TOK@ISPrague

Ministers in the U.K. are considering banning homeopathy from the treatments that can be prescribed by doctors working for the National Health Service (NHS). At the moment, the NHS spends £4 million ($6 million) on homeopathic prescriptions and hospitals every year

"Given the finite resources of the NHS, any spending on homeopathy is utterly unjustifiable. The money spent on these disproven remedies can be far better spent on treatments that offer real benefits to patients," Simon Singh, founder of the Good Thinking Society, said in a statement.

The positive effects from homeopathy come exclusively from the placebo effect, a physiological response to a harmless substance that leads to a reduction in symptoms from an ailment

The administration of President Park Geun-hye also knows that history is a powerful tool for molding young minds. That is why, after weeks of rancorous public debate, on Nov. 3 it made official its decision to replace current middle and high school history textbooks produced by private publishers with government-issued ones by 2017. The announcement was condemned by many scholars and the political opposition.

Recently, a psychiatric study on first episodes of psychosis made front-page news. People seemed quite surprised by the finding: that lower doses of psychotropic drugs, when combined with individual psychotherapy, family education and a focus on social adaptation, resulted in decreased symptoms and increased wellness.

Recently, a psychiatric study on first episodes of psychosis made front-page news. People seemed quite surprised by the finding: that lower doses of psychotropic drugs, when combined with individual psychotherapy, family education and a focus on social adaptation, resulted in decreased symptoms and increased wellness. But the real surprise — and disappointment — was that this was considered so surprising.

But the real surprise — and disappointment — was that this was considered so surprising.

A 19th-century French impressionist artist who perished almost a century ago is the world’s leading aesthetic terrorist; you just don’t know it.Fortunately, the Renoir Sucks at Painting (RSAP) movement is here to change that.

t the core of RSAP’s serious political critiques are Eurocentric aesthetics and beauty standards and the domination of art museums by white men. “If the problems with Eurocentricity were personified in a man, Renoir would be the disgusting” embodiment, Geller insisted.Geller did not mince words: “Renoir is the most pulsating, puss-ridden boil which is the most blatant essence of the problem,” he added.“The fact that this utter charlatan can get by the watchmen defending the high altar of art is the proof positive that the system is broken, and that, for far too long, these decisions have been made by people who have access to fancy art educations and pursue them with an eye toward dictating taste,” Geller explained.

In other words, we need to be able to tell when we believe or disbelieve in something based on high standards of evidence and when we are just engaging in a bit of motivated reasoning and letting our opinions take over. When we withhold belief because the evidence does not live up to the standards of science, we are skeptical. When we refuse to believe something, even in the face of what most others would take to be compelling evidence, we are engaging in denial. In most cases, we do this because at some level it upsets us to think that the theory is true.

So how to tell a fact from an opinion? By the time we sit down to evaluate the evidence for a scientific theory, it is probably too late. If we take the easy path in our thinking, it eventually becomes a habit. If we lie to others, sooner or later we may believe the lie ourselves. The real battle comes in training ourselves to embrace the right attitudes about belief formation in the first place, and for this we need to do a little philosophy.

Should public money be spent to preserve these crumbling sites? Is controlled decay an option for anything associated with the Nazis? Or have Hitler and his architect, Albert Speer, locked future generations into a devilish pact that compels Germans not only to teach the history of the Thousand Year Reich the Nazis proclaimed here but also to adapt it for each new era?Several dozen experts — and some curious citizens — gathered for a weekend recently to ponder such questions at a forum titled “Preserve. For what?”

The United Nations has rekindled the debate about sexualized images of children in Japanese manga art after its Special Envoy on Child Protection, Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, called for the east Asian country to ban certain graphic content in anime.

Artist Ai Weiwei is setting up "Lego collection points" in different cities after being inundated with offers of donations from supporters. Ai has accused Lego of "censorship and discrimination" after it refused his bulk order for bricks for a new exhibition in Melbourne, Australia.Lego said it has never sold directly to anyone wanting to use its product to make a political statement.The artist will now use the donated toy bricks to make a "new work".

The opposite of that is the hot-hand fallacy — the belief that winning streaks, whether in basketball or coin tossing, have a tendency to continue, as if propelled by their own momentum. Both misconceptions are reflections of the brain’s wired-in rejection of the power that randomness holds over our lives. Look deep enough, we instinctively believe, and we may uncover a hidden order.

A working paper published this summer has caused a stir by proposing that a classic body of research disproving the existence of the hot hand in basketball is flawed by a subtle misperception about randomness. If the analysis is correct, the possibility remains that the hot hand is real.

Taken to extremes, seeing connections that don’t exist can be a symptom of a psychiatric condition called apophenia. In less pathological forms, the brain’s hunger for pattern gives rise to superstitions (astrology, numerology) and is a driving factor in what has been called a replication crisis in science — a growing number of papers that cannot be confirmed by other laboratories.

I am a theoretical neuroscientist. I study models of brain circuits, precisely the sort of models that would be needed to try to reconstruct or emulate a functioning brain from a detailed knowledge of its structure. I don’t in principle see any reason that what I’ve described could not someday, in the very far future, be achieved (though it’s an active field of philosophical debate). But to accomplish this, these future scientists would need to know details of staggering complexity about the brain’s structure, details quite likely far beyond what any method today could preserve in a dead brain.

It’s sexist to ask a woman (but not a man) her maiden name, or to ask anyone for their mother’s maiden name. It’s none of their business, just its none of their business to know whether a woman is married (“Mrs”) or not (“Miss”) unless she chooses to tell them.