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Group members: Aiymzhan Istayeva, Irina Nazarova

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Post #2 Red Flag: Ancient wisdom (Video)

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Post #2 Red Flag: Ancient wisdom (Video)

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Definition:
Ancient Wisdom red flag includes the belief system that was developed by people a long time ago, with little or no support on a modern science

Connection:

The following video explores Moxibustion and acupuncture techniques, that were created in China in 2-3 century BC. The treatments of alternative medicine imply that there are about 2,000 acupuncture points in our body, and each of these is connected with a channel, and if stimulated the disease can be cured or health can be improved.

It is an ancient wisdom example since this technique was invented by the Chinese nation a long time ago, and it is based on their belief in balance in this world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G87SfHPHj0Ahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G87SfHPHj0A

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Acupuncture and moxibustion of traditional Chinese medicine

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Post #3 Red Flag: Ideological Support (Article)

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Post #3 Red Flag: Ideological Support (Article)

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Definition:
A red flag known as ideological support includes the belief system based on a person's ideology and ignoring the scientific findings.

Connection:
This article explores the growing popularity of the Flat Earth theory, and why this is happening. One of the reasons why is the lack of scientific education, which allows people to be easily convinced that this is the truth. The other, and more popular one is distrust of the authorities. Lots of people think that big agencies, governments, scientists, etc. profit from misleading the general population.
This phenomenon, flat Earth theory, falls under ideological support because believers of this theory based their conclusion on supporting the idea of misleading government, rather than listening to the scientists

https://physicsworld.com/a/fighting-flat-earth-theory/

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Taken from the July 2020 issue of Physics World.

Physicists will find it shocking, but there are plenty of people around the world who genuinely believe the Earth is flat. Rachel Brazil explores why such views are increasingly taking hold and how the physics community should best respond

(Courtesy: Claus Lunau/Science Photo Library)

In 2017 the US rapper B.o.B (real name Bobby Ray Simmons Jr) started a crowd-funding campaign to launch a satellite. The rapper, a vocal proponent of "flat-Earth theory", wanted to seek evidence that our planet is a disc, not a globe. His aim was to raise $200,000 (later upped to $1m) on the GoFundMe website, with the aim of sending one or more craft into space to help him "find the curve" - the term that "flat-Earthers" use to describe the edge of our supposed disc-shaped planet.

The rapper's quest may seem like a joke or publicity stunt. Indeed, there's currently no evidence that B.o.B raised much money or got anywhere near his goal. However, in the last few years there has been an alarming rise in the number of people who, like B.o.B, believe in flat-Earth theories. There's now an annual flat-Earth conference in the US - the most recent of which was attended by more than 600 people - while YouTube is full of videos purporting to provide evidence that the Earth is flat.

Physicists may mock the notion of a flat Earth, but the idea is gaining traction, particularly among people susceptible to other conspiracy theories. "They actually really do believe it," says Lee McIntyre, a philosopher from Boston University and an expert in the phenomenon of science denial, whose books include Respecting Truth: Wilful Ignorance in the Internet Age (Routledge, 2015). McIntyre knows first-hand how sincerely flat-Earthers hold their views: he attended the 2018 Flat Earth International Conference in Denver, Colorado.

Asheley Landrum, a psychologist from Texas Tech University who was also at the Denver meeting, agrees that flat-Earthers are genuine, and not goofing around. "If they were [trolling], they are very good actors," she says. "We talked to more than 90 members of the flat-Earth community and they're all very sincere in their beliefs". Lectures at the Denver event included "Talking to your family and friends about flat Earth", "NASA and other space lies" and "14+ ways the Bible says flat Earth".

Flat-Earth ideas are based on basic scientific misunderstandings that can be easily refuted. For most people, even those who have no physics background, the evidence for a spherical Earth is obvious. So we need to ask ourselves why these ideas still persist in the 21st century and, perhaps more importantly for the physics community: how exactly should we respond?

A circular history

The idea that the Earth is a sphere was all but settled by ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle (384-322 BC), who obtained empirical evidence after travelling to Egypt and seeing new constellations of stars. Eratosthenes, in the third century BC, became the first person to calculate the circumference of the Earth. Islamic scholars made further advanced measurements from about the 9th century AD onwards, while European navigators circled the Earth in the 16th century. Images from space were final proof, if any were needed.

Today's flat-Earth believers are not, though, the first to doubt what seems unquestionable. The notion of a flat Earth initially resurfaced in the 1800s as a backlash to scientific progress, especially among those who wished to return to biblical literalism. Perhaps the most famous proponent was the British writer Samuel Rowbotham (1816-1884). He proposed the Earth is a flat immovable disc, centred at the North Pole, with Antarctica replaced by an ice wall at the disc's outer boundary.

The International Flat Earth Research Society, which was set up in 1956 by Samuel Shenton, a signwriter living in Dover, UK, was regarded by many people as merely a symbol of British eccentricity - amusing and of little consequence. But in the early 2000s, with the Internet now a well-established vehicle for off-beat views, the idea began to bubble up again, mostly in the US. Discussions sprouted in online forums, the Flat Earth Society was relaunched in October 2009 and the annual flat-Earth conference began in earnest.

