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The point behind organic food is that it's better for the environment, not healthier to eat. But thanks for the useless study, UK!

I'm not so sure that's the point either. That might have been the original (if not necessarily well conceived) idea. As it stands now the point behind organic food is mark up what are essentially inferior food stuffs. I know it makes most people feel like they are doing a good deed by paying twice as much for organics, but in truth the issue is a lot more complex. You could make the case that certain types of farming which is deemed organic might locally be "better for the environment". If we assume that the types of farming deemed organic were ubiquitous, we have quite a different story on our hands.

What's perhaps more interesting about organics is how it captivates people's hearts. Indeed, many people who are otherwise skeptical tend to employ some degree of the appeal to nature fallacy.

They don't know. My warranty expired 2 years ago and I get the cards and calls too. They seem to be mailing/calling people based on year model of the car and normal manufacturer's warranty, then continuing the mailings for several more years in case you got an extended warranty. People figure, "wow, they know when my warranty is up, so they must have gotten some "inside" info from the manufacturer, so they must be legit." It's just a variant of the perfect prediction scam.

You mean this guy? Right.

Confirmation bias.

http://skepdic.com/pseudosymmetry.html

Cold fusion was a hoax. Get over it.

I do believe you meant to say, "Someone who edited the page on Wikipedia disagrees with you."

Or in fact, http://skepdic.com/agnosticism.html this website, since it is the "source" of the "definition" the editors of wikipedia are using.

Robert T. Carrol is cited as the source of the link above, and as such the quote from wikipedia "It is often put forth as a middle ground between theism and atheism."

but then you could always throw this in there "Demographic research services normally list agnostics in the same category as atheists and non-religious people, using 'agnostic' in the sense of 'noncommittal'."

Btw, it is provable that something does _not_exist, since phisics is also math... like, it's easy to prove that you can't have perpetual motion, and even get energy from it, right?

Ok:
Exhibit A:
Material proof of the existence of a 6th finger on my right hand = false.
A 6th finger on my right hand does not exist.
Math does not lie.

Exhibit B:
Material proof of the existence of a god = false.
A god does not exist.
Math does not lie.

Just a heads up to people interested in this.

Its homeopathic "science" which is a ridiculous concept.

Oh, and the people who try this? Their skin turns cobalt blue forever.

Let the researches find a safe vaccine to Alzheimers. Dont experiment at home with your health.

There were extinctions of the megafauna approximately 50k years ago in Australia...yet not elsewhere. Was it a local climate change or man? Why did a heap o' species just happen to die out in Oz, but not in say other places that are nearby and/or with similar conditions?

When did the ground sloths die out? Nope, not 10k years ago, at least not everywhere. Ground sloths lived on longer in places where man didn't reach until later: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/08/050803173345.htm There are numerous examples of such "coincidences" that I haven't mentioned. Enough, in my mind, to prove causation and not correlation.

The most direct an indisputable example is one of the most recent. Did the megafauna of New Zealand (i.e. moa, Haast's eagle) just happen to die out 700 years ago by a reason other than man? Mmmm.....I doubt it....wait, let's be clearer: No.

Does it mean climate/environmental changes had no effects? No, it doesn't. But I think it hard to argue that man just happened to be around for so much of the change. You might try looking into a book, Eternal frontier by Tim Flannery, which discusses some of these issues: http://skepdic.com/refuge/flannery.html

No, it doesn't.

http://www.skepdic.com/begging.html

-Rick

No kidding.

Parents don't discipline their kids (OMG, you sent them to bed without supper? CHILD ABUSE THEY'RE DENYING NUTRITION!). Schools can't discipline kids, because "OMG YOU MADE MY LITTLE BOY FEEL BAD ABOUT HIMSELF AND STUNTED HIS SELF ESTEEM!"

I've seen it countless times - we even approved having our class (unknown to the kids) having a hidden video camera so that if some kid acted up and the teacher had to discipline them, the kid whining "wahh teacher was mean and hit me" could be checked on. Five kids - the BRATTIEST, WORST ones - tried exactly that. FIVE KIDS - and every one of them was a fucking liar, proven on tape, yet somehow four sets of parents saw the tape and STILL insisted that somehow their kid was telling the truth and the tape was "doctored."

