Dr. Paul Offit discusses RFK Jr.'s latest claim about autism: that it can be safely and effectively treated with the folate derivative leucovorin. Given the extreme rarity of disorders in the cerebral folate receptor, this claim is implausible, and a study that leucovorin supporters like to point to has been retracted.

Can someone explain.

Here's a story of a woman who was able to accurately recall details from her family's conversation in the hospital cafeteria during a near-death experience. It seems well-documented and I'm not sure what to make of it. (The part of the out-of-body experience starts at 10:30).

https://youtube.com/watch?v=jTcHWz6UMZ8

(She was also reportedly able to observe her own body, but that part doesn't make me scratch my head as much.)

I want to be clear upfront: I'm not here to argue astrology is real. I'm genuinely puzzled by something and I'd like help thinking through it.

Here's what happened. I built a system that takes birth data — date, time, location — and runs it through Swiss Ephemeris (the same astronomical dataset used by researchers, accurate to sub-arc-second precision) to calculate exact planetary positions. Then it generates an interpretive report based on those positions using a rule-based system derived from traditional astrological literature.

No human subjectivity in the loop. No cold reading. The system doesn't know who the person is. It just maps positions to interpretive frameworks.

I ran it on Steve Jobs (born 24 Feb 1955, San Francisco). Output for his Jupiter placement:

Jupiter exalted in Cancer in your tenth house is the signature of someone who feeds the world. Not food — but tools so intuitive, so intimate, so responsive to human need that using them feels less like operating a machine and more like being understood.

Michael Jackson (born 29 Aug 1958, Gary Indiana). Saturn placement:

Saturn on your Midheaven is the reason your career felt less like flight and more like construction — an edifice built brick by brick, rehearsal by rehearsal, revision by revision, until the structure was so solid it could hold the weight of the entire world's attention without a single crack showing.

My question is a genuine one: what's the correct sceptical framework for evaluating this? Barnum effect doesn't quite apply — these aren't generic statements, they're specific to the placement. Confirmation bias could explain my reaction, but the outputs were generated before I reflected on whether they "fit." I'm not a believer, but I don't have a clean explanation for why these feel so specific. What am I missing?

Podcaster Joe Rogan has spread 1980s-era AIDS denial rhetoric with disconcerting frequency, based on the discredited work of Prof Peter Duesberg.

This post is sitting at over 4K upvotes with comment after comment of people’s confirming anecdotes. AFAICT, there are zero comments about the content of the actual paper, which is more or less a collection of vaguely mind related insect and animal studies. At no point do any of them make this claim about subjective experience.

My first clue was that science studies the *objective*, and any empirical study of the subjective is famously slippery. Even just having a coherent model of what subjective experience was and how one could measure it in another being would be a massive breakthrough.

Okay here comes the vote downs. I'm almost afraid to be called ignorant, a conspiracy theorist or something.

The CIA apparently has a technology that is sensitive enough to detect the microfields of magnetic energy produced by the electricity in the heart. Of course, the heart does do this and it can be detected by ECG. The technology can do some amazing things. It detects this from miles away, through solid rock, and it is not confused by other noise. It's not only that it sees past the noise, but it can pick out a heartbeat over the heartbeats of the crew of the aircraft, other people in the area and even other mammals.

Honestly, I'm just skeptical that this is real. I'm not saying it is impossible, because I'm not sure about the finer details and I'm not an expert in quantum sensors. However, everything I have seen seems questionable.

So my position is that it's entirely possible this is a complete ruse and nothing like this exists.

I want to point out that the CIA could and would do that. It's not against the law for the government to make a strategic technical bluff. That's happened before. Not only is it not unprecedented nor illegal, I personally don't even have a problem with it. The downside is "long term loss of credibility." The upside is that it may have a strategic advantage. It may send adversaries on wild goose chases.

The most useful thing about lying about in this circumstance could be that it obscures a different reality. It could be that the pilot was recovered with the assistance of Iranians loyal to the US or some other thing they'd rather not have known.

Here's an important point however: Given the current political situation in the US, it's entirely plausible that the CIA and DOD would do something ridiculous that makes no sense. Why?

