I had the change to speak with well known Sharon Hill (@idoubtit) for the first episode of 2015. We discuss a number of interesting topics including the contributions Doubtful News makes to getting scientific and skeptical information ranked highly in search results, sink holes, why earthquakes are hard to predict, and data collection about paranormal groups via the internet.
Data Skeptic
Doubtful News, Geology, Investigating Paranormal Groups, and Thinking Scientifically with Sharon Hill
(upbeat music) - The Data Skeptic Podcast is a weekly show featuring conversations about skepticism, critical thinking, and data science. - So welcome to another episode of the Data Skeptic Podcast. I'm joined this week with my guest Sharon Hill. Thanks for joining me, Sharon. - Oh, you're welcome. - So I know you quite well from the skeptical world and from doubtful news and your various talks and activism and also had the pleasure of reading a little bit about your scientific background as well. So could you maybe share how you got first interested in both science and skepticism? - Gee, ever since I could remember, I've always been interested in nature and animals and plants and rocks and the weather. So the first books I remember reading were about insects and not too long after that, books on haunted houses and ghosts and monsters as well. - So I've just always been interested in nature and explaining the world in a scientific sense. So I got a degree in geology, geosciences, and after I got out of college, I had some spare time to start reading again for pleasure and I sort of got into the skeptical literature, was always interested in cryptozoology. So I started reading about different animals, Bigfoot, Loch Ness, monster, things like that. And so it's been, gee, I've been in the skeptical community for well over 20 years now and seeing it go up and down and round and round. So yeah, I got a lot of experience that are my belt in that sense. - And when will you motivate to start doubtful news? And maybe for anyone who doesn't know what it is, could you share a quick summary of what you do at the site? - Sure, I think I got started, Gee, you know, I can't even remember the year now. I think we're into like year three or four at this point. I should remember that. But after a while you lose track because every day there's so many stories. What I do is I look at the news every day and I try to find interesting stories about paranormal, anomalies, pseudoscience, alternative medicine, anything that's in the media that would be of interest to people who have a concern about false information or just strange things about the world that are happening. How can we make sense about these things that come out in the news? What does the media tell us that maybe it isn't the whole story? So what I do with doubtful news is I take the media story, I look at it maybe in a more critical way, try to pull in some additional information that maybe the media story left out and try to help people understand that there's probably more to this story than they're getting from the media and even whether or not they should buy into what they're getting from the media. - One of the things I appreciate myself the most about it is being a subscriber, I get these great emails throughout the day, whether it be the strange remains or particular story. I don't know if you've done this on purpose but they seem to come at the perfect frequency in terms of like I'm on other lists that I get way too much and start ignoring them eventually. It's exactly the right bite size that I'm looking forward to read throughout the day. - I try not to make them too long because that can lose people's attention and I really don't have a whole lot of time to dig into a lot of it. I probably couldn't make them longer but I just really am interested in getting the information out there to people. If they're interested in the story they could go look for more about it. But another thing that's important on these stories is to get them out as soon as possible because of search engine keywords, which is very important. Get them out as soon as the story starts getting popular and because the website's been around for quite a while and we've got a good rating on Google at this point we get pretty high hits from search engines. So I think that's really important 'cause if people search for these stories using keywords they'll get to my site and get maybe a view that they didn't expect to get. - Yeah, I think that's especially helpful of some, I don't wanna make an accusation but let's say a journalist that's under a lot of pressure puts forward a story pretty quickly without maybe vetting everything perfectly. That's a story and a headline grabber. So if I start reading up on something, having a resource like doubtful news come up pretty well ranked is a great resource to give a more complete scientific perspective or skeptical perspective on whatever the hottest new woo is. - Right, and I may not know a whole lot about it. I mean, I'm not an expert in a lot of things but getting it out there sometimes will help commenters come in and give us additional information. They'll give us extra links. Or because I've been around the community for so long I kinda know where to go to pull the research information or the past information on these topics because these things come up over and over again. And if a faith healer comes up, it's easy for me to find places where somebody has investigated him before and linked to that story. So people can sort of pick and choose what kind of subjects they're interested in and delve a little bit deeper. At least I give them the resources to get some better information. - Absolutely. And what sort of tools do you use to monitor the website in terms of analytics knowing which particular topics are getting the most attention or how well you're ranking for various subjects? - It's really tough. And it's actually, I don't think very predictable because you never know what's going to happen if you get a certain link. If you get linked to either an aggregator or if you get posted on Reddit and it sort of goes higher in the ranking, you don't expect it. All of a sudden you will get 5,000 hits in an hour and I'm like flabbergasted. I don't