This one:

Isn’t the cartoon a simple answer to a serious problem? Does that make it wrong?

I also thought about the revolutionary ideas in science, like evolution. Darwin’s answer is not complex — it’s fundamentally very simple — but it has deep implications and complex consequences, and yes, it’s a long and winding road if you try to follow all the details that flow from it. But it’s not the complexity that makes people reject it. If complexity were an objection, there would be no Catholics or Muslims in the world.

It’s the mismatch between simple and wrong perceptions and simple but right reality.

Evolution says that biological change is a property of populations — that every individual is a trial run of an experimental combination of traits, and that at the end of the trial, you are done and discarded, and the only thing that matters is what aggregate collection of traits end up in the next generation. The individual is not the focus, the population is.

And that’s hard for many people to accept, because their entire perception is centered on self and the individual. That’s why they invent stories of life after death and eternal life, because what’s the point if you just live for a brief time, and then die? The point only emerges when you step away from it and see the world from a different perspective, that of the population.

So I have to reject the premise of the cartoon. People are willing to avidly embrace difficulty and complexity if it conforms to their personal biases, if it affirms what they want to be true.

I haven’t gone to any of their meetings, but their web site weirds me out. There’s the name: that space makes a difference. Freethought is “a philosophical viewpoint which holds that positions regarding truth should be formed on the basis of logic, reason, and empiricism, rather than authority, tradition, revelation, or other dogma”, and as I’ve said repeatedly, it is not a pointless label for thinking whatever you want (everyone gets to do that, whether you’re a hidebound Catholic or Islamist, or an atheist scientist). So I’m a little skeptical when someone confuses freethought with freedom to think any damn thing.

Then there’s the motto on every one of their web pages: Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent!. Whoa, what? A Calvin Coolidge quote that reeks of Norman Vincent Peale and the Power of Positive Thinking? Look again at that freethought definition — does it mention that truth is determined by thinking really hard and stubbornly about it, or does it say something about “logic, reason, and empiricism”?

And this page: Do People Have Psychic Abilities? Open-Minded Free Thinking at its Finest. It completely misrepresents the status of the science.

Let’s get real. There is no supernatural anything. Nothing is outside of reality. There is no single God, and no Gods, no Ghosts, no Goblins and no Ghouls. They are all fabrications of the human mind in an effort to make sense of what we experience but don’t understand. Our minds create an imagined reality or experience and we accept our imagining as something real. We seek a reason for existence and we just can’t seem to accept that IT JUST IS.

Nonetheless there is strong evidence for anomalous psychic experiences such as extrasensory perception. That doesn’t mean these experiences are outside of reality, that they are somehow supernatural. It just means we don’t understand these experiences and cannot explain them YET. That’s why we use science to study them. First to explicitly identify what it is that people are experiencing, and second to perform further experiments to understand how these experiences physically work.

No, there is no strong evidence for ESP. None at all. It’s been pursued for years by dogged people who think persistence and determination alone are omnipotent, and that if they just keep chasing marginal statistical anomalies with sufficiently sloppy experimental procedures, they will be able to prove that it exists. But the author of this piece has their own interpretation: the scientific establishment has been conspiring against paranormal phenomena.

Unfortunately many skeptical scientists see the study of extrasensory perception as a threat to science. They have already decided these experiences cannot be real. To protect science from the “charlatan” scientists performing these experiments they created a committee to set up rules and tests that the parapsychology research results must pass before they can be accepted as valid science. So the parapsychologists went back, designed tests that met the very strict rules required, and performed the tests again. Many of the tests still came out positive for extrasensory perception. OOPS.

So the skeptical scientists went back to the their drawing board and made the tests virtually impossible to pass for just about any research. One of the skeptical scientists actually quit the committee having realized this was not about making objective tests for parapsychology research to pass. It was about making tests that did not allow parapsychology research to pass PERIOD.

Demanding greater rigor in the face of anomalous results is exactly what scientists are supposed to do; if the phenomena can not survive tests that exclude error and prosaic explanations, than the phenomenon is not what the psychic proponents think it is. This exactly what happened when some physicists found that neutrinos traveled faster than light: a surprising claim like that requires that other, alternative explanations be excluded, and careful repetition and analysis found experimental error that explained the result.

I suppose you could argue that “It was about making tests that did not allow physicists with faster-than-light research to pass PERIOD”. But this is how I see it:

So the chorus has sung and the final curtain has fallen on the faster-than-light neutrino saga. “The story captured the public imagination, and has given people the opportunity to see the scientific method in action—an unexpected result was put up for scrutiny, thoroughly investigated and resolved in part thanks to collaboration between normally competing experiments,” Bertolucci says in a CERN press release. “That’s how science moves forward.” Fair enough. But can we move on now?

The final curtain has also fallen on the psychic powers myth. Can we move on?

Please don’t. I’ve had to rant at a few people lately who credulously post these superficially cool memes that dissolve into absolutely unworkable nonsense when you think critically about them for even a moment, and they’re all coming from this persistent self-promoter named David Avocado Wolfe. Worst of all, I’m seeing these coming from atheist and skeptic groups, people I’d expect to put a little more thought into the evaluation of claims.

This guy is a cancer quack, and is marketing New Agey supplements that are supposed to do magical things for your body. For instance, he’s selling Himalayan Crystal Salt, which he claims contains 84 natural, essential elements (note that he’s careful not to call them “chemicals”, which are all bad). In addition to sodium and chloride, like the cheap stuff you buy at the grocery store, it also contains trace elements (also like any food grade product you buy at the store), which includes arsenic and plutonium.

Wolfe is a no-talent, incompetent, dishonest fraud: the one skill he has to an extreme degree is in marketing, and the only thing he markets is himself. If you push something at me from David Wolfe, I will cut you off completely.

The university has accepted the Ph.D. dissertation of Judy Wilyman, which is plum full of rancid bollocks. She’s an anti-vaxxer, and apparently her advisor had no problems with a thesis that basically lied about the science and promoted bizarre conspiracy theories.

Look at that first line. There is no stringent monitoring of adverse events or evaluation of the effectiveness of vaccines in the population that would provide meaningful data on their effects in the population. Has she never heard of this science called epidemiology? Does she know what a Phase IV clinical trial is? This stuff is assessed out the wazoo. It’s the analysis of effectiveness and side effects that allows doctors to recommend dosages and schedules.

But it seems the social sciences department at UOW doesn’t believe in statistics or science at all. And most appallingly, the university is supporting this crap.

UOW ensures research is undertaken according to strict ethical and quality standards and supports researchers’ academic freedom of thought and expression, he said.

UOW does not restrict the subjects into which research may be undertaken just because they involve public controversy or because individuals or groups oppose the topic or the findings.

I can believe they have quality standards, but this is an admission that those standards are disgracefully low.

I would agree that research shouldn’t be restricted because it’s controversial. That’s not the case here. The problem with Wilyman’s research is that it is wrong, and that it violates the apparently non-existent standards at UOW for truth and accuracy.