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occasionally lured by the promises of effortless slimming

Dr.-Oz-endorsed Garcinia Cambogia pills are languishing in his kitchen cupboard - because they don’t seem to work. Bruni applauds the recent interest in fighting aggressively marketed junk-that-makes-us-fat, and wants to remind us that we should also pay attention to aggressively marketed pills

most of the supplements marketed as fat burners have little or no science to support their claims

Another day, another series of ridiculous and incorrect claims about global warming getting far more air than they deserve. The latest comes from none other than David Rose, a man who has serially misunderstood climate change so consistently that if he told me the sun would rise tomorrow, I'd be more inclined to believe the Earth had stopped rotating. He writes articles for the Daily Mail —it would be an insult to the fish to wrap them in this tabloid — and he uses a lot of typical techniques wielded by deniers, including cherry picking and misdirection. While he doesn't always deny global warming is happening, he does think it's not as bad as scientists say. I'll also note he has claimed the world is cooling, too, despite all the evidence (and I do mean all of it). But if you deny what the overwhelming majority of climate scientists are telling you, then in my opinion that makes you a denier.

Rose is, as usual, grossly exaggerating the death of global warming.

First, the "pause" is a claim that global warming has stopped since 1998 or so. This claim was never really true. 1998 was an unusually warm year, so if you start your measurements there it doesn't look like temperatures have risen much. But if you go back farther in time, the upward trend is very obvious. You have to look at the trend, and not short-term fluctuations!

In a rare bipartisan moment US lawmakers opened up the possibility of mining on other worlds despite an international treaty barring sovereign claims in space

The US Senate passed the Space Act of 2015 this week, sending its revisions of the bill back to the House for an expected approval, after which it would land on the president’s desk. The bill has a slew of provisions to encourage commercial companies that want to explore space and exploit its resources, granting “asteroid resource” and “space resource” rights to US citizens who managed to acquire the resource themselves.

lawmakers defined “space resource” as “an abiotic resource in situ in outer space” that would include water and minerals but not life.

The U.S. was never intended to be a democracy; it was designed as a Republic. The Rule of Law (the U.S. Constitution,) was crafted to "bind down from mischief" the Rule of Man. Nevertheless, two centuries later the Rule of Law has been subverted completely, the Constitution is now meaningless, and we find ourselves living in a Fascist dictatorship run chiefly (though not solely) by Wall Street. A quiet coup d'etat has taken place over the span of many years and decades, and ours is an occpied country now. Even so, American fascism will ultimately fail and collapse. It is inevitable. Too much debt, too much misery, too many structural problems, and more Black Swans waiting in the wings than AmeriKa can possibly hope to survive. It's hard to say what the next chapter will look like, but it will be Hell on wheels, I'm sure.

“In present times, our risk of being fooled is especially high,” she says. There are two main factors at play: “Disinformation spreads like wildfire in social media,” she adds, “and when it comes to news reporting, sometimes it is more important for journalists to be fast than accurate.”

Scientists labor under a burden of proof. They must conduct experiments and collect data under controlled conditions to arrive at their conclusions — and be ready to defend their findings with facts, not emotions.

1. Cultivate your skepticism.

The 1619 Project introduced a date, previously obscure to most Americans, that ought always to have been thought of as seminal — and probably now will. It offered fresh reminders of the extent to which Black freedom was a victory gained by courageous Black Americans, and not just a gift obtained from benevolent whites.

in a point missed by many of the 1619 Project’s critics, it does not reject American values. As Nikole Hannah-Jones, its creator and leading voice, concluded in her essay for the project, “I wish, now, that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag.” It’s an unabashedly patriotic thought.

ambition can be double-edged. Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded

orer eff

The Forer effect refers to the tendency of people to rate sets of statements as highly accurate for them personally even though the statements could apply to many people.

Forer gave a personality test to his students, ignored their answers, and gave each student the above evaluation. He asked them to evaluate the evaluation from 0 to 5, with "5" meaning the recipient felt the evaluation was an "excellent" assessment and "4" meaning the assessment was "good." The class average evaluation was 4.26. That was in 1948. The test has been repeated hundreds of time with psychology students and the average is still around 4.2 out of 5, or 84% accurate.

zero-knowledge proof

Zero trust is a security framework that requires users and devices to be authenticated, authorized and continuously validated over time. Each user and device is tied to a set of granular controls it must adhere to when communicating with other users, devices and systems within a secure network.

The idea is to place applications and services into logically created secure zones.

This is an unfortunate and pernicious pattern. Musk often refers to himself as moderate or independent, but he routinely treats far-right fringe figures as people worth taking seriously—and, more troublingly, as reliable sources of information.

By doing so, he boosts their messages: A message retweeted by or receiving a reply from Musk will potentially be seen by millions of people.

Also, people who pay for Musk’s Twitter Blue badges get a lift in the algorithm when they tweet or reply; because of the way Twitter Blue became a culture war front, its subscribers tend to skew to the righ

there are two very different phenomena at play here, each of which subvert the flow of information in very distinct ways. Let’s call them echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Both are social structures that systematically exclude sources of information. Both exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs.

they work in entirely different ways, and they require very different modes of intervention

An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.

Haidt’s view here is not at all alien to Plato, who saw truth arising only from the right sort of discussion among inquirers accountable to one another. Nor would Plato object to Haidt’s claim that ethics is based on intuition — direct moral judgments — rather than on reasoning. Haidt’s “reasoning” corresponds to what Plato calls dianoia, the process of logically deriving conclusions from given premises.

