Category: scams

A royal scam, and one involving AI

October 12, 2026 • 9:40 am

If you have any kind of public presence, eventually you attract—like remoras to a shark—people who want money or publicity, though they l\often disguise their motives as being laudable or charitable.

A few weeks ago, for example, I got a letter from a woman who said she was organizing an online book club to read my book Faith versus Fact, and invited me to contribute if I wanted. Flattered, I said I’d be glad to, and could contribute a few discussion questions for the readers. The organizer said that was great, and shortly thereafter she asked me for $210 for a “participation fee”.  I was not participating, but contributing, and it became clear that the whole megillah was a moneymaking scheme. I didn’t answer, and have not heard back since.

In the last week I’ve received three letters similar to the following, telling me about the deficiencies of Faith Versus Fact, how it’s become outmoded, and how the sender could publicize it and increase the readership. (I wonder if the “independent” requests are really connected.) Note how thorough the analysis is, as if  the writer, John Ajala, had read and thought about the book. Well, as you’ll see below, there’s a reason for that. First, the email:

Dear Professor Coyne,

You wrote the book that made the incompatibility argument impossible to wave away. Before Faith Versus Fact, the accommodationist position was the respectable default. After your book, it had to defend itself. You did it as a working evolutionary biologist, not a philosopher or a journalist, and that gave the argument a weight it had not had before. Dawkins called it superbly argued. Kirkus called it important. That matters.

Here is the thing I cannot stop thinking about. A reader who searches for “science and religion compatible” will find ten thousand books telling them yes. A reader who is quietly losing their faith and does not know how to think about it is not finding yours.

Faith Versus Fact is filed under Religious Studies, Science and Religion, and Atheism. That is accurate. It is also a fence. Every piece of metadata around the book speaks to people who already know what the incompatibility thesis is. That matters because the people who most need this book are the ones least likely to pick it up. They are not browsing the atheism shelf. They are sitting in a pew, or a classroom, or a kitchen at midnight, trying to figure out whether the thing they were taught is true. Your book would answer that question. It is not the book that shows up.

The book has 1,808 ratings on Goodreads. On Amazon Australia, 159 ratings and 35 written reviews. On Amazon Mexico, 735 ratings and 252 written reviews. On Amazon US, the paperback ranks #290 in Religious Studies, Science and Religion. That is a strong niche position. It is not a general one. For comparison, Why Evolution Is True has 1,379 ratings on Amazon Brazil alone. Your earlier book is reaching a broader audience than this one. The argument that matters more is reaching fewer people. A reader who needs this book is finding your evolution book instead, and then wondering if there is another one.

Because the book is ten years old and the conversation has moved. The accommodationist position has reasserted itself in popular science writing. The new atheism moment has passed. The book that made the strongest case for incompatibility is now filed in a section that only the converted browse. If the argument is going to outlive the moment, it needs to be findable by the people who are just now starting to ask the question.

I believe this is fixable. Not by changing the book. The book is finished and it works. By changing the metadata around it, the description, the categories, the keywords, so that it is findable by the readers who do not yet know they are looking for it. The categories and keywords need to speak to the doubter, not the convert. The description needs to speak to the person who is afraid to ask the question, not the person who has already answered it. The reviews need to be refreshed so the page does not look like it stopped moving in 2016. None of that changes a word of what you wrote.

What it changes is who finds it. A doubting believer searching for “is my faith irrational” is not finding your book today. They would find it if the metadata spoke to them.

What I want for you is the version of this book that a doubting believer finds at 2 a.m. on their phone, when they have no one to talk to and no idea where to start. That is the reader who would be changed. That is the reader who is not finding it.

Picture a reader who has never heard of you. They are twenty-two, they grew up in a church, they are starting to have doubts they cannot say out loud. They search for something, anything, that will help them think about it. They find your book. They read the first chapter. And they realise that someone has already thought this through, with rigour, and without contempt for the person they used to be. That reader exists right now. They are looking. They are not finding you.

Right now, the book is being read by people who already agree. It is being cited in arguments that were settled years ago. It is not reaching the person who is still inside the question. A year from now, the book is the first result when someone searches for “science and religion incompatible.” It is the book that gets handed to a friend who is losing their faith. It is the book that a professor recommends not because it is on the syllabus but because it answers a question the student just asked. It is still the same book. It is just findable.

I am writing to you specifically because most authors with a landmark book are not in a position to act. They are retired, or they are done, or they have moved on. You are still in the fight. You gave a talk in Katowice in December 2024. You resigned from the Freedom From Religion Foundation board in December over a disagreement about free speech. That is rare at seventy-six. It is why I am writing to you and not to someone else.

I work with authors whose books carry real weight and are not reaching the readers who would be most changed by them. I do not fix books. I fix the gap between what a book is and what it could become. I am not going to send you a deck. I am going to tell you what I see, and you can tell me if I am wrong. What I see is a book that won the argument and lost the stranger. And I think you already know that, because you have watched it happen for a decade.

I can make that happen. Not with ads. Not with a campaign. With the specific, unglamorous work of fixing the categories, the keywords, and the description so that the algorithms that decide what a stranger sees decide to show them your book.

