The Wayward Axolotl

This is a collection of twitter discussions with David Pearce.

Another little conversation with Claude.

Another discussion with Bientendre and Alex, from way back in March.

To deal with complexity, we need to analyze things into components, and hide information inside those components.

This is a little discussion I had with Claude, the LLM agent created by Anthropic.

Talking with Ethan Howell about knowledge.

Talking with Garrick about primitivism and other things.

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. — Eleanor Roosevelt We can divide thought and discourse into three levels of abstraction that roughly correspond to the levels in that famous quote: Thought/discourse abo…

Discussion with Garrick about Adam Lanza, eulavism, primitivism, etc.

To almost everyone, it is perfectly clear and obvious what should be done.

Alex sent me some questions about dishonesty in the academy.

This essay is a lightly reworked version of material from Debunking the Selfish Gene.

The continuum fallacy is to deny the meaningfulness of discrete categories, just because they are a somewhat arbitrary partition of a continuum.

Responding to critics is an important part of rational thought and persuasion.

Economists and other social theorists often take the concept of utility for granted.

In this essay, I will debunk the concept of market capitalization.

In comments on the essay The Case Against Moral Realism, I challenged someone (Stephen Lindsay) to define good and evil, or in other words, to define moral value.

The death of George Floyd in May 2020 caused a widespread moral panic about racism and policing, which was commonly called the “Black Lives Matter” movement (BLM).

You are not IN the universe, you ARE the universe, an intrinsic part of it.

Imagine that you are sitting at a table.

Moral realism is an explicit version of the ordinary view of morality.

Our culture assumes that freedom is generally good, and that people should be free to pursue their own desires, unless that pursuit conflicts with the freedom of others.

Apparently, the following is an argument made by Sam Harris on twitter, in a series of tweets.

Essay from the book Lucifer’s Question.

This is a response to a video and blog post by Conundrum.