The Wayward Axolotl

In this essay, I will debunk R/K selection theory. First, I encourage you to read the Wikipedia article on it, even if you know what it is. The article mentions that the theory is no longer generally accepted as valid in biology. I am not appealing to authority — I will debunk it myself — but I thought I should point that out. The R and K come from the Verhulst model of population dynamics: G = R × N × (1 − N/K) G is the growth rate of a population. R is the maximal fertility per individual. N is the size of the population. K is the carrying capacity of the environment. This equation expresses the intuition that increased population density makes life harder. As N approaches K, G approaches 0. If N exceeds K, then G is negative. When N is much smaller than K, G approaches R. Other than expressing an obvious intuition that density impedes growth, the equation isn’t very useful. There is no way to observe K that is independent of N. The only way to estimate K is to o...

Feminists like to define feminism as “a movement for the political, social, and economic equality of the sexes”. That definition is very misleading. It does not describe what feminists believe or what they do. Feminism is much more complex than that definition suggests. In this essay, I will describe feminism in terms of its form and function. I will describe the ideology of feminism and show that it is dishonest and impractical. I will also explain the function of feminism: what it does and why. Although feminism can be thought of as a political movement or as an ideology, it is more useful to think of it as a disease. Feminism is a memetic disease that propagates from host to host. It uses infected hosts to spread itself. This way of thinking involves a role reversal. We normally think of ideas as serving our purposes, not vice versa. We think of ideas as tools that we use to understand reality and act effectively in the world. We don’t normally think of ourselves as be...

In this essay, I will make the case that demographic transition theory is wrong. Demographic transition theory (DTT) proposes that people go through a transition from high fertility to low fertility as their societies modernize. Supposedly, this will lead to a stable or declining world population at some point in the future. This assumption is built into UN population projections. DTT fits the evidence of recent history. Over the last 100 years, fertility rates have fallen dramatically as modern civilization spread around the world. Today, most parts of the world have low or declining fertility. What caused this change in human behavior? The generally accepted view is that poverty causes high fertility, and thus alleviating poverty causes lower fertility. According to this view, poor people choose to have more children either to help on the farm, or to care for them in old age. They also have extra children to replace those who die young. If poverty is alleviated and...

Here are two thought experiments to make you think about consciousness. A scientist offers you $1000 to participate in an experiment. You will walk into a room, be strapped to a chair, and be given a drug that causes extreme pain. The scientist tells you the pain will be something like having your shins bashed with a baseball bat. The pain will last for 5 minutes. After that, the effects of the drug will wear off. There will be no permanent effects. Then he will give you a second drug that erases your memory of the last 6 minutes — enough to cover precisely the amount of time you spent in the chair. The second drug also has no harmful permanent effects. It just erases your recent memory. After giving you the second drug, the scientist will unstrap you from the chair and pay you $1000. From the perspective of your future self, it will be as if you just walked into the room, sat down in a chair, and then got out of the chair and were paid $1000. Your future self will not have any memor...

The immigration and multiculturalism policies of Western societies are often described as “pathological altruism”. The implication of the phrase is that you can have too much of a good thing: that altruism is generally good, but it becomes pathological when it goes too far. Exactly when altruism becomes pathological is not specified, but the current policies are going too far. I reject this view. Altruism is always pathological. People are selfish, so individual altruism cannot explain social altruism. The challenge is not to explain why people or societies are too altruistic. The challenge is to explain how individual selfishness causes social altruism. Altruism is the basic moral value of the modern West. We have discarded most traditional moral values, such as chastity, honesty, bravery, loyalty, etc, and replaced them with a single principle: be nice to others. This principle is vague and incomplete. To whom should you be nice? How nice should you be? What exactly does “b...

Book recommendations, organized by category. Physics Hidden Unity in Nature's Laws by John C. Taylor This is an excellent overview of theoretical Physics. It is not pop science, but it is readable and it does not assume that you have a background in the sciences, just that you are intelligent and can handle a few equations. It goes over all the major theories of physics and shows how they fit together into the conceptual framework of modern physics. QED by Richard Feynman This is a really good introduction to quantum theory. It discusses the observations that quantum theory explains, and then it shows how quantum theory explains those observations. It gives you the empirical basis for quantum theory in everyday observations and simple experiments. If you want a basic understanding of quantum theory, read this book, not some pop-science book on the "multiverse". Chaos by James Gleick This is a book I read when I was around 20 years old, and I really enjoyed i...