If you tell me what you think the obstacle is, and it matches what I see, I will tell you exactly what I would do about it. No pitch, no deck, no retainer. Just the answer.

The book is ten years old. The argument is not going away. The readers who need it are not going away either. But the window where a book can be repositioned without being republished is not infinite. It is open now. It will not be open forever.

When you look at where the book ended up, and who is still not finding it, what do you believe the actual obstacle is?

And a second question, which matters more. Twenty years from now, what do you want this book to have done? Not how many copies. Not which reviews. What do you want it to have done to a reader who picks it up cold, with no atheist blogger telling them to, and no Dawkins blurb on the cover?

Reply with whatever you actually think. One line is enough. If you would rather not, I understand. Either way, the work stands on its own.

With genuine respect for what you have written,

John | Founder, Book Insight Hub

Yada, yada, yada. Had I written Mr. Ajala back telling him what I think the “obstacles” to adopting the book were, I’m absolutely sure he’d offer to help publicize it, and of course for a fee. I wrote back and told him I was happy with the book and not to bother me again.

But I had become suspicious because of the short sentences and words like “metadata”, which are often signs that the writer has used AI. So I put the whole email through Pangram, the best AI analyzer, and one that’s been tested with both AI- and human-written texts. Pangram virtually never says that something is written by AI if it was written by a human. And, sure enough, Pangram told me this:

Sure enough, the “thoroughness” of the email came not from a human, but from a machine’s program.  What a fricking insult!

I would recommend Pangram if you want to see if what you’re reading was written by a human or a bot. In fact, it tells you which parts of a text (100% in this case) have been written by a human vs. AI.  You can have about three free tries with Pangram a day, or you can subscribe for more money, though I don’t use it often enough to warrant that. The effectiveness of Pangram has been tested pretty thoroughly, and you can see the analysis at the site below, clicking on the screenshot and then here to download the paper.

The authors tested four kinds of papers: pure AI-written papers, pure human-written papers. “hybrid” papers that were part Ai-written and part human-written, and “humanised” papers that were first written with AI and then made to look more “human-written” by “Using the AI-generated sections from HYB01, rewritten with a custom ChatGPT prompt to increase perplexity and burstiness (less predictable wording, more varied sentence structures) while keeping meaning and references intact.”

They used 40 papers per category, and judged the ability of five AI-detection programs to see how good they were at sussing out the source.

As you see, Pangram is the overall winner, especially at detecting purely AI-written papers. It also is good at detecting hybrid and “humanised” papers, which it detects about half the time.  But note at the extreme right: the papers that were written solely by humans. Nearly all the problems have a 0% false positive rate on Pangram, i.e. the analysis saying that a paper is AI when it was really written by a human.  That’s why I’m so sure that when Pangram tells me something is 100% AI, like the duplicitous email above (how dare a human sign their name to something written by a program?), I’m nearly sure it’s AI.

I’ve used Pangram to suss out authors of fiction and poetry who didn’t really write their published stuff (more on that later), as well as to analyze essays and articles written by people I admire, but that looked suspicious. After a while you develop a nose for the AI-stuff, especially when you learn what someone’s own personal writing style is like. Facebook is full of that stuff: if you see a post that comprises a number of short sentences, it’s more than likely written by a bot. I deep-six those sites immediately.

If you’ve found AI stuff that pretended to be written by a human, weigh in below.

More woo from the NYT

September 21, 2026 • 9:40 am

UPDATE: Here’s a comment that Wildman herself left after her piece.  Notice how she characterizes what scientists have found: “It doesn’t really matter what anyone else thinks, but how the moment makes the bereaved feel, and where it places us in our grief.”  One could paraphrase that as “I don’t care if it’s true so long as it makes me feel better.”  It is of course tragic that Wildman lost her daughter at only 14, but that doesn’t mean that people speak to us after they’re dead.

***********************

I’ve banged on over the years about how the New York Times is soft on woo—this includes religion—as has Greg Mayer (see references here). The paper still has a weekly religion column, “Believing“, written by a nonbelieving ex-Mormon, albeit a writer extraordinarily sympathetic to faith.  There is no “nonbelieving” column, nor anything about why people reject faith.  In the introduction linked just above, author Lauren Jackson says that the paper’s readers were the impetus for this column:

Earlier this year, we published a series of articles about how people experience religion and spirituality now. In response, thousands of you told us you wanted more: You wanted us to expand our reporting on how ancient ideas are appearing in our very modern lives. You wanted a space for both believers and nonbelievers to share their stories. You wanted, above all, for us to take the subject seriously.

In other words, readers had a “woo-shaped” hole in their being.

The paeans to faith demanded by readers extended to faith in woo. After all, belief in woo—dowsing, mediums, astrology, reincarnation, facilitated communication, and so on—are, like religion, belief in unsubstantiated phenomena that is based on faith.  This is what the NYT readers want, perhaps as a palliative in these parlous times.

Now the NYT has done it again, in an essay by Senior Opinion editor Sarah Wildman. Greg, who has taught a popular course on “Science and Pseudoscience” at the University of  Wisconsin-Parkside, called the piece to my attention, and, sure enough, it’s a type specimen of faith.