even notice it. When I check throughout the day, I do check my stats because I do like to know where the information is coming from and then eventually I will be able to track it down unless it's coming from Facebook. If it's coming from Facebook, I can't backtrack the link to see who's posted it on Facebook which would explain the high hits coming from Facebook. That's the only thing that really bothers me about Facebook because it gives you this generic link back to Facebook and I don't know who has posted it on their wall or page that is giving me huge hits. Now in most cases, it will show up as a URL link and I can look back on it and see if it's somebody like 40 in times or some forum that has linked to it or Reddit, whatever. I can usually trace those back and then I will go back to that link and see what's being said about it. FARC is another one. If you get FARC'd, you'll get some decent hits there but I do like to watch to see when old stories get recirculated. It's funny because one thing I will notice is for some of the older stories, we'll pop back up again. I know that there's been a Discovery Channel special on it aired that night because people will go on the Google on it and it will end up hitting my site for something like the Yeti or Bosnian pyramids or something like that and I could go back and look and see, oh yeah, there was a show that came on last night from Discovery Channel and that's why people are searching for this old topic. - Well, it's great, the resource is still there to help inform where unfortunately a channel with the name Discovery doesn't seem to help do as good of a job. So one of the benefits I get out of doing the podcast is getting a chance to talk to very skeptics and scientific people like yourself. So I want to come back and talk more about skepticism but I thought we could delve a little bit into your geological background and day job, I guess. - Sure. - Which I actually haven't been able to find any talks with you on that in my searches so it might be any other side to cover. - Well, I try to keep it very separate. My work is my work at work and what I do with regards to skepticism is usually quite different. My, I work as a geologist but in a policy in regulatory sense, so I'm not out in the field drilling or examining core samples or something like that. I do work with words a lot at work and try to put together a program for the state that I work for. So the policy is informed by science. And I think that's super important and maybe it's a career that many scientists haven't thought about or don't realize is there but it really is important to have scientific background when you're trying to craft policy and regulations. Otherwise it ends up not working all that well. - Yeah, absolutely. - So I've learned a whole lot and I get to work with the public as well and explain to them some scientific concepts in a way that they can understand which I find very rewarding. And some of the things that I've worked with are mining issues and sinkhole issues, hazards, things like that, groundwater issues. - Sinkholes is one that has always kind of fascinated me and that at least in my life I don't hear about them too much outside of that one very unfortunate case in Florida a few years ago where a man died after one formed under his house. It seems like it ought to be one of those classic rare events that people are afraid of like getting struck by light and being in a plane crash or something. What are the odds there that I'm going to have a significant injury from a sinkhole unexpectedly happening? - Pretty low, not many people have died in sinkhole accidents. There have been some in Africa in a gold mine area region there was a whole village that disappeared into a giant sinkhole. It just happened to be a geologic anomaly that caused this to happen. In the US sinkholes can be related to either limestone and dolomite which we call karst or it could be related to salt extraction which you see down in Louisiana. There's a giant sinkhole in Louisiana that was sucking a swamp down and that was related to salt extraction. It created a void by removing the salt and then the ground sunk back into it. Texas also has a problem. Kentucky has a severe problem. We may have heard about the corvettes that went down the sinkhole in the Kentucky Corvette Museum and Pennsylvania also has a problem. New Jersey also has a problem. So there are some states around the east coast of Florida is probably the worst though, by far they are the worst. They do have the most karst and they have a problem because of being close to the coast and having a lot of rainfall and their geology just is the way it is and it lends itself to some serious problems with sinkholes. We at least have some bedrock in the other states. Florida doesn't have a whole lot of bedrock. So when things collapse into holes, everything collapses. It's very sandy and it sucks the houses and unfortunately that person who did die was sucked down into a sandy sinkhole. - So are those events that people are well able to predict or is there something just inherently or at least given the current models random about it? - Well, that kind of depends on if you look at the data that's available. If you want to find out if you are in a sinkhole-prone area, it's often mapped because once a sinkhole, always a sinkhole. If you fill it in, it's very likely to re-activate for some reason. And the plumbing underneath the ground remains. It's very, very hard to shut that plumbing off. So the drain, if the drain remains and the water comes through and flushes the drain, the material that's holding up the ground will go down the drain. And that's sort of how it works in a general sense. But if you look at old agriculture maps from when the area was not settled, you can spot soil anomalies usually there around that suggest that there is a problem with the soil right in that spot. And it could be a sinkhole if you're dealing with the right kind of bedrock. And it's a shame that developers or consultants don't tend to look at those old maps and will build right over them. And then you end up with a serious problem, mostly with roads, large buildings, even houses, swimming pools go down the drain a lot because they're heavy, they