#skepticism

See tagged statuses in the local BookWyrm community

I've finished: VALIS by Philip K. Dick

An unreliable naraiter in an unreliable universe, in VALIS P.K.D perforates the boundaries between reality, fantasy, hallucination and mental illness. Breaking the wall between the author and the protagonist, between the imagined and the real.

Seeking the truth, he ventures into madness, conspiracy theory, technobabble, religion and mysticism.

As a skeptic, I've encountered many a theory intended to explain unusual phenomena, with motivated reasoning, cherry picking, anomaly hunting, religious overtones and a good dose of mental instability to boot.

It is interesting to see the building blocks of this type of thinking so familiar to me in the 2000nds thriving in P.K.D's mind in the 1970s.

You can see his characters looking for clues in 1970s media as todays conspiracy nuts parous the internet for clues of the machinations of the illuminati.

Reading VALIS was a very interesting experience.

https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/57a734e5-85ae-4008-9ab8-7ddc774d4b26

@ …

Science Based Medicine:

The Hypocrisy Is The Point. Doctors Who Said Not To Mix Politics & Medicine.

Hypocritical articles on politics and medicine weren’t really about politics and medicine, they were a message- the standards we set for you, don’t apply to us and everyone knows it.

by: Jonathan Howard

"Indeed, many We Want Them Infected doctors mixed politics and medicine openly and freely since the start of the pandemic. Scientists, namely Dr. Ioannidis himself, tried to influence politicians as early as March 2020, as Stephenie Lee documented in her article An Elite Group Of Scientists Tried To Warn Trump Against Lockdowns In March."

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/thepoint/

For those of you your beliefs, you should know that you're not alone.

It might feel like the world is being pulled out from under you, but you are building a stronger foundation.

It might be scary, but you are incredibly brave.

You can do it, and you should be proud of yourself for deciding to value what you believe and why you believe it over what others want you to believe.

Hi! I'm a Boston based with a BS in . I primarily work in but have been loving / .

As an ex-conservative ex-christian, I've been trying to get more involved in and the fight against .

I love , (particularly / ), , , and multitudes of other things.

My toots and boosts will probably be all over the place so follow me if you want to come along for the ride!

Other tags of interest:

On The Reception And Detection Of Pseudo-Profound Bullsh*t [2015 paper in the context of 2023 AI?]
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https://doi.org/10.1017/S1930297500006999 <-- shared 2015 paper
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[it would be interesting to see what the author of this 2015 paper thought about what ChatGPT, AI in general, etc is ‘bringing to the table’ in this regard]
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“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullsh*t requires no such conviction.” – Harry Frankfurt
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