Guest Author • Apr 08, 2021 •
Ali Boyle, University of Cambridge If you ask people to list the most intelligent animals, they’ll name a few usual suspects. Chimpanzees, dolphins and elephants are often mentioned, as are crows, dogs and occasionally pigs. Horses don’t usually get a look in. So it might come as a surprise that horses possess an unusual skill, widely considered an indicator of … Read More
Guest Author • Apr 17, 2018 •
Laura Y. Cabrera, Michigan State University and Jennifer Carter-Johnson, Michigan State University This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Mr. B loves Johnny Cash, except when he doesn’t. Mr. X has watched his doctors morph into Italian chefs right before his eyes. The link between the two? … Read More
Guest Author • Dec 14, 2017 •
Rafael A Calvo, University of Sydney and Dorian Peters, University of Sydney If kids spend hours a day speaking to digital personal assistant Alexa, how will this affect the way they connect to real people? When a self-driving car runs over a pedestrian, who do you take to court? Is it okay to manipulate people’s emotions … Read More
Guest Author • Apr 19, 2017 •
By Peter Ellerton, The University of Queensland Which is more important, a fact or an opinion on any given subject? It might be tempting to say the fact. But not so fast… Lately, we find ourselves lamenting the post-truth world, in which facts seem no more important than opinions, and sometimes less so. We also tend … Read More
Guest Author • Jun 27, 2016 •
By Dr Carolyn Mason, Lecturer, Philosophy, University of Canterbury A new study published in Science finds that the majority of research participants accept that it is morally right to program autonomous vehicles (AVs) to kill the occupant of the car to save ten pedestrians. As the authors Bonnefon, Shariff and Rahwan point out, this result agrees with utilitarianism, that … Read More
Eric Crampton • Jun 23, 2015 •
I'll be chairing a discussion with Peter Singer in Christchurch in September. If you're anywhere in the neighbourhood, by which I mean within a 3-hour flight, you should attend.I have never loved and hated and been changed by a book as much as Singer's Practical Ethics. I threw it across the room more often than any other. Actually, … Read More
Ken Perrott • Jun 11, 2015 •
Ken Perrott • May 19, 2015 •
This meme is for those commenters here who accuse me of having a closed mind. I am always happy to change my opinion or view of things – if there is evidence to suggest I should. And no, claims that … Continue reading → … Read More
Ken Perrott • Mar 31, 2015 •
My old man used to label us kids as “fair-weather sailors” when we bitched about working outside during bad weather. That phrase comes to my mind sometimes when I come across people who claim to be “sceptics ” (“Skeptics”) behaving very unsceptically when confronted with a claim outside their area of interest. For example, someone who … … Continue reading … Read More
Ken Perrott • Sep 22, 2014 •
I have seen so much of this lately: And this: And in so many cases when we challenge this cherry-picking and confirmation bias we get this: … Read More