by Carl Howard | May 24, 2014 | Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, Charity and Philanthropy, Mind, Psychology and Consciousness
When I was in Cambodia, I saw lots of beggars. For obvious reasons, I didn’t want to give money to people begging. However, simply saying no and leaving it at that didn’t seem right either. The idea I came up with was to record the number of encounters with beggars....
by Carl Howard | Apr 29, 2014 | Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, Ethics, Evolution and Biology, Feminism and LGBT, Science and Skepticism
There have been some stories over the last few years of parents who are raising a “genderless” child. Of course, this always gets a severe case of moral panic and I have found even people who are usually a bit less prone to such stuff lose their shit a little. Two of...
by Carl Howard | Apr 22, 2014 | Atrocities and Oppression, Biases and Fallacies, Ethics, Mind, Psychology and Consciousness, Race, Society
I used to watch Law and Order. Embarrassing, right? For those who don’t know, it’s a long-running half-cop half-courtroom show focussing on the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. Naturally, the characters’ bias is going to be against defendants. One scene...
by Carl Howard | Apr 15, 2014 | Biases and Fallacies, Ethics, Medicine
“Whatever you do, stop drinking tap water!” my grandma told my mum over the phone a few weeks ago. When asked why, she said that she read in the paper about how ‘they’ found that Australian tap water has something carcinogenic in it. I use the term “newspaper”...
by Carl Howard | Feb 5, 2014 | Biases and Fallacies, Mind, Psychology and Consciousness, Science and Skepticism
A year ago, I moved. The new apartment is in a building right behind a train station. There’s just a very small park between it and the station, maybe 25 metres across. The park has a playground and a table with benches and a roof. It’s a fairly quiet suburb and a...
by Carl Howard | Jan 27, 2014 | Atrocities and Oppression, Biases and Fallacies, Ethics, Society
I saw a meme recently (captioned “He lost an arm. She had a double mastectomy. This is their Christmas card…”): Woman getting a bra as a Christmas present, man using hook to take out a present which is a glove for the hand he’s missing. Both look sheepish. This...
