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from the better-living-through-solopsism dept.
Papas Fritas writes:
Michael Schulson writes that if you want to write about spiritually-motivated pseudoscience in America, you can drive hundreds of miles to the Creation Museum in Kentucky but that America's greatest shrine to pseudoscience, the Whole Foods Market, is only a 15-minute trip away from most American urbanites. For example the homeopathy section at Whole Foods has plenty of Latin words and mathematical terms, but many of its remedies are so diluted that, statistically speaking, they may not contain a single molecule of the substance they purport to deliver.
"You can buy chocolate with "a meld of rich goji berries and ashwagandha root to strengthen your immune system," and bottles of ChlorOxygen chlorophyll concentrate, which "builds better blood." There's cereal with the kind of ingredients that are "made in a kitchen-not in a lab," and tea designed to heal the human heart," writes Schulson. "Nearby are eight full shelves of probiotics-live bacteria intended to improve general health. I invited a biologist friend who studies human gut bacteria to come take a look with me. She read the healing claims printed on a handful of bottles and frowned. "This is bullshit," she said, and went off to buy some vegetables."
According to Schulson the total lack of outrage over Whole Foods' existence, and by the total saturation of outrage over the Creation Museum, makes it clear that strict scientific accuracy in the public sphere isn't quite as important to many of us as we might believe. "The moral is not that we should all boycott Whole Foods. It's that whenever we talk about science and society, it helps to keep two rather humbling premises in mind: very few of us are anywhere near rational. And pretty much all of us are hypocrites."
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fliptop on Thursday March 13 2014, @03:00AM
I mean, come on people. [slashdot.org] I'll probably get modded down for this, but I did warn [soylentnews.org] that letting in Hugh Pickens would ruin the soylent experiment.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Thursday March 13 2014, @03:14AM
I've noticed a few of those. But it's been interesting to compare the discussions, too -- they're not really very much alike, even when the same people are commenting on both sites.
Tho could be they used up all their good comments on the first site they hit.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by istartedi on Thursday March 13 2014, @05:45AM
OK, Karma to burn (numerical, no less) so let's see if my response on that other site [slashdot.org] results in a different discussion here. Copy-pasted verbatim for those who don't want to follow the link:
Author of TFA mixes apples and oranges (Score:2)
No pun intended. Homeopathy and the anti-GMO campaign don't belong in the same bucket. Homeopathy works on the placebo effect. Yes indeedy, that's pseudocience if you believe in it. It "works for that guy" much like prayer. OTOH, running a massive experiment on all of humanity by GMOing foods is more anti-science to me. There is no way to have a control group. Just like drugs that get onto the market and they discover that 1 out of a million people get heart attacks from the drug. There was no way to test that drug properly before releasing it. Likewise, there is no way to test the long-term effects of GMOs on large populations before releasing them. The fact that some of us would rather be in the control group doesn't make us anti-science. It makes us skeptical and that's good. TFA --> recycling bin.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 1) by mrbluze on Thursday March 13 2014, @09:07AM
The way UFO watching has been discredited was by people posing as UFO enthusiasts but making ridiculous claims and appearing as lunatics, whilst in fact they were distracting from secret aerospace programs etc. The same problem exists in the pharmaceutical industry, especially since many cheap/home remedies are as good as paid drugs, it is indeed interesting that non GMO has been thrown in with snake oil homoeopathy.
Do it yourself, 'cause no one else will do it yourself.
(Score: 2) by Daniel Dvorkin on Thursday March 13 2014, @02:29PM
Please, just stop right now. You're not doing yourself or your side any favors.
Pipedot [pipedot.org]:Soylent [soylentnews.org]::BSD:Linux
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 13 2014, @01:54PM
The genetically modified portion of GMO typically means that the organism contains inserted DNA that contains the information to make a particular protein. These proteins usually make the organism resistant to environmental stresses. The proteins themselves are made of the same material as the organism's "normal" proteins and should get digested the same.
(Score: 1) by sjames on Saturday March 15 2014, @09:46AM
Snake venom is just another protean made from the same amino acids as any other protean.
It really does matter a great deal what proteans are inserted and that they are properly expressed.
(Score: 1) by monster on Thursday March 13 2014, @02:03PM
Well, that is the nature of the control group: Even if they don't receive the drug/active agent, they must still think that they do, otherwise differences in Placebo effect kick in. You must not be told that you are not eating GMOs, even if that is the case.
