Shermer writes, “the people promulgating these woke ideas are mostly true believers” and their fervor makes it easier to convince themselves, not others.
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Nature, a British publication, should stay out of American politics; otherwise, it breeds the very mistrust of the science sector that it decries.
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One element of getting to choose our private truths is that we need only notice or understand the significance of the things we want to notice or understand.
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Earlier this year, University of Toronto psychiatrist Ralph Lewis wrote a two-part series at Psychology Today titled “The Strongest Neuroscience Arguments in the Free Will Debate” (here and here). He looked at Mitchell (yes) and Sapolsky (no), both of whom published serious books on the topic in 2023. And he concluded, For now, for practical purposes, given our current level of incomplete understanding of the complexities of the brain’s decision-making processes, and our inability to predict human behaviors in most situations, we might as well regard ourselves as having free will—or rather, degrees of freedom. We do know that our brain has highly evolved systems for self-control—even for those of us who struggle with this relatively more than others, and Read More ›
Stark, reappraising the role of religion, found that seeing history through a positivist, materialist lens reduces its complexities to caricatures.
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Leading atheist philosophers have found Dawkins’s arguments superficial, many find his “warfare” thesis against religion shallow and his certitude unjustified.
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The editors of Nature are destroying a once venerable and important science journal. That’s bad for science, which is bad for the world. Shame.
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Some prediction models were developed by well-intentioned researchers before the perils of p-hacking were clearly understood, hence the failures.
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For many today, truth is whatever benefits Woke causes. Claims for truth that offer them no political benefit are seen as a threat, meriting a hostile response.
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Experiments like ARC–AGI have finally made true computer intelligence into a scientifically respectable theory, because AI can now be falsified.
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When scientists engage in political partisanship, they abandon accuracy, regarding their choice a form of righteousness as long as the Good party wins.
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Increasingly, those who claim to be science’s greatest defenders do the sector wrong by becoming highly ideological and progressively partisan.
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If AI systems such as ChatGPT cannot engage in conceptual thought, then they can only promote consensus, which is what we see.
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The science world has come to depend on China a great deal — for money, among other things — and dare not risk giving offense by unwanted discussion.
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On the whole, Milligan’s worries are not so much unreasonable as they are perennial. People will NOT easily accept that we might be alone in the universe.
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Their strategy worked quite well because, by gentleman’s agreement, everyone closed ranks and no one asked hard questions — until quite recently…
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It continues to astonish us how easily people can be persuaded that LLMs (chatbots) can do our thinking for us
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In a world of private truth that owes nothing to either faith or science, dissenting opinion is an invasion from an alien universe. Stay safe by not hearing.
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Darwinism’s failure to simply *eliminate* the human mind, as promised, enabled a Pandora’s box of materialist claims for consciousness in all life forms.
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The concern Michael Egnor expresses, that materialism, while barren, may be replaced by something worse, may be prescient, depending on how panpsychism unfolds.
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