N.B. that I'm using this as an idiosyncratic term for fields of endeavor which are often humbug.
But often interesting.

• Systems theory, General Systems Theory - Wikipedia
  
  
  
  
  
• Systematics - study of multi-term systems - Wikipedia
  
  
  
  
  
• Gregory Bateson - Wikipedia
  
  
  
  
  
• Abductive reasoning, Abduction - Wikipedia
  
  
  
  
  
• General Semantics
  
  
  
  
  
• Alfred Korzybski
  
  
  
  
  
• Robert Anton Wilson / RAW - Wikipedia
  
  
  
  
  
• Six Domains of the Polynomic System of Value
  
  
  
  
  
• Law of unintended consequences - Wikipedia
  
  
  
  
  
• Comments on "Gulf" by Robert Heinlein
  15 MAY 2005
  

  "Joe is a smart guy, you see, which is why Baldwin is trying to recruit him. The organization is made up of what Baldwin considers an emerging new species within the human race, Homo novis. They're not different physically, but rather mentally -- as he puts it, "supermen are superthinkers" (p. 45) -- and he suspects Joe is one of them. To find out, Joe will be subjected to the novel training methods the organization has developed. Gail is assigned as his teacher:

  'First we must teach you to see and hear, then to remember, then to speak, and then to think.' ...

  Speedtalk sounds pretty cool, huh? I don't believe it for a minute, of course. (But -- [Need I add "Of course"?], somebody is working on the real-world equivalent, Ithkuil / Iláksh. A single eight-character word is given in the article, the meaning of which is "On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point." [Ithkuil writing uses 252 core characters + 54 specialized combinatory elements, and is based on "logical" principles somewhat reminiscent of Tolkien's Tengwar]. Instantiating Ithkuil in practice would seem beyond the capabilities of human beings, but it's actually not too far from a cross between German [compound words] and Chinese.) Speedtalk may be more compressed in principle, but phonemes are phonetically distinct for a reason -- speakers need to be able to pronounce them distinctly even if they've got food in their mouths, and hearers need to be able to tell them apart even it's raining loudly. That business about all thought taking place in symbols provided by language strikes me as plain wrong, too -- when I remember what the Mona Lisa looks like, what language am I thinking in? (I.e., a kick in the pants of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.) (Has anybody used The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis as the name of an album yet?) ...
  
  Heinlein's conception of Speedtalk was heavily influenced by a theory called General Semantics that was developed by Alfred Korzybski in the early 20th century. Heinlein goes on at some length about Korzybski's ideas, which were first laid out in Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933). At the mention of "non-Aristotelian" sharp SF fans will be thinking of A. E. Van Vogt's The World of Null-A, another story built around Korzybski's theories."

  -- A page on this site on / Robert Heinlein /
  
  
  
• Renshaw and the Tachistoscope (and Heinlein too)
  by Alexei Panshin

  "Heinlein's materials in particular are hard to pin down. He has credited Sinclair Lewis with giving him the idea of charting a series of stories, but this affected only the structure of the Future History, not its content. At the moment, I can think of only one bit of material of which Heinlein has explicitly named the source -- in fact, he has done it three times. In the short novel "Gulf," in Citizen of the Galaxy, and in Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein makes reference to the work of a psychologist named Samuel Renshaw.
  
  In "Gulf" ... Renshaw's work is described as proving 'most people are about one-fifth efficient in using their capacities to see, hear, taste, feel and remember.'
  
  In Citizen of the Galaxy ... again Renshaw is described as having shown that our senses may be made more efficient by training. The only training method actually discussed, though, is an improvement of reading speed through tachistoscope training.
  
  Finally, in Stranger in a Strange Land, one of Heinlein's "Fair Witnesses" derives great prestige from the fact that he has been trained in total recall by Dr Samuel Renshaw -- "the great Dr Samuel Renshaw".
  
  This struck me as an interesting thing to look into: what could I find out about Renshaw? (Here, by the way, you can see Panshin's Law of Repetition at work: if Heinlein had mentioned Renshaw in only one story, it would have seemed quite possible that Renshaw was someone made up for convenient use in a story; used three times, in separate, unconnected stories, it seemed most probable that he really existed.) ...
  
  Renshaw has concentrated his work with the tachistoscope in two disparate areas: training Armed Forces personnel in enemy plane recognition during World War II, and in training poor readers for faster speed and retention of materials read.
  
