Michael Shermer vs. The Secret

[Gerald Tarrant]

An old yarn about a classic marketing con game on the secret of wealth instructs you to write a book about how to make a lot of money and sell it through the mail. When your marks receive the book, they discover the secret--write a book about how to make a lot of money and sell it through the mail.

A confidence scheme similar to this can be found in The Secret (Simon & Schuster, 2006), a book and DVD by Rhonda Byrne and a cadre of self-help gurus that, thanks to Oprah Winfrey's endorsement, have now sold more than three million copies combined. The secret is the so-called law of attraction. Like attracts like. Positive thoughts sally forth from your body as magnetic energy, then return in the form of whatever it was you were thinking about. Such as money. "The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts," we are told. Damn those poor Kenyans. If only they weren't such pessimistic sourpusses. The film's promotional trailer is filled with such vainglorious money mantras as "Everything I touch turns to gold," "I am a money magnet," and, my favorite, "There is more money being printed for me right now." Where? Kinko's?

A pantheon of shiny, happy people assures viewers that The Secret is grounded in science: "It has been proven scientifically that a positive thought is hundreds of times more powerful than a negative thought." No, it hasn't. "Our physiology creates disease to give us feedback, to let us know we have an imbalanced perspective, and we're not loving and we're not grateful." Those ungrateful cancer patients. "You've got enough power in your body to illuminate a whole city for nearly a week." Sure, if you convert your body's hydrogen into energy through nuclear fission. "Thoughts are sending out that magnetic signal that is drawing the parallel back to you." But in magnets, opposites attract--positive is attracted to negative. "Every thought has a frequency.... If you are thinking that thought over and over again you are emitting that frequency."

The brain does produce electrical activity from the ion currents flowing among neurons during synaptic transmission, and in accordance with Maxwell's equations any electric current produces a magnetic field. But as neuroscientist Russell A. Poldrack of the University of California, Los Angeles, explained to me, these fields are minuscule and can be measured only by using an extremely sensitive superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) in a room heavily shielded against outside magnetic sources. Plus, remember the inverse square law: the intensity of an energy wave radiating from a source is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from that source. An object twice as far away from the source of energy as another object of the same size receives only one-fourth the energy that the closer object receives. The brain's magnetic brain's magnetic field of 10^-15 Tesla quickly dissipates from the skull and is promptly swamped by other magnetic sources, not to mention the earth's magnetic field of 10^-5 tesla, which overpowers it by 10 orders of magnitude!

Ceteris paribus, it is undoubtedly better to think positive thoughts than negative ones. But in the real world, all other things are never equal, no matter how sanguine your outlook. Just ask the survivors of Auschwitz. If the law of attraction is true, then the Jews--along with the butchered Turkish-Armenians, the raped Nanking Chinese, the massacred Native Americans and the enslaved African-Americans--had it coming. The latter exemplar is especially poignant given Oprah's backing of The Secret on her Web site: "The energy you put into the world--both good and bad--is exactly what comes back to you. This means you create the circumstances of your life with the choices you make every day." Africans created the circumstances for Europeans to enslave them?

Oprah, please, withdraw your support of this risible twaddle--as you did when you discovered that James Frey's memoir was a million little lies--and tell your vast following that prosperity comes from a good dollop of hard work and creative thinking, the way you did it.

link

I underlined the "money quotes"/my favorite responses.

I posted this because I had the misfortune of having a room-mate who bought into this BS for a little while. I made my disdain crystal clear, to the degree that he wouldn't watch it while I was in the room, something about Negative thoughts being contagious. Too bad Shermer didn't write this sooner, because Time made the mistake of listing the author of "The Secret" as one of it's top 100 most influential people of the year

Oh, and Michael Shermer is awesome; if you haven't read it you need to read "Why People Believe Weird Things"

[Sriad]

"But in magnets, opposites attract--positive is attracted to negative."

Better than anything in The Secret; if you don't want any money you'll always have enough. Hermits for the win!!

[Patrick Degan]

I posted this because I had the misfortune of having a room-mate who bought into this BS for a little while. I made my disdain crystal clear, to the degree that he wouldn't watch it while I was in the room, something about Negative thoughts being contagious. Too bad Shermer didn't write this sooner, because Time made the mistake of listing the author of "The Secret" as one of it's top 100 most influential people of the year

There you go with the negative waves.

[Gerald Tarrant]

I posted this because I had the misfortune of having a room-mate who bought into this BS for a little while. I made my disdain crystal clear, to the degree that he wouldn't watch it while I was in the room, something about Negative thoughts being contagious. Too bad Shermer didn't write this sooner, because Time made the mistake of listing the author of "The Secret" as one of it's top 100 most influential people of the year

<snip, 'cause quoting pictures is bad>

There you go with the negative waves.

