Skepticism/Critical Thinking
oracknows | February 9, 2011It's been a crazy week that's reaching a crescendo today and tomorrow, so much so that, unlike yesterday, when I said I'd only be brief and ended up blathering on for close to 2,000 words (Mike Adams has that effect on me, particularly when he's at his most un-self-aware), today I really will be brief for once in my misbegotten logorrheic blogging career. I don't know why, but this warning by Jacob Bronowski about the danger of dogma and how absolute certainty can turn human beings into monsters popped up again, and I couldn't resist posting it*:
Science is uncertainty. That doesn't mean we…
oracknows | February 6, 2011Lest I be left out of the fun, I can't help but point out that over the weekend the Amazing One himself, James Randi, issued a challenge to homeopathy manufacturers and retail pharmacies that sell homeopathy, in particular large national chains like Walgreens and CVS and large national chains that include pharmacies in their stores, such as Walmart and Target. This was done in conjunction with the 10:23 Challenge, which is designed to demonstrate that homeopathy is nonsense. All over the world, skeptics and supporters of science-based medicine gathered to engage in overdoses of homeopathic…
oracknows | January 26, 2011Beginning not long after this blog began, one recurring theme has been the infiltration of "quackademic medicine" into academic medical centers. Whether it be called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" (IM), its infiltration into various academic medical centers has been one of the more alarming developments I've noted over the last several years. The reason is that "integrative" medicine is all too often in reality nothing more than "integrating" pseudoscience with science, quackery with medicine. After all, when you "integrate" something like reiki or…
oracknows | January 23, 2011Most of the woo I write about, fortunately, I don't have to deal with directly close to home. This is a good thing indeed, because it means that where I practice is blissfully free (for the most part) of pseudoscience. Unfortunately, earlier this year, I was in for an unpleasant surprise when I found out that there was going to be a showing of a rather annoying movie. It also occurred to me that I had never, to my memory, discussed the topic of this movie, namely the health claims of raw ("living") food veganism. The vitalism at the heart of this movie and its accompanying "educational" DVD…
oracknows | January 22, 2011Often, my readers educated me. Sometimes, they even teach me a new word. So it was last night when, as I perused my comments, I came across this comment by Antaeus Feldspar:
A "gnoron" is like a moron, except that where a moron is lacking in intelligence (something they cannot help, of course) a gnoron is someone of decent intelligence whose own willful ignorance has brought them to an equivalent state of incompetence.
If there's better term for people whom the arrogance of ignorance has rendered into the functional equivalent of a moron, I haven't heard it. In fact, I think I might well…
oracknows | January 14, 2011I'm tired.
Well, not exactly. I think I'm just suffering a case of what I like to call "anti-vax burnout." It's been a busy couple of weeks on the antivaccine front, given the new set of revelations about Andrew Wakefield, including even more detail about the nature of the scientific fraud he committed and previously untold information regarding just how extensive his business plans were to profit from the MMR scare that his fraudulent science was instrumental in launching in the U.K. Regular readers know that, from time to time, when the news about the anti-vaccine movement is coming fast…
oracknows | January 14, 2011Bummer, people.
The Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism has been announced for 2011 and will take place on April 9 and 10 in New York. It's going to be bigger and better than ever, going from one day to a whole weekend, and it has a killer lineup of speakers.
And I can't go. Damn you American Association for Cancer Research. If you had scheduled the AACR meeting one week later, I could have done what I did last year and made my meeting trip a two-fer, with a stop off for the NECSS conference first and then concluding with my yearly dose of cancer research updates. Oh, well...
But…
oracknows | January 13, 2011It is with some trepidation and more than a little regret that I begin writing this piece. The reason for my hesitation is that, by doing so, no matter what I say I'll be inserting myself into what appears to be a disagreement among people all of whom I admire very much. I don't really want to do it, but I feel obligated, because the issues brought up in the disagreement are important, and reasonable people can disagree--sometimes strongly--about them. I also believe that someone whom I admire greatly has made a regrettable mistake.
