The Dr. Bo Show

You have probably heard the anecdote about the frog in boiling water. If you put a frog in hot water it will immediately jump out, but if you put a frog in a pot of room temperature water, then start to boil it, the frog won’t notice the temperature change and it will boil to death. Besides this being not true, it’s also cruel (it’s "frogal" abuse!) so please don’t try it. Yet this remains a popular metaphor for the fact that, very often, we fail to notice gradual changes and thus fail to recogn. . . See the complete description at http://www.thedrboshow.com/tools/bg/Bo/TheDrBoShow

In 2015, I wrote about victim blaming where I concluded that there is an important difference between responsibility for the crime and responsibility for the situation in which one finds oneself. The purpose of this article was not to arm victim blamers with rhetoric, but to arm potential victims with the knowledge that often can reduce the chances of them becoming victims. Since that time, I have written and spoken about this topic extensively, and just recently, the New York Times posted an ar. . . See the complete description at http://www.thedrboshow.com/tools/bg/Bo/TheDrBoShow

When arriving at a sporting event, we drive into a ten story parking garage. We drive around the entire first level, second level, then third level. After not finding any spots, we conclude that there are probably no spaces left until the upper floors and we end up just parking on the tenth floor and skipping floors 4--9. A little later, we crave a soft pretzel. The first vendor we visit is out of pretzels; so is the second, and the third. Even though there are still about a dozen more vend. . . See the complete description at http://www.thedrboshow.com/tools/bg/Bo/TheDrBoShow

I recently heard a debate where one of the debaters rejected the claim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I was shocked to hear this; not only because I have never heard anyone reject this before, but because I regard this as a fundamental principle of scientific skepticism, and from my experience, so does the scientific community. Should this aphorism be rejected by critical thinkers? As you might have guessed, the answer is an emphatic "No." In critical thinking, it is i. . . See the complete description at http://www.thedrboshow.com/tools/bg/Bo/TheDrBoShow

We are always trying to make sense of things. One of the ways we do this is through probability, or the extent to which something is probable; the likelihood of something happening or being the case. We say things such as "it’s probably going to rain tomorrow," "politician X is likely to do a better job," or "God raising Jesus from the dead is the best explanation of the data." These are just some of the different ways we can express the same general statement: "X is more probable than Y." Depen. . . See the complete description at http://www.thedrboshow.com/tools/bg/Bo/TheDrBoShow

In the early 1980s, the Nobel prize-winning cognitive scientists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman researched what they dubbed the Overconfidence Effect. This is a well-established error in reasoning in which a person’s subjective confidence in his or her judgments is reliably greater than the objective accuracy of those judgments, especially when confidence is relatively high. In the last several decades, continuing research on overconfidence has further supported this effect. Yet the feeling of. . . See the complete description at http://www.thedrboshow.com/tools/bg/Bo/TheDrBoShow

The conspiracy theory is a classic, contentious fallacy. Conspiracies are all too common, and they are a fact of life. So what makes having a theory about a conspiracy fallacious or what makes most conspiracy theorists unreasonable? To answer this, let’s first look at what it means to have a scientific theory.As we know, when used in science, a "theory" is a collection of facts that provide strong evidence for a conclusion, commonly proposed by an expert on the subject matter. But more than that. . . See the complete description at http://www.thedrboshow.com/tools/bg/Bo/TheDrBoShow

One of the many, many, errors in reasoning, or logical fallacies is called the fallacy fallacy, which is also known as the argument from fallacy. This is when someone suggests, implies, or outright claims that an argument or statement is false because it contains a fallacy. If a creationist were to claim that man rode on dinosaurs a few thousand years ago, and in response to that, I said, "you know, the Flintstones wasn’t a documentary," then I could rightfully be accused of committing a strawma. . . See the complete description at http://www.thedrboshow.com/tools/bg/Bo/TheDrBoShow

In science, methodology is the detailed process used to arrive at a scientific conclusion. As you can imagine, the more the methodology is flawed, the more likely researchers are to come to an inaccurate conclusion. Virtually every published scientific paper has a detailed methodology section for three main reasons: 1) so others could assess how reliable the conclusion is based on the methodology 2) so others could assess that the methodology is actually measuring what it is supposed to be measu. . . See the complete description at http://www.thedrboshow.com/tools/bg/Bo/TheDrBoShow

Recently, a former Facebook friend of mine made a post stating unequivocally, that "stealthing" is rape. You should already have three questions: 1) Why is this person no longer your Facebook friend, 2) what the hell "stealthing?" and 3) is it really rape? For the answer to the first question, you will need to wait a bit for the story to develop. As to what "stealthing" is, it is when a man removes the condom during sex, without the knowledge or permission of his partner. Clearly an unethical, i. . . See the complete description at http://www.thedrboshow.com/tools/bg/Bo/TheDrBoShow