Pseudoscience
oracknows | July 16, 2009If there was one thing about going to TAM7 last week, it was the opportunity to contemplate among a thousand fellow skeptics just what critical thinking and reason mean. If there's one thing about woo, pseudoscience, and conspiracy theories in all their forms, it's not just a lack of critical thinking and a plethora of logical fallacies. More importantly, it's the question, "How do we know what we know?" Certainly science is the primary means by which we explore the natural world and make conclusions about how it works, however imperfect they may be, but not everyone uses science, reason, and…
oracknows | July 8, 2009Today, I'm leaving for The Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas. I can't wait to get there. Believe it or not, I'll even be on a panel! While I'm there I'll probably manage to do a new post or two, but, in the meantime, while I'm away communing with fellow skeptics at TAM7, I'll be reposting some Classic Insolence from the month of July in years past. (After all, if you haven't been following this blog at least a year, it'll be new to you. And if you have I hope you enjoy it again.) This particular post first appeared in July 2007.
This sort of thing makes one wonder if the personification of…
oracknows | July 1, 2009Remember Sharyl Attkisson?
She's the CBS reporter who can really bring home the crazy when it comes to vaccines and autism, laying down some serious crankery (complete with many logical fallacies) and hit pieces on Dr. Paul Offit. Indeed, at times she gives Mike Adams a run for his money when it comes to laying down the pseudoscience and crankery. Worse, she appears to be in bed with at least one of the bloggers at the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism for the purpose of bringing antivaccination lunacy to the masses by assisting them in smearing Voices for Vaccines. Indeed, aside from…
oracknows | June 18, 2009
Last night, I was sitting on the couch, my laptop, appropriately enough, on my lap creating my paean to Homeopathy Awareness Week in which I had a little fun discussing homeopathic plutonium. Because Homeopathy Awareness week is not yet over, I'll probably have one more bit of fun at the expense of The One Woo To Rule Them All before it's over. However, while I was getting into the possibilities suggested to me by diluting and succussing plutonium in order to treat all sorts of "Pluto-y" illnesses, I happened to flip through the channels, when what to my wondering eyes should appear but a…
oracknows | June 11, 2009I know I've been very hard on Oprah Winfrey the last couple of weeks, taking her to task for her promotion on her show of medicine that is at best dubious and at worst quackery, as promoted by frequent guests like Suzanne Somers, Dr. Christiane Northrup, and the queen of the anti-vaccine movement, Jenny "I'm not anti-vaccine but would never, ever vaccinate" McCarthy. Not that Oprah cares. After all, she's Oprah, and I'm only a lowly blogger who, although having one of the top medical blogs out there, is as an ant to Oprah's elephant of a media empire. Still, NEWSWEEK did a fantastic expose of…
oracknows | June 7, 2009I'm busy working on a talk today, but there is a tidbit that lends itself to a brief (and hopefully amusing and educational) Sunday exercise. It comes, not surprisingly, from the anti-vaccine blog Age of Autism. It doesn't actually have anything to do with vaccines per se, but it is a perfect encapsulation of the sort of fallacious statements and arguments that pseudoscientists in general make. Indeed, this comment could easily have come from a creationist, religious, alternative medicine, New Age, or 9/11 Truther website, among others and fit right in.
Specifically, it is a comment that the…
oracknows | June 1, 2009Last week I wrote a bit about what I've been tempted to call Oprah's War on Science but settled for the title of a documentary called The Oprah Effect. The reason, as I have mentioned before, is that arguably there is no single person who does more to promote pseudoscientific and dubious health practices than does Oprah Winfrey. I was happy to learn that more people are questioning Oprah's promotion of outright quackery than I recall ever having seen before.
It wasn't always so. Oprah Winfrey is an extremely powerful media figure, having been the host of the highest rated syndicated talk show…
oracknows | May 31, 2009Want to know how Jenny McCarthy, J.B. Handley, other anti-vaccine advocates, creationists, quacks, 9/11 Truthers, and cranks and pseudoscientists of all stripes manage to be heard when they have no science, evidence, reason, logic, or facts on their side?
Sadly, The Onion knows: Oh, No! It's Making Well-Reasoned Arguments Backed With Facts! Run!
At first, it looks as though the forces of reason can win:
Goddamn it, nothing's working! It's trapped us in our own unsubstantiated claims! We need to switch fundamentally unsound tactics. Hurry, throw up the straw man! Look, I think it's going for…
oracknows | May 29, 2009I don't much like Oprah Winfrey.
I know, I know, it's a huge surprise to anyone who reads this blog, but there you go. Over the last four years, I've had numerous reasons to be unhappy with her, mainly because, as savvy a media celebrity and businesswoman as she is, she has about as close to no critical thinking skills when it comes to science and medicine as I've ever seen. Arguably there is no single person in the world with more influence pushing woo than Oprah. Indeed, she puts Prince Charles to shame, and Kevin Trudeau's is a mere ant compared to the juggernaught that is Oprah's media…
oracknows | May 19, 2009A reader informs me of a plaintive, heartfelt request from Oprah for help in developing the television show of her new protege Jenny McCarthy:
You've seen it all over the news...Jenny McCarthy, one of America's funniest and coolest moms and Harpo is giving her, her own show.
Here is where YOU come in.
