The Bad Scientist

Meet Ben Goldacre

"Since I was a teenager, whenever I have a pivotal life event coming—an exam, or an interview—I perform a ritual. I sit cross-legged on the floor, and I imagine an enormous golden beam of energy coming out of my arse."

And so begins a particularly shrewd and insightful column from, erm, wiseass Guardian columnist Ben Goldacre. A British epidemiologist, Goldacre is brilliant, entertaining, a colorful writer and mostly keeps to his own lane, handling scientific subjects in his "Bad Science" column and only occasionally prattling on about God.

This piece caught my attention because Goldacre makes a similar argument to one of the ideas I present in Fringe-ology, which is that the current tendency we have to pillory the paranormal might prevent us from finding things we might use. Goldacre, it seems, has found a way to use the vision of a golden beam pulsing out of his anus.

As a bonus, this video captures talking about The Placebo Effect.

He doesn't quite define what the he means by "flaky new age." And he can't seem to concede that this means a lot of New Age thinking about maintaining a positive outlook and, in a sense, believing in belief, is founded not in fantasy but that other thing called, you know, reality. But he is at least open to the dramatic power of the Placebo Effect, noting how incredible it is that a medicinally inert pill can even clear gastric ulcers—an incredible example of how believing something can actually make it so.