Paranormalists Are Running Out Of Ideas: SLIders

Paranormal stuff sometimes seems to get more ridiculous by the day. The credulous asshats of the world come up with totally random and ignorant shit hour after hour, day after day, seemingly without coming up for breath. One of the dumbest things I've had the privilege to come across since I began my somewhat-less-than-illustrious blogging career is what some silly ass somewhere is calling "The Streetlight Phenomenon." Those that experience the phenomenon are known, among the cool kids, as "SLIders."

I'd like to make a brief digression and talk, for a moment, about my metric for determining the kind of stuff that goes into a Paranormalists Are Running Out Of Ideas (PAROOI?) post. I've thought about how I decide what to write these posts about and realized that it isn't doesn't so much come out of a process of rational decision-making and fact crunching. That most certainly comes later, but my initial yardstick for using something as an example of paranormal barrel-scraping is if it piques in me the following reaction:

"Jesus. That's lame as hell."

Of course, once I realized that was the impetus to post on something, I broke down why certain topics in the paranormal provoked such a reaction. Basically, the Out of Ideas posts are subjects that are so silly, so uncreative, so monumentally self-evidently false, in short, so very fucking lame, that they demonstrate a complete lack of interesting ideas from the paranormalists responsible for them. They make me think "Come on. You don't really believe that, do you?"

Today's is one of the worst I've seen. Unlike rods or orbs, which sprung from the increasingly desperate fields of UFOlogy and ghost hunting respectively, fields that have histories rife with creative hoaxes and compelling (if false as hell) mythologies, SLIders and The Streetlight Phenomenon are apropos of abolutely nothing. They were, so far as I can tell, fully birthed fom an ass one day in their entirety, like Athena from the head of Zeus, owing nothing to earlier crazy paranormal silliness. Somebody made one faulty association, fought a few losing rounds with confirmation bias, and lo and behold, a new paranormal phenomenon splatted wetly onto the concrete and entered the idiot lexicon.

But just what are SLIders? What is The Streetlight Phenomenon?

I'm glad you asked.

Says some asshat somewhere (from the above About.com link):

Around five years ago, I have noticed that at times while I am driving down the road at night a street light will go out as I am passing below it. It happens frequently and seems to be happening more.

Capital-L Lame.

So sometimes you pass under streetlights and they go off. Good for you. So now you're using this as evidence that you're experiencing some sort of psychic phenomenon.

Like paranormalists everywhere, these folks have put the cart before the horse. They're so desperate to believe that their pet anomalies are psychic phenomena that they don't even stop to ask whether or not there is an actual anomaly.

Ghost hunters might be the best example of this: they wave around EMF meters and assume that any random spike they can't personally explain is anomalous, then use that "anomaly" to support the ghost hypothesis. The problem is that the whole fucking world is lousy with fluctuating electromagnetism, and a modern house wired for electricity, cable, and internet is even lousier. They take something that just might be completely normal, call it anomalous, and use it as evidence for their preconceived belief. They believe the EMF spike to be anomalous because of their belief in ghosts, then they turn around and claim that they believe in ghosts because of all the EMF spikes (and EVP and "experiences" and other such things that also fall into that circular relationship).

But surely the SLIders aren't guilty of the same thing, are they?

It has been giving me the creeps. If it happened only once or on very rare occasions, I don't think I would have given it a thought. However, it happens about once or twice a week. Could it be some electronic thing or could it be something less explainable?

Oh, well the fact that it happens all the fucking time makes it completely different, since people and their perceptions and memories are, after all, infallible.

Wait a minute. That's not true at all.

This is a textbook case of confirmation bias and the file drawer effect. The schmoe in question noticed this happening a time or two and then, for some reason creeped by it, watched for it in the future. This is a phenomenon that is far more parsimoniously explained by noticing X rather than not-X and remembering X more often than not-X because one is looking for X to occur.

Of course, I would be remiss to not listen to the evidence put forward by the claimants:

The phenomenon is known as street lamp interference, or SLI, and it possibly is a psychic event that is just beginning to be recognized and studied. Like most phenomena of this type, the evidence is almost exclusively anecdotal.

So that's that. People say it happens, therefore we must investigate it.

Are you fucking kidding me?

They even came up with a technical-sounding name, "Street Light Interference," for this supposed occurence. This shows not only a complete and total lack of skepticism but, arguably, a willingness and desire to believe anything that knocks on one's door claiming to be a new psychic phenomenon.

They did not ask "Hmm...Are these people reporting accurately?" They simply believed credulously every story that came their way from ignorant yahoos who pay too much damn attention to streetlights.

And goddammit, you should only be allowed to call yourself a "Slider" if you hop between parallel realities with Gimli the dwarf, a vaguley attractive lady, and Black Elvis.

The writer of the article also lists a few other things that self-proclaimed SLIders say occur in their vicinity:

* Appliances such as lamps and TVs go on and off without being touched.
* Lightbulbs constantly blow when the SLIder tries to turn them off or on.
* Volume levels change on TVs, radios, and CD players.
* Watches stop working.
* Children's electronic toys start by themselves when the SLIder is present.
* Credit cards and other magnetically encoded cards are damaged or erased when in their possession.

