these.

1. False perception of intention. Not sure what else I have to say about this. Again, the human mind has evolved to see intention even when none exists. If we see our lives as shaped by some external guide, when that guide doesn't really exist, it skews our ability to see how we affected the situation ourselves... and what we might do in the future to make things turn out differently.

2. Rationalization. I get that we all rationalize our mistakes and failures. And I even get that rationalization is psychologically necessary, to let us make decisions and live with them and not have dark nights of the soul every night. I just think that "Everything happens for a reason" is a particularly pernicious rationalization, one that mucks up the learning process and creates a passive approach to life. Try some other rationalizations instead. "I was having a bad day," "I didn't understand the instructions," "I guess you can't please everybody"... these are time-honored rationalizations that let you sleep at night without convincing yourself that your mistakes and failures are all part of someone's brilliant master plan.

3. Saving face. Again, I get it. You flunk out of chemistry or get kicked off Project Runway; you don't want to look like a loser in front of your friends and family and millions of strangers. But again, there are better ways to save face than the "Everything happens for a reason" trope -- ways that don't encourage passivity and get in the way of learning from mistakes. The losing "Project Runway" designers who didn't say, "Everything happens for a reason" had some excellent ones. "I'm sorry I lost, but I'm proud of my work, and I wouldn't have done it differently." "This week's challenge was hard for me, and I didn't do my best work -- I'm just sorry I didn't get a chance to show the world what a great designer I am." And my personal favorite: "I learned a lot from this experience, and I'm going to come out of it a better designer."

4. Wanting to find meaning. And again, I get it. Mistakes and failures and pain... well, they suck. Believing that they have meaning can help make them suck less. But I think there are far, far better ways to get meaning from your mistakes than, "Everything happens for a reason." It's completely possible to learn from our mistakes and failures and pain, and to weave them into the meaning of our lives, without believing that someone or something outside of us made those mistakes and failures and pains happen, on purpose, in order to teach us a lesson.

It seems to me that the "Everything happens for a reason" philosophy is kind of a passive one. It's a philosophy that sees the plan for your life -- and the meaning of that life -- as belonging to someone other than yourself. It's a philosophy that looks out in the world for signs and clues about what you should be doing, instead of looking at yourself and your own life.

And it's a way of avoiding responsibility -- not just the obvious responsibility for your mistakes, but responsibility for the desires you have and the choices you make. Saying, "I guess I wasn't meant to go to medical school" means you don't have to say, "I guess I don't actually want to go to medical school," or, "I guess I screwed up my chances of going to medical school."

Or, for that matter, "I guess if I want to go to medical school, then I need to make some serious changes."

I remember this vividly from my own woo days. The number of times that I said to myself. "I guess I was meant to do X," or, "I guess I wasn't meant to do Y"... it's embarrassing to think of it now. I was meant to live in San Francisco, and to work for On Our Backs; I wasn't meant to stay in my first marriage, or to go to nursing school.

It would have been a lot more honest for me to say, "I guess I really want to do X," or, "I guess I really don't want to do Y." But it was so much easier to interpret the successes and failures of my life, and the happy and unhappy accidents, as signs and symbols from a benevolent spirit guiding me to my path, then it was to think of them as my own damn choices intersecting with random chance. The benevolent guiding spirit of the universe seemed so much kinder and more thoughtful than the indifference and stupidity of random chance; and it seemed about a thousand times smarter and wiser than I knew myself to be. It was a belief that let me avoid taking responsibility for my choices and desires -- and the ways that they shaped my circumstances and opportunities -- without feeling like a piece of paper being blown about by the wind.

But I can't believe it any more. The evidence just doesn't support it. And letting go of that belief has made me both more responsible and more accepting. It's like the atheist version of the Serenity prayer. Letting go of thinking that everything happens for a reason has helped me have more courage to change things that I can, more serenity to accept things that I can't, and more wisdom to know the difference.

Skeptic's Circle #84 and Carnival of Feminists #57

Blog carnivals!

Skeptic's Circle #84 is up at Archaeoporn.

