Month: June 2011
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Our Self-Centered ‘Default’ Worldview: DFW’s Commencement Address
Recent talk of the correspondence bias (here) reminded me of possibly the best commencement speech that I’ve not yet written about (and I’ve written about quite a few): David Foster Wallace’s commencement address to the graduates of Kenyon College in 2005. The speech, often cited as Wallace’s only public talk concerning his worldview, was adapted following…
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Vonnegut: Narrative Arcs and Why We Love Drama
For millennia we have told and absorbed fantastic stories with simple yet strong narrative structures, and the structure of these stories is in contrast to the much less erratic “plots” of our own lives. This discrepancy between the dramas present in our stories and our real lives causes many of us to create unnecessary and…
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First We Believe, Then We Evaluate
When presented with a piece of information for the first time, do we first understand the message before carefully evaluating its truthfulness and deciding whether to believe it, or do we instead immediately and automatically believe everything we read? In an article that traces the history of this question (Descartes argued that “understanding and believing are…
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Congruent Conflations in a Thumbnail
I’ve been going ape-wild for congruent conflations lately and for good reason: they’re the most fun I’ve had with wordplay for a long time and I find they ring off the tongue nicely. Hopefully you’ll cut me a bone if I indulge a little more, as with just a couple more examples you will no-doubt be able to…
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What’s Wrong With ‘Neurobabble’?
We know that irrelevant neuroscience jargon increases the persuasiveness of arguments, but why is the current trend of finding a neural explanation for much of human behaviour a dangerous thing? In his warning against reductionism and trusting in neural explanations for largely psychological phenomena, Tyler Burge, Professor of Philosophy at UCLA, describes the three things wrong…