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Robert Todd Carroll
Personal blog · skepdic.comphilosophyscience
Robert Todd Carroll writes The Skeptic's Dictionary, a personal blog at skepdic.com about philosophy and science. Since 2008, 62 different Hacker News readers have linked it 109 times, most often “Myers-Briggs Type Indicator”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
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109mentions?
62HN people?
2008–2026first – last linked?
Most-linked posts?
- /myersb.html5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2008-05-30
- Myers-Briggs Type Indicator3 people · 20 mentions · first linked 2009-06-19
- The Forer Effect2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2008-08-28
- /posthoc.html2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-01-06
- /adhominem.html2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-03-07
- Randi $1M Paranormal Challenge2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-10-15
- /backfireeffect.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-09-06
- /coldread.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-12-31
- /wishfulthinking.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-04-26
- /tart.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-09-19
What Hacker News says?
You don't actually need to make the filter friendlier to advertising. Rankings change every time they re-run the algorithm. You hint that things will be better if I advertise; 50% of the time, that's true. http://www.skepdic.com/perfectprediction.html
Comment linking /perfectprediction.html
on “A 1-star, unfiltered user review of Yelp”Submitted Critical Thinking Matrices as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttp://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ad-hominem.html "An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument." http://www.skepdic.com/adhominem.html "Ad hominem is Latin for "to the man." The ad hominem fallacy occurs when one asserts that somebody's claim is wrong because of…
Comment linking /adhominem.html
on “The Unix Philosophy”Submitted Myers-Briggs Type Indicator as a story · 2 points
HN discussioncryopreservation That's not what I was talking about. Reviving frozen minds Frozen. Minds. Say What? will likely require some form of basic molecular nanotech, Wild assertion. and this same technology can in principle convert dirt to habitats on Earth and in space. Wild speculation. To sum it up - you have nothing. Asserting "OH the tech we will have by then will magically fix it and we will live in space" is not a…
Comment linking /cryonics.html
on “Monday was my 46th birthday and likely my last”Submitted Forer Effect as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAd hominem . EDIT: Really? Sometimes, HN makes me sad. "Abusive ad hominem usually involves attacking the traits of an opponent as a means to invalidate their arguments. Equating someone's character with the soundness of their argument is a logical fallacy." [1] "Arguments of this kind focus not on the evidence for a view but on the character of the person advancing it; they seek to discredit positions by discrediti…
Comment linking /adhominem.html
on “Why didn't you back me up?”Submitted Clever Hans Phenomenon as a story · 1 points
HN discussionMyers Briggs: http://www.skepdic.com/myersb
Comment linking /myersb
on “The Lie Hollywood Loves to Tell”Submitted Randi $1M Paranormal Challenge as a story · 1 points
HN discussion>Does mystical language honestly require a trigger warning? I think GP was being a little flip with that, especially since many on HN are likely (as I am) empricists who don't really go in for "mystical language" or what is generally known as "woo."[0] Hence the facetious reference to a "trigger warning." Perhaps GP could confirm or reject my hypothesis? [0] http://skepdic.com/woowoo.html Edit: Found the missing lin…
Comment linking /woowoo.html
on “Are you nice or kind?”Submitted The Skeptic’s Dictionary as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYou're not only mis-using appeal to authority, but you're now using argumentum ad nauseum to boot. You're wrong, and you're not advancing the discussion. It also helps to keep in mind the distinction between logical fallacies , used in a strict logical sense, and strength of argument . The case here is one of "what is the evidence to support a belief?", not "are the argument's predicates and conclusions logically va…
Comment linking /authorty.html
on “Technology was meant to herald a new way of working, but that’s not the case”Submitted Ad populum fallacy as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI think, just like a religion, it's not really the skeptics job to 'disprove' the theory. I think the job of the ones promoting it is to prove it. A link to skeptics dictionary: http://www.skepdic.com/tm.html TM recruiting literature is full of charts and graphs demonstrating the wonders of TM. Things like metabolic rate, oxygen consumption rate, bodily production of carbon dioxide, hormone production, brain waves,…
