General Discussion
sb admin | March 23, 2008Often in the discussion of cult medicines such as homeopathy, acupuncture, and reiki, supporters fall back on "the wisdom of the ancients". This raises a question. Since "the ancients" had it wrong (i.e. their belief systems could not effectively treat disease), were they just stupid?
Any of my historian readers already know the answer, but it's worth going over.
Our forebears were neither more nor less intelligent that we (unless you go back about 3 or 4 million years---that gets rather dicey). They were literate, intelligent, and damn good thinkers. They just had limits to their ability to…
denialism | March 20, 2008Everyone please welcome PalMD of WhiteCoatUnderGround.
I've been enjoying his writing for quite some time and think that he gets what the mission of denialism blog is all about.
He has of course introduced himself, and I think in just a few posts you'll see why he's a wonderful asset to the sb team.
denialism | March 20, 2008Now that PZ, Brian, and ERV have all weighed in on whether Chris Mooney's piece on crank enablers is right or not, let me lay out my operational strategy as an anti-denialist writer.
It is true that repetition of denialist arguments is a strategic error, and that the repeition itself can reinforce their arguments. One has to consider this when dealing with nonsense and debunking it not to fall in the trap of just fisking it, which can defeat the purpose of your writing - to decrease the amount of BS in the world.
However, a knowledge of the history of denialism is of utility in this…
denialism | February 18, 2008One of the few advantages of having no time is that when I do get around to sorting through my RSS feeds of various denialists is that I end up seeing patterns I didn't observe as much when I tracked these jokers day-to-day. So, inspired by BPSDB I decided I'm going to share some generalizations.
For one, I feel rewarded by my previous study of denialists and cranks. Given that I have no time to deal with the incredible mass of BS that they generate daily, looking through their output I don't feel particularly inspired to challenge anything in particular they have to say. After all, it's…
denialism | December 25, 2007I had an interesting X-mas week, hanging out with the parents, seeing patients at my mom's general practice and a very different set of patients in clinical studies at the NIH with my father. That, studying, and fulfilling the role of the good son by fixing every piece of technology in the parents' house has been keeping me busy.
And then there was the fun of helping deliver my mom's portuguese water dogs. This further reinforced my feeling that the human reproduction could be improved after watching this dog deliver puppy after puppy about twenty minutes apart with, on average, about 5…
denialism | December 22, 2007Dan Solove brings up some privacy issues with using sitemeter on blogs:
But Site Meter also lists the IP address of each visitor, something that the public really doesn't need to see. An IP address is a unique numerical identifier that is assigned to every computer connected to the Web. It doesn't reveal your name, but it can be used to trace back to the specific computer you used or be linked to your account with an ISP. In other words, your IP address can be used to find out who you are.
...
So all this made me realize that we do have some data about you and we need to construct a privacy…
denialism | December 13, 2007Reading about the latest atrocity by KBR that is the cover up of a rape of a US citizen by its contractors (apparently one of many), I ask the lawyers a question. Surely there is enough on KBR (formerly known as the evil wing of Halliburton - now independent) now to get a RICO indictment on them, correct?
I realize they do this all overseas where they apparently enjoy complete immunity from anything ranging from fraud to cannibalism. But I have difficulty believing that they manage to keep 100% of their criminal misbehavior overseas. I mean, every time we hear some bad news about…
denialism | December 10, 2007We must adapt to the fact that over the last few decades it has become critical that our politicians and policymakers understand science and implement policy that is consistent with scientific facts. And it is past time that we made science enough of a priority to merit a presidential debate on science. The need is clear, these days policymakers must be able to respond in an informed fashion to new technologies, new scientific findings, and potential disasters (such as climate change). Despite the need for a scientifically-literate political leadership, we have a president who says the…
denialism | December 6, 2007Well today is my thesis defense day. For those who are unfamiliar with the process, this is how it works at least at my university.
When you start out in a lab you do the experiments your boss tells you to do, with the goal of picking up a project. This usually involves taking up where another graduate student or post-doc left off, or reading the literature in your field and figuring out an important question to answer. Depending on how many years its been since your boss handled a pipette, he/she will suggest experiments that range from next to impossible to impossible. You spend a year…
denialism | November 23, 2007Can I tell you how boring I find the fine-tuning argument? Paul Davies is the latest to use it and in the NYT no less. Davies' argument depends on whether you believe his initial assertion that science fundamentally rests on faith:
The problem with this neat separation into "non-overlapping magisteria," as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn't be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of…
denialism | November 12, 2007So nothing special for today, I'm too busy with meatworld, but you might enjoy these two links:
Teen sex has been wronged by a puritanical society - it appears teens who have sex earlier are less likely to become delinquents (however I suspect it ignores that they are also more likely to get knocked up). This makes sense to me though. Why bother with drugs, crime, and other delinquent behavior when you've got sex?
