Convincing people by agreeing with them
Worrying that the theory of evolution can can undermine the idea of human equality, Rod Dreher wonders if we’d be better off not knowing some things: Admi...
Month: January 2014
Intelligence, cont.
Victor’s brilliant comment deserves a call-out: The same can be said about class work and research. Even on the same topic or in the same academic area, s...
Is belief in evolution a good predictive tool?
[Warning – a long post that uses yet another tendentious sports analogy. Read at your peril.–PK] A reader questions both creationists ability to do ...
The Wilt Chamberlain analogy for human intelligence
Wilt Chamberlain is one of the most dominant players in the history of basketball, if not team sports. He is the only player to score 100 points in a single gam...
People are scary, part II
Victor helpfully critiqued my goal to develop a model of human intelligence: Of course my question would be what’s the point of creating such a conceptual model...
Models of human intelligence
I want to revisit this Alex Knapp quote yet again: if [politicians] hold ideas about the world around us that are fundamentally at odds with scientific evidence...
I probably should not write this post
Although Alan Jacobs has much useful advice on how to develop as a thinker (see here, here, here, here and here), he goes a bit too far in criticizing writers w...
Reductive thinking about religion and anti-Christian bias
While finding atheism in the human propensity for violence, Ta-Nehisi Coates makes some curious arguments about religion (emphasis added): I don’t believe...
Trend analysis, cont.
My writing here mostly uses the harm principle/individual rights/tolerance frameworks. Since there’s no hard evidence creationist beliefs cause actual har...
Universal laws vs general trends
A reader worries that evolution isn’t the stopping point for creationists: Once a person willingly carves out exceptions and changes evolution to simply a...