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Week of April 16, 2012: Week in Review

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calendar_smLike questions? Got answers? You should spend a day at the park.

John Horgan, writer for the Scientific American, doesn’t like Sam Harris’ view on free will very much. It’s doubtful whether he likes Sam all that much either.

Blogger Alan Litchfield for The Malcontent’s Gambit recently interviewed Dr. Peter Boghossian for his premier podcast. The title of the piece is “Faith: A Barrier to Rational Thought”. In this interview, Alan surveys the growing body of content surrounding Peter’s recent talks, interviews, and articles asking how he responds to many of the critical claims made against him. This interview is a nice rollup of Peter’s ideas and the response of some of his detractors.

A rabbit bemoans the lowly state of the humanities.

A new, groundbreaking argument proves that philosophy does not exist.

I learned about a new type of cognitive bias this week: Rhyme as reason effect – if something is said in the form of a rhyme, you’ll tend to believe it every time.

An amazing song worth thinking about. Lyrics. Buy from Amazon.

Tips for improving memory. I like this list because it covers biology, psychology, and technique.

Favorite quote of the week: “If we imagine that some candidate criterion of rationality is perfectly accessible, then we are always likely to prefer that criterion; but once we recognize that perfect accessibility is quite generally an unattainable ideal, we can learn to live with an imperfectly accessible criterion. We have nothing else to live with. Provided that one’s evidence is more accessible than the truth-values of the hypotheses under investigation, the former can still serve as a useful guide to the latter. Real life is messy.” Timothy Williamson, Knowledge and Its Limits

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