Comment linking /tm.html
on “What Happens to the Brain When You Meditate”Submitted The Barnum effect as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWhile I see what you mean with referencing Myers-Briggs, do you really believe that it is useful? Some reference reading: http://www.skepdic.com/myersb.html
Comment linking /myersb.html
on “Recruiters are, by and large, a waste of your time”Submitted A Practical Guide to Critical Thinking as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Great. It's a modern day equivalent of the lie detector for recordings. Unless it's a lot more reliable than the polygraph, it shouldn't be admissible in court, either. (The polygraph, sometimes called a 'lie detector', does not create evidence admissible in court. It has too many false positives and false negatives.) http://antipolygraph.org/ http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2012/09... http://…
Comment linking /polygrap.html
on “The hum that helps to fight crime”Submitted Nocebo and Nocebo Effect as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis is a demonstration of the fallacy of personal validation. (And yet personal validation is brought up in dozens of replies on Hacker News each day.) That demonstration of the fallacy of personal validation was first made by psychologist Bertram R. Forer (1914-2000), who published a paper about the experiment in 1949.[1] Because Forer was the first to publish about an experiment on the issue, the phenomenon is so…
Comment linking /coldread.html
on “A Magician’s Best Trick: Revealing a Basic Human Bias”Submitted Brain Gym (educational kinesiology) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI'm glad lutusp has already jumped in here to decry the shoddy quality of "science" relied on to build the opinion piece kindly submitted here. He is correct that psychology often relies on data unrepresentative of humankind as a whole, http://hci.ucsd.edu/102b/readings/WeirdestPeople.pdf often engages in dodgy data manipulation after gathering the data, http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/ and is usually part of a l…
Comment linking /placebo.html
on “Your Thoughts Can Release Abilities Beyond Normal Limits”Submitted The Forer Effect as a story · 1 points
HN discussionPost hoc ergo propter hoc is one of the classic logical fallacies[1]. You persist in the assumption that poverty causes lower IQ, rather than the possibility that both poverty and lower IQ are correlated because they share a common cause. [1] See http://www.skepdic.com/posthoc.html
Comment linking /posthoc.html
on “The Latest On Intelligence”Have you heard about the Forer Effect? Horoscopes are written to be convincing to gullible readers. http://skepdic.com/forer.html
Comment linking /forer.html
on “Physicists and Philosophers Debate the Boundaries of Science”> In the bottom comment I provided links to resources dealing with food toxicity. You just provided general resources about food and nutrition (based on the links I'm familiar with -- others could be pseudo-science). Give some specific excerpts about "toxins" and we can discuss them. All food has side effects (e.g. too much sugar and diabetes, micro-allergies, cured meat and cancer, etc). This is not the same as som…
Comment linking /detox.html
on “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)”To be clear: No. This is wrong. Do not follow this advice. The 'alkaline diet' does not work. http://www.skepdic.com/alkalinediet.html http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/DSH/coral2...
Comment linking /alkalinediet.html
on “Show HN: App creates a meal plan that satisfies your nutrition constraints ”"... FWIW, I pissed off a whole entire mailing list of self-described INTJs once by suggesting the same thing, but for differing personality types: that INTJs, being one of the few types that was so self-analytical as to know what type it was ..." Myers Brigg illustrates "self-validation" and is dangerous when used to define careers ~ http://www.skepdic.com/myersb.html
Comment linking /myersb.html
on “Geek behaviors present during conversations”This is a very interesting review of some of the most challenging published literature on the reliability of psychological science. The author's point is correct that parapsychology (ESP and the like) basically has no prior plausibility. Yet a researcher who has the chops to do reliable research, Daryl J. Bem, has conducted "experiments" that appear to show that some human experimental subjects can see into the futu…
Comment linking /projectalpha.html
on “The Control Group Is Out of Control”