That's where we stand. Parents are so worried about their kid getting written up (OMG that could keep my kid out of college!) that rather than discipline their brat and teach them how to behave, they will support trying to get the good teachers (that is the ones who actually try to use what few discipline tools they have left) fired anyways.

Now as far as the study goes, here's the usual debunking boilerplate necessary:
#1 - Bad methodology (the researchers are finding what they want to find when they analyze "violence"; hitting/shooting each other with nerf weaponry is not violence, neither is playing cowboys and indians. Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd do not encourage violence.)
#2 - Crap sample size
#3 - The usual reporting errors ("self-reporting" and "reporting from other students" where they have incentive to overinflate reports and can easily be coaxed into doing so by someone they view as an "authority").

#4 - Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc fallacy. These idiot "researchers" can't imagine for a moment that the "most violent" kids will pick media suiting their temperament. Most rambunctious little boys don't want to play Barbie's Horsey Adventure or Barbie Picks Out Clothes And Does Her Hair, for example, but those sell pretty fucking well to little girls. The games don't "cause violence", they're simply as much of an expression of the kids' temperament (same thing for kids who pick non-contact sports like Tennis rather than medium-contact sports like Baseball or heavy-contact sports like Football).

#5 - "Massaging" the data to fit their sponsors' designs. And who sponsored this one? National Institute on Media and the Family - a known group who have the goal of killing off entertainment media in a variety of forms. When in doubt, follow the money.

Every time one of these studies comes up, the same crap is wrong with them. THAT is why the laws based on this crap "science" are thrown out in court, because even the local half-witted judges can see how nonscientific these "studies" are.

As someone who plays games to escape all the BS on TV and radio, political ads would not slip more easily into my subconscious. In fact, political ads, or any kind of ads in my games would elicit a "WTF is this shit doing in my game" response, and probably cause me to choose another game. When I watch TV, I expect ads and readily ignore them. When I play a game, I pay attention to the game environment, and any sort of ad would break the illusion.

BTW, there is no real evidence that subliminal messages have any efficacy at all.

Yes. Except for the fact that it is not valid. http://skepdic.com/polygrap.html

I don't know the proper place to respond to your .sigline, so I'll just do it here and hope someone notices. STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM LANDMARK.

http://skepdic.com/landmark.html

These people will not leave me alone since I made the mistake of accidentally acting interested in their bullshit.

Essentially, if anyone asks you to pay money and sign a non disclosure agreement, agree to full day classes (forcing you to skip work) and out-of-class "mentoring" (creepy people telling you what to do, subtly cutting off ties with friends and family), be wary. If you do go through with the first class and they try a hard sell for another, stop. Think. Wait. If the classes are worth it, you can afford the extra $100-$1000 they say it will cost to sign up later (if they say it's now or never, run for the nearest exit). It's a used-car salesman tactic, and should bring up alarm bells. These "classes" fall under more names than Landmark. I had a friend go $3,000 into debt to be allowed to "volunteer" (be a slave) for one of these scams.

I don't know the proper place to respond to your .sigline, so I'll just do it here and hope someone notices. STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM LANDMARK.

http://skepdic.com/landmark.html

These people will not leave me alone since I made the mistake of accidentally acting interested in their bullshit.

Beggging the Question.

Do we really want to repeat the days of patent medicine?

Those days are already here.

Do we really want to repeat the days of patent medicine?

Those days are already here.

Do we really want to repeat the days of patent medicine?

Those days are already here.

Do we really want to repeat the days of patent medicine?

Those days are already here.

Do we really want to repeat the days of patent medicine?

Those days are already here.

True, but that line more-or-less paraphrases naturalism: http://skepdic.com/naturalism.html

isn't that when the mayan calendar is supposed to end?

http://skepdic.com/maya.html

so the sun is just preparing to shut down, for the coming end of the world, of course

isn't that when the mayan calendar is supposed to end?

http://skepdic.com/maya.html

so the sun is just preparing to shut down, for the coming end of the world, of course

Your first link is based on cherry-picking the results of a post-hoc meta-analysis -- a double bias. The second (about PEAR) isn't any better. Also, note that those two articles contradict each other -- PEAR claims evidence of psychokinesis, while the SRI/SAIC analysis of the same claims a null result.

