from month 10/2011

The scope-severity paradox

Do criminals deserve a less severe punishment if they harmed more people ? Most people would almost certainly answer "no". Of course: punishment should be sensitive to the severity of the crime. That's what we usually think. Yet in a compelling paper published in Social Psychological and Personal...

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Atheist clergymen and belief in belief

A while ago, Dan Sperber blogged about research by Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola on atheist clergymen. Their paper, which is available in open access here, provides a fascinating qualitative study on atheist clergymen from various denominations, all of whom were anonymousmy interviewed about ...

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An epidemiology-of-representations solution to a WWII shipwreck mystery

The Australian Cruiser HAMS Sidney After a shameful lull in the activities of the ICCI (Sorry, folks!), we need something sensational – something, say, like Urbain Le Verrier’s famous conjecture that there had to be a yet unknown planet and his calculation of the location of Neptune that led to ...

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