Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label skeptics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label skeptics. Show all posts

Friday, January 17, 2014

These Kids Today

Political (and other messaging) Manipulation might get some of us to believe practically everything anybody tells us, but it's just as possible that digital tricks get way too many of us to the point where we're not willing to believe anything about anything at all.

Welcome to the dawning of The Age of Radical Skepticism.

Thursday, January 16, 2014

You Are Not So Smart

Another one I stumbled across yesterday:

The Narrative Bias --David McRaney


You Are Not So Smart is a blog I started to explore self delusion. Like lots of people, I used to forward sensational news stories without skepticism and think I was a smarty pants just because I did a little internet research. Little did I know about confirmation bias and self-enhancing fallacies, and once I did, I felt very, very stupid. I still feel that way, but now I can make you feel that way too.
Here is how the blog started: One week, I saw both the Derren Brown person swap and the Invisible Gorilla videos on YouTube, and they blew my mind. Also, at that time, I was marathoning Penn and Teller’s Bullshit! on DVD. I felt like there was a common thread in all of that, something about how flawed perception and reasoning goes unnoticed because we are all so unwittingly overconfident. It reminded me of the experiments that seemed to stir up the most conversation in class when I was taking lots of college psychology courses, and it all just clicked. That would make a cool blog.

Monday, October 28, 2013

What's A Skeptic?

From The Skeptic Society:



My favorite bit is the Radical Skepticism:
Radical skepticism or radical scepticism is the philosophical position that knowledge is most likely impossible.[1] Radical skeptics hold that doubt exists as to the veracity of every belief and that certainty is therefore never justified. To determine the extent to which it is possible to respond to radical skeptical challenges is the task of epistemology or "the theory of knowledge".[2]