Much has been written about the polarization wracking the Western world; in the US, for example, some data scientists worry it might be as severe today as it was during…
A recent blog post summarizing the science behind mindfulness meditation (MM) based stress reduction technique has released a tsunami of contrarian schadenfreude. The critique—that MM-based stress reduction techniques don’t appear…
As a nineteenth century surgical innovation, medical circumcision was less about fighting disease than controlling male sexuality. Contrary to the formula that opens so many articles in medical journals and…
Every few decades, a new ism comes along that many people see as a threat to the bedrock principles of Western civilization. Communism was one of the big ones, and…
Medicalization is the process of bringing social, legal or political problems under medical authority: this is how human problems become medical problems. The concept is typically used to refer to…
Rats in a Skinner Box Rats wired up to electrodes, housed in an experimental Skinner box, continually press a button to give themselves powerful, pleasurable sensations. The rats go into…
We humans take so much of reality for granted that it is often difficult to recognize which phenomena even require explanation. This is especially true of human behavior, as Steve…
A review of Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins, by Garry Kasparov. Public Affairs, 2018. Netflix series Black Mirror’s latest story arc “Bandersnatch” is an interactive psychological thriller,…
The Yumbo people walked here for centuries. Now I walk through a cloud, green dripping all around, the call of a toucan dopplering towards me before a blur of color…
It may seem to be a rather silly question, but you might be able to find a reasonable argument for the premise. Maybe scientists are racist, and we need to…
There is more in heaven and earth than can be dreamt of in any human philosophy. This is why science is not philosophy. Those who map the skies, observe the…
Is there a more controversial issue in the western upper middle class right now than the intersection of gender and sex? But partial conflation between what sex is and what…
Science traditionally aspires to be universal in two respects. First, it seeks fundamental knowledge—facts which are universally true. Second, it aims to be impersonal in practice; identity should be irrelevant…
Introduction Although physicists tend to fall on the liberal side of the political spectrum, at a professional level it’s generally accepted that science unites us and personal politics should be…
On January 25, 2018, the Doomsday Clock struck two minutes to midnight. Lawrence Krauss and Robert Rosner, members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board (which…
Humanity’s capacity for critical thinking is of paramount importance to our survival. This remains true, even in our hyper real information age, in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing an…
It’s a Godawful Small Affair Human expansion into space is at the periphery of our current, scientific knowledge. There is a long and earnest history of proposals for such a…
The prevailing view that we’re safe from technological unemployment has a dubious basis. We will continue to create new jobs, but we can’t yet create new human capacities. The presumption…