DRINKING LIBERALLY

Virginia Beach
Second Thursday of the Month

Croc's 19th Street Bistro, 6 p. m.
620 19th St.
Virginia Beach, VA (map)

Drinking Liberally Website

Join us at Meetup.
Follow the conversation at Facebook.

In the latest migration to a new virtual private server, some of the links to images in the earliest posts to this blog were broken. If you encounter one of these broken links, please let me know. I have backups and can restore the images.

Hacker Public Radio

Podcasts for the community,
by the community.

Stop pretending that your racism is patriotism.

Image via Job’s Anger

Electronic Frontier Foundation

There’s only one person who agrees with me on everything, and, as I’m not running for office, that person is not on the ballot.

Learn more about registration

2025: J F M A M J J A S O N D
2024: J F M A M J J A S O N D
2023: J F M A M J J A S O N D
2022: J F M A M J J A S O N D
2021: J F M A M J J A S O N D
2020: J F M A M J J A S O N D
2019: J F M A M J J A S O N D
2018: J F M A M J J A S O N D
2017: J F M A M J J A S O N D
2016: J F M A M J J A S O N D
2015: J F M A M J J A S O N D
2014: J F M A M J J A S O N D
2013: J F M A M J J A S O N D
2012: J F M A M J J A S O N D
2011: J F M A M J J A S O N D
2010: J F M A M J J A S O N D
2009: J F M A M J J A S O N D
2008: J F M A M J J A S O N D
2007: J F M A M J J A S O N D
2006: J F M A M J J A S O N D
2005: J F M A M J J A S O N D
0: J F M A M J J A S O N D

From Pine View Farm by Frank Bell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.pineviewfarm.net.

It Must Be True . . . . 0

Kyle D. Killian, writing as Psychology Today Blogs, analyzes the attraction of conspiracy theories. A snippet (emphasis in the original):

On occasion, conspiracy theories can be based on a rational analysis of data. But most of the time, this is not the case. Human beings have an amazing capacity to detect “meaningful patterns in the world around us and to make causal inferences” (Christopher French, Scientific American (link is external)). Humans also can see patterns and causality when they are not really there. (Statisticians refer to spurious correlations—statistical associations that appear significant between two variables, but are artifacts, not really real. Our shoe size does not determine our mathematical ability, but they are significantly correlated because shoe size is associated with age). Conspiracy theories are irresistible to some folks due to two tendencies of our species: confirmation bias and projection. In confirmation bias, we give more value to evidence that supports our beliefs and ignore evidence that conflicts with those beliefs. In projection, persons who subscribe to conspiracy theories tend to spread rumors or be suspicious of others’ motives—in other words, engage in conspiratorial behavior (French (link is external)). Since you yourself engage in such behaviors, it seems more than likely that other people are doing these very things, too.

March 30, 2018 | Posted by: Frank | Posted in: First Looks | Bookmark this post

Comments are closed.

Contact Me

DRINKING LIBERALLY

Just the Facts, Ma ‘am

Missing Links

Hacker Public Radio

Support Marriage Equality

Patriot Gamers

Support the EFF

Vote in the real world.

Meta

Search This Site

Registration

Pages

Music that Swings

Old Time Radio

Reading Rainbow

Required Reading

Updates from the Field

Blue Delaware

Delaware Liberal

Eschaton

Philadelphia Phillies

Progress Pond (was The Booman Tribune)

Rubber Hose

Blogroll

Categories

Archives by Month

It Must Be True . . . . 0