One of my online communities recently experienced a thread of emails complaining about ‘experts’ and the problems they cause.

I offered another perspective…

Part of the problem lies not with the experts, themselves, but with the role expected of them (or assigned to them) by others.

Too often they are asked to provide THE answer, because we want clarity and simplicity where it doesn’t exist.

Is sex binary? The answer to this question depends on who is asking, and why.

There is a classic taboo against discussing politics, religion, and money at polite social gatherings.  These days, one probably needs to add sex and gender to that list. 

(Sex and gender are not the same thing. My commentary here is limited to biological sex as a category and does not address the social construct called gender.)

Is religious belief inevitable? Is it useful?

During a recent discussion of the brutalist style of architecture (the discussants all hated it, some quite passionately) I found myself reflecting on the fascinating variety of aesthetic standards people use.

The neoliberal model driving United States economic policy since the 1970s has failed and needs to be replaced. Market Humanism is the best option. It is a ‘full stack’ framework that starts with a moral grounding, uses a coherent and connected body of validated behavioral science and economic data, and then generates policy proposals.

My youngest sister Margaret was diagnosed with an advanced throat cancer several years ago and died last Fall, leaving a big hole in my universe. Learning to live with that hole has been a challenge. Part of me doesn’t want to accept a world without her in it.

Writing has always been an important tool for me, so I wrote something for her memorial. My piece contains echoes from Robert Frost, e.e. cummings, and an Apache blessing. Both writing it and sharing it have given me considerable comfort.

For Margaret: Absens, sed non oblitus

I recently posted a comment on social media noting that NYC Mayor Mamdani asked New Yorker City dwellers to set their air conditioners at 78 degrees in the context of a severe heat wave and concern about the power grid and was then widely a

Our brains are lying to us.

Our brains do three things:
    •    Collect, organize, and store information.
    •    Use that information to identify possible patterns and create models.
    •    Use those patterns and models to produce behaviors that increase our probability of surviving and reproducing.

(In response to the person who insisted on believing the science he learned in high school - decades ago.)

Cognitive neuroscience shows us that humans fall on a continuum between two poles that I like to label as the Warrior Perspective and the Scout Perspective. (With a shoutout to Julia Galef, whose interests are the philosophy of science and applied rationality, and who has written about this.)

I was asked recently on social media if we are to ignore XX versus XY chromosomes as a scientific identifier of gender and sex? My short answer was that science gave up on XX/XY as an identifier of sex a generation ago. My much longer answer follows.