Comments on: Pushing Skepticism

By: Robert Carnegie

Robert Carnegie — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:57:58 +0000

I’m at BadScience.net on and off, a column from the UK’s Guardian newspaper. Is that the kind of scepticism you mean? But what you want is a facility where you can have displayed on the original Web site “A whole bunch of people think this web page is bogus”, which for one thing you might not want to have on your pages. Anyway, does someone do that? There are services that supply members’ comments on Web pages to other members, but I think they haven’t exactly grasped how large the World Wide Web -is-. So really you want a service where the web site opts in for all visitors to see how markup users commented on the page, but then you might not like what they said.

Actually, what happens if the page content changes? BBC for instance is generating some broadcast show pages dynamically. Same link gets you this week’s new edition.

By: Jon Lester

Jon Lester — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 07:41:44 +0000

I don’t think any of us will truly be old until we can’t follow the beat to “Rock the Casbah” anymore. May that never happen.

By: yezdi

yezdi — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 05:49:13 +0000

I added a comment yesterday pointing to an article about a scam called Blizz Bio Sculpting. It has not appeared here. I have sent it to JREF as well. Nowhere more than here in India is skepticism required as many of the scams perpetrated are directly life threatening.

I hope you and/or JREF will highlight this scam. Thanks.

By: JHill

JHill — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 05:47:43 +0000

Slightly OT, but the twin sites (run by same people with slightly different purposes) http://www.overcomingbias.com and http://www.lesswrong.com are there to discuss rationality, basically how to stop thinking magically. Has a lot on biases, decision theory, and the like. I think a number of people here may find it interesting.

By: Senethior459

Senethior459 — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 01:59:22 +0000

Reddit’s Atheism subreddit is also fairly skeptic-oriented (obviously). http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism
The things posted to it tend to be slightly more anti-religion, but they have some good skepticism.

By: SourBlaze

SourBlaze — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 04:51:47 +0000

We don’t have a whole lot of celebs acting as spokespeople, true, but we also do not tend to have churches on every street corner to collect money for our causes.

By: MadScientist

MadScientist — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 01:43:48 +0000

@T_U_T: Yeah, that’s happened to me with html edit tags. I guess html markup is scrubbed even if you’re allowed to post URIs (once approved by the blog master). So: don’t do anything fancy, stick to plain text until we’re informed just what we can do. Of course if you’re the enterprising type you might poke around – but then you look like a spammer.

By: Bevans

Bevans — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 21:54:14 +0000

The Diggbar can be turned off. And those of you who use Reddit, the Redditbar (or whatever it’s called) can be turned on.

I used to love Digg, but after a while I realized that the only way that anyone will see one of your submissions is if you’re one of their powerusers. Which is why I switched to Reddit.

Also, Digg blocks all submissions from the JREF web site. Makes me wonder what else they’re blocking.

By: IVAN3MAN

IVAN3MAN — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:42:21 +0000

[Rant]
What annoys me about Digg are those selfish bastards who cannot be bothered to provide a brief description of the article that they are submitting (only a few lousy asterisks, e.g., ****), just so that they can be a “firstie” and get their smug-mug git icon of themselves — the kind that is asking for a punch on the nose! — at the right of the article title — APOD is a case in point.
[/Rant]

By: Blashy

Blashy — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:16:09 +0000

I love the DiggBar, I am actually digging sites 10 times more often because of it. I used to forge to go back to digg to make a digg. Now I do not have to!

By: Danny Dangerously

Danny Dangerously — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:15:29 +0000

I go with Reddit over Digg for a million reasons, but one of the main issues is that the comment system there is light years better, and the comments themselves are similarly that much more quality then their Digg counterparts.

By: Larian LeQuella

Larian LeQuella — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 17:49:01 +0000

I have an account on Reddit, but these bloody gubment computers block something there so I can’t vote on stories.

By: Richard Drumm The Astronomy Bum

Richard Drumm The Astronomy Bum — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 17:38:17 +0000

We did have Johnny Carson till he vanished… We need a new celeb in our ranks… Perhaps we can recruit one to come to TAM? Got any free tickets you could hand to somebody famous? But whom…

By: KyleV

KyleV — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 17:32:15 +0000

Yay! Come help contribute articles to the Skeptic Reddit and join in on the discussion. Also, go be skeptics around reddit and battle the credulous on their own ground (/r/Health/ is particularly full of crazy).

By: T_U_T

T_U_T — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:30:07 +0000

blockquote fail. Lack of preview really sucks.

By: T_U_T

T_U_T — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:29:16 +0000

We don’t have a lot of celebrities pretending to be skeptics
what about AIDS ‘skeptics’, anthropogenic global warming ‘skeptics’, holocaust ‘skeptics’, smoking-cancer link ‘skeptics’. I think there are plenty celebrities pretending to be skeptics.

By: Bipedal Tetrapod

Bipedal Tetrapod — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:28:52 +0000

OT – Stephen Hawking has been admitted to hospital:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article6133752.ece

By: Naked Bunny with a Whip

Naked Bunny with a Whip — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:17:11 +0000

yes, I’m old

Not in astronomical terms!

By: 3v1l5w1n

3v1l5w1n — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:14:35 +0000

you know, she might have a point there … health care in the US is so profit oriented (as opposed to health oriented), there is no money in healthy people, there’s also no money in dead people, the real money is in healthy people with one (or a few) chronic diseases hence there might be a certain interest in pharma industry to keep things unchanged. Nevertheless, that definitely doesn’t apply to vaccination (there’s no money in dead kids!)

By: Reid

Reid — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:09:57 +0000

I spend way too much time on Reddit. They tend twards a paranoid police states gonna get you perspective but they still have lots of interesting stuff there.

By: Mchl

Mchl — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:52:53 +0000

As far as I understand Ms McCarthy does pretend to be sceptical… about honesty of pharmaceutical companies.