Things to Read

What’s This All About?

This is the blog of a physicist, who, in the proud tradition of Sir Isaac Newton, likes to think about apples, and also things unrelated to apples. If you’re a religious traditionalist concerned with the way God is vanishing from society, be aware that I’m really not like that myself, but at least I have nice things to say about you. If you’re an idealist concerned with social justice and the intersection of oppression who’s used to being right all the time, you might be disappointed, given that this blog is not woke.

On the other hand, if you’re a clever sort of person who’s interested in unconventional discussion, congratulations for being my target audience! May you enjoy reading all about my very sophisticated comment policy:

Comment Policy

Some people pay lip service to the ideas of tolerance and free speech, but I really do value those things—without them, I wouldn’t be able to hear from people who think and feel differently from me. So comments taking the form “Apple Pie, you are totally wrong, here is why,” are absolutely fair. And I’ll usually engage even with people who are disrespectful, offensive, or annoying to me personally (though admittedly, I really prefer that you not be boring).

On the other hand, well, if you post blatant spam, be warned that your comments are likely to disappear.

Things I’m Interested In

I make few demands on my readers other than that they be smart enough to know what I’m talking about, and patient enough to let me explain it to everyone else. But hey, it does also help if you have a working familiarity with a few of these topics:

• The ethics of reproduction and suicide

• Evolutionary biology (Specifically, as relating to humans)

• The three laws of behavior genetics:1

  • All human behavioral traits are heritable.

  • The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of genes.

  • A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.

• Ethical systems, including Utilitarianism and its superior alternatives

• Personality (especially Honesty, a factor of personality missing from the Big Five)

• Political Theory

• Anthropology (Specifically, subsistence patterns and residence patterns)

• Sociology (Especially the Inglehart-Wertzl map of world cultures),

• History (Especially Quigley’s Evolution of Civilizations),

• Playing the science game using statistics (Correlation, t-test, Cohen’s d, p-values, and type I vs type II errors), and

• Apples (Cultivated fruit of the genus malus, with a growing range extending well into the midlatitudes and tasting very good in pies)