The Pitters' Place

my parents keep sending me articles from there warning of the dangers of wi-fi and suchlike. I googled and apparently he's been subject to criticism from medical authorities and the FDA, which my dad says is only to be expected because his studies will potentially cause harm to big pharma and other corporations and they're afraid of losing business.

There are scientific studies debunking his claims (such as his anti-vac position and questionable things like how HIV isn't what causes AIDS and how autism can be treated with supplements), but again one could argue that those studies are likewise biased and funded directly or indirectly by corporations with vested financial interests in one thing or another.

I dropped by Mercola's FB and the latest post is criticising Snopes as "an unfit arbiter of truth"
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/arti ... truth.aspx

how do you even know who to believe if you don't have the time to get a medical degree? :/

also, since when did it become alleged common knowledge that Snopes can't be trusted? :/ I depend on Snopes a lot to debunk all the weird chainmail and anti-Muslim videos my grandfather sends

sometimes I want to give up and not believe anything any more and live in a bubble where nothing is real unless I want it to be

I've never heard of the guy. But if he's an anti-vaxxer, and AIDS/HIV denialist, and an idiot when it comes to autism then I'm not sure how there's any question here. The guy is demonstrably a lunatic. Have any of his studies actually been published? I just looked him up and the answer is no. In addition to everything already said he's also been outed as a lunatic by Quackwatch, he's a homeopath, he believes microwaving food changes the food's chemical composition, claims mobile phones cause cancer, and has had numerous warnings by the FDA for making false claims about his products. He's probably one of the top ten lunatics on the entire planet.

Also, the credibility of a study does not depend upon who funds the study. That's a logical fallacy. If a pattern of dishonesty can be shown by the organization funding the study, as was done when debunking "smoking does not cause cancer" studies from the 60s and 70s which were funded by tobacco companies that's a different matter. However, it is a form of ad hominem fallacy to immediately jump to a conclusion "Oh, this study was funded by an organization that benefits if the conclusion of the study is accepted as true." Monsanto funded studies on the safety of GMOs. Monsanto benefits from the sale of GMO seed. GMOs are perfectly safe for human consumption. There are numerous problems with Monsanto with respect to their business practices, but GMOs being unsafe is not one of those problems.

^100% in agreement with what Cash just posted.

I mean, I looked him up for about fifteen seconds and he gives off bigger charlatan vibes than Alex Jones and Joel Osteen. He's anti-vax, an AIDS/HIV denialist, he sells dietary supplements, and he hasn't even published any studies. What is the question here?

Without Alex Jones we would have never known the government is putting chemicals in the water that turn the goddamn frogs gay.

haha thanks. My initial response was to dismiss him, but he has a fairly high reputation in the natural health sphere, and my dad seems to read his site a lot - and he's far from dumb; he's got a masters degree and everything (though not in medicine). So I wasn't sure if he knew something I didn't (he said he's aware of the criticism and doesn't believe everything being claimed, but that it's natural that big pharma would try to dismiss and discredit him because he threatens their business), or if it was a matter of how Mercola may be wrong on a lot of things but right on others.

I've spent most of my life thinking the truth mattered a lot, but this year has been weird. I've been doubting the value of truth of late, given how an increasing proportion of information and news out there is apparently false and more and more people are using that as their basis of determining how the world works. If everyone believes something false is true and behaves accordingly, and it produces real effects on the world as a result, then that false thing functions on some level as though it were true. (which partly influences my views on religion, but that's a different story.) Does the truth itself have inherent merit? What if the truth causes suffering rather than prevents it?

I think the truth-nihilism started sometime after I read the article "Keanu Reeves Shares 5 Incredible Pieces of Wisdom We All Need to Hear" and realised that not a single one of those quotes was actually from Keanu.
http://soulspottv.com/blog/keanu-reeves ... of-wisdom/

Without Alex Jones we would have never known the government is putting chemicals in the water that turn the goddamn frogs gay.

Oh man, is he the guy who invented that theory? (or did he just popularise it?) A while back one of my friends was on a fairly high-profile panel debating gay rights here, and the conservative representative seemed reasonable at first but suddenly went on this rant about governments putting chemicals in the water to turn people gay so as to reduce the population. Nobody knew how to respond to that.

Mercola is a known hack, and has been peddling pseudoscience for at least a decade.