And Carnival of Feminists #57 is up at Pandemian.

Nifty!

Atheism, Bad Luck, and the Comfort of Reason

Warning: The first bit of this piece contains a hearty gripe. Stick with me: except for occasional outbursts, the kvetching doesn't last past the first couple of paragraphs, and there really is a point.

As people who are close to me know (and as people who follow the blog closely may have guessed), the last month or two has been among the lousiest times of my life. I've had worse months -- months of death, of divorce, of serious family illness. But in terms of the sheer stupid dogpiling of badness upon badness, I'm hard-pressed to think of another that's sucked more. It's not just been the pneumonia and my cat dying; I've been dealing with other health problems (mostly behind me now, but it wasn't fun); a trip to the emergency room for Ingrid (she's totally fine now, but it was a scary few hours); a small but painful second- degree burn; missing the queer contra dance camp because I was sick; and my hard drive crashing. (Yes, I've been doing backups; no, I haven't been doing them often enough, and I lost some work that I really did not want to lose.)

It's getting to the point where it's almost comical, except that I lost my sense of humor about a week and a half ago. Along with my patience. But of course, you can lose your patience all you want to with bad things in your life, and it doesn't make a damn bit of difference -- you still have to endure them.

I don't bring all this up to cadge sympathy, or to dump on you. I bring it up because of this: This has been the kind of month (two-month? fortmonth? bimonth?) that would make believers in God wonder what they were being punished for. It's the kind of bimonth that, back in my woo days when I believed that everything happened for a reason, would have made me rack my brains trying to figure out what the fuck it was that the universe was trying to teach me. (Amazing, isn't it: the arrogance of thinking that the universe arranges itself around you in order to personally teach you a lesson.)

But I don't think that. Any of it. And I'm so glad that I don't think any of it, I can't even tell you.

I know that religion is repeatedly defended as a source of comfort in difficult times. But this has been one of the more difficult times in my life... and I've been finding that my atheistic, skeptical, rational view of my difficulties is more comforting than any religious belief I've ever held, or could ever imagine holding.

So here is my atheist, skeptical, rational look at why runs of bad luck happen.

1. Just plain luck. Anyone who studies statistics will tell you that, in any random sequence that's long enough, mini-sequences will show up that look like patterns. Pseudopatterns, they're called. You roll a pair of dice for long enough, chances are that at some point you're going to get snake-eyes ten times in a row. And that's some of what this run of bad luck is about. A good example is my cat dying and my hard drive crashing. Nothing to do with each other, as far as I can tell. They just happened to happen in roughly the same time frame. When a lot of it happens in a row, it can feel like a pattern, with intention behind it... but that doesn't mean it is.

2. Bad things can cause other bad things to happen. If you're tired, stressed, distracted, sleep- deprived, etc. from a bad thing happening, you're more likely to make serious mistakes, get into accidents, and/or get sick. Ingrid and I are convinced that this is why she had her trip to the emergency room: it happened in the middle of Catfish's final illness, and Ingrid was upset and distracted and not looking where she was going. And I think it's very likely that the dogpile of stress was a big factor in my getting pneumonia. (At the doctor's visit when the pneumonia was diagnosed, my blood pressure, normally in the very healthy vicinity of 120/70, was 144/87.)

3. Bad things make you less able to cope with other bad things... thus making them feel worse than they otherwise would. I don't think pneumonia is ever a picnic... but I think I'd be handling it with a lot more patience and good humor if it hadn't come at the tail end (what I hope is the tail end, what bloody well better be the tail end) of this ridiculous run of shitty luck.

4. Big bad things make you more conscious of, and more sensitive to, little bad things. This, I think, is a big one. Normally, I pride myself on my ability to take the ordinary bumps of life in my stride, even to have a sense of humor about them, to make them part of the overall optimistic pattern of my life. But in the last month, every little inconvenience and annoyance has been magnified by stress. Ingrid getting a cold, a stain on our nice bedspread, the store being out of the kind of tea that I like... all of it gets magnified into One More Fucking Thing I Have To Deal With This Month. All of it seems like part of the pattern. The non-existent pseudopattern.

