Category Archives: MInd

What We Learned from This Morning’s Newspaper

Posted on 19 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Robert H. Frank, Molly Worthen, Anthony Doerr, and Nicholas Kristof on cutting taxes for the rich, rejecting Roy Moore-style evangelicalism, how even the conscientious among us react to warnings of climate change, and how Blue States do better at practicing … Continue reading →

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Links and Comments: Philip Pullman meets Matthew Hutson

Posted on 25 October 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

There was a big profile of Philip Pullman in the New York Times Magazine a couple weeks ago– Philip Pullman Returns to His Fantasy World — on the occasion of the first book in his new trilogy that parallels his … Continue reading →

Posted in Atheism, MInd | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Philip Pullman meets Matthew Hutson

Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow: Intro and Chapter 1

Posted on 13 September 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

This is perhaps the most influential book of the past couple decades on the whole subject of human mental biases, how the ways in which we think entail errors of perception, and employ heuristics that are often but not always … Continue reading →

Posted in Evolution, MInd, Psychology | Comments Off on Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow: Intro and Chapter 1

George Lakoff on the Conservative Moral Hierarchy

Posted on 14 July 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Retired UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff answers Two Questions About Trump and Republicans that Stump Progressives, a piece that has gotten some circulation the past couple weeks. The questions are: 1) Why don’t Trump supporters turn against Trump even though … Continue reading →

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Carl Sagan’s “Baloney Detection Kit”

Posted on 16 June 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Carl Sagan, one of the great scientist-communicators to the general public of the past century, author of the 1980 book Cosmos and host of the 1980 TV series of that name, has a list of ideas for how to evaluate … Continue reading →

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Linkdump: Science, society, conspiracy theories, the fear of NRA conventioneers

Posted on 12 June 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Science: The Atlantic: Are We Living in a Giant Cosmic Void?. Maybe. Scientific American: How the Science of “Blue Lies” May Explain Trump’s Support. Subtitle: “They are a very particular form of deception that can build solidarity within groups” Guardian: … Continue reading →

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Links and Comments: Tribal Epistemology

Posted on 8 June 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Out of all the links compiled for my previous links post, this is the most substantial, the one I have enough comments on to put in a separate post. 19 May: Vox, David Roberts: Donald Trump and the rise of … Continue reading →

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Parents, Children, Identities: Andrew Solomon’s FAR FROM THE TREE

Posted on 19 May 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

This is an enormous book, 962 pages long, 702 of that text (with the remainder consisting of encyclopedic notes, a lengthy bibliography, and an index). The book is about how parents deal with exceptional children, covering ten categories of exceptionality, … Continue reading →

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Sapolsky on religion, and human behavior

Posted on 18 May 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Via today’s Morning Heresy blog by Paul Fidalgo, this item from Robert M. Sapolsky, a short video on a site called Big Think, called Atheism vs. Religion: Which Is the Healthier Viewpoint?. His thesis is that religious belief, in eternal … Continue reading →

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How science can explain why you don’t believe in science

Posted on 8 May 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s another recent commentary from the San Francisco Chronicle, this by Caille Millner: Free speech is a joke when laughing is a crime It’s nominally about the 61-year-old woman who was just *convicted* of “disorderly and disruptive conduct” for laughing … Continue reading →

Posted in MInd, Science | Comments Off on How science can explain why you don’t believe in science