Second we have news that Chiropracters might also be useless for back pain. Ouch, now that hurts. The last thing left to chiropractors that seemed to have any validity (…
denialism | November 1, 2007 The question this month is "Which parts of the human body could you design better?"
This is a great question, because a lot of aspects of the human body represent what worked well enough for survival, not necessarily what works best. Therefore the engineering ends up being rather ramshackle, and convoluted, and sometimes, downright terrible.
For instance, who can look at this image - an anatomical model of human pregnancy at term, and not think this is really, really stupid engineering.
(image via wikipedia)
The very first thing I would change would be the female reproductive system.…
denialism | October 29, 2007BPR3, or Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting has announced the release of their new icons. For those of you who don't know what this is all about, it's pretty simple. When we're not making up lolcats, and being all super-serious, we want to have a simple way to communicate to the audience that we're discussing the scientific literature itself. That is, we're not just reacting to idiotic press releases, poorly-written articles in major newspapers, or the latest misunderstanding of science by some crank. We're actually reading the science before we pontificate about it.
This…
denialism | October 26, 2007Are placebo's really effective? So asks Darshak Sanghavi in Slate, citing this study from 2001 that shows the placebo effect, compared to passive observation, to be relatively minor for improvements in pain or objective measures of health.
This is an interesting topic, but unfortunately, a really bad article. Given how many alties love to stress the role of placebo and its apparent proof of the benefit of positive thinking, we should critically re-evaluate the evidence that placebos on their own can do anything more than improve subjective symptoms. Although there is a fair amount of proof…
denialism | October 24, 2007Orac has brought up the interesting point that debating the homeopaths at U. Conn might not be a good idea.
On a related note, in a post derriding attacks on consensus I was asked by commenters if isn't it incumbent on science to constantly respond to debate; to never let scientific questions be fully settled. And I understand where they're coming from. These ideas represent the enlightened ideals of scientific inquiry, free speech, and fundamental fairness.
However, they're also hopelessly misplaced in regard to the problem at hand. That is, denialists, cranks, quacks, etc., are not…
denialism | October 8, 2007Noted sockpuppet and sniveler Lee Siegel warns us that the new militant atheists may be closing the book on imagination. And for some reason the LA Times saw fit to publish this tripe.
In the last few years, so many books have rolled off the presses challenging God, belief and religion itself (by Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Victor Stenger and Christopher Hitchens, among others) that a visitor from another planet might think America was in the iron throes of priestly repression. You'd never know that we live in the age of Paris Hilton, HBO, Internet porn and flip-flops. The…
denialism | October 2, 2007I thought for sure the idiotic slugs that pass for security in our airports had mishandled this woman resulting in her death when they said she strangled herself while trying to escape from handcuffs. However, Slate reports indeed you can manage to screw up this maneuver and contort yourself into such a position. They also linked this video
showing how the double-jointed might attempt this maneuver, while warning people not to try it at home with handcuffs and asphyxiate themselves like this woman did.
Not that I'm saying this lets the cops entirely off the hook, but I have to admit…
denialism | September 20, 2007It looks like it will be two announcements of new sciblings today. We have A Few Things Ill Considered joining us at Scienceblogs. It's a climate science/debunking blog I've been familiar with for a while, and author of the excellent Howto talk to a climate skeptic.
Welcome!
denialism | September 20, 2007Welcome Sciencewoman to the block, as she starts up her new blog here. I'm continually impressed with our Sb overlords and their ability to acquire a diverse set of talented individuals. It seems they're doing a better job the The Scientist as some of my sciblings have pointed out.
denialism | September 20, 2007For anyone curious about complexity, genome size, and non-coding or "junk" DNA, there are a number of good posts on the topic at Genomicron.
See in particular Junk DNA: let me say it one more time fand Function, non-function, some function: a brief history of junk DNA for a discussion of what junk DNA is, what it means for biology, and why creationists that have made hay out of it are purposefully misunderstanding and misrepresenting it.
And What's wrong with this figure? for a discussion on a common mistake in assuming that genome size automatically means increasingly complex organisms.
Good…