Or, to sum it all up in a couple of words: Shit Happens.

So where's the comfort in all this?

Here is the comfort:

I know what's happening.

I understand what's happening.

So I'm not afraid of it.

And I don't have to feel guilty about it.

I don't have to add guilt to the dogpile. I don't have to add the shameful and frightened feeling that the dogpile is a punishment for some unknown sin. I don't have to add sleepless nights trying to figure out what I've done wrong, what I've done to deserve this, what lesson is being taught me that I'm too dense to learn. I don't have to feel like it's my fault. (Okay, not backing up my data often enough was my fault... but other than that.) I don't have to take it personally.

Now, I understand that "not taking it personally" is itself hard for many people. If shit happens simply because shit happens, and not to teach you a lesson, then the shit can seem both meaningless and out of control. Believing that runs of bad luck are punishment for some sin is a way to give your suffering meaning... and it's a way to convince yourself that you have it in your power to prevent it from happening again.

But given a choice between thinking that the meaning of my suffering is "Shit happens," and that the meaning of my suffering is "You're a bad person," I'll take "Shit happens" any day. And given a choice between spending my life in a desperate, futile attempt to figure out which set of rituals and sacrifices I need to make to appease my god and prevent the shit from happening again -- and instead having some sort of reasonable expectations and wisdom about what in my life I can and cannot change -- I'll take the latter in a heartbeat.

Memories of a Good Science Education... and Worries About Bad Ones

I didn't see the point at the time.

When I was a kid, I always got annoyed by the lab portion of my science classes. I guess I've always been more of a theory person than a research person (hence my career as an essayist instead of a journalist). Rolling balls down inclines and measuring the speed; putting nails in different liquids and seeing how fast they rusted; cutting up fetal pigs... it always seemed like a waste of time.

I mean, I never had any problem understanding the theories being taught by the books and the teachers. And I was perfectly happy to believe the books and the teachers. After all, it's not like my measurements of gravity or magnetism or whatever were going to be written up in the science journals. Even at the time, I knew perfectly well that if my numbers didn't come out the way the theory said they should, the discrepancy would, without a doubt, turn out to be caused by my experimental methodology... not the theory.

And it's not like the theories we were learning in second -grade or sixth-grade or tenth-grade science class were on the cutting edge of new scientific thinking. Again, even at the time, I knew that the stuff we were learning was well-established, and had been experimentally verified thousands upon thousands of times... by researchers who were a whole lot more careful than my sixth-grade science class. I knew we weren't really verifying the theories. The theories had been verified, many times over. We were just seeing how they worked for ourselves.

Which I didn't think I needed. I got it. The books and teachers and theories made sense. I didn't need to roll the damn ball down the damn incline to see it for myself.

So it seemed like a waste of time.

But now that I'm an adult, I see the value in it much more clearly. And especially now that I'm so engaged in the skeptical/ rational thinking/ science groupie blogosphere (what I've seen referred to as "the reality-based community"), I value it even more.

I see the value because I think there's an enormous difference between learning something purely by authority -- "it's true because I say it's true, and you can trust me" -- and learning something by seeing it for yourself. And the latter is the core of the skeptical, rational, reality-based approach to life that I think is so very valuable.

Let me give you an example. We'd learned very early on, of course, that the earth was round. But in a high school science class (freshman year, if I remember correctly), we learned how, exactly, the ancient Greeks determined that the earth was round. It had to do with comparing shadows: you measure the shadows of two poles of equal height set, say, a mile apart. You do it at noon, and again an hour later. And you do the math. The difference in the length of the two shadows will be different on a curved surface -- i.e., the earth -- than they would be on a flat surface. You can even figure out, within a crude approximation, how large the curved surface is.

So we learned how exactly this information was acquired. And then we went outside and acquired it ourselves. We did it with sticks set a few feet apart, so of course our measurements weren't super-accurate -- but we got measurable results that weren't that far off the mark.

