Reading Time: 9 minutes The Healy wearable has only a very limited FDA clearance. But its claims go much, much further as they blitz your social media.
pseudoscience
Posted inPsychology
The methadone of the people
Reading Time: 6 minutes A lot of us are mystified that so many Millennials and Gen Z, after finding their way out of religion, have flopped right over to astrology and crystals. Between 40 and 62% of Gen Z give at least some credence to astrology. It shouldn’t mystify us.
Posted inHealth
Reminder: Reject anti-vax politicians
Reading Time: 4 minutes Anti-vax ideology isn’t a harmless quirk or a side issue. It reflects a worldview unmoored from empirical reality, and that’s an extremely bad sign for a candidate’s ability to make the right choices in a crisis.
Posted inPseudoscience
The scam of astrology
Reading Time: < 1 minute Horoscopes are harmless when regarded only as amusements. But when they’re taken seriously, it’s disturbing.
Posted inDeep Dive
Reclaiming human agency in how we think about AI
Reading Time: 9 minutes Online panic about AI models like ChatGPT follows a well-travelled path set by impoverished understandings of evolutionary theory. Can we reclaim human agency?
Posted inCritical thinking
There’s a reason every strip club has a ghost story
Reading Time: 3 minutes Late one night, I stepped down from what I hoped was my last stage show of the night at the strip club where I worked the closing shift. My eyes were still dazzled by the strobe lights and the fake smoke. My Red Bull had long since worn off. I was exhausted and more than […]
Posted inPseudoscience
Why are pseudosciences so appealing?
Reading Time: 5 minutes It’s only natural for us to try to find certainty and protection from our fears. Pseudoscientists take advantage of this yearning.
Posted inPseudoscience
Demand for useless and dangerous ‘alternative’ cures hits an all-time high
Reading Time: 5 minutes In Oscar Wilde’s fabulously funny The Canterbury Ghost, an apparition haunting Canterbury Chase is both mortified and angry when the new owners of the property—American clergyman Hyram B. Otis and his family—flatly refuse to be fazed by his attempts to scare them. The ghost of Sir Simon de Canterville is particularly outraged by the clergyman’s […]
Posted inGeneral
Licensed Astrologers
Reading Time: 2 minutes By James A. Haught The solar system is relatively flat, occupying an imaginary plane in the sky called the ecliptic. Planets waver 8 degrees on each side of the centerline, in a belt called the zodiac. As the Earth travels around its orbit through the year, twelve different constellations of stars come into the zodiac […]
Posted inUncategorized
Afterlife: When the Science Spoke At Last to Me
Reading Time: 7 minutes Hi and welcome back! Yesterday, I noted that I struggled mightily with my belief in some sort of afterlife. Today, I want to show you what happened as I slowly began coming to grips with mortality. Plunging Into Science. During that time, 2013-2015, I was devouring a lot of science about the brain — and […]