Reposted, will some spelling errors corrected. I am a professionally published award-winning Science Fiction and Fantasy author, who is amused by the fan fiction in question, but wonders why the author does not attempt to have paid, edited, Fantasy or Science Fiction published in a SFWA-endorsed Major Market.

Harry Potter is a brilliant series of novels about Evil, in politics, in pedagogy, and in attacking people with whom one disagrees. That it is set in a world where Magic works (though more on a cook-book basis than an axiomatic or empirical science basis).

Irrational people who pretend that they are Rational, and devote blogs to boasting about their purported rationality. Is it rational for me to be driven crazy by them?

I think that I'm mostly rational, most of the time. The people I know in person (especially professional Physicists and Mathematicians and computer programmers in areas such as A.I.) who insist that they are entirely rational, all of the time, have at times annoyed me, especially when, for example, their pose breaks down and they leap and yell for joy while clapping their hands at Sarah Palin speeches (as one ex-FermiLab JPL neighbor of mine does), or turn red-faced and yell at me. We are imperfect beings, and I consider it a flaw to pretend that we are perfectly rational.

In the monograph that I've been working on for a couple of years about lying and deception, axiomatized, using bisimulation, there is a deep epistemic question about to what extent you can know something, but not know that you know it. In vernacular, this is about "the unconscious" mind, which Freud and others have explained at length is dedicated to "primary" mental processes (affective) rather than "secondary" mental processes" such as rational cognition.

Not to single out the academically suspect Eliezer Yudkowsky merely because he declines to rationally admit that I exist, but he screamed at my former business partner and still friend John Sokol (an internet pioneer, first to send video through the net) and then wept "like a little girl" (said Sokol). I thus cannot accept that someone is "rational" because he self-publishes that he is, and worships Bayes' Theorem.

In my informed opinion, Eliezer Yudkowsky is an irrational blow-hard cult-leader who denies my very existence. Last time I checked, I am still banned for posting comments on the only-self-published Eliezer Yudkowsky's blog, where he refused ever to retract the public claims that I am a hoax perpetuated by Professor Philip V. Fellman (then a full-professor at Southern New Hampshire University) and internet pioneer, inventor John Sokol. Feel, free, facebook friends, to post anytime on Yudkowsky's blog that copious evidence confirms my existence. And asking why he persists in pretending to be rational. Call me irrational, but I take it personally when I am defamed online.

I stand by to see if I am censored, or if I receive a years-late apology.

ProfessorPost

ProfessorPost

ProfessorPost

ProfessorPost