The title says it all: mediums, who pass on messages from dead to living people, “may be on to something.”  Unfortunately, tests of mediums over the years show that there’s nothing to it save duplicity (including some mediums who have bought into the idea that they really can talk to the dead) and credulousness.  James Randi’s “million dollar challenge”, which ran from 1964 to 2015, offered a cool million bucks to anybody who could demonstrate paranormal powers under Randi’s rules designed to rule out fraud.  Thousands of people applied, but nobody passed the tests, including a medium.

Click on the screenshot to read the latest osculation of woo; you can also read it for free at this archived site.

There are two forms of “reading” that mediums use: “hot” and “cold”. In “hot” readings, the “psychic” finds out stuff about the client, her relatives, and her life in advance, and then spits it back during a session, claiming it came from the dead. From Wikipedia:

Hot reading is a technique used when giving a psychic reading in stage magic performances, or in other contexts. In hot reading, the reader uses information about the person receiving the reading (for example, from background research or overhearing a conversation) which the receiver is not aware that the reader already knows. Hot reading is commonly used in conjunction with cold reading (where no previously gathered information is used) and can explain how a psychic reader can get a specific claimed “hit” of accurate information

In “cold” readings, the psychic doesn’t know about the subject in advance, but uses a number of cues to confect a message that seems real:. From Wikipedia:

Cold reading is a set of techniques used by mentalists, psychics, fortune-tellers, and mediums.  Without prior knowledge, a practiced cold-reader can quickly obtain a great deal of information by analyzing the person’s body language, age, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. during a line of questioning. Cold readings commonly employ high-probability guesses, quickly picking up on signals as to whether their guesses are in the right direction or not. The reader then emphasizes and reinforces any accurate connections while quickly moving on from missed guesses. Psychologists believe that this appears to work because of the Barnum effect and due to confirmation biases within people.

Neither of these are mentioned by Wildman in her article, nor does she talk about successful efforts to debunk mediums. This lacuna is expanded more because Wildman seems confused about her point. In places she states or implies that messages are really coming from the dead or the beyond, conveying “inexplicably specific knowledge.” In other places, though, she emphasizes that people’s belief that they’ve somehow sensed the presence of the dead, or contacted the dead, is simply a wonderful palliative for their grief; but she doesn’t state explicitly that what they’ve sensed is real.

This mixing of soothing faith and reality makes the whole article a mess.  Nevertheless, both kinds of belief are harmful (see below).

I’ll give some quotes. First, one that mixes both theses (bolding is Wildman’s):

. . . in recent years, researchers have spent considerable, serious effort to examine the psychological impact of perceiving a lost loved one after their passing, and the positive role that can play in what grief therapists describe as our ongoing relationship to those we have lost. Contact, for lack of a better word, can be sensory, auditory, visual, a sense of presence, or smell. It can be spontaneous, reached through meditation or directed therapy or even, sometimes, through mediums who, like this one, offer inexplicably specific knowledge. References to such experiences extend just about as far back in literature as the written word and are not limited by geography, or culture.

Some studies put the proportion of people who have perceived the presence or signs of their lost loved ones at around 60 percent. Sympathetic psychologists call these sensory and quasi-sensory experiences of the deceased or even “after-death communication.” (Others — perhaps less sympathetic — call them “bereavement hallucinations.”) The therapists I spoke to for this essay aren’t trying to determine the veracity of the supernatural. They are trying to learn how perceiving the presence of the lost can lift the bereaved from their darkest spaces.

In study after study, the sensation of contact with a deceased loved one plays a rather remarkable role in alleviating grief. In one recently published review of 14 psychological studies across seven countries, spanning over 1,900 participants, researchers found that a majority of those who reported experiencing the sensation of their lost loved one had had some sort of “emotionally restorative experiences that contributed to coping with their grief.” That doesn’t surprise me. It is bleak finality that leaves the griever reeling.

Note that she mixes the “inexplicably specific knowledge” (yes, inexplicable), with the palliative properties of simply perceiving signs from the dead or of the dead. Later in the piece she adduces more “evidence” that mediums are trawling up something inexplicable.

Here’s the one mention of doubt, but it expresses an anti-scientific attitude:

The study of these occurrences and their impact on grief has long been prejudiced by exactly what you’d expect: the surety of scientists and skeptics that all of it — mediums, sensations, signs — might be about as real as a dime-store Ouija board, a 19th-century séance or, worse, a momentary psychotic episode. William James, the philosopher and psychologist, who was himself sympathetic to the idea, published a study of mentally healthy individuals in 1890 and noted the peculiar insistence of the “hallucinations of the sane.” Sigmund Freud once called it “hallucinatory wishful psychosis.”

Oh, those cold, nasty scientists who are sure that psychic phenomena are delusions! How vicious they are to dispel comforting illusions! But I don’t think scientists have ever denied that mediums may be able to mitigate grief. Of course they do—that’s why mediums are in business! Scientists are concerned not with the psychological effect of mediums so much as with whether they are really doing what they say they’re doing.