  In a demonstration to convince Navy personnel of the value of his methods, Renshaw's students had 95% recognition of twenty planes at flashes of duration of 1/100th of a second. A Navy line officer got none. Renshaw accomplished his plane recognition feats by training in recognition of planes as gestalts in split-second flashes on a tachistoscope. The Army and Navy officially credit Renshaw and his recognition training with saving thousands of lives and uncounted numbers of airplanes and warships, and the Navy honored Renshaw with a citation for his work at the end of the war. ...
  
  This is how Renshaw puts it: '...the evidence is clear and unambiguous; children who have had adequate tachistoscope training in the first grade read more fluently and understandingly, show distinctly greater skill in number work, exhibit greater range, quickness and accuracy in general observational noting, in art work, etc., than the children of equal native ability, under teachers of equal competence in the same curriculum who have not had this form of visual training.'
  
  No doubt they have fewer cavities, too.
  
  This is Renshaw's side of the picture. There are plenty of people on the other side. One is Roy E. Sommerfield who quoted the above paragraph from Renshaw in his doctoral thesis for the University of Michigan. ...
  
  In another University of Michigan doctoral thesis, a man named Robert Leestma agreed that perceptual span could be modified by training. ...'At present, the best experimental work -- (and here Leestma cites our old friend Dr. Sommerfield) -- has tended to frown on extravagant claims for improvement in reading ability as a result of tachistoscope training, especially after training with digits.' "

  "Written for a college course, 1958
  Lightly revised for fanzine publication, 1966"
  
  
  
• Apophasis - Wikipedia
  Including praeteritio, preterition, cataphasis, antiphrasis, parasiopesis, proslepsis, expeditio, and occultatio.
  
  
  
  
• How to detect b*llsh*t
  by Scott Berkun
  09 AUG 2006
  Scroll down or word search for "BS detection".
  
  
  
  
• Risky Business - Steve's place
  

  "People aren't very good at judging risk. In fact, I reckon our shoddiness at judging risk is one of the principle driving factors behind religion, superstition, pseudoscience and general human stupidity.
  
  [We are especially afraid of]
  
  Things that are new
  Things that are unknown
  Things that are invisible
  Things where we don't understand (how to estimate) the hazard at all
  
  I have listed these not because they are surprising, nor because I find them silly, but because most people's metacognitive ability is appalling: you might be worried about mobile phone masts destroying your brain, but the least you could do is recognise that this is in no small part due to the fact that mobile phones are new, microwaves are invisible, and you probably don't have the foggiest idea what a microwave actually is anyway. Metacognition (examining your own brain processes to understand why you think what you do) generally seems lacking from the hysterical reactions you see to the siting of mobile phone masts, traces of pesticides in food, etc. The fact that the same hysterics are happy to drive cars, cross roads, and eat junk food is testament to the blind spot people have for hazards they are used to.
  
  So not only are we dreadful at judging risk, we are also terrible at judging most of the hazards we are now exposed to, because there is nothing in our history to prepare us for them. This means we either under- or over-estimate the hazards of driving cars, using mobile phones, and drinking tap water. ...
  
  So what can we do to make up for our uselessness at judging probabilities, risk and danger? The only method we have so far come up with is mathematical modelling, and in particular, that dreaded word, statistics.
  
  Statistics is how scientists judge risks. We know that our intuition is a grotesquely unreliable tool, so we invented a slightly less unreliable tool to better our intuition. Statistics is not a panacea, and it is all too easy to be taken in by shoddy statistics, but it is all we have. This is most certainly not to say that you should blindly belive statistics thrown at you by scientists, the media or the government."

  Links are in original -- ed.
  
  
  
• Emergence -- Wikipedia
  
  
  
  
  
• Gresham's Law -- Wikipedia
  
  
  
  
  
• Walter Lippmann on Gresham's Law in public discourse
  
  
  
  
• Aristophanes Understood Gresham's LawNYT, 25 JAN 1989
  
  
  
  
• Gresham's Law meets the Law of Group Polarization
  Language Log, 07 MAY 2007
  
  
  
  
• Gresham's Law for the Blogosphere?
  Notes From the Lounge, 08 JUN 2006
  
  
  
  
• Gresham's Law of electronic discussion
  Inroads, Summer 2007
  
  
  
  
• Gresham's law school rankings
  MoneyLaw, 16 NOV 2007
  
  
  
  
• Japan is Cursed by Gresham's Law: Let Darwin's Law Rule
  
  
  
  
  
• Review of
  Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 5 Reasons The Future Will Be Ruled By B.S. . (Part 2)
  by David Wong
  18 OCT 2010
  
  Mr Wong discusses what he views as the importance of "Forced Artificial Scarcity" in the economy of the future.

