Carolyn Bailey's Blog – October 2011 Archive (4)

Transcript of Dino Sarma’s Live ARZone Guest Chat

15 October 2011

6pm US Eastern Time

11pm UK Time…

Transcript of Howard Lyman's Live ARZone Guest Chat

8 October 2011

3pm US Pacific Time

11pm UK Time…

What is a counterfactual and why should you care? Suppose that I say, “If only Thomas Jefferson had championed the cause of the abolition of slavery then slavery in America would have been abolished when the United States was founded.” That’s a counterfactual. It poses a solution to a problem (or a cause for some effect) that runs counter to the facts as we know them. Why should you care? Because, staying with the example, it the counterfactual was true, then supposedly we would know…

Spend any time online and sooner or later you will witness someone accuse someone else of using an Ad Hominem attack. Most of the time, the accuser is mistaken. Consider the following two examples:

 1. “Prof. Guy Frangelini is abrasive, arrogant, egotistical and mean-spirited. Given that, I choose to avoid him and his most loyal followers at all…