Skepticism/Critical Thinking
oracknows | January 10, 2007After having pontificated a bit longer than perhaps I should have about why Richard Dawkins' treatment of the execution of Saddam Hussein as a missed opportunity for psychological or historical research was so misguided, I thought it might be time to take a more pro-Dawkins tilt. After all, even though the majority of my posts about Richard Dawkins have been critical, on balance I do admire the man; it's just that he has a maddening penchant for using historical analogies that make me want to tear my hair out.
A while back, PZ posted something that he called The Courtier's Reply. In essence…
oracknows | January 5, 2007It's always a shame to see a once confident man reduced to whining. Well, maybe not always. Sometimes it's immensely satisfying, particularly when that man happens to be David Kirby, who, through his book Evidence of Harm, Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy, was one of the two men most responsible for publicizing the pseudoscientific scare-mongering that claims that mercury in thimerosal, the preservative that was until late 2002 used in childhood vaccines, causes autism. (The other was Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) Unfortunately for poor ol' David, time and science…
oracknows | January 5, 2007It's back.
Yes, I was wondering what would be the best way to start out a brand new year of Your Friday Dose of Woo. Once again, as is all too unfortunately the case, there was an embarrassment of riches, a veritable cornucopia of woo out there, each one seemingly just as worthy of Orac's loving attention as the other. And, after having taken a week off from this, there was even a backup of woo. (I wonder if a little cleansing might be in order to relieve the backup.) Then it occurred to me. I started YFDoW with a very special treatment of some truly spectacular woo known as quantum…
oracknows | January 4, 2007You know, like the namesake of my nom de blog, I'm not immune to a little vanity. Indeed, I daresay that no human is. What differs among humans are two things: the level of vanity and what we're vain about. Given that I don't have all that much in the looks department going on, it's fortunate that I'm probably not as vain as my blog namesake. Even so, I like to think that I'm pretty intelligent and that possess close to the proper level of skepticism, being neither so credulous that I'm easily fooled nor so skeptical that it devolves into cynicism. Consequently, when someone apparently thinks…
oracknows | January 3, 2007Two days after the holidays are over, and I'm still taking care of unfinished business from last year. Still, the study I'm about to discuss is making the rounds of the blogosphere, and because it's about breast cancer risk I felt the need to weigh in. This is particularly true, given some of the representations of this study that are popping up in the press and in the blogosphere, particularly among right wing bloggers. Let's start with a BBC news story about the study:
Women who exercise by doing the housework can reduce their risk of breast cancer, a study suggests.
The research on more…
oracknows | January 1, 2007What a lovely way to start the New Year, catching up on all the blogging I missed while I was on vacation. While doing so, via Skeptico, I came across a most worthy project: Stop Sylvia Browne. In this site, Rob Lancaster has accumulated in one easy stop a lot of useful information that helps to show how Sylvia Browne cannot really do what she claims she can do and how what she does appears indistinguishable from cold reading. Rob's manifesto:
Over the years, Sylvia Browne has been the focus of a number of skeptical pages on the web, but I don't think that there has ever before been one site…
oracknows | December 31, 2006The host of next week's Skeptics' Circle asks: What's the worst argument you can think of?
I think it's as good a question to close 2006 up with as any, and certainly there have been a lot of really bad arguments used during the last year. Perhaps if we air some of them, we can be inoculated against their return in 2007. Certainly near the top of the list has to be the argument by many pseudoscientists that "all sides deserve to be heard" about issues like evolution/creationism or certain forms of alternative medicine, like the exceedingly ridiculous pseudoscientific treatment known as…
oracknows | December 30, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on November 30, 2005 and is the followup to the first article I did (reposted earlier today). I debated whether to repost…
oracknows | December 27, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on April 22, 2005.
Unfortunately, Blogger was down for "scheduled maintenance" last night in my prime blogging time, meaning I…
oracknows | December 27, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 25, 2006
I hate spammers.
On the scale of Internet scumbags, spammers rank just one notch above pedophiles (barely…
oracknows | December 26, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 21, 2006.
I know I'm a bit of a stickler, a curmudgeon, if you will, when it comes to medicine. Call me crazy, but…
oracknows | December 24, 2006This one's too good for me to ignore even on vacation. It's the perfect gift for the skeptical.
Remember the Friday Dose of Woo in which I had a little fun with the whole concept of trepanning (drilling a hole in your head to "improve blood flow")? Well guess what?
