Category: Letters to the Editor

Afloat in Misinformation As a former teacher of undergraduate and graduate students, I appreciate Melanie Trecek-King’s excellent articles in Skeptical inquirer (“Teach Skills, Not Facts,” January/February 2022, and “A Life Preserver for Staying Afloat in a Sea of Misinformation,” March/April 2022). They are the result of much thought, effort, and devotion. Her students are very …

Dissonance and Reasoning I enjoyed reading David Robert Grimes’s article concerning motivated reasoning (“Schrödinger’s Bin Laden: The Irrational World of Motivated Reasoning,” January/February 2022). The background discussion of Dr. Festinger’s origin of the cognitive dissonance (CD) theory, along with the admission toward the end of the article that CD is sometimes selective, affirms my long-held …

Remembering Randi Your marvelous tribute to James Randi (“Remembering Randi,” January/February 2021) unfortunately did not mention one of his magnificent contributions to the world of science. In 1988, the French researcher Jacques Benveniste published a scientific paper in the renowned journal Nature that appeared to support the concept of homeopathy. John Maddox, Nature’s editor-in-chief, asked …

Downfall of a Charlatan I was disappointed with David Marks’s long and interesting article on the downfall of Hans Eysenck (November/December 2020) for two reasons. First, he criticizes Eysenck for his “credulous defense of parapsychology.” But parapsychology is a legitimate field of science, even if the phenomena it seeks may never be found. It is …

Science and Creationism I agree with all the arguments in Brian Bolton’s excellent article “The Continuing Assault on Science by Creationist Group Reasons to Believe” (September/October 2020), but I’m very unhappy when he uses “Christian faith” synonymously for the “word-for-word understanding of the Bible,” especially the book of Genesis. Bolton correctly notes that there are …

Coronavirus Crisis Toward the end of his special report on the coronavirus crisis (“Coronavirus Crisis: Chaos, Counting, and Confronting Our Biases,” July/August 2020), Benjamin Radford, in mentioning the public’s blaming the media for misinformation, drops in the qualifier “—and often deservedly so—.” This phrase is fatally imprecise. Does this qualifier include all media (e.g., the …

The Nobel Disease I enjoyed the article “The Nobel Disease” (May/June 2020) so much so that I read it before even getting it into my office or bedroom stack of reading. I also enjoyed and related to the editor’s comments, as I have met quite a number of Nobelists, a few with crank ideas, including …

The New Climate War Michael E. Mann is correct when he says that we cannot allow the profits of a few companies to destroy our planet and that the misinformation tactics of Exxon and other major oil firms are criminal (Commentary, “How to Win the New Climate War,” March/April 2020). However, the hydrocarbon producers are not …

Nine Evidence-Based Guidelines I read with interest Gary Bakker’s article promoting evidence-based guidelines for a “good life” (November/December 2019). Yet I was left pondering the nature of the evidence proposed to support the nine suggestions. In his introduction, Dr. Bakker promotes the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs). A key feature of RCTs is, of …

The Health Wars First, let me say the happiest day every two months is when my new issue of Skeptical Inquirer arrives, and the saddest day is the day I finish reading it (which sometimes occurs the same day). I admit when I first saw the subject of your “Health Wars” issue (September/October 2019), I …

The Claims of Parapsychology I found the reasoning in the article “Why Parapsychological Claims Cannot Be True” (Reber and Alcock, July/August 2019) disturbingly flawed.   The first priority of a serious scientist studying parapsychology is to determine whether such phenomena actually occur—here I mean phenomena such as psychokinesis, telepathy, retrocognition, precognition, and clairvoyance. Only once …

DNA Misconceptions Carl Zimmer’s article “Seven Big Misconceptions about Heredity” (May/June 2019) makes some excellent points, and I would like to amplify a bit on “Misconception 1: Finding a Special Ancestor Makes You Special.” Using the generally accepted rule of thumb that there are three generations per century, it is possible to estimate how many …

Respectful Skepticism? Craig Foster (“Respectful Skepticism,” March/April 2019) makes the serious linguistic mistake of treating disrespect as the negative counterpart of respect—which it is not—and then builds on this mistake in arguing that we skeptics should respect crazy ideas and the misguided people who hold them. Of course we shouldn’t indulge in “disrespecting” other people, …

The Age of Misinformation “Surviving the Misinformation Age” (May/June 2017) offered my incredulous skeptical brain a real epiphany. We often simply cannot understand how the masses can possibly believe things that are, well, unbelievable. But people who read SI and our friends tend to be those who do know how satellites can tell us where …

Stem Cell Research It is disappointing to learn how “sluggish” stem cell research has advanced as described in Drs. Barglow and Schaefer’s detailed chronology, “Stem Cell Research: Still Embattled After All These Years” (January/February 2017). Sadly, violation of the Jeffersonian principle of “separation between church and state” has reinforced obstruction of stem cell research in Congress. …

Nuclear Power and Risk Psychology In his excellent article on nuclear power (“Nuclear Power and the Psychology of Evaluating Risk,” November/December 2016), Daniel Vogel compares nuclear power to a hypothetical perfect alternative that is completely risk free. In spite of doing so, he makes an excellent case for why nuclear power is not the dirty …

Spread the Word Bill Nye’s “Promote Reason, Prevent Climate Catastrophes: Let’s Get ’Er Done” (September/October 2016) was a great article on critical thinking, but it misses the mark on two points. First, you are, as they say, “preaching to the choir” (sorry about the theistic reference). Send this to The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, …