Camestros Felapton

2022 Hugo Award Finalist

Month: Jul 2015

  • Reason Hell: Arguments from Authority (Authority, Ad-Hominem, and credibility Part 3)

    How should we distinguish good appeals to authority from bad ones? Bad Appeals to Authority Appeals based purely on somebody’s profession, or social status. Police officer, priests, academics, politicians will lie or make false statements for all sorts of reasons. They aren’t a source of truth simply by virtue of wearing a uniform, having a […]

  • Reason Hell special: Scares and authority

    As anybody reading this blog may have noticed, I’m having a nice old chat with John C Wright about global warming. I’m sticking the global warming replies here but there is another issue in Wright’s post that I’m pulling out separately and which is best exemplified by this paragraph. The hoax was clear from the […]

  • More on Wright and Global Warming

    So I’ve been busy typing replies here http://www.scifiwright.com/2015/07/a-question-about-the-global-warming-hoax/ …but now I keep getting a “Blacklisted as spam message” 😦 Here is what I wrote in replies

  • Global Warming [Updated]

    OK I said I wouldn’t go and read John C Wright’s blog but whenever I talk to Timothy the Talking Cat I feel a need to check out what is going on there. Wright has posted a message related to a claim made by Steven Goddard who is a Climate Change denialist of an odd […]

  • Not really reviewing Terminator 2: a dialogue

    Timothy the Talking Cat: Ah Terminator: Genysis! I thought you said you weren’t going to watch it. Camestros: I’m not. I’ve absolutely no interest in seeing it and.. Timothy: oh, groan, not another ‘sequels ruined my childhood memories’ Camestros: No, and please don’t interrupt. I’ve got some very specific thoughts on the issue and I […]

  • Watson and the Big 5

    I discussed the Big 5 psychometric dimensions in an earlier post here. Interestingly the topic has come up again via a circuitous route which took me along to the IBM website. The Watson Developer Cloud is a set of what IBM are calling ‘cognitive computing’ – a mix of data mining and machine learning that […]

  • More on that video game sexism study

    In a post entitled An insight into video game sexism? I’m in two minds… I looked at a PLOS One study into how people playing HALO online reacted verbally to players they considered female. The paper recieved a lot of coverage because of its takeaway claim that the more verbally abusive players were losers. While […]

  • Monday beer: Polish porter?

  • Reason Hell: Authority, Ad-Hominem, and credibility Part 2

    In Part 1 I discussed how people and credibility are unavoidable when it comes to argument and reason. An individual simply doesn’t have the time or brain power or expertise to do everything themselves and an individual cannot be everywhere at once to witness events as they happen. We have to, at times, rely on […]

  • Slow and Quick: two contrasting videos

    The first is this video of work down to mitigate the damage done by a relatively fast lava flow. The second is a video of a journey out from the Sun through the solar system at light speed. I think the two show interesting perceptions of time. In the first we see geology happening quickly […]