Religion in the White House: a history
Richard Balmer is a historian of religion. On Jon Stewart's show, he surveyed the relationship between religion and the Presidency since John F. Kennedy:
The age of agnotology: culturally constructed ignorance
Robert Proctor is a historian of science at Stanford who has pointed out a bizarre modern phenomenon: the coexistence of easily available factual information and ignorance. That is the subject of Clive Thompson's article in Wired:
He has developed a word inspired by this trend: agnotology. Derived from the Greek root agnosis, it is "the study of culturally constructed ignorance."
As Proctor argues, when society doesn't know something, it's often because special interests work hard to create confusion. Anti-Obama groups likely spent millions insisting he's a Muslim; church groups have shelled out even more pushing creationism. The oil and auto industries carefully seed doubt about the causes of global warming. And when the dust settles, society knows less than it did before.
"People always assume that if someone doesn't know something, it's because they haven't paid attention or haven't yet figured it out," Proctor says. "But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing truth—or drowning it out—or trying to make it so confusing that people stop caring about what's true and what's not."
After years of celebrating the information revolution, we need to focus on the countervailing force: The disinformation revolution.
Thompson suggests that we need to develop more tools like Wikipedia to allow society as a whole to "build real knowledge through consensus," thereby allowing us to expose systematic lies for what they are.Say hello to Eriophora biapicata
eriophora biapicata Thought I'd post something different - a little taste of home. Literally from my own backyard in fact. This is a female eriophora biapicata, or Garden Orb-weaving spider (females are about one-quarter to one-third bigger than males). Unlike many Australian arachnids (and most Australian wildlife in general), this…
To what extent are homophobic men attracted to other men?
In this age of Ted Haggard, the question is an obvious one: To what extent are homophobic sexually attracted to other men? This January 2009 Scientific American article explores the research regarding these two variables. There appears to be a correlation.
Why would an innocent person confess to a crime?
Today I read a 2005 Scientific American article that discussed why so many innocent people confessed to committing crimes.
The pages of legal history reveal many tragic miscarriages of justice involving innocent men and women who were prosecuted, wrongfully convicted, and sentenced to prison or to death. Opinions differ on prevalence rates, but it is clear that a disturbing number of cases have involved defendants who were convicted based only on false confessions that, at least in retrospect, could not have been true. Indeed, as in the case of the Central Park incident, disputed false confessions have convicted some people notwithstanding physical evidence to the contrary. As a result of technological advances in forensic DNA typing--which enables the review of past cases in which blood, hair, semen, skin, saliva or other biological material has been preserved--many new, high-profile wrongful convictions have surfaced in recent years, up to 157 in the U.S. alone at the time of this writing.
Typically 20 to 25 percent of DNA exonerations had false confessions in evidence. Why would an innocent person confess to a crime? A scan of the scientific literature reveals how a complex set of psychological factors comes into play . . . [One of those factors is the tendency] toward compliance or suggestibility in the face of two common interrogation tactics--the presentation of false incriminating evidence and the impression that giving a confession might bring leniency. In short, sometimes people confess because it seems like the only way out of a terrible situation.