Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Dragons and psuedoscience

Brian Dunning has a must-see movie about critical thinking and the fallacy of pseudoscience. Also, on the subject are perpetual-motion and free energy machines that violate thermodynamics.

2 comments:

Elias said...

I gave up watching after the first minutes where they put vitamin C supplements, Yoga, and organic food into the same category as psychic reading...

Jeremy said...

Yeah, I thought lumping all those together was a bit of a stretch. The point behind doing that was more about the lack of peer-reviewed science and the generality of claims. My girlfriend does yoga, which is a form of exercise. For that, it's as good as anything else. However, the idea of cleansing some "energy force" is crossing the line into pseudoscience. Organic food may be tastier, but is it always healthier? Probably depends on the type of food, what was used on them, etc. It won't have magical healing powers though. The point of the movie is just to raise flags for "I should be skeptical of this."