Please, for the love of God, don’t share links about broccoli as an autism cure! Not only is the constant search for autism cures incredibly offensive, but that particular “study” is horrendously unscientific. There were fewer than fifty participants and it was rejected by peer review. I don’t think that even counts as a clinical study. That’s, like, a sixth-grader’s science fair project. I haven’t seen anything this ridiculous since Jenny McCarthy.
Indigo children, according to a pseudoscientific New Age concept, are children who are believed to possess special, unusual, and sometimes supernatural traits or abilities. They are sometimes also referred to as crystal children orstar children.
The concept of indigo children gained popular interest with the publication of a series of books in the late 1990s and the release of several films in the 2000s. According to experts, indigo children’s nature and abilities range from their being the next stage in human evolution, in some cases possessing paranormal abilities such as telepathy, to the belief that they are more empathetic and creative than their peers.
“If you’re not an expert but you think you’ve destroyed the entire foundation of a vast scientific edifice with 10 minutes of Googling, you might want to consider the possibility that you could be wrong.”
Earlier this year, a study made headlines worldwide by bluntly demonstrating the human capacity to be misled by “pseudo-profound bullshit” from the likes of Deepak Chopra, infamous for making profound sounding yet entirely meaningless statements by abusing scientific language.
This is all well and good, but how are we supposed to know that we are being misled when we read a quote about quantum theory from someone like Chopra, if we don’t know the first thing about quantum mechanics?
In a lecture given by Richard Feynman in 1966, the influential theoretical physicist told a story about the difference between knowing the name for something and truly understanding it:
“This boy said to me, ‘See that bird standing on the stump there? What’s the name of it?’ I said, ‘I haven’t got the slightest idea.’ He said, ‘It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you much about science.’
I smiled to myself, because my father had already taught me that [the name] doesn’t tell me anything about the bird. He taught me ‘See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a halsenflugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird — you only know something about people; what they call that bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way,’ and so forth. There is a difference between the name of the thing and what goes on.
The result of this is that I cannot remember anybody’s name, and when people discuss physics with me they often are exasperated when they say, 'the Fitz-Cronin effect,’ and I ask, 'What is the effect?’ and I can’t remember the name.
There is a first grade science book which, in the first lesson of the first grade, begins in an unfortunate manner to teach science, because it starts off on the wrong idea of what science is. There is a picture of a dog — a windable toy dog — and a hand comes to the winder, and then the dog is able to move. Under the last picture, it says, 'What makes it move?’ Later on, there is a picture of a real dog and the question, 'What makes it move?’ Then there is a picture of a motorbike and the question, 'What makes it move?’ and so on.
I thought at first they were getting ready to tell what science was going to be about — physics, biology, chemistry — but that wasn’t it. The answer was in the teacher’s edition of the book: The answer I was trying to learn is that 'energy makes it move.’
Now, energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right. What I meant is that it is not easy to understand energy well enough to use it right, so that you can deduce something correctly using the energy idea — it is beyond the first grade. It would be equally well to say that 'God makes it move,’ or, 'Spirit makes it move,’ or, 'Movability makes it move.’ (In fact, one could equally well say, 'Energy makes it stop.’)
Look at it this way: That’s only the definition of energy; it should be reversed. We might say when something can move that it has energy in it, but not what makes it move is energy. This is a very subtle difference. It’s the same with this inertia proposition.
Perhaps I can make the difference a little clearer this way: If you ask a child what makes the toy dog move, you should think about what an ordinary human being would answer. The answer is that you wound up the spring; it tries to unwind and pushes the gear around.
What a good way to begin a science course! Take apart the toy; see how it works. See the cleverness of the gears; see the ratchets. Learn something about the toy, the way the toy is put together, the ingenuity of people devising the ratchets and other things. That’s good. The question is fine. The answer is a little unfortunate, because what they were trying to do is teach a definition of what is energy. But nothing whatever is learned.
Suppose a student would say, 'I don’t think energy makes it move.’ Where does the discussion go from there?
I finally figured out a way to test whether you have taught an idea or you have only taught a definition. Test it this way: You say, 'Without using the new word which you have just learned, try to rephrase what you have just learned in your own language. Without using the word “energy,” tell me what you know now about the dog’s motion.’ You cannot. So you learned nothing about science. That may be all right. You may not want to learn something about science right away. You have to learn definitions. But for the very first lesson, is that not possibly destructive?