Such logic yields merely hypothetical knowledge (if p, then q), since logic cannot prove the truth of its premises.  Reasoning, therefore, will reliably yield truth only when it is completed by acts of intuition (noesis) that justify the premises from which we reason.

Plato’s intuitions are not like the snap judgments of everyday life, driven by genes and social conditioning. But nor are they the insights of individuals meditating in isolation.

SCIENTISTS have often been accused of exaggerating the threat of climate change,

The year just concluded is about to be declared the hottest one on record,

Science is conservative, and new claims of knowledge are greeted with high degrees of skepticism.

For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.

One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming.

He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.

Political correctness has become a major bugaboo of the right in the past decade, a rallying cry against all that has gone wrong with liberalism and America. Conservative writers fill volumes complaining how political correctness stifles free expression and promotes bunk social theories about “power structures” based on patriarchy, race and mass victimhood. Forbes charged that it “stifles freedom of speech.” The Daily Caller has gone so far as to claim that political correctness “kills Americans.”

But conservatives have their own, nationalist version of PC, their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. I call it “patriotic correctness.” It’s a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can’t be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences.

Blaming the liberal or mainstream media and “media bias” is the patriotically correct version of blaming the corporations or capitalism. The patriotically correct notion that they “would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University” because the former have “common sense” and the “intellectual elites” don’t know anything, despite all the evidence to the contrary, can be sustained only in a total bubble.

A common tactic of those who claim that science and religion are compatible is to argue that science, like religion, rests on faith: faith in the accuracy of what we observe, in the laws of nature, or in the value of reason

Such statements imply that science and religion are not that different because both seek the truth and use faith to find it

science is often described as a kind of religion.

Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Trump, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that the White House had put forth “alternative facts” to ones reported by the news media about the size of Mr. Trump’s inauguration crowd.

In leveling this attack, the president and Mr. Spicer made a series of false statements.Here are the facts.In a speech at the C.I.A. on Saturday, Mr. Trump said the news media had constructed a feud between him and the intelligence community. “They sort of made it sound like I had a ‘feud’ with the intelligence community,” he said. “It is exactly the opposite, and they understand that, too.”In fact, Mr. Trump repeatedly criticized the intelligence agencies during his transition to office and has questioned their conclusion that Russia meddled in the election to aid his candidacy. He called their assessment “ridiculous” and suggested that it had been politically motivated.

Mr. Trump said of his inauguration crowd, “It looked honestly like a million and a half people, whatever it was, it was, but it went all the way back to the Washington Monument.”Aerial photographs clearly show that the crowd did not stretch to the Washington Monument. An analysis by The New York Times, comparing photographs from Friday to ones taken of Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, showed that Mr. Trump’s crowd was significantly smaller and less than the 1.5 million people he claimed. An expert hired by The Times found that Mr. Trump’s crowd on the National Mall was about a third of the size of Mr. Obama’s in 2009.

but this has come with the side effect of a toxic combination of confirmation bias and Google, enabling us to easily find a study to support whatever it is that we already believe, without bothering to so much as look at research that might challenge our position

Indeed, this is a statement oft-used by fans of pseudoscience who take the claim at face value, without applying the principles behind it to their own evidence.

at present, most published findings are likely to be incorrect.

many services that claim to offer that rarest of digital commodities — privacy — don’t really deliver. Read the fine print.

Snapchat’s privacy page explains that private images are stored on someone’s phone — and on its own servers. “Forensically, even after they are deleted,” Snapchat says, those images can be retrieved. Whisper’s privacy page says the company owns the intellectual property, both images and text, that people post; Whisper reserves the right to sell that stuff to third parties. And Telegram, while seemingly less innocuous with its claims, nonetheless leaves out something you might want to know: someone can just take a screenshot or picture of that “private” conversation.

Don’t have a smartphone yet? They still know where you are and where you’ve been. The American Civil Liberties Union released a report this year that found that technologies that let governments scan license plates are being used to build databases of vehicle locations across the United States.

much of this angst can be interpreted as part of a noisy but inexorable endgame: the end of white supremacy. From this vantage point, Americanness and whiteness are fitfully, achingly, but finally becoming delinked—and like it or not, over the course of this generation, Americans are all going to have to learn a new way to be American.

What is the story of “us” when “us” is no longer by default “white”? The answer, of course, will depend on how aware Americans are of what they are, of what their culture already (and always) has been.

The thing about the list, though, was that it was—by design—heavy on the deeds and words of the “dead white males” who had formed the foundations of American culture but who had by then begun to fall out of academic fashion.

a painstaking yearslong effort to reproduce 100 studies published in three leading psychology journals has found that more than half of the findings did not hold up when retested. The analysis was done by research psychologists, many of whom volunteered their time to double-check what they considered important work. Their conclusions, reported Thursday in the journal Science, have confirmed the worst fears of scientists who have long worried that the field needed a strong correction.

The vetted studies were considered part of the core knowledge by which scientists understand the dynamics of personality, relationships, learning and memory. Therapists and educators rely on such findings to help guide decisions, and the fact that so many of the studies were called into question could sow doubt in the scientific underpinnings of their work.

The new analysis, called the Reproducibility Project, found no evidence of fraud or that any original study was definitively false. Rather, it concluded that the evidence for most published findings was not nearly as strong as originally claimed.