Rational-Empirical Babies

Psychologist Alison Gopnik wrote a book called The Philosophical Baby. It's loaded with cool insights on the rationalism-empiricism debate. Here's an interview with Gopnik about the book, and here's a review. Below is her appearance on The Colbert Report.

Vaudevillian Dialectic

The Psychology of Happiness

Since utilitarianism focuses so much on happiness, I thought I'd share some links on the cool new psychological research on happiness popping up lately.

• Here's a great overview of the psychology of happiness. And here is another, and another.
• Recent studies suggest that our baseline level of happiness doesn't change much throughout our life. So, even if we won the lottery, we wouldn't wind up that much happier. This is potentially very depressing news, although some say there's room for some optimism, and others think the research is wrong.
• There's an insightful, accessible book by Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert called Stumbling on Happiness. One of his big points is that we often don't know what makes us happy. Here's Gilbert's appearance on The Colbert Report:
• And here's Gilbert giving an awesome TED talk on his research:
  
  

Suffer-iness

Here's Stephen Colbert's take on evil:

Random Comedy

As usual, The Onion nails it:

• "Realistic Announcer Shouting How Kevin Durant Making His Last 4 Shots Has No Bearing On Whether He Will Make Next Shot"
• "Cornell Drains Fun Out Of Cinderella Run By Explaining How On A Long Enough Timeline The Improbable Becomes Probable"

Bro-ing Out

Philosophy Bro is a website devoted to summarizing classic philosophical texts in bro-speak.  Recently, P-Bro tackled Aquinas's Five Ways as well as the ontological argument (warning: the summaries contain curses).

McGurk

Here's a neat video on an optical illusion called the McGurk effect:

My favorite illusions are the ones that still work even after you realize they're just illusions.

An Expert for Every Cause

Looking for links on arguments from authority? This is your post! First, here's an interesting article on a great question: How are those of us who aren't experts supposed to figure out the truth about stuff that requires expertise?

Not all alleged experts are actual experts. Here's a method to tell which experts are phonies (this article was originally published in the Chronicle of Higher Education).

We should judge experts who are into making predictions on how accurate their predictions turn out.  Well, most experts are really bad at predicting, and have the same biases as non-experts.

It's important to check whether the person making an appeal to authority really knows who the authority is. That's why we should beware of claims that begin with "Studies show..."

And here's a Saturday Night Live sketch in which Christopher Walken completely flunks the competence test.

Arguments by Example

Here are a few dumb things about arguments by example (also called inductive arguments, talked about in the book chapter titled "Generalizations"). First, a video of comedian Lewis Black describing his failure to learn from experience every year around Halloween:


Next, this stick figure comic offers a pretty bad argument. Why is it bad? (Let us know in the comments!)

That Beyoncé Video WAS Great...

Why doesn't Kanye give a toast to the tools?

Howard Sure Is a Duck

Howard the Duck is my favorite synecdoche for the 80's:

Philosophy: The Annoying 3-Year-Old

Here's comedian Louis CK's take on the broad, fundamental questions kids ask.

Louis CK - Why?