Naming climate change as a ‘contentious issue’ risks treating settled science as a matter of political opinion. Humanists UK previously led a successful campaign to stop state schools in England presenting ‘intelligent design’ as a scientific alternative to evolution. Ofsted inspecting individual lessons for ‘bias’ could make teachers reluctant to teach anything a parent might object to, including LGBT+ issues. Section 28 was rarely if ever enforced, but for 15 years teachers avoided the subject altogether: the threat of inspection and referral is enough to do damage.

At dinner last weekend my uncle said full moons make the ER crazy. I asked how he'd know and he said "every nurse says so." Thing is, I've repeated that exact line before without thinking about it.

When I looked it up later, the studies I found mostly show no real effect on ER visits or admissions. It looks like classic confirmation bias. A wild night under a full moon becomes a story people tell for years. A quiet full moon shift just gets forgotten, and nobody remembers a busy night that happened under a half moon.

What bugs me is that "every nurse says so" feels like evidence because it's lots of people, but it's lots of people sharing the same memory filter.

Oddly, my cousin had some "orbivanius" numerology thing open on her phone at the table, and it happened to say something about seeing patterns that aren't there. Vague enough to fit anyone, but it made me laugh.

Anyone have a good source on why this belief sticks so hard in hospitals?

hey, long time lurker. wanted to share a raw reflection and ask how you guys handle the aftermath of dismantling your own cognitive distortions.

for years i was neck-deep in the conspirituality space, esoteric stuff, synchronicities, new age bullshit. looking back objectively, it wasnt that i genuinely found bulletproof evidence for any of it. it was pure motivated reasoning and emotional self-defense. i was grieving lost family, terrified of non-existence, and overwhelmed by the boring, heavy demands of ordinary adult life. magical thinking was just a very seductive bunker to avoid facing an indifferent universe and my own lack of agency.

eventually the contradictions broke the dam. i spent months picking apart my own cognitive biases, fallacies, and rationalizations (ironically bouncing logic back and forth with an llm helped me see where my reasoning was completely circular). ended up landing hard in philosophical materialism and absurdism. no cosmic scripts, no higher vibrations, no grand narrative.

heres my struggle now: the intellectual deprogramming was the easy part. the hard part is the void that comes after.

when you strip away the magical theater, reality is just... reality. stubborn, completely indifferent, quiet. for those of you who have been rational skeptics for a long time or broke out of high-control irrational belief systems: how do you build a grounded, active life without slipping into cynical paralysis? how do you satisfy the human need for depth, connection, and drive while staying strictly tethered to empirical reality and knowing nothing owes you a damn thing?

appreciate any straight answers.

Hello. I am just deconstructing from Christianity and learning more about psychology and how our mind works has really had me questioning the existance of a deity or of God. However my deconstruction has not been easy and one of my biggest areas of difficulty has been miracles especially the untested and witness claimed ones. I understand perfectly that not all eyewitness accounts point towards truth and between being honestly mistaken to embellishment and even to fraud I often have little trust of the same. But there is a particular claim that especially feels sticky to me and I would like your help in evaluating the same.

https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/amp/article/2000125937/kenyan-nun-who-photographed-god-is-headed-for-sainthood

https://sisterannaali.org/page.php?id=MDAwNEZCa053WjNBM3A

These are the links to the story. For the most part I am more comfortable with the claims of crying blood and the images and I know the evidence needed to affirm the same though I would like to hear your views on the same. For me I believe the part where I am bit hung up is on the issue of the cameras being damaged. I know that a claim and a witness story is not enough and there is a need to establish more like what damage was caused and what is the actual cause of damage etc.

But I often feel like my arguments are weak and not emotionally compelling. It definitely hasn't been helpful that the only medium I have consulted this far has been AI.

I guess what I am asking for specifically is what are your views and opinions on the same especially with the evidence claimed to be provided and am I being overly skeptical by choosing to be uncertain over the same information or for not accepting testimony face value .

There is a real event underpinning the story, and an authentic chart showing a dramatic decline in automated internet traffic. But the leap from a viral chart to the disappearance of Russian propaganda bots is a large one. Much of the apparent corroboration comes from anecdotes about how social media feels, rather than measurements of what actually changed. And this speaks to a broader problem...

