Flat Earth Debate Heats Up

A 56-year-old Brockville man was so enraged by his son's girlfriend's irrational suggestion that the Earth is flat that he threw a propane cylinder into their campfire.  Police expect to charge the man with mischief, while there are no charges pending for the woman's heresy.

Cooperation Intensifies to Combat Hate Speech

Leading technology companies, including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, have signed a collective pledge to the European Union to scrub any hate speech from their walls within twenty-four hours.  Some kind of definition or understanding of what qualifies as hate speech is presently lacking, but such details will surely be worked out cogently and transparently very soon.

Soft and Hard Targets of Scepticism

When people like this get together, they become tribal. They pat each other on the back and tell each other how smart they are compared to those outside the tribe. But belonging to a tribe often makes you dumber.

On The Unreliability of Witnesses and Scientists

Once the reality of meteorite falls became established, the historian Eusebius Salverte pointed out that scientists' failure to recognise the truth of the matter for so long was borne out of "a predetermination to see nothing, or to deny what we had seen."

Public Given Small Yellow Submarine in Consolation

Some assholes at the U.K.'s National Environment Research Council--who asked for people's suggestions for a publicly-funded ship's name--apparently think the Sir David Attenborough is a better name for a research vessel than Boaty McBoatface, and they'll subvert the will of the people to wage their poncy class war against fun!

Parsing Partisan Psychology

Political discussion among like-minded people polarises political opinion and retroactively alters biases.  Political psychology is so pernicious as to invisibly intensify upon exposure to consensus!

Strange Animals in the House of Knowledge: On Forteans & Paranoia

"What may look to outsiders like a conspiracy of lies and secrets is often just an effect of the inertia of systems to change, the result of countless different interacting factors that are, each individually, perfectly innocent. Those systems are always being renegotiated and modified to make them work better, but change is always sluggish from the viewpoint of outsiders, such as the far-seeing paranoids and Forteans on the margins."

The 'Love Hormone' May be Making You a Liar

"This latest research looks into the theory that the hormone encourages greater feelings of association between people, making them more willing to bend or break ethical responsibilities for the sake of their group.

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."

Using Google makes people overestimate their own intelligence

"One of the experiments involved showing one group of people the answer to a question via the internet and another group the answer via a printed page with the same information on it. After absorbing this data, the groups were asked a second question on a completely different topic. Despite neither group being able to search for the answer, the people who previously read their info online believed they were smarter than the non-internet group did."

Latin American Countries Unite Behind Venezuela in Clash With US

"'This is an unacceptable attack on Venezuela's sovereignty,' said Ecuadorian officials, while Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner said it was ridiculous to think that Venezuela could pose a threat to such a superpower. 'It's absolutely incredible to think that Venezuela is the problem. It's absurd and unjustified,' she said.
  
Cuba called Washington's action as 'arbitrary and aggressive,' while the Bolivian government said Obama’s executive order was 'interventionist' and reminded them of a dictatorship.

Maduro went on to accuse the Obama administration of trying to overthrow the Venezuelan government, which he reiterated was 'democratically elected' while the US is 'an imperialist police state.'"

Cooperative communities emerge in transparent social networks

"When the reputation (previous actions) of everyone in the network was rendered transparent, the overall levels of cooperation were almost twice as high as when only the previous actions of immediate connections were known.

When the social connections for the entire network were also revealed to all, the cooperators formed their own community, leaving those with a history of being uncooperative out in the cold."

Conformity 'doubly hard' to beat

"'If all they care about is moving in the direction of the goal, they all end up in the same darn position,' says Epstein.

'It is a very counter-intuitive result ... Nobody had really thought that you could get conformity out of people trying to be distinct.'"

Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links

"The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings."

Pro-Vaxxers are the new pro-lifers: Religious hysteria trumps rational discussion in the vaccine debate

"We were surprised to hear that the bible prohibits believers to be swayed by internet rumours, apparently in two different chapters. The prophetic power of that book has clearly been understated. It's also surprising to hear that the lesson to be learned from someone who died from the small pox vaccine should be held as an example of how it's a good thing to take 'calculated risks'. How's that for some mental gymnastics?"

Scientists Tried Trolling Conspiracy Theorists

"So you've got a group of people who only engage with each other, do so vehemently, and are incapable of recognizing when they're being ridiculed. It's almost like being inoculated from critical thinking, but then, we can say pretty definitively that that isn't the case."

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

"Gulvi simply didn’t understand that she would be branded a racist if she didn’t believe that the entire worlds population could come to Sweden and be financially supported for life by the Swedish people. She died a couple of months later."

Ritual and the Consciousness Monoculture

"As scholastic-industrial consciousness has made our selves more weighty and painful, increasing the need for the loss of self through ritual, the opportunity for such rituals has decreased. As we have become more literate and rational, a process begun during the Enlightenment and accelerating throughout the twentieth century, group rituals and the mental states that they induce have been lost."

The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever

"Of much more serious significance, however, is the way this wholesale manipulation of the official temperature record – for reasons GHCN and Giss have never plausibly explained – has become the real elephant in the room of the greatest and most costly scare the world has known. This really does begin to look like one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time."

Chimps joining new troop learn its 'words'

"Unanswered is what motivated the Dutch chimps to sound more like the Scots: to be better understood, or to fit in by adopting the reining patois?"