We Are Not Saved

All more enlightened forms of government require certain institutions and customs in order to function. Democratic capitalism doesn't work without strong contract enforcement and low corruption for e…

I recently read an article titled How I Almost Destroyed a £50 million War Plane and The Normalisation of Deviance. In this post I examine the idea of deviance and what it means to normalize it. The …

Like many people the 50th anniversary of the first man on the moon is an opportunity for retrospection, and the thing that jumps out to me and to everyone is the fact that after Apollo was over we ha…

In a continued attempt to drill down into cultural evolution, I examine whether, in addition to cultural evolution, if there's a separate phenomenon which deserves the label memetic evolution. I conc…

I recently read the book Alone, by Michael Korda. It was about the opening months of World War II, and he said that at the time the French had the reputation as the world's preeminent military power.…

We've discussed cultural evolution, and everyone knows about evolution by natural selection, but is something different happening now? Some people have said that we have transitioned to a different a…

Lots of trends associated with the modern world seem to be increasing at an exponential rate. This includes things like energy use, CPU speed, and even scientific publications. But what if rather tha…

I had not intended to revisit abortion so soon, but the previous post generated some interesting comments on a wide range of issues, so I decided to collect them and answer in the form of a post. In …

I was reading the Iliad recently and I was struck by the fact that while there were a lot of horses that no one rode them, they were all used to pull chariots. Horses had been domesticated for thousa…

Abortion is back in the news, and perhaps unwisely I've decided to give my two cents on the subject. I think most of the things that annoy people about the recent laws are tactics in the larger game …

I review the book Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick, with a particular focus on the way the history of walls has been misinterpreted and distorted by recent examples of wall buildin…

At the moment it seems like nothing can stop the Democratic nominee from beating Trump and nothing can stop Biden from being the democratic nominee. But what are they going to do about immigration? T…

When people think about AI Risk they think about an artificial superintelligence malevolently and implacably pursuing its goals with humans standing by powerless to stop it. But what if AI Risk is mo…