Headlines for November 9, 2011
The bullshit detector
Why scepticism is a necessary application of the scientific method
The basic idea behind scepticism was perhaps best summarized by the physicist Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” This principle is exponentially more difficult to uphold in the modern era, where information of all degrees of truthfulness can flow without limit. To further complicate things, there are whole industries based on pseudoscientific nonsense that are more than willing to take your hard-earned cash from your gullible hands.
So how do we protect ourselves from the unscrupulous people who brazenly lie to enrich themselves? We need a bullshit detector to separate truth from their profitable claims. Luckily for us, the scientific method provides us with exactly the tools for the job! A brief review: any claim must be backed up with clear, inarguable, and reproducible evidence. Furthermore, this evidence ought to be free of the various cognitive biases that humans bring into the picture unintentionally. This includes conflating correlation and causation or interpreting data in a way that favourably confirms your presuppositions. Although this sounds simple in principle, it is nearly impossible to consistently apply.
… perhaps doctors should be accountable in some way?
GPs gave 15,000 children as young as five chemical cosh
Soaring numbers of children as young as five are being chemically coshed with antipsychotic drugs, an investigation by Channel 4 News has found. A staggering 15,000 children under the age of 18 were prescribed the medication last year by their GPs – double the number a decade ago. The drugs, such as Risperdal and Seroquel, are meant for serious mental conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and psychosis.
Iran could be the unmaking of Obama’s presidency
Iran presents Barack Obama with the biggest international test of a presidency mired in underachievement. Having fluffed his lines on Afghanistan, climate change and the Arab spring, he is under growing pressure to fulfil his pledge to prevent Iran obtaining nuclear weapons. A report by the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, is expected to indicate that Obama is steadily failing in this objective, too. So what should he do? A wrong move now, and all the disappointments of the past three years could be wholly eclipsed by the most profound of moral ruptures.
It all comes down to Obama because, in the end, the US alone has the military firepower to stop Tehran in its tracks. Now Libya, supposedly, is done and dusted, Israeli officials have turned hyper, talking up the Iranian threat and arguing the time for diplomacy has all but passed. Those glum doomsayers, prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, defence chief Ehud Barak, and president Shimon Peres, are frantically ringing alarm bells like a trio of demented churchwardens. Something, they say, must be done, preferably involving some very large American bombs.
No Matter What, Blame the Protesters
Over the past couple of days, I’ve been getting mail accusing me of consorting with Nazis. My immediate reaction was: What the heck? Then it clicked: the right wing is mounting a full-court press to portray Occupy Wall Street as an anti-Semitic movement, based, as far as I can tell, on one guy with a sign.
At the same time, the claque is claiming that Occupy Wall Street is responsible for a crime wave.
According to an article in The New York Post published on Oct. 22, “recent gunplay has now pushed the number of shooting victims this year slightly above last year’s tragic tally — to 1,484 from 1,451 — through Oct. 16. Four high-ranking cops point the finger at Occupy Wall Street protesters, saying their rallies pull special crime-fighting units away from the hot zones where they’re needed.”
Occupy Vancouver prepared for potential police violence: Medics
Volunteer medics at Occupy Vancouver — including an emergency room nurse and a first aid responder trained in the military — are preparing for the worst as political rhetoric over the three-week-old encampment escalates.
After the death this weekend of Ashlie Gough, 23, in the camp, Mayor Gregor Robertson has come under pressure from his right-leaning opponent in the upcoming city election, Suzanne Anton, to remove Occupy Vancouver’s tent city — although the mayor said Sunday he was happy to let the protest continue, without people sleeping in tents. Stronger warnings from City Hall have medics at the encampment worried.
Conrad Black : My Manifesto For the Occupy Movement
The Wall Street occupiers have some legitimate grievances, but are effectively asking redress of the grievances by their authors.
The complaints against the Wall Street bailouts, in which they echo the Tea Partiers they affect to despise, are not well-founded. The taxpayers will make money on the bailouts and great misery and confusion has been avoided by them, though Paulson’s original TARP plan of the government buying distressed assets directly was nonsense.
There have been design errors in the bailouts, such as that so much of the payoff in the automobile industry has been to the egregious, Luddite, avaricious United Auto Workers, which was the greatest single architect of the near-death and out-of-body experiences of the once invincible U.S. auto industry. This bailout complaint by the occupiers is also inconsistent with the succeeding complaint that organized labour is under siege from the U.S. government, which is in fact grovelling to it, completely undeservedly. (General Motors has 10 UAW pensioner/shareholders for every active autoworker.)
