document updated 16 years ago, on Oct 14, 2007
Articles I find interesting, whenever I browse several articles a day on Wikipedia:
2007-10-14
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodidacticism
I guess that's me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysphemisms
Ahhh, so THAT's the pure antonym of euphamism... I'd thought it was something else. (hyperbole, maybe?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Skepticism
A few really good articles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_realism
A more philosophically-oriented take on naturalism/empiricism/skepticism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoskepticism
Excesses of skepticism... things to avoid. The quote in the article is particularly salient:
In science, the burden of proof falls upon the claimant; and the more extraordinary a claim,
the heavier is the burden of proof demanded. The true skeptic takes an agnostic position,
one that says the claim is not proved rather than disproved. He asserts that the claimant
has not borne the burden of proof and that science must continue to build its cognitive map
of reality without incorporating the extraordinary claim as a new "fact." Since the true
skeptic does not assert a claim, he has no burden to prove anything. He just goes on using
the established theories of "conventional science" as usual. But if a critic asserts that
there is evidence for disproof, that he has a negative hypothesis --saying, for instance,
that a seeming psi result was actually due to an artifact--he is making a claim and
therefore also has to bear a burden of proof.
The description of "pathological skepticism" is an interesting observation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_skepticism
Aha, that's what most of the skepticism podcasts would be classified as.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
Ahah, the larger discipline that covers much of skepticism and related interests.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Himmler
Staged/faked "attacks" on German institutions along the German/Polish border, at the start of
WWII, as the casus belli to allow Germany to invade Poland, ostensibly for self-defense.
(I knew false-flag events existed, but didn't know they were so blatant or prominent)