And an incorrect usage of "begs the question".

(I assume "sumbitter" is deliberate -- seems to be somehow more descriptive of many articles.)

Its like the holy grail of data analysis;

And just like the holy grail, it doesn't exist. Ever heard the expression "garbage in, garbage out"? Now imagine how that applies to a huge database of information compiled from diverse sources (including unverified, anonymous tips), where nothing is ever thrown away, and where nobody's quite sure what they're looking for.

The human brain is amazingly good at finding patterns - so good that it often finds patterns that aren't really there. Even with years of experience, training, and peer review, professional scientists are pretty bad at handling problems like confirmation bias, post hoc reasoning and the file-drawer effect - how are law enforcement agents likely to fare, with no statistical training and no effective oversight?

The people constructing these databases are falling into the trap of believing that more data means better data. That's an understandable mistake for people who are usually "data-poor", such as archaeologists, historians and detectives. But anyone from the "data-rich" sciences will tell you that once you have the data you face a whole new set of problems, and I very much doubt that counterterrorism officials, working in conditions of secrecy and under pressure to justify their jobs, are going to handle those problems in a rigorous way.

Please note that I'm not trying to say "police officers are too stupid to understand statistics" - scientists make these mistakes all the time, but they operate in an atmosphere of relative transparency and competition, where it's usually in some other scientist's interest to bring errors to light. The same conditions don't apply to government officials.

What does this mean? It means that false positives will lead to innocent people being monitored, blacklisted and imprisoned without trial, while false negatives will mean genuine threats go undetected. We urgently need to make our governments understand that more data doesn't necessarily lead to better decisions.

This reminds me a bit of the so-called Mozart effect claimed by Shaw and Rauscher that has been accepted as true by the general public. Their studies were not reproduced and had pretty shoddy methodology. Consult http://skepdic.com/mozart.html.

Yes, I would, if the project would fail were I to go ahead. Not doing so would be falling victim to the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

Yes its not only about using quantum physics to validate some way-off new age theory. Its also about Ramtha, 35000 years old warrior spirit , who is using JZ Knight as a channel to express himself all the while making her richer...

Also there's that Dr Emeto's "experiment" where thoughts make ice crystals happy or unhappy that has NO scientific basis.

Here's a complete debunking of that way-off movie.

if thats your reason for liking the MPAA, you must like windows for the blue screen of death.

Unfortunately pointing him towards Rick Ross' excellent site or the entry on SkepDic will only shore up his belief that you are broken and only the Landmark Education cult can help you understand that you're "running a racket" and that you haven't "become the possibility of being".

He'll offer to be "a stand" for you and help you into Landmark but do not fall for it.

I wish you well, I've lost several friends to Landmark. It's only a matter of time before he thinks that you don't "Get It" and he'll have to marginalize you.

Sorry, but this is how cults work. You'll see this for yourself first hand. Use this as fuel for the fight against cults.

Scientology and all its offshoot cults like The Landmark Forum are brainwashing users of people. Money money money.

How exactly does this warrant an Insightful moderation? What keen insights are we supposed to obtain from reading this sentence? How has this stimulated our thinking in new ways? The fact that this is given an Insightful mod and is currently at a score of 4 shows how horribly broken the moderation system here on slashdot really is.

I could see giving this an Informative moderation since there is a link to criticism of Landmark Education, although the sentence doesn't seem to really emphasize that this was the purpose. The "money money money" is a personal judgment made by the AC; personal judgments do not warrant Insightful moderations. If someone tells me "I like peanut butter", that's informative (assuming I gave a shit) but certainly not insightful.

But since the AC raised the topic of "money money money", let's think about this. Landmark Education has a program called the Self-Expression and Leadership Program (SELP). It costs $200 and runs for three months. They also feature the Introduction Leaders Program (ILP), a seven-month program that goes for $400. These cost about as much as a membership to a high-end gym. You would think that if Landmark was truly brainwashing people who take their courses, they ought to be able to get away with charging a hell of a lot more than that.

