Posts tagged: epistemic horror

Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels

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 …

Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems

I'll write my way out
Write everything down, far as I can see
I'll write my way out
Overwhelm them with honesty
This is the eye of the hurricane
This is the only way I can protect my legacy

—"Hurricane", Hamilton

So, as I sometimes allude to, I've spent basically …

Book Review: Charles Murray's Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class

This is a pretty good book about things we know about some ways in which people are different from each other, particularly differences in cognitive repertoires (Murray's choice of phrase for shaving nine syllables off "personality, abilities, and social behavior"). In my last book review, I mentioned that I had …

The Social Construction of Reality and the Sheer Goddamned Pointlessness of Reason

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way …