Ryan’s Important Papers (RIPs) — A Prelude
There’s the old adage of “If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.” I don’t think that that’s true, exactly, but I appreciate the spirit of the idea. I love science, and I love…
Ryan Boyd
The Disgust Response
When it comes to food, I don’t use the word “disgusting” very much. People like what they like — you might personally dislike something, but like… that doesn’t mean that it’s objectively gross or weird. It just isn’t your preference. But there…
Laughter
“Comedy is a very powerful component of life. It has the most to say about the human condition because if you laugh you can get by. You can struggle when things are bad if you have a sense of humor.…
The Bedrock of Human Experience
“Although these points of view do reflect the prevailing empirical climate of our times, they fail to express more than a small part of the value of personal documents for social science. Properly used, such documents anchor a discipline in…
On Being a Peer Reviewer, and on Being a Semi-sentient Potato-like Creature from the 6th Dimension
In science, we virtually never deal in absolutes. Especially in Psychology and the social sciences, we are exceedingly careful to acknowledge that virtually every aspect of the mind, mental life, and the human condition is insanely multi-determined, and there is…
All Aboard the Gravy Train
This recipe may seem way less exciting than the vegan pumpkin pie recipe. Like… it’s just gravy, right? Even a so-so gravy is still gravy. Gravy is a sidekick that nobody pays attention to. Gravy, my friends, is never the star. Heck,…
Pumpkin Pie, Veganized
Around 20 years ago, a confluence of ideas and events led me to the conclusion that I should go vegan. I quietly conveyed this to my younger brother while we were standing in my kitchen, and he paused. He put…
Onto Something
“The search is what everyone would undertake if he were not stuck in the everydayness of his own life. To be aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to…
Simplify
During my 20s, I amassed a huge collection of videogame hardware and software. Multiple rooms were dedicated to housing the collection: hardware from the 70’s and 80’s in one room, 90’s in another, 2000’s in a third. A closet literally…