Skepticism/Critical Thinking
oracknows | May 22, 2007The other day, I wrote about how the only use of homeopathy that makes sense is its use by a fictional character, namely Doctor Strange, The Sorcerer Supreme. Now, I have been fortunate enough to have been granted a sign that the homeopathic enchantment works! Woe be unto you skeptics!
Behold, a vision of the Eye of Agamatto on a pancake!
For those of you unaware of what the Eye of Agamatto is, it's the mystic amulet that is Dr. Strange's most powerful occult object. The eye contained within the amulet can, at Strange's command, radiate brilliant light that allows him to see through all…
oracknows | May 22, 2007I've complained on multiple occasions about the infiltration of non-evidence-based "medicine" (a.k.a. woo) into every level of medicine in the U.S.. Worst of all, it's infiltrating medical education in a big way, starting with the pro-woo activism of the American Medical Student Association (AMSA), to various educational programs in various medical schools, to even the mandatory medical curriculum in at least one prestigious medical school. This is more than just teaching what various "alternative medical" therapies are, so that new physicians know what their patients are referring to or…
oracknows | May 21, 2007I hadn't planned on revisiting this topic again quite so soon, but sometimes a piece of information comes up that's so disturbing that I can't ignore it and can't justify delaying blogging about it by very long. So it is yet again with the strange and disturbing saga of dichloroacetate (DCA), the small molecular chemotherapeutic drug with a novel and scientifically interesting mechanism of action that could lead to a whole new class of chemotherapeutic agents and that has shown considerable promise in rat tumor models but has not yet been tested in humans. Not to belabor the story, which has…
oracknows | May 20, 2007Time passes. What once was new is old, and what once seemed far in the future is now just around the corner.
In other words, the Skeptics' Circle is rapidly approaching again; it's a mere four days away!
This time around, the 61st Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is scheduled to be hosted by Rebecca at Memoirs of a Skepchick on Thursday, May 24. No more procrastinating! Time flies too fast for that, and, if you're not careful, you'll wake Thursday morning to realize that you missed the Wednesday deadline and didn't get your best skeptical blogging submitted to Rebecca for inclusion in this…
oracknows | May 18, 2007I want to apologize to Abel Pharmboy in advance on this one. This is the second time in less than three months that I've invaded his territory to a certain extent in Your Friday Dose of Woo, specifically his The Friday Fermentable feature. Last time around, I couldn't believe it when I encountered some serious farm woo particularly common in wineries known as biodynamics, which involved burying various animal parts (among other things) on the farm in order to promote its life force. Who said that the best woo is found only in medicine?
Certainly not me. At least, not anymore.
This time around…
oracknows | May 17, 2007
When I learned of this, I had been highly tempted trot out everybody's favorite undead Führer for a little fun with the Church of Scientology's latest antics. Indeed, when you find out what I'm about to discuss, you'll see why it was a candidate for the loving chomp of his rotting jaws. Heck, I even started to do the whole Hitler zombie schtick that regular readers all know and some even love (or at least tolerate--well, most of you, anyway). As I typed away, though, I was having more and more trouble. My conscience was feeling more and more troubled. After all, I've lovingly crafted…
oracknows | May 16, 2007Here are a few typical eugenicist quotes from early last century:
"It is an excellent plan to keep defective people in institutions for here they are not permitted to marry and bear children."
"[Scientists who are working at the task of improving the human race] would like to increase the birth rate of families having good heredity, while those people having poor heredity should not marry at all."
"At the present time there are in the United States more than a million people with serious hereditary defects, and to reduce their numbers by even a few thousand would reduce the amount of…
oracknows | May 16, 2007One of the favorite targets of pseudoscientists is the peer review system. After all, it's the system through which scientists submit their manuscripts describing their scientific findings or their grant proposals to their peers for an evaluation to determine whether they are scientifically meritorious enough to be published or to be funded. Creationists hate it. HIV/AIDS denialists hate it. Indeed, pseudoscientists and cranks of all stripes hate it. There's a reason for that, of course, namely that vigorous peer review is a major part of science that keeps pseudoscientists from attaining the…
oracknows | May 15, 2007A while back, I coined a term for woo so irrational, woo so desperate to masquerade as reason and science, that it could be spewed forth into books, the Internet, and the blogosophere by only one man.
The man is Deepak Chopra, and the term is Chopra-woo, examples of which can be found here and here.
I had thought that there was no man quite as capable of producing such concentrated woo cloaked in the language of science (well, except perhaps for the DNA Activation guy or the guys at Life Technology, but their woo is so utterly over-the-top that I have a hard time accepting that they actually…
oracknows | May 11, 2007Remember the SCIO? It was featured in Your Friday Dose of Woo two weeks ago. It's an amazingly woo-ey piece of woo that was just perfect for my little weekly feature.