As with any fringe movement there are disagreements and several different flat-Earth models exist to choose from. Some models propose that the Earth's edges are surrounded by a wall of ice holding in the oceans. Others suggest our flat planet and its atmosphere are encased in a huge, hemispherical snow globe from which nothing can fall off the edges. To account for night and day, most flat-Earthers think the Sun moves in circles around the North Pole, with its light acting like a spotlight. The most recent "US model", for example, suggests that the Sun and Moon are 50 km in diameter and circle the disc-shaped Earth at a height of 5500 km, with the stars above this on a rotating dome. Many flat-Earthers also reject gravity, with the "UK model" suggesting that the disc is itself accelerating up at 9.8 m/s ² to give the illusion of gravity.

Physicists will scoff at these ideas, but the worrying thing is that they are spreading rapidly and gaining proponents outside America too. "While they may not be as many [in Europe], they are as loud as their colleagues in the US," says Jan Slegr, a physicist from the University of Hradec Králové in the Czech Republic, who in 2018 co-authored a paper outlining ways for teachers and others to confront outlandish flat-Earth ideas with physics ().

Such efforts are important. Alarming polling data by the firm Datafolha, for example, indicate that 7% of the Brazilian population - some 11 million people - believe that the Earth is flat. This shocking number has been attributed to a resurgent evangelical Christian church, but there are also signs that religious fundamentalism is spreading these ideas in Islamic countries too. In 2017 the website Jeune-Afrique reported that a geology student in Tunisia was intending to submit a PhD defending her work on a flat-Earth model.

Conspiracy mentality

It would be easy to dismiss flat-Earthers as simply being misguided due to a lack of education. While there are indications that those susceptible to such views have low levels of scientific literacy, Landrum at Texas Tech says that flat-Earthers aren't necessarily people who don't believe in science. "It's not really an education thing," she says. "It really is about distrusting authorities and institutions. [It] seems to be based on both a conspiracy mentality and a deeply held belief that looks a lot like religiosity but isn't necessarily specifically tied to a religion".

Landrum thinks this conspiracy mentality is linked to science denial and a susceptibility to believing deceptive claims on social media (Politics and the Life Sciences 38 193). No longer the domain of a "foil-hat-wearing fringe", she believes those with a conspiracy mentality have lost the ability to judge when to trust and when to be a sceptic. Their lack of trust in authority includes not just scientists but scientific bodies such as NASA, all of whom (they think) are part of a massive conspiracy to prevent the flat-Earth truth being revealed. "[They] view the world through this really dark filter where [they] assume that all authorities and institutions and corporations are just there to exploit you."

McIntyre adds that the flat-Earthers he interacted with each believed a selection of conspiracy theories, including that governments control the weather and that chem-trails from aeroplanes consist of chemical or biological agents. "The only one I found that they all believed," he says, "was that we hadn't gone to the Moon. If you offer them back evidence, like the view of the Earth from the Moon, they say it's fake." Indeed, many flat-Earthers are more invested in the idea of a conspiracy than in providing a workable model of a flat Earth.

Nikk Effingham, a philosopher at the University of Birmingham in the UK who has met flat-Earthers at a London meet-up, says that we often don't recognize the extent to which confidence in authority shapes our beliefs. "When we try and prove something like the Earth being round, because it's a belief that we are so sure of, we under-play the justified role of authority in that," he says. Most people are therefore comfortable accepting the world is a globe, even if they can't immediately recount the scientific evidence.

Flat-Earthers seem to have a very low standard of evidence for what they want to believe but an impossibly high standard of evidence for what they don't want to believe
Lee McIntyre, Boston University

But that's not the case for those mired in a conspiracy mentality. What's also clear is that the rise in flat-Earth beliefs has been fuelled by the Internet and YouTube videos in particular. "Almost everybody that we spoke to said that either they were directly exposed to flat Earth on YouTube or they were exposed to it via a family member who was exposed to it on YouTube," says Landrum. Flat-Earth videos often present numerous arguments in rapid succession with what Landrum dubs "an illusion of fluency".

Key to the videos' success has also been the algorithms that serve them up to viewers of other conspiracy-related content. "The algorithms facilitate the normalizing of conspiracies and the feeling of a consensus within your community," explains Landrum. "Flat Earth is just another example of that." In 2019 YouTube did acknowledge the problem and said it would be tweaking its algorithm to reduce its recommendations of conspiracy-theory videos. But the fact remains that the videos are still on its platform.

Proving the Earth isn't flat

It was McIntyre's work on science denial that led him to the 2018 flat-Earth conference in Denver, where delegates spent time discussing the "evidence" and finer details of their theory as well as the supposed conspiracy that flat-Earthers believe is shielding their ideas from the wider public. "I thought that if I could understand how to push back against flat-Earthers, I could use the same techniques to fight back against climate-change deniers and anti-vaxxers," he says. After all, their ideas are all generally based on fallacies and misunderstanding of science. "Some of the flat-Earthers know enough physics to throw around the vocabulary, but they don't actually understand enough physics to be compelled by the truth."

But even without the visual confirmation of pictures taken from space, many of the arguments used by flat-Earth proponents can be easily dismissed with trigonometry or basic physical laws. A good place to start is with a Foucault's pendulum, the device named after the French physicist Léon Foucault, who in 1851 famously hung a heavy 28 kg brass bob from a 67 m chain in the Panthéon in Paris. Such a pendulum, which can swing in any plane, changes direction during the course of a day, yielding direct evidence of the Earth's rotation. (Though as Slegr points out, that hasn't stopped some flat-Earthers claiming that all Foucault pendulums are fraudulent and that museums use magnetic coils to turn the plane of the pendulum's rotation to make the Earth seem to rotate.)

