Some good points: I liked the presenter, who performed professionally and knowledgeably. It was good that major categories of flawed argument were presented in a simple and easily-accessible ways. It's always good to have another film on critical thinking, because they are so rare, relative to the nonsense that fills our TVs, cinemas, and YouTube.
Some frustratingly bad points: The film lacks editing. Early on, we're presented with a musical montage of supposedly pseudo-scientific subjects, without any explanation. It goes on and on, seemingly subject to the length of the tune. And now yoga is pseudo-scientific? Well, it can be. But sometimes yoga is just yoga. There can be benefits to some behaviours, beyond any health or supernatural claims, and those claims aren't always present anyway. The presenter should have been more specific, rather than painting with a broad brush. A disappointing sequence.
The film lists appeal to authority as a bad thing, and yet invokes that very same appeal when claiming science to be good. Unless we personally witness the repetition of scientific experiments to address our questions, even science ultimately comes down to trust or faith. That trust or faith may be well-placed, but for people who cannot or will not reproduce the experiments, that is all it is. And is science actually good? While I agree that science is how we learn, I disagree that there is anything necessarily good about it. Recognize that all the good things science has given us didn't come in isolation. They came with rapid global climate change, PCBs, nuclear waste, superbugs, lives lived primarily by responding to devices, and our catastrophically unsustainable way of life. I expect skeptics to be a lot more skeptical about their pro-scientific claims, and look at the full picture of where science has actually taken us. Science has been good to us. And it has also been bad. On the whole, it may have jeopardized our species' long-term survival.
Beyond that, two claims in particular bothered me.
One is the presenter's claim that the health industry wants to find cures. Economics and first-hand accounts seem to disagree with this. Health product corporations (by which I mean to include pharmaceutical companies, and any company working on a product or service for health) like all corporations, are required to maximize profit. It's necessarily true that in some cases, it is going to be significantly more profitable to produce a treatment than a cure.
The other claim that particularly bothers me is the presenter's claim that scientific discoveries aren't buried or hoarded. I begin to wonder if he's ever signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement. Not all science is government-funded and open. We do know of people's corporate scientific work being suppressed, as it is considered their employer's property, even if their employer can't figure out what it is, or what to do with it. I question whether it's even possible to know what percentage of scientific work this represents.
My last complaint is that the film does feel a bit like an infomercial for more products by this presenter. That's not cool. Still, all the above wasn't enough to stop from me giving it 7/10.
Some frustratingly bad points: The film lacks editing. Early on, we're presented with a musical montage of supposedly pseudo-scientific subjects, without any explanation. It goes on and on, seemingly subject to the length of the tune. And now yoga is pseudo-scientific? Well, it can be. But sometimes yoga is just yoga. There can be benefits to some behaviours, beyond any health or supernatural claims, and those claims aren't always present anyway. The presenter should have been more specific, rather than painting with a broad brush. A disappointing sequence.
The film lists appeal to authority as a bad thing, and yet invokes that very same appeal when claiming science to be good. Unless we personally witness the repetition of scientific experiments to address our questions, even science ultimately comes down to trust or faith. That trust or faith may be well-placed, but for people who cannot or will not reproduce the experiments, that is all it is. And is science actually good? While I agree that science is how we learn, I disagree that there is anything necessarily good about it. Recognize that all the good things science has given us didn't come in isolation. They came with rapid global climate change, PCBs, nuclear waste, superbugs, lives lived primarily by responding to devices, and our catastrophically unsustainable way of life. I expect skeptics to be a lot more skeptical about their pro-scientific claims, and look at the full picture of where science has actually taken us. Science has been good to us. And it has also been bad. On the whole, it may have jeopardized our species' long-term survival.
Beyond that, two claims in particular bothered me.
One is the presenter's claim that the health industry wants to find cures. Economics and first-hand accounts seem to disagree with this. Health product corporations (by which I mean to include pharmaceutical companies, and any company working on a product or service for health) like all corporations, are required to maximize profit. It's necessarily true that in some cases, it is going to be significantly more profitable to produce a treatment than a cure.
The other claim that particularly bothers me is the presenter's claim that scientific discoveries aren't buried or hoarded. I begin to wonder if he's ever signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement. Not all science is government-funded and open. We do know of people's corporate scientific work being suppressed, as it is considered their employer's property, even if their employer can't figure out what it is, or what to do with it. I question whether it's even possible to know what percentage of scientific work this represents.
My last complaint is that the film does feel a bit like an infomercial for more products by this presenter. That's not cool. Still, all the above wasn't enough to stop from me giving it 7/10.