I make a Charge-of-the-Light-Brigade-style attempt to reclaim the words Liberal, Progressive and Conservative as terms to describe my political attitude. Read more (6 min, 2000 words)
I, LPC
Author: John Nerst
Anatomy of Racism
I pick apart the concept of racism and find out that it's a self-driving cycle, a knot in idea-space, a bag of unrelated phenomena and an ideology that shares important properties with consciousness, intelligence and explosives. Read more (32 mins, 10700 words.)
Taste Books That Don’t Take Off
I review the book Hit Makers and go on about how it loses its point in a sea of storytelling . Read more (10 min, 3300 words).
The More the Merrier
I use pretty pictures to illustrate how we can use many partially overlapping belief systems to get a better image of reality than any one model can offer. Read more (4 min, 1100 words).
Facing the Elephant
I read The Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson and discuss its implications for the structure of the mind (and how I was wrong about it), our tendency to value loyalty over expertise, my own blindness, and the future of institutions. Read more (27 min, 6800 words).
30 Fundamentals
I've spoken before about how it's difficult to interpret texts written by people with very different background assumptions, interests and preoccupations from you. Here I experiment with enumerating my basic beliefs in the hope that it'll make the meaning of my writing more transparent. Read more (13 min, 3200 words).
Postmodernism vs. The Pomoid Cluster
It's common to hear "postmodernism" used as a snarl word against an ill-defined lump of ideas and attitudes hostile to the idea of objective truth and standards. I sympathize with this but also recognize that this is an inadequate conception of postmodernism. In this article I talk about what it is, what it's often used to mean, and how we need words to refer to vulgarized academic ideas. Read more (17 min, 4200 words).