Here is Wildman is on the frequency and therapeutic value of having experiences of the dead:

Nevertheless, researchers have long recognized how widespread the experience is. In 1971, Dr. William Dewi Rees conducted a study of 227 widows and 66 widowers in Wales in which nearly half — half! — reported what was referred to as “hallucinations” of their lost spouse. Most of them had told no one. Dr. Rees noted the episodes were considered “normal and helpful,” and nodded to the similar experience of widows in Japan.

Again, we’re not denying that people dream about, long for, and even experience the presence and feelings of the dead, just as we don’t deny that people have experiences of God. The question is this: do such experiences show real communication with dead people and that God exists?

Towards the end, Wildman becomes more and more invested in the reality of psychic contact with the dead:

In conversation, Mr. Ginsberg told me that, though he suspects a large percentage of mediums can’t offer what they promise, he has had too many inexplicable experiences not to believe in some form of continued communication with his daughter, both through mediums and on his own. It makes her loss a bit easier to carry.

After Mr. Ginsberg told me about a number of inexplicable occurrences, I offered him one of mine. Once I was sitting in a coffee shop, describing to a friend the lack of resolution I felt over Orli’s untimely death [Orli was Wildman’s daughter who died at 14]. When I got up, the song lyric playing as I entered the bathroom was “Find a way to make some peace / with how the story ends.” It was a song by the Midnight that I had never heard. It felt like magic.

I told several of the researchers I spoke to about instances like this that feel peculiarly transcendent.

To me it would feel like a coincidence, and these coincidences happen all the time.  Wildman has undoubtedly often grieved the loss of and thought about her daughter. How many different songs must she have heard before, during, or after such times? What are the chances she would find one at least vaguely relevant to her grief? Different kinds of songs are heard by grieving people, but they report only the ones that feel “transcendent.”

Finally, here’s the kicker meant to show that something weird and numinous is going on. Here’s what Wildman says after she had calls with the well known medium Laura Lynne Jackson and her press person. The “prediction” apparently comes from Jackson herself:

Ms. Jackson’s press person told me that when she does an interview she typically does not also offer a reading. Part of me hoped she might anyway. How could I not?

Just before we wrapped up our call, she asked me: Did Orli have a weird stuffed animal? “Not like a teddy bear,” she added. I laughed. Orli had an anteater stuffed animal, pillow-size, I said. It is still on her bed. Ms. Jackson mentioned her own spiritual signs are armadillos, aardvarks and anteaters. Receiving a sign of an unusual animal like this one, she said, was a wink to us both from Orli. She said I’d receive such a sign, and it would arrive as an image.

I didn’t tell anyone about this conversation.

Some weeks later, one of my old friends from college texted me out of the blue. It happened to be Orli’s birthday. “I just saw this,” he wrote. He attached an image of a belt buckle he said he planned to buy. It had, he said, made him think of us.

On it was a brass armadillo.

Oy! Orli had a stuffed anteater, not an armadillo. This is a classic example of how readers dupe their clients (and sometimes themselves). First, the medium asks a generic question, and, upon receiving the answer, feeds the answer  directly back to the client as though it was conveyed by the spirits, and not  just moments earlier by the client; Wildman just laps up this classic cold reading move. Then, when she hears about an armadillo, Wildman falls prey to what students of readings call “free interpretation”: she finds a way to turn a mention of one thing into a mention of something else, converting a psychic “miss” into a psychic “hit”. How far off from an anteater would an animal have to be before it was not considered a sign from the spirits? Would an elephant fit the bill, as it too has a long snout?

All we have here is the kind of coincidence that many of us have experienced. Or perhaps Ms. Wildman’s old friend knew about Orli’s stuffed animal and was sending a belt buckle in that knowledge. Who knows? What is clear is that closing the essay in this way suggests that Wildman was receiving the psychic “sign” predicted by the medium.

You might ask, sensibly, “What is the harm of making people feel good by telling them stuff about their dead loved ones, even if that stuff is made up or ‘cold read'”?

You know the answer. There are two palpable harms. The first is that people pay good money to psychics. Jackson doesn’t given prices on her site, but her waiting list is years and years long. But it’s big business. As the AP notes,

“The psychic services industry — which encompasses various specialties such as astrology, palm-reading, psychic readings and fortunetelling — generated an estimated $2.3 billion in revenue in 2024 and employed 105,000 people, according to market research firm IBIS World.”

Since there’s no proof these people are doing anything that’s really psychic, though they may be soothing people, this is a form of therapy in numinous clothing.

The second harm is that, like religion, belief in the reality of psychic stuff weakens our skepticism, making us more liable to believe other unsubstantiated stuff, conspiracy theories, and other claims without evidence (“the election was stolen”).  Now I am not going to be the one to tell a dying relative that she’s not going to heaven, nor would I cast a cold eye on a psychic reading that soothed a widower.

But with this article, the NYT is buttressing the reality of psychic phenomena, and buttressing it with the imprimatur of America’s most authoritative newspaper.  The piece is irresponsible, as was the editor who let it go by. Once again the Paper of Record is meeting America’s demand for woo when it should be dispelling that woo with facts. Will there be an op-ed arguing that mediums are fraudulent? I doubt it.

Randi exposed many of the techniques of mediums and other psychics in the classic PBS Nova film, “Secrets of the Psychics”; it is well worth watching.

