Viewing profile — moldbug

Indeed.

I've never understood why anyone gets so hung up on their "right to vote." Why should women have the right to vote? Why should anyone have the right to vote? In what possible conce…

Wow. BTW, any couple planning a pregnancy soon should get tested for Mendelian carriers - eg using the Counsyl or Natera test. These tests won't catch a de novo mutation, of course…

Well! If you know SCC, you must love the Box Chevy Phantom! And Chalkie! And I'm sure you've seen the famous Cabrini-Green thread: http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2010/10/end-of-…

One little bird (presumably a Chicago cop): By my totals 17 shot on Sunday, 7 of them in 011. With 11 more starting at midnight to 0800 monday morning. The blackberry was ringing a…

The program itself is more interesting than the gimmicky app: http://www.archive.org/stream/officialsouvenir00goldrich#pag... Imagine a San Francisco where you not only can't buy c…

Sure. I wasn't harshing on PT - I'm a huge fan like all decent and reasonable people :-) In fact I'd be careful about attributing any kind of controversial position to him, but I m…

The latter? "Moderate" is always relative to standard industry practice. If patent trolling isn't standard industry practice quite yet, it's fast getting there. "Don't be evil" is …

Don't miss Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke , far and away the best introduction to a cynical interpretation of WWII.

When I first heard about the setuid patent, I thought it was pretty cool. That was, I don't know, 1989. I think it was 1992 or so before it was really clear that patents were the t…

I find it distressing that even PT has succumbed to this Orwellian use of the word "clean." CO2 isn't dirt. The human instinct for hygiene is one of our most basic. When, as a calc…

If you can't accurately quantify all the concurrent things you're hypothesizing about (like: values as practiced from values as professed) then your "experiments" just show correla…

So their arguments establishing a causal chain back to a certain system of values is too long to summarize here? Um, too obvious to summarize here? I really find it difficult to be…

"Christianity" and "Islam" are historical clades of theological doctrine, not "value systems" in the same sense as "left" versus "right" or "revolutionary" and "conservative." For …

Really? I think results are always a good reason to question values. Note that libertarianism is an Enlightenment ideology too, just an older one (19th-century liberalism). We know…

Concentration camps and gulags excluded, I don't think there has ever been a human society - anywhen, anywhere - as degraded as the 20th-century tower block/project, a pure product…

Stross answers his own question - he just doesn't want to go there. Turn your back on the Enlightenment's ideological values. Until the 21st century can accomplish this, it'll stay…

The first half of your first sentence answers the second, doesn't it? You could ask exactly the same questions with regard to John Brown - another classic American figure. The supp…

It's pretty simple - Anglophone North America is a left-wing polity and always has been, its deviant and extinct Confederate branch aside. You won't find a single leftist trope tha…

Pinkie Pie is a frickin' genius. But I'm curious about this equation, interesting == effective == intricate. Intricate == complex, right? So, the exploit certainly reveals that Chr…

You don't think you're proving the point of my Eric Rudolph analogy? Ie: you don't feel perfectly fair, rational, and justified in applying the "icky," simplistic, five-year-old al…

What I'm saying is that it's immoral to play kissy-face, even intellectual kissy-face, with murderers. Somehow this is controversial. But you can see it easily if you flip the poli…

Here's a catchy name for the ad bubble - we could call it "advertising-supported software." Or, for short, ASS. Google isn't ASS, because Google ads aren't really ads. They're more…

Oh, that's lovely. I'm sure Professor Skrbina is also pen pals with Eric Rudolph, the abortion bomber: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Rudolph Every other week, he teaches his ad…