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sharp.blue
Adrift on the ocean of truth
1,270 posts 241 followers 904 following
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Posts 23 Comments 27

Someone needs to be extremely dull before their IQ score is one of the most interesting things about them, even assuming that IQ measures something worth measuring, which I seriously doubt.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

There’s nobility in committing ourselves to ideals against which we’re found wanting. If there was no possibility of failure, we would hardly need ideals at all.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

The should be a name for the phenomenon of someone’s every utterance being either obvious or wrong. Jordan Peterson is one such person; Elon Musk another.

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

One day, a thesis will be written about how people more suited by temperament and ability to be second-rate Twitter trolls ended up with their grubby hands on the levers of power in so many countries.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

There are some situations in which all actions, and even inaction, are morally wrong. We should try not to find ourselves beyond such moral event horizons.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

The problem with the idea that I should say what I think is that I mostly don’t know what I think. I shall have to settle for not saying what I don’t think.

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

Although humans, especially of the Homo sapiens species, later introduced some interesting innovations, this, the Acheulean hand axe, is the characteristic human technology.

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

Nikhil Krishnan: “A tradition without a heterodoxy is only half a tradition.”

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

If the UK government forces Apple to weaken its security and as a consequnce bad actors gain access to my data, the UK government should pay me compensation. I imagine a few million pounds would be adequate in most cases.

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

A curse on you, “Once More, With Feeling”, and a curse on you, looped playback!

submitted 18 days ago • 1 comment

I keep forgetting that I’m not an EU citizen. This really is a quite dismal timeline.

submitted 22 days ago • 0 comments

‪In a very real sense, ChatGPT, Claude and so on are interactive fiction generators, which in combination with the user produce stories about a person talking to an artificially intelligent machine.‬

submitted 29 days ago • 0 comments

We should not overestimate the purchase that liberty, reason, humanism and liberalism have had on the history of humankind. All have always been open only to a small fraction of people, even in their heartlands, and their wider success far from assured.

submitted 30 days ago • 0 comments

Thomas Aquinas wrote at a rate of approximately twenty tweets per day. I expect equivalent corpora from each of you in twenty years.

submitted 34 days ago • 0 comments

After waiting patiently on my shelf for almost seventeen years, it’s time…

submitted 34 days ago • 3 comments

There’s never going to be a better time to use the Twenty-fifth Amendment than today.

submitted 35 days ago • 1 comment

Every monoclonal antibody medication sounds like a Babylonian demon. I mean, Risankizumab?

submitted 40 days ago • 0 comments

Populists want you to have a small, simple identity, with clear boundaries and as much distance as possible from other identities. They want to be able to speak for you, limit you, and identify your aspirations with their power. Resist them.

submitted 43 days ago • 0 comments

Elif Shafak: “We must strive to become intellectual nomads, keep moving, keep learning, resist confining ourselves in any cultural or mental ghetto, and spend more time not in select centres but at the margins, which is where real change always comes from.”

submitted 43 days ago • 0 comments

I don’t understand people who like science-fiction and fantasy but just want ever more of the same. I already have the past’s stories: I want the future’s.

submitted 44 days ago • 1 comment

I keep thinking that MDMA are the people who make the missiles.

submitted 48 days ago • 0 comments

IQ is supposed to be a proxy for “g”, a one-dimensional measure of general intelligence in humans. This is problematic enough, and furthermore there is no reason to think IQ tests are a proxy for intelligence in general rather than specifically in humans.

submitted 53 days ago • 1 comment

Going back to Pinter’s “A Book of Abstract Algebra” after the Christmas break and I can remember nothing about ideals, integral domains, or probably even numbers…

submitted 53 days ago • 0 comments