A Quickie on Cancel Culture Questions

27 January, 202117 January, 2022 ~ Jnerst ~ 9 Comments

A quick, improvised post inspired by a question put to me on Twitter. Read more (4 min, 1000 words).

Anatomy of Racism

16 November, 201817 January, 2022 ~ Jnerst ~ 8 Comments

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.)

30 Fundamentals

16 July, 201817 January, 2022 ~ Jnerst ~ 23 Comments

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).

A Lament on Simler Et Al

5 December, 201717 January, 2022 ~ Jnerst ~ 8 Comments

In response to an article by Kevin Simler I complain about how often people mistake "selfishness" in an evolutionary sense for selfishness in the normal sense. Read more (12 min, 2900 words).

Erisology of Self and Will, Part 6: The Need and the Reasons

4 August, 201717 January, 2022 ~ Jnerst ~ 6 Comments

Part 6 of a series adapted from my 2009 Bachelor's Thesis in philosophy. The reasons why the traditional view persists when prescientific thinking on other topics often doesn’t: freedom and responsibility. Read more (9 min, 2300 words)