I think for lesson number one, to learn a mystic formula for answering questions is very bad. The book has some others: 'gravity makes it fall;’ 'the soles of your shoes wear out because of friction.’ Shoe leather wears out because it rubs against the sidewalk and the little notches and bumps on the sidewalk grab pieces and pull them off. To simply say it is because of friction, is sad, because it’s not science.”
Feynman’s parable about the meaning of science is a valuable way of testing ourselves on whether we have really learned something, or whether we just think we have learned something, but it is equally useful for testing the claims of others. If someone cannot explain something in plain English, then we should question whether they really do themselves understand what they profess. If the person in question is communicating ostensibly to a non-specialist audience using specialist terms out of context, the first question on our lips should be: “Why?” In the words of Feyman, “It is possible to follow form and call it science, but that is pseudoscience.”
Putting aside the specious connection drawn here between the plasmaspheric hiss and the biblical Firmament, I’m confused by how angry this post is. Like, the scientists supposedly affirmed your beliefs. Why are you mad.
In late 2015, a study made headlines worldwide by bluntly demonstrating the human capacity to be misled by “pseudo-profound bullshit” from the likes of Deepak Chopra, infamous for making profound sounding yet entirely meaningless statements by abusing scientific language.
This is all well and good, but how are we supposed to know that we are being misled when we read a quote about quantum theory from someone like Chopra, if we don’t know the first thing about quantum mechanics?
One of the worst things about the Depp conpsiracy apparatus is alleged progressives are now worshipping at the pseudoscience alter of expert body language analysis when that used to be mostly neckbeards who were irrationally angry at Meghan Markle
16. This millionaire entrepreneur is bringing Black Mirror closer to reality with his“Kernel”, which is planned to integrate computers to the human brain
6. Europe and China planning on a Moon base by 2020′s, (in other news, Trump craps his bed as he hears China will mine lunar fuel and hopefully starts a bigly space race)
7. Prepare yourself for a smartphone app that uses light to control engineered-cells and regulate blood sugarcontinuously
Innocent questions could take a person down dangerous rabbit holes. Questions like, for example, “Why doesn’t ghost ice melt?”
He hadn’t really thought about it before, but, surrounded by the icy caves of the Far Frozen, it seemed a natural enough question. He hadn’t a lot of time to ask about it when he was here before, in ice power bootcamp, trying to get enough of a handle on them to fight Undergrowth without freezing to death.
But the crystal he’d given Sam had yet to melt, and even when they’d held it over a tea light, it had retained its shape. They’d only been able to melt ghost ice with ghost fire. It was cool, but also weird.
Frostbite beamed at him. Frostbite did a lotof beaming, actually. It was a welcome change from how most people looked at him.
“An excellent question, Great One! How familiar are you with elements?”
This post was written by Simone Mohite, a recipient of an Archival Scholar Research Award for the 2021 Spring Semester.
2020 has proved to be anything but ordinary. With the sudden onset of the coronavirus, millions of people comprising a non-scientific jury tried to determine the rules of survival. To wear a mask or not to wear a mask? Are vaccines safe or is the data weird? Is this science, or is it pseudo-science?
Although dismissive statements about science and questionable “scientific” claims in the public sphere are routine, the coronavirus epidemic has shown us that it is even more difficult to know who and what to trust when the doctors and scientists offer conflicting guidance. We all want to know the truth that science can tell us—in this case, to keep us safe—but what classifies something as science in the first place? To answer this question, I turned to philosopher Carl Gustav Hempel’s work on logical empiricism. I examined a manuscript from 1981 in which to understand how Hempel developed his ideas before they were ‘fixed’ into print and disseminated.
The manuscript I chose was titled “Logical empiricism: Its problems and changes.” It is the revised text of a lecture delivered by Hempel in China in 1981. On the very first page, there is a note that says, “Revised and Submitted to Hung.” I was curious to know why Hempel was in China giving this lecture on the recent history of Western philosophy. As it was towards the end of his career, I wanted to know if Hempel had taken an interest in Chinese Philosophy, or if philosophers in China had taken an interest in him.