leak. And it just propagates the problem. Right now in the US, a lot of states are having trouble with their infrastructure. Old pipes are leaking or they're broken or there's water drainage problems. And it's causing these sinkhole problems to be exacerbated and causing a public issue. - Makes sense. So I don't wanna put you on the spot. I can cut this out if you don't like going this direction, but from a policy point of view, what needs to happen to protect those areas? - Well, it's a really good question. Not that many states have any sort of protection for homeowners or municipalities when it comes to sinkhole disasters. Say you are living in an area that's got limestone bedrock and it just so happens that sinkhole appears in your yard. It doesn't matter if it's three feet across or 30 feet across, the township or municipality will come to your house and say you need to fix that. And that's a considerable expense that comes out of your pocket. Insurance will not cover it. You can get sinkhole insurance in some places, but it typically only covers, that's all I've ever heard is it covers the structure damage, does not cover the expense that you may have to pay to fix your front yard or if your car falls in a sinkhole, something like that. So it's very tricky and it is a hazard that isn't really covered in under normal insurance provisions or any sort of state aid or emergency assistance. - Interesting. So I know this may be getting also a little bit away from your area of expertise, but I feel compelled to ask, in my community, which is the data science world, we're always pointing to earthquakes as this notoriously unpredictable phenomenon. Everyone says, I can't predict earthquakes. And I trust that's the case, but I've never been able to pin down what is it about them? Do we not have adequate measurements? Do we not have good models? Are they just completely random? Do you have any insight? - They're very complicated. Most people don't realize how complicated the earth is underground because they don't see it and they don't have any concept. When you try to look at the rock layers and try to figure out where everything is and the ages and fault lines and fracture zones and stuff, it's extremely complicated. Sizmology itself goes over my head because faults branch off, they go up, they go down, they go sideways, we can't see where they go, they may be blinded, we can't see where they surface. So there may be one we're standing on and we don't know about it because it's never shown up on the surface features. There are going to be areas that are obviously earthquake prone. We have the whole ring of fire area around the perimeter of the Pacific, where we know it's a geologically active zone. We have subduction zones and we have strike slip areas in California. We know that there are gonna be earthquakes there. But when those faults specifically are going to break and move is not well documented. We can monitor, what they've tried to do is they've tried to monitor foreshocks and aftershocks and then try to predict how that relates to the main shock. It doesn't work. Foreshock measurement was tried with the United States Geologic Survey as their methods of prediction and doesn't work. Some of the other ways of prediction would be things like the Chinese would watch their animals. And so if their animals reacted funny, they would suspect that there would be an earthquake coming. A whole lot of oddities that people will attribute to four coming earthquakes, not reliable in most cases, but I tend to think that they may be reliable in some cases. And that's where I kind of get into a head budding with some of my fellow skeptics that don't believe in this stuff. But what I think is happening is that in certain areas where there are very large earthquakes, there is stress and strain on the rock. The rock will release gases. It will change groundwater flow because of the micropores that open up. And you can see strange anomalies in wells or in lakes and rivers or the animals that may pick up these vibrations or these gases. There's also an idea that the air gets ionized above a fault in some cases. And it will create things like a strange cloud or mist or ball lightning, which are called like earthquake lights you may have heard of. So there's all these anomalies and I've always been fascinated by those. And I think that there in some cases there is something there even affecting the ionosphere because the ions go up and they create this strange anomaly in the ionosphere, that's been measured. But it's very unreliable. - Interesting, yeah. Do you think we'll ever get to the point where we have reasonable measurements or will it take putting sensors everywhere to monitor all those potential features that might give away what's coming? - I would like to think that at some point we'll narrow down the way that we can measure more precisely and get a better idea. I think perhaps we're not measuring the right things right now because we don't have enough data to see the patterns. And I don't think that they'll always be reliable because the weather is different each time, that the bedrock is different, the fault lines and the orientations are different. There's so much variables that can go into this one event that we may not be able to do a good job ever but I think we can get a little bit better. - And for the time being, all this data scientists can still point to this as our classic example of what we can't predict yet. - Right. (laughs) - So I want to switch gears a little bit. I enjoyed reading your master thesis. - Oh. - It was, I don't know, I was going to summarize. Maybe I'll give you the chance to do that if you prefer. (laughs) - I'm currently making it into a book. I don't know how that's going to go. I did update it a little bit and make it into a book. What I did was, I wanted to study something interesting and the master's degree was in science and the public. It was an education master's degree focusing on science and the public. And I wanted to do something that was skeptically related but what I was interested in was how these amateur scientists who are investigating paranormal claims are using science or claim to use science and scientific processes. And my idea was that most of