I had a nasty chest cold that’s been hard to shake, but no, I’m not sick. Updates have been delayed because my time has been so thoroughly tied up with my university day job this spring term. They’ll resume when the work load is lifted.

Just to remind readers, in my day job I’m Chair of the Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Iowa State University. In the eyes of many it’s a great job, a privileged job. But it’s also a dream killer. Let me explain.

We have about 19 tenure track faculty and 7 full time lecturers in the department. The Chair’s administrative tasks comes in bursts that are tied to the university’s academic and administrative calendars, and the career clocks of the faculty in the department.

Here’s a sample what I had on my plate this year:

• 2 job searches for new tenure track faculty
• 5 performance reviews for lecturers
• 2 preliminary reviews for junior tenure track faculty
• 1 post-tenure review for a senior tenure track faculty
• 26 annual reports for all faculty
• rewrote department governance document language on lecturer hiring, evaluation and reappointment
• prepared a summary report on the department for a new college Dean
• supervised budgeting and department finances
• managed and ran department meetings
• plus the steady stream of smaller tasks that show up in my email inbox on a daily basis

I’m also teaching two courses this spring, Philosophy of Physics and Philosophy of Biology, with no teaching assistants. The best time of the week is the time I spend in these classes, but there’s a lot of work involved.

Oh, and we’re a homeschooling family. I’m responsible for my 17 year old daughter’s instruction in math, science and English. Almost every day I’m checking her work and assigning new material. I absolutely love this work.

But this is why the tutorial updates and podcast episodes have slowed down. Not for lack of desire or interest, just lack of time. Rest assured they’ll pick up as the spring term draws to a close and summer begins.

This is also why I can’t stay at this job. I enjoy my colleagues, I find value in the work, I think I do it pretty well, but the Academy will never reach its full potential and I will never have the freedom to pursue my deepest passions if I stay here.

I’m happy that my colleagues don’t want me to go. I’ve been told that I have a good chance at an Associate Dean position if I stay, with the promise of a significant salary boost.

I don’t say this to anyone’s face, but I can’t express how terrifying that prospect is to me. It would be the death of the dream I’ve been working toward for many years.

What is that dream? It is the dream of a life of true freedom and passion — freedom to live anywhere, freedom to continually learn new things that interest and excite me, freedom to share what I’ve learned with anyone who is interested, freedom to make an impact beyond the borders of academia. I’ve had this dream for as long as I can remember.

And it’s a dream I’ve had to keep from my colleagues until very recently. It’s not smart to talk openly at your workplace about your plans to quit your job. I built the Academy on weekends and late nights, bit by bit, over months and years, in secret.

No more secrets. I’ll be resigning in May 2013, come what may.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

• default skepticism about grand conspiracy theories
• a variety of hypothesized mind control methods
• Karl Popper’s concept of “falsifiable” versus “unfalsifiable” theories and its relevance to the debate
• an introduction to the history of covert CIA and FBI operations, including MK-ULTRA and COINTELPRO

Here are some links to online sources mentioned in or relevant to the discussion in this episode:

• Skeptical Inquirer Magazine cover story on the  9/11Truth community
• Skeptical Humanities blog
• Mind Control Theories and Techniques Used by Mass Media (Vigilant Citizen)
• 10 Modern Methods of Mind Control (Infowars)
• Truth in Government Conspiracy Theories/Mind Control (Conspiracy Truth)
• Alan Watt on Alex Jones – Mind Control – YouTube
• Project MK-Ultra – Wikipedia
• COINTELPRO – Wikipedia
• COINTELPRO 101 – YouTube
• Falsifiability – Wikipedia

His new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, is a synthesis of his life’s work and an accessible introduction to the field.

Much of the material that I’ll be developing for the Academy over the next few courses can be thought of as breaking the essentials of this content down into bite-sized video chunks.

Some dust jacket quotes:

“Profound . . . As Copernicus removed the Earth from the centre of the universe and Darwin knocked humans off their biological perch, Mr. Kahneman has shown that we are not the paragons of reason we assume ourselves to be.”
–The Economist

“The ramifications of Kahneman’s work are wide, extending into education, business, marketing, politics . . . and even happiness research. Call his field “psychonomics,” the hidden reasoning behind our choices. Thinking, Fast and Slow is essential reading for anyone with a mind.” –Kyle Smith, The New York Post

“This book is a tour de force by an intellectual giant; it is readable, wise, and deep. Buy it fast. Read it slowly and repeatedly. It will change the way you think, on the job, about the world, and in your own life.” –Richard Thaler, University of Chicago Professor of Economics and co-author of Nudge

Go check it out on Amazon.

