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Uncomfortable products
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Mar 27, 2014
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A Greek designer redesigned a bunch of useful everyday objects to be more uncomfortable and annoying to use. Examples include a concrete umbrella and open-toed rain boots. (via kottke.org) #products
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Naturalism and chemophobia
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Mar 27, 2014
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Naturalism, or an appeal to nature, is the fallacy that things that are natural or found in nature are better than things that are artificial or created in a lab. This sounds good on the outside but is of course false. Hemlock and poison mushrooms come from nature. Boom, argument over. But when used in the justification of diet and medicine, naturalism always sounds reasonable to me. I need to get over that.
Chemophobia is the related idea that things that have complicated chemical names are inherently bad. This is essentially an argument from ignorance. Everything is made of chemicals, and certainly not all chemicals are bad. Eggs contain hexadecenoic acid, and blueberries have methylbutyrate. And these foods come from nature, so they can't be bad. We've come full circle. #psychology
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