 

Changes in orange juice and other foods coming from the FDA, and not for the better

August 11, 2025 • 11:00 am

Here’s an article from Food and Wine that simply gives more of the bad news that I thought I was avoiding by reading “regular stuff.” Click on the screenshot to read it. The upshot is that foods—and not just OJ—are going to be diluted and their quality reduced, all supposedly in the name of consumer welfare. Yes, I know that government agencies are doing a ;pt worse stuff, but anybody who beefs that this post is trivial compared to that other stuff risks dire punishment, for I post what I want.

As you probably know if you’re American, the Food and Drug administration sets standards for how food is constituted if it’s going to be labeled one way or another.  For example, the standards of “ice cream” specify that it has to have a certain percentage of milk solids and milk fat. That’s why, before I buy ice cream in a store, I inspect the carton to be sure that it’s labeled “ice cream” rather than “ice milk” or, Ceiling Cat help me, “frozen dairy dessert”. (This is, of course, independent of the ever-shrinking volume of containers, like the half gallons of ice cream that have morphed into 1.5 quarts.) So check what’s written on your carton of Breyer’s to ensure that you’re buying ice cream.

Now the FDA is changing the standards for other foods, and of course not for the better. Quotes from the article (indented):

As Food & Wine previously explained, the FDA began setting standards of identity in 1939 to promote “honesty and fair dealing” and ensure the “characteristics, ingredients, and production processes of specific foods were consistent with what consumers expect.”

Back then, the FDA added, companies often sold products “that were represented as jams containing fruit, but the products contained little fruit,” so it established baseline rules for certain foods to be labeled as such. For example, the Oregon Growers explained that “preserves” and “jams” must contain at least “55% sugar and 45% fruit. If a product does not meet these requirements, it must be called by another name.”

With this new update, jam makers may no longer be required to adhere to these percentages if their standard of identity were to go away, meaning your next jar could be more sugar, water, or some other ingredient entirely than mostly fruit.

Be sure to start inspecting your jams. However, looking at a few of mine, they don’t list the percentage of fruit versus sugar: they just give the ingredients in order of predominance, and sugar is first, even in good jams. But how much sugar are you spreading on your toast? The FDA will ensure that it can increase without your knowing. You’d have to write to the manufacturer to find out.

As for orange juice, well, that’s gonna be diluted:

On Aug. 5, the FDA announced that it’s proposing to amend the standard of identity for pasteurized orange juice, which has been in place for six decades, in an effort “to promote honesty and fair dealing for consumers.” It added that the proposed rule change will “provide flexibility to the food industry.”

Why the change now? As the FDA explained, it’s in response to a petition by the Florida Citrus Processors Association and Florida Citrus Mutual, which is asking for the change, as the current standard of identity has a minimum Brix requirement, “a measurement that indicates the sugar content of a liquid,” at 10.5%. It wants to reduce this requirement to a flat 10%. That’s because the state of Florida has been ravaged by citrus greening disease, which has caused a lower crop production as well as fruit that has less sugar than before.

“The FDA’s pasteurized orange juice standard of identity, when originally promulgated in 1963, was carefully constructed to reflect the qualities of U.S. oranges,” the petition by the two organizations states. “It should now be updated to align with the properties of the modern U.S. crop. Without these changes, manufacturers of finished pasteurized orange juice products must increasingly rely on higher Brix imported juice to meet or exceed the U.S. minimum Brix for pasteurized orange juice.”

The FDA further explained that the change shouldn’t affect the taste of orange juice and will have “a minimal impact on the nutrients found in orange juice.”

What a load of bull! The way you reduce sugar, of course, is to add more water.  “The qualities of U.S. oranges” have changed because of the disease and lower crop production. Granted, perhaps a half percent of lower sugar may even be better for some people, but those standards were there in the first place. And you can bet your tuchas that when the disease goes away and they can once again make OJ to the specificiations, they’re not going to go back to the old standards. But wait! There’s more!

Other foods that may have their standards of identity change soon include several types of canned fruits and vegetables, including artificially sweetened canned fruits (apricots, cherries, pears, peaches, pineapples) and select canned vegetables, such as field corn and dry peas. More than a dozen dairy products are included in the list, including low‑sodium cheddar and colby cheeses, along with cream cheese blends, and frozen desserts like goat milk ice cream and mellorine. Milk breads, rolls, and buns are also on the list, as are enriched macaroni and frozen juice concentrates.

Now I don’t know what the changes are, but you can be sure that they are not going to increase the quality of the product. What are they going to do to breads and macaroni? The mind boggles.  The only worse thing that this reduction of food quality is the way they justify it. There’s a quote in the article that apparently comes from the FDA:

“The FDA’s Standards of Identity efforts have helped ensure uniformity, boost consumer confidence, and prevent food fraud. But many of these standards have outlived their usefulness and may even stifle innovation in making food easier to produce or providing consumers healthier choices,” FDA Commissioner Marty Makary added in the July press release. “Antiquated food standards are no longer serving to protect consumers. It is common sense to revoke them and move to a more judicious use of food standards and agency resources.”

Stifling innovation? Giving consumers healthier choices? “Antiquated standards”? Excuse me, but I’d rather have more fruit in my preserves.  This paragraph is a prime example of duplicity masquerading as good intentions.

