#Scott-Alexander explains his #atheism in terms of #Bayesian #epistemology
on 02026-08-19Metabunk is apparently a forums site devoted to debunking #pseudoscience? This one about the Great Pyramid of Giza and its amusingly-lightspeed-like latitude. #epistemology #humor
on 02026-08-19The location of the Great Pyramid of Giza encodes the speed of light, in meters per second, to seven decimal places: 29.9792458° N. “The lesson of the Pyramid-lightspeed link is that sometimes it isn’t. It just looks like some sudden and shocking coincidence. The other lesson of the Pyramid is that I cannot consistently figure this kind of thing out. I threw everything I had against the correlation, and I still ended up with p = 0.003. I don’t think this is because the Pyramid really was designed by aliens with a suspicious link to 1600s France. I think it’s because I’m not creative enough to fully dissect coincidences even when I’m looking for them.” #pseudoscience #humor #epistemology
on 02026-08-19Tyler Vigen’s list of spurious correlations, such as the very tight correlation between bachelor’s degrees awarded in psychology and the number of groundskeepers in Utah (R² = 0.980). #humor #statistics #epistemology
on 02026-08-18The turkey’s inductive reasoning fallacy originated in Bertrand #Russell’s 01912 “The Problems of #Philosophy” #epistemology
on 02025-11-11David Foster Wallace on #epistemology in "This is Water", his 02005 Kenyon College commencement speech
on 02025-11-05"The Toxoplasma of Rage" #history #epistemology #memetics #politics
on 02025-09-16“Suppose I wanted to argue that mice were larger than grizzly bears. I note that both mice and elephants are “eargreyish”, meaning grey animals with large ears. We note that eargreyish animals such as elephants are known to be extremely large. Therefore, eargreyish animals are larger than noneargreyish animals and mice are larger than grizzly bears.
As long as we can group two unlike things together using a made-up word that traps non-essential characteristics of each, we can prove any old thing.” #epistemology
on 02025-06-16Daniel Lemire’s meditations on Feynman’s ignorance-of-experts quote. #epistemology
on 02022-01-09Context of Feynman’s “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts,” a speech to science teachers. #epistemology
on 02022-01-09#epistemology “You could consider this a form of epistemic learned helplessness, where I know any attempt to evaluate the arguments is just going to be a bad idea so I don’t even try. If you have a good argument that the Early Bronze Age worked completely differently from the way mainstream historians believe, I just don’t want to hear about it. If you insist on telling me anyway, I will nod, say that your argument makes complete sense, and then totally refuse to change my mind or admit even the slightest possibility that you might be right.”
on 02021-11-06Huemer’s "In Praise of Passivity" #paper, Studia Humana 1,2 (2012): 12-28. #epistemology #philosophy #politics #passivism
Abstract: “Political actors, including voters, activists, and leaders, are often ignorant of basic facts relevant to policy choices. Even experts have little understanding of the working of society and little ability to predict future outcomes. Only the most simple and uncontroversial political claims can be counted on. This is partly because political knowledge is very difficult to attain, and partly because individuals are not sufficiently motivated to attain it. As a result, the best advice for political actors is very often to simply stop trying to solve social problems, since interventions not based on precise understanding are likely to do more harm than good.”
on 02021-06-05Faré's "Passivism" #paper. Interestingly, he uses the term “#propertarian,” approvingly, then moves on to a rather radical proposal for what sounds like worldwide insurrection by property owners. #politics #epistemology #philosophy
on 02021-06-05on the #epistemology of being sane in a crazy world. #philosophy
on 02021-06-04“In comparison to expert-based knowledge, collective intelligence does not aggravate the bias of online content when articles are substantially revised. This is consistent with a best-case scenario in which contributors with different ideologies appear to engage in fruitful online conversations with each other, in contrast to findings from offline settings.” #wikipedia #epistemology
on 02021-01-20#PDF #ebook scan of Sagan’s 1994 draft of his 1995 "The demon-haunted world", with the invisible garage dragon example. #epistemology
on 02021-01-19Astrologer publishes a “sociology” doctoral thesis attacking science. #epistemology #academic-fraud
on 02017-06-07#politics #USA #epistemology #journalism
on 02017-02-23Hamming’s longer sequel to Wigner’s more famous “unreasonable effectiveness of mathetmatics” article. #philosophy #epistemology
on 02015-11-19Wigner’s famous “The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences” #philosophy #epistemology
on 02015-11-19