A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age (28 page)

From the Purdue University website—Purdue has one of the leading veterinary medical centers—we were able to obtain the following survival statistics:

1. Median survival with major surgery = 109 days
   
2. Median survival with chemotherapy = 130 days
   
3. Median survival with Piroxicam = 195 days
   

The range of survival times in all of these studies, however, varied tremendously from dog to dog. Some dogs died after only a few days, while others lived more than two years.

We decided that the most rational choice was to start Shadow on the Piroxicam because its side effects were relatively minor, compared to the others, and to get the cystoscopy in order to give the doctor a better look at the mass and the associated biopsy to give us more to go on. Shadow would have to be lightly anesthetized, but it was only for a short time and the doctors were confident that he would emerge fine.

Two weeks later, the cystoscopy showed that the mass was in fact very close to the ureters and the urethral openings—so close, in fact, that surgery wouldn’t help if the mass was cancerous because too much of the tumor would be left behind. The pathologist wasn’t able to tell if the tissue was cancerous or not because the procedure
ended up not getting a large enough sample. So after all that, we still didn’t have a diagnosis. Yet the statistics above suggested that if Shadow was among the 30 percent of dogs for whom Piroxicam worked, that would yield the best life expectancy. We wouldn’t have to subject him to the discomforts of surgery or chemo, and we could just enjoy our time together at home.

There are many instances, with both pets and humans, that a treatment doesn’t statistically improve your life expectancy. Taking a statin if you are not in a high-risk group or surgically removing the prostate for cancer if you do not have fast-moving prostate cancer are both treatments with negligible impact on life expectancy. It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true: Not all treatments actually help. It’s clear that Shadow would be better off without the surgery (so that we could avoid the 20 percent chance it would kill him) and the chemo wouldn’t buy him any time, statistically.

Shadow responded to the Piroxicam very well and within three days he was back to himself—energetic, in a good mood, happy. By one week he had no more difficulty urinating. We saw occasional minor amounts of blood in the urine, but we were told this was normal after biopsy. Then, 161 days after the initial suspicion (which was never confirmed) of TCC, his kidneys started to fail. We checked him into a specialty oncology clinic. The doctors weren’t sure whether the organ failure might be related to TCC, or why it was occurring now. They prescribed medications to address common kidney conditions and ran dozens of tests without getting any closer to understanding what was happening. Shadow grew increasingly uncomfortable and stopped eating. We put him on an IV drip painkiller and two days later, when we took him off for just a few minutes to see how he was doing, he was clearly in pain. We talked to his
current and former doctors, carefully describing the situation, its progression, and his condition. All agreed it was time to let him go. We had Shadow’s company—and he had ours—for a month longer than the average chemotherapy patient, and during that month he was able to avoid hospitals, catheters, IV lines, and scalpels.

We went to the oncology hospital—the staff knew us well because we had been visiting Shadow there every day in between his tests and treatments—and arranged for him to be put to sleep. He was in pain, and we felt that we had perhaps waited one or two days too long. It was awful to see that large personality suddenly drift away and disappear. We found comfort knowing that we had considered every stage of his care and that he had as good a life as we were able to give him for as long as possible. Perhaps the most difficult emotion that people experience after a disease ends a life is regret over the choices made. We were able to say good-bye to Shadow with no regrets over our decisions. We let our critical thinking, our use of Bayesian reasoning, guide us.

Were Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin Thespians?

Moon-landing deniers point to a number of inconsistencies and unanswered questions. “There should have been more than a two-second delay in communications between the Earth and the moon, because of its distance.” “The quality of the photographs is implausibly high.” “There are no stars in the sky in any of the photos.” “How could the photos of the American flag show ripples in it, as though waving in the air, if the moon has no atmosphere?” The capper is a report by an aerospace worker, Bill Kaysing, who wrote that the probability of a successful landing on the moon was .0017 percent (note the precision of this estimate!). Many more such claims
exist. Part of what keeps counterknowledge going is the sheer number of unanswered questions that keep popping up, like a game of Whac-A-Mole. If you want to convince people of something that’s not true, it’s apparently very effective to simply snow them with one question after another, and hope that they will be sufficiently impressed—and overwhelmed—that they won’t bother to look for explanations. But even 1,000 unanswered questions don’t necessarily mean that something didn’t happen, as any investigator knows. The websites dedicated to the moon landing denial don’t cite the evidence for it, nor do they publish rebuttals to their claims.

