Skepticism/Critical Thinking
oracknows | December 8, 2006Ever since I started Your Friday Dose of Woo (YFDoW) back in June, I had always intended that someday I wanted to expand this loving deconstruction of various forms of woo beyond just medical woo and quackery. True, having a little fun with woo that claims to treat disease or restore health is something that I've gotten pretty good at. You may wonder why I would want to move beyond medicine occasionally. After all, there's no shortage of medical woo to deal with every Friday, and I'll almost certainly return to it next week.
Sometimes a skeptic needs a change of pace, and this is one of…
oracknows | December 7, 2006Those of you who have been kind enough to submit your skeptical blogging to this week's edition of the Skeptics' Circle may have been puzzled by the replies you received. It appears that DoC relied upon a certain medium to transmit the entries telepathically or by distant reading to DoC.
Well, now that the Circle is here, it would appear that DoC is AWOL. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending upon your point of view), the Medium has taken a hand and channeled the entries to a certain very famous deceased skeptic named Harry, who is as we speak transmitting them from the other side to…
oracknows | December 5, 2006Apparently my handy-dandy Only Response You'll Ever Need To Choprawoo, written in response to the last volley of Choprawoo to hit the blogosphere, hit a nerve. Chopra sycophant and blog comment spammer extraordinaire "ChopraFan" was none too pleased with it.
Good.
I have to wonder if "ChopraFan" is either Chopra himself or whether he or she just works for Chopra, scanning the blogosphere for negative reactions to Chopra's woo that can be spammed with plugs for the latest installment of still more Choprawoo. Whatever the case, he/she/it led me to The God Delusion? Part 7 (also found here).…
oracknows | December 4, 2006Note: If you're not familiar with the Hitler Zombie, here are two posts to introduce you to the creature, with the most recent installment of his terror here, in which Orac narrowly escaped the creature.
And, now, the adventures (if you can call them that) continue....
PRELUDE: SEVERAL MONTHS AGO
It was a dreary, overcast day, as so many days were there, with the clouds seeming to reach down to engulf everything with a wet chill that went straight to the bone.
An eminent professor sat in his study typing. Gray-haired, bright-eyed, and very professorial in appearance and bearing right down…
oracknows | December 3, 2006I'm getting really tired of "ChopraFan" spamming the comments of unrelated posts with his serious kissing of Chopra's posterior over Chopra's risibly idiotic multipart response to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. In fact, given the number of times that I've fisked Chopra's profound ignorance of and obtuseness over science and what the theory of evolution actually says, I feel like I'm playing a game of Whac-a-Mole with him, with no end in sight.
Consequently, as promised over at PZ's demolition of this woo, my response will be brief. In fact, I daresay it may be the only response ever…
oracknows | December 1, 2006Yesterday, I explained why a study that purports to show that psychotic patients tended to vote for President Bush in the 2004 election and is presently making the rounds to snarky gloating through the left-wing blogosphere is so utterly flawed that almost certainly does not mean what the author claims it does, given the data dredging, small sample size, and the failure even to consider alternative hypotheses to explain the observations. In my discussion, I complained that I had only found one skeptical take on the study among the credulous acceptance and use of the study to imply (or…
oracknows | November 30, 2006I have to take this opportunity to express a bit of disappointment in one of my fellow SB'ers.
When I encounter a study that seems to confirm my biases, as a skeptic, I try very hard to be even more skeptical than usual, because I would hate to be caught trumpeting a weak or bogus study as evidence supporting a belief of mine. That would be very embarrassing to me. At the very least, although I might not always succeed, I usually try to be very candid about limitations of studies that I cite. Unfortunately, yesterday, Bora (via Archy) failed to heed that rule. Indeed, he clearly let his…
oracknows | November 29, 2006I don't know about you, but I'm starting to get a bit bored with Deepak Chopra. He's like the Energizer Bunny of woo; he just keeps going and going and going and going. Unfortunately, one of his sycophants going under the 'nym "ChopraFan" appears to have infested my blog, posting plugs for Chopra's latest idiocy in the comments of unrelated blog posts. it's almost as though he wants me to trash Chopra's latest incursion into woo, a breathtakingly inane piece called The God Delusion? Part 5 (or here on The Huffington Post).
PZ's already chewed over the woo, but I can't resist getting a couple…
oracknows | November 28, 2006Remind me to mark April 10 down on my calendar. I never realized it was such an important day, and, in any case, I wouldn't want to miss it. Nor should the rest of the skeptical blogosphere. Why? It's World Homeopathy Day, "celebrated" (or, if you're a fan of evidence-based medicine, as I am, lamented) in "honor" of Samuel Hahnemann, the originator of homeopathy, who was born on April 10, 1755.
Oh, joy. (On the other hand, I'm sure I can think of some sort of blog fun to have next April 10.)
Homeopathy, as you may recall, is the "alternative" medical therapy in which, it is postulated, a…
oracknows | November 27, 2006With the internecine sniping that's been going on lately throughout ScienceBlogs ove Larry Moran's intemperate "flunk the IDiots" and "Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists" remarks, or, more specifically, whether opposing ID requires that one oppose religion in general as well, I hesitate to tread here. However, given my interest in the Holocaust, World War II history, and how Nazi racial hygiene programs laid the groundwork for Germany's plan to exterminate the Jews and all others viewed as threats to the regime, I can't resist putting my two cents in about this issue.
