In "Comment on a Scene from Planecrash: 'Crisis of Faith'", I criticized a scene in which Keltham (a magical universe-teleportation victim from an alternate Earth called dath ilan) plays dumb about why a pre-industrial Society would only choose males for military conscription.
Planecrash coauthor Eliezer Yudkowsky comments:
Keltham wouldn't be …
I went on Phil Illy's show to talk about the blog! There's probably not much new here for long-time readers.
Here's the transcript, which has been, you know, like, sort of edited for, like, clarity. (I'm not a practiced speaker, and verbatim transcripts are famously awful.)
PI: Hi everyone, I'm …
It was not the sight of Mitchum that made him sit still in horror. It was the realization that there was no one he could call to expose this thing and stop it—no superior anywhere on the line, from Colorado to Omaha to New York. They were in on …
"—but if one hundred thousand [normies] can turn up, to show their support for the [rationalist] community, why can't you?"
I said wearily, "Because every time I hear the word community, I know I'm being manipulated. If there is such a thing as the [rationalist] community, I'm certainly not a …
Why idly theorize when you can JUST CHECK and find out the ACTUAL ANSWER to a superficially similar-sounding question SCIENTIFICALLY?
In "Autogenderphilia Is Common And Not Especially Related To Transgender", Scott Alexander, based on his eyeballing of data from the 2020 Slate Star Codex reader survey, proposes what …
Apropos of absolutely nothing—and would I lie to you about that?—ever since early 2020, I keep finding myself thinking about Hrunkner Unnerby, one of the characters in the "B" story of Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky.
The B story focuses on spider-like aliens native to a …
Do not at the outset of your career make the all too common error of mistaking names for things. Names are only conventional signs for identifying things. Things are the reality that counts. If a thing is despised, either because of ignorance or because it is despicable, you will not …
"I want you, Jake," said the woman in the video as she took off her shirt. "Those negative comments on your pull requests were just a smokescreen—because I was afraid to confront the inevitability of our love!"
Jake Morgan still couldn't help but marvel at what he and his …
Here's how I know that I moved to the correct side of the Caldecott Tunnel.
Just outside my door (which has one lock, three fewer than the old apartment—probably some kind of prior being expressed there), the street lamp post has a "CENSORSHIP IS ANTI-SCIENCE" sticker on it.
A …
Can we all start over
After the final chapter's end?
When it all starts over
How do these scars begin to mend?—Centaurworld
I moved apartments the other week, on some philosopher's birthday or the anniversary of a national tragedy, to a nice studio in a nice neighborhood back on …
If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.
—Zora Neale Hurston
Recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far—in a previous post, "Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems", I told the part about how I've "always" (since puberty …
I'm beginning to wonder if he's constructed an entire system of moral philosophy around the effects of the loyalty mod—a prospect that makes me distinctly uneasy. It would hardly be the first time a victim of mental illness has responded to their affliction that way—but it would certainly …
Don't think.
If you think, then don't speak.
If you think and speak, then don't write.
If you think, speak, and write, then don't sign.
If you think, speak, write, and sign, then don't be surprised.—Soviet proverb
When I decided I wanted to write about autogynephilia in late 2016 …
I'm going to make this a brief "endorsement" rather than a detailed "review", because the most important thing about this book is that it exists. There just doesn't seem to have been a polished, popular-level book-form introduction to autogynephilia/autoandrophilia before!
(Previously, the secondary sources I've referred to most often …
(a stray thought from October 2016)
Erotic-target-location-erroneous is the uniquely best sexual orientation for rationalists—I mean intrinsically, not just because everyone has it.
(a stray observation from December 2016)
Janet Mock's autobiography Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love, & So Much More is an poignant example of an HSTS telling her story while adhering strictly to the 2014 mainstream-trans-identity-politics party line about how all this works ("gender identity", sex "assigned at birth …
This is a terrible children's book that could have been great if the author could have just pretended to be subtle. Our protagonist, Johnny, is a kid who loves to play make-believe. One day, he pretends to be a walrus, fashioning "tusks" for himself with wooden spoons, and "flippers" from …
NEELIX: One of those species is the Benkarans. They occupy just ten percent of Nygean space, but take up nearly eighty percent of the space in Nygean prisons.
PARIS: Maybe they commit more crimes.
—Star Trek: Voyager, "Repentance"
(Attention conservation notice: boring Diary-like post about a boring special event.)
(SPOILERS …
In the days of auld lang syne on Earth-that-was, in the Valley of Plain Speech in the hinterlands beyond the Lake of Ambiguous Fortune, there lived a population of pre-intelligent squirrels. Historical mammologists have classified them into two main subspecies: the west-valley ground squirrels and the east-valley tree squirrels—numbers …
A common far-right objection to tolerance of male homosexuality is that it constitutes a "signaling hazard": if Society legitimizes the gays rather than oppressing them, that interferes with normal men expressing friendly affection for each other without being seen as potentially gay, which is bad for the fabric of Society …