Intelligence, logic, statistics, and one's own petard (2012/05/16)
A while back, Eric Raymond blogged what he called an intelligence test. It’s based on the much-commented on “the talk: non-black edition” piece that was making the rounds a while back. Raymond continues with some questions, then says:
[read more...]Cognitive dissonance and how people manage it. (2012/05/13)
The human brain is a complicated thing, and people have a lot of ego invested in thinking they are smart and correct.
[read more...]Thanks to the Internet, societal change is faster. (2012/05/09)
Back in 2011, Rick Perry was whining about how there is “something wrong in this country when gays can openly serve in the military”. Ten years ago, that might have been a selling point, politically. But then, ten years ago, you didn’t find out, in real time, how people felt about things.
[read more...]Amazing discovery: Talking to people sometimes helps. (2012/05/02)
School experiments with finding out why kids are acting up, discovers that this helps.
[read more...]No girl believes that she's beautiful... (2012/04/27)
Someone posted a little image meme on Tumblr recently, which was just the oh-so inspiring text:
[read more...]Sometimes you just gotta eat the losses (2012/04/25)
A lot of our problems come from people being obsessively focused, somewhat irrationally, on trying to absolutely eliminate things that they regard as losses. From the DMCA’s “anti-circumvention” rules to the attempts at making SOPA/PIPA (and new attempts to make the same laws again), there is a huge amount of damage being done or attempted in the hopes of completely eradicating copyright infringement.
[read more...]The tone argument argument: A straw man in motion (2012/04/11)
Someone linked me to a discussion of the tone argument. Here’s the key point:
[read more...]Stereotypes: Sometimes not purely made up. (2012/04/11)
Homophobia stronger in unacknowledged gays.
[read more...]Dear Mr. Santorum: You are out of order (2012/04/10)
Someone made a quip that Rick Santorum ought to have to carry his dead campaign to term, but this is of course ridiculous.
[read more...]Power laws and percentages (2012/04/09)
So, was thinking more about the Million dollar Murray article. This raises an interesting question.
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