Maybe. But I’m looking ahead, and it’s going to be hard to do what I eventually want to do with the site exclusively through WordPress plugins.

Here are some things that I want the site to do. Some of these are my own wishes, others are in response to Academy members asking for certain features:

• add more quizzing tools, and integrate quizzing tools in every course
• track student progress through courses
• offer certificates for successful completion of sequences of courses
• provide tools for communication among members
• export courses as SCORM packages for integration into other
  LMS/CSM systems

People join the Academy for different reasons.  Some want help with general reasoning, writing and communication skills. Others have more specific interests. Hence, some courses, and some sequences of courses, are of more interest than others. Members have said that if they could just purchase access to Course A or Course B they would, since they’re not really interested in Course X or Course Y. Others want the whole ball of wax. This suggests another feature that might be desirable:

• ability to sign up for just one course, or a selection of courses

Finally, there’s the question of how much of this content I want to develop myself.

My vision for the Academy is to have different course sequences or “tracks” that emphasize different aspects of critical thinking that can be tailored to the  needs and interests of members.

I have a clear vision of what I want to offer in the logic/argumentation/cognitive biases/decision theory track, and other philosophy-oriented courses, but I’d like to offer more courses in writing, composition, communication and rhetoric (there’s a big demand for these). It’ll take a long time for me to get around to all these courses.

But why should I be the sole instructor in the Academy?

There are LOTS of talented instructors with better training and more teaching experience than me in many of these areas. Why not recruit other instructors to produce video course content?

Great idea!  But that will require a change in the e-commerce options. How do you pay an instructor if a membership gives access to all of the content on the site?  Ideally, an instructor would be paid whenever someone signs up to take their course.

However, this just reinforces the request I introduced above, the ability to sign up for just one course, or a selection of courses, at a time.

So the idea is that each course would be very low cost (say, 5 dollars – think iPad app prices; this business model relies on volume ). That would give the member access to that course and all the materials in it for, say, a year.  Members could add courses to their shopping cart one at a time, just pick and choose the courses they want, when they want.

Then instructors could be paid for the enrollments in their individual courses because we could track this. Popular courses would earn more, which adds an incentive to make them awesome and provide real value to members.

What do you think?

I’m currently working on a platform switch that will do EVERYTHING on this list. I’ll keep you posted!

In the previous episode I introduced a view that I called “default skepticism” about conspiracy theories, which in a nutshell says that the grander the conspiracy, the less likely it is to be true.

In this episode we look more closely at some of the main arguments that skeptics give for this position. What is it about conspiracy hypotheses that makes them implausible?

To bring these arguments to life I walk through a case study, the so-called Moon Landing Hoax. This is a grand conspiracy theory that says that the United States never landed astronauts on the moon; instead, the televised moon landings were faked on a sound stage. I discuss what is plausible about this theory and what (according to skeptics) is implausible about it.

In a nutshell, the skeptical position is that grand conspiracy theories require that the conspirators possess an almost magical ability to control information and human behavior. They object that we have no evidence that such control is possible.

Conspiracy theorists think otherwise. We’ll follow this up in the next episode.


 
Some examples of “default skepticism” among professional skeptics:

• Michael Shermer’s 2011 book, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths, (Chapter 10).
• The Skeptic’s Dictionary: Frauds, Hoaxes and Conspiracies
• The Skeptical Inquirer: The Conspiracy Meme

In this  episode I give a basic introduction to what conspiracy theories are and why they’re interesting from a critical thinking perspective.

This is the first of a multi-part series. In the next two episodes I’ll be going over the most common arguments for what I call “default skepticism” about conspiracy hypotheses, according to which the greater the scale and extent of a conspiracy hypothesis, the lower the intrinsic plausibility of that hypothesis. This is the mainstream view among professional skeptics and, I think, most academics. In the last episode I’ll raise some challenges to this mainstream view.


 
Here are some of the topics mentioned in the podcast, with links to a small number of online sources. I don’t include much by way of skeptical links here, since I’ll be taking this up more thoroughly in later episodes, but the wikipedia entries usually include some discussion of criticisms of conspiracy hypotheses.

