Things to Read
Articles
The origin of insight
Neurotransmitters are a confidence game
It's not 'just' a placebo
The trap of scientific evidence
The beauty of stress
Changelog
Updates to All Food is Toxic.
After the move from "the Armchair Collective" to btrmt, the articles were named "The Armchair Collection" so old readers would find familiarity there. After some (vocal) feedback, the interim 'Armchair Collection' is gone. Now the articles are just the articles. Membership to The Armchair Collective is still by invitation only (for now), but everyone will always have access to the articles.
Updates to four common causes of relationship conflict.
Marginalia
How and why fringe theories stack:
believing that Earth is flat essentially requires that you think that NASA’s achievements are part of an elaborate conspiracy: there is no ability to travel to the Moon, nor are the photographs of a globular Earth from space authentic.
Reminds me of the contrarian cluster.
The logical mystic---on Witgenstein's Tractictus:
Simply, the truly religious was outside of speech. It could only be “shown” – and, as he puts it in Tractatus, “what can be shown cannot be said.”
To call a religious belief or practice “false” is, to use a basic philosophical term, to commit a category error. Truth and falseness belong to the sorts of “facts” which make up the world, the meaningful propositions of language. Religious belief – the mystical – is not a fact of this sort, and therefore to submit it to the truth tests of propositional logic is incorrect.
My work consists of two parts; that presented here plus all I have not written. It is this second part that is important.
1977 study shows that science has always leaned into its rituals:
Experimental results showed that--contrary to a popular assumption--the reasoning skills o f the scientists were not significantly different from those o f nonscientists
he scientists in this study appeared to be strongly inclined toward early speculation with relatively little experimentation ... Both of these phenomena--the apparent pen- chant for quick speculation and tenacious fidelity to a hypothesismhave been observed as relatively common phenomena in the scientific culture
Curated