Oct 22, 2020 05:44 PM
Organic Farming Is Not Compatible With Conservation
https://www.science20.com/hank_campbell/...ion-251319
INTRO: A recent paper finds that if just 15 percent of farmland reverted to nature, it would wipe out nearly a third of the carbon we've generated since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. The good news; we can do that easily. The bad news; it involves science, and western elites in environmental activism, from Environmental Working Group in the U.S. To Swiss Public Eye in Europe, are never going to allow that without a fight.
America actually does quite well protecting the environment. We have more open land than Africa does. Because America leads the world in scientific approaches to agriculture, we also provide nutritious, affordable food using less water, less energy, and less land per unit than ever before. Modern agriculture has been so successful that Berkeley Professor Paul Ehrlich's apocalyptic "Population Bomb" prophecy and prognostications about rampant starvation have become a running joke.
We have even been so successful that wealthy elites in developed nations have embraced a kind of modern feudalism; hearkening back to a time when they got to lord it over peasants doing back-breaking work for the benefit of nobility. They buy organic food, with its imagery of weeding ancient crops by hand in the sun.
It's all fake, of course. Organic food claims to be more natural, but only by redefining natural each year to be whatever they want... (MORE)
Daryl Bem, Psi Research, and Fixing Science
https://theness.com/neurologicablog/inde...g-science/
EXCERPTS: In 2011 Daryl Bem published a series of ten studies which he claimed demonstrated psi phenomena – that people could “feel the future”. He took standard psychological study methods and simply reversed the order of events, so that the effect was measured prior to the stimulus. Bem claimed to find significant results – therefore psi is real. Skeptics and psychologists were not impressed...
[...] What are the lessons we can take from all of this? In my opinion this is a perfect case study for the integration of more scientific skepticism into mainstream science and academia (and Richard Wiseman is also a major proponent and practitioner of this). It shows the positive results that can come from mainstream scientists studying pseudoscience. In my experience academics often live in a bubble, based upon a false dichotomy – the notion that there is mainstream science on one hand, and then there are the “kooks” who can comfortably be ignored. In fact, they should be ignored and giving them any attention is counterproductive and sullies one’s academic reputation. Often when they are published it is often because some editor dropped their guard and gullibly promoted nonsense.
I have often argued, however, that studying pseudoscience is like a physician studying disease. We don’t just study healthy subjects – we study disease precisely so that we can learn how best to maintain health. Studying exactly what goes wrong with pseudoscience should provide lessons and insight that can be applied to mainstream science, which may suffer more subtle versions of the problems that plague pseudoscience. In fact – science vs pseudoscience is a false dichotomy (something known as the demarcation problem). There is, rather, a continuum, so when studying “pseudoscience” experts are actually studying science... (MORE - details)
https://www.science20.com/hank_campbell/...ion-251319
INTRO: A recent paper finds that if just 15 percent of farmland reverted to nature, it would wipe out nearly a third of the carbon we've generated since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. The good news; we can do that easily. The bad news; it involves science, and western elites in environmental activism, from Environmental Working Group in the U.S. To Swiss Public Eye in Europe, are never going to allow that without a fight.
America actually does quite well protecting the environment. We have more open land than Africa does. Because America leads the world in scientific approaches to agriculture, we also provide nutritious, affordable food using less water, less energy, and less land per unit than ever before. Modern agriculture has been so successful that Berkeley Professor Paul Ehrlich's apocalyptic "Population Bomb" prophecy and prognostications about rampant starvation have become a running joke.
We have even been so successful that wealthy elites in developed nations have embraced a kind of modern feudalism; hearkening back to a time when they got to lord it over peasants doing back-breaking work for the benefit of nobility. They buy organic food, with its imagery of weeding ancient crops by hand in the sun.
It's all fake, of course. Organic food claims to be more natural, but only by redefining natural each year to be whatever they want... (MORE)
Daryl Bem, Psi Research, and Fixing Science
https://theness.com/neurologicablog/inde...g-science/
EXCERPTS: In 2011 Daryl Bem published a series of ten studies which he claimed demonstrated psi phenomena – that people could “feel the future”. He took standard psychological study methods and simply reversed the order of events, so that the effect was measured prior to the stimulus. Bem claimed to find significant results – therefore psi is real. Skeptics and psychologists were not impressed...
[...] What are the lessons we can take from all of this? In my opinion this is a perfect case study for the integration of more scientific skepticism into mainstream science and academia (and Richard Wiseman is also a major proponent and practitioner of this). It shows the positive results that can come from mainstream scientists studying pseudoscience. In my experience academics often live in a bubble, based upon a false dichotomy – the notion that there is mainstream science on one hand, and then there are the “kooks” who can comfortably be ignored. In fact, they should be ignored and giving them any attention is counterproductive and sullies one’s academic reputation. Often when they are published it is often because some editor dropped their guard and gullibly promoted nonsense.
I have often argued, however, that studying pseudoscience is like a physician studying disease. We don’t just study healthy subjects – we study disease precisely so that we can learn how best to maintain health. Studying exactly what goes wrong with pseudoscience should provide lessons and insight that can be applied to mainstream science, which may suffer more subtle versions of the problems that plague pseudoscience. In fact – science vs pseudoscience is a false dichotomy (something known as the demarcation problem). There is, rather, a continuum, so when studying “pseudoscience” experts are actually studying science... (MORE - details)