In the case of the moon landing, each of these (and the other claims) is easily refuted. There
was
a two-second delay in Earth-moon communications that can be easily heard on the original tapes, but some documentary films and news reports edited out the delay in the interest of presenting a more compelling broadcast.
The quality of the photographs is high because the astronauts used a high-resolution Hasselblad camera with 70mm high-resolution film. There are no stars in the lunar sky because most of the images we saw were taken during lunar daytime (otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to see the astronauts). The flag doesn’t show ripples: Aware that there was no atmosphere, NASA prepared the flag with a t-bar to support its top edge and the “ripples” are simply folds in the fabric. With no wind to blow the flag, its creases stay in place. This claim is based on still photos in which there appears to be a rippling effect, but moving film images show that the flag is not blowing, it’s static.

But what about the report of an aerospace worker that a moon landing was highly improbable? First, the “aerospace worker” was not trained in engineering or science; he was a writer with a BA in English who happened to work for Rocketdyne. The source of his
estimate appears to be from a Rocketdyne report from the 1950s, back when space technology was still in its infancy. Although there are still unanswered questions (e.g., why are some of the original telemetry recordings missing?), the weight of evidence overwhelmingly points to the moon landing being real. It’s not certainty, it’s just very, very likely. If you’re going to use spuriously obtained probability estimates to claim that past events didn’t happen, you’d have to similarly conclude that human beings don’t really exist:
It’s been claimed that the chances of life forming on Earth is many billions to one. Like many examples of counterknowledge, this uses the language of science—in this case probability—in a way that utterly debases that fine language.

Statistics Onstage (and in a Box)

David Blaine is a celebrity magician and illusionist. He also claims to have completed great feats of physical endurance (at least one was recognized by the
Guinness Book of World Records
). The question for a critical thinker is: Did he actually demonstrate physical endurance or was he using a clever illusion? Certainly, as a skilled magician, it would be easy for him to fake the endurance work.

In a TED talk with more than 10 million views, he claims to have held his breath for seventeen minutes underwater, and tells us how he trained himself to do it. Other claims are that he froze himself in a block of ice for a week, fasted in a glass box for forty-four days, and was buried alive in a coffin for a week. Are these claims true? Are they even plausible? Are there alternative explanations?

In his videos, Blaine has a down-to-earth manner; he doesn’t speak quickly, he doesn’t seem slick. He’s believable because his
speech sounds so awkward that it’s difficult to imagine he’s calculated just what to say and how to say it. But bear in mind: Professional magicians typically calculate and plan everything they say. Every single move, every apparently spontaneous scratch of the head, is typically rehearsed over and over again. The illusion they’re trying to create—the feat of magic—works because the magician is expert at misdirecting your attention and subverting your assumptions about what’s spontaneous and what’s not.

So how do we apply critical thinking to his endurance performances?

If you’re thinking about hierarchies of source quality, you’ll focus on the fact that he has a TED talk and TED talks are fact-checked and very tightly curated. Or are they? Well, actually,
there are more than 5,000 TED-branded events, but only two are vetted—TED and TEDGlobal. Blaine’s video comes from a talk he delivered at TEDMED, one of the more than 4,998 conferences that are run by enthusiasts and volunteers and are not vetted by the TED organization. This doesn’t mean it’s not true, just that we can’t rely on the reputation and authority of TED to establish its truth. Recall TMZ and the reporting of Michael Jackson’s death—they’re going to be right some of the time, and maybe even a lot of the time, but you can’t know for sure.

Before looking at the underwater breath holding, let’s look more closely at a couple of Blaine’s other claims. For starters,
Fox television reported his ice-block demonstration to be a hoax. A trap-door beneath the chamber he was in led to a warm and comfortable room, Fox reported, while a body double took his place in the ice block. How did he get away with this trick? A lot of what magicians practice over and over again is getting the audience to accept things that are a bit out of the ordinary. There are some telltale clues that
all was not as it seems. First, why is he wearing a mask? (You might assume that it’s because it’s part of the show, or because it makes him look fierce. The real reason might be because it makes it easier to fool you with a body double.) Why do they need to spray sheets of water over the ice at periodic intervals? (Blaine says it’s to prevent the ice from melting; maybe it’s so that he can change places with the body double during the brief moment you can’t see through the ice.) What about the physiological monitoring equipment on his body, reporting his heart rate and body temperature—surely that’s real, isn’t it? (Who says that the equipment is actually hooked up to him? Perhaps it wasn’t and was instead being fed by a computer.)

