Tag Archives: Politics

Wednesday Links

Wednesday Links

Chiropractors playing to a parent’s deepest fear – SIDS. We don’t know what causes it, we know little about how to prevent it, but Chiropractors lay claim to secret knowledge and take advantage of new parents’ willingness to do anything for their children by lying to them.

Ed Yong tells an inspiring story of a triumph in genomic medicine. Lilly Grossman carries a gene mutation that fills her nights with shaking and seizures instead of sleep, but finding it delivers the treatment she needs to live an almost normal life. Grab your hankies.

This won’t make a lot of sense to many people, but an abstract that shows a possible neurobiological connection for skin picking and hair pulling (dermatillomania and trichitillomania) makes me think how nice it would be to eventually find a way to fix it.

Take this, people who think diet can prevent all disease. So there.

This may seem like a wonderful advancement in prosthetics, but can you say. . .mind control?!?!?

Recognize a pattern? Republican sticks to party platform, opposes gay marriage. Republican offspring comes out as gay. Republican weasels out of original stance.

I can’t say this where it’s appropriate, but you can tell when someone thinks he knows more than he actually does when he’s not even wrong. Unfortunately, the Dunning-Kruger effect means it will be impossible to educate him as to why this is so. He does not experience the discomfort of cognitive dissonance and learns only what strengthens his confirmation bias. Worse, this is willful ignorance and intellectual dishonesty. Rationalwiki is an appropriate source of information to reflect my repressed snarkiness. Enjoy.

Bookmark this site for when you need a good laugh or a healthy dose of schadenfreude. There is simply too much here for me to give it to you a bit at a time. Bask in its guanophrenic glory as it slowly loads the page bit by bit up to the top. If you really want to get in the spirit, go to the pantry and get some tinfoil to make yourself a party hat first.

AWWW!! ELEPHANT BAYBEEE!

Wednesday Links

Wednesday Links

Sorry for the paucity of links this week, but I have been spending a significant portion of my days either sleeping or wandering about wishing I were asleep. This should keep you busy for a little while, though.

Carl Zimmer explains what’s up with the wrinkly brains.

Theory of Mind describes our ability to understand the emotions and thoughts of others by relating them to our own. Rebecca Saxe is using fMRI to study how it develops.

The Human Brain Map Project proposed by President Obama sounds really cool, but some scientists have what sound like legitimate gripes about it.

Jon Stewart interviewed Steven Brill about his Time Magazine Article, Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us, and didn’t ask him too many tough questions about his information. However, Matthew Iglesias did in Slate, and David Dobbs agreed and added a story of his own as illustration on Wired. (H/T to Miss Cellania)

Gorillas playing in leaves!!

Belief Makes You Close-Minded. . .

Belief Makes You Close-Minded. . .

It’s a refrain that’s heard often by skeptics – “You’re close-minded!” “If you’d open your mind, you’d understand!” “By ruling out the possibility of (fill in the blank) you’re closing your mind to all possibilities!” The thing is, in pretty much every instance, these insistences are completely wrong. The believer is the one whose mind is closed. Let me outline why this is.

Someone who believes something is, by definition, rejecting all evidence and argument that contradict with those beliefs. It doesn’t matter if it’s a belief that was taught to them, or when it was taught to them. It doesn’t matter if they came to the belief via anecdotes or personal experience. The core of belief is that it is not based on actual evidence. What a believer views as evidence is actually confirmation of belief. Evidence is reliable, consistent, and reproducible. Evidence doesn’t happen only under certain circumstances or only when observers are believers.

To a believer, evidence is inextricably bound to belief. Stories that support the belief are considered evidence, while those that contradict the belief are picked apart and dismissed as inconsequential. Supporting information is accepted, regardless of whether it is actual evidence, and dissenting information is rejected, even if it is actual evidence. If we’re talking about what constitutes closed-mindedness, I’d put this way up at the top of the list.
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