Recent Blogs Posts

I started writing about false premises as a logical fallacy, when I realized that false premises have frequently been used as the basis for an ideology. By selecting a suitable premise one can "prove" pretty much anything. Founders of political, religious, and social movements have usually used false premises as the bases for their movements. The premises are often stated outright as the principles of the organization, but they are sometimes unstated or misstated.

False ...

Educational systems seem to fail everyone in some significant way. Here in the U.S.A. elementary and secondary school teachers are generally under-trained and underpaid, so they aren’t fully prepared to teach children, and there are major problems with the curriculum they are expected to teach. The curriculum doesn't include many things that should be included, and it does include many things that are a waste of time.

One thing that I was thinking of was basic logic. Many people ...

Sometimes I get the impression that most people don’t understand causation, as in every event is caused by something(s) that came before; things don’t just happen without anything causing them. Something causes something else to happen, and that cause was caused by something else entirely. For example, when one drops a piece of lead from one’s hand, it falls; the effect is falling, and there are at least two causes that team up to produce the effect: dropping the piece of metal and gravity, and ...

Once again I am going to rant about how people believe hype in preference to science. Earlier today his problem came up in conversation. I don’t remember exactly how we got around to discussing Cholesterol, but I mentioned the fact that even the NIH has admitted that the idea that serum cholesterol doesn’t cause heart disease. This has been known with complete confidence for the last thirty years, or so, but it was only rarely put forth in consumer level literature, so most people believed the myth ...

If no one ever said anything of value, then it wouldn't make any difference whether there was free speech. And if I were the only one in the world who knew any accurate information, then free speech would be pointless, because everyone except me would just make noise, rather than making real, useful speech. But it is possible that any and every person (almost) might utter something of value, so allowing free speech is a good idea. Please understand that this is my opinion; there are some people ...