Anomaly
Mental Self-Defense in an Ideologically Offensive World
Living in the Information Age, the ability to think critically and defend oneself against manipulation is not just a skill—it’s a necessity. I have a methodology I call Mental Self-Defense, a framework designed to empower individuals to identify logical fallacies, avoid reasoning errors, and counter social engineering tactics. Informal Fallacies and Examples of Proper Retorts…
Hypnosis vs. Mind Control: A Scientific Analysis of Misconceptions and Realities
Hypnosis has long been misunderstood, often conflated with the concept of “mind control” in popular culture and media. However, scientific research over the past several decades has provided a clearer understanding of hypnosis as a psychological tool, contrasting it sharply with actual methods of coercive mind control. This report synthesizes the latest findings in neuroscience,…
Anomalistics & Periphenia*
Knowledge changes over time. Ptolemaic cosmology gave way to the Copernican view of the universe. Lamarck’s worldview overtook the Creationists view of biology, which, in turn, was replaced by Darwin’s. Quantum mechanics has superseded Newton’s classical mechanics. The cognitive revolution in psychology has left the behaviorists behind. Every time, a new model, offering more intension,…
Analogies, all the way down…
“A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at…
First-Hand Inbuilt Knowledge vs. Epistemic Hand-Me-Downs
“[T]o us mind must remain forever a realm of its own, which we can know only through directly experiencing it, but which we shall never be able to fully explain or to ‘reduce’ to something else.” Hayek, F. A. The Sensory Order. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976, p. 194 How do we know…
Reason & the Rhetorical Revolution
The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason. Given the central role of language in our thinking, it is well past time to resurrect a Classical Liberal curriculum known as The Trivium. In the Classical Liberal education, there are seven branches of knowledge upon which our…
Whither Memory & History?
Any assessment of the accuracy of memory requires some record of the to-be-remembered events themselves. One way to get those records is to obtain immediate first-hand accounts of experiences that are likely to give rise to vivid recollections later. On the morning after the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, it occurred to…
The Anomalists
The absence of proof is not proof of absence. —William Cowper (1731-1800) Two early American anomalists, Robert Ripley and Charles Fort, challenged preconceived notions and got wealthy doing it in the early twentieth century. The ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not’ cartoon strip started its very own cottage industry of books, television shows, and museums here…
Follow
New info to your inbox. Zero cost.
Mental Self Defense 