Another phenomenon that proves the Earth is a spinning globe is the Coriolis force, which acts perpendicular to the direction of motion of a spinning mass. This force leads to cylones swirling clockwise in the southern hemisphere and counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere; through the direction of winds, it also impacts ocean currents. Long-range military snipers even have to make allowance for deflections caused by the Coriolis effect. Indeed, as Slegr points out, getting physics students to explain the evidence for a spherical spinning Earth is a great critical-thinking exercise.

But that deep critical thinking is what's often missing among flat-Earthers. Consider photos of distant skylines, which are often wheeled out as "proof" that the Earth is flat. In his interactions with flat-Earth theorists, McIntyre was commonly shown a picture of Chicago, taken from Lake Michigan, in which the city's skyscrapers are clearly visible despite being viewed from a distance of 100 km out. "Given the curvature of the Earth, you shouldn't [in principle] be able to see the skyline of the city from that far out," he says.

The reason the buildings are visible, as McIntyre knows, lies in the fact that air directly above the water's surface is colder than the air higher up. This inverse temperature gradient means that light rays refract toward the colder, denser air, allowing an image of the reflected skyline, formed on the water below the horizon, to appear almost hovering above the horizon (figure 1). This notion can easily be verified by taking a photo even further away, where the "superior mirage" will disappear.

1 Why distant skyscrapers are visible despite the curvature of the Earth

This photo was taken from Mount Baldy in Indiana Dunes National Park on the south-east coast of Lake Michigan, roughly 60 km across the water from the city of Chicago, which lies on the opposite bank. At that distance, Chicago's skyline should not be visible as the curvature of the Earth takes it beyond the horizon. The fact that the buildings are visible is in fact simply a mirage. Mirages are usually created when a cold, dense layer of air sits above a layer of warmer, less dense air, for example when the Sun beats down on a black road on a hot summer's day. The warm ground heats the bottom few centimetres of air, refracting sunlight up to your eyes to create an "inferior mirage". But if a layer of warm air sits above your line of sight, with a cool layer beneath, you get a "superior mirage". Light bends down towards the denser air, but because our eyes assume the light has travelled in a straight line, the object appears higher than it is. The effect also explains why a far-off ship can be seen even though it might have dipped below the horizon. It can even make distant boats appear to float in the air.

But, as McIntyre found, this type of reasoning is unlikely to convince flat-Earthers. "They seem to have a very low standard of evidence for what they want to believe but an impossibly high standard of evidence for what they don't want to believe." One of their key experimental tools is a Nikon P900 camera with a ×83 optical zoom, in which flat-Earthers place an almost religious faith. Able to capture details not visible to the naked eye, they hope to use it to show that objects don't disappear over the horizon but come back into view when examined at high enough resolution.

McIntyre described his frustrations with flat-Earthers in a paper last year in the American Journal of Physics (87 694), in which he challenged physicists to come up with simple, straightforward answers to refute the "evidence" for a flat Earth that could be understood by a general audience. Someone who rose to the bait was retired physicist Bruce Sherwood, who realized that "just citing the scientific facts is not going to convince anybody". Instead, given that flat-Earthers place so much emphasis on naked-eye observations, he and colleague Derek Roff decided to create a navigable 3D computer simulation of a flat Earth to see how well it could replicate what we see.

Based on the US version of the flat-Earth model, it allows anyone to virtually roam a flat world. "Walking round in it, there were many things that show tremendous discrepancies," says Sherwood. One of the major problems is the size and brightness of the Sun. In the flat-Earth model this varies by more than a factor of two from sunrise to midday, something we obviously do not see. The night sky also differs. In the northern hemisphere we see constellations rising in the east and arcing across the sky but in the flat-Earth model they would just circle at a constant height. "What [Sherwood] has created is something that's much harder for [flat-Earth proponents] to laugh off, because it takes their own views seriously, [and] traces out the consequences," says McIntyre. "I think that on this basis, other physicists can go out and help to push."

Dangerous liaisons

From McIntyre's perspective, flat-Earth conspiracies are a danger and need confronting. "Maybe 10 or 20 years ago, I would have said, just laugh at them, how much traction are they going to get? I no longer feel that way." If these ideas are not challenged, he fears that as with supporters of "intelligent design", proponents of a flat Earth will start running for US school boards, looking to push their ideas into the US education system. "The sort of reasoning that they use is infectious and if you don't push back against them, it just gets worse and they're able to recruit new members," he warns.

But Effingham, who has also interacted with flat-Earthers on Facebook, wonders if physics is the place to start combating these conspiracy-based ideas. "I'm not saying that the perfect formula doesn't have some kind of physics argument in it, but just turning on a YouTube video of physics lectures is not going to do it." Instead, Effingham has tried to get flat-Earthers to understand that, by watching YouTube videos, they too are slavishly following an authority - not a scientific authority, but the authority of whoever is proposing the conspiracy theories they subscribe to.

Effingham also tries to point out their inconsistencies. "Every position they took required a different view of the conspiracy, and required the conspiracy to be bigger or smaller, and it was impossible to get a consistent conspiracy going that explained everything." McIntyre, for example, recalls asking one flat-Earther why planes flying over Antarctica from, say, Chile to New Zealand don't have to refuel, which they'd have to if the continent were (as they believe) an ice wall tens of thousands of kilometres long. He was simply told that planes can fly on one tank of fuel and refuelling planes could just be a giant hoax to stop us realizing that the Earth is flat.

