Your friends make you fat

(Subtext: so if any of your mates are a wee bit plump you better drop them quick smart or you’ll be rooned, rooned! Yay, let’s make fat people even more socially isolated and scorned!)

So say all the headlines and radio shows this morning, based on a study in America that has found a correlation between gaining weight and having friends who also gain weight. The talkback shows especially are full of all the talking heads of the Diet Industry sagely shaking their heads and wagging their fingers at the ‘obesity epidemic’[1].

Most of the discussion I’ve heard has focussed on “individuals”, but you know what? The study found that the “friend” correlation only holds up for men.

Filed under: fat-hating, health, moral panics, skeptics

New Yorkers always tell us not to bother with Long Island anyway

If I never go to Long Island then I never have to worry about some unfortunate accident bringing me or someone I love under the knife of neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, who is a professor of neurosurgery and paediatrics at State University New York (Stony Brook), and who apparently doesn’t accept that the mind arises from the physiological properties of the brain.

Lest someone accuse me of oversimplifying Egnor’s dumbarsery with my summary above, I can’t see any other way to describe his argument: he’s reifying “altruism” as a concrete concept separate from observable altruistic actions taken by a thinking being, and then arguing that if we can’t point to the place in the brain where altruism is situated then something magical happens and then the creationists win. This essentially comes down to arguing that mind is entirely separate from our physical bodies and not actually dependent upon the physiology of the brain.

Yeah, I’d so want him cutting into my grey matter. Not.

I don’t understand how someone like this functions without collapsing under the weight of the cognitive dissonance they have to studiously ignore as they go about their professional day.

More Egnorance at the Panda’s Thumb.

Filed under: creationists/ID, medicine, skeptics

1Q: How relevant are motives in assessing the public policy stance of a politician or commentator?

This week’s One Question is from Harry Clarke, who writes in an earlier post:

In assessing testimony in a court of law motives are important. Elsewhere they are less so but they pervasively affect our attitudes. Some have argued that the ‘The Motive Fallacy’ (specifically, believing that exposing the motives behind an expressed opinion shows that the opinion is false) is so common in politics that serious policy debate is almost nonexistent.

…The problem with falling prey to the Motives Fallacy in a political debate is that attention is turned away from the analysis of policy consequences. Policies just become part of a political game that seeks to establish who might win or lose. The specific effects of policies remain unanalyzed by the person who says ‘X is only just saying that because of Y’ where Y has nothing to do with the effects of the policy.

My fellow 1Q contributors have largely concentrated on current events, and made many of the best points (teach me to get weighed down and be late). I plan to look back at how motives have been weighed as to relevance in the past, and particularly the roots of the idea of weighing motives in a truly ancient debate, albeit a debate that probably long predates its first recorded pithy summation.

“Cui bono?” (to whose benefit?) were the words flung by the orator Marcus Tullus Cicero repeatedly at a jury in Rome, words he attributed to the consul and censor Lucius Cassius Longinus Ravilla, as he defended a client charged with murder and succeeded in vindicating him. As Harry alludes to above, the principle of cui bono? forms the basis of criminal investigations today, in determining who is a credible suspect, and in weighing the strength of various motives according to the benefit derived. Whether the benefit is tangible, intangible or even delusional, the belief in a benefit to be gained through committing a crime underpins our concept of what constitutes a motive.

But the political arena is not susceptible to the same simplifications and controlled microinvestigation as the criminal court, and political policy decisions have ongoing ramifications and ripple effects that a single concrete criminal act does not.

Filed under: 1Question, Media, Politics, ethics, history, skeptics

How to talk to a global warming skeptic

An inadvertent companion piece to Suzoz’ earlier find from New ScientistA guide to the Perplexed on Climate Change , from Gristmill comes How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic.

a complete listing of the articles in “How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic,” a series by Coby Beck containing responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming. There are four separate taxonomies; arguments are divided by:

* Stages of Denial,
* Scientific Topics,
* Types of Argument, and
* Levels of Sophistication.

Sweet.

Via Ezra Klein. Amanda Marcotte feels the term “skeptic” is misused when talking about a cult of denialism.

Filed under: Politics, skeptics

There’s an Office of the Messiah

It’s in Tasmania. Terence from the Office of the Messiah in Tasmania sends Richard Dawkins (and cc’s PZ Myers) long emails pointing out their multitudinous errors.