them were amateurs with no scientific training. And what they were doing was using science as window dressing. They were using it in a way that made it sound very impressive using the words, the language, the jargon and also using gadgets and concepts, name dropping. They'll say, they'll bring up Tesla or Einstein or Edison or something. Maybe even use equations or ideas about quantum physics, things like that and sure enough, that's pretty much what I found. I actually looked at 1,000 websites of different kinds of paranormal investigation groups and found that about 53, 54% of them claim to use science in some way and almost none of them did it anything close to scientific. But one of my conclusions from that was, at least they're trying. - Yeah, that's fair. - They want to, they just don't know how. And I'm not sure if that's a problem with our education system or the media. And I'm not sure what the answer is on that. But it is kind of upsetting for people who are actually scientists and go through the training to be a scientist to be told, you don't know what you're talking about. I'm a paranormal expert and I know what I'm talking about. - As a good thesis is, there's no personal point of view. You didn't say anything about, this was such a difficult work or anything, but I could kind of get a sense of-- - Sure, I imagine you could. - There was a tremendous data collection process you must have had to go through. Could you share any of the challenges you had in gathering data about these groups? - Right, one thing I couldn't do was the focus on an individual. I had to focus on the group as my unit of study. And the data that I had to collect was the group's image of how they want to present themselves that was available on the internet, which was the main means of people to contact them. They also get contacted locally by word of mouth and things like that. But for the most part, they put this presence out to the public via their webpage. They talk about their goals and their background and their experience. So that's what I used at face value as how they were representing themselves. To me, just an everyday person looking at their website, I was able to gather a very large data set of potential websites for all these groups. And I put them into a database and then I randomized it. And then I went down, numbered it and went down from one to a thousand. And in the most cases, the site was active. In some cases, the site was no longer active and I had to throw that out, go to the next one. So I ended up with about 1300 websites to use, but then I just went through the first 1000. But it was important to randomize them because when I was trying to gather the website data, I'd be looking by state and I didn't want to just focus on one state. I wanted to see which state had the most paranormal groups. It turned out to be Ohio, I think. They were very close. Do you remember it was at Ohio? - Yeah, it was either Ohio or Ohio was the most disjoint from population expectations. - Oh, that's right, yeah, that's right. Yeah, when you get out to the West, you're not gonna have as many because of the population density. But yeah, exactly, in the Eastern states, they're tripping over each other, trying to get to investigate the UFO, the Bigfoot or the haunted house. - It seemed to me, I think you noted this, that there seemed to be a growth in these groups. We're seeing maybe even explosion of more and more every day. Do you think that's an effect of just the growth of the internet, that it's more and more possible for people to communicate and put up websites so we're just measuring it more? Or is something about the internet letting more of them come together? - That's definitely part of it. The internet was game changing, not only for paranormal, people of paranormal interest, but also for skeptics as well. We were able to connect with people who shared our views and we were able to follow our ideas about what we were interested in and find other people that were interested in the same thing. So definitely in the community and networking aspect, that's important. But for the paranormal groups, I would say the number one catalyst for growth was television for them. It was the television shows like Ghost Hunters, Finding Bigfoot. There was a couple of UFO shows. What I found that actually some of the shows, not in the 2000s, but actually before that, things like In Search of and Unsolved Mysteries, were catalysts for people to get interested in this kind of topic. And then it stuck in their mind and often they had a personal experience. And the personal experience caused them to want to investigate it more. And so they can go on the internet now and find this network of people who feels the same way. So it was a series of factors I think they came together that made this very popular. They've also had to do with the economy or the job market. If people were unsatisfied with their daily jobs or keeping a factory, they felt that they could become a weekend Bigfoot hunter and it felt fulfilling to them, which was another concept that I found really interesting from a sociological perspective, something called serious leisure, where people define themselves by how they spend their leisure time more so than their day-to-day career, which I found really interesting. - Yeah, yeah. So there's this phrase, I originally thought you had coined this, which was being scientific. I think you said one of your time talks that it was actually there on urban legend before you got a chance to post it yourself. - I was disappointed, yes. I thought I had, but it made a lot of sense to me because they weren't being scientific as much as they were just sort of trying to impress their listeners, their audience with a pretend way of looking scientific. And this concept has gone round a lot. It's not new, but it's never been given a good name. Richard Feynman used to talk about it as cargo cult science where people would construct what looked like a scientific or a very reasonable facsimile of what they're supposed to do, but there was really no meaning or understanding behind it. That's exactly what was happening here. They were using things that they saw on TV or they were pulling things out of wherever, old books or ideas