Skepticism

Chris Mooney has been exploring the basic underpinnings of denialism lately, with this latest article a good summary of the basic problems: In a recent study of climate blog readers, Lewandowksy and his colleagues found that the strongest predictor of being a climate change denier is having a libertarian, free market world view. Or as Lewandowsky put it in our interview, "the overwhelming factor that determined whether or not people rejected climate science is their worldview or their ideology." This naturally lends support to the "motivated reasoning" theory—a conservative view about the…

In the wake of the dramatic events surrounding the discovery of three women including Amanda Berry, being held captive for a decade by a monster, it's important not to forget another sociopath played a role in this drama. That sociopath is the psychic who told Amanda Berry's mother that her daughter was dead: Her mother, Louwana Miller, never gave up hope that the girl known as Mandy was still alive, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The case attracted national attention when Miller went on Montel Williams’s nationally syndicated television show in 2004 and consulted a psychic. “She’s…

A long, long time ago in a ScienceBlogs far, far away (well, it seems that way anyway, given the halcyon times back then before Pepsigate), Mark Hoofnagle coined the term "crank magnetism." It was a fantastic term used to describe how susceptibility to one form of quackery, pseudoscience, or just plain crankery tended to be associated with other forms of quackery, pseudoscience, or crankery. It explains why so many creationists tend to be into quackery and/or antivaccinationism, why so many 9/11 Truthers also tend to flirt with Holocaust denial or anthropogenic global warming denialists go…

As part of my duties as chairman of the Swedish Skeptics, earlier tonight I took part in a studio discussion on Swedish TV4 about Gardasil, the vaccine against human papilloma virus that is offered to all 12-y-o Swedish girls. It was a pretty silly affair. The TV people had decided on the angle that the information given about the vaccine to young girls isn't detailed enough. For instance, the school hallway fliers don't tell the kids that the protection rate against HPV isn't 100% (duh) or that very rarely the vaccine can provoke some serious side effects (duh again). These are traits, I…

The New York Times has an article on the rise of predatory, fake science journals — these are journals put out by commercial interests with titles that sound vaguely like the real thing, but are not legitimate in any sense of the word. They exist only for the resource that open access publishing also uses, the dreaded page charge. PLoS (a good science journal), for instance, covers their publishing costs by charging authors $1350; these parasitic publishers see that as easy money, and put up cheap web-based "journals", draw in contributors, and then charge the scientists for publishing, often…

There is a new Gallup poll that together with earlier data from Gallup provides some interesting information about attitudes in the US about global warming. Earlier polls have shown increase and decrease in concern about global warming, and changes in what people think of news about climate change and the severity of the problem. Recently, there has been a shift towards greater concern which follows a low point, which, in turn, follows a period of global concern. One question involves reading off a list of specific concerns related to global warming and asking participants to rank their…

In this well-written, painstakingly annotated and beautifully designed book, physicist Baruch Sterman (with contributor Judy Taubes Sterman) traces the history and prehistory of a certain blue pigment, along with its cultural and religious significance through the ages. It's what the Torah and Talmud calls tekhelet, and it's made from a gland harvested from Murex sea snails. Though greatly interested in history, archaeology and biology, I find myself poorly equipped to engage with the book's subject matter. Or put differently, I don't think I'm part of its intended audience. Because there's a…

Registration has opened for the 15th European Skeptics Conference. Hie thee there and register NOW, because there's only 400 tickets! Here's the confirmed (still evolving) line-up: Anna Bäsén (Sweden): Undercover Health Journalism Chris French (UK): Psychological Perspectives on Paranormal Belief and Experience Maria Berglund (Sweden): Våra opålitliga hjärnor: hur fel vi uppfattar världen och hur fel vi tänker om det vi uppfattar Dénis Caroti (France): CorteX and Chomsky's Wish Kendrick Frazier (US) of the Committe for Skeptical Inquiry: title to be announced. Christer Fuglesang (Sweden):…

Two links today for denialism blog readers, both are pretty thought provoking. The first, from Amy Tuteur, on the newly-released statistics on homebirth in Oregon. It seems that her crusade to have the midwives share their mortality data is justified, as when they were forced to release this data in Oregon, planned homebirth was about 7-10 times more likely to result in neonatal mortality than planned hospital birth. I'm sure Tuteur won't mind me stealing her figure and showing it here (original source of data is Judith Rooks testimony): Oregon homebirth neonatal mortality statistics, from…

So I finally made it to the Society of Surgical Oncology Annual Symposium. Thanks to the snowstorm that apparently wasn't (at least, I don't see any snow around), my arrival was delayed by a day, as all flights to the Washington, DC area were canceled on Wednesday. But I did finally get here, and, although I missed most of the first day, I did at least get to see a talk given by a friend of mine late in the day and I had a chance to hang out for a while with an old friend. I also got the chance after I got back to my hotel room to be highly amused by a "response" to criticism from the author…

