Fallen angel, answering my own questions
Acquiescence Bias is the human (social) propensity to portray a positive or agreeable overtone when questioned or queried (or vice versa - disagreement). Psychologists refer to it as "yah-saying" and define it as the tendency to agree with a statement when in doubt. If someone is unsure of the answer, they will often agree rather [...]
To say that I stand with the Ukrainian people doesn't and shouldn't imply that I support the United States government. I don't. I do worry, however, about The Russia-Ukraine War and American Hypocrisy. A level of hypocrisy that is historically damaging to the world. The fiasco with Honduran president Xiomara Castro, when Kamala Harris intended [...]
Epistemology is one of those fancy ideas more people should understand. And I mean this, countless notions could change the world if only the world paid closer attention to them. The anti-luck intuition is one of those notions. And the phrase itself is elegant; it appears to mean something significant or to belong to a [...]
You might find a title such as "The Devil's War on Tiktok's Hypocrisy" a bit frivolous. And you'd be correct in doing so. And this title comes across as an attempt at levity because you know TikTok, and most of social media, for that matter, is more sinister than anything the Devil has ever done. [...]
The so-called comfort zone, the proverbial space where humans find respite from the pressures the world exerts upon them, is a favourite topic of the new age and self-help communities. Comfort can be nice People describe this zone as a state in which people see and hear only what they want to hear and see. [...]
The reason for Devil's journal is an exercise in intellectual humility. Moreover, it's an endeavour of honesty in which the author and other contributors tell real-life stories creatively. The project stipulates three essential preoccupations that cannot be betrayed. One, to make the anecdotes shared here colourful and exciting without deviating from the truth. Two, the [...]
Contemplating lies appears a human predilection, especially when those lies come from ideas they want to be true. I am not pointing to contemplation as meditation but in the sense of entertaining the evident falsehoods behind a statement. And when I say that I'm contemplating TikTok's lies, I mean a clear falsehood behind a public [...]
A quick meditation on the dangers of misused, out of context quotes. the Devil’s favourite quote.
I want to bet all my money that you've encountered the argument of chemical versus natural before. Especially in the alternative medicine industry, where appeals to the naturalistic or genetic fallacy are commonplace. And anyone with a basic understanding of nature knows that "natural" isn't always good, and "chemical" isn't the bad word they'll have [...]
In mid-December of 2021, a video about Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, did its rounds on the conspiracy Internet, and hundreds of thousands of tinfoil hat-wearing folks shared it without requiring additional information. The video, a deceptively edited twenty-five-second snippet of a more extended interview, showed Justin Trudeau allegedly saying that his government was willing [...]