Showing posts with label reason. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reason. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Sam Harris and Ezra Klein on intelligence and race

›
Recently atheist activist Sam Harris and journalist Ezra Klein had a discussion about intelligence and race . The background is that Harris ...
3 comments:
Saturday, March 10, 2018

Reading The Varieties of Religious Experience: Lecture 2

›
In his second lecture, James defines what he would 'religion' consider to be for the purposes of the lecture series. He stresses r...
Monday, September 11, 2017

What exactly is new about New Atheism?

›
On Sunday I went back to the book fair with my family, and of course I bought another few books. One of them is a collection of essays writt...
Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Discussions of diversity and equality are generally very depressing

›
Somebody at Google circulated an opinion piece on Google's diversity efforts, which was ultimately published by Gizmodo . A public discu...
Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Cogent Spam and, while we are at it, ARTOAJ spam

›
In the last two weeks several of the blogs I read have discussed an attempted 'hoax' publication that aimed to repeat for gender stu...
1 comment:
Saturday, March 25, 2017

How not to convince a scientist that comic artists make good science communicators

›
Thanks to RationalWiki I found a blog post by a comic artist on science communication . It left me confused at several levels. As always I ...
Saturday, March 11, 2017

Promiscuity

›
Recently I participated in an interesting discussion on the internet. The main topic was how some people reject scientific evidence if it co...
Thursday, December 17, 2015

Fun with trendline charts

›
Via Pharyngula I was recently lead to an American blog that had produced the following chart of average annual global temperatures, appare...
Tuesday, November 10, 2015

The historicity of Jesus

›
One topic that regularly comes up in parts of the blogosphere I read is whether there was a real human being at the root of the Jesus charac...
Friday, November 6, 2015

Reading Stormfront, Book One of the Dresden Files

›
The last three weeks have been a bit full; first field work, then meeting, then moving house, and then a bad cold. But although we are still...
Saturday, June 6, 2015

Will you only believe that the sky is blue if a recent peer-reviewed paper says so?

›
The usual disclaimer: The following is my personal opinion. It is not my professional opinion and much less necessarily the opinion of any o...
Saturday, May 23, 2015

An interesting congruence of objectivist and singularitarian beliefs

›
In the latest instalment of his dissection of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged Adam Lee of Daylight Atheism discusses, and quotes at length s...
3 comments:
Monday, February 9, 2015

Alter Wein in neuen Schläuchen

›
It often seems to me as if the milieu or class of technology-savvy and allegedly, according to themselves at least, "rational" peo...
Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Intelligence is not actually magic

›
Reading once more a discussion of the singularitarian movement Less Wrong , it occurs to me that the principal mistake of singularitarians ...
Sunday, November 16, 2014

Your mileage may vary on certain internet discussion memes

›
I do consider myself to be an advocate of equality for all, of feminism, and of inclusiveness. However, when reading controversies around th...
Friday, October 10, 2014

Limits to growth

›
Economics is not usually the topic of this blog, but this week I read something that I found quite remarkable. Nobel Prize winning macro-e...
Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Real and difficult problems

›
One argument that I have come across surprisingly often in recent times is this: Many smart people have thought hard about topic X and found...
Friday, September 26, 2014

Still don't understand what supernatural means

›
Some time ago I wrote that I don't really understand what supernatural is supposed to mean . Recently I took the opportunity of a discus...
Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Consciousness and the Fallacy of Composition

›
I wrote some time ago that I consider the Just World Fallacy to be perhaps the most pernicious fallacy there is, but lately it seems as if ...
4 comments:
Friday, July 4, 2014

Techno-optimists are strange

›
Recently a post by PZ Myers at his blog Pharyngula, originally about how frequent intelligent life can be assumed to be in the galaxy, got ...