Jeremy Sherman
Bio
Jeremy Sherman is an evolutionary epistemologist. For 17 years, he has been a close colleague of anthropologist Terrence Deacon collaborating to develop a general theory of evolution, a chemistry-to-consciousness, matter-to-mattering bridge from the physical to the life sciences. He is a professor of English, psychology, sociology, philosophy and history, and business strategy currently teaching at the University of San Francisco.
Recent Essays
- Serenity Prayers: Theme and Variation on Life’s Tough Judgment Calls
- Shoe-Shifting: To put yourself in their shoes you’ve got to be able to get out of yours
- Extralegality: A Wishful Thinker’s Attraction to Gangsters
- Meta-Conflict: Playing couples counselor in your own marriage can be dangerous…or helpful depending.
- Fallacy Pairs: For Every Infraction There’s an Equal and Opposite Infraction
- What if everybody didn’t? How common sense becomes nonsense when it’s not fully common
- Crypto-Prescription: How to pretend you’re not giving advice when you are
- Please & Thank You: Stop saying them so much. Please!
- Fix-It Self-Efficacy: A Yes-We-Can Attitude Learned the Hard Way
- Emotional Reserves: What Lurks Below the Tip-of-the-Icerberg Coldness
- Sympathy for the Devil: On Compassion for Jerks
- Grindblindness: Given habituation, how do you keep the spark alive?
- Intimacy: With Them or With Your Truth?
- Retaliation Self-Efficacy: When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Move Slowly
- Within or About: Three positions one can take in an argument
- Seven habits of sometimes effective critics: Unreliable sure-fire recipes for speaking your mind
- Exit Interview: The Pros and Cons of Giving Feedback as a Relationship Ends
- Teflon Tyranny: The Hidden Cost of Self-Defense
- Virtue Verbiage: Thou Shalt Always Throw
- NPC’s: Non-player Character, God and Lifeline Theology
- Philosophizing: Hard Because It’s Easy
- Fallibalism: Every belief is a bet but some bets are better than others
- Rung Running: Getting good at distinguishing “within” from “about” in everyday interaction
- Means and Ends: Opening a can (and can’t) of worms.
- Meta-cons: Righteous indignation as a con about conning
- SCIBIT: Building a Scientifically Coherent Integrated Bottom-Up Information Theory
- Seven Wonderings of the Ancient World: Life’s Universal Tough Judgment Calls
- Granularity: Think as big as possible but no bigger
- ACIDs (Ambiguous Cues; Incompatible Dos): What eats at us when something does
- Exaptation: The loose link between representation and function
- Floating For-ness: Under a Firm Mantle of Function, Molten Motives Churn
- Zipslide Errors: Confusing the nature of past and future
- Brain Velcro: Why good things happen to bad ideas
- Self-Efficacy: How Supply Permits Demand
- Prevenge: “I’m like rubber; you’re like screwed.”
- Butterfly Punch: Shaming your opponent into putting on kid gloves before you knock him out.
- Turing’s Blurring Anxiety (TBA): Forgiving dead jerks but not live ones.
- Guesswork: Enough is enough, but how much is enough?
- Deduction: The dream and nightmare of absolute certainty
- The Free Willies: Are computers like humans? Are humans like computers?
- Cause and Effect: Not black and white, but read all over as if it were
- Co-dependence: When do two wrongs make a right?
- Transceiver Bias: Writing and reading are not the same thing
- The Golden Paradox: If we always sacrificed for each other, no one would ever have to make sacrifices
- The Other Golden Rule: Do Unto Yourself as You Do Unto Others
- Ambigamy: Love’s Lost Labors
- I’m Sure Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone
- Mindreader’s Rights: Don’t tell me what I’m thinking
- The Second Fundamental: Stalemates and infinite loops in a human-persuade-human world.
- Extended Memotype: On Advice, Part 1
- Cocky: Self-certainty made easy
- Minutia and Highfalutia: Evasion by scrambling to a safer level of analysis
- Sorry: That Big Dumb Powerful Word
- Sorrytaliatory Cycle: “I owe you an apology or a scolding, I can’t tell which.”
- Poser-Proof Practices: Don’t tell–show
- The Secret: Negotiating the Slippery Slope between Hope and Hoax
- Aspirational Tense: “I most definitely am, I hope”
- Realincarnation: Requiem for the immortal soul
- Spit or Go Blind: Slang with cosmic implications
- Yintimidation: Wolf in she’s clothing
- Offanonda Meditation: Learning flexibility in fits and starts
- Rather Partial: The delicate art of clinging right
- Youjustifications: Why are we fighting? Let me not count the ways
- Down & Out, Up & Out, Out & Out: Reading between the lines on “Fine”
- Myopium: One day at a time as a drug
- Going Uncertain: Casting doubt on inconvenient possibilties
- Liar’s Paradox Moral Litmus Test: If you contradict yourself you can’t both be right
- Breakthrough Baggage: How a winning formula becomes a strange brew
- Can’tibration: What do you mean, you can’t?
- Sweating the Petty vs. Petting the Sweaty: Two ways to play the game of life
- Careful Caring: We can’t always care, so why feel guilty when called uncaring?
- Exempt By Contempt: “I’ve checked with me and we both agree you’re inferior”
- Coherence: Making our ideas consistent with each other
- Co-Satisficing: Squeaky wheels and vicious cycles
- Multi-Level-Headed: The ins and outs of humor
- MOGIBO (Me Outside. Good Inside. Bad Outside): Personal popularity in popular culture
- R.O.S.C.O. (Right On Schedule, Chill Out): Global warming as inevitable
- Bottom Fine Line: Beneath every bottom line secret to success there’s a fine line between success and failure
- Flying By Instrument: The difference between doing and feeling like your doing
- Flow: Being a player at work makes work feel like play
- Letter and Spirit: Two-fisted adventures at home and in the classroom
- United States: Your life as an oxymoron
- Reversals: Coinings for the other side of the coin
- Value: The Pursuit of happiness; the happiness of pursuit
- Figments of Ultimate Satisfaction: Our high ideals may be our downfall
- Peace Triangle: A Way to Measure Social Combustability
- Mastery and Masters: The Fine Line Between Substantive Debate and Power Struggle
- There Go I: Anger From Three Angles
- Loving Ingratitude: A Thanksgiving Sentiment
- The Critical Gap: Spin, Out of Control
- Truth or Care: Thanks But No Thanks for Sharing
- OK Corral: Words Like Arrows Pointing the Way to OK
- Combinotions: More Limerical Glimmers
- Declaration of Co-dependence: You might as well face it–you’re addicted through love
- Molassets: Developing Our Assets is Slow, Murky, Sticky Guesswork
- Youmeus Point: Out Of The Frying Pan; Into You’re Fired
- After-math: What Do You Get When You’ve Made a Big Decision?
- Co-passion: Gridlock at the Crossroads of Love
- Romanticynicism: Love in the Irony Age
- Low- and High-Stimulus Present: On two ways to be here now
- The Wisdom to Know – Either Oars
- Meditation and Future Pharmaceuticals: A Short Science Fiction
- Not the Baker, but the Bake-off – part of the Genes, Genesis, and Gods discussion
- MISTAKE: Applied Evolutionary Epistemology