I don’t recall if I ever mentioned this before, but back when I was in college I had quite the interest in a couple of sciences that you might not have expected or guessed at, namely anthropology and archaelogy. Indeed, an archeology class that I took as a senior was one of the most memorable […]
Category: Skepticism/critical thinking
If there’s one characteristic of denialists of all stripes, it’s that they have a strong tendency to personalize their dislike of their particular bete noir science. For instance, anti-vaccine activists tend to attack Paul Offit as though he were the Dark Lord of Vaccination. Creationists tend to attack Charles Darwin (who, being conveniently dead, can’t […]
They call it the Nobel disease. Linus Pauling is the prototypical example. A brilliant chemist who won two Nobel Prizes, one for chemistry and the Nobel Peace Prize, in his later years Pauling became convinced that high dose vitamin C was a highly effective treatment for cancer and the common cold and, expanding upon that, […]
The other day I had a bit of fun deconstructing a shockingly bad post by a blogger at the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism named Dan Olmsted. In his post, he criticized the progressive movement for not “getting” autism. It was one of the silliest bits of whining I had ever seen, in essence […]
Woo-meisters love to build massive straw men about what skepticism is, the better to tear it down with gusto and paint skeptics as close-minded “debunkers.” I just came across a video that does just that (click on the link for even more straw men in addition to the video), but in one of the most […]
