Observations on the world and its inhabitants
It is a reasonable assumption that people who have been through university should not make basic errors of thinking. They have been selected for ability, trained in a subject, and surrounded for years by argument, evidence, and criticism. History does not support the assumption. This article follows from Critical Thinking 2.0, in 2023. Educated people ...
Section 1: The Challenge of Interpretive Texts Policy documents, legal texts, and regulatory instruments share a common feature: they are dense, layered, and conditional. A single provision may depend on a definition found elsewhere. That definition may itself contain exceptions or cross-references. The result is a text that is difficult to hold in working memory ...
A question landed in a WhatsApp group the other day. Simple enough. What is one divided by zero? One person answered at once. Undefined. That is the textbook answer. It is what a calculator, mathematician or the internet tells you. Clean, final, no fuss. Someone else paused. They looked at the question a different way. ...
The Tobacco and Vapes Act 2026 makes it a crime, punishable by two years’ imprisonment, to sell a product that Sweden used to achieve Europe’s lowest smoking mortality rate TVA2026, s.7-9. It simultaneously protects the sale of combustible cigarettes to every adult who already smokes them. Those two facts, side by side, tell you something ...
In December 2008, a minor archaeological excavation in Shangsi County, Guangxi, southern China, produced a mystery that should have been forgotten within a fortnight. Instead, it has lingered for nearly two decades—not because the mystery was solved, but because it was never properly resolved. In that unresolved space, something interesting happened to the human mind. ...
Most of us spend our lives fighting with our keyboards. We have these thoughts—medical observations, legal arguments, complex lines of code—but the physical act of typing it out over and over feels like a tax on our time. When I first looked at Espanso, I almost closed the window. It looked like a wall of ...
Date: 8 February 2026. System: Scan 3XS Laptop (Clevo X56xWNx Architecture), Processor: Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX (Arrow Lake), RAM: 64GB DDR5 RAM, DRIVES: 3TB NVME, Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Laptop GPU (Blackwell). In simple terms, this just means no-nonsense very high end. Luddites will be deterred by all the ‘jargon’ in here. ...
1. Introduction The Eva Vlaardingerbroek situation presents a case that demands careful scrutiny, not merely due to the specific politics involved, but because the mechanism itself appears slippery. It is generally accepted that the state must intercept “undesirables” at the border—criminals, terrorists, and those posing a physical threat. In the case of Vlaardingerbroek, however, the ...
Most of the time, we think we’re reacting to the world as it is right now, but we’re usually just living out the consequences of a past that refused to fade. A single event—maybe a project that blew up or a warning heard in childhood—somehow stops being just a memory and hardens into a universal ...
Humanity has always lived in the shadow of its own ingenuity. Every leap in technological power has widened the gap between what we can do and what we can wisely control. Today, that ancient asymmetry has become the defining tension of our age. We are accelerating into a future shaped by artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, ...
The meeting was initiated by a brief, precise text from Tarek to both Walker and Elara, devoid of social warmth but heavy with implication. He often used the language of his personal journal for these invitations. The WhatsApp message read: “New data point concerning affection. Requires immediate systems analysis before the metaphor stabilises into sentiment. ...
The “Scout Mindset” is a compelling idea in modern self-improvement. Julia Galef (2021) [2] coined the term. It presents a powerful metaphor for how we process information. It contrasts the curious truth-seeker with the defensive soldier. The idea is simple, but its implications are profound. It touches everything from our relationships to scientific discovery. At ...
Alan Turing’s 1950 proposal was not an attempt to define intelligence in abstract terms. Instead, it offered a pragmatic approach to recognising intelligence through conversational indistinguishability. The central question posed was whether a machine that could converse indistinguishably from a human should be considered intelligent. This reframing allowed Turing to sidestep metaphysical debates and focus ...
Decision-making is something I’ve explored before. I go deeper this time. Everybody believes that they are making the best decisions for themselves. But how good are those decisions, actually? No psychologist is coming to tell you what’s what in the confines of your own cranium. We humans make countless decisions every day, from the trivial ...