9-11 conspiracy
Wikipedia entry on “9-11 conspiracy theories”
9/11 Truth Movement
9/11 Proof
The Big Lie (comic)

“Moon landing” conspiracy
Wikipedia entry on “moon landing conspiracy theories”
Conspiracy Theory – clip from 2008 episode “Did We Land on the Moon?”

“New World Order” conspiracy
Wikipedia entry on “new world order (conspiracy theories)”
Educate-yourself: the new world order
Jeremiah Project: new world order
Illuminati Conspiracy Archive

Influential conspiracy theory figures (internet, radio)
www.infowars.com (Alex Jones)
www.davidicke.com

Conspiracy theory and critical thinking education
In the podcast I mention that many people who endorse some form of conspiracy theory also endorse critical thinking education. A good example is the close relationship between this site — http://www.tragedyandhope.com/ — which is a hub for independent media that is sympathetic to various forms of “stigmatized knowledge” and/or New World Order theorizing, and this site — http://www.triviumeducation.com/ — which offers resources for education in the classical trivium approach (grammar, logic, rhetoric). The rhetoric of The Matrix is widespread in conspiracy theory circles.

But those who know me closely also know that a career in university administration was never part of my long term career plans!  Nor, in fact, was it part of my long term plans to remain in academia my whole life (gasp, shudder — are you mad?!). My family has wanted to return to Canada for a long time, and I’ve been looking for other ways of feeding my passion for learning and teaching philosophy, science and critical thinking.

What even fewer know is that deep down I’m a frustrated cartoonist and illustrator. As a kid in high school I moved back and forth between my science-geek friends and my art-geek friends (my best friends have always had a leg in both worlds). At one time I was seriously considering going to art college after high school to study animation, and then either to do studio animation or go into cartooning.

But science seemed less risky, and to be fair I was equally passionate about it, so I figured I could always do art on the side. I studied physics in university, and in the process I discovered I was really a philosopher, and decided after my physics degree to pursue graduate studies in philosophy. But art was always a hobby, and I dreamed of making a career one day in educational cartooning (my inspirations were people like Scott McCloud, Larry Gonick, and Jay Hosler, who combine the sensibilities of a teacher and an artist).

Cut to 14 years later, and I’ve got a comfy academic job, but feeling older and no closer to my earlier dreams of combining my passions for teaching, philosophy and art.

Until recently. Until I started the podcast, created the Academy website and began to see the possibilities of a career outside of tenure-track academia. Until I started sketching and drawing more, and feeling like it wasn’t just an indulgent waste of my time.

We took a big step just a couple of weeks ago (September 2011, if you’re reading this in the future). I announced to the faculty in my department that my family and I were planning on moving back to Canada within two years. And I announced that in so-doing I would very likely be leaving the shelter of a tenured academic position, to explore creative opportunities that would be impossible otherwise.

I’m happy to report that while my friends and colleagues were shocked they’ve also been very supportive.

So what’s the plan?

The plan is to keep learning, keep teaching and keep adding value to the Academy. We’re nowhere near replacing my current salary with the revenue from the site, but I have faith that at some point we’ll reach a critical mass.

And in the meantime, I’m going to start a webcomic. Something that I can work on in my spare time, something that gives me an excuse to exercise my artistic muscles, and something that I hope will attract a different kind of audience to philosophy.

Details to come!

It comes as no surprise to me that communication and critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills are at the top of this list.

The final table in the report lists and ranks 17 “learning outcomes” on which employers believe colleges and universities should place more emphasis:

Studies like these highlight the need for supplemental resources like the ones offered in The Critical Thinker Academy, that can help students develop the communication and reasoning skills that are necessary not only for success in school, but also, as this study confirms, in government, business and industry.

Here’s a link to the full report.

This episode covers quite a bit of ground, from evolutionary psychology to collaborative reasoning to biological functions and the Greek story of Odysseus and the Sirens!


 
The argumentative theory of reason was developed by researchers Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. Below you can find links to their work and some other internet stories on their research.

• The Reason We Reason (Jonah Lehrer, Wired Magazine)
• The Argumentative Theory:  A Conversation with Hugo Mercier (Edge.org)
• Hugo Mercier’s homepage.
• Dan Sperber’s homepage.