In The Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan has a short section on the role of rhetoric in discourse, which is something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time now. In Caplan’s analysis, he makes the case that since people have preferences over beliefs, being right isn’t sufficient to convince them that [...]
As anyone who reads this blog probably knows, logical discourse is something I spend a good deal of time thinking about. So, as is my wont, I now turn my eye to how logical discourse relates to information. In my view, logical discourse serves two major functions: in the first place, it allows you to [...]
It seems common to disparage twitter by saying that people are just sharing mindless minutiae that no one cares about.Maybe it is the case that twitter is, in fact, a time-wasting endeavor filled with people just pumping out tons of information that no one cares about. I am much more inclined to believe, however, that [...]
On more than one occasion in the past week alone, I’ve been accused of fallacious reasoning for the use of a reductio ad absurdam. This is a bit of a tricky issue, because a reductio is only useful when someone hasn’t taken into account all of their own premises. What you do is to stress [...]
Much of what I’ve been reading I’ve been reading lately has dealt with the subject of rationality and rational choice theory. I’m still trying to get my head around the general arguments about the thing, but I have come up with a basic framework for what I think of the subject.
First off, the arguments that [...]
If you’ve ever looked at the transcripts of Brian Dunning’s Skeptoid podcasts, you may have noticed that he always includes a “References” link to this page, wherein he explains that there are no references to be found. I think it’s an interesting example that illustrates how Dunning (and presumably the people he is writing this [...]
In Wednesday’s post, I talked about how the authors of this Washington Post article vastly overstated their case by neglecting Bayes’ theorem. In that post, I took for granted the assumption that their assessment was correct when they said that only 1 in 200 truly random distributions would exhibit the number frequencies seen in the [...]
In this article, political scientists Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco make the case that they have compelling evidence of election fraud in Iran just based on the statistical distribution of the numbers coming in from the polling booths. They make their case based on the fact that humans aren’t perfect random number generators, and so [...]
Way back on May 27th, Planet Money ran a story that I found was a particularly good example of another kind of misuse of human interest in logical discourse. The story in question, from their podcast entitled Listen to Your Parents, is a two minute segment wherein they talk to some random guy who is [...]
USA Today has uncovered this important news story about what happens when you try to come in the US without fingerprints. Spoiler alert: It’s a bit harder to get through customs but not a big deal, really. This excerpt from the end of the article sums it up:
In the world, an estimated one in 50 [...]
Physical chemistry Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley and all around curious guy.