All Thoughts Being Equal

Now that we've seen why Western Washington University decided (and was justified, in my view) to cancel classes for Tuesday, 24 November 2015, in response to racist and threatening comments on the anonymous social media shithole application Yik Yak, let's look at the reaction from the students and the community. Was their response justified? I don't think so. This post is a partial follow-up to: On the rigged-world fallacy and pullback error , Rhetorical imperialism I. Let's get this out of the way first: of the two "camps," so to speak, of students who disagreed with President Bruce Shepard's decision to suspend classes, the ones who thought classes shouldn't have been suspended have a very weak position. Now, there wasn't a lot of publicity of the various posts made, so I can understand why—at the time—some people might have thought the class cancellation was the wrong call. I hope that since those posts have come to light, those peop...

Recently the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a research arm of the World Health Organization, classified processed meat as a known carcinogen and red meat as a probable one. Some people took it as a strong argument against meat. Industry PR called it "dramatic and alarmist overreach." I think this is an example of how poor science reporting, from the original press release to mainstream and secondary follow-ups, plus public innumeracy, can lead to over-political science news. I. Let's start at the source: What did the IARC 's press release [ pdf ] actually say? After thoroughly reviewing the accumulated scientific literature, a Working Group of 22 experts from 10 countries convened by the IARC Monographs Programme classified the consumption of red meat as probably carcinogenic to humans (Group 2A), based on limited evidence that the consumption of red meat causes cancer in humans and strong mechanistic evidence supporting a carcinogenic ef...

This post is a direct follow-up to: Summer camp for adults, pt. 1 – The Rahh of the wild I. In the previous post I analyzed the marketing for Camp RAHH, a so-called "summer camp for adults." The whole thing made me almost excessively peevish, and I want to figure out why. Let's recap what seems to be the problem here. The ethos at play is one where the main problems are external. It's society that's creating FOMO in us; society that demands constant status updates and check-ins; society that forces booze and drugs into our hands, and makes us use them; it's all peer pressure . Them, not us. Society is preventing us from unleashing our truly authentic, uniquely personal selves . But see, all five ( five ) sections in that post were more or less predicated on the assumption that the target demographic for Camp RAHH is sane . The alternative, far more depressing than enraging, is that something is wrong. The prospective RAHHers haven't made pis...