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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 13 2014, @04:54AM
Someone claims to promote science and their convincer is an anecdote about their "scientist friend" saying that something is bullshit.
Would it have made homeopathy proven and great if said friend had exclaimed that this is some amazing stuff?
Sometimes it feels like there are people out there that believe in science not because they've examined it themselves but because that just happens to be what some authority figure they trust have told them is right.
I wish those people would just switch sides and join the crackpots.
(Score: 1) by mascot on Thursday March 13 2014, @01:45PM
Well I get the vast majority of my scientific opinions from authorities I trust.
I trust the IPCC to tell me about climate change, the FDA to tell me what is safe, the EPA to tell me whic pollutants need to be regulated...the list goes on. I trusted my teachers at school and my text books.
Life is to short to be an expert in everything. I can't go reading papers and working stuff out from first principles- If I was so skeptical of authority I doubt I'd have gotten as far as high school science by now (I'm 30).
I think trusting an authority is fine, even necessary. You just need to be a bit careful which authorities you trust. I guess I'll be with the crackpots if any one asks......