Skip to content

Spin city: why improving collective epistemology matters

The gene for internet addiction has been found! Well, actually it turns out that 27% of internet addicts have the genetic variant, compared to 17% of non-addicts. The Encode project has overturned the theory of ‘junk DNA‘! Well,…

Read More

Refusing Treatment to the Overweight: A Case Analysis

It was recently reported that a doctor in Shrewsbury Massachusetts refused to treat a patient named Ida Davidson because she was overweight. Dr. Helen Carter recently decided to stop admitting patients who weighed over 200 pounds to her pra…

Read More

Chemical castration and homosexuality

Last week the Sydney Herald published details about an Australian Doctor who has been struck off as a GP (although not as a Radiologist) after prescribing Cyprostat to an 18 year man in order to treat his homosexuality.1 Both men were membe…

Read More

The Paralympics and Short Basketball

It has always been a puzzle to me that there is no league in basketball for small people.  Height is a vague concept, like baldness, but just as some people are unquestionably bald, others are unquestionably short.  Shortness is a category …

Read More

The deadly dangers of peer review

By Charles Foster I’m just reading Michael Rosen’s (very good) book, ‘Dignity: Its history and meaning’ (Harvard University Press, 2012). He robustly questions the use of peer review in philosophy. Of course it is an essential part of scien…

Read More

The Continuing Tragedies of Home Birth and the Rights of the Future Child

By Lach De Crespigny and Julian Savulescu Windsor Coroner’s Court has heard that a mother died within hours of giving birth at home after a private midwife committed a horrifying catalogue of errors . According to reports, the woman h…

Read More

The Immorality of the News

People tend to worry a great deal about censorship of the press, and to talk about the obligation governments and others are under to allow the press the freedom it needs to report accurately. But maybe we should worry more about what the p…

Read More

Home Alone? On Being Liberal in East Asia

A version of this piece was originally published on carnegiecouncil.org.  What is it like to be liberal in East Asia, where political leaders repeatedly denounce liberal values for various purposes—from suppressing dissenters to pursuing po…

Read More

The times they are a changing…

In 1920, Jackson Scholz set the men’s 100m world record at 10.6 seconds. The 100m race is one where progress is very hard; we’re getting towards the limit of human possibility. It’s very tricky to squeeze out another secon…

Read More

The AAP report on circumcision: Bad science + bad ethics = bad medicine

By Brian D. Earp See Brian’s most recent previous post by clicking here. See all of Brian’s previous posts by clicking here. Follow Brian on Twitter by clicking here.   UPDATED as of 27 May, 2013. See the bottom of the post. The AAP re…

Read More
1 164 165 166 167 168 263