I really mean it this time. For the last few years, these yearly summaries are the only things I've published on this once-much-more-active blog. I'm writing my book Competitive Sensemaking, which I got a grant to write back in 2022. Optimistically it looked like I could've finished it in 2023, I definitely feel I should've … Continue reading 2025: The Final Final Year
Tag: online debate
Political Capital Flow Management and the Importance of Yutting
I discuss how you can dismiss, acknowledge, or generalize from the particular to the general, and how this matters for the way political capital is created and accumulated. Read more (11 min, 2800 words).
A Quickie on Cancel Culture Questions
A quick, improvised post inspired by a question put to me on Twitter. Read more (4 min, 1000 words).
Fantasia for Two Voices
A dialog on how everything is. Read more (6 min, 1600 words).
Turnabout Trash: An Exercise in Lowbrow Cryptonormativism
I roleplay being a culture warrior in response to something unusually irritating, and decide not to do it again. Read more (15 min, 3800 words).
Picking Apart Eugenics
A quick-and-dirty piece on what the hell people mean by "eugenics", promted by the fallout from a tweet by Richard Dawkins.
Read more(7 min, 1700 words).
Erisology, Round Three
Third attempt at a relatively user-friendly introduction to what "erisology" means.
Read more (10 min, 2600 words).
Cat Couplings
"I prefer honest argumentation to dishonest rhetoric." Do I mean that rhetoric is essentially dishonest, or am I talking about the kind of rhetoric that's dishonest? That's a cat coupling. Read more (7 min, 1800 words).
Interpretation Matrix: Free Trade Benefits Everyone
Many disagreements are complicated by terms having several meanings. What if a claim is made up of more than one such term? How would we deal with that complexity? I look at an example about the benefits of free trade.
Read more (7 min, 1800 words).
The Prince and the Figurehead
When we misrepresent other people, is it a mistake or do we do it on purpose? Neither explanation feels right to me. Rather, I think we should consider that we often perform "semitentional" actions, which is the result of our agency being more distributed than we think.
Read more (6 min, 2900 words).
Everything Studies 