Landrum agrees the underlying problem is one of trust rather than physics. "We really should figure out as a scientific community, and as a society as a whole, how we can start building back trust in our organizations and institutions." And she feels we need to do this face-to-face. "I don't mean go yell at them on Twitter - that's not engaging." It's also vital, she says, for scientists not to patronize flat-Earthers but to take questions seriously. That may seem like an excruciatingly painful process, but a necessary one, for people to gain trust in science as an institution again.

A level of sustained personal engagement can change minds. "It does work to push back against science deniers," argues McIntyre, pointing to current NASA boss Jim Bridenstine. He was appointed by Donald Trump in 2018 and was known to have disputed climate change. "[But] once [he] became head of NASA, within a matter of two months or so, he changed his mind on climate change, and publicly said, 'I was wrong'," says McIntyre. The difference was that the evidence was presented to him by scientists he had grown to trust.

Oddly, Landrum says that many flat-Earthers may distrust scientists, but they are not against the scientific method. "The majority of them put a lot of faith, for lack of a better word, in science. There's a lot of curiosity and a lot of scepticism and a lot of the really good qualities that make scientists." But while the spirit of experimentation may be there, flat-Earthers are not always prepared to change their minds when their experiments fail. And that's why McIntrye hopes some physicists might go with him to future flat-Earth conferences.

"I think that physicists need to be more involved," he says. "There's really no excuse for us to just sit back and laugh at them. Because while we're laughing, they are recruiting people to believe these crazy things."

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Fighting flat-Earth theory - Physics World

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Rachel Brazil explores ways in which the physics community can best combat unscientific thinking, such as the belief the Earth is flat

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Definition:

Mystical energy red flag includes the reference to some kind of "energy", which is misused in a current context. If you substitute the word "energy" with "ability to do work" and it does not make sense, then there is a pseudoscience content in front of you

Connection:

Taoism is one of the main religions in China today. This religion is based on the concept of harmony between humans and the energy found in this universe.
It is a pseudoscientific red flag mystical energy because the word energy used in this article does not make sense if we use the scientific meaning of it.

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Image

Mount Laojun in Luoyan, Henan Province, China is a sacred site for Taoists. Hundreds of Taoists embark on pilgrimages every year along with tourists from around the world to see this spectacular site.

Photograph by HelloRF Zcool / Shutterstock

Encyclopedic Entry Vocabulary

Taoism (also spelled Daoism) is a religion and a philosophy from ancient China that has influenced folk and national belief. Taoism has been connected to the philosopher Lao Tzu, who around 500 B.C.E. wrote the main book of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching. Taoism holds that humans and animals should live in balance with the Tao, or the universe. Taoists believe in spiritual immortality, where the spirit of the body joins the universe after death.

The Tao Te Ching, or "The Way and Its Power," is a collection of poetry and sayings from around the third and fourth centuries B.C.E. that guides Taoist thought and actions. While the author is traditionally believed to be the philosopher Lao Tzu, there is little evidence that Lao Tzu existed at all. Rather, the Tao Te Ching is a gathering of earlier sayings from many authors. This book was given an origin with the philosopher Lao Tzu for cultural and political reasons. Lao Tzu is sometimes understood as the image of the Tao, or a god, and given legendary status.

The Tao (or Dao) is hard to define but is sometimes understood as the way of the universe. Taoism teaches that all living creatures ought to live in a state of harmony with the universe, and the energy found in it. Ch'i, or qi, is the energy present in and guiding everything in the universe. The Tao Te Ching and other Taoist books provide guides for behavior and spiritual ways of living in harmony with this energy. However, Taoists do not believe in this energy as a god. Rather, there are gods as part of the Taoist beliefs, often introduced from the various cultures found in the region known now as China. These gods are part of the Tao, like all living things. Taoism has temples, monasteries, and priests who make offerings, meditate, and perform other rituals for their communities.

One of the main ideas of Taoism is the belief in balancing forces, or yin and yang . These ideas represent matching pairs, such as light and dark, hot and cold, action and inaction, which work together toward a universal whole. Yin and yang show that everything in the universe is connected and that nothing makes sense by itself.

Taoism became well-known in the eighth century C.E. as the religion of the Tang dynasty. In the following centuries, it existed alongside Buddhism and Confucianism (another philosophical religion). However, during the Communist takeover in 1959, Taoism, Confucianism, and other religions were banned. This caused a decline in the practice of Taoism in China. Many modern Taoists live in Taiwan, although recent reforms in China have increased the number of Chinese Taoists.

learned behavior of people, including their languages, belief systems, social structures, institutions, and material goods.

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Director

Tyson Brown, National Geographic Society

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National Geographic Society

Production Manager

Gina Borgia, National Geographic Society

Program Specialists

Sarah Appleton, National Geographic Society
Margot Willis, National Geographic Society

Specialist, Content Production

Clint Parks

Producer

André Gabrielli, National Geographic Society

Last Updated

Aug. 31, 2020

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Director

Tyson Brown, National Geographic Society

Author

National Geographic Society

Production Manager

Gina Borgia, National Geographic Society

Program Specialists

Sarah Appleton, National Geographic Society
Margot Willis, National Geographic Society

Specialist, Content Production

Clint Parks

Producer

André Gabrielli, National Geographic Society

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Image Mount Laojun in Luoyan, Henan Province, China is a sacred site for Taoists. Hundreds of Taoists embark on pilgrimages every year along with tourists from around the world to see this spectacular site. Photograph by HelloRF Zcool / Shutterstock Encyclopedic Entry Vocabulary Taoism (also spelled Daoism) is a religion and a philosophy from ancient China that has influenced folk and national belief.