The really sad thing was that my room-mate should have known better, his major is Civil Engineering. They have at least some exposure to the scientific method. So if anyone should be able to spot and avoid Psuedo Scientific BS it's him. I think his central problem is that he's too credulous, he doesn't exercise enough critical thinking before reaching a conclusion. I hope he gets that straightened out before he starts designing buildings/bridges.

[Cykeisme]

I know it's perverse and sadistic, but I love to see silly pseudoscience get bashed.

Still, minor bit..

"You've got enough power in your body to illuminate a whole city for nearly a week." Sure, if you convert your body's hydrogen into energy through nuclear fission.

Shouldn't it be nuclear fusion?

[Darth Wong]

The really sad thing was that my room-mate should have known better, his major is Civil Engineering. They have at least some exposure to the scientific method. So if anyone should be able to spot and avoid Psuedo Scientific BS it's him. I think his central problem is that he's too credulous, he doesn't exercise enough critical thinking before reaching a conclusion. I hope he gets that straightened out before he starts designing buildings/bridges.

There is, unfortunately, no such thing as an education which makes you proof against the Dark Side of facile but illogical answers. The BYU astronomy prof who runs a 9/11 conspiracy website and the creationist astrophysicists are proof of that already.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

My boss made us watch this crap, which was especially irksome because you can't loudly criticize something that the boss openly endorses. I wanted to ask whether she thought she'd sleep with me if I spent all day thinking about it, then point out that the "Law of Attraction" doesn't sound so reasonable (to an unscientific, credulous person) when it's me thinking of her cheating on her husband instead of her thinking of a promotion.

[Gerald Tarrant]

I know it's perverse and sadistic, but I love to see silly pseudoscience get bashed.

Pseudo-science needs to be loudly and publicly discredited, leaving it unrefuted is probably the worst punishment you could envision for the proponents/believers. So while you might have motivations that smack of sadism, the end goal of debunking this sort of silliness is a good one. And if you were truly perverse and sadistic, you'd allow them to keep their illusions.

Sherme noted this bit

Oprah, please, withdraw your support of this risible twaddle--as you did when you discovered that James Frey's memoir was a million little lies--and tell your vast following that prosperity comes from a good dollop of hard work and creative thinking, the way you did it.

Still, minor bit..

"You've got enough power in your body to illuminate a whole city for nearly a week." Sure, if you convert your body's hydrogen into energy through nuclear fission.

Shouldn't it be nuclear fusion?

Probably, I guess nobody is immune from the plague of typos/vocabulary errors. Although you'd think the editors at Scientific American would catch that one. It might be that Shermer actually wrote this as a letter to Oprah, in which case it might not have received the full editorial scrutiny it deserved.

The really sad thing was that my room-mate should have known better, his major is Civil Engineering. They have at least some exposure to the scientific method. So if anyone should be able to spot and avoid Psuedo Scientific BS it's him. I think his central problem is that he's too credulous, he doesn't exercise enough critical thinking before reaching a conclusion. I hope he gets that straightened out before he starts designing buildings/bridges.

There is, unfortunately, no such thing as an education which makes you proof against the Dark Side of facile but illogical answers. The BYU astronomy prof who runs a 9/11 conspiracy website and the creationist astrophysicists are proof of that already.

I guess I was deluding myself but I always had this vague hope that some part of college would render you immune to such errors. Or that maybe they'd kick people out if they couldn't think critically, or give them remedial critical thinking courses. But I realize it's hard to measure critical thinking, it's sometimes hard to measure thinking at all, some tests just turn into "Regurgitate facts", and "Calculator Derby's"

My boss made us watch this crap, which was especially irksome because you can't loudly criticize something that the boss openly endorses. I wanted to ask whether she thought she'd sleep with me if I spent all day thinking about it, then point out that the "Law of Attraction" doesn't sound so reasonable (to an unscientific, credulous person) when it's me thinking of her cheating on her husband instead of her thinking of a promotion.

I didn't completely ignore the DVD roomie was watching(much to my chagrin) so I caught how "The Secret" pre-empted that argument. I don't have a transcript or exact quote, but the gist of it was that if you didn't fully commit yourself to positive thoughts it wouldn't work, because your negative thoughts/disbelief would stop any hope of getting what you wanted. Neatly providing a way for its believers to ignore any sort of testing of the principle.

Oh it didn't work for you? You must not have believed enough.

An aside, my room-mates credulous nature also made him a believer in the AMWAY model, although he went with a slightly updated model called ACN. He convinced me to attend one of their briefings in all their briefing videos they had the fine print something like this "results represent less than .1% of all employees." (For the folks that crawl to the top). One of their big selling points is VOIP I don't know how their product compares but my room-mate was shocked to discover the existence of people like "Skype" et al. At which point he stopped trying to sign me up as an associate.