Shapiro at first comes over as someone who knows his onions – for example, he realizes that it’s stupid to hold on to a belief in the face of hard evidence:

If science can disprove some aspect of Judaism then to hold on to it makes me, I guess, a loyal jew, but a stupid human being … If my religion says that the world is flat and I can show a photograph that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the world is round, but as a faithful person I’m going to hold onto the flatness of things then yeah, I’m a faithful idiot.

He also makes a lot of sense when talking about religion and morality.

But at the same time he shows his total ignorance of what Quantum Mechanics is all about:

It’s people like Amit Goswami, the physicist … who in his studies of Quantum Mechanics says that maybe the whole thing is consciousness and that … the brain is a tuner, well that’s fascinating…

And as usual Tsakiris brings up the subject of NDEs again, and Shapiro plainly doesn’t know the facts. What’s worse is that he then makes a completely unjustified statement about why scientists hold the position they do on the subject:

I realize there’s a lot of scientists who say no, this is bogus, that this is simply, you know, the brain with a lack of oxygen, and they have all kinds of ways of excusing it, because they just don’t like the idea that there is any kind of experience that can happen when the brain is dead.

Interesting if only to show what happens when someone with more than a smidgen of intelligence still lacks a basic understanding of science and scientists.

It turns out that this is not, as I first thought, an interview with either Sheldrake or Wiseman – mostly it’s a collection of sound clips about Sheldrake’s “psychic dog” experiments which are being performed within the Open Source Science project. At just over 22 minutes it’s the shortest Skeptiko to date.

Sheldrake was talking at a debate at Trinity College, Cambridge last year. He starts by saying things like, “…telepathy, if it exists, is natural, not supernatural…” – which is correct to the point of being tautological. But he then goes into, “It may well be that there are principles of which we as yet know nothing, that could help to explain telepathy”. In other words it looks like he’s doing what myself and others have said – assuming that telepathy exists and needs explaining, without first considering the evidence supporting telepathy (or the lack thereof).

Sheldrake said that if it were found to be true then it would change science, but it wouldn’t be an Earth-shattering change. True enough. Alex unfortunately seems to misinterpret some of what Sheldrake is saying at that point; he suggested that for some reason we skeptics are afraid that such a discovery would undermine science-as-we-know-it. He goes as far as to say that this is a point that you will “often hear hard-core skeptics make”. I consider myself a fairly hard-core skeptic and this is not a view I hold, nor do I know of any other skeptics that would agree with this view. Which hard-core skeptics has Alex been talking to?

Actually, changes in science happen all the time; it’s the way science works. For example all the recent work on Dark Matter and Dark Energy (which could be very literally Earth-shattering, if the Big Rip idea is correct). Am I afraid it’s going to overturn or undermine science? Nope. The new ideas and discoveries become part of the next iteration of science. Proving that telepathy is real would just do the same thing.

We don’t actually get to Sheldrake talking about the Dog experiments until almost halfway through the show. He explains something of the experiments and how video recordings were used to get rid of some of the “noise”. Alex then points out that he’s been talking to dog owners on forums, asking for their stories about the phenomena and how amazing the results were (Cherry Picking! Anecdotal Evidence!).

Sheldrake then touches on his dispute with Wiseman about the interpretation of the results. As Wiseman explains (in a clip taken from his interview with Alex that played about six weeks ago), he thinks that the core of the dispute was that he was not testing the same thing that Sheldrake was; he was testing a claim about the dog that was made on TV, and found that the claim was false (I think this is the one where they tested to see if the dog moved to the door or window at the same time that the dog’s owner was told to head home). Wiseman believes that Sheldrake was asking the bigger question of whether the dog was psychic (and came to the conclusion that he was), so that there was some confusion about what the comparison was about.

Alex goes off into the weeds at this point – “So I guess from that we have to interpret Richard Wiseman’s comment as being that he was really coming in as a debunker, and that Sheldrake was doing more detailed research” – not what Wiseman said at all. On debunking, he thinks that debunking is “a good role for skeptics to play”… huh? He has no idea what real skepticism is about.

Alex mentions that Sheldrake and Wiseman disputed whether Sheldrake should include Wiseman’s data as a replication of his results. He then says that in his Skeptiko interview Wiseman “conceded” that his data matched Sheldrake’s and that he (Alex) can only interpret that it’s appropriate to include that data (although I have to say that Alex’s powers of interpretation, as evidenced by the other interpretions he’s made in this podcast, leave a lot to be desired). We then hear Wiseman saying that the patterning in his data did match Sheldrake’s, but what that means is a matter of interpretation of the data.

All in all not the best or most interesting Skeptiko to date – no interview (has Alex run out of people to interview?) and what was there was really just a showcase of pseudoscientific thinking with a few digs at us “debunkers”, and a puff for Open Source Science.

Alex Tsakiris is the host of the Skeptiko podcast and a pseudoskeptic. The podcast itself is rather interesting, although many (skeptical) people find it difficult to listen to. In its favour, Alex has invited a number of well-known skeptics to take part and he’s pretty good about letting them have their say. However it’s plain that Alex isn’t really listening to what they say – if he did, he might learn a few things himself.

Nevertheless, don’t be fooled; despite the name, despite the words on the web page, this is not a skeptical podcast at all. You have been warned.

The podcasts appear weekly, usually each Monday. Last week’s podcast was with Steven Novella, well-known skeptical champion and host of the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast (I’ve been posting sort-of-reviews of each Skeptiko podcast on the SGU message board for the last few weeks); the podcast was one of the best to date. Alex actually signed up on the SGU boards and there has been some lively debate going on, although the latest posts have been getting a bit testy.

I don’t know if it’s a coincidence but for some reason this week’s Skeptiko podcast hasn’t shown up yet. Possibly it’s because of the Memorial Day holiday but until now the ‘cast has never been late by more than one day. We shall see…