Is 90% of All EvoPsych False?

6 December 2015

Evolutionary Psychology is the study of how attributes of human psychology evolved biologically by natural selection. I and others have averred many times that it is mostly a pseudoscience. EvoPsych proponents balk and take offense. We cite numerous papers by experts...

No, Bacon Is Not as Bad for You as Smoking

27 October 2015

Some of you might have heard that bacon was rated as being as carcinogenic as smoking by the World Health Organization. No. That did not happen. And this is a good case for learning some modern critical thinking skills. I’ll spoil the surprise by quoting them...

Katherine Cross on Tone Policing

28 April 2015

Katherine Cross has written an excellent piece on distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate tone policing: Words for Cutting: Why We Need to Stop Abusing The Tone Argument. The article is a valuable read all through. Do not regard my summary here as its replacement....

Peter Boghossian on Gay Pride and Hobnobbing with an Online Misogynist

4 April 2015

Yesterday I posted an enhanced edition of my Ohio speech on feminism. Today I am posting key material from my Portland speech that extends the same argument to a broader application, focusing on some of the recent public statements of Peter Boghossian… Gay Pride...

Why Atheism Needs Feminism

3 April 2015

Over the last few months I’ve given a few public speeches on how things said by some of the top front men in our movement are divorced from reality. Including Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Peter Boghossian. One of those speeches I delivered last year as the...

Live, This Sunday, on Atheist Analysis!

20 February 2015

The vidcast Atheist Analysis, which streams live at 10pm Eastern this Sunday (Feb. 22) and takes questions from the audience during the show, will be interviewing me. The topic: why Bayes’ Theorem is awesome. (Also, of course, what Bayes’ Theorem is, how...

Appearing Near Phoenix for SSA West

9 June 2014

The Secular Student Alliance’s Western Regional Conference is coming up, this June 20-22 (Friday-Sunday, 2014), in Tempe, Arizona, near Phoenix (details and registration and everything here). And I’ll be there. Some of my books will be for sale the whole...

On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus

8 May 2014

I have often been asked how we should evaluate arguments from consensus. That’s where someone says “the consensus of experts is that P, therefore we should agree P is true.” On the one hand, this looks like an Argument from Authority, a recognized...

Innumeracy: A Fault to Fix

26 November 2013

Innumeracy is more of a threat than scientific illiteracy. And I want to illustrate this today. A Problem Atheists Should Care About Ordinary literacy is not so much a problem online, since participation on the internet requires basic literacy—although of...