Before assessing the content, I began by examining the document itself. The first half of the manuscript is mainly typewritten. In the second half of this document are what appear to be Hempel’s notes for the lecture, mainly made using a black ink pen; however, visible changes and edits were made with a pencil. It looks as if the document were written in a journal notebook, from both the size of the writing and comparing it to the typewritten pages. His handwriting on these notes is significantly more legible than other notes available at the archive under Hempel’s name, which made me think someone else was probably supposed to read this – possibly for more edits.
Another thing I found interesting was Hempel’s remarks on the second page in the handwritten journal. They stated, “I remember my teachers with great respect and gratitude, but in the course of time, I have found certain difficulties in their ideas” (Hempel, 1981). Hempel then omits this from the revised text. I plan to delve deeper into Hempel’s correspondence to see which teachers he may be referring to and how he came to disagree with their ideas. I noticed other omissions between the two versions of the text, but they seem generic, as if he was refining his language for publishing this text.
I then turned my attention to the content of these versions of Hempel’s texts. My brief analysis helped me develop two insights, and additional research helped me begin to answer my questions about Hempel’s relation to China and Chinese philosophy. First, this manuscript helped me figure out what the Logical Empiricists and members of the Vienna Circle characterized ‘pseudoscience’. To my surprise, figuring out what separated scientific truth from metaphysics was an issue that logical empiricists, like Hempel, were thinking about back in the 1930s! They were concerned with verifications and considered any metaphysical statement meaningless.
Second, this manuscript provides evidence of who had influenced Hempel’s philosophy and who he may have had corresponded with. In Hempel’s lecture he mentioned a few recurring references to philosophers in Berlin and the Vienna Circle, such as Otto Neurath, Hans Reichenbach and Rudolph Carnap. However, the one that particularly interested me was “Professor Hung” – likely the same Hung from the first page!
As it turns out, I soon discovered that ‘Professor Hung’ was Tscha Hung, a Chinese Philosopher who was curious about logical empiricism and the foundations of truth (Cohen, 1996). This evidence provided an answer to my initial question: it seems Hempel was invited to China because Hung had an interest in Logical Empiricism and Western philosophy. Cohen (1996) mentions that he had heard of Hung while having a conversation with Marie Neurath Reading Hempel’s notes in the second half of this manuscript, I found Hempel’s account of meeting Professor Hung in Vienna. Apparently, Hung also attended the Vienna Circle meetings or one of the classes taught by either Moritz Schlick or Carnap. Hempel also mentions that the next encounter he had with Professor Hung was when he was giving a lecture in China 50 years later! Comparing the handwritten lecture and the revised version, I saw that Hempel had omitted this story about meeting Hung, which was surprising to me, considering that he was delivering this lecture in person, with Professor Hung in attendance. However, the final typewritten version might be an article he wrote, based on said lecture, so that may have led him to cut out all the informal sentences spoken at this lecture.
Works Cited
Cohen, R. S., Risto. Hilpinen, and Renzong. Qiu. “Realism and Anti-Realism in the Philosophy of Science : Beijing International Conference, 1992 ” Dordrecht ;: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996.
This is your yearly PSA that homeopathy IS NOT a synonym for home remedy. The homeopathy industry encourages this confusion because of the warm fuzzy feeling people get from home remedies. Homeopathy is a specific pseudoscience based on two primary principals:
1. Against all common sense, positive effects of a medicine get stronger the more you dilute it. Homeopathic remedies have their “active” ingredients diluted so many times that you’re paying big bucks for water and sugar pills. The common homeopath response to this criticism is to ramble a word salad of terms stolen from quantum physics that sound smart if you don’t happen to know what those terms actually mean.
2. Like-cures-like. This is the idea that you can treat an illness by giving a patient an extremely tiny amount (see above) of something that causes similar symptoms. Homeopathic treatments for nausea are typically dilute extracts from very poisonous plants that cause nausea & vomiting on ingestion. Luckily these don’t do anything because of how dilute they are, but it’s really funny to see homeopathy peddlers say that evidence-based medicine is poison, then watch them put Strychnine Tree (“nux vomica”) extract in their pills.
Anyway, double check medicines you’re buying over the counter at the pharmacy to make sure they don’t say “homeopathic” anywhere (sometimes it’s in fine print) because you are literally paying for nothing. And remember that chicken soup for colds is a home remedy, it’s not homeopathy unless you put a drop of the soup in an Olympic sized swimming pool.
Side note: the homeopathy industry likes to mask the identities of famous poisons withuncommon names so you get Arsenic Trioxide being called “Arsenicum Album.”
