I often point out to people that “absence of denial proves nothing” when dealing with some of the more ridiculous arguments people make about what they want to find in J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings. For example, you might believe that Tom Bombadil is one of the Maiar (the angelic companions and servants of the Valar, the great angels who were given the responsibility of watching over the world).…
Check into any argument between extremist groups divided over any given set of topics and it won’t take you long to find examples of one side “debunking” the other side’s arguments with plausible explanations. Plausible explanations are tools employed in pseudoscientific debatery to discredit ideas and/or distract attention away from inconvenient statements. Plausible explanations fall into that category of pseudoscientific tricks where you can find Occam’s Razor, demands for citations, and creating reasonable doubt.…
How often can the majority of people in a single industry be completely wrong? You may think there is no such industry but when I look back at the disastrous track record of the online marketing, or search engine optimization, industry over the past ten years I can honestly say I believe it has become a perennial situation. The people who were wrong about how search marketing works last year were also the people who were wrong about it the year before. …
Have you ever seen a disagreement where one party claims something happened in the past and the other party says, “Prove it!”? I have. But how do you prove the past exists? I mean, how do you know you’re not the only truly living being, trapped in a virtual reality manipulated by a giant computer that creates and destroys the world just beyond your horizons?…
Some days, you just cannot help but think about the white bears. The more you try not to, the more you feel compelled to think about them. That’s the thing about white bears: they never quite go away.
Worse, once you step on the white bear treadmill, there is no getting off. Failing to avoid thinking about white bears is a loss of innocence.…
