Heidi Stevenson

Heidi Stevenson amuses me. The reasons are legion. Be it the time when Heidi lectured scientists on anecdotal evidence (which she values far more highly than scientists, of course, declaring it the "basis of all knowledge"); launched a vile and nonsensical attack on Stephen Barrett; argued against prior plausibility with using a straw man argument so massive that if it were set on fire (which she did) it could be seen from space; or made an even more idiotic argument to try to "prove" that wi-fi signals and EMF cause autism, Heidi never fails to deliver the stupid in mass quantities of black…

No matter how you slice it, I've been at this blogging thing a long time. it's been over seven years now. It's been even longer than that, though, because before that cold gray Saturday afternoon in September when I started farting around with Blogger and ended giving birth to the first iteration of Respectful Insolence, I had been sparring with quacks, cranks, and various other promoters of pseudoscience for at least five years before. Even after all that time, however, it's humbling and amazing to contemplate that I haven't seen it all, no matter how much at times I might feel that I have.…

About three weeks ago, fresh after having experienced my own attack by anti-vaccine activists who tried to get me fired, I noticed that Doctors Data was doing what cranks and crank organizations can't resist doing when they face scientific criticism, namely to lash out. Such lashing out can take many forms. In my case, as I mentioned, the cranks were the anti-vaccine loons at Age of Autism, and the attack consisted of an e-mail campaign against me to the board of directors of my university. To Dr. Barrett, who, thanks to his many more years taking on medical pseudoscience than I, is far more…