If Blaine was lying about the ice block—claiming it was a feat of endurance when in reality it was just conjuring, a magic trick—why not lie about other feats of endurance too? As a performer with a large audience, he would want to ensure that his demonstrations work every time. Using illusions and tricks may be more reliable, and safer, than trying to push endurance limits. But even if it did involve a trick, perhaps it’s too harsh to call it a lie—it’s all part of the show, isn’t it? No one really believes that magicians are calling upon unseen forces; we know that they rehearse like the dickens and use misdirection. Who cares? Well, most reputable magicians, when asked, will come clean and admit that what they are doing are rehearsed illusions, not demonstrations of the black arts. Glenn Falkenstein, for example, performed a mind-reading act that was among the most impressive ever seen. But at the end of each show, he was quick to point out that there was no actual mind-reading involved. Why?
Out of a sense of ethics. The world is full of people who believe things that aren’t true, and believe many things that are ridiculous, he said. Millions of people who have a poor
understanding of cause and effect waste their money and energy on psychics, astrologers, gambling, and “alternative” therapies with no proven efficacy. Being forthright about how this sort of entertainment is accomplished is important, he said, so that people are not led to believe things that aren’t so.

In another demonstration, Blaine claims to have stuck a needle clear through his hand. Was this an illusion or did he really do it? In videos, it certainly looks real, but of course, that’s what magic is all about. (Search YouTube and you’ll find videos showing how it can be done with specialized apparatus.) What about the forty-four-day fast in a glass box?
There was even a peer-reviewed paper in the
New England Journal of Medicine
about that, and in terms of information sources, that’s about as good as it gets. Upon closer examination, however, the physicians who authored that paper only examined Blaine after the fast, not before or during, and so they can’t provide independent verification that he actually fasted. Was this question ever raised during peer review?
The current editor of the journal searched his office archives but the records had been destroyed, since the article was published a decade before my inquiry.
The lead author on the article told me in an email that based on the hormones she measured after the event, he was indeed fasting, but it’s possible as well that he was sneaking in some food; she couldn’t comment on that. She did point me to an article by a colleague of hers in another peer-reviewed journal, in which
a physician
did
monitor Blaine throughout the fast (the article didn’t show up in my PubMed or Google Scholar searches because David Blaine was not mentioned in the article by name). Relevant is the following passage from the article, which appeared in the journal
Nutrition:

Immediately before the start of the fast, DB appeared to have a muscular build that was consistent with the body mass index, body composition figures, and upper arm muscle circumference, which are reported below. On the evening of Saturday, September 6, 2003, DB entered a transparent Perspex box, measuring 2.1 x 2.1 x 0.9 m, which was suspended in air for the next 44 d, close to Tower Bridge, London. Continuous detailed video monitoring was available to one of the investigators (ME, office and at home), who was able to assess the clinical state and physical activity of DB. DB, who was 30 y old, had consumed before the event, a diet that was estimated, but not verified, to have increased his weight by as much as 6–7 kg. He also took some multivitamin tablets for a few days before the event, which he stopped on entry into the box. He felt weaker and more lethargic as the event progressed. From about 2 wk onward he experienced some dizziness and faintness on standing up quickly, and on some occasions, temporary visual problems, as if “blacking out.” He also developed transient sharp shooting pains in his limbs and trunk, abdominal discomfort, nausea, and some irregular heart beats. . . . A small amount of bleeding from his nose occurred on the fifth day after entry to the box and this recurred later. There were no other obvious signs or symptoms of a bleeding tendency. There were also no signs of edema before or at the end of the fast. In addition, there were no clinical signs of thiamine deficiency. DB, who was initially a muscular looking man, was visibly thinner on exit from the box. His blood pressure taken almost immediately before the event began was 140/90 mmHg while lying and 130/80 mmHg while standing, and at the end it was 109/74 mmHg while lying (pulse 89 beats/min) and 109/65 mmHg while standing (pulse 119 beats/min).