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Cognitive Karstica

• [article] Ideologies stack — 15 Jun 2024
  Fringe theories always seem to cluster together. It seems weird, but mainstream theories also do, we just don’t often examine them. Examining why different theory stacks arise reveals much about our biases, ideologies, and the influence of community-based knowledge.
• [article] The Trouble With Objectivity — 21 Dec 2023
  The obsession over objectivity is a confusion of two things. There’s rationality, the desire to be less biased. Then there’s truth which is going to be necessarily biased toward whatever aspect of the world we’re trying to understand. In both cases objectivity is irrelevant.
• [article] Eerie coincidences aren't that eerie — 12 Nov 2023
  Your phone probably isn’t eavesdropping for ads. Your brain’s job is to highlight unexpected hits while ignoring the misses. Eerie coincidences are probably just you not noticing all the times something weird could have happened but didn’t.
• [article] Panpsychism isn't that fun — 22 Sep 2023
  Panpsychists reckon they’ve one-upped materialists and non-materialists in explaining how consciousness might have come to be by telling us that everything is conscious. Then they just leave us hanging.
• [article] The value of ritual — 17 Mar 2023
  Rituals are often dismissed, but they’re just procedures with a purpose. We all engage in ritualistic behavior—many habits and routines meet this criteria. Redefining them through the uncomfortable lens of ritual prompts us to question our own practices and beliefs.
• [article] Trans-opportunism is boring — 22 Nov 2022
  Focusing on edge-cases of “trans-regret” is missing the point. If you actually care about these cases, then the interesting issue are the underlying vulnerabilities that lead to regrettable decisions. But probably you shouldn’t care.
• [article] Amusing Ourselves to Death — 21 Sep 2021
  Since the invention of the telegraph, information has become increasingly atomized, incoherent, and irrelevant. Our media technology encourages entertainment, not discourse. Information ‘from nowhere’, ‘to no one’ about which we can do nothing. We don’t have to lean in.
• [article] Voluntary Censorship — 8 Sep 2021
  Our education bestows on us a ‘common sense’ that narrows our vision to only those things that ‘can be said’. We censor ourselves and, as a result, have a schizoprenic approach to important issues.
• [article] In praise of the sage — 19 Jul 2021
  Our culture spurns the ‘guru’ as a charletan and the traditionalist as a relic. Legitimate knowledge comes from reasoned observation, not intuition. Except that this is a lie that we tell ourselves and which blinds us to how useful the sage can be.
• [article] The Millennium Myth — 22 Mar 2021
  Year 2000 predictions once foretold catastrophe, but now we laugh at those predictions. The same is true of many historical cycles and years with big, round numbers. They become significant simply because we collectively believe in their importance.
• [article] Solving the Paradox of Tolerance — 24 Feb 2021
  Every now and then a proponant of ‘tolerance’ will cite political philosopher Karl Popper’s ‘paradox of tolerance’ to justify their suppression of the tolerant. Shame Karl Popper didn’t see it as much of a paradox, then.
• [article] Genetics is nurture — 11 Jan 2021
  How much of who we are and what we do is the result of our genetic predispositions, and how much because of our environment? This tension is made complicated by the fact that the dichotomy doesn’t really exist. Rather, our nature is a form of nurture.
• [article] Your personality doesn't belong to you — 17 Nov 2020
  The study of personality has a fairly storied history—a pretty contentious search for the essence of human expression. But more modern approaches to the study of personality show us something interesting—that our personalities might be something that’s forced upon us.
• [article] Advice on brain science from a farming manual — 22 Oct 2020
  In the early stages of a career in brain science, one learns very quickly that the human brain is still largely unknowable. But perhaps this is because our approach is wrong. Perhaps, rather than solving the unsolvable, we should be like the farmers of old. Observing, contemplating, and adding only a little helpful illumination on a complex problem.
• [article] Female zealots — 19 Oct 2020
  A popular academic fact claims that females are the most zealous religious adherents, despite being marginalised in their own religious communities. We are told this is because they are uneducated and submissive. But a quick look at most of recorded history shows us this was not always the case. Once, female zealots formed the core of what is possibly our most universal religious tradition.