Category: Education

  • Schieber vs Hernandez: Does God Exist

    Having some time to kill yesterday, I watched a theism/atheism debate between Justin Schieber and Eric Hernandez, hoping to see a new or (at least) interesting argument from the theism side. Alas, Hernandez’s arguments were old, illogical, debunked-centuries-ago nonsense, from a very particular strain of Christian Protestantism.

  • Confabulation, Math, and Self-Knowledge

    As with many other people, I often find myself denigrating things that I consider ridiculous, and on my best days I’ll catch myself and ask myself ‘ok, but *why* is that ridiculous…?’. There’s that weird experience of being in two places at once, the Brian that’s experiencing the ridiculous and seeing it as the silliness…

  • Being an Effective Devil’s Advocate

    Scene: a coffee shop where two people are in a heated discussion over a complex topic. Galina: “So you can see that, generally speaking, this is predominantly the case!” Bob: “No! What about this one time, that thing happened! That shows that you’re completely wrong!” Galina, confused: “I don’t understand what that has to do…

  • Beliefs Don’t Change in “Real-Time”

    An acquaintance of mine sent me a link to a conversation between Dan Dennett and Sam Harris, wherein Dennett attempts to explain the holes in Harris’s puerile arguments against the concept of “free will”. In any case, this particular post isn’t about Harris, but a particular point he reiterates repeatedly: that we can (and should)…

  • Philosophy of science. Again.

    I wrote about philosophy of science back in 2012, and a recent spat in biology has brought this up again. The Wired article “Twitter Nerd-Fight Reveals a Long, Bizarre Scientific Feud” explains the details of that fight pretty well, and I just want to dig into a particular comment that seems to represent the core…

  • LSAT/GMAT/GRE Resource in Vancouver

    As part of helping out people studying for the LSAT/GMAT/GRE tests, I try to find free resources they can use to help themselves. Vancouver Public Library provides access to one such resource. It’s difficult to find if you don’t know what you’re looking for, so I put together the below guide. You can also get…

  • Government Funding of Religious Schools

    In many parts of Canada (and, of course, other parts of the world), there are two systems of schooling in place: a secular system that does not explicitly endorse any particular religious faith (though can implicitly do so), and an explicitly religious system. In Canada, both of these are funded by the government, and it’s…

  • Langara College and the Bullshit it Peddles

    When I first came to Vancouver from Ireland, I found out about the student loan program that was available in Canada and discovered that I could actually afford to go to University. I’d just missed the enrollment deadline for the University of British Columbia, but a helpful advisor there suggested a number of avenues I…

  • Lester B. Pearson School Board, Bastion of Small Thinking

    Montreal teen, Lindsey Stocker, was suspended from her school (Beaconsfield High School) for having an opinion. Her opinion was that the school (Beaconsfield High School) was policing the clothing of the girls of the school rather than policing the unacceptable behaviour of the boys in the school, and thus contributing to a culture whereby women and…

  • Tenure, and the Bizarre Case of the University of Saskatchewan

    On May 14th, it hit the news that the University of Saskatchewan had done the unthinkable: they had fired a tenured professor for the crime of ‘having an opinion’. It’s worth noting here that the opinion wasn’t racist, mysogynist, called for the armed overthrow of the Canadian government, declared that the Moon People were our…