Skepticism
pharyngula | June 15, 2009I thought I knew of all the institutions of higher learning in my neighborhood, but I seem to have missed one: The University Of Metaphysical Sciences, located in the small town of Kandiyohi, Minnesota. I even know exactly where that is — it's just outside of Willmar, where my wife works every day.
You might be wondering what, exactly, you would learn at a University Of Metaphysical Sciences. Well, that isn't clear. You get to learn about Colors and Symbols, and Chakras, and how to connect with Angels (if I were younger, I'd be tempted to get a degree in that, just so I could use it as a…
aardvarchaeology | June 15, 2009Everybody knows that energy is good for you and calories are bad for you. What newagers, health nuts and alties seem to be completely ignorant of is that both words originate in physics and that they refer to the same thing.
Energy "is a scalar physical quantity that describes the amount of work that can be performed by a force". It can be measured in various units, in the context of food usually kilocalories. A Snickers bar contains about 150 kilocalories, which is equal to the energy content of about 20 ml of gasoline.
Both energy content estimates of course refer to the amount of chemical…
pharyngula | June 12, 2009Look here: Britain's National Health Service threw away £12 million on homeopathic treatments. It's a complete waste; millions were spent on teeny-tiny bottles of 'special' water that could have been had for pennies from the local water tap.
But hah! America is #1! We spent $2.5 billion on remedies that don't work! Doesn't that make you all feel so good right now? Now one might reasonably argue that paying all that money for clear negative results really isn't that bad; good science doesn't begin with your conclusion, and good studies can show that a hypothesis was wrong. Unfortunately, these…
pharyngula | June 10, 2009It looks like an admission of guilt to me. The McTimoney Association, a British chiropractic group, has sent out mail to its members urging them to immediately shut down all of their websites. Why? Because, as a result of the Simon Singh fracas, people are becoming aware that chiropractors are making "claims for treatment that cannot be substantiated with … research", so they're trying to make the quackery go away fast. (By the way, my ellipsis removed the word "chiropractic"; I would not trust chiropractic research, but they can't even provide that). It's a hilarious message — they flat out…
aardvarchaeology | June 10, 2009A seminar in Stockholm tomorrow will treat the question, "What are the most important unanswered questions in the humanities and social sciences?". In my opinion, the most important ones are "How can peace, prosperity and democracy be established in countries where they are lacking?". And historian Arne Jarrick (whom I met last week at Alan Sokal's talk) agrees. In yesterday's Dagens Nyheter he's quoted as saying (and I translate),
To build a bridge you need technological knowledge. To bomb the bridge you need technological knowledge. But to understand why the bridge was bombed and how to…
aardvarchaeology | June 9, 2009Why are we here? Why do we live? What is the meaning of life? These questions are poorly phrased as neither "why" nor "meaning" has a distinct definition.
To begin with "why", it can refer either to the cause of something happening or the purpose for which something was done by an agent. Causality vs. teleology, to use big words. And in the present context, the question "why" can be dismissed for both senses of the word. Teleology: humans/animals/plants/protists are not given life for any particular purpose and there is no agency involved. Causality: the answer to the question "Why am I here…
aardvarchaeology | June 3, 2009Sweden's secularisation process has been going on for about a century, usually pretty quietly, with the anti-Christian polemics of philosopher Ingemar Hedenius marking a brief period of open conflict in the 1950s.
As is the case in most European countries, Sweden's university system was born in the Middle Ages with the main aim to educate priests. Some of the older ones still have a Faculty of Theology. The other day another one of the National Agency for Higher Education's evaluations was published. They recently checked out the country's archaeology departments. Now they've done religion…
pharyngula | May 31, 2009I'm impressed. It's a highly critical article about Oprah's peddling of quackery, and it's about time one of the big media players pointed out that she is promoting dangerous fake therapies…all with a happy smile, of course, and a message of positive self-esteem for women. It's still credulous glop, though.
It also summarizes why she's successful.
At some point, it would seem, people will stop looking to Oprah for this kind of guidance. This will never happen. Oprah's audience admires her as much for her failings as her successes. In real life, she has almost nothing in common with most of…
aardvarchaeology | May 27, 2009I just got home from Alan Sokal's talk at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on the outskirts of Stockholm. He was on the same stage where astronaut Christer Fuglesang spoke a year ago. The headline was "What is Science and Why Should We Care?".
Sokal's reply to his first question was, briefly, that science is to use reason and observation when approaching factual matters pertaining to any aspect of the single real world we live in. It's thinking clearly and respecting the evidence. Not only natural scientists proceed in this manner. Sokal also mentioned historians, plumbers and detectives…
pharyngula | May 23, 2009I have just read the most awesomely insane but calmly stated collection of dangerous medical advice ever. Andreas Moritz claims cancer is not a disease — it's a healthy response to stress. Guess what causes cancer? Guilt, low self-esteem, and insufficient spirituality.
