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posted by mrpg on Thursday December 06 2018, @04:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-power-of-god-compels-you-to-read-it dept.

The conviction that demons exist—and that they exist to harass, derange, and smite human beings—stretches back as far as religion itself. In ancient Mesopotamia, Babylonian priests performed exorcisms by casting wax figurines of demons into a fire. The Hindu Vedas, thought to have been written between 1500 and 500 b.c., refer to supernatural beings—known as asuras, but largely understood today as demons—that challenge the gods and sabotage human affairs. For the ancient Greeks, too, demonlike creatures lurked on the shadowy fringes of the human world.

But far from being confined to a past of Demiurges and evil eyes, belief in demonic possession is widespread in the United States today. Polls conducted in recent decades by Gallup and the data firm YouGov suggest that roughly half of Americans believe demonic possession is real. The percentage who believe in the devil is even higher, and in fact has been growing: Gallup polls show that the number rose from 55 percent in 1990 to 70 percent in 2007.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/catholic-exorcisms-on-the-rise/573943/


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  • (Score: 2) by exaeta on Friday December 07 2018, @03:43AM

    by exaeta (6957) on Friday December 07 2018, @03:43AM (#771018) Homepage Journal

    Sort of. Common sense can get your further, but some people do lack it. Real understanding of whether food X is good or bad for you will result from understanding the chemistry of that food and how it interacts with your body. These correlational studies are often done will sample sizes that are too small and they often make proclamations before the evidence fully supports them.

    I think it's best if we stopped looking for 2% relative differences in risks and 0.05 P-value. Scientists need to think more and write braindead reports less. These studies are a symptom of the money being funneled to them. It seems there is little that can be done besides structural reform to encourage a different kind of science.

    We also experiment far to little and do studies far too often. It's better to do large numbers of experiments, and once you notice a pattern in one of them, then decide to do a double blind study to confirm or deny it. Instead of just doing a bunch of random studies one after the other, which produces little substantial results. Take a moment to think about how most major discoveries are made, by investigative scientists experimenting, not the double blind placebo controlled study.

    Whilst these studies are useful with large enough sample sizes, they aren't useful for small sample sizes. Also 0.05 is wayyyy too big. P should be less than 0.00001 as a rule and repeated at least 3 times by different groups of researchers before we accept a conclusion. (Reproducibility is important.)

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