I’ve started reading through some of the works of Mencius Moldbug. I figure that politics is a waste of cognition but, hey, it’s entertaining and I enjoy being exposed to different points of view. Moldbug is a bit long-winded (understatement), but the guys at More Right have put together PDF copies of the “essential Moldbug,” which makes reading it a whole hell of a lot easier. I guess I better set this up.

Last night, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos appeared on 60 Minutes and spoke about the possibility of using drones to deliver small packages (“drone delivery“). My gut reaction is the engineer’s natural skepticism: I’ll believe it when he’s rolled out something that works instead of touting vaporware. (Remember hyperloop? Yeah, that’s never going to happen.) That’s not so fun to read about, though, so let’s instead talk about the promise of drone delivery.

I don’t have the requisite expertise to lay out compelling criticism of economics as a whole, and I suspect such an endeavor would be profitless (heh). The thrust of such an argument, though — its quintessence — is captured in this quote by Richard Feynman: See, I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself.

Perhaps Sarah Palin will actually read about what that Jesus guy kept talking about and her head will explode. —Reddit user Popcom I have spent the past couple of weeks spending 15 minutes chunks on Reddit, leaving when I become disgusted enough to get back to working through my topology textbook. The experience has, however, been enlightening insofar as it sheds light on the opinions of the masses. Hence, this post.

The line about “what if he’s guilty?” made me almost throw my laptop across the room. Who the fuck cares? It’s better to ensure 0 innocent men face punishment than to ensure all those guilty go to prison. —User RPIAero on Reddit, 172 upvotes You’ve been called for jury duty and you’re sitting in on a murder trial. The evidence is strong and you feel that, even after correcting for overconfidence and coming at the issue from every possible point of view you can think of, there’s a 99 percent chance that “he done it.

Imagine that there are many universes, not just the one we live in, and that they can reproduce; that one universe can have many children. If there is some mechanism that universes can use to pass on their “genes,” we would expect universes to evolve. Think of it this way. Say we start with two universes, one who births four universes and one who births twelve. These universes would in turn reproduce, passing on some of their “genes.

Skepticism, while logically impeccable, is psychologically impossible, and there is an element of frivolous insincerity in any philosophy which pretends to accept it. —Bertrand Russel The standard argument against nihilism – the notion that life is an affair devoid of meaning – goes something like this: Nihilists don’t actually believe anything they’re saying because they still act as though the world is ordered. They still value something, like freedom from pain, and this is revealed through their actions.

Elaine Landry is working on putting together a book, Categories for the Working Philosopher. The list of topics that various contributors are working on is broad, including model theory, special relativity, quantum mechanics and ontology, biology, computer science, foundations, and more. John Baez has posted an excellent abstract of his planned contribution. It talks about what happens when we attempt to formalize intuitive notions of equality. Some exciting relationships fall out, such as understanding equivalence as a path between two points in a topological space.

There’s a nice question on MathOverflow about the mental experience of mathematics. I tend to lean heavily on bodily sensations of motion and mental imagery when working on something mathematical: stretching, compressing, and movement. Proofs and algebraic manipulation often seem like a sort of flowing. (Something I’ve covered before in my post on reading math.) But, anyways, here’s an excerpt from one of the responses that I think is particularly valuable.