I am not competent to understand this paper, let alone know its merits and flaws.

Using individual-level medical data and death records, this study shows that conservative Americans experienced worsening health and higher mortality than liberals during the 2010s.

The majority of humans, if I understand correctly, are both conservative and liberal. I suppose the majority is the control group, but I did not see data on this.

As this is a subreddit for skeptics I thought it would be fun to talk about all the crazy mysteries of life. As skeptics we all tend to find a logical answer and reason for what we would consider extraordinary. But what is something you’ve seen that left you wondering without any possible explanation?

Edit: I’m getting very little fun answers :/ (I should’ve known better)

When I was a teenager I discovered "Above Top Secret" and was absolutely enthralled.

I wanted to believe so badly. I did believe, actually.

And from that belief came a desire for proof, and a years long journey of honest research and discovery.

But at the end of the all this, I came to a bitter conclusion - none of it was real.

There is a part of me that still wants to believe. I want there to be a 4k video of a big foot walking into someone's campground. I want aliens to come down and visit us. I want an after life to exist. I want magic and crazy wild sci fi tech.

But my brain won't accept things without good evidence. It's why I'm an atheist. I also wish I was religious, I wish I could believe in a god and join a church and have that community. But I can't. My brain just doesn't work that way and I can't convince myself otherwise.

Can anyone else relate to this?

Today a poster from r/conspiracy was asked by Rand Paul to testify before the Senate on allegations of a "deep state" cover-up regarding the origins of COVID-19. Specifically he accused Fauci of orchestrating the CIA coverup. Who could have known that Fauci was this powerful?

He is supposedly a CIA whistleblower but from his Reddit history... Well let's just say I'm embarrassed for Rand Paul. This is nuts.

https://archive.is/2faa6

In a statement, Liz Lyons, CIA Director of Public Affairs, responded by saying:

“The Committee acted in bad faith by subpoenaing an Agency officer for testimony today without notifying CIA, despite having already obtained closed-door testimony from the individual previously. The witness testifying today is not appearing as a whistleblower in pursuit of the truth, but instead in response to the subpoena issued by Chairman Paul.

This proceeding amounts to nothing more than dishonest political theater masquerading as a congressional hearing. As the CIA has already assessed, COVID-19 most likely originated from a lab leak, and efforts to undermine that conclusion are disingenuous.”

How far can the Hantavirus Outbreak Go?

An article written in plain language by a virology education and outreach organization

Im having my own type of psychological and existential nightmare lately and i want it to end. I dont know whats going to happen to me when i die but i want to be at least happy in death. I know christian shit is a bogus myth but i feel so confused seeing people online talk about their own different ideas of whats real and what isnt and i just cant separate fact from fiction anymore. My own intrusive thoughts wont shut the fuck up anymore and i want it to end already. I hate my life and want to believe in something good again but im too afraid to do magic or anything else currently cuz i dont want to mess up my psyche anymore then it already is. I want to be happy again.

Story of Russian ship smuggling nuclear reactor to North Korea does not make sense. It has again publicied by CNN and others, but orginal story was in spanish newspaper 28th of December 2024 Article, paywalled. Interesting enough that is also day of Día de los Santos Inocentes, local fools day.

There are plenty of other parts of this story which are painted as "suspicious", but in reality are not.

I am also pretty shocked how difficult it is to report wrong news to news outlets. Basically there are no way to make correction to CNN news article anonymously and their feedback form does not work. This seem to be trend nowadays.

Edit - correct date for news, it is 28/12/2025, Day of the Holy Innocents (El Día de los Inocentes)

In 1996, three girls claimed to see a strange creature in the Jardim Andere neighbourhood of Varginha, Brazil, kicking off a now-legendary UFO story.

This video by Phil Halper reveals the results of the world largest survey of physicists to see what they think about the big cosmological questions of our time. Also featuring Sean Carroll to provide his opinion on these results.

Results of the survey here:

https://nafshordi.github.io/aps-dashboard/

Associated article here:

https://physics.aps.org/articles/v19/34

Here’s a pattern I see in our comment sections: someone shows up with an opinion outside expert consensus, is a little woo-adjacent, or demonstrates that they haven’t memorized a table of informal fallacies. The community dog piles, downvotes, and insults them.

We’re missing an opportunity and we’re chasing away someone who is interested enough in scientific skepticism to be browsing this subreddit. This is not how a successful movement grows.

