Briggs

More On The Tyranny Of Experts: CDC & Banning Driving

Want to hear a great joke about our burgeoning Expertocracy? Rochelle Walensky still has her job. Hilarious! Not as funny as England's Experts proposing those under 25 can't drive their…

Statistics

If You Had To Choose “Ignore Or Believe All Academics On Climate Change”, Which Is Smarter?

Update See the Twitter thread (and account) for many more examples. NOBODY has been able to find a word yet that Experts haven't tied to "climate change." Got an email…

Culture

Doctors At NEJM Release Important New Statement: Do Not Get Sick

It's not certain---where I take that word in its strict sense---that the men on our side of Reality are right about how to gain and keep health. Should you slonk…

Philosophy

How The Laws Of Physics Lie

The title is Nancy Cartwright's, from her book of the same name, and from an article which forms Chapter 3, "Do the Laws of Physics State the Facts?" No, she…

Culture

On Why That “In Defense of Merit in Science” Paper Will Fail In Its Worthy Goal

You might have heard of the peer-reviewed article "In Defense of Merit in Science" by "intellectual dark web" members like Peter Boghossian and old-school lefties like Jerry Coyne, John McWhorter…

Statistics

The Less You Know About Climate, The More You Cry About Climate

Some things, the saying goes, are too good to check. Take the peer-reviewed paper "Environmental knowledge is inversely associated with climate change anxiety" by Hannes Zacher and Cort W. Rudolph…

Culture

Why The Inexorable Increase In The Expertocracy: Examples

Our goal, no easy one, is to figure the trajectory of the Expertocracy. Their goal we know. Complete total full control of every aspect of all life under the guidance,…

Philosophy Statistics

There Is No Problem Of Old Evidence In Bayesian Probability

Rationalists, like those at Less Wrong (think Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander), are prone to fetishsize Bayes theorem, seeing it as the key to all thought. It isn't. Bayes is…

hudbwu on Over-Certainty Of Polygenic ScoresJune 11, 2025
I stopped midway to write this comment. What exactly is the difference between polygenic scores and two-layer neural networks? Other…
NLR on AI & The Dilemma Of TechnologyJune 11, 2025
It's not just that the effects of technology are complex, it's that there's no guarantee that the results will fit…
Cloudbuster on AI & The Dilemma Of TechnologyJune 10, 2025
"Anyway, murder is illegal, too, yet murder is still with us. So it shouldn’t be strange that forbidding scientists to…
Mike Wooly on Cosmic Radiation, Clouds, & Global WarmingJune 10, 2025
The IPCC report that anthropogenic warming is around 0.2 degrees C per decade. That's two hundredths of a degree C…
Chaeremon on AI & The Dilemma Of TechnologyJune 10, 2025
IMHO the dot ai bubble, as direct follower of the dot com bubble, is trying to instantiate Gödel's incompleteness theorems,…