Broken down into 8 bite size segments by a leading disinformation researcher

1. What happened, and why does everyone think the Russian bots disappeared?
2. Wait, what exactly is a "bot"?
3. So what does the Cloudflare chart actually show?
4. But couldn't the strikes also have disrupted Russian propaganda operations?
5. Why did so many people believe the claims?
6. Couldn’t disinformation researchers just check whether accounts stopped posting?
7. What does this all tell us about the state of the information environment?
8. Why is it so hard to answer these questions now?

So, ironically, a story about the disappearance of Russian propaganda bots became a viral misleading story on its own. 

1. Skepticism existed in ancient Egypt, contrary to the belief in absolute religious devotion.

2. Religious practices often reflected personal piety rather than adherence to official cults, indicating skepticism.

3. Tomb robbing from the Badarian period suggests a significant skepticism regarding afterlife beliefs.

4. Literary texts demonstrate skepticism towards the efficacy of divine intervention and afterlife promises.

5. Ancient skepticism diverged from modern ideas, focusing more on suspending belief than on questioning knowledge.

It's natural to map the world around us with heuristics, but sometimes they can lead us astray or even reveal our biases and bigotries.

This shouldn’t be news to any skeptic, but it is well-written and it is good to see stuff like this published on BBC.

Richard Dawkins famously called the God of the Old Testament “the most unpleasant character in all fiction.” What’s interesting is that he may have understated the case.

From divinely commanded massacres and the slaughter of children to the death penalty for homosexuals, the Bible offers plenty of evidence for Dawkins’ indictment. And since Yahweh is the God at the foundation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the implications extend to all three monotheistic religions. Take a closer look at these disturbing passages that reveal the dark character of its god.

https://fightingthegods.com/richard-dawkins-was-right-why-the-god-of-the-bible-is-far-worse-than-you-probably-think/

Lots of people are meming about troll bots going down but the data doesn't support that.

Besides the lack of data, simple skepticism and knowledge about how networks and traffic analysis work should make it obvious the calls are coming from inside the house.

Domestic traffic is less likely to be intercepted or straight up banned.

The single most disgusting piece of deliberate disinformation I have seen here on Reddit. They equate vinyl chloride (an odorless, colorless, deadly gas) with polyvinyl chloride, a common type of drinking water pipe. Kind of like equating pure sodium with salt. And they don't allow comments on their posts or on their user page. I presume that they're trying to sell some other kind of drinking water pipe that's much harder to use and/or much more expensive.

Ai was invented to cure cancer... To bring back smoking.

I recently went on an overnight ghost hunt at the Ancient Ram Inn in Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, UK.

The organisers described it as a relatively quiet night in terms of paranormal activity, although guests reported seeing flashes of light in the rafters, hearing knocking sounds, and feeling something tugging at their clothing and brushing against their legs.

Towards the end of the night, in a room called the barn, one of the organisers placed a wooden rocking chair on top of a table. Six people sat around the table, each placing a finger on one of the chair’s two curved rockers. One finger was positioned at each corner and two in the middle, where the rockers made contact with the table.

My finger was on one of the corners, at the end of a rocker. The rocking chair began to rock slightly, and I kept my finger on it, trying simply to follow the movement of the chair without consciously pushing it.

As the chair rocked, I distinctly felt several strong, sharp, brief mechanical impulses transmitted through the rocker into my finger.

Later, at home, I reproduced similar impulses by placing my finger on one end of a foot-long piece of wood, held in place by a heavy weight, and lightly striking the other end with a heavy hammer.

I don’t believe those impulses could have been produced by anyone else’s fingers touching the chair or by its rocking motion on the table.

The baseless theory that life is just a Matrix-like computer simulation has caught on in Silicon Valley and is taking on increasingly religious tones.

• Conspiracy beliefs have important political correlates and consequences, which can undermine trust and participation in democratic processes.
• They are not the preserve of the ideological left or right, and are more common at ideological extremes, though may be strongest at the extreme right.
• There are reliable individual differences in a generalized predisposition to believe in conspiracy theories.
• This predisposition has been characterized as a conspiracy mindset, and more specifically a generalized political attitude.
• Problems with this characterization and alternative ways of understanding the ideological significance of conspiracy theories are discussed