Before I…
oracknows | November 24, 2006It may be Thanksgiving weekend here in the States, and fellow ScienceBloggers PZ and Ed may be getting sniping at each other over Larry Moran's rather intemperate comments. (Can't we all just get along, guys, at least for the holidays anyway?). Worse, this kerfluffle is threatening to suck in other fellow ScienceBloggers Mike Dunford, John Wilkins, John Lynch, and Chad Orzel, as well.
You know, this whole thing reminds me a lot of political and religious arguments that used to break out among my family sometimes during holiday gatherings. Let's hope the results of this one, like the results…
oracknows | November 21, 2006I tried not to do it. I really did.
I tried to resist the temptation to respond to Deepak Chopra's latest incursions into woo as he flailed futilely at Richard Dawkins' arguments for science. Fortunately, PZ Myers and MarkCC have been around to take down his idiocy. But then I thought about it Why should they have all the fun? Besides, the discussion I've been having over the last week or so about the infiltration of pseudoscientific woo into the nation's medical schools and its promotion by medical students is just way too depressing. I needed to switch topics, although I'm not sure that…
oracknows | November 19, 2006Via Recursivity and Pharyngula, I've learned that, after being an embarrassment to Princeton University for nearly three decades, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory is closing due to lack of funding. I'm only amazed that it held on so long. Let's just hope that Deepak Chopra doesn't decide to bail it out.
From my perspective, given this news, the most important question of all is: How will the impending closing of PEAR affect the Global Orgasm (news story here) scheduled for December 22 and featured in last week's Your Friday Dose of Woo? After all, the organizers…
oracknows | November 17, 2006It's almost here. In fact, it's closer than you would think, because of the Thanksgiving holiday here in the U.S.
Yes, the Skeptics' Circle is due to land at this session's host (decorabilia) one day early, on Wednesday, November 22. So this time around the deadline will be Tuesday, November 21. decorabilia provides instructions on how to submit your blog posts here, and a more general description of what the Circle is looking for, along with a hosting schedule can be found here.
And, as always, if you're interested in hosting, drop me a line at oracknows@gmail.com. I've heard rumblings that…
oracknows | November 17, 2006Given my love of science and advocacy of evidence-based medicine, people may have come to the erroneous conclusion that I hate all woo. Nothing could be further from the truth. I just want medical woo to be subject to the same scientific testing as conventional medicine, because I believe that there should not even be a difference between "alternative medicine" and medicine. There's just medicine that has good scientific, clinical, and epidemiological evidence to suggest it works, and that's all I care about. Heck, if someone produced good scientific evidence that there was something to…
oracknows | November 12, 2006It's Frank Zappa, of course, with what is arguably the best (or at least one of the best) songs celebrating skepticism ever written (and it has a killer guitar solo in the middle, too!):
I used to love that song when I was a teenager. (I still do.) I wonder if it affected me...
oracknows | November 9, 2006Holy Reiki, Batman! This month's Skeptics Circle, hosted by Polite Company, has landed, and it's a doozy. In fact, it's a Circle of Heroes:
Observe the Skeptic:
often battle-hardened by years of living in a world gone mad with magical thinking and spurious logic;
frequently alone in the fight against codified irrationality;
forced to search far and wide for another candle in the darkness, hoping that one day enough candles together can create the flames of a new renaissance;
I like it.
Next up is someone who's hosted before, Jim Anderson at Decorabilia. Please note that, due to the…
oracknows | November 4, 2006Fellow ScienceBlogger and author of The Republican War on Science Chris Mooney was interviewed for one of my favorite podcasts, Point of Inquiry, the official podcast for The Center for Inquiry, this week. It's well worth checking out. I don't agree with everything in Mooney's book (which I finally finished reading about a month ago), but there's enough there that is hard to refute to make it nonetheless a rather disturbing piece of work
In fact, while I'm on the topic, I will also mention that Point of Inquiry is a consistently excellent podcast. I highly recommend adding it to your podcast…
oracknows | November 3, 2006Time flies.
In fact, it flies so fast that it seems only yesterday that Kev put together a great Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, but in fact it's been over a week and the time for a new host to take on the responsibility is fast approaching. This time around, it's Thursday's turn to host the Circle at Polite Company. (Appropriate name, given that the Circle is scheduled to appear next Thursday, November 9.) It's going to be hard to top Kev, but I have high hopes. But Thursday can't do it without your skeptical entries. So, if you're a blogger and have written something in the last couple of…
oracknows | October 27, 2006No, I'm not talking about "Iron Justice," a guy who regularly posts to misc.health.alternative and seems obsessed with iron metabolism as the be-all and end-all of health and disease, with a particular affinity for iron overload as the cause of seemingly all disease, although he might make an amusing target at some point in the future. This time, it's something different. This week, as every week since inaugurating Your Friday Dose of Woo, I was sitting back, contemplating what flavor of woo I should have a little fun with. As is often the case, it was hard. No, it wasn't hard because of lack…