Skepticism
oracknows | October 13, 2017As you probably noticed, I didn't manage a post yesterday. Nor did I manage one today, other than this. That's because I was busy preparing for QEDCon, where I will be on a panel and giving a talk, and, of course, putting together my talk. As I write this, I'm horrendously jet lagged; so I probably couldn't write much that's coherent anyway. Consequently, there likely won't be any new posts until next week.
I will take a moment, however, to mention that there will be significant changes to this blog in the near future. It's a process that will likely take a couple of weeks, and I'll update…
aardvarchaeology | July 20, 2017Bob Lind has yet again managed to get the National Heritage Board to abdicate its responsibility at Ales Stenar, a beautiful 7th century AD burial monument near Ystad in southern Sweden. Bob has self-published odd interpretations of the site that have found no traction among professional archaeologists. He has kept vigil at Ales stenar for decades, lecturing to visitors, ranting at the municipal guides and occasionally attacking them. He has a very large sign on site, next to the National Heritage Board's, with permission from the County Archaeologist. My colleague Björn Wallebom has…
gregladen | May 26, 2017What, with all the attacks on science and scientist these days, we may not want to be focusing on those times when science goes off the rails and makes a huge mess of things. But, science at its best and scientists at their best, will never shy away from such things.
Dr. Paul Offit just wrote a book called Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong, which not about an evil black dog that escaped from a box, but rather, seven instances when the march of scientific progress headed off a cliff rather than in the desired direction. People died. Many people died. Other bad things…
gregladen | February 28, 2017Karen Stollznow has edited this book: Would You Believe It?: Mysterious Tales From People You'd Least Expect, and you will find my chapter on page 112.
This is a great idea for a book. Suppose Susan Blackmore told you she had an out of body experience? Or that Don Prothero had an alien abduction story for you? Or that I claimed I had once hunted down and captured a ghost? Would you believe it??? Indeed.
You would probably be skeptical if any of the 30+ established skeptics who authored chapters in this book told you that they had a paranormal, psychic, or otherwise impossible experience…
aardvarchaeology | January 5, 2017The Swedish Skeptics have announced their annual awards for 2016.
The Enlightener of the Year award is given to the science desk at Dagens Nyheter, a major newspaper. Science editor Maria Gunther and medicine reporter Amina Mansoor have made medicine and other science accessible in an initiated yet comprehensible way. Congrats Maria and Amina, well deserved!
The Deceiver of the Year anti-award is really gutsy and interesting this year. Karolinska Institutet is one of the world's most prestigious medical universities. The 2016 award will be remembered as the one given to the most respected…
oracknows | January 3, 2017Back in the day, quacks and cranks liked Wikipedia. Because anyone can become an editor on Wikipedia, they assumed that they could just sign up to edit Wikipedia pages and change them to reflect their views on alternative medicine or whatever other pseudoscientific topic they believed in. When Wikipedia first emerged on the scene, I had to admit that I didn't think very much of it for the very simple reason that anyone could edit, and I did from time to time come across entries that were clearly too woo-friendly. Not surprisingly, I was also concerned that there would be an asymmetry of…
oracknows | December 30, 2016This will almost certainly be my last post of 2016. Unless something so amazing, terrible, or just plain interesting to me happens between now and tomorrow night, I probably won't be posting again until January 2 or 3. Many bloggers like to do "end of year roundup"-type posts that list their best or most popular post, trends noted in 2016 relevant to their area of blogging interest, or predictions for the coming year as their last post of the year, but that's never really been my style. I don't remember the last time I did a post like that, and I'm too lazy today to bother to go and look it…
gregladen | June 29, 2016Ikonokast interviews Don Prothero.
Don Prothero is the author of just over 30 books and a gazillion scientific papers covering a wide range of topics in paleontology and skepticism. Mike Haubrich and I spoke with Don about most of these topics, including the recent history of the skeptics movement, the conflict and potentials between DNA and fossil research, extinctions and impacts, evolution in general, and the interesting projects Don is working on now.
The interview is here. Please click through and give this fascinating conversation a listen!
aardvarchaeology | June 13, 2016Like Romanticism, Post-Modernism is a poorly defined term that means different things in different contexts. But in academe, pomo can pretty much be equated with relativism. This term also means several different things, but all of them apply to pomo.
The relativism that makes me hostile to pomo is knowledge relativism or epistemological relativism. “All statements of fact are historically and culturally situated and thus meaningless outside a local contemporary sphere”. This stance can be applied to itself and immediately yields absurdity.
The other pomo relativism is aesthetic. “All value…
oracknows | May 18, 2016Contrary to what some of my detractors think, I don’t mind criticism of my viewpoints. After all, if I never encounter criticism, how will I ever improve? On the other hand, there are forms of criticism that are what I would call less than constructive. One form this sort of criticism takes is obsessive repetition of points that have already been addressed and failure to pay attention to how they were addressed. This is the sort of criticism that will eventually provoke an exasperated shrug of the shoulders or even an angry—dare I say Insolent?—retort.
