The Canadian Lückenpresse

If you live in the CBC matrix, you are living in a bubble that will soon be pricked by reality. A reality that even the CBC cannot hold at bay. Your trusted information gatekeepers will not be able to stop the truth from busting through and overwhelming you. The shock will render you bewildered and paralytic. You will not be able to make sense of what has befallen you, much in the way that the establishment media pundits are dumbfounded by Trump's success. How could this happen?

TV Worse Than Nothing For Learning, Parents Don't Care

Television time in early childhood has been found to decrease motor, vocabulary, math, and social skills, as well as "physical prowess at kindergarten."

Believers are Dumb; Non-Believers are Evil

In the battle between conflicting paradigms of existence, two modes of experiencing truth are forced into competition by the efficient arrangement of human neural architecture.  Social and analytic thinking require different parts of the brain, a brain that will suppress the neuronal networks not useful for the problem at hand.

Empathy for others predicts spiritual beliefs, while also entailing low scores on critical thinking and mechanical reasoning.  Those more disposed to analytical thought are less likely to be religious, but more likely to express traits in common with psychopathy.  While religiosity correlates with empathic concern, non-religiosity correlates with self-centred impulsivity and coldheartedness.

It could be possible to engage both mental modules in tandem, but the percipients would have to be aware of the differing functions of the brain, and the manner in which cognition and emotion act at odds with one another in the interest of simplicity.

How to Succeed in Uncertain Times

Our efforts to contain the world in a system or idea may be doing more to hurt us than help us. Instead of trying to find the answer, maybe we ought to embrace that there isn’t any answer besides what we do and what is.

Neuroscience's New Consciousness Theory Is Spiritual

Pondering questions previously deemed appropriate only for pot smoking college dorm-dwellers is now a task for the best and brightest scientific minds. Most rational thinkers will agree that the idea of a personal god who gets angry when we masturbate and routinely disrupts the laws of physics upon prayer is utterly ridiculous. This theory doesn't give credence to anything of the sort. It simply reveals an underlying harmony in nature, and a sweeping mental presence that isn't confined to biological systems.

Many psychology studies fail the replication test

"Not everything we do gets published. Novel, positive and tidy results are more likely to survive peer review and this can lead to publication biases that leave out negative results and studies that do not fit the story that we have," he says.

"If this occurs on a broad scale, then the published literature may become more beautiful than the reality."

The Mainstream Media is Junk Food For Your Brain

"It’s a lot like when you know you should eat a salad instead of that enticing doughnut, but you choose the doughnut instead because it’s oh-so-good in the moment. When the less intelligent segments of society are presented with the real facts or even just told to investigate an issue on their own (the salad), they often react with confusion or fury, choosing instead to accept whatever the mainstream media is telling them to say or think (the doughnut)."

Artificial intelligence experts are building the world’s angriest robot. Should you be scared?

"The future of Artificial Intelligence is extremely uncertain, and computer scientists like Dr Armstrong are working to make sure we’ll be safe from dangerous robots. But for now, the angry robot in New Zealand poses no serious threat."

Common Core education: the insane bottom line

"The goal wasn’t planting falsehoods. Under the guise of teaching logic and critical thinking, the goal was mass confusion. Young minds want answers. If you keep denying them those answers, you induce chaos. You pour chaos into what would otherwise be a straightforward process. You demean thinking. You make children believe thinking has no purpose. Do you see? Do you see what that achieves? Schools become factories for insanity."

Why the Earth Will Never Be Invaded

"The odds of us existing, concluded Metaxas, 'are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that the notion that it all "just happened" defies common sense. It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row.'"

Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism

"If meta-contrarianism is a real tendency in over-intelligent people, it doesn't mean they should immediately abandon their beliefs; that would just be meta-meta-contrarianism. It means that they need to recognize the meta-contrarian tendency within themselves and so be extra suspicious and careful about a desire to believe something contrary to the prevailing contrarian wisdom, especially if they really enjoy doing so."

Anthropocene: New dates proposed for the 'Age of Man'

"Maize from Central America was grown in southern Europe and Africa and China. Potatoes from South America were grown in the UK, and all the way through Europe to China. Species went the other way: wheat came to North America and sugar came to South America - a real mixing of species around the world.

We saw these species jump continents, which is a geologically unprecedented impact, setting Earth off on a new evolutionary trajectory."

Complex Societies Evolved without Belief in All-Powerful Deity

"'They are tools of control used by purveyors of religion to cement their grip on power,' says Pagel. 'As soon as you have a large society generating lots of goods and services, this wealth can be put to use by someone who can grab the reins of power. The most immediate way to do this is to align yourself with a supreme deity and then make lists of things people can and cannot do, and these become 'morals' when applied to our social behaviour.'"

New Study Confirms That There Are Way Too Many Studies

"Some scientists formulated complex equations and concluded that with the new media age comes more material, and with more material comes a decline in our attention towards the important scientific studies."

How Social Norms Suddenly Take Hold

"'Consensus spontaneously emerged from nothing,' Centola said. 'At first it was chaos, everyone was saying different things and no one could coordinate, and then all of a sudden people who had never interacted with each other were all using the same words.'"

How to Live with Mystery in a Culture Obsessed with Certainty and Definitive Answers

"Learning more about the world doesn’t lead to a point closer to a final destination — whose existence is nothing but a hopeful assumption anyway — but to more questions and mysteries. The more we know, the more exposed we are to our ignorance, and the more we know to ask."

Researcher explores how the universe creates reason, morality

"You can look at the universe as a kind of 'complexity machine', which raises all sorts of questions about what this means in the broader sense.  For example, does believing the universe is structured to produce complexity in general, and rational creatures in particular, constitute a religious belief?  It need not imply that the universe was created by a God, but on the other hand, it does suggest that the kind of rationality we hold dear is not an accident."