The trepanation guy (Randall W. Haws) has shown up right here in the comments of that post. And he thinks that I (and those of you who chimed in) are truly, truly misguided, not to mention hypocrites. He's also pointing out how he is "free" and we're all still "imprisoned."
I can't think of a better blog Christmas present. Well, OK…
oracknows | December 21, 2006Yes, it's that time again, time for another Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle.
Given that yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the death of Carl Sagan at the too-young age of 62, this edition of the Circle, posted at Humbug! Online, is a tribute to the man and his dedication to science and skepticism. Theo has decided to arrange it in a similar fashion to the chapters in what is arguably Sagan's greatest book: The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.
Next up to host the first Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle of 2007 is See You At Enceladus. If you're a blogger trying to follow…
oracknows | December 20, 2006Today is the tenth anniversary of Carl Sagan's death from myelodysplasia at the too-young age of 62. On this day, as part of the Carl Sagan Memorial Blogathon (more here), I'd like to explore three observations about Sagan.
First and foremost, Carl Sagan was brilliant at expressing the sense of wonder at the universe and how amazingly fortunate we are to be able to perceive it. Even as scientists, we often get lost in the nitty gritty and the details of what we are doing. It's all too easy to lose sight of the forest through the trees and forget about just how amazingly beautiful and complex…
oracknows | December 18, 2006I don't think I could have done it much better, if at all.
Dr. R.W. presents, in FAQ-form, a primer on the difference between woo and conventional medicine, even conventional modalities that are weakly grounded in evidence.
A couple of examples:
Many of mainstream medicine's conventional treatments are not evidence based. Aren't they a form of woo?
No. Although some conventional methods fail to measure up to best evidence they are at least based on known anatomy and physiology. They have some plausibility in the observable biophysical model in contrast to the "vital forces", nebulous "energy…
oracknows | December 15, 2006Yes, I know that skepticism and Christmas don't exactly mix. After all, most people, even highly skeptical and unreligious ones, tend to enjoy at least a few, if not many, of the myths that accompany the season, myths such as Santa Claus. But we won't let that stop us from having a bit of skeptical fun next week on Thursday, when the next Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle lands at Humbug! Online on December 21.
A while back PZ pointed out that December 20 just so happens to be the tenth anniversary of Carl Sagan's death at the too young age of 62 and that a memorial blog-a-thon is being…
oracknows | December 13, 2006I've become a big fan of podcasting and now like to listen to podcasts when I happen to be in my office while I'm working and in my car while driving to and from work. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of good skeptical podcasts, at least in comparison with the number of credulous ones. I thought I'd take this opportunity to mention a few skeptical podcasts that I listen to regularly:
1. Point of Inquiry. This is the official podcast of the Center for Inquiry and has to be near the top of the list for any skeptic to check out regularly. Host D. J. Grothe is a great interviewer, always prepared…
oracknows | December 13, 2006Believe it or not, I missed my own blogiversary.
It's true. It was two days ago. For some reason, as the date approached I got the idea that it was the 13th, when in fact this blog was born on December 11, 2004 on a dreary Saturday afternoon when, after reading the TIME Magazine story about how 2004 was supposedly the "year of the blog" and, given my long history on Usenet pontificating on various topics, on a whim, I decided that I'd dip my toe into this thing called the blogosphere.
Thus was Respectful Insolence⢠born, and I've never looked back since.
Since then, this thing has grown…
oracknows | December 11, 2006Over a week ago, fellow ScienceBlogger revere fired a bit of a pot shot across my bow regarding my bow regarding a study regarding, of all things, chicken soup. Initially, it was at a bad time, when I had other things to do, having just labored mightily to produce the latest Hitler Zombie extravaganza, after which I had to lay low blogging for a while because of obligations midweek. When those obligations were over, then blogging about the Tripoli Six took precedence, as did this week's Your Friday Dose of Woo (which, by the way, is still overrun by the tinfoil hat brigade). And then I just…
oracknows | December 10, 2006After I did an installment of Your Friday Dose of Woo a couple of days ago about some truly strange 9/11 conspiracy theorists, the tinfoil hat brigade has descended en masse into the comments section of that post. Consequently, it is quite serendipitous that I've found, via Secular Blasephemy, a new theory for the 9/11 Truthers to mull over, a post that suggests what was the real cause of the towers collapsing. It turns out that the truthers have not detected anywhere near the full depth of the government's deception. (Surprise, surprise.)
No, it wasn't passenger airliners hijacked by Islamic…