Breaking News

Be advised that the awaited Messiah and Divine Saviour and Just Leader of the whole of humanity has returned into the flesh of this world to restore the purity of faith, being the doctrine of PEACE as commanded by God the Creator. Please advise all that he has a fresh and uncontaminated message from the Creator for humanity to prepare all for the coming TRIBULATIONS & utter destruction. It is now on line at:

http://www.the-testament-of-truth.co.uk
http://www.the-testament-of-truth.com
http://www.dar-es-salaam.org
Issued by Terence Malaher – Office of the Messiah
Pyengana – Tasmania 7216

The words emphasised in bold above are highlighted in different coloured fonts in the original email, which PZ has duplicated at Pharyngula. The different colours seem to emphasise different themes in Terence’s writings.

Via Pharyngula

Filed under: religion, skeptics

Yes and No

This post has been hanging around as a draft since February, because I wasn’t quite happy with it. Lindsay’s recent post (and my response), on how misusing “moderate” to describe faith positions which don’t preach intolerance imputes that the intolerant theology is the orthodox position made me recast it – everywhere that now reads “more tolerant” used to read “moderate”.

The image below speaks to me, but I don’t think it tells the full story. To my religious readers, I’m sure some of you will be offended by the picture. I hope you read the rest. The idea of non-overlapping magisteria [1]is taken to a ridiculous extreme, and certainly there are faith positions not as wilfully ignorant of contradictory evidence as that pictured here.

Image Credit: wellingtongrey.net

The faith side above is a reasonable representation of reactionary fundamentalist views such as Wahabists, Young Earth Creationists, steadfast Mormon polygamists etc. It’s not a reasonable representation of how a whole lot of people of faith I know think, act and believe.

Filed under: fundies, religion, skeptics

Ghouls

I haven’t posted here about the Virginia Tech massacre, because I had nothing adequate to say. I got in an argument about guns over at LP, and that was one reason I didn’t write on it here either. Sadly No! summed up most contributions aptly as everybody thumping their usual tubs and bellowing that “this massacre proves that I was right all along!” (paraphrase). Even the best contributions had some whiff of furthering established agendas about them, and I didn’t want to add any more to that than was already out there.

But when some ghoul starts linking the massacre to Cho’s alleged autism diagnosis, and then further goes on to thump their discredited vaccination-causes-autism tub, (therefore Vaccines Are The Real Killers) I can’t stay silent.

Thankfully, Orac (Respectful Insolence) has the rebuttal covered:

Never mind that blaming autism for the rampage is bad enough, but Moses has to compound the vileness by implying that vaccines can turn children into killers. Never mind that there is no good evidence that the mercury in thimerosal in vaccines in any way contributes to the development of autism or autism spectrum disorders. Never mind that the latest statistics from, for example, California show no decrease and, indeed, a continued increase, in its autism caseload in 3-5 year olds in the first quarter of 2007, now four years since thimerosal was removed from all childhood vaccines other than the flu vaccine, when by now, if mercury causes autism, we should have seen a huge decrease in the caseload. Never mind that there’s lots of other evidence that shows no link between vaccines and autism.

Thimerosal has been utterly discredited as the cause of autism, and removed from vaccines in the West for years now, yet still autism cases are on the rise. When are these pseuds and quacks going to give up on this bullshit?

Filed under: Science, autism, moral panics, peeves, skeptics

Framing that Overton Window for science

This is all over the science blogs at the moment: how to present science convincingly to the public in an atmosphere of anti-science media sensationalism. It’s got a lot of scientists very agitated indeed.

The debate is mostly US-centric, but there’s no reason for the science-literate elsewhere to rest on our laurels: anti-intellectualism and partisan attacks on science findings that don’t fit particular ideological agenda are on the rise throughout the world, the big drivers being climate change/pollutant effects vs economic growth and evolution vs creationism. Lots of politicking on all sides.

The master of the blog-round-up, Coturnix, has put up a huge collection of links to articles/blogs discussing the issue of framing science. Fascinating and disturbing stuff.

Filed under: Politics, Science, creationists/ID, skeptics

Skeptical Sunday: How do you prove photography to a blind man?

A great post from 2005:

That was the question I was asked: how would you prove to a blind man, that photography exists?

I knew what he was getting at. We had been discussing psychics. He was a firm believer in psychic powers, had had psychic experiences, and regularly visited a psychic. His point was, since I had not experienced psychic powers, I would never be able to believe in what he “knew” to be true. You could never prove to a blind man that photography exists, and likewise no one would ever be able to demonstrate to me that psychic powers were real.

It took me about ten seconds to think of a way to show he was wrong.

from Skeptico.

Filed under: skeptics

Damn straight

There Is No Fucking Face On Mars.

Link (and wording for link) both lifted shamelessly from the 44th Skeptic’s Circle at Salto sobrius, which as usual for the SC, had lots of good stuff to check out.

Filed under: skeptics