About Andrew Hirst

I'm currently a PhD student at the University of Nottingham, working on an interdisciplinary thesis looking at the evolution of art and its relation to the human mind. I founded this site as my personal blog in 2010. I've also written for some music websites, including Kicking Against The Pricks and Never Enough Notes.

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Here are my most recent posts

The Mystery of the Decline Effect

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(c) 2009 Dave Gray (davegrayinfo.com)

There is a very, very strange phenomenon in scientific literature called the decline effect. For some inexplicable reason, many positive scientific effects seem to decline over time as more and more research into the effect is conducted. A theory that seems to be initially supported by overwhelmingly positive evidence [...]

Written by , 24.01.13 | Tags: , , | Category: Heuristics and biases | Leave a comment

How would we behave if we truly believed free will did not exist?

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If free will does not exist, then we should not praise good behaviours.

Can we behave as though free will doesn’t exist? What would we do if we believed that all human behaviour (and everything else, for that matter) was determined by causal chains which stretch back to the Big Bang? What would we [...]