Another way criticism can get on one’s…
aardvarchaeology | April 5, 2016 Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-90)
Yesterday I finished reading the first volume of Sir Richard Burton's 1855 Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (in the public domain). Here Burton recounts his travels in the summer of 1853, when he disguised himself as a wandering Persian physician and performed the Muslim pilgrimage. At the time, if a non-Muslim was caught doing this, he would be lucky if he only ended up forcefully circumcised.
Burton is an amazing writer, with a keen eye for detail and fine cynical sense of humour. He comes across as a man without any…
gregladen | January 13, 2016Truth or Truthiness: Distinguishing Fact from Fiction by Learning to Think Like a Data Scientist is a new book by Howard Wainer that can serve as a manual for how to be a good skeptic.
Wainer is a statistician, formerly with the famous Educational Testing Service, and a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is well known for his work in statistics and data presentation.
You know what "truthiness" is. It is a term coined by Stephen Colbert in 2005 to refer to assertions that are clearly true because of how they look, feel, smell, but that are in fact, not…
aardvarchaeology | January 7, 2016 The Institutet radio show: 2015 Enlighteners of the Year
The Swedish Skeptics have announced their annual awards for 2015.
The Enlightener of the Year award is given to a radio show on Swedish Broadcasting's channel 3, Institutet, "The Institute". Show hosts Karin Gyllenklev and Jesper Rönndahl use humour to reach out with science content to a wide audience.
The Deceiver of the Year anti-award is given to a neighbouring show of the aforementioned, channel 1's Kaliber, "Calibre". They get this doubtful honour for a show where they suggested that vaccination against HPV, Human Papilloma…
oracknows | December 1, 2015Of all the slick woo peddlers out there, one of the most famous (and most annoying) is Deepak Chopra. Indeed, he first attracted a bit of not-so-Respectful Insolence a mere 10 months after this blog started, when Chopra produced the first of many rants against nasty "skeptics" like me that I've deconstructed over the years. Eventually, the nonsensical nature of his pseudo-profound blatherings inspired me to coin a term to describe it: Choprawoo. Unfortunately, far too many people find Deepak Chopra's combination of mystical sounding pseudo-profundity, his invocation of "cosmic consciousness"…
oracknows | November 23, 2015As a surgeon and skeptic, I find neurosurgeon turned presidential candidate Ben Carson to be particularly troubling. I realize that I've said this before, but it's hard for me not to revisit his strange case given that the New York Times just ran a rather revealing profile of him over the weekend, part of which included Dr. Carson answering criticism for the really dumb things he's said about vaccines, evolution, and the like. People like Ben Carson are useful examples of how highly intelligent people who are incredibly competent in one area can also demonstrate unbelievable ignorance in…
oracknows | November 6, 2015As a surgeon, I find Ben Carson particularly troubling. By pretty most reports, he was a skilled neurosurgeon who practiced for three decades, rising to the chief of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. Yet, when he ventures out of the field of neurosurgery—even out of his own medical specialty—he routinely lays down some of the dumbest howlers I've ever heard. For example, he denies evolution, but, even worse, he's been a shill for a dubious supplement company, Mannatech. Worse still, when called out for his relationship with Mannatech in the last Republican debate, Carson lied through his teeth…
oracknows | September 6, 2015This is a public service announcement—with skepticism. Orac needs a recharge:
Some of you might have seen it alluded to in the comments that I am on vacation this week. It is true, although it's not entirely a vacation. Basically, I was invited by a collaborator to give a talk at a two-day conference at Imperial College London, and my wife and I decided to make a vacation of it. What this means is that, depending upon my mood and the amount of time I have, there might or might not be new material this week. Worst case scenario, there will be reruns. Of course, if you're relatively new to…
pharyngula | September 5, 2015Earlier this summer, Michael Shermer wrote a column for Scientific American to explain Why Do Cops Kill?. I was rapturously unaware of it because he's an author I long ago decided I could ignore, but just recently a reader had to destroy my state of ecstatic ignorance by pointing it out to me. I read it with growing disbelief, my jaw sagging further and further at the dreadful illogic and the scientismic insipidity of the thing. How does he still get published?
To make it short, for those who prefer not to read anything associated with The Shermer, his answer is…it's not racism, it's because…
pharyngula | August 15, 2015First thing when I landed at SeaTac: it started raining, as I'd hoped.
Second thing at the airport: we were taking a shuttle bus, and this guy started talking at his friend. I learned many things.
It's obvious that cell phones cause cancer. They radiate energy. Energy causes cancer. QED.
The only reason we don't have proof is that all us old guys use them sparingly. Just wait: a few more years, and all those kids going around with phones glued to their head will be getting brain cancer! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
The best part: he got sort of quantitative. At low energies, they don't cause…
tsmith | August 4, 2015Almost a year ago, I wrote about a terrible article that was published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health. FiPH is a legitimate, peer-reviewed journal, and they had just published a manuscript that was straight-up HIV denial, titled "Questioning the HIV-AIDS hypothesis: 30 years of dissent." At the time, it was listed as a regular review article; after much outrage, it was re-titled into an "opinion" statement, but not retracted.
Now another "Frontiers In" journal has stepped in it, publishing a paper that has the anti-vaccine groupies frothing at the mouth. Published in Frontiers in…