Have you ever heard of, or seen, the Hering Optical Illusion? How many of you believed that the two long lines are absolutely straight? How many other people do you think would insist, on the basis of an apparent appeal to authority alone, that this is the case? Well, it’s …
The following is what happens when you ignore the reality of genetic influences on populations: I’ve raised five children in the same nurturing environment. I’ve incessantly “talk-maxxed” them all. Nevertheless, the verbal ability of those five children on a variety of standardized tests is, as predicted, perfectly correlated with their …
I was not a fan of Bill Clinton, nor of his sexual indiscretion. But of all the things to criticize him for, this quote is not one of them. Bill Clinton is among the most intelligent presidents of all time, with common estimates of his IQ ranging from the high …
It is no secret that I enjoy a healthy debate. I enjoy pitting arguments against one another and finding out which is better. I enjoy discovering some truth that I heretofore did not know or was otherwise mistaken about. One of the most common criticisms that I see about religion …
Over at Twitter, there are various topics of Christianity that come up from time to time that capture everyone’s attention for a week or two. Recently, after comments made by Kirk Cameron, there was a big debate over Eternal Torment in Hell and Annihilationism. Back in 2023, I wrote about …
This is part of a series. See the index here. One of the main reasons I think hypergamy is believed, despite being an illusion, is because statistics are not intuitive. People just don’t naturally see how statistical effects underlie reality and so grasp onto other (incorrect) explanations. While most traits …
In response to “The Evils of Womankind,” I received the following comment: It turns out that I’m not the only one who has received this fairly common criticism. I don’t often bother to cite these statistics because it’s not debated at a serious factual level. I’ve never even seen any …
One of the subjects I find difficult to convey is the rather unintuitive idea that objectively bad (or otherwise flawed) data is useful. Surprisingly, erroneous data does not invalidate it, nor obligate us to throw it away. To illustrate this, I like to use an example from signal and data …
One of the objections you commonly hear among atheists and Roman Catholics regarding Christianity is the following (in one of many different permutations): The atheist concludes that you cannot know if God is even real, while the Roman Catholic determines that you need some higher authority to interpret what is …
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It is a day dedicated to be thankful to God for all his provisions and blessings. When Christ came, he abolished all of the blood sacrifices. But he retained one kind of continual sacrifice: the thanksgiving. When the early church gathered together, it would offer …