Three recent anecdotes about drastic failures in buying goods and services ( Read more... )

Scott Alexander is my favourite blogger/essayist. He's an extremely smart psychiatrist who writes fascinating, insightful, often very funny (but also long) posts about lots of aspects of psychology, cognition, medicine, science in general, politics and culture. His ideas have shaped my thinking more than any other writer, with the possible ( Read more... )

This is a diagram of how I see the culture war and the three main "sides". They are not symmetrical in size or in their relationship to each other.


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Trolling originally meant posting something provocative to get a reaction. The etymology is from fishing: offering bait and hoping to get a bite ( Read more... )

Racism is bad and is a problem that needs tackling; practically everyone agrees on that ( Read more... )

BBC article today: "Twitter apologises for letting ads target neo-Nazis and bigots".

"Twitter has apologised for allowing adverts to be micro-targeted at certain users such as neo-Nazis, homophobes and other hate groups ( Read more... )

This is how I used to think the abortion debate worked: Everyone agrees that abortion means killing a living being of some sort, but they disagree on whether it's morally equivalent to killing a born human, a pet, an insect, or a bacterium ( Read more... )

(Content note: discussion of nonconsensual and debatably-nonconsensual sex)

Suppose you're complaining to your friend Bob about a mutual acquaintance Charlie who deliberately got a girl drunk and then guilt-tripped her into having sex with him. You comment that Charlie violated the girl's consent.

Bob says "Well, actually, that's not what consent ( Read more... )

andrewducker  posted a link to an article about whether people feel they've become more their "true" or "authentic" selves as they've got older. In general, it turns out, they do ( Read more... )

I don't know whether or not I'm in the autistic spectrum. I have some autistic traits; I have a daughter with an official diagnosis, and AFAIK autism has a genetic component; and some people have asked me, based on their impressions of me, if I'm on the spectrum. But I've never been officially tested.

I'm saying this because some people (and I am ( Read more... )