What strikes me here is a second assumption of infallibility: not only are a person's perceptions and memory inafallibly with regards to their SLI experiences, any electronic technology is, too. If it breaks, then it can't have been a problem with the toy or the lamp or the watch. It had to be some as-yet unexplained problem with the person who was around when it broke.

Come on, people. Shit breaks. Get over it. Modern electronics are becoming increasingly complicated and fragile. Sometimes my TV acts wonky for no reason. Last week the TV at work turned itself off and when I turned it back on it deactivated itself again. Repeated trials demonstrated a pattern: I could unplug the TV, plug it back in, and turn it on three times. Each time it would immediately turn itself back off. It would not turn on a fourth time. I staggered the three, thinking it was a timing issue, that three times was all I could get before the juice stopped flowing, but it wasn't so. Three times, then done, until I unplugged and replugged it again.

A few hours later, it spontaneously stopped misbehaving.

Electronic devices misbehave like that all the time. Even the simplest item these days involves a webwork of tiny, intricate circutry. A kid's LCD game today is more complicated than a TV from thirty years ago. It is absolutely no wonder than sometimes they go on the fritz for no discernable reason.

Just because you're on the lookout for these things and thus notice them more than the rest of us doesn't mean you're somehow special and psychic, that you cause the problems. It means you notice them more.

It has also occured to me that the type of person who honestly contemplates that they are somehow magically responsible for streetlamps flashing off, the type of person to whom modern electronics are an insoluble mystery, also might be the type of person who programs or uses appliances incorrectly, or who installs a lightbulb that far exceeds the recommended wattage of the lamp being used.

More from the article:

Any attempt to pinpoint a cause for SLI at this point would be mere speculation without a thorough scientific investigation.

Wrong. That there is a phenomenon at all is mere speculation. You don't need a full-fledge investigation to be able to mount a parsimonious explanation that doesn't require psychic powers.

The problem with such investigations, as with many forms of psychic phenomena, is that they are very difficult to reproduce in a laboratory.

I wonder why that is?

They seem to happen spontaneously without the deliberate intention of the SLIder. In fact, the SLIder, according to some informal tests, are usually unable to create the effect on demand.

That is probably because they are, and I'm just spitballing here, fucking imagining it.

A reasonable speculation for the effect, if it is a real one, might have something to do with the electronic impulses of the brain. All of our thoughts and movements are the result of electrical impulses that the brain generates. At present it is known that these measurable impulses only have an effect within an individual's body, but is it possible that they could have an effect outside the body - a kind of remote control?

Possible? Maybe. But who cares? The question should be "is it probable?" and the answer is clearly "No."

From there they mention the PEAR labs, which is an immediate tipoff to bullshit. Those people would do shoddy, poorly controlled research on my left boot if I told them that it sings opera at night. Citing them does more to hurt a case than help it. And yet they claim:

This research - and research being conducted at other laboratories around the world - are beginning to reveal, in scientific terms, the reality of such psychic phenomena as ESP, telekinesis and soon, perhaps, SLI.

No, it fucking is not. It is poor research built around confirming biases and preconceived notions rather than falsifying them. It is biased, badly constructed, and run by pseudoscientific imbeciles.

But then, a ray of hope:

A research project into SLI has been started by Dr. Richard Wiseman at the University of Berkfordshire in England.

If Wiseman's digging into it, chances are we'll have some hard data to demonstrate the complete lameness of SLI someday. Unfortunately, they seem to be stretching his research to include their particular brand of lameness when, as far as I can tell, it doesn't even apply to SLI:

Wiseman recently made the newspapers with a project to test ESP with a kiosk-type machine - called The Mind Machine - that he set up in various locations around England to collect a large amount of data about the possible psychic abilities of the general public.

This seems to be only somewhat indirectly related to SLI in that they are claiming SLI is a psychic phenomenon.

Of course, then they're back to retardation, quoting some woman named Hillary Evans:

"It's quite obvious from the letters I get," Evans told CNN, "that these people are perfectly healthy, normal people. It's just that they have some kind of ability... just a gift they've got. It may not be a gift they would like to have."

I'll say it again in case the morons still haven't heard: Before you start talking about amazing anomalies and the powers they represent, make sure you're dealing with an actual anomaly.

The real death knell for this "phenomenon," however, doesn't require Dr. Richard Wiseman or any systematic research whatsoever. All it requires is a basic knowledge of streetlamp technology and human psychology. See, when sodium vapor streetlamps reach the end of their lifetimes, they exhibit what is called "cycling:" that is, they turn on and off regularly until they burn out entirely. This is just how the damn things work.

It also pays to remember that there are thousands upon thousands of streetlamps across the country and the world. People tend to remember weird stuff more than common stuff, so someone driving across town at night will remember "That streetlamp turned off when I was under it" because it was an exception to normalcy, but not remember "The other 499 I drove under did not." That is normal.

What is not normal is to interpret that kind of statistical outlier as evidence that you, the driver, are somehow magical or special, that you have a power or gift or ability that others lack, something that allows you to perform superhuman feats of electronic manipulation. Not only is it not normal, it is self-centered, self-serving, egotistical wishful thinking, and it is wishful thinking with one of the lamest possible justifications I have ever seen.

Proof yet again that paranormalists are running out of ideas.