Benquo

Linkpost note: I originally avoided cross-posting this to Lesswrong because I felt readers would likely feel it was too political, but now that top posters have been prominently advancing arguments on the specific premise this article argues against, and engaging in related naked political posturing as predicted by this model,...

The classical undergraduate humanities curriculum in America was destroyed and replaced over the course of the twentieth century. The destruction is usually blamed on postmodernism in the 1970s, but the replacement was already well under way by then. Neither the attackers nor the defenders of the old curriculum can (or...

"Telescopic altruism" is when progressives are supposed to care about distant strangers at the expense of those close to them. Scott Alexander recently argued against the concept (without quoting anyone specific making the claim). He countered that concern for distant and proximate others is correlated rather than opposed: the people...

Is the US a ruthless cognitive meritocracy that reliably promotes outlier talent? VB Knives defended that claim in a Twitter argument against Living Room Enjoyer that got my attention. [1] Knives argued that if you have a 150 IQ, you'll be a National Merit Scholar, which "at a minimum" gets...

There is a scene in Plato that contains, in miniature, the catastrophe of Athenian public life. Two men meet at a courthouse. One is there to prosecute his own father for the death of a slave. The other is there to be indicted for indecency. [1] The prosecutor, Euthyphro, is...

A 2022 LessWrong post on orexin and the quest for more waking hours argues that orexin agonists could safely reduce human sleep needs, pointing to short-sleeper gene mutations that increase orexin production and to cavefish that evolved heightened orexin sensitivity alongside an 80% reduction in sleep. Several commenters discussed clinical...

Spinoza's Compendium of Hebrew Grammar (1677, posthumous, unfinished) claims that all Hebrew words, except a few particles, are nouns. The standard scholarly reaction is that this is either a metaphysical imposition (projecting his monistic ontology onto grammar) or a terminological trick (defining "noun" so broadly it's vacuous). Both wrongly project...