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Post #5 Red Flag: Confirmation Bias (Video)

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Post #5 Red Flag: Confirmation Bias (Video)

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Definition:
Confirmation bias red flag consists of people focusing on things that align with their beliefs and ignoring facts, that don't

Connection:
This video explores the cognitive biases that affect the decisions about vaccinating children.
When the parents are faced with their child's diagnosis of autism, some of them are determined to find the reason why that happened. They go on the internet and find a lot of articles and anti-vaccine activists' opinions on the harmful effects of vaccination.
Confirmation bias steps in when the parent starts believing that the vaccines were the cause of autism, because of the popularity of this belief.
That way, the vaccination rates will decrease unless people start researching medical studies showing that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the harm, and there is no connection (and has never been) between autism and vaccines.

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Definition:
Appeal to Authorities uses people in lab coats, with university degrees, celebrities, successful businessmen, etc. to advertise a product, or popularize the idea.

Connection:
This article explores Gwyneth Paltrow's company Goop, which includes in their products items that are not scientifically proven to work, not properly tested, might harm a person's health, and are expensive.
This company received a lot of criticism from certified doctors, but people are still actively buying these products.
This influence of this public figure overshadowed the peoples' critical thinking, and opinions of the specialists, which makes it a good example of an appeal to authority red flag.

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How a new-agey website started by an actress became so popular-and what it says about the future of health journalism

Evan Agostini / Invision / AP / Gusak / fotoecho_com / Shutterstock / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

In an interview with Goop.com, Gwyneth Paltrow's lifestyle company, a former cable-television technician named Clint Ober explained the practice of "earthing," or walking barefoot on the ground. What he seemed to draw from his experience in cable systems was that, not unlike live wires, humans' electrical charges could be neutralized through contact with the earth. Doing so, he explained, "prevents inflammation-related health disorders":

It's intuitive that-like in a cable system-grounding would neutralize any charge in the body. After grounding myself, and a few friends who had arthritic-type health disorders, I became convinced that grounding could reduce chronic pain.

To help readers reap these supposed health benefits without having to touch their bare feet to the ground, the Goop article provides a link to bedsheets and mats that can be plugged into the grounding port of an electrical outlet. One queen-sized sheet goes for $200.

The post claims several people in the Goop "community"-including "GP" herself-swear by earthing for "everything from inflammation and arthritis to insomnia to depression." But Truth in Advertising, a consumer-advocacy group, cited earthing in a database of 50-some instances in which Goop promoted unsubstantiated products or claims. Last month, Truth in Advertising urged two California district attorneys to investigate Goop and take "appropriate enforcement action."

Yet by outward appearances, it's still a very successful media company. Its June "In Goop Health" summit, crammed with crystals and aura photographers, sold out of its $1,500 tickets, and there are two more like it scheduled. Each month the site is read by 1.8 million people-people who have the very advertiser-pleasing characteristics of an average age of 34 and a household income in the six figures, according to Adweek. In April, Goop announced it was teaming up with Condé Nast, which publishes The New Yorker, Wired, and other prominent magazines, to create a quarterly print publication debuting this month. According to People magazine, in the inaugural issue Paltrow's editor's letter describes the joys of cleanses, bee-sting skin treatments, and, of course, barefoot strolls:

For me, when I take my shoes off and walk in the grass, it's so healing. It's hard to find scientific evidence for the idea that "I feel good." But by trying, you get so much juice out of life.

( Goop did not respond to multiple requests for an interview. In a statement provided to The Hollywood Reporter, said, "while we believe that [Truth in Advertising]'s description of our interactions is misleading and their claims unsubstantiated and unfounded, we will continue to evaluate our products and our content and make those improvements that we believe are reasonable and necessary in the interests of our community of users.")

How to explain Goop's popularity? In many ways, it exemplifies-and has capitalized on-several recent trends in health media. Fact-checking often doesn't fit into increasingly tight media budgets, or isn't much of a priority, so dubious health claims about prolonged fasting or avoiding gluten ricochet around the internet. The rich are already more likely than the poor to be healthy, so they shell out for alternative treatments and supplements in hopes of achieving even greater vitality.

And as news consumers increasingly seek out their own preferred sources, finding reliable expert advice becomes a choose-your-own-adventure game. Or, to use a Goop-ier word, journey.

* * *

When it hits newsstands later this month, Goop magazine will join a large roster of celebrity-blessed lifestyle publications, following in the footsteps of Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart, Rosie O'Donnell, and Rachael Ray. The idea behind celebrity-led publications, says Brooke Erin Duffy, a Cornell professor who researches women's magazines, is that "celebrities were not just individuals we saw on the screen, but we had a connection to them. We could emulate them in our everyday lives." By some measures, it works: Dr. Oz The Good Life and O, The Oprah Magazine were both top-10 monthly magazines at newsstands last year, according to the trade publication Min.

The print-magazine and events business are part of a broader shift in how women's publications position themselves. With news-media profits shrinking, publications want to be a "cross-platform brand, a place that people will come to even if the print publication no longer exists," Duffy said. Rachael Ray, for instance, has her own line of products, and Cosmopolitan hosts events (as does The Atlantic). Goop has its own online shop, complete with pictures of Paltrow sporting whimsical tops.

For a media company, Goop already seems to be doing relatively well. Revenue reportedly tripled between 2015 and 2016. That year, Paltrow announced she had raised $10 million from venture capitalists.

