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Canadian Blood Services Promotes Pseudoscience

trianglecat writes "The not-for-profit agency Canadian Blood Services has a section of their website based on the Japanese cultural belief of ketsueki-gata, which claims that a person's blood group determines or predicts their personality type. Disappointing for a self-proclaimed 'science-based' organization. The Ottawa Skeptics, based in the nation's capital, appear to be taking some action."

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  1. Re:Japanese Science and Pseudo by MindlessAutomata · · Score: 5, Informative

    Many, many famous scientists are such skeptics, such as Richard Dawkins, Phil Plait, Carl Sagan...

    I'm pretty sure you've got some agenda you haven't quite revealed to us. So, what exactly is your agenda? Believer in ESP? Ghosts? Homeopathy? Hmm?

    Your talk of going to pubmed and looking up the terms yourself makes you seem clever to the uninitiated but anyone who has ever used a scientific DB would know that those keywords are going to produce a lot of noise. Indeed, they do--and almost none of it, if any, has to do with ABO-typing and personality, but merely hormones or chemicals in the blood influencing personality traits, something almost no scientist / skeptic would deny. I looked over the keywords you gave. Some of them reference no association found between a personality characteristic and some chemical, some of them are completely tangential, and again, almost none of them have anything to do with the blood typing myth.

    You try to present yourself as a scientist very well, but I have to question how much you really do in practice, as any researcher, even on an undergraduate level, would be able to instantly spot how much noise the keywords "blood type personality" would produce. And indeed, it does--all the results that come up do NOT support ABO typing to personality, despite you implying that the results you'd get with those keywords indicate research done on ABO-typing and personality. It's telling how you don't even cite a single study, instead pointing people to impressive-sounding numbers on database hits in a database using broad key words in order to make it seem like research is being done on ABO-typing and personality when there isn't, because the notion has long been discredited even in Japanese scientific circles.

    You clearly have some sort of agenda, to so cleverly try to mislead people the way you have What is it?