Don’t Believethe Esoteric Hype!Jochen Wolters, Skeptic

Fortune Telling

Image by Flickr/nellyfus

$850 for 30 minutes

“Revitalized” Water

$15 per quartSource: http://homepage.univie.ac.at/erich.eder/wasser/eder2002.htm

“Quadro Tracker”

$400 – $8,000 a pieceSource: http://sniffexquestions.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-is-alpha-6-detector.html

Alas, …

Failed!

Failed!

Failed!

Pattern Recognition

Images by Flickr/aeter and Flickr/Kaptain Kobold

useful

Pattern Recognition

Images by Flickr/aeter and Flickr/Kaptain Kobold

useful deceiving

Concurrency vs. Causality

Image (right) by Flickr/manyhighways

useful✔

Concurrency vs. Causality

Images by Flickr/anna gutermuth and Flickr/manyhighways

useful

deceiving

✔

✘

Confirmation Bias

Image by Flickr/carbonnyc

ConfirmingEvidence

ContradictingEvidence

Confirmation Bias

Image by Flickr/carbonnyc

ConfirmingEvidence

ContradictingEvidence

always deceiving !

The Antidote:

Good Science

The Sixteen Postulates of Sciencehttp://bit.ly/GoodScience

#4Scientific experiments should be repeatableunder similar circumstances.

The Sixteen Postulates of Sciencehttp://bit.ly/GoodScience

Why bother?

Factv.

fiction

Educateyourself!

The Skeptics Societyhttp://skeptic.org

James RandiEducationalFoundationhttp://randi.org

Carl Sagan

TheDemon-HauntedWorld

Don’t Believethe Esoteric Hype!Jochen Wolters, Skeptic

http://polytropia.com@jochenwolters