Question: Who's better than Bad Boy?

Answer: Sears

Olga commented the other day about me adding photo's to my story/geographic posts. What I've already started to is use google street-view to get images of my walks so I can start to add them. It's a long process but it will make the experiences a little less inside to just me. Part of me likes that only people who are familiar with say Dépanneur Lydia would have any idea what the fuck I'm talking about, but I also like readers so I'll get on that.

Today's post is going to be more about the lovely world of skepticism. Ironically, I had to pause my writing because Mary need help for her critical thinking class. She essentially needed to find articles with reference to studies and then studies about the article topic. It's kind of like that but not. Anyway I helped her get articles on the moronic wi-fi in schools thing from a few months back. It's a great example of how the public and the media will just feed each other bullshit and then regurgitate that bullshit back into each other's mouths. An awful science Hot Carl.

I won't get into the specifics of the claim but what basically happened is that some idiot parents (probably Oprah/Jenny McCarthy fans) tried, and successfully had the school remove wi-fi citing that it was causing illness in their kids. I guess physics, biology and medical science is no match for suburban moms. They know this is true despite the fact that the entire scientific community over the course of the last 50 years, and with the studies and data to show, say otherwise.

Skepticism is not cynicism. The reason many skeptics seem cynical is usually the result of years of frustration in dealing the human condition know as cognitive dissonance. Skepticism is also not "narrow" or "closed" mindedness. This label gets tossed around so much and to most of us who consider ourselves skeptics it's more hilarious than it is insulting.

For example it isn't that I am not open to the possibility that psychics are are real, I just have no reason or evidence to back up the idea that they are. People claim to have this ability all the time but to date there is no scientific evidence to support a reality in which there are individuals who can forsee the future, read my mind or talk to the dead. At least not in the way most people claim.

There have been studies where the conclusions drawn at then end of the published paper support fractional percentages of a phenomenon. What all of these published studies fail to reveal is how the margin of error for all of them is much greater than the any positive results achieved. What this means of course is that any data confirming the hypothesis falls within the area where the results can be false positives.

Most people get into para-psychology because they have a previous interest in things like psychics and ghosts and shit. It's pretty rare that you have a person enter a field where the main subject matter is completely unbiased to them. By simply choosing a field for which there is no consensus of positive results you've raised a red flag that you want to prove that positive results do exist. It most likely isn't deliberate or willfully done but results do get swayed. This is exactly why a higher success rate is needed to confirm these studies.

But the thing is that most psychics don't claim to be .275% supernatural. They claim things like 90% accuracy and it's the people who just soak up every claim without really examining it that end up calling those of us who don't "closed-minded".

I often hear the same people dismiss the scientific method as if it were a club. It's a tool. A method. So far it's been the best method we have to determine the difference between real and not real. What's really golden about that is the fact they usually use devices that are the exact result of using the same processes they claim doesn't work. When people are stabbed and bleeding out, they almost always except the medical interpretation of the sciences. It's only when that interpretation dismisses their previously held belief that they start calling the process dogmatic.

People such as homeopaths also like to do the whole "big pharma" thing. The logic is that because corporations don't give a shit about people that they're also actively trying to kill them too. I always like to point out that if "Big Pharma" really wanted to make money they could just cut all their research and laboratory teams and just sell magic water. They could just be homeopaths. That would increase profits.

My mom used to think that "Big Pharma" was actually trying to keep people sick. I responded with this: "Mom, you work as a sonographer (ultrasound technician). Would it not make more sense to you to tell people that they needed to keep coming back in order to make more money? Even if they don't need it?"

Her response usually was that that she actually cared about people unlike the evil corporations. To which I would then say: "But you do have people who need to see you more than once. What's more likely, that thousands of research scientists, medical professionals, statisticians, and people in analysis all collude to keep people sick, or that one sonographer is telling people they are sick and need to keep coming back?"

Then she would say "But I don't do that, I would never do that."

and of course my response is... "But you assume they do."

If "Big Pharma" was a huge conspiracy of people keeping the population sick we would see far more whistle-blowers. If you assume that thousands of people who all educated themselves and dedicated themselves to the health sciences are all actively hiding evidence in order make money, then I should assume you're the kind of person who would. As cynical as I am, I don't assume everyone can be that heartless. It makes more sense that a heartless person would.

Here is a small list of things that millions of people believe despite the fact that they not only lack any scientific evidence but also defy the fucking galaxy of things we already know about the natural world:

Acupuncture
Alternative medicine
Chelation therapy
Chiropractic
Colon cleansing
Detoxification
Ear candling
Energy medicine
HIV/AIDS denial
Holistic medicine
Homeopathy
Naturopathy
Psychic surgery
Vaccine denial
Vaccine autism links
Astral projection
Curses
Exorcisms
Faith healing
Ghosts
Magick
Psychics
Vampires
Voodoo
Witchcraft
Astrology
Attachment therapy
Dowsing
Dream interpretation
Evolution denial
Expert witnesses
Facilitated communication
Feng shui
Hypnosis
Numerology
Reparative therapy
Repressed memory therapy

god.

There many many more and I am sure that some of my reader's believe in one or more of those things. Even so, the simple fact remains that none it is supported by reality. Sorry about your luck. I'm too lazy to edit this mess.

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