Year: 2021

Psychology, religion, and public policy

Hello! I hope your Saturday is going well. Here is a talk I gave in November, at the Psychological Society of Ireland’s annual conference. The transcript appears below. Enjoy! * * * * * * Transcript: Psychology, religion, and public policy Now, this particular topic is very wide-ranging. I wouldn’t […]

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Will innumeracy cause this study to be retracted? Don’t count on it…

I used to be concerned about bad science. These days, what gets me going is wrong science: blatant error somehow surviving peer-review and ending up published as if it were fact. It seems that is where we have got to with modern academic publishing. Standards have slipped so badly, even […]

landscape photo of stonehenge

Psychogenic ME/CFS: Turning the Nostalgia Up to Eleven

Some examples of comedy are jarringly impactful precisely because they feel so authentic. A personal favourite of mine is the 1984 movie This is Spinal Tap, the legendary mockumentary depicting a fictional English rock band attempting to rescue their dwindling reputations by organising one last big-splash concert tour. It is […]

a woman in white tank top lying on bed

No, that antibody study does *not* show that Long COVID is caused by “beliefs”

The pandemic of Long COVID psychobabble continues. This week saw yet another terrible study claiming that long-haul COVID is just an illusion of human cognition, an illness-like experience rooted in psychological processes. The widely reported “finding” was published in the medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine by a group of French […]

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Self-styled medical leaders defend “neurolinguistic processing” as legit treatment for ME/CFS

Having spent years casting their critics as angry anti-science activists, some of our favourite panjandrums have now entered Phase 3 in their own year-long campaign of (a) getting angry, (b) engaging in activism, and, yes, (c) throwing science-based medicine under the bus. Here is what the Royal College of Physicians […]