2025-06-12
el comunicador
Scott Alexander in defense of nitpicking. The other side of predictive processing is that you need to make sure that what you are experiencing is what is actually there, as opposed to what your prediction imagines. Something that I’m noticing as my content consumption increases and the more I skim, the more I’m projecting my own beliefs into the text as opposed to seriously contemplating what it is that they are actually trying to say.
Rebecca Lowe notes that “the age of AI is the age of philosophy”.
Nicholas Decker on the current value of a human life in economic calculations, noting that the current value of a life year considerably exceeds the current GDP per capita, and therefore represents an excessive present focus over that of future generations’ welfare.
Andrew Cutler has some arguments against the out of Africa hypothesis, based on linguistic similarity and what he terms the simplicity of African folklore. His theory seems to be that consciousness developed sometime between 65-15 kya, which is much later than the standard out of Africa hypothesis. Insofar as this is true, it seems to me more likely that a combination of the two theories is involved, with the genetic potential beginning 300 kya in Africa, but without a robust method to reliably unlock it until the development and diffusion of the Indo-European cultural-linguistic package around 15 kya.
Evolutionary Psychology podcast discusses how the popular conception of the field is almost entirely focused on sex differences and mating1. It would never happen, due to publishing incentives which encourage picking the easy fruit, but it seems to me that the field would have developed much better if it completely ignored the question of sex and merely performed cluster analysis on traits, from which relevant sex differences would then naturally show themselves. While certainly important, it’s not completely obvious to me that male versus female is actually the principal component for many of the most interesting questions.
There does seem to be an inability to reckon with the is-ought distinction within our current political climate. There is an excellent post by Maarten Boudry on this topic, blaming postmodernism and the primacy assigned to “social reality” as bad for the idea of progress, which relies on coming to consensus both on where we currently are and where we would like to go. In our current political landscape, the left has trouble with the former while the right fails to do the latter.
Blake Nelson in Republic of Letters on The Feminist, his review pointing out the confusion that is caused by feminism being a post-modern ideology2. Somewhat relevant, here’s a piece by Eurydice on how men should butt out of motherhood discourse, as something they cannot experience personally. Also, a translation in Sinification of a piece by Lao Dongyan on attitudes towards marital rape in China. While we’re at it, Cartoons Hate Her interviews Noah Smith on solving his hangups around attraction and sex. Finally, Deep Left Analaysis on various aspects of Aella-drama.
Robert Yamen points out that while thinking of animal suffering in the abstract is a worthy goal, what really matters right now are the details: determining out what the future we want actually looks like, and figuring out how to steer ourselves towards it.
Cate Hall on commitment as a thing you do rather than something you feel.
ChinaTalk has a translation from Ren Zhenfei on basic research, which reads to me as a call to return to hiding strength and biding time.
Partially due to the well deserved success of David Buss. It was interesting to learn that he apparently started out as a personality psychologist. It’s a little confusing to me why he doesn’t seem to have the desire to connect the two fields by uncovering the biological mechanisms behind personality. Although perhaps exactly because of his experience, he understands the enormous scope behind this question.
On that note, there’s a theory I’ve been thinking on that men cannot credibly claim to be feminists, exactly because feminism is a post-modern ideology which allows for every woman to have their “personal feminism”. In which case, claiming to be a feminist means that you are either signalling unconditional surrender, or prioritizing your definition and denying their personal viewpoint. There are two primary objections that people have, one claiming that “words have defined meanings”, a sort of conventionalist repudiation of post-modernism, and another which leans into it by describing self-labeling oneself as a feminist as declaring allegiance to a worldview first which treats the holding of specific positions as secondary. It’s not clear to me that these are actually responses, as opposed to just choosing which of overriding or surrendering is preferred. But my response is that exactly because there are these two contradictory responses, if we treat the purpose of labels as the efficient communication of information, then self-assigning clearly fails in this respect; as there are two diametrically opposed philosophical positions which could be what is being expressed, this leads to more confusion than it clarifies. Yet having said all that, I suppose there’s an alternative utilitarian analysis which tells you that you should just say you are a feminist if it makes the woman you’re talking to happier; and that’s how we ended up where we are today.