Bloody Shovel 4

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/26/world/asia/singapore-language-hokkien-mandarin.html?mcubz=0

Damn, New York Times link show up automatically like Tweets now. Talk about privilege.

Anyway; you know what Gell-Mann amnesia is. You read the news, and assume what you're reading is, well, worth reading. It's generally accurate. Then you read something on a topic you have some expertise about, and you find that it's worse than false. It's completely inaccurate and misleading. It just shows how the writ...

Chalupas Cowen interviews Ben Sasse. I had no clue who this Sasse guy was, but apparently he's a poster child of a well-adjusted American conservative. The uber cuck. Now this is a bit unfair. The guy does seem smart. And he seems like a good person. A healthy, down to earth family man. He's even written a book about education which isn't half bad.

The guy just seems like a very productive person. A german-descendend guy from Nebraska, when he commits to a job he does it well. Extremely well. And...

Let me explain what I mean when I call myself a Behaviorist. No, it's not about blank slatism, or being able to completely manipulate anyone at will. It's about not taking what people say at face value.

See this tweet:

https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/827054957329260544

No, no. Just, no. Please, somebody just close all the psychology faculties. Or close the whole universities while they're at it. But this is completely wrong. Nonsensical, really. "People believe that..." doesn't make sense. Loo...

So let me follow up on my last post on Sam Harris vs. Jordan Peterson, and what constitutes a solid epistemology. The podcast itself is quite painful to listen to, and Jordan Peterson doesn´t do much of an argument there. I think the guy doesn't do debates well. He's best when you let him speak for hours. Just give him a mike and let him ramble. He'll get somewhere. You'll notice he doesn't use notes when he speaks, he improvises all the time.

That's impressive, but there's a reason why most goo...

Razib Khan recently wrote a good post about how retarded the whole tirade on "social constructs" can be. Gender is a social construct! Sports should be integrated! Come on. As a scientist it's natural he gets pissed at the whole thing.

I commented there a while ago about how, you know, leftists are actually right. Race is a social construct. Gender is a social construct. They got that exactly right. It's a rather profound point, and I've been thinking on exposing my argument a bit better. It's a...

This has been going around. Guess I should say something. I really don't know how to comment on that pile of nonsense. I might as well let the sages do it for me.

Confucius and his disciples were gathered at the master's house. One of his disciples, Zilu, asks the master.

Zilu: The Duke of Wei has asked for your opinion in how to rule his realm. He'll call you for an audience any time. What will be the first thing you tell him?

Confucius: Oh, that he must fix the names.

Zilu: What? That? Oh come o...

I dig linguistics, and I dig HBD, so how do you join them both? I've had this idea for some time now, but I hadn't written about it lest some guy stole it and wrote a book before I did. 

It seems I'll have to give up on that, as science is fast catching up with my awesome blog (see, I just pulled a Half Sigma here). Razib Khan quotes a recent study in Northern Australia that documents how some Abo kids came up with a new language just for the kicks. It fast became cool, and now the young kids of...

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...

Moldbug has a new post, where he says:

Seriously?

'Deserving' must be the most useless and obfuscating word in the dictionary. It's bad philosophy, bad morals and bad manners in general. It's cheap fatalism, escapism from debate, intellectual sloth.

What does it mean anyway? Asian languages don't have the concept, and sometimes doing translation it's very hard to explain. In the end it must be derived from Christian catechesis. In videogame terms, the idea that humans through they daily behaviour e...

I am a linguist by training, so I have this bias for etymology. The word reactionary, which is what the Jacobins called the pious rebels of the Vendeé, just didn't sound right. Still after careful thought, it seems clear to me that the intellectual descendants of the Vendeé farmers are what today we called traditionalists, and it's mostly secular dissenters of liberalism which call ourselves reactionary. If you think about it, we are using an old word for what is a very new movement.

But of cou...