024 – How Commerce Became a Tool For Getting Outside My Head
In this episode I talk about the surprising role that commerce has played in raising the relevance and impact of my work as a critical thinking educator, and other positive highlights of 2017.
Adventures in Entrepreneurship:
2017 Year in Review
The end of the year is always a good time to take stock of one’s successes and failures over the past twelve months, think about what lessons can be learned, and chart a course for the future. So here you’ll find my “2017 Year in Review”. I’m writing this mainly for myself, as an exercise in critical reflection that will help me identify problems, organize priorities and make positive changes in the new year. But I’m also writing for those who may be thinking of pursuing a similar path (a version of me ten years ago).
Double Induction and the Appeal to Nature
This 8 minute video summarizes an important form of confirmation bias involving scientific appeals to nature to justify particular social arrangements. It’s a fallacy that has been called “double induction”.
What Critical Thinkers Can Learn From Actors
Good actors need to be able to slip into the skin of a character and view the world through that character’s eyes, even if those eyes are very different from their own. They need to cultivate the ability to empty themselves, to forget who they are, temporarily, so that another persona can live through them. As a critical thinker, you need to cultivate a very similar set of skills.
Thoughts on Bias and Objectivity in the Media
Here are four principles for which I believe there is compelling evidence in the psychological and sociological literature on reasoning. They inform how I interpret news and media information.
023 – The Argument Ninja Difference
I’ve learned over the past year that I’m not the only one talking about the failings of traditional schooling. I’m not the only academic talking about developing online courses for the public that they can’t find anywhere else. I’m not even the only one using the language of martial arts in this context. (e.g. Jordan Peterson, Thaddeus Russell, Mixed Mental Arts ….). But I realize that even among my audience, it may not be clear how the Argument Ninja Academy is supposed to stand out — how it’s different from what I’m seeing in these other projects. In this episode I want to talk about these differences. I want to talk about what makes the Argument Ninja Academy special.