Reading Time: 3 minutes When the scientific method is used badly, when preconceptions are allowed to dictate analyses and conclusions, then you get bad science, and false knowledge. Untruths. In this vein, the work of Dr Caleb Lack and Dr Charles Abramson is well worth looking in to.
Psychology
Secular writers explore human behavior through the lens of psychology.
Posted inPolitics, Psychology
The extreme right: UKIP and the evolution of ideas
Reading Time: 7 minutes “I’m not a racist, I’ve got coloured neighbors and they’re fantastic neighbors” – An interviewed UKIP voter on the BBC.
Local elections have just taken place in the UK for a proportion of local councils where the electorate can decide which councillors will represent their interests in local wards by winning seats on their local council. UKIP (the UK Independence Party), essentially a break-away faction of the Conservative Party, the right wing mainstream party of the UK, originally set up to take the UK out of membership of the EU, made massive gains.
Posted inPhilosophy, Psychology, Religion
My appearance on the Skeptic Canary Podcast, with Dan Fincke
Reading Time: < 1 minute I really enjoyed being a guest on the Skeptic Canary Show podcast where we covered lots of issues and philosophy, including Neil deGrasse Tyson’s dismissal of philosophy. It was great to have Dan Fincke from Camels With Hammers pop by.
Posted inPhilosophy, Psychology
The correlation of belief in free will and paranormal beliefs
Reading Time: < 1 minute This is really interesting, and whilst it doesn’t prove anything particularly in and of itself, it does hint at a connection between more ‘out there’ irrational beliefs and free will, which, in my opinion, is equally irrational.
Posted inPsychology, Science
Psychology of Religion: Religion – a Hell of a Lot of Fear and Depression
Reading Time: 5 minutes This article is taken from the excellent podcast Reasonable Doubts which itself borrows from source material and commentary from Tom Rees’ superb Epiphenom blog. Thanks to these two great sources for the bulk of this article. Some interesting research has recently found out that there is a correlation between depression and religiosity. This goes against some research which […]
Posted inPhilosophy, Psychology, Science
On psychology as science, and straw men
Reading Time: 19 minutes Some fellow tippling philosophers and myself are having an email exchange about psychology. It started with one of us writing an email lauding Daniel Kahneman’s work Thinking Fast and Slow (the bold is where he is quoting someone else).
Posted inPsychology, Science
On Human Emotions
Reading Time: 3 minutes In reading Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works, which has been a slow burner (both in terms of time taken to read it and time taken to get into the really interesting stuff [Now long finished]), I have just started to read about the importance and ontology of emotions. I
Posted inBooks, Psychology, Science, Sex & Gender
“Psychology Gone Astray” – an excerpt from an upcoming Onus Books release
Reading Time: 3 minutes Dr Caleb W. Lack, purveyor of the fine opinions and science over at Great Plains Skeptic here at SIN, already has two Onus Books publications:
Mood Disorders: An Introduction
Anxiety Disorders: An Introduction
These great little introductory texts illuminate the latest understandings on these conditions. Look out for one on OCD to come. Further to such contributions to the Onus Books portfolio, he is, with a fellow psychologist, producing a text called “Psychology Gone Astray: A Selection of Racist & Sexist Literature from Early Psychological Research”. Here is a post from his blog to describe the project. In reading the MS to edit it, I am finding much of interest in this early, pseudoscientific era of the discipline:
Posted inPsychology
Quote of the Day by Ed Babinski
Reading Time: < 1 minute I am hoping to have Ed Babinski writing the foreword to Beyond an Absence of Faith, an anthology of deconversion accounts. In a private email, Ed wrote this gem:
…it’s sad that many people either avoid reading books based on views they oppose, or they read them and STILL manage to slough off all the questions raised. The mind is a marvelously creative artist when it comes to finding ways to maintain whatever worldview it acquires rather than juggling and shifting between different worldviews all day long, which takes too much mental energy.
Posted inPhilosophy, Psychology, Science
Explanatory scope of free will
Reading Time: 4 minutes So I have a question. I will detail the following research. For ‘free will’ to be true, it has to explain the following. Or more accurately, the following has to be fully explicable within the free will hypothesis. How does it do that?