1. Good article, a few years old, on global administrative law.
2. Steve Sailer writes recently about Professor Pinker's apparently excellent criticism of Gladwell, the best take down of a non-expert by an expert I've observed since Finkelstein's critique of Dershowitz.
3. It occurs that most agents actively seeking immortality are at the level of living in the medium of aggregations of human beings, rather than individual humans such as me. I think this is a huge short term challenge for me, because to such agents I represent a replaceable element of the medium -their motivation is not for immortality technology at the individual human level. They are constituents for Bostrom's technologies, but not for de Gray's.
Rating of this post for maximizing my persistence odds: 9.8.
Via Steve, a roundup of articles criticizing Gladwell (and one creepily intruding into his personal life, which was actually funny on reading Gladwell's responses):
http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/criticism_of_gladwell_reaches.php
I like the point about his similarity to Tom Friedman. It's hip to bash Friedman, but he's still higher status than his detractors.
Posted by: TGGP | November 17, 2009 at 08:42 PM
My angle is less hip-to-bash, than experts vs. people with audience. As an expert in the field of psychology, I think Pinker is higher status than Gladwell. Same with Finkelstein vs. Dershowitz.
Sailer's counterhierarchy is probably the same as mine and yours: willingness to engage in thought about repugnant ideas without a public mainstream values posture.
A difference I think is that you and I are open to looking more critically at our own epistemologic motivations.
Posted by: Hopefully Anonymous | November 17, 2009 at 10:08 PM
probably should read "our own motivations regarding epistemologic framing" or something like that.
Posted by: Hopefully Anonymous | November 17, 2009 at 10:09 PM
Present company excluded, who do you think is most open to critically looking at their own epistemological motivations?
Posted by: TGGP | November 18, 2009 at 08:10 PM
Scott Aaronson has a nice "it's turtles all the way down" transparency to his writing. He manages the progressive postures with a more ironic detachment than most.
Perhaps Reihann Salaam. He did call himself an "ironic conservative". I think he gets as close as he can to saying he's only "conservative" to help in the larger pageantry of mainstreaming (muslim) south asian technocrats -sort of how Dennis Prager does for jews and Andrew Sullivan does for gays.
I get the sense miner's canary is similar to us, but I haven't read enough of him.
There's more, I'm sure. But those two jump to mind.
Posted by: Hopefully Anonymous | November 19, 2009 at 08:04 AM