http://www.leedsskeptics.org/events Upcoming events of Leeds Skeptics (C) 2012 Chris Worfolk Foundation Dr Dimitar Kazakov, Senior Lecturer in the AI Group at the University of York. We'll be back at the Victoria Hotel this month, in the room directly in front of you as you go in, rather than the one on your left. http://www.leedsskeptics.org/events/45 Sat, 19 May 2012 14:00:00 -0400 Rob Lyons, author of Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder discusses the unjustified anxiety present in society around the topic of food. http://www.leedsskeptics.org/events/46 Sat, 16 Jun 2012 14:00:00 -0400 Talk by Steve Moxon. Leeds psychologist Dr Gijsbert Stoet finds no evidence that women under-perform through internalising false stereotypes, a recent major review reveals no sex-discrimination in academia, and ground-breaking field research shows that it is actually in favour of women in recruitment; so why is it women tend not to 'get to the top'? Recent science confirms the sexes to be not just different but dichotomous, albeit that confounds with other factors often obscures this, and on many measures there is more variation within- than between-sex. This itself is revealing in that the form of within-sex distribution is profoundly different - males are often at the extremes of variance, whereas females overwhelmingly cluster around the median. This pattern results from several key sex-dichotomies: in sociality, stress-response mechanism, and brain architecture. Drilling down further to the deep biology, the major problem of accumulating gene replication error necessitates a coping mechanism that has to be quarantined on the male side of the lineage (to spare females additional burden on top of rearing offspring). This is why there is always more selection on males, and why male 'mate-value' is not fertility (as for females) but 'good genes'. This in turn explains why male social structure is a dominance hierarchy, which is the basis of the polarisation of male quality that is evident in male variance. The ramifications in human psychology are profound: even a mode of reasoning to 'police' the male hierarchy so as to largely prevent males gaining access to sex. This is the basis of why we have always 'done down' the male whereas the female we tend to 'big up'. Anti-male / pro-female prejudice is reinforced in periods of rapid social change because arrangements in place to privilege women become anachronistic yet are held on to through the very pro-female prejudice that also ensures new arrangements are quickly made. Both the tardiness and rapidity of change contribute to an 'unfalsifiable' feminist perception, which is furthermore grounded in the 'political-correctness' backlash against the mass of ordinary people by the intelligentsia to salve the 'cognitive-dissonance' of its political-Left mindset. The failure of the ethos to have any practical impact led to the blaming of 'the workers' for not 'following the script', and their replacement by those who are not stereotypically 'workers': women. Our deeply politicised back-to-front perception that women are the subject of prejudice and disadvantage is the greatest fraud in history, but given important facts have never been effectively suppressed for very long, it should be only a question of the time-scale over which it collapses. http://www.leedsskeptics.org/events/48 Sat, 21 Jul 2012 14:00:00 -0400 Every day we all make perceptions of people and the world around us. But perception is a two-way process and most people don't stop to think about the biases inherent in their own perception. What are these cognitive biases and how much can they affect our judgement? In this talk Paul Hopwood is going to look at some of these biases and provide examples from his studies in Cognitive Psychology to (hopefully!) show just how much they are capable of distorting our view of reality; as well as providing a few suggestions as to how we can limit their effects. Paul Hopwood is a relatively new and highly enthusiastic member of the Skeptic Community and a keen amateur chess player. He gained his Psychology Degree from Leeds and his Master of Research Degree in Psychology at York; for which he studied the long- and short-term memories of his fellow chess players. http://www.leedsskeptics.org/events/49 Sat, 18 Aug 2012 14:00:00 -0400