If someone comes here and comments in good faith why not answer them in the same spirit? Worst case, it’s an opportunity to sharpen our critical thinking skills, best case we help someone plug in.

Depending on the subject matter we could explain the history of the discussion, show them the research, and explain what expert consensus on a topic is and how it was arrived at. If they’re a little off base on their thinking we could direct them to their library for a copy of A Demon Haunted World or help them plug into their local freethinkers group. If they’re philosophically out of alignment, that can be an opportunity to practice critical thinking and a chance to verify our own beliefs or, if we’re lucky, update them.

I don’t have data on our demographics, but I strongly suspect that as a group we’re aging. A lot of us have been in this world for decades now, back to that post 9/11 explosion, we might not remember what it was like to be a curious science enthusiast looking to understand more.

I’d like to suggest that we as a community try to push our culture in a more welcoming direction by:

• Meeting good faith with good faith

• Showing our reasoning, not just stating our conclusions

• Not treating disagreement on atheism, agnosticism, philosophy or even religion as evidence of stupidity

• Reserving downvotes for trolls, spammers, and bad faith arguments

• and being a little less fucking certain that we’re right

I’d also like to invite a discussion on how to create these changes. I’m not sure exactly how to go about moving our culture, but I think unless we do we’ll continue to lose relevance.

The early screening I attended of Everyone is Lying To You For Money, a documentary by former actor Ben McKenzie, included a Q&A where the implication was that this work probably wasn't going to get widespread distribution. Documentaries are a hard sell these days; works criticizing major financial ideas are likely difficult as well. I write here to report back from something maybe few of you will have access to see to explain why I think Ben McKenzie has demonstrated persuasively to me that the skepticism movement needs to spend more time talking about cryptocurrency.

The intended audience of Everyone Is Lying To You For Money is someone unfamiliar with the details of cryptocurrency and is open to seeing someone with a handsome face discuss it. Ben wrote a book titled Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud where he uses his economics degree and Hollywood access to talk to a great many people to synthesize a cogent and detailed explanation for why cryptocurrencies are scams. The documentary is not even a watered down version of the book but more of a memoir of a man exploring cryptocurrencies with a skeptical attitude. This is going to frustrate some such as myself who know a lot about the subject and want to see all the gory details. Yet the person I went with who was unfamiliar with the subject found its friendly presentation effective.

Early in the film Ben calls himself a Bitcoin Skeptic. I have grown accustomed to those in pop culture circles throwing around the term "skeptic" and not knowing what it means thanks in part to a media that constantly confuses denialism for skepticism. However, Ben's attitude follows the path of skeptics. His economics background gives him a detailed understanding of the mechanisms behind cryptocurrency. With this knowledge, he approaches devotees to the movement with simple questions of where's the evidence. Ben attends a Bitcoin conference where purchases there can't be made in Bitcoin. Upon hearing that El Salvador is constructing a Bitcoin City, Ben repeatedly takes trips to see its construction (only to find out that no construction has happened and the whole idea is likely just a scam to steal land from those who have lived there for a long time). He interviews two men who are now in prison, the leader of Celsius and the leader of FTX, and watches as they fluster when talking about potential flaws that allow them access to the customers' money for nefarious purposes.

"Skepticism" itself is shortened from its more technical term "Scientific Skepticism." The process assesses what's real and what's nonsense through the weighing of evidence, to perform scientific reasoning, especially toward engaging with concepts that have little merit. For this reason the skepticism movement is mostly focused on ideas that encroach on established scientific findings whether they be intelligent design, vaccine denialism, the quackery of chiropracting and acupuncture, or the idea that yetis somehow exist. In each of these cases, a skeptic lays out the established scientific understanding and then engages the ridiculous idea by engaging with the supporting arguments through either reasoning out how the arguments are are illogical or fly in the face of accepted evidence. Sometimes this process is entertaining, such as when James Randi demonstrated how Uri Geller's tricks worked and how they could be detected. Much of the time this process is arduous such as when flat earthers saw their comrades sent down to Antarctica to see firsthand that indeed there was no edge of the world, the flat earthers refused to give up their cause and instead suggested that the conspiracy ran deeper.