This is important stuff. Along the lines of whether or not Bigfoot is real. So let’s talk about it for a moment. The crosswalk buttons in my neighborhood work. At least some of them. Last summer and the summer before, Huxley and I would walk around quite a bit, crossing through intersections that at other times I would drive through, and from the latter vantage (driving) I’d observe people at intersections trying to get a walk light. Between our pressing of the buttons, and my observations of others, I’m pretty sure that the lights change to “walk” during the traffic signal cycle far more…

Ivan Oransky and I moderated a session last week at ScienceOnline, the yearly conference covering all things at the intersection of science and the internets. We discussed the topic ""How to make sure you're being appropriately skeptical when covering scientific and medical studies." We started out discussing some of the resources we'd put up at the Wiki link. Ivan teaches medical journalism at NYU, and noted that he recommends these criteria when evaluating medical studies. I noted I use similar guidelines, and as a scientist, think about papers in a journal club format before I cover them…

Paul Peters, Hindawi Publishing The Scholarly Open Access web site says that Open Access journal house Hindawi Publishing may show some predatory characteristics. I've simply called Hindawi "dodgy". Their Chief Strategy Officer Paul Peters commented here on the blog and then swiftly replied to some questions of mine, showing that the firm realises that its on-line reputation is important to success. Here's what Mr. Peters says. MR: Why did Hindawi's Journal of Archaeology go on-line months before it had any papers? This is generally the case for all new journals that we launch, and I…

Hot on the heels of the hapless Science Publishing Group, I have received solicitation spam from another dodgy OA publisher, Hindawi Publishing in Cairo, with another odd on-line archaeology journal. The Journal of Archaeology has 71 academics on its editorial board. And a strangely generic name. What it doesn't have is any published papers yet, after months on-line, or an editor-in-chief. So I wrote to some board members at European universities, and they replied that they thought the journal was probably legit, though they weren't exactly sure. "The lack of published papers and low…

The Swedish Skeptics have announced their annual awards for 2012. Both the Enlightener award and the Deceiver award are given to the editorial staff of programmes on Swedish national radio. Medierna is a weekly media criticism show. They roast journalists in an excellently skeptical fashion and have during the year touched upon mistreatment of subjects such as climatology, alternative medicine and vaccination. Nyhetsguiden is a daily news analysis show. In April and May they ran several anecdote-based antivaccine stories about the ongoing effort to vaccinate prepubescent girls against the…

I love Oklahoma-- Great school, great cost of living, genuinely nice folks, and believe it or not, a fantastic atheist/skeptic scene. You all know about FreeOK (one and my talk isnt up yet from two... SEEEETH!), organized by Atheist Community of Tulsa and the OKC Atheists.  Those groups are amazing, outside of the conference.  Ive mentioned it numerous before, but whether you are into a quiet night of boardgames or partying it up at karaoke, need support/confidence/advice for dealing with radical theist relatives or want to go see 'The Hobbit' with some folks, want to learn something new at a…

I was recently pointed to this post by Edward Clint which purports to show Rebecca Watson using the 5 tactics of science denialism during her talk "How Girls Evolved to Shop" which was critical of evolutionary psychology at Skepticon. I watched her talk, found it entertaining, informative, wondered why I haven't been invited to Skepticon, and I found I agreed with many of her examples of really bad pop psychology nonsense that's filtered into the media through both scientists, press-release journalism, and marketing disguised as science. In particular the "pink is for girls" idiocy, which…

Today is the Swedish Skeptics Society's 30th birthday! It was started in 1982 on inspiration from the American organisation CSICOP (est. 1976). I've been a member since 1996 and now I'm the society's sixth chairman. So, what does a skeptical society do? We're a science-friendly resistance movement. We fight quack medicine, newspaper horoscopes, spiritualist mediums, climate change denialism, anti-vaccine propaganda, technophobic scare mongering etc. We make the New Age a Past Age. This we accomplish by publishing a quarterly journal, organising lecture series and pubmeets, handing out prizes…

Imagine the following scenario. Two guys are walking down the street, in different cities. Guy A has two PhDs, one in quantum physics with a focus on dimensionality dynamics, the other in astrophysics with a focus on relativistic aspects of gravity and black holes. She has published dozens of peer reviewed papers on both topics and is a brilliant mathematician. Guy B never took a physics class but yesterday he finished reading large parts of The Elegant Universe. Suddenly, at the same moment, they each have an idea (they do not have the same idea ... they have different ideas) about how…

All the monotheistic religions have a problem known as Theodicy or The Problem of Evil. Simply put, it's the question “How can there be evil and suffering in the world?”. The religions in question posit that their god knows everything that happens, so he isn't ignorant of the shit that's going on. And they posit that their god is endlessly well-meaning and loving, so he isn't the one inflicting the evil and suffering upon hapless humanity. And they posit that there is nothing he cannot do if he wants to, so he isn't watching powerlessly as evil and suffering happens. But evil and suffering…