You can find the new FDA standards here and here, which, I suppose, are driven not by consumer demand but by corporations, and if you want to go through them, see if the changes conform to the explanation above.

Oy! My kishkes!

23andMe executive waffles before a Senate committee on what the company did with its “deleted” data

June 14, 2025 • 11:10 am

The ancestry-testing company 23andMe has had a hard go lately. First, in 2023 a data leak at the company exposed millions of customers’ personal information—inhcluding genetic information—to hackers. As Wikipedia reports:

The cyberattack gathered profile and ethnicity information from millions of users. The affected customers were reported as primarily Ashkenazi Jews but also including hundreds of thousands of ethnically Chinese users. The hacker(s) stole information customers had chosen to share with their DNA matches, which could include name, profile photo, birth year, location, family surnames, grandparents’ birthplaces, ethnicity estimates, mitochondrial DNA haplogroup, Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup, link to external family tree, and any text content a customer had optionally included in their “About” section. On October 6, 2023, the company confirmed that the hacker(s) had illicitly accessed data on approximately 6.9 million users.

And now the company is going to sell off its genetic data to a new company, TTAM Research Institute. We were informed by 23andMe (I was a customer), that we could have our genetic data deleted before the sale, and I naturally did this; I believe I urged customers somewhere on this site to delete their data, too (you can always use a different company in the future).  But 23andMe is now subject to a lawsuit involving this sale:

Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia have sued the genetic-testing company 23andMe to oppose the sale of DNA data from its customers without their direct consent.

The suit, filed on Monday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Eastern District of Missouri, argues that 23andMe needs to have permission from each and every customer before their data is potentially sold. The company had entered an agreement to sell itself and its assets in bankruptcy court.

The information for sale “comprises an unprecedented compilation of highly sensitive and immutable personal data of consumers,” according to the lawsuit.

The CEO of the company was promptly dragged before a Senate committee to explain what 23andMe were going to do with the data, and his performance, as you’ll see in the eight-minute video below, was abysmal; he wriggled like a caught eel.

This wiggling and evasion from CEO Joseph Selsavage is even more waffle-y than was the testimony of the MIT, Harvard, and Penn Presidents before Congress (actually, the Presidents answered accurately, but it wasn’t good enough for Representative Elise Stefanik). A reader sent me the link to the new

video with this comment:

I thought you might be interested in this.  You recommended that readers who used 23&Me to conduct genetic analysis might want to delete their data after the company claimed bankruptcy and intend to sell this data to Regeneron for $300M [JAC: see above, TTAM won the bidding over Regeneron.]  I followed your sound advice.

Very disconcerting is this hearing where Senator Josh Hawley absolutely hammers the CEO of 23&Me about whether they are actually deleting our data or not even after instructed by customers to do so.  It’s not clear if they are actually permanently expunging our data records or not given the waffling but how outrageous if they are not:

Here’s the caption for the YouTube video, which was posted on June 12:

At today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) questioned interim 23andMe CEO Joseph Selsavage.

Oy vey! Look at Selsavage equivocate and squirm! It’s a pathetic and reprehensible performance. And only Ceiling Cat knows what TTAM will do with our data. (Since I asked for mine to be deleted, Regeneron presumably doesn’t have it, but Selsavage isn’t at all clear about that.)   Hawley is civil but also persistent, and manages to show up Selsavage as somewhat of a liar.

I get scamming emails

February 10, 2025 • 12:30 pm
This is the first email I got when I woke up this morning (yes, it was early). I’ve left the sender’s address in because this is so clearly a scam. And I’m wondering who would be dumb enough to fall for this. It purports to be from the Secretary-General of the UN! But you can bet your hat that there will be at least on credulous sap who wants half a million dollars.
From: Antonio<lnfo@sommariamente.it>
To: Jerry Coyne
​Mon 2/10/2025 3:55 AM
Hi,

The United-Nations received a report of scam against you and other-British/US and Asia citizens.Your Email ID was among those that was scammed as listed by the UN Financial Intelligent Unit,For the above reason the UN is Donating the Sum of $[500.000.00] as Compensation for your loss.

You are also required to Choose one option below.

(1) [Bank to Bank Transfer]
(2) [Atm Master Card]
(3) [Western-Union]

make your choice  and get back to us for your Payment ASAP

Contact person.
António Guterres
info@sommariamente.it

Regards,
Mr António Guterres

D. J. Grothe pushes back on the NYT for romanticizing Uri Geller and calling him a “victor”

July 11, 2023 • 1:00 pm

In the Nooz two days ago both Greg Mayer and I weighed in on a very weird article in the New York Times declaring that swindler Uri Geller (you’ll know him as the “spoon bender”) had come out victorious over his critic James Randi, who exposed Geller’s “psychic” manipulations as pure hokum. Nevertheless, the NYT extolled Geller. Here’s what both of us said:

*From Greg:

The New York Times‘ fondness for woo continues to grow: a big homepage article today declares that Uri Geller has “emerged the victor“. The evidence for this: Geller is rich and has opened a museum about himself; an Australian has written a coffee table book about him; and he has outlived his critic James Randi (who was 18 years older than Geller, and died in 2020 at the age of 92). And besides, what harm can there be in cultivating the habits of mind that allow people to believe in telekinesis? The Times used to be a little less credulous about such things, and the harm they can cause.
The article is in the “Business” section, so I guess how much money you have is the right way to judge who ‘wins’. But there’s nary a mention of the size of Randi’s estate– how can we be sure who really won?
From the NYT:

It’s a fortune he might have never earned, he said, without a group of highly agitated critics. Mr. Geller was long shadowed by a handful of professional magicians appalled that someone was fobbing off what they said were expertly finessed magic tricks as acts of telekinesis. Like well-matched heavyweights, they pummeled one another in the ’70s and ’80s in televised contests that elevated them all.

