@CotyReh
@CotyReh
Classrooms in the Underground Ian Marcus Corbin's essay “Losing the Class” tries to console his colleagues in academia about the disengagement they’re feeling from their students. He describes the scene as he sees it from his side of the classroom: https://americanmind.org/essays/losing-the-class/ *“If you were to ask them about their views on shareholder capitalism, transgender bathrooms, hormone therapy for children, religious pluralism, or any other heavy-freighted…
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Thesis Draft: Preface | An Open Letter to the Intellectuals of Both Parties ***[The following is the most recent incomplete draft of a chapter of a thesis I am writing about my own independent research. I've been doing this research for two years now, and I'm doing it completely independently of any institution. Over the next few months I will be putting together this thesis and sharing drafts as I go.]*** **Preface** *An Open Letter to the Intellectuals of Both Parties*…
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The Social Justice Hash Function Today, I am going to teach you about the Social Justice Hash Function. A hash function is something that takes input(s), applies a mathematical transformation, and spits out an output, or digest. The SJHF is a specific type of hash function which takes any social stimuli (a poster, a gesture, or an idiotic remark) and generates a particular kind of output (“You know, sitting with your legs like that just reinforces men’s dominance in…
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Whose Problem is Disinformation Anyway? Check out this article published by the UK Independent last February. It’s written by an alleged comedian named Liam Evans who criticizes other comedians for telling jokes he thinks should be considered hate crimes. Now, after you’ve read it, go through the article again and look at the fourth letter of every sentence. It spells out: TITANIA MCGRATH WROTE THIS YOU GULLIBLE HACKS.…
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Don't Write for Money, Write for Power This isn’t going to be a guide for turning your passion into yet another soul crushing pursuit for income. By now, you should’ve seen enough bad poetry on WordPress sites to figure out that any idiot can make a living writing online. Everything I’m about to tell you assumes you are already making enough money to pay your bills. If not, my advice to you is to go out and get yourself a soul crushing job. Then come back to this article. In…
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On Being Stunning and Brave When we look up at the antics of the celebrities on stage, we often give the more eccentric of the lot the benefit of being “ahead of their time.” The window of what is appropriately ahead of our time is very brief, though. I’d say only about 2-3 years. Five years? Now that’s bordering on lunacy. Imagine that Kanye West waited five years to jump up on stage and interrupt Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the VMA’s. It would have been 2014 then.…
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Academic Turing Tests | How to fool the experts with nonsense The Turing test is a set of criteria used to determine if machines can “think”, or exhibit signs of intelligence. If a computer can reliably convince interrogators that they are communicating with another human, it passes the Turing test. John Searle, philosopher of language and mind, claims this test misses an obvious point about language and communication. He illustrates the test’s problem with the Chinese room…
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The Vinegar Tasters Three men named Alex, Bernard, and Wayne went on vacation in China to celebrate the New Year. They got lost while site seeing one afternoon, and came upon a barrel of vinegar. They decided to rest there. Alex stuck his finger in the vinegar, pulled it out, and had a taste. “Yuck! It's sour.” The taste reminded him of how life today seems out of step with the way things used to be. No one respects the old traditions anymore, he thinks, and the people in…
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The Election Day Holiday Season Currently in America, where I am writing from, we are celebrating the holiday season leading up to Election Day. This is a special holiday to us because it’s a cathartic experience in which we act out one of the two oldest mythological stories: either (1) we continue the tradition of Kronos killing his father Uranus, and Zeus killing his father Kronos, ad infinitum, or (2) we act out the story of the Hebrew God killing the Leviathan. Our…
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Do Male Social Scientists Have "Female Brains"? Beginning in May 2019, I ran the first iteration of a survey of university professors across the United States about their research interests, their methods, and their individual temperaments. My goal is to measure whether certain personality types tend to cluster into some disciplines more often than other fields; for example, do highly extraverted people tend to go into the social sciences at a higher rate than into the…
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How I Hedge My Portfolio with Stablecoins I started January of this year by rounding off $500 from what I earned last year to start a new crypto portfolio. The idea behind it was to be conservative about what went into it and the strategies I used to build its value. You see those ads on YouTube all the time about a guy who starts off with $321.48 and turns that shit into a lambo. The thing about markets is.. they’re gonna get their money back from most people. Speaking of,…
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My Small Volume Trading Results this Weekend It’s been a shaky few days in the crypto market. I noticed last week there was a lot of hubris going around, but the technical charts didn’t show any good opportunities for trading for me. My strategy is conservative. I prefer to get in and out of a trade in less than a day and scrape the excess into a high-interest account. Just before the selloff last week when most of the top currencies lost between 5 and 13% in value, I…
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The First Step to Developing Your Writing Voice - The Audience I was an assistant to a philosophy professor for 6 years and helped many students clarify and better articulate their arguments. I’ve also helped proofread and edit original work for that professor, including one piece submitted to a refereed journal. Since that time, I’ve taken to proofreading and editing papers and master’s theses for international students. I’m always thinking about the difficulties that…
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On Retreating into the Wilderness When someone pursues a goal with a high enough risk for failure, and especially one with high energy costs, their body gives them a little biochemical boost in the form of adrenaline, endorphins, and anandamide. All the best research on exercise consistently demonstrates that physical exertion is followed by improved affect, sense of wellbeing, anxiety reduction, post-exercise calm, etc. When you consider the sort of lifestyle that man has…
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The Identity Industrial Complex | Introducing Simmel's "The Metropolis and Mental Life" *It isn’t just that the winners write history, but that they always portray themselves as the underdogs. History looks to us like one long David and Goliath story. And so will the “Mayor Pete: America’s Mayor” Netflix original docuseries accompanying his election victory.* One of the central problems of modern life, as Georg Simmel sees it, is that the will of the individual to assert…