Otto Kretschmer

You're welcome!

I'd say it's the 2nd. I just thought about the negaive impact of this tendency first, since I learned about it through the negative examples.

Does it? The quality of politics around the world suggests otherwise...

It's a tendency to assume a certain conclusion before any evidence is even examined and then to cherrypick or invent evidence to fit that preexisting conclusion. It leads to obvious closed epistemic loops - the worst case I am familiar with are conspiracy theorists who treat lack of evidence for the conspiracy as evidence of it being... correct (since it means the conspriacy is powerful enough to suppress evidence). Any ideas?

I've just started reading Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson after finishing The Soviet Century by Moshe Lewin. I plan to read the entire Mars Trilogy.

One can see that Max wasn't amazed by this dish...

Today I learned that Protestant Christianity has split into over 45,000 denominations since the 1500s. That's a lot of splitting - the number of Trotskyist parties looks tiny by comparison.

Wow, I did not expect that my thread will generate a heated debate. Honestly, I expected a handful of replies at most.

Purr. 😺

Ugh. This is going to pour fuel into already prevalent anti-science/anti-intellectual sentiment in the US. ☹️ https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00388-0

I think mostly to the left. Here in Poland we move between different classrooms throughout the school day as a group. In Poland you don't take classes like in the US, you are IN a class, the same group of 18-25 people, you have the same lessons with the same people.

Who was he? The name does ring some bells but nothing specific.

Today I learned that I didn't learn anything new today.

Today I learned that the No True Scotsman fallacy is just 51 years old (it was coined in 1975 by a philosophist Antony Flew). That Scotsman could still be alive today if he was a real person!