Posted inCulture
This Week In Doom: Grade Deflation
This week's doom: "higher" education, art, and sex. Racism's return It may be time to rethink the idea of academic freedom. Seems this professor blurted out a series of racist…
Posted inCulture
Encyclical Delayed, Possibly Downgraded To Lesser Form?
The encyclical might be downgraded to some lesser form of "statement." This is the rumor as reported to me from "sources." Given the excitement the encyclical generated on the left,…
Posted inCulture Statistics
The New Pew Religion Survey Isn’t What You Think (Probably)
Lot of chatter over the new Pew survey of religiosity, "Christians Decline Sharply as Share of Population; Unaffiliated and Other Faiths Continue to Grow". Main result: Christianity down, "nones" up.…
Posted inStatistics
Hypothesis Testing Relies On The Fallacy Of False Dichotomy
Classical hypothesis testing is founded on the fallacy of the false dichotomy. The false dichotomy says of two hypotheses that if one hypothesis is false, the other must be true.…
Posted inCulture
Arguing About Climate Is Largely Pointless
Regular readers will already know that arguing with climate-of-doom True Believers is pointless. Don't bother. A for instance. When my piece appeared at Crisis on the Pontifical Academy for Science's…
Posted inCulture
British Elections Open Thread. The Return of Nationalism?
We haven't discussed much the elections of our English-speaking cousins, but it's worth doing because of how this one played out. Particularly in its nationalistic aspects. Ed Miliband, Labour, a…
Posted inCulture Philosophy
The Purposeful Lowering Of Physical Standards: More Consequences Of Egalitarianism
Remember how we were told that when women joined the military there was no danger of lowering standards to accommodate them? Letting them join was a question of "fairness", which…
Posted inStatistics
Will Climate Change Kill One-Sixth Of All Species?
Today's headline was prompted by Mark Urban's peer-reviewed paper in Science "Accelerating extinction risk from climate change", which assures us that if we don't "do something", this is the end…