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Who Should You Trust? Why Appeals to Scientific Consensus Are Often Uncompelling

Anthony Fowler | February 15, 2024

Consumers of scientific information should be skeptical of an apparent scientific consensus. Consider: How politicized is this topic? What are the career incentives for the scientists? How easy would it be for scientists to selectively report only the favorable results? Would a study have been published if it had found the opposite result or a null result? The answers to these questions will not definitively tell us whether the scientific consensus is right or wrong, but they should help us…

Autism’s Cult of Redemption: My Adventure Searching for Help for My Son’s Autism Diagnosis in the World of Alternative Medicine & Anti-Vaxxers

John Summers | February 8, 2024

A pediatric neurologist at Boston Children’s Hospital diagnosed my son, Misha, with autism spectrum disorder at age three. At Massachusetts General Hospital, another pediatric neurologist answered my call for a second opinion only to rebuff my hope for a different one. “I did not find him to be very receptive to testing,” the expert sighed. […]

Your Microbiome & Your Health:Prebiotics and Postbiotics — The Good, the Bad, and the Bugly

Michael Greger, M.D. | February 1, 2024

The human colon may represent the most biodense ecosystem in the world. Though many may believe that our stool is primarily made up of undigested food, about 75 percent is pure bacteria—trillions and trillions, in fact, about half a trillion bacteria per teaspoon. Do we get anything from these trillions of tenants taking up residence […]

Leonardo da Vinci & Albert Einstein: Could the Renaissance Genius Have Grasped the Foundational Concepts of General Relativity?

José María González Ondina | January 25, 2024

The article “Leonardo da Vinci’s Visualization of Gravity as a Form of Acceleration,” published in the aptly named journal Leonardo (peer-reviewed, MIT Press Direct), has gained some fame, as it has appeared in many news articles. The authors claim that Leonardo understood gravity almost as well as Newton, and even suggest that he anticipated Einstein’s equivalence principle. José María González Ondina presents a more likely interpretation, based on Leonardo’s own manuscripts, that negates these incredible claims.

Educational Testing and the War on Reality & Common Sense

Craig Frisby | January 18, 2024

The practice of discussing educational testing in the same sentence with the term “war” is not necessarily new or original.1 What may be new to readers, however, is to characterize current debates involving educational testing as involving a war against: (1) accurate perceptions about the way things really are (reality), and (2) sound judgment in […]

How American Schools of Education Burked* Education in America’s Schools

Robert Maranto | January 11, 2024

Institutionalized experiments take a while to fail so fully as to be discredited. The 1917 Russian Revolution put its people “seventy years on the road to nowhere,” three generations of poverty, fear, and violence (as the news media, quoting protesters, declared in the regime’s last year).1 Poles who survived communism dismissed it as something that […]

Why Education Policy and Practice Have Become Research-Free Zones

Jonathan Wai | January 4, 2024

When you drive past any American school, you’ll see signs telling you to reduce your speed and declaring the area to be a “drug-free zone,” with draconian penalties for violators. While we can all agree on keeping drugs away from school children, drugs are not the only thing we keep out of schools. Unfortunately, when […]

Quantifying Privilege: What Research on Social Mobility Tells Us About Fairness in America

Robert Lynch | December 27, 2023

Is it more of a disadvantage to be born poor or Black? Is it worse to be brought up by rich parents in a poor neighborhood, or by poor parents in a rich neighborhood? The answers to these questions lie at the very core of what constitutes a fair society. So how do we know […]

A Vision for Comprehensive Educational Reform: Where Learners Control Their Own Education

Skeptic | December 20, 2023

Everyone knows the problems with American education; there is no point in rehashing them. Identifying the source of those problems, however, is essential to any meaningful reform. At every level, educational innovation is choked off by bureaucratic administrators who benefit from the current structure’s inefficiencies. Let’s be clear, there is no grand administrative conspiracy— both […]

The Kill Your Brother Game: Playful Dramas & Unintended Consequences of Censorship

Dennis Junk | December 13, 2023

In the controversies surrounding campaigns to ban books from school libraries and publishers’ new policy of removing offensive words from classic books, most commenters focus on the nature of the books’ content and whether it’s appropriate for children of a certain age. In contrast, this essay focuses on the nature of stories and how concerned parents should think about them in the context of their children’s moral and social development.