The problem with all the criticisms and exposes of Landmark that I see is that no honest attempt has been made to evaluate their programs in an unbiased format. The Skepdic's Dictionary entry on Landmark is pretty typical. The last paragraph lists the prices for the expensive courses but oddly seems to have forgotten to mention SELP and ILP. The write-up starts with "I have never attended a session of either est or Landmark but..." and then the author proceeds to write authoritatively about a topic he openly confesses he knows nothing about. It's not exactly hard to find a way to attend a Landmark session; these things are all over the friggin' place. The author cites a "Christian cult-watch group" as evidence that Landmark is bad, but neglects to mention a Harvard Business School study that had positive things to say about Landmark's management consulting arm.

If you don't like The Landmark Forum, that's fine. But a statement claiming that Landmark brainwashes people (BTW, the wikipedia entry on Brainwashing indicates that term and the theory are not supported by The American Psychological Association) to make money is just plain not deserving of an Insightful moderation.

GMD

Funnily enough, I'd known how evil Scientology was for years, and then I happened across the Skeptic's Dictionary which has entries on est and the Landmark Forum. I'd read them in about 1999, and a couple of years later a friend of mine invited me to audit (heh) a Landmark Forum workshop. I'd forgotten about what I'd read, so I checked it out, and it seemed vaguely interesting... and familiar. Then I realized that I knew where I'd heard of it before, and I sent the SkepDic links to my friend.

He stopped participating in the Landmark Forum shortly thereafter. :)

Funnily enough, I'd known how evil Scientology was for years, and then I happened across the Skeptic's Dictionary which has entries on est and the Landmark Forum. I'd read them in about 1999, and a couple of years later a friend of mine invited me to audit (heh) a Landmark Forum workshop. I'd forgotten about what I'd read, so I checked it out, and it seemed vaguely interesting... and familiar. Then I realized that I knew where I'd heard of it before, and I sent the SkepDic links to my friend.

He stopped participating in the Landmark Forum shortly thereafter. :)

Funnily enough, I'd known how evil Scientology was for years, and then I happened across the Skeptic's Dictionary which has entries on est and the Landmark Forum. I'd read them in about 1999, and a couple of years later a friend of mine invited me to audit (heh) a Landmark Forum workshop. I'd forgotten about what I'd read, so I checked it out, and it seemed vaguely interesting... and familiar. Then I realized that I knew where I'd heard of it before, and I sent the SkepDic links to my friend.

He stopped participating in the Landmark Forum shortly thereafter. :)

When religion doesn't get it right, people abandon it completely.

No they don't. They just reinterpret the primary tenets of the religion to suit their current desired conclusions.

A good demonstration of this is in the classic study When Prophecy Fails. A group of social psychologists studied a doomsday cult whose leader had predicted the end of the world. When the predicted date passed and the world didn't end, people did not leave the cult. Instead, they found reasons to explain it away (God was so impressed with their devotion that he put off the apocalypse on their behalf). The end result was that their beliefs were strengthened, not weakened, by disconfirmatory evidence.

(As a sidenote, the study was an important early test of Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance; Festinger had predicted the cult's response based on his theory.)

While there's a kernel of fundamentalism in the UK, I'm afraid this particularly virulent, anti-science, Know-Nothingist, inerrantist version of Christianity is an American invention.

While certainly true, it's equally true that the British (in particular, and Europeans in general) are not immune to a widespread acceptance of stupidity that appears to be a problem that is uniquely "common" to their society. I think we are in danger of viewing this problem too narrowly and thus asserting some sort of absurd cultural superiority. My hypothesis is simply that stupid people are drawn to stupidity. This fact, it seems to me, isn't culturally unique. And so cultural differences manifest themselves in different ways in different places.

In my view, all of these varieties of stupid are simply symptoms of the same fundamental flaw in human reasoning when viewed through the cultural of the person in question. So, more to the point, it needs to be examined why people, in general, believe stupid things. Pretending this is a uniquely American concoction hides, in my view, the underlying problem and distracts from the primary issue.

Well, as long as the lasers don't interfere with the "chemtrails"...

