Category Archives: Psychology

Links from NYT recently, with Comments

Posted on 12 April 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

Op-ed by Amy Sullivan in the New York Times, April 1 (posted March 31): Trump’s Christian Soldiers The recurring, amazing fact that the self-righteous evangelicals support someone like Trump. You could open a publishing press devoted to the theological and … Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Culture, Evolution, Politics, Psychology | Leave a comment

Link and Comments: UFOs and Other Fairy Tales

Posted on 26 December 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

No I don’t “believe” in UFOs, in the sense of believing them to be evidence of extraterrestrial visitors, because I’ve long been too familiar with the many ways human perception can go awry and of the many ways reports of … Continue reading →

Posted in Psychology, Religion | Leave a comment

Links and Comments: Regulations; Science on Sundays; How to Talk to Someone in a Conservative Bubble

Posted on 26 December 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Slate: Trump’s quiet attack on the regulatory state is another part of his broader class war The conservatives’ simplistic rebellion against “regulations” will have consequences, and costs. Regulations are there for a reason. Yes, these rules and regulations might technically … Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Psychology, Religion, Science | Leave a comment

Lunacies: On Finland and Flat-Earthers

Posted on 24 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Vice, from December 2016: This Dude Accidentally Convinced the Internet That Finland Doesn’t Exist. The article touches on how some people will believe anything, and the notion of Poe’s Law There is an internet adage named after a commenter by … Continue reading →

Posted in Lunacy, Psychology | Comments Off on Lunacies: On Finland and Flat-Earthers

Link and Comments: Fractured Reality

Posted on 20 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

The cultural theme of this second decade of the 21st century seems to be the fracturing of consensus cultural norms, even of consensus reality, especially in the US. I’ve observed this in tandem with reading about advances in psychology, over … Continue reading →

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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 →

Posted in MInd, Politics, Psychology, Religion, Science | Comments Off on What We Learned from This Morning’s Newspaper

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

More from Cory Doctorow’s Locus Interview

Posted on 17 July 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

While editing the ‘excerpts’ from Cory Doctorow’s long interview in the current issue of Locus Magazine, excerpts that I posted online on Sunday (here), I captured several other passages from that interview that particularly appeal to the themes of this … Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Culture, Psychology, Species Reset | Comments Off on More from Cory Doctorow’s Locus Interview

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 →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Cosmology, Lunacy, MInd, Psychology, Science | Comments Off on Linkdump: Science, society, conspiracy theories, the fear of NRA conventioneers