How to Ensure You Are Always Right

Welcome to Part 2 of my mini-series on better reasoning (Lesson 1). In today’s lesson we’re going to learn how to prove that you are right every single time–even when you’re not! You will learn about two important concepts: confirmation bias and counter-exampling. Confirmation bias is our brain’s tendency to see only confirming evidence for […]

Read More How to Ensure You Are Always Right

The Skeptic and The Fool

The internet is a fantastic place. You can find some of the most intelligent ideas and some of the most fantastically stupid ideas. Lately, the internet has been providing more of the latter. My response hasn’t been what I’d like it to be. For over ten years I’ve been studying conspiracism, science denialism, and political […]

Read More The Skeptic and The Fool

IF YOU LIKE SOCIALISM SO MUCH, WHY DON’T YOU MOVE TO VENEZUELA?

We’re entering election season in the US of A, so it’s time to pollute the internet’s comments sections with fear mongering, bad arguments, strawmen, and knee-jerk reactions. Of course, these rhetorical techniques and fallacious argument forms pervade all domains of discourse. But when it comes to political discourse in ‘Murica, expect to find these cranked […]

Read More IF YOU LIKE SOCIALISM SO MUCH, WHY DON’T YOU MOVE TO VENEZUELA?

Selective Sharing

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 Sharing

How Not to Argue for Animal Rights Online: What Proponents of Animal Rights Should Learn from the Revised Dietary Guidelines on Meat-Eating

Unless 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-Eating

Surviving and Thriving in Grad School

Here’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 School