slider

Psychology’s exaggeration crisis

From the Archives [A while back, I wrote this piece about academic exaggeration for The Psychologist magazine. See what you make of it…] Not another article about the crisis in psychology, you might complain. Déjà vu all over again? You thought we reached peak crisis some time ago, didn’t you? […]

person covered with gray blanket

No More Mr NICE Guy…

The newly released draft NICE guidelines for the management of “myalgic encephalomyelitis (or encephalopathy)/chronic fatigue syndrome” continue to cause a stir. And rightly so. The new guidelines not only repudiate a heretofore favoured treatment approach for a particular illness, they also threaten to discredit an entire (albeit quirky) branch of […]

person holding injection

COVID conspiracies and the psychology of vaccine hesitancy

There’s a lot of talk about a vaccine for COVID-19. However, vaccines only work if people take them, and for that we require people to think cogently and coherently about the coronavirus. But if that were actually happening, there might not actually be a pandemic in the first place. Take […]

Post-Covid syndrome, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, and the recurring pseudoscience of mass hysteria

The people who want you to think that everything is “all in your mind” are back, their schtick now revised and updated for a COVID-19 world. Here’s the Daily Telegraph: Some local coronavirus outbreaks could be ‘mass hysteria’, Joint Biosecurity Centre warns Some local coronavirus outbreaks may just be mass hysteria, […]

Things to do in Chernobyl when you’re alive

Given the current global lockdown scenario, I thought it was high time I posted some photographs from my (pre-Covid) visit to Chernobyl and the now deserted nearby city of Pripyat. Perhaps such places present a lesson. We get to see what society looks like when humanity itself is no longer […]