<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss version="0.92">
<channel>
	<title>Science That Matters</title>
	<link>http://sciencethatmatters.com</link>
	<description>hosting cognitive dissidents since 2007</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 07 Jan 2009 23:25:25 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<docs>http://backend.userland.com/rss092</docs>
	<language>en</language>
	<!-- generator="WordPress/3.0" -->

	<item>
		<title>There is No Satisfactory Form of Utilitarianism</title>
		<description><![CDATA[In 2000, a paper written by Gustaf Arrhenius called An Imposibility Theorem for Welfarist Axiologies showed that all forms of utilitarianism lead to at least one of three highly undesirable implications. The result is extremely dire for those of us who might have hoped that utilitarianism could give good answers to ethical questions about birth, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://sciencethatmatters.com/archives/38</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Misattribution of Arousal</title>
		<description><![CDATA[In 1974, Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron published an important paper on what the psychology literature calls misattribution of arousal. Their study involved having both a man and a woman stop men on a bridge and administer a questionnaire that included some basic questions and imagination exercises. After the questionnaire was filled out, the person [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://sciencethatmatters.com/archives/39</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Are Whites More Supportive of the Death Penalty for Blacks?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[In 2001 political scientists Mark Peffley and John Hurwitz carried out two surveys. The first one found: Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder? Somewhat favor: 29% Strongly favor: 36% The second one found: Some people say that the death penalty is unfair because most of the people who [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://sciencethatmatters.com/archives/37</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Unit Bias</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Last year, a group of psychology researchers at the University of Pennsylvania published a paper on what they call &#8220;unit bias.&#8221; In their study, the researchers would top up a bowl of an M&#38;Ms in the hallway of an apartment building each day. Next to the bowl was a scoop and a sign that said, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://sciencethatmatters.com/archives/35</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Is the net effect of health care zero?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[UPDATE: Nyman (2007) points out the RAND study discussed in this piece had a terrible flaw that undermines its argument. See the update below. In the 1970s, the RAND Corporation picked out 7700 people in six cities and gave half of them free health care. Those lucky ones took advantage of it (spending 30-40% more [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://sciencethatmatters.com/archives/30</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Sex, and other -isms of science</title>
		<description><![CDATA[It is tempting to think that serious sexism died in the 1970s. These days, overt gender discrimination is unusual, and slightly risky for its perpertrators. But a classic study, conducted in Sweden in 1995, found that sexism (and perhaps less surprisingly, nepotism) had retained a preeminent role in the allocation of scientific jobs and the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://sciencethatmatters.com/archives/27</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Can humans act utilitarian?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[One of the most important schools of ethical thought is consequentialism, which holds that the best actions (or rules, or ways of making decisions) are simply the ones that lead to the best outcomes. When acts are bad (hitting someone with a stick, for instance) it is not because of the deed itself but because [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://sciencethatmatters.com/archives/18</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Who truly governs America&#8217;s cities?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Who Governs? is a widely-hailed classic in the field of political science; it was the book that basically made the career of &#8220;the Dean of American political scientists&#8221;: Robert A. Dahl. In it, Dahl attempts to discover how government really works in America. To do this, he decides to study decision-making in a typical American [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://sciencethatmatters.com/archives/25</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>What&#8217;s the best way to fight drugs?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[In 1994, the RAND Corporation, a major US military think tank, conducted a massive study (with funding from the Office of National drug Control Policy, the US Army, and the Ford Foundation) to measure the effectiveness of various forms of preventing the use of illegal drugs, particularly cocaine. They analyzed a variety of popular methods [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://sciencethatmatters.com/archives/24</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Evo psych error roundup</title>
		<description><![CDATA[An influential group of biologists, psychologists, and other busybodies has for decades promoted the idea that the social sciences should be grounded in the ideas of evolution, that human behavior should be predicted from estimates of what evolution would do. The idea has been heavily promoted from the 1970s, when it was called sociobiology, until [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://sciencethatmatters.com/archives/23</link>
			</item>
</channel>
</rss>
