Skeptic

A good dissection of bullshit "science" about vaccines - this dissection also highlights good general points to think about when applying critical thinking to any such out of left field "scientific" claims on the internet or those blathering dolts on TV news segments.

https://theunbiasedscipod.substack.com/p/anatomy-of-a-failure-why-this-latest

Dig into things before promoting them on social media.

Jan 14, 2025

Skeptics should largely agree about what science says, but that's not always the case. Exploring when and why skeptics disagree may be illuminating.

In this talk, Steven Novella dives into a series of topics where skeptics disagree amongst each other.

Steven Novella is the host and producer of The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, a popular and award-winning weekly science podcast. He is an internationally known author of three books on science and critical thinking and science communicator with multiple TV appearances and two popular blogs (NeuroLogica and Science-Based Medicine).

This talk took place on October 25, 2024

I haven't kept up lately, so this whole thing was news to me. I used to support CFI, but not anymore unless there is a major change.

This is anti-skepticism and, as Hemant Mehta/The Friendly Atheist says, it is anti-science and it helps religious fundamentalists.

Other secular, humanist and freethought groups have released a statement in support of queer people and queer issues: https://www.atheists.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/FINAL-Joint-Statement-on-LGBTQ-Rights.pdf

One question is: can you stop your friend believing these conspiracy theories? Regrettably, almost certainly not, at least not without a huge investment of time and patience. People are free to think whatever they want and some of us put that freedom to the weirdest uses. At least we can be thankful the conspiracies your friend has latched on to are about objects in the sky and not, say, which reptilian species is secretly controlling things.

A different question is: can you change the norms of the relationship so you don’t have to engage with this? Happily, that’s a different mission.

This seemed like good advice to post here because I know a lot of people are wanting to maintain friendships with such people (or family relationships for that matter) despite their nutty beliefs.

What if the drones are just drones?

It's going to come as such a shock to Ray Kurzweil when he dies.

If you've been following the politics of the pandemic response, you can pretty much predict the sorts of conclusions the committee's majority wanted to reach: Masks were useless, the vaccines weren't properly tested for safety, and any restrictions meant to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2 were ill-informed, etc. At the same time, some efforts pursued during the Trump administration, such as the Operation Warp Speed development of vaccines or the travel restrictions he put in place, are singled out for praise.

In contrast, when it comes to mask use, where there's extensive evidence that they can be effective, the report concludes they're all worthless: "The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relied on flawed studies to support the issuance of mask mandates." The supposed flaw is that these studies weren't randomized controlled trials—a standard far more strict than the same report required for travel restrictions. "The CDC provided a list of approximately 15 studies that demonstrated wearing masks reduced new infections," the report acknowledges. "Yet all 15 of the provided studies are observational studies that were conducted after COVID-19 began and, importantly, none of them were [randomized controlled trials]."

Similarly, in concluding that "the six-foot social distancing requirement was not supported by science," the report quotes Anthony Fauci as saying, "What I meant by ‘no science behind it’ is that there wasn’t a controlled trial that said, 'compare six foot with three feet with 10 feet.' So there wasn’t that scientific evaluation of it."

Perhaps the most egregious example of shifting the standards of evidence comes when the report discusses the off-label use of drugs such as chloroquine and ivermectin. These were popular among those skeptical of restrictions meant to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2, but there was never any solid evidence that the drugs worked, and studies quickly made it clear that they were completely ineffective. Yet the report calls them "unjustly demonized" as part of "pervasive misinformation campaigns." It doesn't even bother presenting any evidence that they might be effective, just the testimony of one doctor who decided to prescribe them. In terms of scientific evidence, that is, in fact, nothing.

Staff Pick Comment:

You essentially can't perform a randomized controlled trial on masking during a pandemic for a LOT of reasons.

1. Your institutional review board would never approve it because there's enough evidence of masks reducing disease spread generally that it would be considered placing participants at risk of harm for limited scientific benefit.
2. You would have largely insurmountable confounders, ESPECIALLY during a pandemic when there are likely to be rules people need to follow regardless of what mask group they were randomly assigned to.
3. Behavioral confounders would be enormous. Since people would be randomly assigned to a mask group, and participation must necessarily be voluntary; the only participants would be people who don't care about wearing or not wearing a mask or truly don't have any opinion about if it's safe or dorky looking or socially unacceptable in their circle to be seen wearing/not wearing a mask. The sample would not be at all representative of most people.
4. Adherence would be terrible. The same applies to virtually any study about diet, activity, changing habits, dependence on things like caffeine or nicotine, etc. If participants don't follow the prescribed behavior of their randomized group the data gets weaker and weaker until there is no longer any visible signal.
5. Even if all else was solved by magic, the study would still not be blinded. People would know if they're wearing a mask or not and those around them would also know. This would create it's own set of confounders.

Observational data is likely to be the best and only data you can get on this topic. To throw it out because it's not randomized and controlled is to admit that you have no idea what any of these words mean or how such studies are conducted.

So when it comes to Pycnogenol, I wouldn’t recommend it as a daily or routine supplement, but I wouldn’t dismiss it if someone wanted to use it for one of the more evidence-backed reasons for use. Hopefully more trials will be conducted to better establish its place in therapy.