What would you like to see featured on Jenny's show? What would you like for her to talk about? What are you and your friends buzzing about?
Any topics you'd like for her to tackle? Are there any questions that you have -- that you would love for her to answer?
If so -- we definitely want to…
oracknows | May 10, 2009Regular readers here know that I really hate to see stories like the one I'm about to discuss, specifically that of 13-year-old Daniel Hauser, a boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma who is refusing chemotherapy based on religion and his preference for "alternative" therapy, whose parents are also supporting his decision.
Since I'm a bit behind on this story, its having percolated through the blogosphere for the last three or four days, let me start with a bit of context. If there is one theme that I've emphasized time and time again here, it's science- and evidence-based medicine. That means…
oracknows | May 6, 2009A while back, Mark Hoofnagle coined a term that I like very much: Crank magnetism. To boil it down to its essence, crank magnetism is the phenomenon in which a person who is a crank in one area very frequently tends to be attracted to crank ideas in other, often unrelated areas. I had noticed this tendency long before I saw Mark's post, including one Dr. Lorraine Day, who, besides being a purveyor of quackery, is also a rabid anti-Semite and Holocaust denier who had treated arch-Holocaust Ernst Zündel with "alternative" therapies when he was in jail awaiting trial, and a conspiracy theorist…
oracknows | April 29, 2009
Well, the weird news just keeps coming in from my hometown. This time around, consider the case of Tinker Bell. Tinker Bell is a tiny Chihuahua weighing all of five pounds. This poor little creature met nature in a most unfortunate way on Saturday, when some rather heavy storms swept through southeast Michigan. It turns out that storms and Chihuahuas don't mix very well (as you might expect), and poor Tinker Bell discovered that in a most harsh way:
Tinkerbelle was with her owners, Lavern and Dorothy Utley of Rochester, when a powerful storm swept into the Dixie Land Flea Market in…
oracknows | April 16, 2009For skeptics, TV news in my hometown sucks.
Actually, it sucks for just about anyone with two brain cells to rub together, but it's especially painful for skeptics and scientists to watch. On one station last year, there was the most credulous report I've ever seen about--of all things--orbs! It was presented as though these "orbs" in photos were actually ghosts or spirit presences, rather than the reflections from bits of dust in the air or on the camera lens that we know them to be. As I pointed out at the time, not even die-hard ghostbusters take orbs seriously anymore. They're so...1970s…
oracknows | April 3, 2009Let me say right up front that I'm not entirely sure that the victim--I mean target; no, I mean subject--of this week's little excursion into the deepest darkest depths of woo is not a parody. That's the beauty of it. I've never heard of it before, but a little Googling brought me evidence that it may not be a parody, that the guy purveying it may actually believe it. I'll leave you to judge for yourself, or, if you've heard of this guy before, to chime in and let me know the deal. I'll also point out that parts of this website are not entirely safe for work. Actually, a couple of the pages…
oracknows | March 25, 2009I've at times been asked where I come up with my blogging material. Since I've become fairly popular, one major source has been readers sending me stories. I often don't have time to respond, and most of them don't interest me enough to be motivated to write, but there are enough that do that I consider my readers to be a major source of material. Then there are medical and surgical journals, as well as sources like EurekaAlert! Then there are my numerous RSS feeds that I peruse on a daily or every-other-day basis in the evening or early in the morning. Then, of course, there are the various…
oracknows | March 20, 2009Oh, goody! Vox Day wants to play.
You remember Vox "Hey, it worked for Hitler" Day," don't you? It's been a long time. In fact, I had to do a search to find the last time I had a run-in with him, and it appears that it's been about a year since I last noted him mindlessly parroting antivaccinationist myths and spouting his usual misogyny. Alas, Vox has been a regular irritant to this blog since very early on, when he didn't like my likening his views towards women to the Taliban for his arguing that women shouldn't be allowed to vote because they are "fascists at heart." Since then, every so…
bioephemera | February 20, 2009San Francisco based company Cordarounds seems hell-bent on living up to every stereotype about that quirky city. Their store is online-only and features a trippy blog. Their catalog ads involve horizontal corduroy pants worn by attractive-and/or-grungy people drinking, eating, playing guitar, camping, reading The Satanic Verses in a reversible smoking jacket, that sort of mundane thing. They offer free shipping - but only to Greenland, of course.
Best of all, they're not afraid to offend people with their uberedgy science:
Okay, maybe that's actually pseudoscience. If it's not, I really…
sciencepunk | February 19, 2009I came across this quote today - can you guess which group of pseudoscientists is being discussed?
These people use the "reverse scientific method"... they determine what happened, throw out all the data that doesn't fit their conclusion, and then hail their findings as the only possible conclusion.
No cheating with Google! Your suggestions below please.
oracknows | February 19, 2009Unfortunately, as we have been dreading for the last four months or so since her relapse was diagnosed, my mother-in-law passed away from breast cancer in hospice. She died peacefully, with my wife and the rest of her family at her side. As you might expect, I do not much feel like blogging, and even if I did my wife needs me more. Because I foresaw this coming, however, I do have a series of "Best of" reposts lined up. If you've been reading less than a year or two, they're new to you. If not, I hope you enjoy them again. I don't know when I'll be back, other than maybe a brief update or two…