Pareidolia!

Last week I talked a great deal about audio pareidolia and audio illusions generally. This week I want to spend some time on the visual. As a reminder, Pareidolia is a phenomenon in which vague or random stimuli are perceived as significant or meaningful.

For some reason I have been running across many examples of visual pareidolia, so I thought I would share them on the blog. This first image is a nice example of pareidolia on a tree:

I assume everyone can see the owl face in the tree.
This next example of pareidolia comes from an overhead image of some flamingos, ironically in the shape of a flamingo:

This last image is one of the most common types of pareidolia, an image in the clouds:

So, there are three nice examples of visual pareidolia. I will post more visual illusions in the upcoming days.

The McGurk Effect

On the webpage were I found the example of audio pareidolia I discussed last time, there was also a video talking about something I had never heard of before, the McGurk effect. The video does an excellent job explaining the effect and what is going on with it:

There are a few interesting points from this video that I wanted to highlight. First, this effect really demonstrates the role our brains play in constructing our experience of the external world. The brain takes in stimuli from the various senses, and then seeks to integrate those stimuli into a cohesive whole which is what we then experience. We do not directly access the world through our senses, rather our brains construct the reality we experience. A second interesting feature of the McGurk effect is that it demonstrates the primacy of visual stimuli over auditory stimuli. When there is a conflict between the two (as when we hear the word "ba" but see the speaker moving his lips as if he were saying "fa") our brain privileges the visual and corrects what we hear to match what we are seeing. This is closely related to the audio pareidolia I discussed in my previous post where the captioning really assists one in hearing what is being sung. A third interesting feature of the McGurk effect is that this is a perceptual illusion that we can't avoid hearing. Even if we know that the word being said is "ba," when our eyes see the lip movement for "fa" we can't help by hearing "fa." This demonstrates that even when our perceptual faculties are functioning perfectly, we can still succumb to systematic unavoidable errors.

The take away from this (as with all perceptual illusions) is that we should recognize the unreliability of our experience and the experience of others. This is why when someone relates some incredible, unbelievable experience that they had, we should be skeptical about the veracity of that experience. This is also why anecdotes and eyewitness accounts are so unreliable.

Green Chalk Can Taste Like Hippies

In a previous post I discussed the phenomena of pareidolia, which is when our brain interprets random stimuli as being meaningful or significant. This phenomena is most common with visual perception, but it also occurs with auditory perception. Here is a funny example:

The song in question is "O Fortuna" and you have probably heard it before in movies and other media. It is based on a Latin poem written in the 13th Century and then set to music by Carl Orff in the 1930's. What I find interesting about this example of pareidolia is the role that the captioning plays. I have heard this song numerous times, but I never really paid attention to the lyrics until I came across this video. With the captions in front of me it then becomes very hard to not hear silly things in the song. And this suggests how our brains construct reality for us, taking in information from all the senses and then processing it to create a unified, meaningful experience of the world around us. I will talk more about this in subsequent posts.

Here are some other good examples of audio pareidolia. If anyone has any other examples, or perhaps song lyrics that you have always misheard, I would love to hear about them in the comments.

Sen. Paul, perhaps you should educate yourself before you get angry.

We live in a very interesting time in American politics. We live in a time when people who are the most outraged about an issue are also the people who know the least about it. As a case in point, watch this exchange between Sen. Rand Paul and Paul Krugman about the number of public employees in the US under Bush and Obama:

Sen. Paul is very concerned about the size of the government, but as Krugman notes in the video and at his blog, the size of the government has shrunk dramatically under Pres. Obama. In fact, as Krugman argues, this is one of the major reasons the recession has dragged on for so long. Now in fairness to Sen. Paul, employment at the federal level has increased slightly from about 2.77 million in 2008 to about 2.8 million now, but that certainly isn't an "enormous" growth of government as Sen. Paul suggests. Furthermore, given that state and local governments have been slashing jobs at an enormous rate, the total number of government employees (Federal, State and Local combined) is down about 600,000.

Yet, despite these facts, Sen. Paul seems outraged at the size of the government. What are we to do when people become outraged about topics they appear to know nothing about? Our post-truth election continues.

Red Herrings in AP "Fact-Checking"

Fact-Checking is apparently a big thing these days (particularly in the wake of Paul Ryan's falsehood-filled speech at the Republican National Convention), with everyone trying to get in on the game. However, not all fact-checkers are created equal. In the AP "Fact-Checking" of Bill Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention by Matt Apuzzo, there is a great example of a Red Herring:

CLINTON: "Their campaign pollster said, 'We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.' Now that is true. I couldn't have said it better myself — I just hope you remember that every time you see the ad."
THE FACTS: Clinton, who famously finger-wagged a denial on national television about his sexual relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky and was subsequently impeached in the House on a perjury charge, has had his own uncomfortable moments over telling the truth. "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," Clinton told television viewers. Later, after he was forced to testify to a grand jury, Clinton said his statements were "legally accurate" but also allowed that he "misled people, including even my wife."

