Use of Contraception in the United States Reported in the 2017-2019 National Survey of Family Growth April 28, 202216,048 words (~80 minutes) Tags: original research birth control contraception NSFG third-person This original research article reports on statistical analysis of the public use data files of the 2017-2019 National Survey of Family Growth about such topics as the number of persons using and not using contraception in the United States, the contraceptive methods being used, and motives for using or discontinuing various contraceptive methods. Unlike prior works, it reports results for male persons in addition to and alongside results for female persons. Read more »
The Fallacy of Generic Thinking March 4, 20225,561 words (~27 minutes) Tags: fallacies statistics psychology philosophy third-person Generic thinking is unquantified belief about large populations of individuals, a profound and terribly mistaken fallacy that has little use other than prejudice. This article discusses two kinds of generic thinking: generic generalizations and generic comparisons. The former is explored by way of prior academic research, and the latter is explored by way of numerical examples. A straightforward solution is proposed for both: beliefs about large numbers of individuals should be quantified. Read more »
Kwame Anthony Appiah's Criticism of “Cultural Appropriation” Criticism January 26, 20222,498 words (~12 minutes) Tags: book or article review philosophy third-person In his book The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that “cultural appropriation” is based on a mistaken mental model of what “culture” denotes. This article reviews his argument, which has the premise that culture is shared practices and which observes that most of these shared practices have already spread across the world, that culture is not a birthright, and that there are other, better criticisms than “cultural appropriation.” Read more »
Category-Based Prejudice November 26, 20215,435 words (~27 minutes) Tags: fallacies third-person While prejudice can be criticized on moral grounds, this article criticizes prejudice as a form of reasoning. It begins by illustrating general principles of categorization by way of a visual and abstract example using geometric figures. These principles are that properties of a population are not properties of individuals and that categorization is arbitrary. The article goes on to criticize prejudice in the context of more concrete examples involving gender prejudice in hiring. Such criticism includes that prejudice is more costly, less accurate, and more ambiguous than direct measurement. Read more »
Anecdotes Are Not Evidence January 31, 20217,817 words (~39 minutes) Tags: fallacies statistics psychology third-person While alluding to valuable criticism, the maxim “anecdotes are not evidence” is insufficient to describe the evidentiary uses and misuses of anecdotes. This article elucidates the flaws of anecdotal evidence that preclude anecdotes from being informative regarding inferences about larger populations or about cause and effect. It goes on to explore valid uses of anecdotal evidence, such as in investigation of specific incidents, while advising – in light of the findings of psychology regarding the fallibility of memory – scrutiny of anecdotes even in cases in which they are useful. Read more »
Moral Skepticism December 28, 20205,249 words (~26 minutes) Tags: philosophy third-person Much of moral philosophy construes morality as a search for truths and moral knowledge, and much of everyday moralizing consists of handwringing over “justice,” “human rights,” etc. This article disabuses morality of these delusions by examining differences between descriptive and normative mental models, leading to the implication that truth and falsity apply to the former, but not the latter. This in turn implies practices for dealing with moral sentiments, including the rejection of moral constructs as fictitious. Read more »
Selection Bias and the Fallacy of Listing Examples December 7, 20203,328 words (~16 minutes) Tags: fallacies statistics third-person Advocating a belief by finding some number of supporting examples and listing them is fallacious. The reason this practice is a fallacy is that the examples are selected because they illustrate the belief and contradictory cases are ignored. In this article, this fallacy is explored by way of contingency tables used in a thought experiment in which two variables are claimed to be associated, illustrating the lack of information gleaned from such a practice in a straightforward and quantitative way. Read more »
Political Rhetoric as Shibboleths July 4, 20201,813 words (~9 minutes) Tags: opinion third-person Political rhetoric comprises some of the worst excuses for dialogue known to human civilization. In this article, the concept of a shibboleth, which comes from an example of sectarian conflict in the Hebrew Bible, is used to explain a function of slogans in the context of political rhetoric, and the characteristics of shibboleths that make them inimical to independent, critical thinking – namely conformity, superficiality, and exclusion of non-binary viewpoints – are examined. Read more »
Margaret Sanger on Abortion in Her Own Words November 11, 201812,852 words (~64 minutes) Tags: history birth control contraception abortion third-person Margaret Sanger, pioneer of birth control in the United States and founder of the organizations that became Planned Parenthood, felt that abortion is “taking life,” excluded abortion from her birth control movement, and had the explicit goal of ending the use of abortion as a method of family limitation. This causes her legacy to conflict with the false dichotomy surrounding abortion today, both with the so-called “pro-life” movement that vilifies her and with the so-called “pro-choice” movement that exalts her. Read more »
