DiscussMormonism.com

It might take a very otherworldly religion to remain entirely aloof from state power, but some religions have been more theocratic than others. Brigham Young's Utah regime has got to be have been on one end of the spectrum. Orthodox Christianity has also been toward that end, I think. The Eastern Ch...

I’m not sure anyone ever wants to told that they’re brave. Being told that you were brave, in that awful past situation that is now safely over—that might be okay, although heroes probably tire of it. Being told that you currently are being brave is being reminded of how much you have about which to...

What is a "true prophet" or "reasonably clever fraud"? Are they actually mutually exclusive categories such that you can be one or the other but you can't possibly be both? It does seem to me that to being either a "true prophet" or a "reasonably clever fraud" requires a person to be pretty creativ...

No, see, we're not quoting Peterson. These are just unpublished notes for our upcoming books.

Look at her hands. Look at those window panes. This is a deepfake.

It's the actual face of the real Goldilocks, obviously, but she's been photoshopped into an A.I. scene.

See how hard it is these days, to demonstrate reliable evidence for anything?

I'd assume they must have been looking at a different animal and that neither saw a crow. Heh. It kind of wrecks my little logic paradox, but you’re right, the assumption that we know that there was only one animal is another of these artificially constraining setups. As soon as you question it, th...

I can't resist adding a favourite example of how inference gets tricky with multiple options. As far as I know, I thought of it myself, but it may very well be well known, and I might even have read it somewhere and just forgotten the source. There is an animal in a tree, but no-one can see it quite...

Peterson's examples of logic and evidence are all syllogisms. They're great as far as they go, but the whole deal with a syllogism is that it follows one story line. It's about Socrates, and mortality. Is he or not, yes or no? The question is fixed, the possible answers are predefined. There is no m...

Within the story, the flux capacitor was testable. It worked. I was never sure why the tire tracks caught fire like that, but perhaps it was flux. Or capacitance. In some ways the Higgs field is still just a maguffin playing a role in a story, defined by the function it serves rather than as a thing...

One time when we were living in the Boston area, some kind of student activist for the Democratic Party stopped me on the sidewalk and tried to get me involved somehow even after I explained that I wasn't a US citizen. I politely disengaged but my penser d'escalier (the thing you think of just too l...