Bloody Shovel 4

T. Greer linked to this (long) article by Adam Elkus about the relation between academia and politics. Academia and politics are quite different institutions, made up by very different people with often antagonistic tempers. But they also have a lot in common, both claiming to have authority, and in most states they have tend to be integrated into the power structure. They make two of the three big pillars of the Cathedral.

Or so we tend to think of them, as a common tenet of neoreaction takes e...

What is the supreme personal virtue for liberals? Tolerance. You have to be nice and accept others and their opinions. Voltaire wrote a whole Traité sur la tolérance to argue that we are all humans, sons of the same god, and should tolerate each other. It doesn't get any more liberal than that. In 1763.

Funnily though, tolerance is very polysemic, and it has another well-known meaning. In pharmacology tolerance is the progressive loss of reaction to a given dose of substance, meaning that you...

The Chinese in their ancestral wisdom, have proverbs for every single situation. In fact one of the hardest parts of learning the language is their reliance on idioms, which tend to be verbatim quotes of classical works. 3000 years of writing in the same language means there's a vast pool of wise insight and sharp wit to choose from, but the old language isn't intelligible as such, so you have to memorise the idioms by rote. Once you do though, you literally have a comeback for everything.

It's s...

The 60 minutes show on the Yale University Baby Lab has been doing the rounds on the internet, and it has caused quite a stir. And rightly so. It's important that people are putting the resources to try to test nature vs nurture. And it's important that they are ready to admit that nature exists too.

And admit they do, but it's very funny how bewildered they are when nature shows herself. Shocked, shocked! I tell you. Babies can tell friend from foe! Well no shit. One of the best things of having...

I was reading The Economist yesterday, amusingly checking out what the Cathedral and its minions are up to these days. I checked in vain for any news about Kate Rothschild, but it seems the family won't touch the subject. Oh well.

I did find something amusing though, if totally unrelated. An interview with Satoshi Kanazawa! Yes, Kanazawa the evolutionary psychologist. He used to have a very good blog at Psychology Today, titled “The Scientific Fundamentalist”. Well he titled it wrong. Last ye...

I remember as a kid reading about Congenital Analgesia. That's a rare genetic disorder that renders people unable to feel pain. How cool is that? You could play around, burn myself, jump off buildings, get in fights, all without fear of getting hurt. Awesome!

Then I thought it better. Why does pain exist anyway? It must serve a purpose. And then I realised that are supposed to be afraid of pain, because pain is proxy for other nasty problems like burning yourself (tissue gets burned), jump off bu...

It used to baffle me that universities have such a thing as an Ethics department. I had read enough philosophy during high school to know that ethics is just one aspect of philosophy, and the hardest one to get any consensus. I also was under the Humean spell, namely that you can't drive an 'ought' from an 'is'. The fact is the only societal ethics that work are those enforced under the power of religious coercion; you make up some shit and kill people who don't agree with it.

So I wondered: what...