From another place where I blog: If you find what you don’t like in the world, you are only halfway to knowing what you like. When you know what you like, you must reach past what you don’t like to pull what you do like into reality, and in the process, your elbows will knock [...]
Posts from ‘April, 2009’
Choice paralysis
Read this article and then think about the consequences for government and society: Researchers from several universities have determined that even though humans’ ability to weigh choices is remarkably advantageous, it can also come with some serious liabilities. People faced with numerous choices, whether good or bad, find it difficult to stay focused enough to [...]
Determinism
One of the giant problems with any kind of discourse on the net is that the audience is usually too self-obsessed to research the terms it uses and think about their implications. For example, determinism — biological and otherwise. In the form used by most thinkers, it refers to limits on abilities and perceptions, and [...]
Post-scarcity marketing
After I wrote about the self-defeating nature of the media industry’s agenda in the Pirate Bay case, a couple people wrote in to ask the question: what should the media industry do? The real issue we’re dealing with here is an end of scarcity. When we can duplicate any audio, video, text or application, there [...]
Pirate Bay busted, nobody wins
Dear reader, I suppose that now you have heard that the four pirate bay defendants have been found guilty of in essence behind enablers of piracy. I think in the long run this is going to be bad news for everyone, although the music industry currently thinks it has won. However, this is only because [...]
Equality of criticism for bad science
Marina Hyde over at Science Blogs was bemoaning our tolerance for celebrities spewing pseudoscience, when I pointed out the difficult position she’s in: If you want to be intolerant of celebrities speaking scientific nonsense, you have to be intolerant of them speaking all scientific nonsense. This includes the non-sensical idea that intelligence and abilities are [...]
Libertarianism and Anarchism: in denial?
I think both of these forms of political activity succumb to one basic critique: People are in denial of this obvious fact: Being part of a civilization requires you to cooperate with others, usually through some central authority or power. I guess where I agree with libertarians and anarchists is that less government is more [...]
What is “freedom”?
The term “freedom” baffles philosophers but not artists. It baffles philosophers because freedom is a negative term. You need something unfree to be free from; that’s never made clear when people talk about fighting for freedom. When they said they wanted freedom from Britain, that made sense, but claiming that we’re fighting in Germany or [...]
The unpopular truth
This blog grew out of a previous blog that existed on blogger.com. I found the software limiting after some time, and started to get frustrated with the backlog of posts that did not reflect my opinion at the time but in the past. So an update occurred, but the concept is the same: The Unpopular [...]
Bad science: nurture advocacy
In the nature versus nurture debate, bad science proliferates. This is because the nature side argues that an individual’s abilities are determined mostly by biology; the nurture side argues that an individual’s abilities are determined mostly by access to social resources. Obviously, nurture will be infinitely more popular to a crowd. We’d all like to [...]
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