Education Matters in the Culture Wars: Can We Separate Bias From Ideology?

Carol Tavris | December 6, 2023

Instead of liberal-conservative bias in education we should think about biases and orthodoxies by topic. Each side values truth and cites facts, but only if they confirm what they already believe. Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology (edited by Frisby, Redding, O’Donohue, & Scott Lilienfeld) details the harm to psychological science, academia, and society from today’s very illiberal ‘woke’ ideology.

A Skeptical View of J. Edgar Hoover & the FBI

Michelle Ainsworth | November 29, 2023

Michelle Ainsworth reviews: G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage (2022) and The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism (2023) by Lerone A. Martin.

Bone Wars: How Activists Are Targeting Teaching

Elizabeth Weiss & James W. Springer | November 22, 2023

Disputes rage across campuses and the courts concerning the location and treatment of human remains from other times, places, and cultures. How do we balance the rights of protesting ethnic groups against the scientific need to study and teach medicine, ancestry, and evolution? Disposition needs to be based on the preponderance of evidence — scientific versus affiliation to modern-day claimants.

Roe v. Wade—One Year Later

Kevin Mccaffree | November 15, 2023

Our survey of a diverse sample of U.S. adults following the Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade found both extremes — always legal or never legal – unpopular; 70% favored an intermediate position. Importantly, only 37% understood that the decision did not outlaw abortion. Those younger, less educated, more religious, and more trusting of political figures tended to be less knowledgeable.

The Real Value of Diversity

Nicolas Lynch-Pinzon | November 13, 2023

The class followed its usual script. The professor took center stage, exposing the deep racism, sexism, and homophobia of a previous generation, and like well-rehearsed actors we students assumed our roles as moral arbiters in a semester-long show trial. This was a course called “Darwin and Natural Selection” and we were intrepid voyagers on the […]

Stop Bleeding and Start Leading: Dispelling Teaching’s Greatest Myth is the First Step Towards Educational Reform

Chris Edwards, Ed.D | November 10, 2023

Concrete educational reforms cannot begin until the greatest myth in teaching is dispelled: educational reform will not be created out of sympathy for teachers. Instead, reform must be built upon new ideas presented by teachers. Teachers themselves need to stop bleeding and start leading. And the place to start is by dispelling existing myths.

The Spectres That Haunt Africa: Strange Ailment in Kenya Sets Social Media Alight

Robert E. Bartholomew | October 10, 2023

In response to recent (often ominous) reports from western Kenya regarding a bizarre condition that swept through a Christian all-girls high school, medical sociologist and journalist Robert E. Bartholomew reminds us that these types of outbreaks should be seen for what they are: collective manifestations of distress.

Fossil Fuels: The Past and the Future

Donald R. Prothero | September 15, 2023

How were coal and petroleum produced? (NOT from dinosaurs!) How much is left? Can or when will we run out? The end of “cheap oil” will happen soon but we will probably not realize it until oil-producing countries can no longer keep up with demand, no matter how high the price. If we don’t phase out fossil fuels, climate change will become even more intense and oil will get too expensive for all but the most essential uses.

Skeptic Interviews Steven Koonin

Skeptic | September 8, 2023

Skeptic: How did you get interested in energy? Koonin: I was educated in New York City public schools and grew up in a middle-class household. I went to Caltech as an undergrad, MIT for my PhD, and then returned to Caltech as faculty for 30 years. I was the Provost for the last nine. I […]

Ranking American Presidents: Does It Make Any Sense?

John D. Van Dyke | September 1, 2023

U.S. Presidents have been ranked since Schlesinger’s 1948 list in Life magazine. Others have since done likewise; Siena College Research Institute’s being the standard. Problems include: interpreting the past in terms of the present; the evolving role of the Presidency; and the unique circumstances facing each President. Rather than one overall rank, it is more accurate to score on a set of attributes, including: Experience, Integrity, Imagination, Intelligence, Risk Taking, Communication, Accomplishments, Appointments, Ability to Compromise; and Avoiding Big Mistakes.

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