Other side note: You can often identify homeopathic products quickly if they’ve put the word somewhere obscure by looking at the back of the box. If the ingredient is in a comically low percentage (0.0000001%), the amount is given as a confusing dilution factor like “30X” rather than an amount, or HPU (“homeopathic unit,” probably their attempt to ape actual measures like USP units) it’s a homeopathy medication.
Side side side note: just to confuse you even more, occasionally herbal supplements are listed as homeopathic on the package even when they aren’t because these terms aren’t regulated in most places.
This book is about the effect of colored light on plant physiology, specifically on whether sun rays on the blue scale improve crop growth and animal health. This concept (chromotherapy) is considered a pseudoscience, meaning the light in a blue color makes no difference on physiology. The concept was developed and the book written by Augustus James Pleasonton (1808-1894). The concept was expanded to human health and a “blue glass craze” was born and fizzled out within a few years.
Not only is the cover of this book blue but even blue ink was used to print the text. Besides red inks used sparingly on early-modern title pages, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a lot of colored inks used in text based printing.
“New York, July 13–Recently a stir was caused by the claim of Boston scientists that by weighing the bodies of persons before and after death they had been able to determine the weight of the soul. Now comes Henry Price, a retired professor, who not only tells what the soul looks like and where it is located, but offers to photograph it as it leaves the body. He has asked the Bellevue hospital authorities for permission to install cameras at a few deathbeds in order to make such pictures.
A number of subjects would have to be exposed to the camera, because, you see, some people have no souls.
‘You only have a soul,’ says Professor Price, ‘if you have merited 1 from the Deity. If you have transgressed His law, if you are steeped in sin, you have no soul. You die like a dumb animal and crumbling dust is the end of you.
‘What is a soul like? Why, it is small, shapeless and gelatinous, and is located beneath the first rib. At the moment of death the soul is removed by an angel or agent of Deity. It must be taken while warm and palpitating and transferred to a body the counterpart of the 1 it has left. There is no such thing as eternity. The soul expires after its second life.
‘A camera sees and records things not visible to the eye. That is why I am seeking an opportunity to take photographs and thus demonstrate this discovery that has come after almost a lifetime of study.’
The professor thinks a soul does not weigh more than a gram.”
~The Spokane press. (Spokane, Wash.), 13 July 1907. Chronicling America. Lib. of Congress.
Hmm I wonder why someone who has just been electrocuted and is being forcibly restrained would enter into a panic and frantically resist? Surely nothing about this situation would register to the brain as a serious danger to one’s safety and naturally trigger one’s instinctual fight or flight response? No it must be the fault of an obscure mental illness I’ve just invented.
Excited delirium, originally identified by pathologist Charles Wetli to account for the deaths of nineteen Black prostitutes due to “sexual excitement” while under the influence of cocaine; the women later turned out to be victims of a serial killer.[26] The condition is primarily found in people under police restraint, especially after being Tasered,[27] and, while it is not in the ICD-10 or DSM-5, it is promoted by a number of doctors, many of whom are on the payroll of Axon, the manufacturer of Tasers.[27]
[Then the header of the Wikipedia page “Drapetomania”, as follows.]
Drapetomania was a supposed mental illness that, in 1851, American physician Samuel A. Cartwright hypothesized as the cause of enslaved Africans fleeing captivity.[1]: 41 Slave life was so pleasant, the official view was, that only the mentally ill would want to run away. In actuality, the desire for freedom is a natural human impulse.[2][3]
Okay someone asked me earlier “Hey CT, you study the occult for a living, off the top of your head, what’s the most popular form of the occult in today’s world?”
Pseudo-nutrition. Bar none. A massive amount of the fad dieting world goes beyond simple misinformation and ignorance and full on into a systemized non-scientific theory of anatomy and nutrition that 100% qualifies as magic. If you replace the term “toxins” with “evil ghosts” half of these blogs would sound like sumerian curse tablets.
Okay someone asked me earlier “Hey CT, you study the occult for a living, off the top of your head, what’s the most popular form of the occult in today’s world?”
Pseudo-nutrition. Bar none. A massive amount of the fad dieting world goes beyond simple misinformation and ignorance and full on into a systemized non-scientific theory of anatomy and nutrition that 100% qualifies as magic. If you replace the term “toxins” with “evil ghosts” half of these blogs would sound like sumerian curse tablets.
