The “Meaning Crisis” is popularly discussed and debated these days: John Vervaeke has a fifty episode youtube series on it, David Chapman has a multi-volume website-book on it, and there is an endless collection of posts on the Culture War. …

As a physicist, I get to think about free will just like the rest of ’em. I was recently prompted to set my thoughts to writing on the talk page of the Wikipedia article free will theorem. I think I can string together a few more pieces, and clarify how…

Before neurotransmitters, there was bacterial signalling, for example, quorum sensing in bacteria. Signalling with small polypeptides can solve certain kinds of decision problems, for example, the exploit vs explore problem in slime molds (basically, the trade-off of effort searching for new food sources, vs. “exploiting” (eating) the current food source)…

Suppressing Data, Fake and Real We all know that facebook and many other web sites are now engaged in the active suppression of false and misleading information. We know this “intellectually”, even if we have not experienced it first hand. We also know that some innocent victims, bystanders get swept…

A short essay inspired by discussions of Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012)” Those who studied science in high-school may recall learning how to fit a straight line through a set of points that were not-so-straight. …

I have only one question, but it is complicated to explain. But I enjoy asking it, so I will once-again, type it in the long way, instead of pointing you at some pre-existing blog post. It is about the future of humankind. But it has to start with bacteria. Bacteria…

Free speech on college campuses. This is debated in some circles. Some of the debaters seem not to understand what is happening. Here’s a meta-explanation. College campuses — the 16–22 year-old-set, tend to give voice to what was silently burbling about in homes and social settings five years earlier, when…

We are all hyper-aware of political polarization these days. But what is the cause, how can it be explained? One model is the so-called “echo chamber”, where you only hear the opinions similar to your own. In the old days (centuries ago) we’d say “birds of a feather flock together”…

An excerpt from a post from Alexander Kruel: (3) At Google, managers are cautioned about rewarding people who exhibit values such as meritocracy, winning, avoiding conflict, and a belief in objectivity because they are part of the “white/male” culture.[3] [3] Class-action lawsuit against Google, page 51 onwards https://www.dropbox.com/s/qumybkgxo5lb8kx/20180418%20Damore%2C%20et%20al.%20v.%20Google%20-%20FAC.pdf?dl=0