A lot of people are not logical. When people aren't logical their beliefs are separate and polarized like fuses in a fusebox. They can be thrown any which way by the operator. Unless they're blown, I guess.

It can be interesting to imagine that myths are true. That doesn't make them any more true.

Maybe a Ph.D. is like a badge. A cop might finish academy and get a badge, but that doesn't say whether they're a good cop or a bad cop.

Three books (a book every 6 years and 8 months).
Twenty articles (an article every year).

One book (or article) that becomes a little well-known.
Hold down a teaching job in the meantime!

Component steps:

Submit article
Revision process
Publication

Submit book
Revision process
Publication

On that, she was careful to feel nothing.

Here, people speak freely so they can learn about human nature. Most of them join groups and defend their ideas against other groups. But they should stay separate. They should spend their time defending their own ideas against truth. Truth is veracity; sincerity; "honesty, uprightness, righteousness, virtue, integrity;" "absence of deceit, pretence, or counterfeiting;" and "accuracy of delineation or presentation."

It's much harder to be true than to win. But people here can fight each other. I can't do anything to stop the fighting. They must stop themselves.

It probably won't happen. But that's okay.

"Freedom returns in wretchedness, and truth returns in doubleness."

Rigorously arguing from first principles, cynically denying truth, and naively misreading truth are different subtly. In books they may all look the same.

It's going to work because it's right. It's going to be right because I've been there.

My school's environment has been bothering me. I have figured it out. I had forgotten that, because of the nature of competition, many people here have cheated, used other students, or used their parents to get here. Now they are failing, or they are succeeding by using the same methods they used before.

Hard scientists. What's the deal with them, anyways? We all know that lots of them are antisocial geeks who can't get along with other people, partly because they are abrasive and partly because other people are jerks. In anger and fear they turn away from the social, which is distressing, and take refuge in what they define as "the scientific," which is nice and pat and doesn't play mind games with you or give you guilt trips; remind you of your sainted mother or hated father; pass you over for a less angry, more fun, and more well-groomed male; or anything like that.

People displace their energies onto a more tractable target. Numbers, colliding masses, and chemical reactions aren't ambiguous the way people and perception are. Then they, and others who don't really feel one way or the other but like to draw conclusions about unfamiliar things, say that social scientists are bad, maybe not even scientists, because their work is sloppy, imprecise, unverifiable, and, most damningly, does not give them comfort.

Sorry, guys. You try it sometime.

People are terrible. Letter on Salon.com.

I read a book that I was assigned. It is advice on doing research. It said that researchers should be a community, and research is supposed to convince other researchers to change their minds, not so much to show them that they are wrong. But when regarding the things I am interested in, other researchers are to me wrong, and they do, to me, show the kinds of prejudices that I have never been able to reason away in real life people. I have only ever succeeded in forcing a change of mind. Prejudice lives in a part of a person that is terrifying to unpack. It is the last refuge of their fear. People fight harder to protect their prejudices than they do their own bodies.

That is what prejudice is like face-to-face. Is prejudice different in research's abstract world? I wonder.

I fear I can't just talk. I fear I must fight. But I don't want to be a bad researcher.

I read the New Yorker every month in the last year of high school, and that is when I decided it was not very good. It's written by and for upper-class East Coast WASPs, people that want to be like them, and people that have been duped into believing that they are the only ones that can find truth.

From the West Coast I couldn't tell how widespread they really were, how much power they had, and how much of their show was real. First, were they all so status-obsessed, so morally adrift, so credulous of trappings trappings of power and knowledge as it seemed? And, were they as misogynist as they seemed?

Yes.

In this world anyone will clear a path for a person who can quote enough Kant or Hegel, or other approved philosopher. But morality or values are never discussed. They are dirty and weak. Only theory is discussed. Theory is God. God is theory.

The Christian God is theory.

All those lands that worship a different god, a different version of God, or perish the thought objects, Nature, many different gods at once, have not been touched by theory and have nothing.

More's the pity that I have studied Chinese philosophy.

The Devil can quote Scripture to his own purposes, likewise any philosopher. Strange that they do not understand this.

There is only one solution, which is to argue from morals and first principles. But like I said, that's not allowed.

The women are stiff and rigid... one can't imagine that they want to be touched or even looked at. They wear shapeless clothes. Romantic relationships are violations. Some marry early and are shipped around the country to follow their husbands, and left at home while the husbands work late into the night.

It is just like it seems in the New Yorker.

"The rest of the world can pretend there is something else sensational going on if they want to but it isn't science." Thread

Physicists say

NPR is bad journalism. There, I said it. I had to say it. Okay.