Arguments often appear convincing when they drift away from the main point while still sounding relevant. This can give the impression that an issue has been addressed when it has not. One of the most common ways this occurs is through the fallacy of irrelevant thesis. This mistake involves offering a conclusion that may be ...
Situations where authority trumps logic continue to weigh on my mind. As a doctor, I often find myself in situations where I need to break down complex concepts into simple, digestible pieces of information for patients and staff. Despite my best efforts to avoid medical jargon and make these explanations as clear as possible, I ...
Some will be going ‘That has to be the stupidest question yet on your blog!‘ – as if I would give a flying flamingo. The question came up in passing, on a forum somewhere when someone referred to water being wet as a way to say ‘naturally so and so is the case’ on some ...
In September 1990, Marilyn vos Savant, known for her “Ask Marilyn” column in Parade magazine and her record-high IQ, received an intriguing question from reader Craig F. Whitaker about the now-famous Monty Hall problem. The problem The question was something like: Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: ...
The fallacy of misplaced concreteness, also known as reification, is a logical fallacy where an abstract concept is treated as if it were a concrete, tangible object. This error involves attributing a physical reality or concrete qualities to something that is abstract. Alfred North Whitehead introduced the term to critique the way certain abstract scientific ...
The question “If a tree fell in a forest but no one saw or heard it fall, did it fall?” is a philosophical thought experiment that explores the nature of reality and our perception of it. I approach this problem from the angle of logic and reasoning: Based on these logical arguments, some would argue ...
Expanding on the Fifteen observations on stupid statements and stupid people I now create the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Stupidity! This list will be expanded in time. Celestial and galactic Viral and infectious Humanity and stupidity IT and social media Dangers and powers Education and stupidity.
I am the way I am because of my life-experiences and particular knowledge. I make decisions based on those and of course applying the rules of logic. Other people, not uncommonly, do not understand or grasp why I do what I do or what I decide. I cannot communicate to each and every person the ...
This bias is quite common. Have you ever been in a conversation where you make a thoughtful point, only to have the other person latch onto a single word or phrase and totally miss your intended meaning? This common phenomenon is known as focalism bias, and it can lead to frustrating misunderstandings and derailed discussions. ...
Thought disorder is not a diagnosis nor do I allude to a mental condition in Bloggs below. In psychiatry when thought disorder is observed, it may point to any of a dozen underlying mental disorders. But note carefully that the environment of observation would be clinical and not extend into the wider world. However, many ...
In the following weeks I’ll be doing an exploration of several logical fallacies and errors of thinking. I’m returning to this area because it is a difficult one to recall a taxonomy of categorised fallacies and errors. There are some 300-plus logical fallacies on record. Most people cannot name one. What’s the importance of this? ...
As some will know I spend time on certain social media forums. The reasons have been explained before but I will again just in case someone has stupidly forgotten or won’t take the time to find out. Statement of intent I spend time there observing human thought processes. No – I’m not ‘psychoanalysing’ or psychiatrising ...
The following email was sent to Amazon tonight. ============== I got this message tonight on the Amazon.co.uk platform. (2022-09-01 around 23:00). >>We apologize but Amazon has noticed some unusual reviewing activity on this account. As a result, all reviews submitted by this account have been removed and this account will no longer be able to ...
Some will be afflicted by the Semmelweis Reflex to immediately reject this post and linked reports. Others will bawl, “I could be run over by a bus – so what?” Well, read this excerpt first if you’re still here – from Nature Journal 17th Aug 2022: Huge volcanic eruptions: time to prepare. Over the next ...
Some will be reaching for Google and dictionaries on this. Some fine examples of Barnum statements, “Humans a not perfect“, or “Everybody makes mistakes – are you perfect?” or “Not everybody is a scientist.” The words seem to hold a truth held dear by ordinary people. But in essence they lack depth by the way ...
I’ve touched on ‘justification‘ in several posts over the years. A recent event last week, made me think even more about it. As always I try to define or refine what I mean by words like justify or justification. Google addicts may now pause to check what the words mean. What is the concept? To ...
Captain Walker
Captain Walker