CAPTCHA: weeping

Since the Ideometer effect only should apply to believers it is interesting to see that also sceptics sometimes get a reaction (when searching for wires at least). See also as described in this link http://skepdic.com/comments/dowsecom.html/ that there are compressions that affect your stance and the rods.

Ideometer and compression could possibly be the explanations that explain how both believers and sceptics can get a reaction from the rods.

Thanks for an interesting debate

Funny that many people mistake mythology with factual history... you also think that x-files are documentary, aren't you?

Your comment is classical pseudoscience tactic: find some problem with actual theories and claim "so my completely ludicrous idiotic shambling on acid must be right!!!!oneone".

And for rest of universe, I would like to present Velikovsky in all ot his (in)famous glory...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Velikovsky

http://skepdic.com/velikov.html

"report the arrival of Venus into our solar system as a comet-like body within the past 10,000 years"

No. Venus was to be expelled from Jupiter. And remind me, what comets have anything in common with Venus? Mass? Temperature? Looks? Materials? Orbital parameters?

Your comment is classical pseudoscience tactic: find some problem with actual theories and claim "so my completely ludicrous idiotic shambling on acid must be right!!!!oneone".

And for rest of universe, I would like to present Velikovsky in all ot his (in)famous glory...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Velikovsky

http://skepdic.com/velikov.html

"report the arrival of Venus into our solar system as a comet-like body within the past 10,000 years"

No. Venus was to be expelled from Jupiter. And remind me, what comets have anything in common with Venus? Mass? Temperature? Looks? Materials? Orbital parameters?

You can't prove one way or another what someone else has perceived.

It is possible to use context (such as conflict of interest), interrogation and corroborating evidence to build or destroy confidence in a witness's statements. But overall, you're right: testimony is not a great basis to build strong beliefs upon.

Our society has condemned men to death on the eyewitness testimony of only a handful of witnesses; yet those who claim contact with God throughout history are innumerable. If our justice system believes eyewitness testimony is good enough for life-and-death decisions, why isn't it good enough for the atheist?

A criminal case (in the US anyways) deals with a very small scope: proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is indeed guilty of committing the crime and deserves the punishment prescribed by law. For such a scope, the testimony of a (non-accomplice) eyewitness can be enough to support the death penalty (AFAIK, IANAL), although it's hardly ideal.

The question of religion (and interpretation thereof) has a much larger scope. It makes claims not just about a single event in a single place concerning the fate of a single person, but for all events (is there a plan for everything? how strict is it?) all places, all times (long before there were any witnesses, and for historical periods we don't have objective records of), and for all people. The methods in a criminal trial for proving an event and guilt are not sufficient here. For this, we need a theory that can generalize to a much larger scale. Such a theory needs 1. consistent, understandable and comprehensive enough content to be able to make such overarching religious claims and predictions concisely, and 2. a great deal of data to back it up. In collecting data, a testimonial is just an anecdote. No amount of anecdotes can substitute for data.

People have a lot of biases that prevent them from judging things rationally:
People are rationalizing creatures: if they take on a belief, they'd much rather defend that belief than question it seriously, particularly if it's one that they feel defines them, or is comforting, or otherwise makes things easier (properties which I think are involved in a lot of people's religious beliefs). This leads to confirmation bias, which causes them to tend to accentuate the events and interpretations that reinforce those beliefs and discard those that don't. Applied here, once someone becomes religious, their credibility as a witness decreases when it comes to offering their opinion on evaluating their own religion. These things are better evaluated by someone who doesn't have an emotional stake in the matter.
Memes are ideas that spread from person to person on their own momentum, i.e. without the need to be independently verified. Memes represent a lot of people's beliefs and can result in very strong beliefs, including ones that aren't true. This is a huge confounding factor in trying to extrapolate truth from popular beliefs or beliefs of other people. Beliefs based on other people's beliefs run a big risk in becoming an extension to a baseless meme.
The human brain is not a precise, logical, systematic computer like the one you're reading this post on. The brain is subject to many factors that can cause anomalous behavior. Subconscious states can manifest as artifacts that the conscious mind cannot control, or oftentimes interpret correctly. For example, severe depression can manifest even as hallucinations. In the same way, people who believe deeply enough in something may actually hallucinate in support of their belief.
My point is that in an unstructured collection of people's beliefs can never be good enough to support major religious belief rat

Unless you happen to love debunking the falsely-claimed-paranormal, you're probably like me and had no idea who the hell James Randi is/was/will be. Here's his Wikipedia page, here is his standing $1,000,000 challenge for a demonstration of true paranormality, and here is his Education Foundation (on "the Paranormal, Pseudoscientific, and the Supernatural").

