This semester I’m taking a class called biology of mind with a really cool professor named John Hawks. The first day of class, I learned that most of our grade would be based on blogging at the class group blog. my first post is up, and reviews a paper I discovered while picking a fight [...]
Monthly Archives: September 2008
Fair and balanced
Posted by Chris Hallquist on September 8, 2008
2 comments
This Fox News slogan has been pretty well laughed off the face of the planet by now, but every once in awhile you come across another example of the odd ideas people have about bias and objectivity. The first example is from Uncommon Descent, which claims that ScienceBlogs.com really isn’t about science, but is just [...]
Obama on the budget: to trust or not to trust?
Posted by Chris Hallquist on September 5, 2008
3 comments
Bush went into office, saying he only wanted to cut taxes because we were running a surplus, never indicating he was straying from the Republican pounding post of balanced budgets. Then he got in office, and we all know what happened. Politicians know a lot of people are mad about this, that’s why both McCain [...]
Rawls, part 2
Posted by Chris Hallquist on September 3, 2008
1 comment
Last lecture, I started off talking about political theory, and then did a little jump to decision theory–how to rationally make decisions. I explained two ideas–the idea of average benefits when deciding under risk with known probabilities, and the idea of maximizing the worst outcome when deciding under totally uncertainty, with no probabilities. Now I [...]
In defense of Orwell
Posted by Chris Hallquist on September 2, 2008
4 comments
In the comments of my review of Orwell’s essays, Ephant alerts me to Geoffrey K. Pullum’s attacks on one of those essays over at The Language Log. The essay in question: Politics and the English Language. First issue: clichés. The main thing I can say here is Robert Fisk is no Orwell, and just because [...]