See Reason: Looking at the World through Science and Reason

Capitalism: you hate it, you love it, you love to hate it, and you hate to love it. As the dominant, or at least most successful, economic system of  the last 3-5 centuries  (depending how you want to  define capitalism ), it has been an integral part of the socioeconomic fabric for innumerable successes and tragedies. For almost any take you might conceive someone having on capitalism, if you look around enough, you’ll likely find someone has already written about it (maybe even this one!). A common trope, of course, is the “greedy capitalist,” the evil banker or industrialist or business owner ruthlessly exploiting those beneath them for their own profit. Gordon Gekko  infamously lauded the goodness of greed , kicking off a generation of bloodthirsty blue-shirted hostile takeover artists who saw economics in brutal Darwinian terms.   Blue shirt + white collar + power tie + suspenders + gold Cartier = hide ya assets, hide ya balance sheet, hide ya sales project...

I'm Doing Darwin a Disservice Most of my days are spent at work programming. As 50% of the entire workforce and the sole programmer (though not for long - we welcome our first developer hire July 5!), I have a lot of work to do. When I program, I usually listen to punk and metal on Pandora, and today while watching a new data analysis process I was debugging cranking along in AWS, a lyric from the NOFX song " The Idiots are Taking Over " struck me: Darwin's rollin over in his coffin the fittest are surviving much less often I've listened to this song a million times, and it's always good for a whipping up a little anti-conservative, anti-religious-establishment furor in me. NOFX really nails that in some of their songs (see also Leaving Jesusland ), but that one line hit me in a new way today. I'm not very evolutionarily fit. What Do We Mean by "Fitness?" Somewhat subconsciously, I've always considered myself extremely fit (I'...

Eight years went by fast! Better late than never picking back up a blog I suppose. Since I last wrote (in addition to everyone driving home getting “Internet phones” to provide them real-time traffic data which should hypothetically lead to more efficient travel times) I’ve largely maintained most of the beliefs from my posts and developed my thinking along several lines. Today, I’m going to talk about something that’s been on my mind a lot recently: what will happen to society leading into and after the singularity? On one hand, the definition of the singularity is that we cannot see what the world will be like beyond its horizon, because we cannot predict what the presence of one or more intelligences far superior to our own would do with the world. However, we can project some of the current aspects of our society forward to the singularity and make some educated guesses about what will happen to them after the singularity as well. I’m going to first talk through the DM...