I am a man of science. Okay, perhaps not of science, but certainly near it. I’m science adjacent. But regardless, I consider myself to be bound, in the end, by logic and facts. As such, I like to think that I eschew my beliefs for what the facts tell me. As a very young man, I was […]
Psychology
My eight-year-old daughter is a fourth-generation perfectionist. In my family, the trait is matrilineal, so I know from firsthand experience that it has a few advantages. My daughter is likely to pay her bills on time and use semicolons correctly. She will not be intimidated by details. She will have a certain baseline competence that will make her […]
Emily Underwood, Friend of LWON, posted on Facebook a collection of topics from her community listserv. Lions (mountain lions) Free blue heeler Sick chicken Ann doesn’t know exactly where Emily lives but it sure isn’t Baltimore. Ann’s community listserv looks more like this. 2nd Quarterly Citizen’s Decision-Making Training (formerly known as “Shoot Don’t Shoot”) […]
I have neighbors who were also friends who have just moved away. I look at their house now and they’re not in it, it’s empty, they’re gone. I’m sad. Why should I care so much? It’s what urban America does, it moves away — stays a while, then moves somewhere else. I’m used to it. […]
As human civilization becomes ever more technologically complex, the average competence of each person declines. When a society operates using a suite of technologies that a single adult can learn in his or her lifetime—building a house from scratch, farming, spinning cotton, making medicines, having babies, hunting, fishing, singing and dancing—then it is possible to […]
This post originally ran on October 26, 2011, back when Donald Trump was relentlessly propagating an easily debunked conspiracy theory about President Obama. As we ponder the triumph of “alternative facts,” it’s worth considering what makes bullshit so appealing and why it’s so hard to debunk.Earlier this month, I gave an Ignite talk at the National Association of […]
If you read science magazines – and certainly if you read this blog – you know by now that lots of people are talking about placebos these days. They are real, they are scientifically important, they are distracting, they are good, they have something to do with chakras, they are bad, they are the next […]
I wish I could remember – but I can’t – the woman who told me a story about how she and other women in her profession had regular lunches, casually, unofficially, no agenda. Was she a lawyer? A writer? An astronomer? Just don’t remember. The thing I’m sure about is that the point was not […]