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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: 4, Funny) by Aighearach on Thursday March 13 2014, @04:43AM
After the buyout, it appears that soylent news is feeding us to the right wing propagandists. :(
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 13 2014, @07:57AM
and it sure would be nice if the same exact troll story didn't appear here three days after it showed up on mother slashdot.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hubie on Thursday March 13 2014, @11:27AM
I'm not sure what your expectations are. Should one scour Slashdot and perhaps all other tech-related web sites before submitting a story here? Right now, on the front page of mother Slashdot, is a story about how a paper talks about how happy developers are more productive developers. That was posted here, like, three days ago. It goes both ways. Personally, I try to submit stories that are fairly unique, but there is only so much due diligence I'm going to put in because uniqueness of stories is not a requirement, but a desirement. And pretty much most stories I see posted either here or there I see on the MSN home page, or the default Google News page. Does that mean they shouldn't be posted to either site?
This site needs to try to be itself, and not worry about trying to not be Slashdot.
(Score: 2) by weeds on Thursday March 13 2014, @12:34PM
slashdot can do what it wants and post what it wants. If our members find a story that they think might be of interest to other members, post it. Until and unless we decide on a specialty, there may be overlap. We certainly should not be copying from slashdot - we are independent. (Holds up pitchfork and torch!)
Get money out of politics! [mayday.us]
(Score: 1) by SleazyRidr on Thursday March 13 2014, @02:39PM
Is this site just supposed to survive on the dregs that the other sites don't report? Personally I'd be happy to see the same story posted on /., |., here, technocrat and s'qute (and the other sites I don't know about, too). We're here for the discussion and getting different viewpoints from different people is important to knowing what's actually going on.