Why the embryo rescue case is a bad argument against embryonic personhood

Invoking embryonic development and the notion of "personhood" to justify early abortion: a curious argument.

Why are people bad at detecting randomness? A statistical argument.

Errors in detecting randomness are often explained in terms of biases and misconceptions. We propose and provide evidence for an account that characterizes the contribution of the inherent statistical difficulty of the task. Our account is based on a Bayesian statistical analysis, focusing on the fact that a random process is a special case of systematic processes, meaning that the hypothesis o...

Why Pereboom's Four-Case Manipulation Argument is Manipulative

Research suggests that intuitions about thought experiments are vulnerable to a wide array of seemingly irrelevant factors. I argue that when arguments hinge on the use of intuitions about thought experiments, research on the subtle factors that affect intuitions must be taken seriously. To demonstrate how failing to consider such psychological influences can undermine an argument, I discuss Pe...

Why Believe That There Is a God?

This article presents an argument for the existence of God, showing that the evident phenomena are best explained by supposing that a God causes them. The argument is based on the inductive force of four very evident general phenomena: that there is a physical Universe; that it is governed by very simple natural laws; that those laws are such as to lead to the existence of human bodies; and tha...

Why Programmer-specified Aliasing is a Bad Idea

The ISO C standard C99 has added a special keyword, named restrict to allow the programmer to specify non-aliasing as an aid to the compiler’s optimizer and to thereby possibly improve performance. However, it is the programmer’s responsibility to ensure that the annotations are correct. Therefore, in practice, restrict will be useful only when the programmer’s effort is rewarded with noticeabl...