The site may be benefiting from a growing interest, at least among wealthy Americans, in all things healthy-ish. Organic food sales have grown, well, healthily over the past decade; even Gatorade now comes in an organic variety. Nearly 10 percent of Americans do yoga, and 8 percent meditate. People are skipping soda for " mindful" beverages like coconut water. Americans now spend about a third as much out-of-pocket on "complementary" practitioners as they do on regular doctors.

It's even tougher in the health space, he points out, since WebMD and similar sites attempt to answer people's health questions for free. And unlike Dr. Oz-who has his own magazine and controversy-Paltrow doesn't possess medical credentials.

The recent criticisms of Goop's claims mirror the plight of Jessica Alba 's personal-products brand The Honest Company, which has been beset by recalls and lawsuits. A celebrity like Paltrow might well attract advertisers, Lafavore said. But, "if there's any controversy at all, advertisers flee."

* * *

As she explained to attendees at her June summit, Paltrow became interested in wellness after her father was diagnosed with cancer. "Why do we all not feel well? Why is there so much cancer? Why are we all so tired? Why have we created a society where so many of us feel over-obligated with responsibility to the point where we aren't feeling good-and what can we do about it?" she told audience members, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Since the launch of Goop in 2008, her vision of "what we can do about it" has become untethered from mainstream medicine. One Goop post suggested that bras might be linked to breast cancer, based on the notion that they restrict the flow of "toxins" through the lymph nodes and magnify radiation from cellphones. A large 2014 study found no link between bras and cancer. The Goop post mentioned that study, but it nevertheless wrapped with a roundup of unproven recommendations, including, "Consider a traditional internet connection for your home instead of WiFi. The whole family will be healthier for it."

Gunter, who did her residency at the University of Western Ontario and a fellowship in infectious disease at the University of Kansas Medical Center, remembers feeling lured to the depths of internet pseudoscience in 2003, when her sons were born very prematurely and with multiple health issues. "I started researching things online that I had never researched before," she told me. "I was googling stem-cell therapy. It was a minefield of bad information."

"I knew where to step," she said-but others might not. "I realized what it's like to be desperate at 3 a.m."

Gunter has written, repeatedly, that the jade eggs discussed in Goop can cause pelvic pain and infections. "Jade is porous, which could allow bacteria to get inside," she wrote in January. "It could be a risk factor for bacterial vaginosis or even the potentially deadly toxic shock syndrome."

Nathaniel DeNicola, a faculty ob-gyn at George Washington University, confirmed that the risk of infection with a jade egg is "worrisome," though it depends on how porous the egg is and how it's sanitized.

Goop's editors struck back at Gunter with a post titled, " Uncensored: A Word from Our Doctors," in which they explained that "we are drawn to physicians who are interested in both Western and Eastern modalities." Its readers, they implied, can decide for themselves whose advice to follow: "We chafe at the idea that we are not intelligent enough to read something and take what serves us, and leave what does not."

The "uncensored" post included a note from Steven Gundry, a doctor who has contributed to Goop. In it, he chastised Gunter for using the word "fuck" in her posts, defended his credentials, and claimed Gunter "did not do even a simple Google search of me before opening your mouth."

On Goop, Gundry promotes the idea that lectins, a type of protein found in certain plants, such as kidney beans, cause diseases like asthma, multiple sclerosis, or irritable-bowel syndrome. It's true that lectins from uncooked beans can cause food poisoning-like symptoms, but as my colleague James Hamblin reported in April, experts say cooking prevents any potential harm from the lectins. Gundry has also been quoted warning against taking Advil and antibiotics, as well as eating tomatoes, potatoes, corn, and soybeans, among other foods.

In our interview, Gundry described his portion of the Goop editorial as a plea for civility. "Discussion should always be welcome, but discussion ... has always been at a collegial level, and there's no shouting or screaming or profanity," he said. (Paltrow has been quoted using the phrase, "If you want to fuck with me, bring your A game," and reportedly has cocktail napkins stamped with the motto.)

Gundry told me he began contributing to Goop because he knows Alejandro Junger, an Uruguayan cardiologist who, according to the The New Yorker, has treated Paltrow and helped her with her vitamin business. "When he says it's a good place, that's good enough for me," Gundry said. He said he does not get paid for contributing, and he did not know about Goop 's plans for a print magazine.

I sent several of Goop 's articles to Scott Kahan, the director of the National Center for Weight and Wellness in D.C. Kahan specializes in nutrition and obesity treatment and serves on the faculties of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and George Washington University's schools of medicine and public health.

The pieces I sent him included one titled "You Probably Have a Parasite-Here's What to Do About It," in which a homeopathic doctor claims, "If you have a health system with a low vibrational field or a weakened immune system, you're more susceptible to parasites." Another featured an interview with a doctor about the role of hormones in weight loss and included a "shop now" link for supplements. Finally, one interviewed celebrity fitness trainer Tracy Anderson, who claimed, "people can generally lose around eight pounds" in a one- or two-week timeframe.

"You absolutely can lose eight pounds in a week whether you're 400 pounds or 150 pounds," Kahan said, "but relatively little of that is actually fat."

Kahan said the site resembles other celebrity-driven platforms: "a well-presented mix of a lot of harmless pseudoscience combined with a lot of high-profit-margin snake-oil promotion, combined with some potentially harmful pseudoscience and product sales, and also combined with some reasonable, if repackaged, recommendations, that are completely accepted but by themselves aren't enough ... to sell copies of their products," he said. Cleanses, he said, are usually harmless, but if done for weeks they can lead to extreme dehydration. Supplements, meanwhile, can affect the body in unpredictable ways, and splurging on them might leave some patients with insufficient funds for more effective treatments.

