All Thoughts Being Equal

I. Kayla at Crows Against Murder has a great post up about September—that calendrical signifier of Back To School which, for those of us in the current "quarter-life" cohort, is still about two-thirds of our entire lives, and almost the entirety of our remembered lives—and the prolonged existential crisis that is "adult life": But the milestones from my youth are no longer relevant.  I don’t have a promise of seeing old classmates, or meeting new ones.  I won’t develop new relationships with teachers or mentors.  Nobody will curate information for me to consume.  There will not be a semester, nor will there be the accompanying guaranteed measurable accomplishment that I can feel proud of by the time Winter Break comes around.  There isn’t even such thing as “Winter Break” anymore. Most disorientingly, I’m no longer building towards a discrete point at which I will have “graduated” from my current world to another one that is somehow more rea...

This was provoked by Scott Alexander's wonderful story "... And I Show You How Deep the Rabbit Hole Goes." I decided to take the original Tumblr meme and put a pessimistic, Needful Things-esque spin on it. Comments and critiques are welcome: I wrote this all at once in a mad haste of inspiration (thus my earlier word choice) so it may or may not be rough. "Let's just say you don't pay... with money. " — Mr. Needful *** YELLOW "Gives you the ability to read and search the minds of anyone you can see, even if it's a picture. You can also turn their minds 'off' to put them into a coma." Yes, now everyone's mind is an open book to you. But alas, the man never said whether you'd be able to understand these books. The first time you attempt to use this power, on a photograph of the President, it felt like that time you had to read Immanuel Kant in college, except that now "A Critique of Pure Reason" was co...

I.   I just finished an ebook by Stuart Armstrong called Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence , and it's increasing my skepticism of the singulatarians—those whacky A.I.-vangelists such as inhabit MIRI, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. They're doing (what they think is) an important public service, by trying to warn the public about the dangers of a fully-godlike, insufficiently-friendly machine intelligence. Except I'm not so convinced that we could stumble on the kind of superintelligence they usually preach in fear about, an alien god with boundless powers: You [the machine superintelligence] are currently having twenty million simultaneous conversations. Your predictive software shows that about five of those you are interacting with show strong signs of violent psychopathic tendencies. You can predict at least two murder sprees, with great certainty, by one of those individuals over the next year. You consider your options. The human poli...

[Note: This is a parody of a recent Alternet/Salon piece called "The 7 strangest libertarian ideas," which was silly enough to warrant a mirror-satirization. Try to decide before section II whether I'm super committed to the implied ideology or not.] I. Few movements in the United States today harbor stranger political ideas than the self-proclaimed feminists. The Tumblr school of feminism is at least as far outside the mainstream on the left as, say, a rather doctrinaire old-school form of anti-Masonism on the right. The difference is this: The mainstream media isn’t telling us that we’re in the middle of a “Anti-Masonic moment.” Anti-Masonic politicians aren’t being touted as serious presidential contenders. And all the media chatter we’re hearing about a “Feminist moment” ignores the very harsh, extreme and sometimes downright ugly ideas that are being disseminated under that banner. It’s great to have allies like MoveTheFuckOverBro working alongside other Am...

Okay, I (sort of) understand the rationale that drives so many conservatives to harp on "one man, one woman" marriage as the "bedrock of civilization" ( for often poor reasons ) and to position themselves as so-brave champions of the pure in a "war on marriage." For the highly religious it really does seem to stem from a bedrock-level worldview, something like the Great Chain of Being where there's a truly universal law that places God, husband/man, wife/woman, children, and everything else in a vertical hierarchy (in that order). I think that's bizarre and rather repugnant, but at least it does explain why we see such otherwise insane statements about how gay marriage will lead to a hermaphroditic universe . When gender-essentialism enters the picture, homosexuality truly is a Blue Screen of Death. But for the red-blooded conservative who wants to uphold strong family values but isn't that committed to the Great Chain of Being, here's ...