The King of the Memento Sapient Guildocracy has 2 ministers, blue-team and red-team. One has to always back up the king’s idea, plan, judgment, exploring implications, justifications, and executions. One has to always find holes in these, and proffer own alternate theories with implications, justifications and executions. They will argue…

How do you graph a song? The seeking bar is a 1-D line that graphs it purely on time elapsed. Used to be the standard design that on the left you’d have the time elapsed that moved dynamically, and on the right you’d have the total length of time that…

I saw a post recently with this chart on the skyrocketing levels of atheism among Gen Z. It was shocking not just because the absolute % of religious folk was so low, but because the curve that showed its recent trajectory was so steep compared to the modest decline of…

Technophobia should really be three mutually exclusive phobias. Autotechnophobia: What is tech doing to me? To my brain, to my pleasure and pain systems, to my memory and learning, to my emotions and homeostasis. Here comes anxieties like the fact that I’m spending too much time on my phone, I…

It is not self-evident to me that Plato’s Cave should have become so strongly associated with Cartesian dualism, and the modern victory of logical positivism over phenomenology. Consider a different interpretation of the allegory. The problem is that we have kept both the physical figure behind the fire, as well…

We suck at statistics. Statisticians suck at statistics. It’s been 50 years since Tversky/Kahnemann’s paper on the belief in the law of small numbers. 50 years. Another failure of statistical intuition, to not realize just how long we’ve been living with knowledge of these results. But why do we suck…

The problem with socialism is it distracts from the underlying problem. A lot would be solved if we internalized more precisely the difference between Marxism, a philosophy of society, and Communism, a political system of government that seeks to solve the issues Marxist philosophy uncovers. …

A cooperative society is one where individuals share values. Either these are extrinsic, we are told to share values given to us by priests, kings, or governments. Or these are intrinsic, where we innately value certain things, and we tend to form groups of people who value the same things…

Might conspiracy theories be the expression of a paradigm shift in our morality, an Enlightenment 2.0? Conspiracy theories are Veblen goods. Their value goes down with popularity. So to the casual dabbler during the innocent 2000s, they used to be fun and kooky, harmless exercises in pareidolia and synchronicity. Now…