And so now I know. I know that the earth is round, not because I read it in a book or was taught it by a teacher, but because I measured it myself. And now when I'm in a debate with some theist who says that science is just another religion and my belief that the earth is round is no different from their belief in God, I can say, "Yes, it is different. I know that the earth is round -- because I measured it myself."

Of course, in practical terms, most of what I know about science -- or what any other layperson knows about science -- is learned from authority. I haven't personally done experiments to see the effectiveness of antibiotics in treating pneumonia; I haven't personally dug up any of the millions upon millions of fossils supporting the theory of evolution. Had I but world enough and time... but I don't, so I'm not going to.

But the difference is that I could. Any smart, dedicated person with access to education can get into epidemiology or paleontology, and find out for themselves whether or not the stuff that the books say about antibiotics or fossils is true.

We can do this because scientific knowledge is transparent, and it's replicable. When researchers publish their findings, they publish not only what their results were, but how exactly they obtained them. They don't keep it an arcane secret, accessible only to those who have achieved the 34th Level of Poobahhood; they don't tell overly- inquisitive students to stop asking so many questions and just accept their teachings on faith. They say, "Here's what we think, and here's why, and here's what we did to find it out, and here's the kind of evidence that would prove us wrong, and here's exactly what you need to do to see it for yourself."

There were other good things about my grade- school and high- school science education. We learned a lot about the scientific method -- even as early as third grade, we were learning about the difference between observation and inference (illustrated with cartoons about wet tricycles on lawns -- the observation is that the tricycle is wet, the inference is that it rained... or that someone turned on the sprinkler). And we started learning very early on about the importance of careful measurements -- we were measuring liquids by reading the meniscus as early as third or fourth grade, and I remember a stern lecture from a science teacher about how screaming and cheering at the hamster running the maze would probably have a negative impact on his learning curve.

But of all the good things in my science education, I think the "see it for yourself" labs were probably the best. As annoying as I found them at the time, I now think that they were some of the most important and influential experiences in all of my early education. Because it taught me not to believe what the teacher told me, just because they were telling me. It taught me that I had the power to find things out for myself.

And it's one of the main reasons I get so upset when I read about the "No Child Left Behind," teaching- to- the- test style education that American public school kids are getting. Science education -- and indeed, all education -- needs to be about more than learning enough facts to let you pass standardized tests. Science education -- and indeed, all education -- needs to teach kids how to learn. It needs to teach kids how to think critically; how to ask questions; how to look things up. And it needs to teach kids that they don't have to believe everything they're told, just because they're told it. It needs to teach kids that they have the power to find things out for themselves.

Blood and Suffering: A Seriously Pissed-Off Rant About Alternative Medicine

Readers, be warned: This is not one of my more diplomatic pieces. I'm angry, and while I'm trying to be fair here, I'm not trying to be nice. If you don't want to read that, please don't. (It was also written under the influence of an entertaining assortment of prescription drugs; so if I'm more meandering than usual, please forgive me. Hey, what a pretty tree!)

As regular readers of this blog know, I've been home sick for several days with pneumonia. The experience hasn't been a picnic: as anyone who's had pneumonia knows, even a relatively moderate case that you don't have to be hospitalized for will totally kick your ass. I've been exhausted; I've been uncomfortable and at times in actual pain; and since all I could do for days was sit on the sofa breathing steam and watching TV, I've been bored out of my mind. (It's only been in the last couple of days that I've been alert enough, or able to stop hovering over the steamer for long enough, to do any writing.)

But the experience has given me a renewed respect for conventional medicine. And it's given me a renewed rage at the alternative medicine practitioners and proponents who are undermining it.

Here's the thing. As soon as I started suspecting that my bad cold was something more than a bad cold, I hightailed it over to Kaiser. And within two hours, I had a diagnosis, medicines in my hand, and a treatment plan. In case you're curious, here's what I'm on:

Antibiotics. Penicillin, quaintly enough. Obvious purpose -- to kill the infection in my lungs.

