16 posts
If science keeps changing its mind, is any of it authoritative? The honest answer requires noticing that revisions have sizes. Going from a flat Earth to a sphere corrects 8 inches per mile; going from sphere to oblate spheroid corrects three hundredths of an inch.
Inherited rules can preserve hard-won knowledge, reduce decision costs, and protect against biased exceptions. They can also survive through inertia and serve interests we no longer endorse. Age creates a reason to investigate—not a duty to obey.
'BP invented the carbon footprint to blame you for climate change' is one of the internet's favourite facts. The individual-scale framing came from two ecologists at UBC a decade earlier, and the uncomfortable part is that it was designed that way on purpose.
Most of what people do carries far less deliberation than observers assume. Research shows intentional explanation is the automatic default — under time pressure people judge even accidental acts as deliberate — and that reading calculated motive into ordinary behaviour is the effortless option, not the accurate one.
Industry is excellent at research with a measurable operational payoff. The harder gap appears when effects are delayed, cumulative, distributed across society, and difficult for any one firm to own.
A stammering expert loses arguments to a confident amateur more often than it should ever happen. The reason isn't laziness — it's a measurable perceptual glitch where the brain mistakes ease of processing for truth, and it shows up in your face before you've even judged the content.
The mathematical case for trusting majorities has two conditions attached. One of them — that people judge independently — is destroyed by the ordinary act of letting them see each other's answers. Experiments show groups converging hard, feeling more confident, and getting no more accurate.
Two governments can both fail, two claims can both be wrong, and two systems can both constrain people—without being equally false, harmful, powerful, or correctable.
A quote about Macaulay praising India's wealth and spiritual heritage before plotting to destroy it has circulated for decades — cited even by a former Indian president. It's fabricated. Here's the paper trail, and what his real 1835 Minute actually says.
The horoscope arrived in India from Hellenistic Greece — the founding text is called the Yavanajataka, 'of the Greeks.' But the more interesting number is modern: fewer than half of Indians say they believe in astrology, while 83% fix important dates by auspicious timing.
Often, we confuse respecting a person's dignity with agreeing with their ideas. This common error, known as the Moralistic Fallacy, hinders our ability to distinguish truth from mere desirability.
This post explores how high-control spiritual groups in South India use self-sealing logic and epistemic gaslighting. They rebrand parlor tricks as "Vedic science" to dismantle critical thinking, trapping followers in an "epistemic black hole" and making them dependent on the Guru for their perception of reality.
The idea that your mother tongue shapes how you think is either a profound truth or a debunked myth, depending on who you ask. The honest answer is more interesting: some specific versions have strong experimental support, and the most-quoted version failed to replicate.
We treat empathy as the foundation of ethics — the more you feel someone's pain, the better you'll act. In the lab, inducing empathy makes people violate their own stated principles of fairness. The problem isn't that empathy is bad. It's that it was never a moral faculty.
Two findings usually get quoted separately and belong together. False news does diffuse farther, faster and deeper than true news — but bots spread both at the same rate, and 1% of individuals accounted for 80% of all fake-news exposure. The mechanism is real; the flood is not.
Modern discourse routes almost every adult difficulty back to a childhood injury. The research says something more specific: most people recover without help, childhood-adversity scores are near-useless for predicting any individual, and treating a bad event as the centre of your identity independently predicts worse symptoms.
