Decades ago, we learned about grade inflation in schools and colleges. Today we are having another kind of inflation; Journalism is inflating everything into a crisis. And it isn’t just journalism; the government is doing the same thing. Yesterday I got an emergency notification on my phone that there was a flash flood watch. There was a thunderstorm later, but I was nowhere near any watercourse that flooded. If that were the only crisis. Then it would be amusing, but people have ...
I don't meet everyone, but the people that I do run into seem to be less intelligent than people used to be, and they seem to be less willing to accept correction. I fear that Donald Trump is responsible for part of that. When people who have IQ's in the 80's and low 90's saw one of their own as president of the U.S.A., they seem to have gotten the idea that if he can do that, then I should do whatever I want to do, and no one can condemn me. Part of this thinking is that I have been among the lowest ...
In these modern times ignorance has been winning against knowledge and science. Stupidity is more admired than intelligence. Fallacy is more common than logic. Maybe I’m just getting crotchety in my middle age, but I find it absurd that ignorant people hold their ignorance with pride and expect other people to treat their misunderstandings about the world and what is in it as if they were actual facts. I started thinking about this in regard to an interview that Trump had with Hugh ...
I asked someone what I should write about next, and the response that I got was, "Mysteries, the unknowable." That is a fairly good topic, and it is somewhat related to what I have written along the lines of consciousness, epistemology, and Turing test, etc. Then that person suggested that I write about god, the unknowable. That's completely different, because there are many Gods and Goddesses, and most of them are quite knowable, and some are downright friendly, so that can't ...