Category: reflections
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Needless suffering / call a Mexican
I recently heard a story that reminded me of how much graduate students can suffer. Some graduate students out there suffer enormously and needlessly because of unprofessional and untrained mentors. To be fair, scientists in academia wear lots of hats. They typically have to do all these things: Unfortunately, faculty tend not to have any…
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Gays, Islam, and the Virtues of Cognition (Updated)
Over at EverydayFeminism, Andrew Hernann wrote an article titled “Why the Idea That Islam Promotes Intolerance of the LGBTQIA+ Community Is a Lie” At no point in the article does he present any evidence, even though this is an easy issue to resolve with an evidence-based approach. In the world, there is a resource called…
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Sam Harris, Jon Haidt, and Bias
I was fascinated by my colleague and mentor Jon Haidt’s analysis of the rate of certainty words in Sam Harris’ books, and the reaction it sparked. I recently came upon Daniel Miessler’s post, where he defends Harris thusly: Haidt makes a major mistake here by thinking (and saying) that because individuals are bad at judging…
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Men and women should be the same size
For years I’ve thought it’s ridiculous that women are smaller than men. There’s no reason why we should just accept this. Embodied cognition is an endlessly interesting area of research. I don’t know what’s been done on the condition of chronic smallness with respect to other beings, mates, authorities, and so forth. The fact that…
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Give me your racists, sexists, and homophobes
Marquette’s decision to strip Professor John McAdams of tenure is a disgrace and may influence my long-term plans with respect to the intellectually craven environment that is American academia. A key pivot point for this story is that a student in a philosophy class was concerned about the tolerance for dissent in that class on…