The Skeptical OB

In 2020 BC those who believed the earth was flat suffered from ignorance. In 2020 AD, those who believe the earth is flat suffer from motivated ignorance. What’s the difference? According to philosopher Daniel Williams: Motivated ignorance involves a form of ignorance that is driven … by an active aversion to possessing [knowledge]… It’s not […]

Science denialists don’t understand science. It’s not that they are ignorant of scientific facts although they are. The real problem is that they don’t understand the scientific method. This is the scientific method (adapted from All In One High School): It involves making an observation, offering a hypothesis, conducting an experiment, collecting and analyzing data […]

Injuries and deaths resulting from COVID denialism are soaring. One reason is that there are no penalties for denialists. We ought to change that by applying 3rd party laws — requiring large financial payouts — to COVID denialists. How? We can adapt existing 3rd party drunk driving laws. Injuries and accidents resulting from drunk driving […]

To stay healthy you need to eat right and exercise. Those who don’t can end up obese and sick. To stay informed about science you need to read “right” and exercise your critical faculties. Those who don’t often end up intellectually flabby and sick. Science denialists — be they COVID denialists, vaccine denialists or climate […]

One of the greatest ironies of the alt-right is how conservatives have eagerly embraced previously despised attributes of liberals. After years of decrying political correctness, micro-aggressions and trigger warnings, we now have a group of people — COVID denialists — who think they are special snowflakes. What’s a special snowflake? According to Urban Dictionary: A […]

Hi, folks! Jack Daniels here, spokesperson for CPRDD, the Committee to Promote Responsible Drunk Driving. I’m sure you’ve seen newspaper accounts of horrific crashes that happened after someone drove drunk, but I’m here to tell you that just because a person died or killed someone else while driving drunk, does NOT mean that drunk driving […]

Carl has done his research and believes stop signs don’t work. That doesn’t give Carl the “right” to ignore stop signs. Masks are like stop signs. The theory behind stop signs is that if you stop before entering an intersection, there’s less chance of being hit by another driver traveling through the intersection. If stop […]

Dear Mr. Zuckerberg, It must be extremely difficult to run Facebook, a multi-billion dollar business spread around the globe. A lot of things are automated — for obvious reasons —and therefore subject to unforeseen error. That’s why I suspect you never intended for Facebook to become an instrument to censor science communicators. But sadly, that’s […]

Contemporary midwives and their advocates suffer from a lack of imagination. They view childbirth in Manichean terms, pitting the so-called midwifery model against the so-called biomedical model. It’s a false duality. There is a framework for maternity care that rises above both. It’s a framework that should govern the provision of all childbirth care. I […]

A new study shows — yet again — that breastfeeding has NO benefit for cognitive development. Let’s start with the money quote from Associations between breastfeeding and cognitive function in children from early childhood to school age: a prospective birth cohort study published yesterday in the International Breastfeeding Journal: Breastfeeding should not be interpreted to […]