But that's not why you're reading this. That's not why Murray wrote the book. That's not even why _I'm_ writing this. We should hope—emphasis on the _should_—for a discipline of Actual Social Science, whose practitioners strive to report the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, with the same passionately dispassionate objectivity they might bring to the study of beetles, or algebraic topology—or that an alien superintelligence might bring to the study of humans.
-We do not have a discipline of Actual Social Science. Possibly because we're not smart enough to do it, but perhaps more so because we're not smart enough to _want_ to do it. No one has an incentive to lie about the homotopy groups of an _n_-sphere. (The <em>k</em><sup>th</sup> group is trivial for _k_ < _n_, and isomorphic to the integers thereafter. _You're welcome._) If you're asking questions about homotopy groups _at all_, you almost certainly care about getting _the right answer for the right reasons_. At most, you might be biased towards believing your own conjectures in the optimistic hope of achieving eternal algebraic-topology fame and glory, like Ruth Lawrence, but nothing about algebraic topology is going to be _morally_ threatening in a way that will leave you sobbing that a malicious God created the universe as a place of evil, or fearing that your ideological enemies have taken control of the publishing-houses to plant lies in the textbooks to fuck with your head.
+We do not have a discipline of Actual Social Science. Possibly because we're not smart enough to do it, but perhaps more so because we're not smart enough to _want_ to do it. No one has an incentive to lie about the homotopy groups of an _n_-sphere. (The <em>k</em><sup>th</sup> group is trivial for _k_ < _n_, and isomorphic to the integers thereafter. _You're welcome._) If you're asking questions about homotopy groups _at all_, you almost certainly care about getting _the right answer for the right reasons_. At most, you might be biased towards believing your own conjectures in the optimistic hope of achieving eternal algebraic-topology fame and glory, like Ruth Lawrence, but nothing about algebraic topology is going to be _morally threatening_ in a way that will leave you sobbing that a malicious God created the universe as a place of evil, or fearing that your ideological enemies have taken control of the publishing-houses to plant lies in the textbooks to fuck with your head.
Okay, maybe this was a bad example; topology in general really is kind of a mindfuck. (Remind me to tell you about the long line, which is kind of like the line of real numbers, except much longer.) Anyway, as soon as we start to ask questions _about humans_—and far more so _identifiable groups_ of humans—we enter the domain of _politics_. Everyone _and her dog_ has some fucking _agenda_—and the people who claim not to have an agenda are lying. (The most I can credibly claim for myself is that I try to keep my agenda reasonably _minimalist_—and the reader must judge for herself to what extent I succeed.) You can't _just_ write a book about "things we know about some ways in which people are different from each other"—to write and be understood, you have to do some sort of _positioning_.
> Yet each generation seems to accept the craziness of the past generation, even when balking at the craziness of the new generation. We think that in the past, academia was on track, and that those who opposed progress were crazy, right-wing nut-jobs. But we dissidents think that this time, this new generation–well–they have gone too far and have gone crazy. There is a certain Cthulian horror when suddenly you realize that many of the nut-jobs in the past were actually right. Many were slandered retroactively, not because they were wrong, or evil, not because they made bad predictions, but because they lost and the winners wrote the histories. There is a horror in realizing that you are just like them, this cycle has played out before, and that your children’s generation will see you as the nut-job.
>
> —[Devin Helton](https://devinhelton.com/historical-amnesia.html)
+
+> A similar definition of intelligence was expressed by Aquinas as "the ability to combine and separate"—the ability to see the difference between things that seem similar and to see the similarities betweeen things which seem different.
+>
+> —Arthur R. Jensen, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"
Eric Raymond gets ousted from his own organization: http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/2020-February/thread.html
https://medium.com/@kemenatan/its-just-a-fetish-right-91cb0a4e261
+https://archive.is/AAyxt
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ER8fXJcXkAIn8G9?format=jpg&name=large
Honesty Is Activism
The Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine as Compression Artifact
Elision _vs_. Choice
-The Wisdom of Nature (I like the idea of transhumanism, but in practice, biology is just too complicated)
+The Wisdom of Nature (I like the idea of transhumanism, but in practice, biology is just too complicated) https://nickbostrom.com/evolution.pdf
+
+
The Strategy of "Apartment Patty"
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff