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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, 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.