Here’s a new piece of weight-loss advice: eat on a crinkly plate! Um…sounds weird. It is kinda, but we’ll explore why this might be a good bit of advice. We’ll also take a minute and a half sound byte from the TV show Luther and wring all kinds of critical-thinking goodies from it. We’ll discover why it might be a total waste of time for you to read about how other people became successful (or happy or have a better marriage or whatever else you might want). All those advice-giving books could be a waste of time. It has to do with our self-esteem and confirmation biases. We’ll have some fun.
Resources for this Episode
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- Is There a Link between Music and Math?
- Want to lose weight? Eat off a crinkly plate
- Click here to check out Bo Bennett’s books – including Logically Fallacious and his new book, Uncomfortable Ideas.
Andrew
June 5, 2017The informal logical fallacy ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’ seems to me to have boundary conditions. It’s most frequently invoked in arguments about the existence of god or supernatural phenomena, so the boundaries/variables are immense, possibly unknowable, and usually unverifiable. But consider if we were looking in a safe for evidence that a gold coin is inside. We can complete that kind of search. Absence of evidence that the coin exists within the dimensions of the safe IS evidence of its absence in that case and it would be silly to say it isn’t. I’m not going to remain agnostic about whether or not I’m out of milk if my fridge is clearly empty.