Mr. Geller ultimately emerged the victor in this war, and proof of his triumph is now on display in the museum: a coffee-table book titled “Bend It Like Geller,” which was written by the Australian magician Ben Harris and published in May.

My take:  The victor? The VICTOR?  The NYT then admits that Geller wasn’t really banding spoons or was psychic; it was all trickery:

And the point is that Mr. Geller is an entertainer, one who’d figured out that challenging our relationship to the truth, and daring us to doubt our eyes, can inspire a kind of wonder, if performed convincingly enough. Mr. Geller’s bent spoons are, in a sense, the analog precursors of digital deep fakes — images, videos and sounds, reconfigured through software, so that anyone can be made to say or do anything.

That’s bad writing, and is in fact not true, since Geller never admitted he was doing trickery (see below).

And get a load of this from the NYT:

If Mr. Geller can’t actually bend metal with his brain — and civility and fairness demands this “if” — he is the author of a benign charade, which is a pretty good definition of a magic trick. Small wonder that the anti-Geller brigade has laid down its arms and led a rapprochement with the working professionals of magic. He is a reminder that people thrill at the sense that they are either watching a miracle or getting bamboozled. And now that fakery is routinely weaponized online, Mr. Geller’s claims to superpowers seem almost innocent.

My take: No,  civility and fairness don’t demand the “if”—the possibility that he really was bending spoons with his brain. His followers now more or less admit it, and magicians like Randi could do it regularly.  By saying that Geller “won”, and putting in that “if”, the NYT is once again pandering to woo. And if it wasn’t woo, but just magic, then Geller lost and Randi won. Oh, and the NYT also lost.

Now D. J. Grothe, whom you may remember as a voice in the “new atheist movement” as well as a magician and a good friend of James Randi, takes out after the NYT for its extolling of Randi. Click below to read Grothe’s Substack post:

First, the take of reader Stephen, who brought this link to my attention

Mr. Grothe is criticizing The New York Times for the way they’re telling the story of a swindler, quote: Geller’s history of fraud is surreally romanticized in the New York Times profile — he’s audaciously portrayed as a mere magician somehow performing his deceptions in the public interest! and the NYT article treats James Randi as “little more than a footnote”, dismissing him as just spewing “vitriol” against a poor Uri Geller, who is portrayed as just an “almost innocent” fellow entertainer, a mean-spirited and joyless Randi tilting at the inocuous windmill of Uri Geller.
 
I’m surprised that a serious newspaper publishes something about a crook, but trying to convince us is not.

Indeed, Grothe admits that Geller has bamboozled people because he has an amiable and endearing personality, but he still bamboozled them:

He built his valuable brand on this falsehood that he was real, and in the process, offended many in the magic community, skeptics, and anyone else who values the truth and cares when the cognitively vulnerable are being defrauded by charlatans. This offense his critics felt — a kind of moral outrage — has led them to debunking Geller countless times, and yet he’s always remained undeterred. And his unscrupulous deceptions weren’t confined to the stage; I think it was and continues to be his very identity, a dangerously misleading persona ethically identical to conscienceless faith healers and psychic charlatans who knowingly dupe the gullible for personal gain.

I’ve only met Uri Geller twice, and I can confirm others’ accounts: he is a beautiful huckster. When I first met him, he made me feel like the center of the universe — he was so warm and attentive, even affectionate, and he honestly seemed like a genuinely nice guy.  I found him to be extremely likable. Even though I knew his history of destructive fraud and deceit. It should be no wonder that someone with his history could be so beguiling.

Two things in this piece surprised me. First, Geller has never admitted that his psychic ‘tricks’ were a form of magic (i.e.,deception): (Bolding is mine.)

That the magic community, with some notable if rare exceptions, has recently turned a blind eye to Geller’s history is not at all due to the fact that Geller has finally confessed to being a fraud, and to bilking his victims out of literal fortunes over the years, because Geller has never confessed to this, nor has he ever tried to make good, nor tried to make his victims whole. Instead, I think magicians have welcomed Geller into their community because magicians as a group are charmed by his personality and especially by his celebrity — magicians are nothing if not starfuckers, and ethics aside, Geller is a bona fide very charming celebrity.

