Skepticism
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science | Mother Jones
Illustration: Jonathon Rosen Read also: Kate Sheppard on the smear campaign behind Climategate. "A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point."
In Depth › Opinion Why do some of us reject consensus on a whole range of scientific findings? As Professor Stephan Lewandowsky explains, it often comes down to the way we look at the world.
Why do people reject science? › Opinion (ABC Science)
This educational web site provides over 100 free online tutorials on critical thinking, logic, scientific reasoning, creativity, and other aspects of thinking skills. Our online tutorials have been used by universities, community colleges, and high schools across the world. Dr. Joe Lau, the author of this website, has just published a new companion textbook: An Introduction to Critical Thinking and Creativity: Think More, Think Better (Wiley, 2011).
Critical thinking web
1. Close reading is the most important skill you need for any form of literary studies. It means paying especially close attention to what is printed on the page. It is a much more subtle and complex process than the term might suggest.
What is close reading? - a tutorial and guidance notes « Mantex
EDITOR’S NOTE: Because I am at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Chicago, between the meetings, working on a policy statement, working on a manuscript, and various other miscellaneous tasks, I alas was unable to produce a post worthy of the quality normally expected by SBM readers. Fortunately, Lorne Trottier, who’s done a great job for us twice before , was able to step in again with this great post about “safe” cell phone cases. Speaking of the manufactroversy over whether cell phone radiation causes brain cancer, there’s a session at the AACR that I’ll have to try to attend entitled Do Cell Phones Cause Brain Cancer? Who knows?
Science-Based Medicine
NeuroLogica Blog
May 17 2012 I hadn’t planned for this topic to take over my blog this week, but it happens. Judging by the comments there is significant interest in the issue of consciousness, and Kastrup and I are just getting to the real nub of the argument. So here is another installment – a reply to Kastrup’s latest offering. First, however, some background. Materialism, Dualism, and IdealismAlmost exactly a year ago, I came across a bit of woo so incredible, so spectacularly stupid and unbelievable, that I dedicated one of the last segments I've done in a long time of Your Friday Dose of Woo to it. Basically, it was about a movie called Eat the Sun , which described a bunch of people who believe that they can imbibe the energy they need to keep their bodies going by "sun gazing," which involves, as the name implies, staring directly into the sun. The idea is to stare directly into the sun for as long as possible at sunrise or sunset, so as not to burn out your retinas by staring at the noon day sun. Sun gazers seem to think that mammals are like plants in possessing an ability to absorb energy directly from the sun. We're not, of course, as I explained in my inimitable way a year ago . Sun gazing also leaves out the fact that plants get the organic building blocks they use to produce their actual structures from the ground in which they grow.
Respectful Insolence
Evidence is More Important Than Outrage: An Introduction | Against the New Taboo | Big Think
What happens when scientific investigation gives us a conclusion we do not like, for example: prayer does not physically heal anyone ( or else makes things worse for the patient being prayed for ), homeopathy’s only effect is to pay a charlatan, and “Mother” Earth is finding smarter ways to kill us ? What happens when evidence conclusively shows that what we thought is precisely or almost the opposite of what is true ? Do we load our guns of conformity, light the canons of outrage, and march on?
This article has been subject to a clarification by the author. You can read the full clarification here . Two years ago Oxford University neuroscientist Prof. Dorothy Bishop established the Orwellian Prize for Journalistic Misrepresentation of a scientific paper in a national newspaper, judged according to the number of factual errors in the piece. The prize is awarded based on a scoring system of a point per error in the body of the piece, two points per error in the subtitle and three points per error in the headline. This year the Daily Mail took the prize with a blinding twenty-three points in one article.
Just ONE Copy of The Daily Mail Could Ruin Your Life
Proposition (or statement): The meaning of a declarative sentence (e.g., It is raining outside, Joe was born in 1995, killing people is wrong, a ghost is living in my house). Propositions differ from other kinds of sentences such as sentences that ask questions (e.g., How old are you?), issue commands (e.g., Shut the door.), and make exclamations (e.g., Oh no!). Argument: A connected series of propositions in which one or more propositions is proposed as evidential support for some other proposition(s).
Fundamentals of Logic
T here are many forms of logical fallacy, errors, and mistakes of reason. In addition to this many fallacies co-exist and network together in yet further complex combinations. The net consequence of this is a conviction and feeling of coherence in the views being held – a sense of things making sense! This feeling of ‘everything making sense’ in the absence of any evidence, logic or reason, is an illusion based in the collective impact of unstructured thought. The level of the delusion is often far greater than the sum of its underlying parts.
Seven fallacies of thought and reason
March 2008 The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read.
How to Disagree
Structure of a Logical Argument Whether we are consciously aware of it or not, our arguments all follow a certain basic structure. They begin with one or more premises, which are facts that the argument takes for granted as the starting point. Then a principle of logic is applied in order to come to a conclusion.
The Skeptics' Guide To The Universe - Logical Fallacies
DISTORTED THINKING