Unfortunately, not everyone appreciates my having a little fun with it. For example, one of the woomeisters responsible for the SCIO has appeared on my blog to complain and defend Professor William Nelson, the luminary of woo who's had a hand in not one, but two pieces of woo featured in YFDoW. This woomeister, who signed his comments "Dr. D," is displeased and showed up in the comments to tell me so:
ill Nelson hasn't yet won…
oracknows | May 11, 2007I really love Life Technologyâ¢. I really do. Heck, I could spend the next several weeks mining it for topics for Your Friday Dose of Woo. The stuff there's so over-the-top that I find it hard to believe that these guys are serious. I mean, really, look at some of their products, a couple of which I've featured on YFDoW before; specifically the Ultra Advanced Psychotronic Money Magnet Professional Version 1.0⢠(a.k.a. The Ultimate in Financial Abundance Engineering Technologyâ¢) and the Tesla Purple Energy Shieldâ¢, two pieces of such amazingly tasty woo that it's pretty hard to top them.…
oracknows | May 10, 2007A common refrain among practitioners and advocates of alternative medicine is that the reason randomized clinical trials frequently fail to find any objective evidence of clinical efficacy for their favorite woo is because, in essence, science is not the right tool to evaluate whether it works. In essence, they either appeal to other ways of knowing, invoke postmodernist nonsense claiming that science is just one way of knowing that is not any better than any other ways, or both. The most outrageously absurd example of postmodernist silliness in this regard that I've ever seen was the…
oracknows | May 10, 2007It's that time again! Has it really been a fortnight since the last time the skeptics of the blogosphere met to apply desperately-needed critical thinking skills to the woo, credulity, and general lack of critical thinking in which the blogosphere is continually awash?
I guess so.
This time up, we have a rather unusual presentation of the Circle for the 60th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle over at Infophilia. This time around, the threat is real:
"So, here's the situation. Woos have struck at the foundation of reality, and it's now determined by the popularity of ideas. Simply put, the…
oracknows | May 9, 2007I'll admit it.
There have been at least two times since I started blogging that I fell for a dubious story because I exercised insufficient skepticism. The first time occurred very early on in my blogging history when swallowed a story about how legalization of prostitution was claimed to lead to the requirement that unemployed women take jobs as prostitutes or lose their unemployment benefits. More recently, I backpedaled a bit over a story about how supposedly history teachers in the U.K. were not teaching about the Holocaust out of concern for offending the sensitivities of certain of…
oracknows | May 4, 2007Everybody (well, mostly everybody) learns in science and physics class the Three Laws of Thermodynamics:
Energy cannot be created or destroyed, meaning that the increase in the internal energy of a thermodynamic system is equal to the amount of heat energy added to the system minus the work done by the system on the surroundings.
The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.
As temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a constant.
These three laws pretty much describe the…
oracknows | May 3, 2007If there's one undeniable aspect of "intelligent design" creationism advocates, it is their ability to twist and misrepresent science and any discussions of evolution to their own ends. Be it Dr. Michael Egnor's twisting of history to claim that eugenics is based on Darwinism, rather than the artificial selection (or, as we snarky ones like to call it, intelligent design), claims that "Darwinism" is a tautology and irrelevant to the question of antimicrobial resistance, or blaming evolution for atheism, the decline of Western mores, and, if you believe the ID advocates, bad breath, key to the…
oracknows | May 2, 2007Dr. Steven Novella, an academic neurologist, President of the New England Skeptical Society, and organizer of what's become my favorite skeptical podcast, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, took the time to weigh in on the Nature Neuroscience article that I discussed the other day and that engendered dozens of comments, as posts about antivaccination irrationality tend to do around here.
Besides my being interested in what a neurologist has to say about these issues, the reason that I want to bring your attention to his article is because he issues a clarion call to arms for those who…
oracknows | April 29, 2007Thanks to a reader commenting in yesterday's post, I've been made aware of a truly brilliant summation of creationism of both the young earth and intelligent design variety:
Exactly.
oracknows | April 29, 2007I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Certainly it's a bad thing that another physician is diving head-first into the pseudoscience that is "intelligent design" creationism and making a of himself in the process.
On the other hand, at least this time it's not a surgeon:
A Columbia medical professor made his case for scientific acceptance of "intelligent design" last night and found himself taking fire from his peers for his view.
John Marshall, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Missouri-Columbia, argued in front of about 100 people in a University Hospital…
oracknows | April 27, 2007I've said it once before, but this week's woo compels me to say it again: I happen to love gadgets.
I've been a bit of a technogeek since very early on in my life, with a lot of the things that go along with it, including a major interest in science fiction, awkwardness around the opposite sex, When at their best, gadgets can do things that need to be done and, if well designed, can do them with panache, making drudgery almost fun Then of course, there's the almost Dilbert-like joy males into technogeekery have in one-upping each other, almost like the surgeons I described yesterday one-…