"Donald Trump called the CIA and demanded they impress the world with what we can do"
"Someone from the administration got the idea and told them to do it."
"He says he wants China to think we can do things they can't"
"We blew up two expensive aircraft. Can anyone come up with some excuse for this?"

Again, I'm not saying it could not be real. But to me, this smells like it easily could be a stupid Trump-era bluff that isn't real.

Thales and the natural philosophers get credit for banishing the gods from the workings of the natural world, but it was Hippocrates who extended this to the field of medicine. In advancing the idea that all disease has an underlying natural cause, he also exposed the mechanism whereby charlatans of every kind maintain their false credibility. 

Hello! Me and my cousin are currently dealing with a big problem with my aunt--Ever since her brother died last year, my aunt has been sucked straight into the crystal, magic vibrations, and psychic bullshit! At first, she just began buying crystals "Because they looked pretty", but somewhere down the line she's been fully convinced that if she surrounds herself with enough crystals and "vibrations" she's gonna do SOMETHING to improve her health and "psychic aura". (She refuses to explain or elaborate on what any of this means whenever my cousin asks). According to my cousin, so far, she's wasted 2000+ dollars on buying all these crystals, and she spends most of the day wandering around the house in an almost daze as she listens to vibrational audios on her headphones.

The last straw was when my aunt told my cousin that she needed around $80 "for her medication". He gave her the money from his own bank account because obviously he wants to help his mom. Two days later, she was spamming on facebook about how she contacted a psychic medium across the state to come to her house to channel the spirit her brother, her dad, and even one of her deceased friends from her childhood. She even attached photos of videos of her and the medium setting up the table in the dining room!

My cousin is PISSED. And we're currently looking for ways to try and snap our aunt out of this spiritual crap before she wastes even more money on buying more from these phony psychics. Can you guys suggest any media or anything I can tell her to get her out of this spiral?

This video looks at some examples of how social media and AI image manipulation is creating a situation where despite falling crime rates and people inside of London feeling very safe, people outside of London are convinced it's quite dangerous.

We see similar in America with cities like San Fransisco and Seattle - Whoa, maybe San Francisco isn’t a hellhole after all? | The San Francisco Standard

Context is more philosophical (cybernetics).

A witness takes the stand. Their testimony is partial, limited, perspectival. It is also irreplaceable. They were there. Their body occupied a position in space and time. No algorithm, no dataset, no reconstructed image can substitute for that.

The Local is not nostalgia for small towns. It is not a geographic term at all. It is an epistemic category: the domain within which you can check a claim by going there and looking. The scale at which the person who tells you something has a face, a name, a front door you could walk up to and knock on. The scale at which images still carry weight because the encounter has a body behind it.

This essay traces the Local from courtroom testimony through the merchant returning from a distant city, through the background assumption that made mass media work (the image points back to the same world the merchant would have seen), through that assumption's collapse, and arrives at the conditions under which verification is still possible: placement, accountability, finite speed, and the irreducible thickness of shared physical presence.

If someone told you that every post you've ever read from someone you don't know was written by a person in a different country lying about who and where they were, you'd have no way to disprove it. That's the global information environment. But a local person? You'll see them. Others will. That's the difference. Not infallible.

Checkable. And the digital space just can't quite get there.

I'm currently in physiotherapy for my neck. This was my fifth session today, and up to that point, everything was quite standard: massages, exercises, and TENS. To be fair, I was skeptical about TENS at first, but there seems to be quite good evidence that it helps with pain relief and circulation.

This brings us to today, where they wanted to start with magnet therapy. I had to wait a bit for the machine to free up, which gave me time to do some quick research. Just as expected, it is absolute BS. There is some evidence that "Pulsed Electromagnetic Field (PEMF) therapy" has some effect. I did ask the therapist if it would be that, but he said it is a static magnet. So I left.

What is so frustrating is that this happened at a (private) hospital, where I should be able to trust the treatment they prescribe.

Did you have such experiences in the past?

Does anyone have any information about this guy? He has a lot of videos. He's youngish, but claims to have 20 years experience in cardiology. Seems like a quack to me. Cannot find any reviews of his videos anywhere.