(Photo: Blogger)

Homeopathy, an alternative form of medicine employed by free-spirited aunts everywhere, has just made a very potent enemy. On his newly-minted Quora blog, Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales voiced his disapproval for the method, which has been systematically proven to be an ineffective pseudoscience.

While suffering from a cold, Mr. Wales asked a pharmacist in London to suggest a remedy. The pharmacist suggested Oscillococcinum, a French homeopathic remedy that he claimed would "disrupt the DNA of the virus before it could make [him] ill." Unfortunately for this poor pharmacist, he had no idea who he was talking to.

Mr. Wales politely declined the recommendation and instead purchased some cough drops. But his hatred for homeopathy was reignited.

The flu, Mr. Wales argues, is a dangerous virus that kills people every year, and yet some people may eschew a life-saving vaccine in order to take homeopathic remedies that are falsely marketed as being effective. "What I want to know is this: why is this legal?" Mr. Wales wondered. "Or, if it is not legal, then what can be done about it?"

Since the Wikipedia cofounder is a little busy at the moment, he asked who he should contact to help fight the good fight against homeopathy. "This is not my primary area of interest and so I am not the right person to lead it myself," he wrote. "But I would like to help."

Mr. Wales is not alone: Many technologists, scientists, Singulatarians and skeptics have also voiced their anti-homeopathy stance. Last year, Singularity University's VP of academics Vivek Wadha came under fire for allegedly spreading the dark art of "pseudoscience" when he let a homeopath speak to students.

(h/t Carl Franzen)

(Photo: Wadhwa.com)

We thought the debate over homeopathy had been settled long ago, when several credible academic studies found that the alternative medicine wasn't proven to work better than a placebo. Turns out we may have just lapse into "closed-mindedness."

The scientists at Skepticblog are up in arms about an email out of the academic department of Singularity University that seemed to give credence to homeopathy. In case you're not a Kurzweilan futurist, S.U. is a non-profit institution dedicated to teaching students how to facilitate "the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges." It's kind of like summer camp, but for people who believe our consciousness will one day merge with robots.

Brian Dunning, a writer at Skepticblog, obtained an email sent from Singularity U.'s VP of Academics, Vivek Wadhwa, which "used hoary fallacious logic to encourage students to give pseudoscience equal consideration, and gave a platform to a homeopath (!!) to promote his business." The email was sent to a large list of students and staff.

In the email, Mr. Wadhwa encourages students to challenge the establishment (traditional medicine), reminding them that, "it is always the most controversial ideas and concepts that lead to the greatest advances."

Of course, Mr. Dunning, well-acquainted with the scientific findings regarding homeopathy, outlined several logical fallacies compacted into Mr. Wadhwa's short correspondence, concluding:

Controversial ideas that have already been proven wrong are not something that a VP of Academics should be encouraging his students to investigate further....My hope is that this episode was a fluke and does not represent the standards of Singularity U.

Mr. Dunning's post inspired a spirited debate on Hacker News, with some Singularity U. grads arguing that Mr. Wadhwa was simply trying to facilitate discussion, while others claimed they had lost all respect for him. The post also elicited a response from Eliezer Yudkowsky, cofounder of the Singularity Institute:

The Singularity Institute is working on [a logic class] (or rather, the spinning-off Center for Applied Rationality is working on it); and indeed, we have literally been known to refer to it as "Defense Against the Dark Arts".

Perhaps everyone should just take a sniff of lavender and calm down.