Also, here's a video of him in action.

As some others have mentioned, how do you propose to get the equipment needed (which is rather large and cumbersome) to be mobile?

MRI while not NMR, is very similar to NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance - google it yourself). The subject (or sample) is placed in a powerful magnetic field; powerful enough to align the hydrogen atoms along field lines. Then radio frequency energy is beamed through the subject, from which we can make a "picture" (in the case if MRI, I believe we look at the water in your body, but I might be wrong). These techniques require REALLY POWERFUL MAGNETS. Magnets that are super-cooled with liquid nitrogen and weigh several tons. Have you ever been in for an MRI scan? These machines are BIG. And LOUD.

And these are only the practical matters. None of this addresses the basic issue which is still, "We won't know what you're thinking." Look here for some clues on why we won't know what you're thinking...

Irving Kirsch, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut, believes that the effectiveness of Prozac and similar drugs may be attributed almost entirely to the placebo effect. He and Guy Sapirstein analyzed 19 clinical trials of antidepressants and concluded that the expectation of improvement, not adjustments in brain chemistry, accounted for 75 percent of the drugs' effectiveness (Kirsch 1998). "The critical factor," says Kirsch, "is our beliefs about what's going to happen to us. You don't have to rely on drugs to see profound transformation." In an earlier study, Sapirstein analyzed 39 studies, done between 1974 and 1995, of depressed patients treated with drugs, psychotherapy, or a combination of both. He found that 50 percent of the drug effect is due to the placebo response.http://skepdic.com/placebo.html

"Prozac is associated with insomnia, restlessness, nausea, and tension headaches, which normally go away within one to two weeks from the time it was first taken. One possible Prozac side effect, which remains for the time it is taken, is its effect on your sex life. It often reduces desire and can delay or interfere with orgasm, in both women and men. Fatigue and memory loss are other possible problems."http://www.panic-anxiety.com/prozac_side_effect/prozac_side_effect.htm

Not surprising since the royal family are believers in this nonsense.

If you had ever been through a polygraph, you would not have made that statement about the source.Yes, they are antipolygraph.org, but they are also right. Last time I was in the chair, I told the truth for 8 hours. When we were finished for that day, I was astounded to hear the polygrapher accuse me of being a drug dealer, a terrorist, and molesting my own children. And no before you ask, I am none of those. I began to wonder how I could tell the truth for so long and have the machine be so wrong.

Polygraphs are pseudoscientific claptrap. If I was offered the chance to take one in a criminal investigation to clear myself, and especially if I was innocent, I would never submit to one.

Maybe someone could sue him because of using fake rolex watches he bends.

"You can't criticize Jesus." true, though one can criticize some people's various figments** that those people label as "jesus". :/ ** look boss! da toast, da toast! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptions_of_religi ous_imagery_in_natural_phenomena http://skepdic.com/pareidol.html http://artfiles.art.com/images/-/Fantasy-Island-Ph otograph-I10042195.jpeg, amen

Well, Science is claiming that a fire in some building corrupted the accuracy of the shroud of torine and it isn't as old as once thought.

Um... no. Actually, the opposite. Carbon dating showed that the 'shroud' dated to the 14th century. Some people (not scientists) argued that a fire in the 16th century infused the shroud with carbon soot that confused the date. However, "Science" sure as hell doesn't say that:

A weight of 20th century carbon equaling nearly two times the weight of the Shroud carbon itself would be required to change a 1st century date to the 14th century (see Carbon 14 graph). Besides this, the linen cloth samples were very carefully cleaned before analysis at each of the C-dating laboratories."

(BTW, you claimed that some oil field or another was found with "young earth theories". I'm very interested in actual documentation about this - do you have any?)