Weird and Wonderful Communications

Skeptic Steven Novella recently published an interesting open letter to cranks. In it he speaks in a very forthright, honest way about people who email him and pronounce that they have figured out something that overturns science, or have single-handedly solved one of science's many unsolved puzzles. Steven explains in the letter about the importance of peer review, and talks of the arrogance of those who think they're smarter than the combined wisdom of the world's experts. He makes a really good point that the proper route to making your claims public, and ensuring they are properly vetted and tested, is a lot of hard work - and it's this hard work that cranks are keen to bypass, often preferring to instead jump straight to making claims without designing experiments, and publishing books rather than writing scholarly articles.

Steven Novella

Last week I was contacted a couple of times (although not by cranks) as a result of articles I've written in the past.

The first contact was a phone call asking to talk to Father John. It took me a few seconds to realise that the person on the other end of the phone was a “true believer” wanting to talk with Father John Rea, a Catholic faith healer. A few years ago I wrote an article about my visit to be healed by Father John, where I talked about how he purports to heal, and I went up for healing from him myself. From my article:

John reads out a list of conditions, and for each condition he gives some clues as to who the person or people who are suffering might be. Some were fairly benign - RSI, back pain, etc - but others were much more serious, such as cancer and leukemia. When you hear something that is close to being a match to either you or someone you know, you own that "word" and it will come true. It was stressed that what was said might not be exactly correct, and that you should believe it's for you if parts of it matched for you.

The caller must have found a copy of that article on my personal website, and then clicked on the site's Contact page and found my mobile number. Erroneously thinking that I must be connected to Father John in some way, she called me up. Despite the fact that Father John has absolutely no ability to heal anyone through prayer, and he's likely to be doing more harm than good with his claims of prayer being able to heal all illnesses including cancer, I was polite enough to find the correct phone number for her.

The second contact is not really skeptical, but I thought it might be of interest to readers anyway. A few years ago I worked on a fun project for the company I was working for at the time, reverse engineering a type of computer file used to diagnose issues with server hardware. Although I never managed to finish the project, I did write up my findings in a blog post in case they were useful to anyone else. Well it turns out that in Russia, where they're currently dealing with the impact of wide-ranging sanctions, someone is keen to see me finish off my project so that they can continue to repair this hardware without official support:

_Hello Mark!

I have recently found your blog post back from January 2020. I find it very attractive for my current job duties. I was working for since 2006 as a support specialist. Now has left Russia because of war in Ukraine and I was invited to join a support company to help customers with technical support of their hardware.

…

I would greatly appreciate your help in developing the tool, so that we can provide technical support for our customers and other users better understand what they have and how it works. Please, let me know if you are interested in such a collaboration.

Thanks!

With best regards,

Ivan_

Needless to say I have not responded to, and will not be responding to, this email.