It’s another CFI conference, titled Dangerous Nonsense – Exploring the Gulf between Science and its Impostors, which is being held in Chicago on 24 April. I just got the notice today, though, and noticed that the cutoff date for discounted early registration is 7 April, right now! If you’re interested, work fast, save yourself a few dollars.
Californians, if you’re living anywhere near Berkeley, you might want to go to this: the Skeptical Conference on 24 April. They’ve got some good speakers, and it should be a fun meeting.
Just don’t believe anything they tell you unless they provide lots of evidence to back it up.
I know many of you are occupied with batting around an obtuse creationist named JohnHamilton, but if you need a break, there’s a nice post here that has drawn out a couple of scientologists. They’re actually trying to defend the fantasies of L. Ron Hubbard as “science”!
Science (from the Latin scientia, meaning “knowledge”) is, in its broadest sense, any systematic knowledge-base or prescriptive practice that is capable of resulting in a correct prediction, or reliably-predictable type of outcome. In this sense, science may refer to a highly skilled technique, technology, or practice, from which a good deal of randomness in outcome has been removed.
Dianetics and Scientology processes fit that description.
Why, no it does not, since Scientology has no reliable, testable outcome other than the separation of the suckers from their money.
I have arrived safely in Rochester, New York!
OK, totally unsurprising and boring. How about this for exciting news: Simon Singh has won an appeal, and gets to use the defense of fair comment in his battle with the chiropractic quacks.
Air travel works! Reason wins one!
You could also smack it with a hammer and set it on fire. More mass media lunacy is looming, with a new show on TLC called Paranormal Court.
Robert Hansen, a psychic medium famous among people who believe in psychic mediums, will mediate disputes between family members squabbling over possessions left behind by the deceased.
You know, if somebody I loved died, and a fraud like Robert Hanson came along to tell me what that person believed, I think I’d be a bit pissed. And no, I wouldn’t accept that he had any authority or knowledge to determine the state of mind of the deceased.
Oh, and TLC (it stands for The Lamebrain Channel, I think) descends a few more notches in credibility.
Nikki Owen is “a practitioner of neuro-linguistic programming and TV commentator who is described as Britain’s leading charisma expert.”
Let that sink in. You just know she’s got to be an utterly astounding dingbat, and you wouldn’t be wrong.
Anyway, she has made an incredible claim that is testable (that last bit is probably the most astonishing part of it all — these gomers usually run away from anything that can be evaluated as fast as their little legs will take them). Owen says that if you slice an apple in two and talk lovey-dovey to one half, and spiteful meanness to the other, the loved half will stay prettier longer…or the hated half will decay faster. And what’s more, because faces are just like apples, you can make yourself prettier just by sweet-talking yourself in a mirror. Now I think that confidence and cheerfulness can improve your attractiveness, unsurprisingly, but this claim that it is a physical effect that can even impinge on non-sentient vegetables is a bit much.
Rebecca Watson is taking Nikki Owen on. She’s going to replicate the experiment, with blind assessment and a control.
This is excellent. Some people are complaining about the deviation from the Owen protocol by the addition of mustaches on the jars, but that’s irrelevant, since all of the jars get them — since we know already that mustaches make one youthful, lovely, and sexy, all they’ll do is uniformly preserve all the apple slices for a bit longer. No worries.
Rebecca also has a facebook page on the experiment. You can join in!
I have to admit that I’ve been doing a slack variant of this experiment for a while. I’ve got this stash of consecrated crackers in a baggie, and every day I tell them how much I hate them, taunt them with a nail, and tempt them with dominion over the earth, and creepily, they have stayed exactly the same. Lo, behold the power of preservatives, or perhaps the complete absence of nutritional value. Not even bacteria or mold wants a bit out of Jesus.
Word.
On Saturday in Melbourne, I’m going to be giving a talk on the incompatibility of science and religion. Now what happens? Another eruption of those accommodation arguments, and I’ve got this big pile of stuff I could say right now, but I’m going to hold it in, so it’s at least a little bit fresh for the end of this week. Until then, read Larry Moran, who has it covered.
I am particularly appalled that Larry’s comments contain that hoary old chestnut, “science can’t explain love,” with the bizarre claim that “No scientist that is also a decent human being subjects all her/his beliefs to scientific scrutiny.” I think otherwise. There is a naive notion implicit in that statement that scientific scrutiny is somehow different from critical, rational examination. I’d argue the other way: no decent human being should live an unexamined life.
This is old news. The NY Times has an article on the expanding agenda of creationists to include denial of lots of other phenomena that make them uncomfortable. We’ve known this for years! It isn’t just creationism; those beliefs have a surprisingly high correlation with denial of climate change, denial of HIV’s role in AIDS, anti-vax nonsense, rejection of the Big Bang, dualism, etc., etc., etc. At the root of these problems is discomfort with modernity and change, resentment of authority, anti-intellectualism, and of course, goddamned religion, which is little more than a rationalization for maintaining barbarous medieval values. So, yeah, face the facts: creationism isn’t just a weird reaction to bad science instruction and those annoying godless liberal college professors — it’s just one symptom of a deep-seated mental derangement.
One example from the story:
In Kentucky, a bill recently introduced in the Legislature would encourage teachers to discuss “the advantages and disadvantages of scientific theories,” including “evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning.”
They often do this, taking the opportunity to try and get a whole slate of dogma incorporated into law. This one, from State Reprehensible Tim Moore of Kentucky, is just particularly stupid, but characteristic of the genre. I’m just impressed that now human cloning is a theory — I thought it was a technique.
They also mention the recent South Dakota resolution.
“Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant,” the resolution said, “but rather a highly beneficial ingredient for all plant life.”
Change the wording a little bit, and substitute “shit” for “carbon dioxide”, and it’s still just as true.
I have been repeatedly told that going to the root of the problem, the unwarranted deference given to religious views, is a tactical error if what we want is to improve the citizenry’s understanding of biology. What these kinds of absurdities reveal, though, is that creationism is just one wretched excrescence of a whole body of pathological thought…and that focusing on one symptom while avoiding the cause is pointless.
Gosh, when I put it that way, it doesn’t sound like much. But at least Dr Rachel Dunlop has won the Shorty Award in the Health category, beating out some quack. Congratulations!
