Official Website for Amitabha Palmer
What is It? Selective sharing involves sharing and promoting independent research to frame an issue in a way that is congenial to the propagandist. Drawing on independent research avoids people’s natural suspicions of interest-group funded or produced research (see: biased production). It also makes it harder to detect as propaganda. For a full set of […]
Read More Selective SharingI. Introduction Imagine that you can only know what you discover by yourself through trial and error. There are no websites, no books, no teachers, not even other people to talk to. How much could you know about the world? Do you think you could figure out which chemical molecules compose your food? What was […]
Read More How and Why Anti-Science Propaganda WorksUnless you’ve been living in a cave for the last week, you have seen the new systematic review of the existing evidence concerning the health effects and dietary guidelines surrounding red meat and processed meats. Without getting into the gory details, the review evaluates of the quality of the evidence that had guided previous dietary […]
Read More How Not to Argue for Animal Rights Online: What Proponents of Animal Rights Should Learn from the Revised Dietary Guidelines on Meat-EatingHere’s an article I wrote on how to survive and thrive in grad school. It was published in the American Philosophical Association (APA) blog: http://blog.apaonline.org/2019/09/09/thriving-and-surviving-grad-school/ An excerpt:One of the biggest traps you can fall into is to fail to be grateful for the extreme privilege of going to grad school. You begin to complain about how […]
Read More Surviving and Thriving in Grad SchoolI. IntroductionPlant-based meats and clean (aka lab-grown) meats will be the next targets of a well-financed major misinformation campaign. In the long run, the traditional meat industry is not going to be able to compete on price or quality. An informed consumer will rarely pay more for an inferior or similar product. The meat industry […]
Read More The Next Big Misinformation Campaign: Plant-Based and Clean Meats Are Dangerous!!!Introduction For a while, I’ve had the idea of writing short posts presenting right wing and conservative ideas as charitably as possible. There’s a tendency on both sides of the culture wars to oversimplify and straw man (person?) the opposition. I fall prey to this just as much as the next person but in an […]
Read More Gender, Sex, and Transgender DebatesI. Introduction Anytime a constitutional case intersects with the culture wars, you can bet your bottom dollar that everyone on social media will magically become a constitutional scholar–in their own minds anyway. Yes, folks, merely believing something is sufficient for it being true. But I digress (already)… In this post, I’m going to give an […]
Read More Theories of Constitutional Interpretation and How to Think About Upcoming Constitutional CasesAnyone teaching in college these days knows that plagiarism is a growing problem. Not just the incidence rate but student attitudes. Here’s an excerpt from a recent NPR piece on it: Student: Technically, I don’t think it’s cheating because, like, you’re paying someone to write an essay, which they don’t plagiarize, but they write everything […]
Read More How to Prevent Your Students from Plagiarizing: Stop Looking for A Technological SolutionHere’s a short essay I wrote for a one-page essay competition on the meaning of life. I was a dumbass and didn’t read the rules properly. The rules were one page double-spaced. Mine was one page single spaced which I figured out only after I’d submitted it. Anyway, I’ve posted it here so it doesn’t […]
Read More Stoicism vs Existentialism on the Meaning of LifeIntroductionI’ve been seeing what I take to be a lot of bad inferences by smart people concerning the Jussie Smollet hoax. There is a long-running narrative on parts of the right (particularly online) that we should be skeptical of the authenticity of many hate crimes. The Jussie Smollet hoax is pouring gasoline on this narrative […]
Read More Jussie Smollett, Bad Inferences, and Narrative