The Wayward Axolotl

If you make content and put it on the internet, you will get criticism. I divide critics into three categories: Good faith critics: They are polite, and constructive dialogue is possible. Ideological critics: They are rude and aggressive. Constructive dialogue is not possible. They typically insult and run away. Advice trolls: They are explicitly polite but implicitly insulting — passive-aggressive. Constructive dialogue is not possible. They attach like parasites and drain your time and energy. This essay is about the advice troll. The advice troll poses as someone offering constructive criticism, but he is just role-playing as an authority figure. He thinks of himself as an intellectual, but he is too lazy, stupid, and/or cowardly to create content of his own. Instead, he criticizes the work of others. This is a way for him to assert authority. The act of criticizing presupposes that the critic has superior knowledge or intelligence, so by criti...

UBI stands for “Universal Basic Income”. In its simplest form, UBI is a direct payment to every citizen every month. It would (at least in theory) replace other government programs that alleviate poverty, such as means-tested welfare. It is growing in popularity as a political proposal. In this essay, I’m going to make the case against UBI. The basic argument for UBI is that we already agree on the existence of a social safety net, and UBI would be simpler and fairer than existing welfare schemes. As it is typically conceived, UBI would just be a direct payment from the government to all members of a society, without the complex bureaucracy that administers means-tested welfare schemes. Because it would be universal rather than means-tested, it would also eliminate or reduce certain perverse incentives of existing welfare schemes. Let’s consider some of the problems with means-tested welfare scheme. They require means-testing on an individual basis, so they need a bureaucracy to admi...

This is a response to a comment by EyesWideOpen on the video Lucifer’s Question . His comment is long, so I will break it into parts and respond to each part. He began by quoting something I said: “Even if you fling yourself into the Abyss, so that you may reign in hell, you’re still serving in heaven.” Then he said: Do you really think that John Milton was an advocate of anything closely approximating the autocatalytic cells view of existence where ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ can both be reduced down simply to causality in a 100% materialistic universe? I believe Milton’s many metaphors should be viewed in context — Milton’s belief system was Christian. Although he was anti-organization when it came to Church governance, his ideas on existence and purpose were always structured within a framework built upon the Word of God as a divine revelation of higher truth (metaphysical). The video wasn’t about Paradise Lost or Milton’s worldview. I used the character of Luci...

This essay is about the economic problem created by the coronavirus pandemic. Here is the situation. There is a new disease that spreads like the flu or common cold, but with significantly worse symptoms. It floods hospitals with patients and kills about 3% of those infected. It spreads around the world. Stopping or slowing the spread of the disease is now a major goal of every government, and avoiding the disease is now an important goal for most individuals. Governments in most places introduce measures to slow the spread of the disease. They shut down travel, outdoor gatherings, restaurants, and other public activities. Individuals also change their behavior to avoid infection, mostly by reducing their exposure to others. The pandemic has effects on both production and consumption, both supply and demand. Certain goods and services are no longer produced, either because of new regulations or because of decreased demand. A huge number of businesses shut down and a huge number of ...

Consider the following statement: Trans-women are real women. It is a required belief in the current year. We are supposed to believe that trans-women are real women. Claiming otherwise is hate speech. Of course, this is crazy, and it demonstrates the insanity of Western culture in the current year. But the statement is more than just a blatant denial of biological reality. It is a semantic paradox. I’m going to call it the “trans paradox”. The trans paradox is similar to the liar’s paradox. An example of the liar’s paradox is “This sentence is false”. If the sentence is false, then it is true, and vice versa. Thus, it cannot be assigned a truth-value. The trans paradox is also self-negating, but in a different way. If the trans paradox is true, then it is meaningless. The trans paradox negates its own meaning because the concept of a trans-woman depends on the concept of a woman. More generally, it presupposes the gender binary. “Trans-woman” can be defined in differ...

The coronavirus pandemic is now spreading into the West in a way that was completely predictable. Once the virus got into the general population in China, it was only a matter of time before it spread to the rest of the world. Mass international travel made that inevitable. But although the rest of the world had about a month to prepare, most countries did very little. As the numbers were growing in China, I kept wondering why there were so few cases in the US and Canada. Both have large Chinese populations, and there is a lot of travel between China and North America. In particular, there are many Chinese students who went home for the Christmas break and might have brought the virus back with them. So, I expected quite a few cases to show up in Canada and the US during February, and I was puzzled when the reported counts were much lower than I had expected. Now I know the reason for those low numbers. The health authorities in Canada and the US did very little testing. Dur...

The information revolution has been going on since the invention of the printing press, or maybe even earlier, but we didn’t reach information abundance until the 2010s. The internet, smart phones and social media were all contributing factors. Those technologies not only enabled a greater consumption of information, they also enabled everyone to produce and distribute information. This has profoundly affected our culture. To understand how things are changing, we need to understand what existed before. From the 1920s until about 2010, our culture was dominated by mass media. Mass media (I’ll treat it as a singular noun) is the production and distribution of information for mass consumption. Mass communication technologies include newspapers, books, radio, TV and movies. Those technologies send a small amount of information to a large audience. What we think of as “popular culture” was created by mass media. Mass media has a distribution bottleneck. Airtime on TV or radio was a...