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Tag Archives: philosophy

Paging Dr. Collins

More on skepticism v. cynicism
 httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T69TOuqaqXI&feature=player_embedded
 I sent that Collins article to a sociologist friend of mine, and she explained that both his faulty understanding of what science is and his extraordinary mistrust of it derive from a tradition in anthropology of anti-westernism left over from guilt about the field being founded to study indigenous peoples during [...]

Surely you’re joking, Mr. Collins!

[Alternate title: In which I tactlessly destroy an article in Nature]
 Except that I am not laughing.  I’m really not.  This I would have expected from New Scientist, but from Nature?
 As a skeptic, my very first issue is with the title of the article (in full here):
  We cannot live by scepticism alone
But Collins doesn’t mean [...]

Miscellany

Coffee shop revolutionary – (noun) one who believes that progressive change results from whining about the current political climate over iced white mochas and chai tea lattes
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NSFW (i.e. put in some headphones)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHqq6kPbzsg
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You can now buy my personal information (including call registry, gps location data, and purchased services) from Verizon Wireless.
I’m not a constitutional lawyer or [...]

Another quick pre-class post

Family break-up, unprincipled advertising, too much competition in education and income inequality are mentioned as big contributing factors.
A panel of independent experts carried out the study over three years.
The report, called The Good Childhood Inquiry and commissioned by the Children’s Society, concludes that children’s lives in Britain have become “more difficult than in the [...]

There is also no lettuce

Not having been trained in philosophy, it took a bit longer than I had expected to make it all the way through the most recent version of Susan Hurley’s shared circuits model.  Off the top, I must admit that it is quite an achievement of thought , but something doesn’t sit quite right with me [...]

Pop psychology rant in F# minor

And this here is one of the reasons no one takes psychology seriously.  I wouldn’t bother reading the whole thing (it’s about the DSM-V), but I found this quote particularly resonant:
“This is not cardiology or nephrology, where the basic diseases are well known,” said Edward Shorter, a leading historian of psychiatry whose latest book, “Before [...]

I can only express surprise that borders on alarm

As this just came out, I feel it appropriate that the first science discussion we will have after my exams are done should be Susan Hurley’s shared circuits model.  I actually derived this independently while doing background reading in cortical processing for my perceptual research with Jeanine, and only discovered Hurley’s work a few months [...]

Strategic underwear shopping locations

The conference was… interesting. Because of my class schedule, I could only attend one of the three sessions, but I did see a really good presentation on the effects of hormones on executive function given by Dr. Sternberg. The evening ended with me getting into a two hour argument with a group of [...]