Category Archives: Psychology

Lunacies: On Finland and Flat-Earthers

Posted on Friday 24 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Vice, from December 2016: This Dude Accidentally Convinced the Internet That Finland Doesn’t Exist. The article touches on how some people will believe anything, and the notion of Poe’s Law There is an internet adage named after a commenter by … Continue reading →

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Link and Comments: Fractured Reality

Posted on Monday 20 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

The cultural theme of this second decade of the 21st century seems to be the fracturing of consensus cultural norms, even of consensus reality, especially in the US. I’ve observed this in tandem with reading about advances in psychology, over … Continue reading →

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What We Learned from This Morning’s Newspaper

Posted on Sunday 19 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Robert H. Frank, Molly Worthen, Anthony Doerr, and Nicholas Kristof on cutting taxes for the rich, rejecting Roy Moore-style evangelicalism, how even the conscientious among us react to warnings of climate change, and how Blue States do better at practicing … Continue reading →

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Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow: Intro and Chapter 1

Posted on Wednesday 13 September 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

This is perhaps the most influential book of the past couple decades on the whole subject of human mental biases, how the ways in which we think entail errors of perception, and employ heuristics that are often but not always … Continue reading →

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More from Cory Doctorow’s Locus Interview

Posted on Monday 17 July 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

While editing the ‘excerpts’ from Cory Doctorow’s long interview in the current issue of Locus Magazine, excerpts that I posted online on Sunday (here), I captured several other passages from that interview that particularly appeal to the themes of this … Continue reading →

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Carl Sagan’s “Baloney Detection Kit”

Posted on Friday 16 June 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Carl Sagan, one of the great scientist-communicators to the general public of the past century, author of the 1980 book Cosmos and host of the 1980 TV series of that name, has a list of ideas for how to evaluate … Continue reading →

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Linkdump: Science, society, conspiracy theories, the fear of NRA conventioneers

Posted on Monday 12 June 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Science: The Atlantic: Are We Living in a Giant Cosmic Void?. Maybe. Scientific American: How the Science of “Blue Lies” May Explain Trump’s Support. Subtitle: “They are a very particular form of deception that can build solidarity within groups” Guardian: … Continue reading →

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Parents, Children, Identities: Andrew Solomon’s FAR FROM THE TREE

Posted on Friday 19 May 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

This is an enormous book, 962 pages long, 702 of that text (with the remainder consisting of encyclopedic notes, a lengthy bibliography, and an index). The book is about how parents deal with exceptional children, covering ten categories of exceptionality, … Continue reading →

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Link and Comment: Modern Conservatism

Posted on Wednesday 17 May 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

From a review in Sunday’s NYT Book Review, by Damon Linker, of a book about the famous conservative intellectual William F. Buckley, and his relationships to various presidents of the United States. The review is titled “William F. Buckley and … Continue reading →

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Links and Comments: Expertise, Dunning-Kruger, Tactics of Denialists

Posted on Monday 10 April 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

NPR’s Adam Frank on Why Expertise Matters, commenting in part about Tom Nichols new book The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. Frank quotes a couple key passages from Nichols: Nichols is profoundly troubled … Continue reading →

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