November 2010 archive

Joe’s Grand Fantasy, Part One

You keep using that word...

I’ve written about Joe Cienkowski on a previous occasion. Some of you may already be familiar with Joe and his ideas about evolution and atheism. I’ve had brief exchanges with Joe on Twitter, and though we disagree, we keep things fairly cordial. Someone was kind enough to recently provide me with one of Joe’s self-published …

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A Poster Boy for the Dunning-Kruger Effect

Atheist cat finds your prayer cute, but ultimately futile.

Many people are not familiar with the term Dunning-Kruger Effect. The linked Wikipedia article begins with a very good description: The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer …

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Can’t take a joke? Confirmation bias too strong?

Cancer Humor on Twitter

I read a blog post today. It was one of several that I took time to look at. This post in particular was made by someone who was angry about something they saw on the Internet. What was it they saw? They read an article from The Onion. For those of you not familiar with …

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Good without god. But… Isn’t that impossible?

Indiana Atheist Bus Campaign Ad

The mere idea that there are individuals who do not believe in god, and some that even have the audacity to say so, is tremendously offensive to a certain segment of the population. If someone implies that it is possible for people to be good people without that belief, some of the offended people might …

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