I pick up and elaborate on some parts that were cut from my review of "The AI Does Not Hate You", including some riffing on mind dumps, weirdness, tensions between the rationalist community and polite society, my conservatism-free youth, the conservatism of Star Trek and my hopes for AI stagnation. Read more (17 min, 4300 words).
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).
"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).
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).
In this follow-up I describe the two remaining quadrants in my version of the political compass and discuss how they relate to left and right in Sweden and the United States. Read more (15 min, 5100 words).
I'm not a fan of the popular Political Compass. Here I explain why, list what makes a good 2-by-2 and rederive the meaning of the political left and right. Read more (10 min, 3300 words).
Some reflections, comments and elaborations on my appearance on the Intellectual Explorers Club Podcast. Read more (9 min, 3200 words).
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 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.)
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).
