for thinking people
January 20, 2019
The post hoc fallacy is a widespread logical fallacy. Post hoc fallacy examples abound everywhere around us, and especially on the internet – where all fallacies are exposed sooner or later!
The full name of this fallacy is post hoc ergo propter hoc, which means “after this, therefore because of this” in Latin. In simple terms, a post hoc fallacy is one where when two events happen soon after each other, the occurrence of the second is attributed to the first.
January 15, 2019
The term digital dehumanization might sound obscure. It surely sounds bad, and referring to the dark side of the internet makes it worse. But what do we mean by digital dehumanization, and what does the internet have to do with it?
The term dehumanization refers to the process of depriving a person or a group of persons the qualities of being human. Take a look at my article on zombies and dehumanization. I wrote back then:
The thoroughly disturbing aspect in all this is the concept of Dehumanization. If you’re interested, read Jonathan Glover’s Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century to see how it works. Basically, you convince a group of people – normal, everyday people like you and me – that another group of people are not really humans. Then, it becomes far easier to convince the first group to turn on the second. This is how the Holocaust happened, this is how Hiroshima happened, this is how My Lai, Bosnia, and Rwanda happened.
Let’s begin to unpack the process of digital dehumanization – a dehumanization process occurring digitally, on the internet – with a little hypothetical scenario. It will perhaps set up the tone for today’s article.
January 9, 2019
If you take a look around you, you’ll discover we’re obsessed with measuringFor more on this, take a look at my article on measuring success. Your camera is this many megapixels, your phone has this many gigabytes of RAM. It’s no surprise that texts – novels, essays, and blog articles – fall victim to the same process. But what is an optimal word count for a given text?
In today’s article I’ll… Well, let’s be unusual and start from the end: I’ll eventually give you some tips on how to calculate the optimal word count for your novel (though probably it won’t be what you expect). But before that, I will talk a bit about word counts.
I’ll explain why I think optimal word counts are overrated. Furthermore, I’ll show you why becoming preoccupied with having the “right” word count for your novel might be counterproductive.
(more…)