Cough medicine. Purpose: to quiet my cough, which had been doing this nasty self-perpetuating loop -- the cough was making my lungs irritated, which was making me cough even more. (This also reduces my pain and discomfort and lets me rest, since I got the good stuff with codeine.) Also -- not to be too gross about it -- it loosens the gunk in my lungs, so when I do cough it does some good.

Bronchiodilators. Purpose: to ease the constriction in my lungs. Thus helping me breathe, as well as helping me sleep.

Decongestants. Purpose: at the risk of thoroughly grossing you all out, to stop post-nasal drip from dripping into my lungs and gunking up the works even further. (The gross-out portion of this blog post is now complete. My apologies.)

All of which -- how exactly shall I put this? -- works. It does what it sets out to do. All of it was carefully, rigorously tested, with placebo controls and double-blinding and peer review and replicability and all that good stuff... and all of it has been shown to work. It's going to be a little while before I'm back to normal -- pneumonia is no joke -- but I started writing this three days after I started the treatment, and I'm already significantly and measurably better.

And contrary to one of the more popular misconceptions about conventional medicine, the doctor didn't just send me home with a bag of drugs. She also sent me home with instructions to breathe steam; drink enormous amounts of fluids (especially tea); stay warm; not talk too much; and rest as much as I possibly could. Plus she asked me about fifty times if I smoked. Contrary to the accusation leveled in a comment in this blog that "anything that isn't designed by a human in a lab isn't considered 'real medicine,'" a large part of my treatment plan had nothing to with anything designed in a lab or cooked up by a pharmaceutical company. And the non-drug part of the treatment didn't make anybody rich... except perhaps the Celestial Seasonings tea company. (Even the drugs in a bag weren't making anyone terribly rich; they're mostly old-school drugs that moved into generics long ago.)

Now, I haven't been tremendously happy these past few days. I've been exhausted, cranky, woozy, uncomfortable, and bored out of my mind. And let me tell you, the combination of codeine and Sudafed is one weird-ass speedball. I don't recommend it.

But here's what I haven't been:

Dead.

Or dying.

Or even suffering all that much.

The history of pneumonia before antibiotics is not pretty. Until the 20th century, treatment was pretty much non-existent. You either got better on your own, or you died. Mostly, you died. Pneumonia killed a ton of people, and it was known and feared for its special ability to kill young, healthy people in the prime of their life. And death from pneumonia is no fun at all. (I'll spare you the details, since I promised earlier to stop grossing you out.) There was some treatment beginning to be available in the early 20th century -- but antibiotics completely changed the picture.

Pneumonia still kills people today. Mostly the very young, the very old, the immune-suppressed, and people who don't get medical care in time. But thanks to conventional medicine and Big Pharma, I am rotting on the sofa for a week, feeling sorry for myself and watching all of "Firefly" on DVD... not rotting in a grave. And so are thousands of other people who got pneumonia this week. (Well, they're probably not all watching "Firefly"...)

Okay. All very good reasons for me to be happy about conventional medicine. So why is this experience making me angry about alternative medicine? Not just annoyed, not just amused, but deeply, seriously, lividly angry?

I'm angry because I think alternative medicine undermines conventional medicine.

I'm angry because so many alt medicine practitioners convince sick people to treat their illnesses, not with treatments that have been rigorously tested and shown to be effective, but with whatever powders and potions and procedures the practitioner's fancy happened to light upon, backed up at best with carelessly-done testing, and at worst with nothing but an interesting philosophy. With the best result being a placebo effect, and the worst being actual harm being done, either from neglect of the medical condition or from the sometimes harmful treatments themselves.

I'm angry because so many alt medicine practitioners promise "alternatives" that are easier, more pleasant, and more palatable than conventional treatments... along with promises of more complete and dramatic cures. I'm angry that they encourage people to pursue preventions and treatments based not on thorough testing of what does and does not work, but on what they find emotionally and psychologically and culturally appealing. I'm angry that they encourage people to abandon conventional medicine, which is often unpleasant and sometimes only partially effective, by offering appealing promises that they can't back up.

