Yesterday's post was about my reaction to a Facebook post by a well known yoga teacher of my acquaintance. I said that when I see anti-vaccination propaganda I tend to respond and challenge the post in hopes of getting the writer to stop posting that sort of propaganda. I know I'm unlikely to change their opinion, but at least I may be able to decrease the antivax background noise, at least a little. Well, in yesterday's case it worked. The...
My wife teaches yoga. I practice yoga. I make it clear that I'm a consumer of yoga and not a yogi. I don't pay attention to the philosophy or spiritual side, but I like the fact that at 64 I can touch my toes and do a few other things that I might not otherwise be able to do. As the spouse of a member of the community I know lots of other teachers. Yesterday I saw a post on Facebook by a senior yoga teacher who I've known for years and like a...
I'm a skeptic. While it's popular to pigeonhole skeptics as cynics who don't believe anything and will criticise everything, it's really not like that. It's really a question of not blindly accepting things as true. It's about testing ideas for plausibility and evidence. It's something that grows out of a reaction to what this skeptic perceives as the willingness of so many to believe so many silly things. While it's tempting as a skeptic...
Confirmation bias, according to Wikipedia is a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. It's just one kind of bias. If you look of types of bias on the inner webs you'll find lots of them....