Entangled Minds

Upon witnessing Mozart's first Viennese opera, "Die Entführung aus dem Serail," Emperor Joseph II reportedly offered the famous criticism, "Too many notes, my dear Mozart." In a recent review of Entangled Minds on Amazon.com, I am admonished with a similar criticism. The reviewer writes, in part: When I bought this book, I was fully ready to accept every word of it. But, as I read, I found Radin's numbers, especially his quantitative statistics of probabilities, rather ridiculous. 35 trillion-to-one against chance?? Come on. Mr Radin says his experiments gave a 56% rate of success (with 50% being chance). Come on. Chance is not hardcore. Sometimes chance is 42%, sometimes it's 56%. 6% over chance is not scientific evidence of anything. Come on ... And so on, in a similar vein. What comes to mind is the Emperor's suggestion (from the movie Amadeus ), that Mozart "just cut a few [notes] and it will be perfect." To this Mozart responds, "...

I sometimes receive comments via email and on this blog along the lines of "What do you think about the criticisms of skeptic X on web site Y?" The answer is "Not much." In most cases I've found it to be a waste of time to respond to long-winded, free-ranging critiques appearing on blogs and in magazines. Articles published in journals aren't perfect either, but at least they provide a first-pass verification that the critiques seemed reasonable to a few referees. One hopes that the selected referees were knowledgeable about the topic at hand, which is not always the case, but compared to the level of discourse one sees in most op-eds, journal articles are a far superior way to debate controversial topics. So my response to most web critiques is this: If the author of a detailed critique is confident about their opinion, then they should publish it in a journal. Sometimes when I run across a comment on a web page that is flat wrong, and it's easy to corr...