Recent Blog Posts
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RPGs and skepticism (Sunday fun post)
If you really aren’t interested in video games at all, you….probably won’t bother reading this post. But if you’re somewhat interested in them but don’t know much about them, you might not know that this weekend has been BlizzCon, the annual convention held in Anaheim, California by Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard’s most famous and far-reaching games are…
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Biased ! = wrong
Let me say this, right from the start: I love biases. No, I don’t love that they exist, but I think they’re endlessly fascinating. I love thinking about them, identifying them, figuring out where they come from. Studying biases is how I came to the realization that the way we generally think about human reasoning is…
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Spokespeople
Not allowed to be right aboutanything. After posting a clip from Bill Maher’s show in which the comedian mocks the Republican presidential candidates, Ed Brayton got some flack from readers complaining that they wouldn’t watch it because Maher has established himself as having some pseudoscientific views, specifically being anti-vaccination. When Ed expressed confusion about why…
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The phenomenon of the petty tyrant
Researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Business decided to examine the relationship between status and power in how people treat each other. So they organized a study that involved telling participants they would be working on a business exercise with another student, and randomly assigning each participant a role in the project with a…
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“Normal” is overrated
“We’re all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that’s all.” — Andrew, The Breakfast Club The Pervocracy has a great post on the end of “normal” relationships in general, but I particularly liked the part about gender norms: you don’t have to be non-heterosexual to question what gender means to…
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Coulda been, shoulda been, never woulda been
Apparently October 9th is National Pro Life Cupcake Day. Did you know? It’s a day when pastries become political…poor pastries. Pressed into service on behalf of highly controversial issue which doesn’t have, so far as I can tell, any direct connection to wax paper wrappers and frosting. But, one might ask, how is this joyous…