by Carl Howard | Jan 9, 2012 | Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, Charity and Philanthropy, Science and Skepticism, Society
I thought a brief foray into cartooning (using material from other people’s hard work) would explain things better than words: I think ultimately it’s just another example of folk-Kantianism (ie. caring mostly about the “intent” of an act, quite literally an...
by Carl Howard | Dec 8, 2011 | Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, Race, Resources, Food and Environment, Society
t’s recently come up in a Facebook discussion that I don’t think the idea of a “Third World” has much merit. I’ve posted on this briefly a few years ago but I hope I’ve learnt a thing or two since then! Just to get things clear, there are definitions of First/Third...
by Carl Howard | Nov 14, 2011 | Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, Evolution and Biology, Philosophy, Science and Skepticism
A quick follow-up to last week’s post about the dancing squid. An interesting related post was made on the Seed of Reason blog in 2009. The post speaks of the danger of basing too much of our conclusions about the lives of animals on direct observation — which I would...
by Carl Howard | Nov 7, 2011 | Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, Evolution and Biology, Science and Skepticism
You might have seen this video making the rounds a few months ago. It’s of a whole (small) squid on a bowl of rice in presumably a Japanese restaurant. The diner pours soy sauce over the squid and it starts to wriggle around coming alive. My first impression of the...
by Carl Howard | Sep 6, 2011 | Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, Philosophy, Science and Skepticism
There’s quite a lot of content out there that reaches beyond the standard logical fallacies and peels the layers of the onion. It talkis about the deeper biases and features of our brain that make us all susceptible to flawed and magical thinking, as opposed to more...
by Carl Howard | Aug 22, 2011 | Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, Evolution and Biology, Interesting Stuff, Science and Skepticism
You’re probably familiar with the original Sokal’s Hoax. If not here’s a brief summary otherwise skip down to the Sokal 2 heading. The Sokal hoax was perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a professor of physics+mathematics dismayed at the excesses of postmodernism in academia....
