The Wisdom of Not Understanding
by Ben Radford
Skeptical Briefs · Volume 22.3
When people don’t understand something they are told, there are three possibilities or root causes.
According to legend, a place called Gore Orphanage housed a hundred or so orphans. One night, either by malicious intent or by a tragic accident, the orphanage burned to the ground. I was told this story when I was a kid growing up in Ohio and thought that it was time to find out if there was any truth to it.
When people don’t understand something they are told, there are three possibilities or root causes.
From January 7 to 11, our current Director of International Programs at CFI, Bill Cooke, visited Kenya to have a look at the expansive programs CFI-Kenya has been undertaking.
This is the story of a fiery death that became a cold case—a mystery unsolved since 1847. It begins with an elderly Frenchman, whose badly burned body suggested to authorities that it may have been set afire to conceal evidence of foul play.
On January 23, the Skeptics for the Protection of Cancer Patients delivered a birthday present to Houston cancer quack Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski and the Burzynski Clinic: a donation of around $13,000 raised in his name to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital – with a request that the clinic match those funds for the hospital.
Pseudoscience is what one might call a two-dollar word. Skeptics often throw it around because of its weightiness and the values it transmits. We need to talk about this word, where it came from, and why we should be cautious about using it.