I'm angry because so many alt medicine practitioners and proponents convince people that conventional medicine only cares about symptoms and acute conditions and ignores prevention and overall health... when the reality is that doctors and nurses and public health officials around the world are desperately trying to get people to exercise, eat better, reduce their stress, and quit smoking.

Along that line, I'm angry because so many alt medicine proponents and practitioners convince people that "doctors don't know anything, and all they care about is making Big Pharma rich." (As if alt medicine practitioners were all-knowing, and nobody in the world were getting rich off of it.) I'm angry at the ways that alt medicine encourages the anti-intellectual strain so prevalent in American culture; the all- too- common attitude of, "What does that hi-falutin' doctor know anyway, with their book larnin' and their fancy degrees? Us simple folk know more about (X) than Dr. Fancy-Pants, with their years of specialized training and experience."

And I don't mean that altie practitioners and proponents encourage people to question doctors; to have a healthy skepticism about them; to treat them as fallible human beings who aren't God. I encourage people to do that. Hell, most doctors and nurses I know encourage people to do that. I mean that they encourage people, not to question doctors, but to disregard them at their whim.

Now, a lot of people will argue that many alt medicine practitioners don't do any such thing. They'll argue that many altie practitioners see alt medicine as a supplement to conventional medicine, not a replacement for it. That's why it's often called complementary and alternative medicine, or CAM -- because it complements conventional medicine, rather than supplanting it.

Okay. Fair enough. So look at it this way. If I had gone to an alt medicine practitioner with my pneumonia symptoms, one of two things would have happened.

Option A: They would have tried to treat my pneumonia with their dilutions, their energy fields, their sacred herbs, whatever. Seriously. Here are some of the gems that my Google search on "pneumonia" + "alternative medicine" turned up. We have this site, recommending that pneumonia be treated with diet, bowel and dental cleansing, and -- believe it or not -- exercise. (Exercise being absolutely the last fucking thing in the world you ought to be doing if you have pneumonia -- except maybe for smoking.) No mention of antibiotics. We have this site, which mentions antibiotics but says they're problematic, and suggests as alternatives cayenne pepper, manuka honey, and hydrogen peroxide. And then we have Holisticonline.com, which recommends that pneumonia be treated with chiropractic care, pleurisy root, and the color red.

In which case they would, in my opinion, be guilty of reckless endangerment of human life. If anyone anywhere in the world has died, or even suffered needlessly, because they acted on the advice of an alt medicine practitioner and treated their pneumonia with exercise, cayenne pepper, or the color red, then that is blood and suffering on the hands of alternative medicine.

Don't believe me? Don't think that CAM practitioners prescribe CAM treatments for serious, life-threatening illnesses -- in the place of conventional medicine? Here's a nice little story from the BBC about homeopathists in Britain telling people that they didn't need to take anti-malarial drugs when visiting Africa or other high- malaria- risk parts of the world -- they just needed to take the homeopathic remedies. Read it and seethe. And there is no reason to think they did this for malaria only and not for any other life-threatening illnesses. Even a cursory Google search will turn up alt medicine treatments for cancer, heart disease, diabetes, AIDS, and more. And check out these "what's the harm?" sites for more stories of people suffering or dying because their serious illnesses got alt medicine instead of conventional medical treatment.

So that's one option. The reckless endangerment option. But the other option is B: They would have recognized that I had a serious medical condition that they couldn't treat, hustled me out the door, and sent me scurrying to a conventional doctor. (When I Googled "pneumonia" + "alternative medicine," this is what a number of the sites I found essentially did.)

In which case, what the hell is the point? If the only thing alt medicine is good for is mild health problems that quickly go away on their own, then why bother? What on earth is the point of a multi-billion dollar alternative medicine industry if it exists solely to make people feel slightly better when they have sniffles or sore muscles or tummy aches? (If it even does that, in any way other than as a placebo.)

Conventional medicine is far from perfect. Insert a standard "I know conventional medicine is flawed" disclaimer here; I've written them before, and I don't feel up to writing another one now. But it's the best game in town. It is, pretty much by definition, medicine that has been rigorously tested using the scientific method, with placebo controls and double-blinding and replicability and peer review and all that other difficult, expensive, time-consuming stuff that alt medicine doesn't bother with.

