by Spencer Greenberg Gender is a central part of many people's identities, and yet a very basic and politically contentious question is still being debated: What IS gender? And what defines whether someone is a "man," a "woman," or neither? This question is especially topical and important now in light of the January 20, 2025, Executive Order from Donald Trump attempting to define w...

It's interesting to observe the effects of AI on chess as a sport. You might expect that since AI defeated Gary Kasparov in 1997, and subsequently, AI became far better than any human player, interest in chess would diminish. But interestingly, there has been a surge in interest over the past 5 years, with more and more people playing and watching it (COVID and the Queen's Gambit get some of the ...

Is it a bad idea to broadly tell people to just "trust the science"? I think so. The reason stems from my thinking that all of the following are important and true (and too often overlooked) regarding science: 1) A lot of science is real AND valuable to society. 2) A lot of "science" is actually fake - see, for instance, a decent percentage of papers in psychology 15 years ago. 3) "Sc...

One reason people often disagree about what's immoral is that they have different values. But there's another important reason that I think few are aware of: there are at least four different kinds of moral evaluations of behavior, and it's easy to conflate them. I argue that only one of these categories is actually sufficient grounds for judging an *action* as immoral, despite many people using ...

At what step do you stop agreeing with this logical argument relating to animals? For each step, I'm also showing the percentage of disagreements on social media that involved this step (either direct disagreements with the step or disagreements with its premise). (There were a total of 63 such disagreements described across my posts on Facebook and X.) Note: any time the argument mentions...

While some group conversations are great (e.g., with close friends), a lot of group conversations are boring, the lowest common denominator, or hijacked by one talkative person. How can you make group conversations more interesting? Here's what I've found to be useful: 1) Shrink the group The best group conversations typically happen (I claim) in groups of 3 to 5. If your group is bigger...