Skeptic

A conspiracy theory cannot stay the same size. It constantly has to grow because every time you find a way to disprove the conspiracy it creates a bigger conspiracy as you have to create sub-conspiracies to account for the "false" evidence that disproves the conspiracy. This process is what I'm calling Conspiracy Scope Inflation.

Questions that homeopathy should have answered in a century:

1. how long do the vibrations last?
2. how can you test a homeopathic pill to see if the vibrations have decreased
3. what are the frequencies of the vibrations for the different homeopathic ingredients?
4. do the vibrations decrease over time?
5. how do you remove all previous vibrations?
6. what is the half life of the vibrations and does it change from the vibrations of an onion to the vibrations of a duck liver at some point?
7. by what mechanism does the body read and measure these vibrations?
8. once measured by the body what actions are taken and now can measure them?
9. how are vibrations transfered from one molecule to another?
10. how does the native vibrations of water change the vibrations of the substance? Because vibrations set frequencies and when you add two frequencies you get a new third frequency.
11. how are these frequencies different from brownian motion?
12. how can you verify your water is free of vibrations from previous interactions?

Even its name is B.S. propaganda

from the you're-not-anti-establishment-if-you're-pro-authoritarian dept

Web Archive link because I don’t want to support anyone hosting that vile stuff.

Really makes me think about the illnesses with no known cause we often blame on “hysteria”.

It does seem to be a pattern that illnesses of unknown cause (with physical symptoms) are blamed on psychology… until a cause is found.

See how peptic ulcers were treated before the discovery of “H. Pylori” or just the general history of Lupus.

A good dissection of bullshit "science" about vaccines - this dissection also highlights good general points to think about when applying critical thinking to any such out of left field "scientific" claims on the internet or those blathering dolts on TV news segments.

https://theunbiasedscipod.substack.com/p/anatomy-of-a-failure-why-this-latest

Dig into things before promoting them on social media.

Jan 14, 2025

Skeptics should largely agree about what science says, but that's not always the case. Exploring when and why skeptics disagree may be illuminating.

In this talk, Steven Novella dives into a series of topics where skeptics disagree amongst each other.

Steven Novella is the host and producer of The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, a popular and award-winning weekly science podcast. He is an internationally known author of three books on science and critical thinking and science communicator with multiple TV appearances and two popular blogs (NeuroLogica and Science-Based Medicine).

This talk took place on October 25, 2024

I haven't kept up lately, so this whole thing was news to me. I used to support CFI, but not anymore unless there is a major change.

This is anti-skepticism and, as Hemant Mehta/The Friendly Atheist says, it is anti-science and it helps religious fundamentalists.

Other secular, humanist and freethought groups have released a statement in support of queer people and queer issues: https://www.atheists.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/FINAL-Joint-Statement-on-LGBTQ-Rights.pdf

One question is: can you stop your friend believing these conspiracy theories? Regrettably, almost certainly not, at least not without a huge investment of time and patience. People are free to think whatever they want and some of us put that freedom to the weirdest uses. At least we can be thankful the conspiracies your friend has latched on to are about objects in the sky and not, say, which reptilian species is secretly controlling things.

A different question is: can you change the norms of the relationship so you don’t have to engage with this? Happily, that’s a different mission.

This seemed like good advice to post here because I know a lot of people are wanting to maintain friendships with such people (or family relationships for that matter) despite their nutty beliefs.

What if the drones are just drones?