Winter’s Haven

The usually excellent Glenn Greenwald has written a very poorly argued tirade against the influence of Wall Street money in national politics.
It’s trivial to use this incident to support the exact opposite of Greenwald’s conclusion. If bankers are complaining that they haven’t gotten anything in exchange for their political contribution to Democrats, then presumably [...]

Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson have recently gotten themselves into a scuffle over cryonics, immortality in silicon, and personal identity. I suggest skimming the original two posts and then reading Julian Sanchez’s take on the question — he approaches the issue with more caution and more philosophical expertise than either Caplan or Hanson.
Finally, Will Wilson [...]

Robin Hanson says we are presently living in the most interesting stage of human development, and in the age where our delusions have the greatest impact. I will not even attempt to summarize this. Go read it for yourself.

Dartmouth researchers have discovered that “A dead salmon perceiving humans can tell their emotional state.“.
Well, actually no. Rather, this is an example of the sort of ridiculous result you can obtain if you’re not properly attentive to the possibility of false positives when separating noise from signal in fMRI scans. And it’s a nice example [...]

Five Percent of New Jerseyans Who Voted For Obama Think He’s The Anti-Christ.

Jose Flores, a Christian pastor from Bolivia, used a fake bomb to hijack an Aeromexico flight on September 9th, demanding to speak to president Felipe Calderon. Why was it so important for him to speak to the president?

Flores, 44, has said he was acting on a divine revelation and wanted to warn Calderon of an [...]

Julian Sanchez has an excellent post on symbolic beliefs. However, the question which the post nominally addresses (Are people in the South completely insane, or merely slightly batty?) is actually much less interesting than the generalized discussion of symbolic beliefs.

In the wake of the news that NICE approved acupuncture and chiropractic treatments for lower back pain, Daniel Davies has written a fantastic article at Crooked Timber on how politics makes it much more difficult to rationally evaluate the effectiveness of treatments on the evidence.
Doing science is hard to begin with. When large amounts of [...]

Billy Graham apparently has a newspaper column in which he answers letters (hat tip to PZ). One person writes:

DEAR BILLY GRAHAM: Why do people get involved in cults? My cousin has gotten involved in one, and no matter what we say to him, he refuses to listen. He says we are the ones who are [...]

You have a radical idea about how the world works. The stodgy scientific orthodoxy rejects your idea. At this point, you naturally ask yourself: am I the next Galileo?
Figuring out who is right and who is wrong can be difficult and complicated. I can, however, suggest a starting point. If you have to fabricate data [...]