  "In the last few decades, thousands of babies in Third World countries have died from contaminated baby formula.
  
  ... the mothers mix the baby formula with contaminated water, because sanitation is poor. So why the hell do the mothers feed their infants poison formula when they can just produce milk, for free, from their own bodies? The answer is that they do it because the manufacturer of the formula, Nestle, ran lots of ads telling them to.
  
  If you want to know what the future looks like, there it is. The future is going to hang on whether or not businesses will be able to convince you to pay money for things you can otherwise get for free. ...
  
  Now think about how many people you know who live in apartments or trailers barely big enough to host a game of Twister but who don't care because they spend every waking moment at home either playing World of Warcraft or surfing the Internet. They're not looking for a two-story house with a swimming pool and a white picket fence. With a $300 netbook and a $20-a-month Internet connection they can connect with friends, meet girls, get their entertainment, pursue their hobbies and stay in contact with family or co-workers. They may even work from home.
  
  Look at how many of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs they're getting digitally ...
  
  And so, here we are. We're celebrating that we don't need to pay greedy corporations because technology means we can get more and more of what we want for free, but at the same time, we're moving toward an era when corporations won't need to pay us. Both of us are hoping that in the future people will, for no tangible reason, simply choose to pay. If you work at Gamestop, both you and corporate are hoping for the same thing: that people will just 1) arbitrarily choose to pay for their games, and 2) choose to get them from a human.
  
  And no, don't give me that old line about, "If you do good work, society will always be happy to pay for it!" I live on the Internet. I've seen how that works. I've seen too many of my favorite websites go under because they were so popular that the traffic crashed the server, but PayPal fundraising drives brought in nothing but the sound of crickets. If people got paid according to the inherent value of their work as measured by the satisfaction of the consumers, Achewood wouldn't have to beg for donations.
  
  No, a "pay what you choose" system eventually becomes charity, and we humans only hand out charity when we're in certain moods, or have extra money. It's no substitute for commerce. ...
  
  (Throughout all of human history, human society has been structured on the basis that) We need things, and we need other people to need the things we make so they'll be willing to give us the things we need. It's a cycle that has been running for thousands of years, and it's about to stop.
  
  And so, to save society, we're going to have to rely on our old friend, the invisible force that has saved humanity again and again. It's a little thing I like to call bullshit.
  
  Bullshit is the next growth industry. People who deal in it are going to be more valuable than surgeons -- yes, the same people who convinced us that bottled water comes from an enchanted mountain spring and made uneducated mothers believe that contaminated baby formula was a life-giving health potion. Only they can save us." (I think that William Gibson was writing something like this in the Sprawl Trilogy, with "style" or "fashion" substituting for Wong's "bullshit". The Gibsonian economy is largely structured around people being anxious to pay twenty times more for a fashionable purse, pair of shoes, or restaurant - and fashions changing fast.)

  Some of the most sophisticated analysis and news in our culture comes from people who are ostensibly "humorists".
  
  I was going to write that that's really strange, but it occurs to me that from Aristophanes through medieval jesters, Shakespeare's comedies, and Oscar Wilde, this actually hasn't been very unusual.
  
  At any rate, I find that David Wong consistently produces some of the most insightful work of this kind.
  
  
  
  
• Avoid the Logic Failz: 21 Common Logic Errors
  
  
  
  
• Semmelweis reflex aka "Semmelweis effect" - Wikipedia

  "The Semmelweis reflex or "Semmelweis effect" is a metaphor for the reflex-like rejection of new knowledge because it contradicts entrenched norms, beliefs or paradigms."

  I don't see any kind of source for this -- may have been made up by the editor.
  
  
  
  
  
• Pyramid of Debate Techniques
  Reddit, 16 FEB 2011
  
  Pyramid of Debate Techniques graphic
  
  How To Disagree
  MAR 2008
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Fallacious Argument - List and discussion of logical fallacies
  
  
  
  
  
  
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