Goop's most vocal critic is Jen Gunter, a San Francisco ob-gyn who has assailed the site for everything from its detox smoothies to its series of " anti-bloat" recipes. Her most viral posts are takedowns of the jade egg, the infamous green weights that Goop has suggested women insert into their vaginas for " spiritual detox." Goop sells the eggs through its online shop, and despite their $66 price tag, they've reportedly sold out at times.

Millennials, in particular, are more likely than older Americans to say "health" means more than just not being sick. Goop gives many of these SoulCycling, chia-chomping young people a place to ramp their zen to the next level.

One health reporter and editor who has worked at various women's magazines suggested that Goop's fun approach to wellness might be more appealing to readers and advertisers than more serious health fare, such as how to prevent diabetes or avoid the flu. Goop "already has a readership built in," she said. Plus, "Gwyneth Paltrow is an interesting figure and really beautiful ... She is living proof of Goop- y health." (She asked to be kept anonymous because she was not authorized to speak to reporters and was worried about jeopardizing her professional relationships.)

However, the odds for print health magazines are steep these days. Condé Nast recently closed Self magazine in print, and last month American Media ended the print version of Men's Fitness. (The print version of died in 2015, 23 years after it was born.) Women's-health magazines are "chasing an older and smaller pool of women," said Mike Lafavore, the long-serving former editor in chief of Men's Health, who also served in top editorial roles at Meredith Publishing and Rodale. "Is Gwyneth Paltrow going to appeal to that group? Or will millennials flock to a magazine about Gwyneth Paltrow? I don't know. All you have to do is ride the subway and count the number of people who are holding a piece of paper."

"Anyone launching a print magazine in this environment," he added, "God bless 'em."

I asked him where he recommends people get their health advice. "I'll toot my own horn, GundryMD.com," he said, referring people to a site where, alongside a blog with health tips, he sells $70 supplement bottles. "I personally feel that it's the best source of health advice. I think there's other sites, like Mercola.com, which gives very useful health advice." When I checked Mercola.com, the site of Dr. Joseph Mercola, a few weeks later, a prominently placed ad on its "vaccine" subsection offered to show readers "How to Legally Avoid Unwanted Immunizations of All Kinds."

* * *

It's not clear how, or if, some of Goop's claims would survive the editing process at more traditional health publications, including at other print magazines. The fact-checkers Lafavore worked with at Men's Health didn't accept out-there theories or unproven treatments. If there were no independent studies to back an expert's statement, the quote would be hedged, i.e., "Dr. Smith says this, however, there aren't any studies to prove it," he explained.

He said the fact-checkers still talk about the few mistakes they've ever made. "Every fact-checker lives in fear of letting something get through that harms someone," he said.

The reporter and editor who requested anonymity also described a rigorous fact-checking process at one of the women's magazines where she's worked. If a source described a health condition to a reporter, for example, the reporter would ask her to sign a release and confirm the condition with her doctor. Claims by medical experts were cross-checked with a different expert. The marketing claims of products-such as jade eggs-would be evaluated by independent doctors. Experts were off-limits if they made questionable claims or sold supplements, as Gundry does. (At The Atlantic, print-magazine articles are checked by a separate team of fact-checkers, while web articles, with rare exceptions, are checked by the article's author herself. Newspapers often do not have dedicated fact-checkers.)

Gundry said that after he's interviewed by one of the site's writers, a separate person will later "ask for a reference to back up what I say." (In one Goop post about lectins, Gundry's views are supported by his own book on the subject.)

When I asked about how something like Goop might be fact-checked, Mark Bricklin, the former editor of Prevention, emailed back simply, " Goop is total BS. It would flunk fact-checking in 15 seconds."

* * *

When one of my interviewees asked me what I, personally, thought of Goop, I wasn't sure what to say. My job, you could say, is "wellness." I, too, like to do yoga, eat berries, and wear flattering neutral tones. When I lived in Los Angeles a few years ago, I dipped toward the Goop-ier end of the spectrum, eating cashew cheese and avoiding "conventional" cosmetics. Even now, with the ruthlessly practical eyes of a Washingtonian, I can see that some of Goop's advice isn't bad, like this post on how cognitive-behavioral therapy can help with sleep problems.

Gunter and Kahan both say they've seen patients who have read Goop-style questionable theories and brought them up in the exam room. Much of the time, Kahan says, questions about dubious health advice can lead to "a valuable discussion about the issues with the claims, the potential harms in some cases, or just the lack of potential benefit of most of them. In some cases, though, not uncommonly, it's hard to convince patients that what they're reading is gobbledygook."

Gunter, who calls Goop's advice "goopshit," recently wrote that the misinformation "bothers me because it affects my patients ..."

"They read your crackpot theories and they stop eating tomatoes (side note, if tomatoes are toxic why do Italians have a longer life expectancy than Americans?) or haven't had a slice of bread for two years, they spend money on organic tampons they don't need, they ask for [unindicated] testing for adrenal fatigue (and often pay a lot via co-payments or paying out of pocket), or they obsess that they have systemic Candida (they don't) ... I worry that you make people worry and that you are lowering the world's medical IQ."

Paltrow encourages Goop readers to weigh the evidence for themselves, but she can also tip their scales: Celebrities influence public health in surprising ways. After Angelina Jolie wrote about her risk of breast cancer in The New York Times in 2013, there was an immediate, 64-percent increase in the number of American women who underwent testing for the breast-cancer gene mutation.