And the chances are excellent that you -- personally -- are alive today because of it. Whether it's the polio you didn't get because you got vaccinated, the smallpox you didn't get because it's been eradicated, the heart attack you didn't have because your high blood pressure is being treated, the pneumonia you didn't die of because it got cured... I could go on and on and on. And on. The benefits of conventional medicine are often invisible, an invisibility that's enhanced by short memories and insufficient history lessons. But the fact is that we easily prevent and treat diseases and conditions that used to routinely kill thousands and millions of people.

Medicine is about the prevention of death and the relief of suffering. And conventional medicine is, by definition, medicine that has been rigorously tested and shown to prevent death and relieve suffering. Alternative medicine, on the other hand, is, by definition, medicine that is outside that rigorous testing system. It is medicine that promises to prevent death and relieve suffering, but is unwilling to spend the time and work and money making damn well sure that it can back up that promise. It is medicine that shares every single one of the flaws of conventional medicine, from greed to arrogance to cultural blindness, without offering any real benefit that conventional medicine doesn't.

And it is medicine that undermines conventional medicine; medicine that draws people away from conventional medicine by making enticing promises that it can't deliver.

So it is therefore medicine with blood and suffering on its hands.

Do-It-Yourself Placebos

Ever since I started blogging about atheism -- and thus started reading more about religion than I have at any time in my life since I was a religion major in college -- I've been puzzled by a particular brand of pro-theism argument. It's the "religion is good for you" arguments: religion gives people comfort, religion gives people hope, religion gives people moral guidance, etc. etc. etc.

There arguments always struck me as evidence of weakness rather than strength. In fact, it's almost a concession of defeat. "Okay, maybe the arguments for religion being true aren't so great... but the kids love us! It makes people so happy! Isn't that enough?" And I'm baffled by the "self-administered placebo" quality of the arguments. I understand unconscious self-deception -- we all do it -- but conscious self-deception? How the heck does that work? Doesn't a placebo stop working when you know it's a placebo?

I still think it's a weak argument. But I'm in this "trying to be relentlessly honest with myself" phase lately (probably because of that Mistakes Were made book). So I've been asking myself: Is that really true? Is the do- it- yourself placebo really that hard to understand? Is there really no area of my life where I know that something isn't true, but act as if it were anyway because I find it useful?

And just off the top of my head, I came up with two:

Setting the alarm clock fifteen minutes fast. And decaf coffee.

Setting the alarm clock fast is a great example. I know that the alarm clock is fast. I've been setting the alarm clock fast for most of my adult life. In fact, the amount of time I've been setting it fast has been gradually sneaking up over the years: in my younger days I only set it five minutes fast, but I'm used to it being fast now, and I now have to set it a full fifteen minutes ahead.

But it still works. In my groggy, half-awake state, I still don't quite grasp the whole "alarm clock being set fifteen minutes fast" concept. I see the time as 9:00; I think, "Shit, I have to get out of bed"; I don't figure out until I'm out of bed that it was really only 8:45. The do-it-yourself placebo works.

Decaf coffee is an even better example. I don't drink regular coffee at all anymore, unless I get it by mistake. I haven't for years. I seem to have what the shrinks call an addictive personality, and I seem to be incapable of having just one or two cups of regular coffee a day. And regular coffee (or cola, which I also don't drink any more) puts me on an ugly emotional rollercoaster, an unpleasant cycle of peaks and crashes that repeats several times a day. It's not worth it.

But when I drink decaf coffee, I get just a little lift: enough to perk me up without putting me on the rollercoaster. It's gotten to the point where I drink it almost every day... and I get cranky and listless when I can't have it.

I used to tell myself that the reason for this was that even decaf cofee has just a little caffeine in it, and that's what I was getting the lift from. But I've seen charts listing the relative amounts of caffeine in different substances... and decaf coffee is consistently at the bottom of the list, by a wide margin. It has a little caffeine, yes; but the amount is negligible. It'