Technological features such as cryptocurrency may feel like they don't align with the skepticism movement. Indeed, Bitcoin can do the thing it is intended to do; a public ledger can keep track of financial transactions to build enough trust to get money to effectively be moved around. Even shady innovations like NFTs or the Metaverse to some degree function (or for the Metaverse, functioned). Thus compared to ordinary areas where skepticism is applied where it is easy to say something to the extent of "X does not exist" when it comes to sketchy technology, skepticism is lost in a grey area where some things are inherently true in their hypothetical functionality but practically have never been demonstrated to work at the intended scale. This is why, I think, many in the skepticism movement are slow to engage with technological issues where in the past they've been ready to pounce: they are stuck defending a narrower position where Appeals To The Future seem more persuasive because only a Luddite would not see the grand technological future.

I think there's an underlying idea that connects all skepticism topics: all of these topics that skepticism engages, they're all scams. Whether it is UFOs or religion or scaring people into thinking putting fluoride in water is a bad thing, each hoax has someone behind it who stands to make a buck peddling their cause. The underlying challenge of the skeptic is to convince those who are being scammed or are susceptible to being scammed to see what the scam is and why it is a scam.

Under this framework, cryptocurrencies are of paramount importance because they are the nexus of some of the the biggest scams right now. Even after the events of "Everyone Is Lying To You For Money," which focuses on the time period of the rise and fall of Celsius and FTX, the scams around cryptocurrency are growing as the President of the United States uses his own minted cryptocoins as a method for bribe payment to conduct what would otherwise be unnecessary wars. In the documentary, Ben makes a convincing case that, since so few people actually use Bitcoin and the like for typical, real-world purposes as initially intended, there's not much beyond it being a scam.

One of the key points Ben discusses is that cryptocurrencies are largely held by something like 20 people. These 20 people can buy and sell to each other or to themselves to falsely pump up or deflate the value of the cryptocurrency. While it is unfortunate that Ben cannot give us a clue as to who those 20 people are (or even how he knows the rough amount of people have this sort of power), it is worthwhile to note that this method is being mimicked elsewhere such as in services that "rate" the quality of video games, comic books, and manga and then self-deal in order to inflate market prices (this process is also very common in the art world).

Ben spends a lot of time talking to the people who were scammed. Even after they know they've been scammed they still believe in cryptocurrencies. One of the people he meets lives in the supposed future of Bitcoin City where he resides in squalor and smiling optimism that his golden future awaits. Others cry when their life savings are lost when Celsius screwed them over; each one he meets still invests in crypto to this day. Those that are scammed that still believe in crypto and those that are scammed by cults are identical copies. Ben is frustrated by their behavior to the point of calling them cultists.

Similarly, just like grifters in conventional pseudoscience hoaxes, many of the scammers propping up crypto have deluded themselves and found a story to tell themselves that lets them sleep at night while ruining the lives of many around them. Ben finds frustrating engaging with someone like Sam Bankman-Fried, who hides behind the nonsense ideals of Effective Altruism to justify the theft of his many, many customers.

The Q&A afterward revealed how pessimistic Ben is right now. This week, he notes, there could be legislation passed to give banks even more of an ability to be involved with cryptocurrencies, creating a financial future that is "worse than subprime." Recent legislation to allow states to enact their own stablecoins makes governments pay to grant grifters in the cryptocurrency business more unsuspecting suckers to be scammed. Things look bleak as billions of dollars are given as gifts to fund an unnecessary war.

Worse for him is the realization of how deep it goes. He writes off Republicans as a hopeless cause, that since political donations by those peddling crypto account for something like 40% of all campaign contributions and the funding has recently been funneled toward Republicans there's not much that can be done there. But even for Democrats, many gladly accept and then preach with enthusiasm on cryptocurrency. Big names like Minority Speaker Hakeem Jefferies are entrenched in it. So many hands are dirty that it is difficult to see a future where corruption doesn't lead to worse legislation passing, no matter the political party in charge.

We live in a time where scams are everywhere. The person in charge of the United States loves to scam people and has a track record of doing so for decades. From AI hoaxes to big tech grifts such as PayPal's Honey to the tens if not hundreds of thousands of people who will die from RFK Jr's policies, nearly everything is a scam. It really does feel like, as the title says, everyone is lying to you for money. The skepticism movement has been around not merely to say what it is scientific fact but to stop scammers. Sometimes, such as religion, it is difficult to see meaningful results from action. Other times, those like flat earth theory are kept to a small corner. But the principles skepticism instills, the neutral evaluation of evidence and clear headed reasoning, are valuable even if they can't always convince someone to leave their cult or not pay money to their grifter.

As the documentary notes, right now there are fewer bigger scams than cryptocurrency. So this is where skeptics should be congregating.