September 28, 2011
There’s been a lot of hubbub over this “Atheists and Asperger’s” study that recently surfaced at the Scientific American blog. For me, this was the interesting line:
In a second experiment, Heywood and Bering compared 27 people with Asperger’s with 34 neurotypical people who are atheists. The atheists, as expected, often invoked anti-teleological responses such as “there is no reason why; things just happen.” The people with Asperger’s were significantly less likely to offer such anti-teleological explanations than the atheists, indicating they were not engaged in teleological thinking at all. (The atheists, in contrast, revealed themselves to be reasoning teleologically, but then they rejected those thoughts.)
In his post Killer Game, Vox Day, internet “superintelligence,” writes:
I don’t believe I could recommend this as a strategy for most men, but it surely educational to learn that raping and killing a woman is demonstrably more attractive to women than behaving like a gentleman. And women, before all the inevitable snowflaking commences, please note that there is absolutely nothing to argue about here. It is an established empirical fact.
Absolutely nothing to argue about? Is he for real?
September 26, 2011
Big surprise, right? From the Queen of VoxWorld herself:
September 25, 2011
Well this whole PZ Myers Memorial Debate sure sparked quite the fiasco, but it’s really got me thinking. A few commenters both here and at VoxWorld have tossed out some pretty decent ideas as far as judging debates are concerned. If you were to judge a debate, what would you look for? What sort of things would you award or penalize? Have you seen any successful debate scoring systems before? What sort of scoring do you think would be fair? Based on what we’ve seen in the recent judging, what sort of things would you advise for or against? Where did the judges do well? Where could we have done better? Was there anything you wanted to see, but didn’t? Let’s see what we can come up with.
September 23, 2011
In what will surely be joyous news to many at VoxWorld, I officially resign my role of honorary judge in the PZ Myers Memorial Debate [with a caveat I'll explain at the end of the post].
September 22, 2011
The interlocutors submitted their second round of arguments and this time, they limited themselves to one piece each. You can read both pieces in their entirety over at VoxWorld. If you don’t read their arguments first, my judgment won’t make as much sense.
September 12, 2011
You can download the four letters that comprise Round One as a single PDF file, here [131KB]. If you don’t want to download it, simply copy the URL and paste it into your address bar. Or go check it out at VoxWorld. Be forewarned: Dominic’s piece is a bit sloppy grammatically, making comprehension a challenging at times. Vox, on the other hand, is at least articulate enough that intelligibility is not an issue.
September 5, 2011
In honor of Paul Zachary Myers publicly declaring that he won’t debate creationists anymore, Vox Day has offered the PZ Myers Memorial Challenge. Long story short: PZ wussed out, said a bunch of mean-spirited personal crap about Vox’s dad, and qualified himself as a “coward” by his own definition. PZ, always the friendly and gentle atheist, wrote:
Who is Vox Day? He’s a recipient of wingnut welfare, a pretentious nobody who had a rich and rotten crook for a father and who writes cheesy fantasy novels in between penning cheesy political discourse.
Now that’s weird. Does anybody remember what PZ said when J.J. Ramsey insulted his daughter before being censored into Darwinian oblivion?
September 2, 2011
I’ve noticed this thing where uber-rational people judge others as “irrational” based exclusively on whether or not the belief in question has **unassailable scientific evidence. When the uber-rationalist makes that move, they misapply a legitimate but isolated truth-criterion without consideration for the full context in which the “irrational” person holds their belief. I say “misapply” because I generally disfavor a myopic approach to reality and I believe truth is best demonstrated through multiple criteria.