Second, I didn’t know that Geller loaned his name to various scams that did hurt people, including medical misinformation:

But Geller wasn’t — and isn’t — any sort of noble Carl Sagan type. He was a con man who hurt people. And his scams were not just confined to lucrative pseudoscientific oil prospecting cons, as the Times article suggests. In the 90s, Geller’s magazines in England were promoting things like dangerous spiritualistic healing of very physical medical ailments. Found on the magazine racks throughout the country (I bought one in person on my first trip to London in 1996), issues were packaged with “Uri Geller Empowered Quartz Crystals,” with step-by-step instructions for supposedly curing very real diseases. He didn’t perform benign magic tricks merely refusing to disclaim them as mere tricks. In my opinion, he was a spiritualistic fraud. And continues to be.

If Geller is still deceiving people by pretending he has spiritual or psychic powers, we should feel sorry for those credulous folks. But we shouldn’t feel sorry for the New York Times, which actually makes a kind of hero out of Geller, declaring him victorious over James Randi, who in my view is the real hero, or at least a thoroughly admirable man. Why is the Times so eager to push woo?

New college admissions scam

May 19, 2023 • 12:00 pm

This article at ProPublica  (also co-published at the Chronicles of Higher Education) recounts what I consider a “scam” because it seems to be a largely unethical way to get students into college. Now that affirmative action is about to go down the drain, and standardized tests like the SAT are becoming more and more optional (the two issues are connected), canny entrepreneurs are developing new ways to give students college-worthy credentials.  But it sounds dubious to me.

Click to read:

Here’s how it works:

A.)  A company arises that promises to help students get into college by having them get some research published. (Real published research by high school students is rare).  They charge huge fees: from several thousand dollars to more than $10,000.

B.) Usually the companies pair a student with a “mentor”, a professor or graduate student who can help the student cobble together a paper.  (As you can imagine, many–but not all–of these papers are not of high quality.)  The “mentors” are paid huge fees for this: up to $200 per hour, far higher than graduate student wages)

C.) A publication is founded that will consider and accept papers written by high-school students (as you might guess, the ideas and writing itself often comes from the “mentors”).  Here’s one of them: the Scholarly Review. These journals also show “preprints”, unreviewed manuscripts that a student can put on their college-application c.v. There are many of these journals, and, unfortunately, some are connected with the very companies that charge students for getting mentors to help them write papers for college applications. Looking at the link will give you an idea about what counts as “publication.”

As you can imagine, many of these journals aren’t very selective, and publish papers with no reviews and no corrections. As the article says, “Almost any high school paper can find an outlet,”

D.) The papers are then touted on college applications. They do seem to help, but of course few evaluators are able to find time to read the papers, much less assess the research. Overall, it does burnish an application, though a lot of the burnishing is bogus. Given the stiff competition to get into good schools, though, parents are willing to pay high fees for the “service.”

E.) As it’s even harder for foreign students to get into American universities, there’s a lot of money to be made getting students overseas to “publish”. Here’s one company in India:

A short walk from India’s first Trump Tower, in an upscale neighborhood known for luxury homes and gourmet restaurants, is the Mumbai office of Athena Education, a startup that promises to help students “join the ranks of Ivy League admits.” An attendant in a white uniform waits at a standing desk to greet visitors in a lounge lined with paintings and featuring a coffee bar and a glass facade with a stunning view of the downtown skyline. “We all strive to get things done while sipping Italian coffee brewed in-house,” a recent Athena ad read.

Co-founded in 2014 by two Princeton graduates, Athena has served more than 2,000 students. At least 80 clients have been admitted to elite universities, and 87% have gotten into top-50 U.S. colleges, according to its website. One client said that Athena charges more than a million rupees, or $12,200 a year, six times India’s annual per capita income. Athena declined comment for this story.

Around 2020, Athena expanded its research program and started emphasizing publication. Athena and similar services in South Korea and China cater to international students whose odds of getting accepted at a U.S. college are even longer than those American students face. MIT, for instance, accepted 1.4% of international applicants last year, compared with 5% of domestic applicants.

A former consultant said Athena told her that its students were the “creme de la creme.” Instead, she estimated, 7 out of 10 needed “hand-holding.”

For publication, Athena students have a readily available option: Questioz, an online outlet founded by an Athena client and run by high schoolers. Former Editor-in-Chief Eesha Garimella said that a mentor at Athena “guides us on the paper editing and publication process.” Garimella said Questioz publishes 75%-80% of submissions.

Athena students also place their work in the Houston-based Journal of Student Research. Founded in 2012 to publish undergraduate and graduate work, in 2017 the journal began running high school papers, which now make up 85% of its articles, co-founders Mir Alikhan and Daharsh Rana wrote in an email.

Last June, a special edition of the journal presented research by 19 Athena students. They tested noise-reduction algorithms and used computer vision to compare the stances of professional and amateur golfers. A survey of Hong Kong residents concluded that people who grew up near the ocean are more likely to value its conservation. Athena’s then-head of research was listed as a co-author on 10 of the projects.

Publication in JSR was “pretty simple,” said former Athena student Anjani Nanda, who surveyed 103 people about their awareness of female genital mutilation and found that they were poorly informed. “I never got any edits or suggested changes from their side.”

As colleges abandon indices of merit (this is of course a way to accept students who would not get in using traditional merits), and go to “holistic” evaluation, this kind of scam will become more and more common. For you can include anything that makes you stand out as “holistic”, and money-grubbing  people will find a way to take advantage of that.

h/t: Steve