Cancer has always been an extremely rare illness, except in industrialized nations during the past 40-50 years. Human genes have not significantly changed for thousands of years. Why would they change so drastically now, and suddenly decide to kill scores of people? The answer to this question is amazingly simple: Damaged or…
denialism | May 21, 2009I have no idea what possessed Action Skeptics to use the Sham Wow guy to present this week's entries, but it's amusing. Check it!
In particular I like ICBS everywhere on this thermography nonsense, and Living better skeptically on yet another cancer quack. It's very upsetting when quack modalities defraud people of hard-earned money. It's even more upsetting when people encourage quackery to replace an legitimate and important screening procedure such as mammography or effective treatments for cancer. These people are the most dangerous kind of quack, if they continue unchallenged they…
aardvarchaeology | May 19, 2009
An issue that has followed me through my career is the fight against pretentious jargon and extreme epistemological relativism in the humanities. The latter is an old idea from the sociology of science which holds that scientific knowledge does not approximate truth about the world, but is instead a kind of agreement among scientists: knowledge is "socially constructed". As a very young and angry grad student, during Scandy archaeology's worst infatuation with this mode of thought, I was heartened to learn about physicist Alan Sokal's 1996 hoax upon the hip post-modernist journal Social Text…
aardvarchaeology | May 18, 2009
Here's me and my skeptical homies outside the Vasa museum last Wednesday: Manuel Paz-y-Mino from Peru and Massimo Polidoro from Italy.
pharyngula | May 16, 2009Baroness Susan Greenfield has been spouting off some bad neuroscience, I'm afraid. She's on an anti-social-networking-software, anti-computer-games, anti-computer crusade that sounds a bit familiar — it's just like the anti-TV tirades I've heard for 40-some years — and a little bit new — computers are bad because they are "changing the workings of the brain". Ooooh.
But to put that in perspective, the brain is a plastic organ that is supposed to rewire itself in response to experience. It's what they do. The alternative is to have a fixed reaction pattern that doesn't improve itself, which…
denialism | May 14, 2009Tomorrow Angels and Demons comes to theaters across the country. One in a long series of movies that profits from the idea that underneath our regular, ordinary world, there are powerful forces controlling the scenes. I understand the appeal of these movies, it's an entertaining concept. A fictional conspiracy engages your intellect, creates a mystery, makes you think about the world and who is in control. But we have to remember when we see these films that these are works of fiction for entertainment. The Illuminati are not real, this sadly ludicrous belief still persists for some…
aardvarchaeology | May 11, 2009Italian skeptical star Massimo Polidoro is on a lecture tour of northern Europe. He spoke in the Netherlands last Friday, and here's the remaining schedule:
Mon 11 May. Gothenburg, Sweden.
Tue 12 May. Stockholm, Sweden.
Wed 13 May. Uppsala, Sweden.
Fri 15 May. Tallinn, Estonia.
Sat 16 May. Tartu, Estonia.
Sun 17 May. Helsinki, Finland.
Thu 21 May. Hamburg, Germany.
For details, see Polidoro's web site.
pharyngula | May 6, 2009As another sign of the ongoing decline of our traditional science media, Scientific American runs a superficial article on plastic surgery with a rather dubious source.
We spoke with osteopathic physician Lionel Bissoon to help us get to the bottom (so to speak) of some of the cellulite hoopla. Bissoon runs a clinic for mesotherapy (injections of homeopathic extracts, vitamins and/or medicine designed to reduce the appearance of cellulite) in New York City, and is the author of the book The Cellulite Cure published in 2006.
Why, SciAm, why?
Also, I had to gag on the guys analysis of…
pharyngula | April 30, 2009The Huffington Post has been getting a lot of grief around scienceblogs lately, since they've been letting some astounding woo slip through under the guise of medicine and science. Now it is partly explained: their "wellness" editor is Patricia Fitzgerald. Here are her qualifications:
Patricia Fitzgerald is a licensed acupuncturist, certified clinical nutritionist, and a homeopath. She has a Master's Degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine and a Doctorate in Homeopathic Medicine.
Words fail me. What is a doctorate in homeopathic medicine? A blank piece of paper taped to your wall?
(via Mike…
pharyngula | April 28, 2009Whenever the Huffington Post brings up a science-related issue, I just cringe. It's Jim Carrey or Deepak Chopra or some other celebrity incompetent babbling out some nonsense — it's like the site editors have no B.S. detectors at all. Well, now they've really done it: they've got some quack named Kim Evans piggy-backing on the recent concerns about a pandemic to offer her own remedies: Got the swine flu? Treat it with an enema. And great dog in heaven, they've got another quack touting chiropractic as a treatment for swine flu.
Of course, it's not just the liberal-leaning Huffpo — every day,…
tsmith | April 28, 2009I was introduced to snake oil salesmen at a young age. My mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when I was in kindergarten, and while she has mostly followed the advice of her neurologists, she's also looked into "alternate" therapies, ranging from the relatively harmless (massages, oils, etc.) to more invasive methods (chelation, all sorts of expensive but worthless supplements). Some of these I've been able to talk her out of (and I personally think her current doctor--NOT a neurologist--is a total quack), but others she's taken because, hey, "what's the harm?" It's frustrating to…