Over the last week or so, I've been blogging a lot about the…
oracknows | January 4, 2011Back in December, I took issue with a highly irritating article by someone who normally should know better, Jonah Lehrer, entitled The Truth Wears Off: Is There Something Wrong With the Scientific Method?, so much so that I wrote one of my typical long-winded deconstructions of the article. One thing that irritated me was contained in the very title itself, namely the insinuation that the "decline effect," which is the tendency of effects observed in early scientific experiments demonstrating a phenomenon to "decline" or become less robust as more and more experiments are performed, is…
oracknows | January 3, 2011About a week ago, I laid a bit of the ol' Orac-style ultra-snarkiness on CNN's chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta for having done an embarrassingly credulous interview with two of Oprah's minions who participated in the atrocity that was Oprah's episode about faith healer John of God. One of the most disappointing things about Dr. Gupta's interview is that he seemed fairly clueless about John of God's "forceps in the nose" trick. Well, while I happened to be perusing incoming links last night, I came across the very good Skepdic article on John of God. Honored that Orac would be…
oracknows | December 27, 2010Christmas is over. Heck even Boxing Day is over. Still, Orac is doing something very unusual for him in that he's taking a bit of a staycation at home. Consider it a sanity break. Even though I'll be working on grants and a variety of other projects at home and even though I haven't signed out my pager to one of my partners, it is still a very good thing indeed not to see the inside of my office for ten days. As for blogging, understandably, given that readership has fallen off markedly the week between Christmas and New Years each and every year since I started blogging way back in 2004, I…
oracknows | December 23, 2010In discussing "alternative" medicine it's impossible not to discuss, at least briefly, placebo effects. Indeed, one of the most common complaints I (and others) voice about clinical trials of alternative medicine is lack of adequate placebo controls. Just type "acupuncture" in the search box in the upper left hand corner of the blog, and you'll pull up a number of discussions of acupuncture clinical trials that I've done over the years. If you check some of these posts, you'll find that in nearly every case I discuss whether the placebo or sham control is adequate, noting that, the better the…
oracknows | December 22, 2010My readers might not think that a Plexiglass box full of blinking colored lights cum most advanced computer in the galaxy would go to the trouble of celebrating Christmas, much less putting up an actual Christmas tree. Well, actually, he didn't. His wife did. But, then, Orac is a Plexiglass box of blinking colored lights. Be that as it may, there are a couple of cool decorations that I can't resist showing off. First, courtesy of the James Randi Educational Foundation, we have the infamous Season of Reason ornament:
By the way, if you're looking for a good secular organization dedicated to…
oracknows | December 21, 2010After you've been blogging as long as I have, you inevitably wind up on a lot of mailing lists. Publicity companies, for instance, long ago discovered that getting a buzz going in the blogosphere is every bit as important as trying to get coverage from the "traditional" media. If you're as fortunate as I've been and your blog achieves a modest degree of fame or notoriety, you can expect to find yourself on a fair number of such mailing lists. At first, I used to read every press release, but now there are just too many. I skim the subject headers, and, if they don't catch my interest…
oracknows | December 19, 2010Everyone knows how much I live pareidolia. It never ceases to amaze me how the human mind can impose imagery on everyday things. We've seen Jesus on toast, on sheet metal, in rocks, on trees, and in windows. We've seen the Virgin Mary on a similar bunch of things--even a Lava lamp or a freeway underpass.
However, this is the first time I've seen both Mary and the baby Jesus in hard candy.
Hmmm. Personally I don't see it, even with the picture of Mary and baby Jesus put right next to the candy. It looks more like a map to me. Perhaps my faith isn't strong enough.
oracknows | December 17, 2010NOTE: Orac was actually out rather late last night. It turns out that the more administrative responsibility he somehow seems to find the more he has to go out to dinner as a part of various cancer center-related functions. As a result, he is recycling a bit of recent material from elsewhere that he in his extreme arrogance considers just too good not to post up on this blog too. In any case, it's always interesting to see how a different audience reacts to his stuff, and he did make some alterations to this post.
'Tis the season, it would seem, for questioning science. Not that there's…
oracknows | December 13, 2010Egads!
You remember my fun little post about a Sokal-type hoax perpetrated by John C. McLachlan, when he completely fooled the "scientific review" committee of a complementary and alternative medicine conference with a hilarious Sokal-inspired hoax in which he created, in essence, butt reflexology. I thought it was an amusing and fairly original bit of made-up woo.
It turns out I was wrong. A reader just pointed me to Jacqueline Stalline's Rumpology. It turns out that she's an astrologer, and that she thinks she can tell a lot about you by reading your rump:
Jacqueline Stallone has revived…
oracknows | December 13, 2010I can't think of a better way to start year seven on the ol' blog.
Remember how I speculated that perhaps Age of Autism or NaturalNews.com would provide me with the first topic of my next year of blogging? It turns out that I was wrong. It didn't come from either of those sources, although I will reassure the antivaccine loons at AoA and Mike Adams at NaturalNews.com not to fear. I'll get to them soon enough. The Huffington Post, too, given that apparently Mark Hyman's back with his woo. In any case, AoA and Mike Adams may at times be utterly hilarious, but they can't compare to what readers…
oracknows | December 11, 2010Has it really been six years?
Six years ago today, on a dim and dreary Saturday in December, almost on a whim I sat down, went to Blogspot, and started up the first version of Respectful Insolence with an introductory post with the cliched title, Please allow me to introduce myself. Here it is, six years later. On this cold December Saturday, I still find it difficult to his blog is considered one of the "top" medical blogs by one measure, and some actually--shockingly--consider me somewhat of a "famous" skeptic. I know, I know, I still can't wrap my head around the concept myself. At least,…
sa smith | December 10, 2010Orac recently had a post up on Terminator Cranks. Which Cranks are the most persistent?
NEW QUESTION.
Which Cranks are the biggest assholes?
My vote goes to the alt-med crew, as a whole.
The anti-vaxers are infamous for their ability to be complete and utter assholes. Like, above and beyond simple assholery. You basically just need to look at the 'Antivaccination lunacy' tag at Oracs place. From photoshopping disgusting pictures to calculated harassment of anyone who speaks out against their message, you can always count on an anti-vaxer to be a huge fucking asshole. The Skepchicks are…