The Wayward Axolotl

These days, most people seem to believe that overpopulation is not a problem, although the reasons for that belief differ. Also, most people view eugenics as both evil and unnecessary. The conventional “wisdom” on these topics is wrong. Overpopulation and dysgenics are serious problems. If we don’t solve these problems, they will destroy modern civilization. The idea that overpopulation is not a problem is usually based on the evidence of recent history: that we have been able to expand food production to keep up with population growth for a hundred years or so, and thus (I guess the reasoning goes) we will be able to keep doing this…forever?? The absurdity of this is pretty obvious. Imagine that you are walking up a mountain in the fog. You can’t see the top of the mountain, and it might take longer than you expected to reach the top. Just because you can’t see the top, and haven’t reached it yet, that doesn’t mean the mountain is infinitely tall. Just because we haven’t reach...

This is a story about a friend from my youth. I’ll call her Indigo. I met Indigo when we were both in the second year of university. I didn’t go to university immediately after high school, so I was a few years older than her when we met. We were in the same program, Cognitive Science, and we had similar interests in philosophy, psychology and linguistics. She was very intelligent and open to new ideas. We naturally became friends, and would often hang out between classes, talking about life, the universe and everything. Indigo came from a sheltered, middle-class background. I came from a much grittier background, and my life experiences were a lot different from hers. There was also a political difference. She had left-wing, collectivist views, and I had more right-wing, individualist views. We would argue political philosophy sometimes, but in a friendly way. When we finished our undergraduate degrees, we went our separate ways. She went somewhere to do a grad program in u...

Nazism is usually presented as a negative moral exemplar without any rational analysis. Nazism is also linked to the theory of evolution, again, without any rational analysis. Nazism is often referred to as “Darwinian’’, although what this means is never spelled out. Certain ideas that were incorporated into Nazism, such as eugenics, are now considered evil because of their association with Nazism. Any use of evolutionary theory to understand human nature and/or solve social problems is equated with Nazism and rejected as evil. This places some very important ideas off-limits to discussion and debate. In this essay, I am going to analyze and critique the Nazi worldview from a “Darwinian” perspective. I will also critique the popular moral narrative about the Nazis and WWII. In the modern Western mythos, Hitler is the epitome of evil. He is simply portrayed as an evil person motivated by hatred. The Allies are presented as morally good, and their victory in WWII is portrayed as ...

You think inside a box. There is no pure reason, no pure arriving at conclusions by rational thought without assumptions or biases. To generate beliefs, our brains use various heuristics and biases in addition to rational methods of inference. One of those biases is framing. We use fixed assumptions to frame thought, so that only a few details are under consideration when we think. Framing assumptions limit your freedom of thought. Most of what you believe is either nailed down or tied to something that is nailed down. That may seem like a bad thing, but it is necessary. If your beliefs were always open to revision, or if you thought about everything, then you would have no stable beliefs. You would be in a perpetual state of confusion. Framing assumptions make thought possible. Everyone thinks inside a box, but some people have bigger boxes than others. Some people think more than others. They bring more alternatives into consciousness to consider. They can have more comple...