About TFA, there is a newspaper page today about transgenics in an spanish newspaper [eldiario.es] (spanish language) with a quite balanced point of view and a lot of links to actual studies about the aspects of GMOs. I encourage people interested in information about it (and not just bias reinforcement) to follow and read them, they are quite interesting.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by bucc5062 on Thursday March 13 2014, @02:11PM
Why do you say that Homeopathy is pseudoscience when many of the drugs created today come from or have there basis in natural ingredients. Before there were giant drug companies turning all humans in to junkies for their pills there were knowledgeable people that understood what plant extract, plant part, or mineral could effect a human condition. Many poisons are natural (homeopathic) and I would consider that science helped prove what we already knew, poison from some plants can kill. That is not a placebo effect. Let's take one:
from healthline.com [healthline.com]
So that seems to be a little more then pseudoscience or quackery medicine. Here is another:
which even states from the national institutes of health (NIH) to be effective via scientific study.
It is not that homeopathy can cure, effect or otherwise be the answer to everything, but to dismiss it as nothing is short sighted.
The more things change, the more they look the same
(Score: 4, Informative) by Daniel Dvorkin on Thursday March 13 2014, @02:25PM
"Homeopathy" has a very specific meaning, which your examples don't address. No one's arguing that herbal medicine as a whole is necessarily quackery (well, I don't think they are, anyway, and if they are then they're wrong) but specifically that homeopathy is quackery by its very nature.
Pipedot [pipedot.org]:Soylent [soylentnews.org]::BSD:Linux
(Score: 2) by bucc5062 on Thursday March 13 2014, @03:22PM
I'll comment on this one though there were a couple after that said simple. I understand your point. I did confuse homeopathy with the utilization of natural ingredients in medications. After reading about it I found that i also had a skeptical eye towards that specific use of natural elements. That is sad really for I have and do see the benefits of using more natural ingredients in managing some health issues.
So I stand on my thoughts that natural products to help some medical conditions is not a bad thing, blind faith in any specific health system is bad.
The more things change, the more they look the same
(Score: 1) by SleazyRidr on Thursday March 13 2014, @02:27PM
A lot of natural remedies are very effective. I agree with you that a lot of medicines come from natural sources and that the pharmaceutical companies are just upset that they can't take money from you along the way. Homeopathy, though is a special kind of bullshit. It's roots are by curing poisons by giving you a very dilute mixture of the same poison. The rate at which it is diluted is so great that you are statistically unlikely to find a single molecule of the "active ingredient" in your treatment. I'd elaborate, but Wikipedia has already covered it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by GeminiDomino on Friday March 14 2014, @01:22PM
If it's good enough for the Dread Pirate Roberts, it's good enough for an upstart like you!
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by umafuckitt on Thursday March 13 2014, @03:04PM
The fact that some homeopathic remedies contain plants with medicinal properties has zero relevance on whether or not homeopathy is a pseudoscience. Homeopathy in fact is a pseudoscience because it is based on a hypothesis (like cures like) which has no basis in fact. It considers high dilutions of the "medicines" to be more effective, even though this principle can be refuted by any child with basic chemistry knowledge. All the best trials of homeopathy show no effect. Only the shoddier trials show significant effects. The meta-analyses show now effects. Homeopaths have countered this by stating that the effects of homeopathy can't be measured in a trial. If that's not a pseudo-scientific claim, I don't know what is.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by tomp on Thursday March 13 2014, @05:59AM
If the best geek news in the past hour comes from slashdot, that's where we'll get it.
There's a lot about slashdot that should be shunned. However if they have news of interest, it should be presented here to be read by those that no longer view slashdot.
Now where's the 411 on sword swallowing?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by guises on Thursday March 13 2014, @11:25AM
it should be presented here to be read by those that no longer view slashdot
Exactly. Isn't that the point of the new site? If Soylent just reposts everything on Slashdot without the ads and without the beta I'll be happy. Anything in addition to that is icing.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Sir Garlon on Thursday March 13 2014, @12:00PM
It's inevitable there will be some overlap between Soylent and Slashdot because there is only so much news to go around. But since the main reason I left Slashdot was the poor choice of stories to publish, too much overlap would make me leave here, too. This story is just trolling, and a good representative of what IMO was wrong with Slashdot.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 1) by fliptop on Thursday March 13 2014, @12:21PM
Amen, brother!
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 2) by metamonkey on Thursday March 13 2014, @02:05PM
I really wouldn't care if people simply took the stories that appear on slashdot and relinked them here, in flagrant dickery. I want discussion, and I'd rather do that on Soylent than Slashdot. News is news, and none of it's OC, anyway (except interviews and asks).
Okay 3, 2, 1, let's jam.