Michigan’s Senate Legitimizes Quackery

According to CFI Cause & Effect Newsletter, Issue 106, May 30, 2018      

      Practitioners of naturopathy have no actual medical credentials and rely on a hodgepodge of baseless, pseudoscientific remedies such as homeopathy, “electromagnetic” therapy, and musculoskeletal manipulation to treat patients. Nonetheless, the State Senate of Michigan decided to legitimize these fake doctors with the passage of SB 826, a bill that would grant state licensure to naturopaths and give them the authority to prescribe medications, perform lab tests, givephysical exams, and even treat wounds.

      CFI Michigan Executive Director Jennifer Beahan said in our formal statement that SB 826 “would give the state’s blessing to unqualified practitioners of pseudoscience and their baseless remedies, meaning more people will waste their money and risk their health by pursuing quack treatments.” And Dr. Harriet Hall reminds us that naturopaths “discourage evidence-based preventive measures like vaccination and water fluoridation.”

Lies Spread Faster Than Truth

There is worldwide concern over false news and the possibility that it can influence political, economic, and social well-being. Vosoughi et al investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise ~126,000 stories tweeted by ~3 million people more than 4.5 million times. 

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146   

They classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications.

False news reached more people than the truth; the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people. 

The effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information. They found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information. Whereas false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust. 

Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.

PBS Test Your Skill at Spotting FAKE NEWS

According to PBS and Merriam Webster, “Fake news appears to have begun seeing general use at the end of the 19th century.”

Throughout 2017, as example after example emerged of bad faith actors pumping false stories into social media algorithms for clicks, profit, and political gain, the idea of “fake news” infused the public consciousness. Recently Facebook announced it would begin ranking news sources in its feed based on trustworthiness.

No matter what measures tech and media organizations take to restore trust, media consumption will always require a healthy dose of skepticism.

To find out how good you are at spotting fake news, take the fake news quiz.

Aside from resources linked within the quiz, here are more resources used and referenced:

Politifact Guide,    Snopes: Fake News Sites,    Washington Post: Fake News Harder to Spot Than Most Believe,    Common Sense Media: How to Spot Fake News and Teach Kids to Be Media Savv,    Snopes: Fake News

Pence Like Trump Has Alternative Facts

As in the case of Donald Trump, Mike Pence likes to make up his own facts. In his commencement address at Hillsdale College, Vice President Mike Pence said,. "Facts are facts. Faith is rising across America." Actually the opposite is true.

According to Gallup, church attendance is going down, belief that the Bible is the inerrant word of God is going down, and belief in God is going down. Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated are growing as a share of the American population, and according to Pew Research, they are now the second-largest “belief” group in the country at 23 percent.

In addition, a new ABC News/Washington Post poll shows that the nonreligious now outnumber white evangelicals. Between 2003 and 2017, white evangelicals dropped from 21 percent of the population to 13. During that same period, the nonreligious swung the other way, rising from 12 percent to 21.

What's Happening with Global Warming Measurements

The official NASA data shows that global temperatures dropped sharply over the past two years. Writing in Real Clear Markets, Aaron Brown looked at the official NASA global temperature data and noticed something surprising. From February 2016 to February 2018, “global average temperatures dropped by 0.56 degrees Celsius.” That, he notes, is the biggest two-year drop in the past century.

A study published in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate showed that climate models exaggerate global warming from CO2 emissions by as much as 45%. 

The journal Nature Geoscience that found that climate models were faulty, and that, as one of the authors put it, “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models.”

The University of Alabama-Huntsville showed that the Earth’s atmosphere appears to be less sensitive to changing CO2 levels than previously assumed.

Over the past 13 years the U.S. has cut CO2 emissions faster than any other industrialized nation.

The polar bear populations are increasing.

We haven’t seen any increase in violent weather in decades.