Tag: pseudoscience

Mindless Consciousness

Speaking of actual geniuses, Noam Chomsky was there. It’s unclear why, because he doesn’t seem much interested in theories of consciousness, though obviously his mere presence classes up any would-be academic gathering — and he left MIT last year for the University of Arizona, so it’s not like he has to fly in for the gig. During his presentation to a packed ballroom, Chomsky compared the current state of neuroscience to a marionette: We can examine the puppet and its strings, but we know nothing of the puppeteer. When a fellow panelist challenged him, citing recent discoveries, Chomsky breezily dismissed the objection as beside the point. Chomsky’s rhetorical powers have been endlessly praised, but let’s give a shout-out to the brutality of his nonchalance. He eviscerates with a shrug.

Nonsense “research”

The International Review for the Sociology of Sport published this paper: “Beers and blurred boundaries: The spatial and gendered organisation of pre-match venues for English football fans”

these are real abstracts. this sort of nonsense can’t last forever, and i’m looking forward to the funding cuts.

CSI pseudoscience

This past April, the FBI made an admission that was nothing short of catastrophic for the field of forensic science. In an unprecedented display of repentance, the Bureau announced that, for years, the hair analysis testimony it had used to investigate criminal suspects was severely and hopelessly flawed.

Berkeley Pseudoscience

the granola nutcases strike again. and this:

City staff had assistance from Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Harvard in drafting the ordinance

i really wonder what compelled lessig to go along with this nonsense.

Gene-free tomatoes

the strongest correlation is with lack of intelligence.

I was curious about opinions about GMO in the General Social Survey. I found the variable TOMATOES. It states: “Ordinary tomatoes do not contain genes, while genetically modified tomatoes do. (Is that true or false?)” The correct answer is obviously false. But I was curious what proportion of the population would answer “true.”

Food Woo

We need another Enlightenment to overcome all this superstitious nonsense.

Vani Hari, a.k.a. the Food Babe, has amassed a loyal following. Hari implores her soldiers to petition food companies to change their formulas. She’s also written a bestselling book telling you that you can change your life in 21 days by “breaking free of the hidden toxins in your life.” She and her army are out to change the world.

She’s also utterly full of shit.

Antivaxxer nonsense retracted

hey antivaxxer dummies, i know you use science very selectively when it fits your confused aims, but even that is getting much harder now that one of your favorite papers has been retracted. good luck with your crusade.

Bringing down “Dr.” Oz

a new front on the war on quacks. i wish this bright student good luck.

Mazer brought a policy before the Medical Society of the State of New York—where Dr. Oz is licensed—requesting that they consider regulating the advice of famous physicians in the media. His idea, Treat health advice on TV in the same vein as expert testimony, which already has established guidelines for truthfulness.

Against holistic “medicine”

woo like this needs to be stamped out. this simultaneously raises my opinion of mr. wales and further lowers it of change.org (though it was already pretty terrible). Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia responds to ridiculous petition seeking to force Wikipedia to take pseudoscience at face value.

No, you have to be kidding me. Every single person who signed this petition needs to go back to check their premises and think harder about what it means to be honest, factual, truthful.

Wikipedia’s policies around this kind of thing are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals – that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately.

Whole Foods pseudoscience

Americans get riled up about creationists and climate change deniers, but lap up the quasi-religious snake oil at Whole Foods. It’s all pseudoscience—so why are some kinds of pseudoscience more equal than others?

If you want to write about spiritually-motivated pseudoscience in America, you head to the Creation Museum in Kentucky. It’s like a Law of Journalism. The museum has inspired 100s of book chapters and articles (some of them, admittedly, mine) since it opened up in 2007. The place is like media magnet. And our nation’s liberal, coastal journalists are so many piles of iron fillings.

But you don’t have to schlep all the way to Kentucky in order to visit America’s greatest shrine to pseudoscience. In fact, that shrine is a 15-minute trip away from most American urbanites.

an inconvenient truth for people who watched an inconvenient truth in theaters.