As you can see, this comment on the speech really doesn't address the claim that Bill Clinton made, but rather tries to change the subject by introducing an irrelevant consideration, namely Bill Clinton's conduct during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. While it is true that Clinton has been deceptive and slippery in the past, that is completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not the Romney campaign is being honest. The fact is, Romney's campaign manager did say the quote attributed to him, and for the AP to ignore that and instead start talking about the Lewinsky affair is a perfect example of a Red Herring.

h/t Alex Pareene

Same-Sex Marriage Lies and Distortions

On the Minnesota ballot in November is a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage by defining marriage as between one man and one woman. As is always the case when these issues come up a great deal of money is spent by people on both sides of the campaign. One group in favor of the proposed amendment is Minnesota for Marriage which has produced a series of web videos arguing in favor of the proposed amendment. In their latest video they have invoked a recent study that they claim shows that couples raised by homosexual parents do far worse on a variety of measures than children raised by heterosexual parents. Watch the video, and then I will discuss a fallacy committed by it.

The primary fallacy committed in this video is the Suppression of Relevant Data. In particular, the actual results of the study are seriously misrepresented in the video. In particular, what the video fails to mention is that the study does not actually compare children raised by heterosexual parents with children raised by homosexual parents. Instead, it is a study of children raised in families where one of the parents engaged in a same-sex affair, often resulting in the destruction of the that family unit. In particular, the study only looks at children born between 1971 and 1994, a period when gay marriage was illegal. The study then looks at marriages in which at least one of the partners had homosexual tendencies that they suppressed in order to lead a "normal" life. As is no surprise, for many of these people the burdens of a sham marriage and the pressures to hide their true desires led them to act out in various ways that were destructive of that marriage; a destruction that naturally had negative impacts on the children born of that union. In effect then, what the study shows is that children from broken households do worse than children from intact households, a conclusion that should surprise no one. The study is criticized in Slate by William Saletan who does a good job pointing out the methodological issues with the study that lead groups like Minnesota for Marriage to misrepresent the results of the study. Saletan concludes by suggesting that what the study really shows is that:

Kids do better when they have two committed parents, a biological connection, and a stable home. If that’s good advice for straights, it’s good advice for gays, too.

This seems accurate, but that is a point that Minnesota for Marriage ignores by suppressing the actual details of the study in order to draw their own ideological conclusions.

Paul Ryan's Inconsistent Address

Much ink has been spilled concerning the various lies and distortions in Paul Ryan's address at the Republican National Convention, but I want to focus on an Inconsistency he commits. As a reminder, Inconsistency occurs when one part of a persons argument contradicts another part of that argument. Let's look at the relevant passages (a transcript can be found here). First, Ryan attacks Obama for cutting $716 billion from Medicare (it is actually not a cut, but a plan to reform Medicare Advantage reduce reimbursement rates to doctors, thereby saving $716 billion). About this, Ryan said:

You see, even with all the hidden taxes to pay for the health care takeover, even with new taxes on nearly a million small businesses, the planners in Washington still didn't have enough money. They needed more. They needed hundreds of billions more. So, they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama. An obligation we have to our parents and grandparents is being sacrificed, all to pay for a new entitlement we didn't even ask for. The greatest threat to Medicare is Obamacare, and we're going to stop it.
In Congress, when they take out the heavy books and wall charts about Medicare, my thoughts go back to a house on Garfield Street in Janesville. My wonderful grandma, Janet, had Alzheimer's and moved in with Mom and me. Though she felt lost at times, we did all the little things that made her feel loved.
We had help from Medicare, and it was there, just like it's there for my Mom today. Medicare is a promise, and we will honor it. A Romney-Ryan administration will protect and strengthen Medicare, for my Mom's generation, for my generation, and for my kids and yours.

Ignoring for the moment that Ryan's own budget plan makes nearly identical cuts, and that restoring such cuts would actually speed up the point at which Medicare would become insolvent and increase premiums for seniors, he goes in in the speech to argue for the need to cut entitlements:

None of us have to settle for the best this administration offers – a dull, adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us.

So, he will defend entitlements like Medicare by restoring a cut made to it, thereby increasing its size, but at the same time will reduce entitlements.  I think Matt Taibbi summarized this argument best as:

My fellow Americans, whatever Barack Obama is doing with Medicare, it's bad, and we promise to reverse it!
(APPLAUSE)
And not only that, we'll go even further in cutting wasteful entitlements from our bloated government budget!
(APPLAUSE)

And here we can clearly see the inconsistency in the argument. On one hand he will defend entitlements, but on the other hand he will cut them.  So, which one is it?