If you’re not sure which to read, try No Really, How Much Do Biases Actually Explain?, Bad Epistemology: How Wrong Ideas about Knowledge Can Ruin Decisions, Evolution And The Myth Of The Selfish Human, or Reasons Why Post-truth Claims Are Plausible, and Evidence That They Are Not true.
This list is sorted by publication date, most recent posts on the top. Academic essays here.
- You Just Believe That Because… (while honesty about where our opinion comes from gets you some virtue points, too much modesty makes us all relativists)
- Postmodernism, oppression, and (post-)truth (truth, for its association with power, is never fully divorced from politics and social conflict. But what exactly is the connection between which statements we accept as facts and political power?)
- The Puzzle of Polarization (how can polarization numbers be so different in the USA and Europe? And how can Europeans feel they’re polarizing even if they’re not?)
- Contra Kahan on motivated reasoning (facts don’t change minds? Identity-protective cognition and belief polarization turn out to be much rarer than we thought.)
- The Complete Guide to Effective Note-Taking. (how to craft your Zettlekasten of atomic notes, actually master books and write essays.)
- I Am An Intuition Machine. (when psychologists run experiments and compare the effect of this or that manipulation on your responses and tell you that “well actually your computation is sensitive to this or that factor,” you are often pretty bad at guessing what makes you tick.)
- No Really, How Much Do Biases Actually Explain? (how fresh developments in cognitive science question the import of classic experiments)
- People Have Wrong Intuitions about the Efficacy of Group Discussion Vs. Solitary Reflection (against palaces of contemplation and philosopher kings)
- Contra Pariser On Filter Bubbels (a look at the empirical evidence on the effects of algorithmic personalization)
- Who’s afraid of Cambridge Analytica? (cunning marketers can predict and manipulate our behaviour. Facebook knows your soul. Google is hacking your brain)
- Reasons Why Post-truth Claims Are Plausible, and Evidence That They Are Not true (algorithms and the new (dis)information landscape: disaster afoot or unjustified epistemic panic?)
- The Stakes Are High, Don’t Shun Contrarians! (why enforced intellectual conformism hurts truth-finding)
- Worse, but More Moral, So Better? (instrumental vs moral justifications of universal suffrage)
- What I Can’t Believe (the truth and the privileged)
- Reality-Making: The Art of Distinguishing Truth from Falsehood (understanding the constitution of knowledge)
- To Open Your Mind, Reverse Your Process of Thinking (escaping cached thoughts)
- Your Opinions Reveal Who You Trust, More Than What You Believe (paradoxically, the collective growth of knowledge undermines individual autonomy)
- 4 Simple Tips to Improve Your Thinking (often, social and cultural causes, rather than intellectually apprehended reasons, are what catapults us into adaopting a set of beliefs)
- How to Deal With Cognitive Biases (how useful is knowing about biases? On the limits of epistemic rationality and the outside view)
- By Pretending Everyone Is Locked in ‘his Own Bubble’, You Give up What’s Needed to Get at the Truth (the move from (i) the shocking discovery that you hold a belief because your life went a certain way to the conclusion that (ii) you’re therefore biased in having this conviction is too quick)
- The Tyranny of the Real You: Authentic Is Not the Point (don’t ask “Who am I really, deep down?” Ask: “Who do I want to be?”)
- The Ultimate Explanation of the Psychology Behind the Spread of Fake News (we don’t have to cook up a complete disinterest in facts, evidence or reason to explain the increased prevalence of seemingly absurd ideas. We simply have to attribute to certain communities a vastly divergent set of trusted authorities, combine it with the cognitive science of central and peripheral processing, recall the unavoidability of trust and believing on the basis of testimony in forming knowledge, and notice the widespread manipulation of this vulnerability)
- The Ugly Consequence of Scepticism about Truth (facts don’t speak for themselves but depend on shared standards of evidence and accuracy)
- Why Truth Doesn’t Change People’s Minds (and What Does) (whoever claims to have found the truth does not automatically have something that’s interesting for others)
- Schools Don’t Support Personal Development. They Distort It (we (focus too much on theoretical, propositional knowledge)
- Philosophy of Consciousness: Why You Are Not Stronger Than Your Environment (the way we experience the world depends on the network we reside in)
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Two Biases That Stop Us From Knowing Ourselves (what does it mean to ‘be yourself’ and how can you know what is and is not?)
- Bad Epistemology: How Wrong Ideas about Knowledge Can Ruin Decisions (Campbell’s law and virtue vs. knowledge)
- Nothing Matters. But That’s Not What Matters (Nietzsche and the purpose of life versus meaning in life)
- Evolution And The Myth Of The Selfish Human (“selfish genes” and what biology actually teaches us about our ultimate motives)
- How Can Stories Be So Powerful? (the story of how narratives (de)form beliefs)
- Some Practical Thoughts On Unhappiness (is it really about acceptance?)
- So You Think Humans Can’t Know Objective Reality (our beliefs are based on appearances but are supposed to be about something – reality – that transcends appearances. Problem?)
- Who Are You ‘Really’? Personalities, Narratives And Psychology’s Crisis (contra ‘narrativists’, and what psychology’s replication crisis means for you)