When I hit the publish button for my last post Cognitive Conservatism, Moral Relativism, Bias, and Human Flourishing I felt a tinge of angst. It took a few days for my rational brain to figure out (or perhaps confabulate) a reason; but, I think I may have. Perhaps it should have been immediately obvious, but …
Read more “When Tribal Moral Communities Collide”
I am a caring and compassionate man with deep concerns about humanity. Of utmost importance to me is the issue of human flourishing, which roughly translated, incorporates wellness, happiness, success, and adaptive functioning not only for the individual, but for society in general. Individual flourishing necessitates societal flourishing and vice versa. One does not rise …
Read more “Cognitive Conservatism, Moral Relativism, Bias, and Human Flourishing”
It is hard to imagine anything more precious than one’s newborn child. Part of the joy of raising a child is the corresponding hope one has for the future. Don’t we all wish for our children a life less fraught with the angst and struggles we ourselves endured? One of the less pleasant aspects of …
Read more “Vaccines and Autism”
I find myself in an untenable situation. I have plenty to write about but I am finding that the choices I am making right now, in the splendor of summer, give me limited time and energy to write. I’ve decided to take a short hiatus. Over the last seven months my writing has been …
Read more “Looking Forward – Looking Back”
For nearly as long as humans have been thinking about thinking, one of the most intriguing issues has been the interplay of reason and emotion. For the greatest thinkers throughout recorded history, reason has reigned supreme. The traditional paradigm has been one of a dichotomy where refined and uniquely human REASON pitches an ongoing battle …
Read more “What Plato, Descartes, and Kant Got Wrong: Reason Does not Rule.”
My previous posts addressed several common cognitive biases while briefly touching on their subsequent consequences. In review, the Fundamental Attribution Error leads us to make hasty and often erroneous conclusions about others’ personal attributes based on our superficial observations. Generally such conclusions are in fact erroneous because we lack a sufficient understanding of the situational …
Read more “Global Consequences of Cognitive Biases”