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“The Unsustainable Autonomy of Reason”

When was the last time you heard a transhumanist say something like this? . . . the Enlightenment project of Reason to which many transhumanists are committed is self-erosive and requires nonrational validation. Transhumanist advocates for Bayesianism and transcending cognitive biases need to . . . . Continue Reading »

Scattered Preliminary Thoughts on Ephemerisle

Those looking for the full-Gonzo narrative account of some of the more interesting 48 hours of my life will have to look elsewhere, if I ever get around to writing it. Short version: It was fun, nobody died. What follows is more like a post-mortem that includes things that surprised me, things that . . . . Continue Reading »

Sex and Control

Matt Zeitlin should be less surprised by the final sentence of his post (link not suitable for children): I’m not familiar enough with the safe-sex corpus to really comment on it authoritatively, but in my own experience (health classes and so forth), the near-obsessive focus on the . . . . Continue Reading »

The Best and the Brightest

Bryan Caplan expresses his surprise at Geoffrey Miller: I’m impressed that after proclaiming himself “a secular humanist, an antiwar internationalist, an animal-rights environmentalist, a pro-gay feminist, a libertarian on most social, sexual, and cultural issues, and a registered . . . . Continue Reading »

Celebrating Obscenity

It’s official. Cultural libertarians have jumped the shark. Read this Reason.com article and marvel. That’s right, the author isn’t celebrating the fact that citizens have a right to be vulgar, but rather the fact that citizens are vulgar. James’ article on the ‘Sex . . . . Continue Reading »

Singin’ the Android Blues

“Any two AI designs might be less similar to one another than you are to a petunia.” - Eliezer Yudkowsky, Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk . John Schwenkler was kind enough to point me towards this post by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution in . . . . Continue Reading »

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