about quantum physics or Edison's idea about communicating with the dead. Nobody would question them on it. They could just make stuff up. And so they kind of did that. And I'm not sure if just, if fed into the other groups thought that sounded really cool, so they started using it, but it ended up being very circular. Whereas if a piece of new equipment would show up on ghost hunters that week, or we've taken this piece of equipment and we've modified it, so now it's a ghost hunting tool, that would be the thing that all the rest of the ghost hunters would buy the following week from the internet stores. I heard that directly from one of these distributors of these ghost gadgets. So they are very much copycats. And they are not very original. - So there's one challenge I see when people start getting scientific, like when I hear the word quantum, my kind of skeptical ears go right up because very few people I think know how to use that properly. And for whatever reason, the least scientific people seem to have a strong eagerness to adopt that particular word. But on the other hand, if I went over to a college and sat in, I don't know, an advanced biology course, it would probably sound like gibberish to me as well, even though that is good science. Are there good hallmarks or heuristics or rules of thumb that people can use who are, you know, just lay people, don't maybe know all the technical jargon from a field to kind of fine tune their BS meters, or how does someone who is a lay person know whether they're hearing the words of an expert or the words of a person using big words? - Yeah, that is really hard. And I think that that does roll back to the idea that we're not well versed in science as a society. It's almost as if science is the other. It's something separate. It's apart from society. And it's only done by special people who are trained in a special way. And I don't really like that idea. I would prefer that we have something maybe in school called science appreciation, where we're taught, just like we have art appreciation, a history appreciation classes. We're taught that science is these general concepts. It can be complicated, but here are the benefits that we have gained from scientific knowledge and just some basic structure about how science works. I'm not really concerned that people know how far away the sun is from the earth or different kind of animal kingdoms, as long as they know that science is a really good structure that we use to explain the world and that there are rules that we should follow. And then they can always go and look up the information they're interested in it. But I wish it was more in our society. If it was more integrated in our society, I think people would be less amazed by it and dumbfounded by it. They would find it more natural. But some of these words that come out, like people are afraid of the word chemical. - Yeah, yeah. - They don't really know what a chemical is. They think a chemical is bad. Well, I actually wrote a piece about chemical or a chemophobia. And I'm thinking, how do I define a chemical? I don't really know how. Even though I take in chemistry classes, it was very difficult for me to define what a chemical was. If I couldn't define it in a way to explain to the average person, how the heck would they know? They were easily fooled because they knew nothing about it. I think looking at good sources is great, but I don't know, people don't know how to do that. They don't know how to do that either. - I'm not sure we're ever gonna get away with the idea of being informed of the latest news headlines by your sister-in-law or your best friend that calls you up or your Facebook buddies who are just gonna spread this information around. What we can only hope is that people who are interested in the truth about that information go looking for better information about it. - Yeah, absolutely. I think that's great advice. So what's next for you on your skeptical work? - Well, right now I'm content editor of randy.org. I'm working on the content that comes out of the James Randy Educational Foundation and doing a lot of content there myself and soliciting content from other people, some good stuff, and we're working on planning the next amazing meeting, which is exciting. And so that takes up a good bit of my time. I still keep up on doubtful news because there's a lot of stories that I like to put up on doubtful news that wouldn't be good anyplace else. I can't help but put them up because I find them really interesting. And I think people now have come to rely on the site for their weird news. So I'm happy to do that. But for the most part, I do projects at home here. I get interested in various subjects. I recently was researching the idea of lay lines as a paranormal conduit. And that has to do with some archeological history and possible geologic connections. And it got into a paranormal vein many decades ago when somebody thought it was the earth currents flowing for these lay lines. So it went off into the woo. And I started to trace back what could be the origin of that. So I'll eventually be writing that up. But for the most part, I just go where things take me. And if I feel like writing about it, if I have an interest in it and I'll go for it and write about it. - So I know people can obviously go over to doubtfulnews.com. Are you on Twitter or any else? Any other places people should follow you? - Yes, I'm on Twitter at I doubt it. And I also have my own website at sharingahill.com where people could see where occasionally I'll write for my own blog, some silly stuff about book reviews that those aren't silly, those are serious. People do send me their books to review. So I like to review books. And I'll put my book reviews up there but I'll also have a rant every now and then that I don't feel as appropriate to be any place but my own website. - Well, great. Thank you so much for your time today, Sharon. This has been a great chat. I'm sure my listeners are gonna really enjoy. - Oh, thanks Kyle. It was my pleasure. Yeah, let me know when the book comes together and I'll do some, either have you back or at least make an announcement. - That'll be a while, I'm sure. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)