Top all-time · #752
Skeptoid
Personal blog · skeptoid.comsciencehistory
Skeptoid is a personal blog at skeptoid.com about science and history. Since 2008, 87 different Hacker News readers have linked it 145 times, most often “There Is No Finland: Birth of a Conspiracy Theory”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 7 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
Linked for skeptical episodes on pseudoscience, myths and contested claims, such as Myers-Briggs, nuclear winter, the Voynich manuscript and the Pacific garbage patch, often cited as a source.
- Recommended for · 7 comments
- Called a great podcast, an excellent write-up, a good summary and a nice episode, and recommended as worth a look.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Skeptoid is an award-winning weekly science podcast. Since 2006, Skeptoid has been revealing the true science behind popular misinformation and urban legends.
Most-linked posts?
- /episodes/41154 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2009-04-25
- /episodes/48183 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-05-03
- /episodes/46033 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-01-16
- There Is No Finland: Birth of a Conspiracy Theory3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-12-07
- /episodes/42212 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2010-12-28
- /episodes/41842 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2010-01-09
- /episodes/42952 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-03-08
- Bend Over and Own Your Own Business2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-10-11
- /episodes/40212 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-06-15
- Is speed reading really possible? 2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-02-25
What Hacker News says?
I got curious what you meant by 'INTJ and INTP'. I founds this in the WikiPedia: "INTJ (introversion, intuition, thinking, judgment) is an abbreviation used in the publications of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to refer to one of the sixteen personality types." Ah, Myers-Briggs, a pyschometric system. I've read some criticism about it: (two excerpts) An American woman, Katherine Briggs, bought Jung's book an…
Comment linking /episodes/4221
on “I am very real”Submitted Is speed reading really possible? as a story · 253 points
HN discussionAuthorative as they may sound, EWG is not a good source to rely on. https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4623
Comment linking /episodes/4623
on “U.S. imposes first-ever national drinking water limits on PFAS”Submitted Stalin's Human-Ape Hybrids as a story · 25 points
HN discussion> this tool is truly excellent for breaking the subvocalization habit Which, according to all the research I've seen, is exactly what you don't want to do if you want to retain any information. (I couldn't find the study I remembered reading recently, but this article references some such studies http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4229 )
Comment linking /episodes/4229
on “Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training”Submitted Steve Jobs, A Lesson in Treating Illness as a story · 17 points
HN discussionYou're not going to solve the problem and your municipality isn't helping unless it burning the garbage, because that's what contaminated loads are. There's absolutely no reason to have multi stream plastics recycling at the consumer end, save for plastic bags because at scale they can be recycled. Only a very small amount of plastics are monetarily valuable. I would not feel guilty at all about throwing out plastic…
Comment linking /episodes/4671
on “Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated”Submitted There Is No Finland: Birth of a Conspiracy Theory as a story · 6 points
HN discussionIt's an appealing hypothesis, but there's some compelling evidence to the contrary [0]. I'm not an expert, but this could potentially fall under the heading of pop history or pseudohistory. [0] https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4707
Comment linking /episodes/4707
on “108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring”Submitted Facts and Fiction of Polynesian Navigation as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThere is a skeptoid episode[0] from 2011 that overviews the different types and some of the science behind it. And, it even mentions the difference between a voting system and a ranking system. [0] http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4281
Comment linking /episodes/4281
on “Senators skip classified briefing on NSA snooping to catch flights home”Submitted Scientists Are Not Created Equal as a story · 4 points
HN discussionhttps://www.quora.com/Is-the-nuclear-winter-a-hoax?share=1 and https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4244 both discuss more detail; but (especially in the 80s) there wasn't "detail", there was just the same "trust us or else!".
Comment linking /episodes/4244
on “Wuhan lab staff sought hospital care before Covid-19 outbreak disclosed”Submitted There Is No Finland: Birth of a Conspiracy Theory as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIce sheets moving rocks, this has been seen before: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4021 "The surrounding mountains were still covered with snow, and the playa itself was firm but had a large lake covering about a fifth of its surface, perhaps an inch or two deep at its edges, concentrated at the playa's south end where it's lowest. We ventured out, armed with cameras, shortly before sunrise. The temperature was just a…
Comment linking /episodes/4021
on “Death Valley National Park: First Observation of Rocks in Motion”Submitted The Riddle of the L-8 Blimp as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThat reminds me of the first episode of Skeptoid I listened to: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4115
Comment linking /episodes/4115
on “Cosmonaut Crashed Into Earth 'Crying In Rage' [in 1967]”Submitted Slacktivism: Raising Awareness as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> Furthermore, they cannot be demonstrated with current tools. I don't know what you mean by they ? It is you who fails to objectively demonstrate the phenomena and claims knowledge. This is called mysticism, plain and simple. > The Randi challenge is a great point and I have already thought of reaching out to Robert Bruce on his forum to ask him why he himself does not submit a proposal to the institution, seeing a…
Comment linking /episodes/4075
on “Steve Jobs, LSD and Drug Freedom”Submitted What You Didn't Know about the Stanford Prison Experiment as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI think it's been raised in the context of a fair few sightings where there's supposedly been a very large craft moving silently and relatively slowly, e.g. the 2000 Illinois sightings (referenced in a great song by Sufjan Stevens). I was looking into this one a few years ago and found references to a private company testing blimp platforms for military purposes around that period, although I can't find it off the t…
Comment linking /episodes/4435
on “The U.S.S. Akron and U.S.S. Macon, America's “flying aircraft carriers””Submitted Fukushima vs Chernobyl vs Three Mile Island as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSustainability is an over hyped and misunderstood term. http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4005
Comment linking /episodes/4005
on “The Ocean is Broken (2013)”Submitted Carthage should be destroyed (2015) (149 BCE) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionMedia outlets were driving panic. Scientists were always saying warming is a problem https://skeptoid.com/episodes/876
Comment linking /episodes/876
on “Worst-case glacial lake flood scenarios in a transboundary Himalayan basin 2022”Submitted Finding the Lost Tribesmen: Aure and Aura as a story · 1 points
HN discussionOn “subvocalization” ... > It’s simply not possible to comprehend what you’re reading and avoid using that inner voice. So reading faster means being able to use this inner voice faster, not eliminating it. To further that, expert speed readers who were studied also subvocalized, they just did it faster. I’ve seen this argued elsewhere, and am not convinced they’ve found readers who do not subvocalize to study. Most…
Comment linking /episodes/4229
on “I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)”Submitted Mao's Barefoot Doctors: The Secret History of Chinese Medicine as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe intro paragraph to the wikipedia article about MBTI is nothing but citations about how bad it is. Aside from that, the standard sources of psuedoscience woo debunking all have long articles https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4221 and finally https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/09/the-personality-test-tha... has a brief bio on Katharine Cook Briggs
Comment linking /episodes/4221
on “IQ Matters Less Than You Think”Submitted Forensic (Pseudo) Science as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
