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- Yeah, in a Minute... is the personal dumping grounds of Paul Landry:
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News Gathering vs. Confirmation Bias
- Remember, if you do not have at least one source of news that you turn to regularly, with which you routinely disagree, then you are not practicing news gathering! You are practicing [confirmation bias].
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Science
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[S]cience is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996) at p.32.
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[S]cience is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
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Tag Archives: skepticism
Snopes: Everyone is searching for an easy “cure”
Snopes Digest, #7, 31 March 2020: As the world deals with an ever-more-frightening pandemic, we at Snopes are seeing the resurgence of a classic form of misinformation: Rumors of snake-oil cures and junk medicine have roared into public consciousness, crossing social media feeds and even the White House podium, around the COVID-19 coronavirus disease. If […]
Also tagged covid-19, rational thought / critical thinking
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A Version of Reality So Elaborately Embellished That it Qualifies as Fan Fiction
New York Times Editorial Board: “I built what I built myself.” This boast has long been at the core of the mythology of Donald Trump, Self-Made Billionaire. As the oft-told story goes, young Mr. Trump accepted a modest $1 million loan from his father, Fred, a moderately successful real estate developer from Queens, and — […]
Also tagged bullshit, government, politics, trump
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Bill Nye Saves the World
Netflix: Emmy-winning host Bill Nye brings experts and famous guests to his lab for a talk show exploring scientific issues that touch our lives. Wow. Great show! Even better than I was hoping.
Also tagged education, entertainment, reason, science
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How should the media cover a White House that isn’t afraid to lie?
Thanks for watching. Strikethrough is a new Vox video series focusing on media coverage in the age of Trump, or, as Sean Spicer would say, the biggest, most impressive video series of all time.
Also tagged government, politics
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A Skeptical Response to Science Denial
So, study after study confirms an overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. But what does the average person think about the consensus? A Yale survey of Americans found that on average, people think that 67 percent of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. That already sounds disturbingly low, but it’s even worse […]
WSJ: NSA Monitoring Includes Three Major Phone Companies, as Well as Online Activity
Honestly, I don’t know why so many people are getting so upset about this. Let me rephrase that: I honestly don’t know why so many people are just now getting so upset about this! Unless you’ve been practicing willful ignorance — for political or other reasons — then you’ve known full well about (or at […]
Also tagged bullshit, government, opinion, politics, reason
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Reason: How Even a ‘Well-Trained Narcotics Detection Dog’ Can Be Wrong 84 Percent of the Time
So even a dog that is very good at finding drugs in a “controlled testing environment” will generate a lot of false positives when sniffing randomly selected cars. Again, forensic “science” (with the exception of DNA) largely isn’t science. The U.S. Extreme Court is WRONG.
Also tagged crime, government, reason, science
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How reliable is the science behind forensic science?
Fascinating PBS: FRONTLINE show from April, “The Real CSI: How reliable is the science behind forensics?” So it turns out that the Forensic sciences (with the notable exception of DNA) are no more “hard science” than Creation “science”, social “science”, or Scientology… Most have no scientific basis at all, and those that do rarely reach […]
AP: 12 things to know about the end of the world?
Cute video. Covers several of the major apocalyptic theories (Talk about “just a theory”!!!), as well as a number of previous (and obviously, incorrect) end-of-days predictions. I truly appreciate that the AP includes in their coverage of the Rapture an important point that most Christians either never knew, or conveniently forget: “The Bible records Jesus […]
Also tagged fear, freethought, history, reason, religion
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Those today who believe whatever nonsense they see on Facebook
John Gruber at Daring Fireball, nailing it as usual: Those today who believe whatever nonsense they see on Facebook are like the people who, a generation ago, believed the nonsense printed in supermarket tabloids like “The Weekly World News”. The difference is that instead of being crackpots who write letters to elected officials, a bunch […]
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