The Thinking Moms' Revolution
oracknows | August 30, 2016One of the great things about having achieved some notoriety as a blogger is that readers send me links to articles that the believe will be interesting to me. They usually come in waves. For instance, after anything having to do with Stanislaw Burzynski, “right to try,” particularly egregious antivaccine idiocy, and the like hits the news, I can be sure that well-meaning readers will send me or Tweet at me about the same article several times. (So don’t take it personally if I don’t respond; I get hundreds of e-mails a day.) Sometimes they’re wrong and its something that I have no interest…
oracknows | November 20, 2015One of the key principles of skepticism, particularly in medicine, is that correlation does not necessarily equal causation. I emphasize the word "necessarily" because sometimes skeptics go a bit too far and say that correlation does not equal causation. I myself used to phrase it that way for a long time. However, sometimes correlation does equal causation. However, much, if not most, of the time it does not. So how do we tell the difference between when correlation might well equal causation and when it does not? Science, of course, and critical thinking. Science is the main reason that we…
oracknows | October 19, 2015Two of the great "icons"—if you can call them "great" given that they're icons but hardly "great"—of the antivaccine movement are Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy. Over the last decade, they have arguably been the most influential people in the antivaccine movement. The reasons are simple. Let's look at Jenny McCarthy first. In 2007, when her child Evan was diagnosed with autism and she blamed MMR vaccine for it, McCarthy became virtually overnight the single most famous celebrity antivaccine advocate. With her then-boyfriend Jim Carrey, in 2008 she led an antivaccine march on Washington…
oracknows | September 22, 2015Antivaccine quackery is arguably one of the worst forms of quackery. First, the pseudoscientific beliefs undergirding such quackery are based on the fear and demonization of one of the greatest medical advances in the history of the human race, the result of which are children left unprotected against preventable diseases that routinely used to populate cemeteries with little bodies. Almost as bad, one of those beliefs, namely the scientifically discredited belief that vaccines cause autism, has led to a cottage industry of quack "treatments" based on the idea that autism is a manifestation…
oracknows | May 29, 2015I've frequently written about the "arrogance of ignorance," a phenomenon that anyone who's paid attention to what quacks, cranks, or antivaccine activists (but I repeat myself) write and say beyond a certain period of time will have encountered. Basically, it's the belief found in such people—and amplified in groups—that somehow they can master a subject as well or better than experts who have spent their entire professional lives studying the subject on their own, often just through the use of Google University and the echo chamber discussion forums that they frequent with their fellow…