#pseudoscience-criticism

#pseudoscience-criticism

Witnessing the presence of God at a bus stop in 2011, I felt overwhelmed by something indescribably majestic, which bared my soul to a profound realization.

'What we often see with this Flat Earth movement is a fundamental failure to really understand the model that they're rejecting. 'I think what a lot of Flat Earthers don't understand is how gravity actually works.' In our day-to-day lives, it might look like gravity is a force that simply pulls things 'down', but this is only because we are so small relative to the size of the Earth.

Some clinicians have an uncanny quality. A colleague describes herself and others with this instinct as "witchy"-a capacity to know things about patients they haven't said yet, to follow a stray association to a song lyric or a half-remembered cultural reference and arrive, reliably, at something the patient urgently needed to say but couldn't reach on their own. We see with artificial intelligence these intriguing possibilities for discovery, especially as connections that human beings never would see pop out of apparently unrelated data.

Making good decisions doesn't merely rely on how much information we take in; it also depends on the quality of that information. If what we've instead ingested and accepted is misinformation or disinformation - incorrect information that doesn't align with factual reality - then we not only become susceptible to grift and fraud ourselves, but we risk having our minds captured by charismatic charlatans. When that occurs, we can lose everything: money, trust, relationships, and even our mental independence.