Memories: trust provisionally, but verify always

Steven Novella makes an important point: memories are fluid. There’s no VCR in your head, and no tape recorder either, and memories are constructs. You remember the framework (sometimes very poorly) of a past event, and your brain builds a plausible set of details around it. When you picture Christmas at your grandmother’s house when you were 12, you don’t have a record in your head of how many logs were in the fireplace or a second by second recording of the flickering of the fire. You remember that Grandma had a fireplace, and sometimes she had logs burning in it, and maybe there was a fire that year, and your brain obligingly assembles an image for you.

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Bill Maher, nevermore

I never watched Oprah, because she was a gullible woo-artist; I don’t watch Dr Oz, because he’s quack; and now all I can say is fuck Bill Maher, because he’s a crank on so many things. On his latest show, he surrounded himself with Marianne Williamson, a “spiritual teacher” and proponent of prayer, Amy Holmes, a news announcer for The Blaze (Glenn Beck’s spinoff), and some guy who didn’t say much, and he went off on a grand tour of kook talk, confident that his panelists wouldn’t disagree with him. Watch. Be embarrased for him.

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I hear the Danes don’t much like Lomborg, either

Once again, I am reminded that I’m in the wrong business to make money. Bjorn Lomborg is in the news again, and I learn that the man makes $775,000/year for running the Copenhagen Consensus Center…which is a drop box in Lowell, Massachusetts. I don’t think buying a mailbox is the secret, though — I think you also have to convince the Koch Brothers to deposit checks in it. Apparently the trick behind that is to lie persuasively about science in a way that allows very rich people to become more rich.

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It’s the same old story

Denialists claiming to be pro-science. Politicians insisting on a balanced treatment. A population ignorant of the science indignantly rejecting a clear and well-established, evidence-based conclusion.

I’m not talking about creationism, although it’s exactly the same story. It’s the anti-vax position now.

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