I’ve concluded that they’re right. Mobile phones DO addle the brain. They DO interfere with competent cognition. They DO cause people to become rambling, incoherent, and negligent thinkers, and to talk ever-more-ridiculous garbage. But their effects are quite subtle. They cause this result in some people simply by existing: all these folks […]
Critics of science regularly suggest that applying empiricism to life serves to deny human beings their true dignity. Very frequently you hear complaints about sociologists, psychologists, and health scientists “treating people like numbers“. Because that’s what we do. We treat you like numbers. You number, you. Take this guy. I think […]
As we all know, the old days were the best. You know. Ye olden days. This is what I thought when I received this tweet alert from @ClaireMcCallion earlier today: This screams Pseudoscience at me.. @b_m_hughes? http://t.co/RicRJiMsrW — Claire McCallion (@ClaireMcCallion) April 8, 2013 It links to an article just out […]
Here are the slides from my lecture from the other week to the Psychological Society at the National University of Ireland, Galway. It’s all about how psychologists — academics in the main — take up biased starting positions in processes of evaluation that are supposed to be objective. Generally speaking, […]
So, I’ve concluded that we might as well give up on trying to spread the word about the correlation-causation fallacy. People just don’t seem to be getting it. I do appreciate that there are complexities (after all, causality causes, and is therefore correlated with, correlation, but correlation does not cause […]
Well, kind of. Here is a video of the keynote lecture I gave as part of the #celt12 ‘Written Word’ conference held last June in Galway, Ireland. Why not set aside 29 minutes or so of your life and watch something exciting, witty, and informative? Okay, shhh down the back. Get […]
