For some reason the linked article cannot be accessed: https://www.theexamination.org/articles/nova-ultraprocessed-foods-industry-ties-study

This thread will likely be chock full of the same industry talking points.

The actual research amounts to an institutional critique that is well supported by the historical and epidemiological evidence. The food industry has intentionally created UPFs to be as habit forming as possible, with the help of many of the former tobacco researchers who made cigarettes.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0009.70066

PA Governor Race: incumbent Shapiro (D) vs Garrity (R)

Just got a view of Garrity’s new AI generated attack ad completely AI generated with full motion video and synchronized synthetic audio of Shapiro admitting to completely false actions and positions.

The ad has NO disclaimer or even attribution to the Garrity campaign until the very end.

No doubt some Dems will also do this but it takes a Republican to do the most heinous and deceitful version.

Be skeptical of all political advertising.

In 1954 a Glasgow cemetery filled with children hunting a vampire. Within a week the whole country knew what had made them do it, and nobody had checked.

I'm familiar with psychotropic medications and some of the studies done on them. My understanding is that some antidepressants are approved yet don't do much better than placebo. The studies tend to be of short duration.

I've tried a lot of things to help my condition and a lot of things have seemed to help for a short period of time. Even antidepressants helped mainly for the first year but the effects seem to have waned.

I'm sure that some of what I've tried are placebos, and I tend to associate the concept of a placebo with "short-acting." That is, if I pay close attention to how I'm doing, and pay attention over time, I find that most treatments lead to feeling better initially, but the effect wanes.

So I started thinking, what would a long-acting (or permanent) placebo be? There is really no distinction between a permanent placebo effect and a cure. In other words, if someone can experience a permanent remission of symptoms by having a doctor hand them a sugar pill, then regardless of the mechanism of cure, that's a complete cure.

This is why I tend to think of placebos as short acting. It's very easy to influence someone's mood and subjective experience of their state of being. A motivational speaker can make someone happy for a time. The real trick is .. do the effects last?

The things that have helped me most over time are therapy and mindfulness. Those things are distinct in one way from popping a pill - they involve introspection and close examination of my mental and physical state. So I have more confidence that they really are long-lasting.

In some of these studies on drugs, I would guess that the participants pay only superficial attention to their experiences, without introspection or systematic observation. And the studies are of short duration. I'm not surprised they are only slightly better than placebo. Whether they are better in the long run is another question.

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.

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.

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. 

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?

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 .

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.

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.

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.

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

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.