And stars' influence is not necessarily positive. Several prominent celebrities are anti-vaccine, and 24 percent of parents surveyed by the University of Michigan in 2011 said they have "some trust" in celebrities regarding the safety of vaccines. As Steven Hoffman and Charlie Tan put it in in 2013, "For people seeking to raise their social status, one strategy is to imitate the behaviors of celebrities."

Paltrow acknowledged her influence on a recent episode of Sophia Amoruso's Girlboss Radio podcast, in which she explained that Goop had expanded into e-commerce because its recommendations could move product. "If we wrote about something we liked ... we would have an impact on the business," she said

"Are there learnings you've had from the flak that you've gotten?" Amoruso asked.

Paltrow described "a lack of willingness to step into who I am ... Going into a hole is exactly the opposite of the lesson."

"The lesson," she added, "is to energetically cultivate, 'fuck you.'"

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How a new-agey website started by an actress became so popular-and what it says about the future of health journalism In an interview with Goop.com, Gwyneth Paltrow's lifestyle company, a former cable-television technician named Clint Ober explained the practice of "earthing," or walking barefoot on the ground.

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Post #7 Reason for Belief: Ideology (video)

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Post #7 Reason for Belief: Ideology (video)

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Definition: Ideology is an idea/religion/set of rules that is usually followed by people. People who follow ideology generally act and think in the way that supports the ideology.

Connection: This video discusses if organic food is beneficial for the health and environment as some people believe which connects to the Ideology that organic food is better. The video is not biased and includes several studies that support both sides: conventional and organic food. The credibility of the studies (evidence) was also discussed and ideas (alternative solutions) for sustainable food sources were provided. The emotional side of and the ideology of the people buying organic food are also discussed, for example, people feel better when buying organic food because they think that it is healthier and more eco-friendly. This video covers all the critical thinking process and gives the best solution in the end.

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Is Organic Really Better? Healthy Food or Trendy Scam?

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We have chosen the video "Is Organic Food Really Better? Healthy Food or Trendy Scam?" for critical thinking analysis.

Extraordinary claim: Organic food is better than conventional food.

Gather information:
Source: a YouTube video that discusses if the organic food is healthier (contains fewer pesticides, is more nutritious, ethical, etc. ) and is more eco-friendly (less greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption, etc.).

Arguments for: Organic foods have more antioxidants, are a little more nutritious, less pesticide residue. Producing organic food requires less energy.

Arguments against: In growing organic food there are still pesticides involved, even if they are natural, they are still toxic (some even more than synthetic pesticides) that in high concentrations are harmful to the organism. All food that is being put to the shelves has to be compliant with regulations and conventional foods also pass the standards.
Both organic and conventional food is prone to bacteria and fungi growth.
Producing conventional food requires more energy but needs less land, while the greenhouse gas emission is the same as for organic food production. These results demonstrate producing conventional food is better for the environment.
Because of the rising demand on organic food, local farms are not able to provide the required amount, which leads to the use of transportation that is not eco-friendly.
There's no internationally approved label for organic food, which means that every company and country has its own view of organic.

Evidence Evaluation: In the video description all of the sources for studies are provided with in-video citations. The credibility of those studies was also checked and questioned in the video. In the video, the discussion follows the scientific method.

Assumptions, Emotions, and Biases: The video is based on the common public assumption that organic food is healthier and better. In the video, it was also discussed how buying organic food which is usually more expensive but seems to be healthier makes people feel better about themselves and their possible impact on the ecology.
The video itself is unbiased, because the studies provided are not one-sided, and give arguments for both sides.

Alternative Solutions: Alternative solutions provided by the video are: 1)combining best sides of both organic and conventional food production, 2) if the person wants to be healthier, then simply buying more fruit, vegetables (organic or not), and less processed food will be enough, 3)buy seasonal local food.

Select Best Alternative: My personal best alternative would be buying conventional foods that are year-round available (most vegetables and some fruits) and seasonal local food. I believe that eating less food that is imported and not in season (for example, berries that are sold not in the summer) is the best action that can be done by me as a customer.

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Post #8 Reason for Belief: Agenticity (video)

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Post #8 Reason for Belief: Agenticity (video)

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Definition:
Agenticity is a human tendency to search for hidden meaning in random events and try to correlate with agents. An example is conspiracy theories that make people come up with and believe in.

Connection:
The video discusses the origin and aspects of the "Lizard People" conspiracy. The father of this "theory" is David Icke who promoted the idea that some human beings are actually lizards who pretend to be humans to rule the world. He also mentioned that lizard people can utilize the fourth dimension to change their appearance (red flag: proof of verbosity) and use telepathy (red flag: mystical energy). People believe in this theory because some people look weird on the videos and people tend to search for patterns in the meaningless (patternicity). In the video, it is also discussed how people tend to search for patterns to give meaning to something and how then this meaning and associations become their belief.

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Post #9 Reason for Belief: Perception and Observation (video)

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Post #9 Reason for Belief: Perception and Observation (video)

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Definition: Perception and observation are the processes that allow us to perceive our surrounding. All of what we see, feel and remember are only subjective and usually is not the reality.

Connection: The video brings up the topic about how our memories are not reliable and can be easily manipulated. A few studies with very interesting results have been provided showing that people can find something in their memories that has never happed to them, their memories can be manipulated by showing something once and asking about it again later on, etc. People tend to change their memories to fit in their current views/position or remember only those that support their current mindset, which is also an effect of confirmation bias.

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Are all of your memories real? - Daniel L. Schacter