Religion of my Generation

Postmodernism is making the continuum fallacy in all matters of inquiry.

Strange Truth

If you know a girl who is really into Betty Boop, there’s a 100% chance she was molested.

Confidence is Rhetoric

The guy who answers first with Ocean’s 11 intentionally does so without confidence and gives a pretty weak sounding reason for his answer. The next guy gives a wrong answer but does so with a cockiness and with a made up reason (2 is the lowest prime number, but that doesn’t make 4 a prime number) and he presents it with extreme confidence. The girl, of course, sides with the more confident answer even though she seems to know it’s wrong. She was just unsure enough for the cocky male to persuade her to lose $50,000, almost to just say “I’m not a dumb blond!”

Try telling a woman something ridiculous with utmost confidence and watch them second-guess themselves. Hours of fun.

Externalities

The state deals with negative externalities, like smoking, with taxation. The state encourage positive externalities, like installing solar panels, with subsidies. One can therefore expect less smoking on aggregate because it’s more expensive and more people on aggregate installing solar panels on their homes because of the tax break they receive.

The poor receive tax breaks and sometimes welfare from the state. They are treated like positive externalities. The wealthy are taxed more and more depending on how wealthy they are. They treated as negative externalities.

There’s no real argument here as to what they state should do, this post is just intended to illustrate the inherent inconsistency with they way the state deals with externalities.

Emergence Again

In emergence, it’s not just the “stuff” that matters, but the organization of the “stuff”.

If we consider consciousness a strongly emergent phenomenon (a completely new and unpredictable thing that arises from physical processes), we can understand that it isn’t just the neurons (stuff) that make the brain conscious, but the arrangement of those neurons somehow play an equally important role.

If we look at a weakly emergent phenomenon like patterns in sand, it’s obvious that the arrangement and not just the sand is requisite to making the pattern. Though weak emergence is a categorically different thing, it serves as an analogy for understanding strong emergence.

If weak (the analog) emergence and strong (the “real thing”) are not understood as completely different things then emergence becomes a useless term as it no longer describes anything new.

Obvious but often overlooked

Men compete for sexual access but women compete for commitment.

Forced cooperation is not solidarity

Separatism is better than forced cooperation. That way, market forces can work on different ideologies instead of one dominating a society only to find out it was broken from the start (see communism).