I don’t necessarily agree with Nussbaum, I just thought it was interesting and related.
There is ample stuff that’s perhaps more empirical
nerfhammer
Karma: 565
I can sort of see how a woman might find such a thing just a tad creepy.
In many cases perhaps the appropriate action would be raise this woman’s consciousness: men’s sexuality isn’t necessarily scary or threatening.
I’m working on a rationality blog aggregator, and should be ready to make it public in the next few days. Would you like to know when it is released?
Yes, I’ll do that. I’ve been looking for places to announce it/request feedback.
Seeking rationality-related blogs
Thanks there are some good ones there.
If it’s not strictly related but likely of interest to the same people that are interested in rationality (e.g. credible self-improvement) then it’s better if posts aren’t that frequently. For instance, there’s a lot of good stuff in hacker news but there’s 100+ front-page posts per day and it would drown everything else out.
If the aggregator proves popular I could introduce a text-classification filter to try to only include relevant posts from sources with varied content, but I’m only willing to invest time in that if it turns out that people are responsive to the aggregator in its current simpler form.
Thanks, added.
Thanks a lot!
I will limit aggregation to the Critical Thinking category as you suggest.
I agree that some kind of filtering (human or machine) could provide additional value, but at this stage I want to see how well the most rudimentary version of the idea works for people before investing further.
Announcing rationalist blog aggregator
May not have been just you, I suspect my ISP was having problems earlier.
Yeah I couldn’t think of one.
Favicon contest?
Meaning you want to turn some sources off?
Options for now:
create a greasemonkey script to hide posts from the sources you don’t want. Every source has a unique CSS class so it should be trivial.
create a yahoo pipe to filter the sources you don’t want through the rss feed and read it through a feed reader
clone the set of sources using the OPML feed in your feed reader of choice and add/remove whatever you want from the source list. However, this will not be kept in sync in the likely event that the official set of sources should change.
Out of curiosity, what don’t you want to see and why?
To be completely honest, I wasn’t going on a strict definition of the term rationalist; frankly I consider the term kind of flawed anyway. But I don’t have a better replacement in mind. For me it means being interested in being rational, being interested in how the mind works, being interested in cognitive biases, Bayes’ rule, probability, statistics, logical fallacies, and scientific self-improvement.
I selected the sources starting with lesswrong and overcoming bias, then taking suggestions from people, doing some rudimentary graph analysis, manually adding blogs of authors in related fields, watching what sources I selected linked to themselves.
I tried to include sources that were readable but not gimmicky (e.g. top 7 secret tips to supercharge your goals!!!). Sometimes sources vary outside this interval, and I don’t have any filtration sophisticated enough to handle this.
I selected against sources that posted too frequently, anything political, anything that seemed angry or upbraiding or read like a manifesto. I included some sources which include these but against which I was able to filter out the political etc. posts easily. The rudimentary methods I used to filter topics doesn’t work perfectly, though.
I tried to include a few sources from less closely related subjects that were high quality and don’t seem to post that frequently. For instance, I included only a couple skeptic blogs, but there are tons and tons of them out there and I feel that it’s a different niche that’s already addressed pretty well elsewhere. Some fields I avoided almost entirely like entrepreneurship or economics.
I tried to not let any one subject dominate the set of sources. I feel like I included too many psychology blogs, for example.
Hmm, I was wondering how much people used those things. Do you want just twitter + email? Facebook?
I’ve thought of ways of working around this. There are ways of actually defeating the truncation. One issue is that there isn’t necessarily an obvious programmatic way of telling which feeds are truncated and which aren’t.
For now, try out this feed proxy: http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/ , e.g. http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/feed?url=http%3A//feeds.feedburner.com/planetrationalist
Is it out of bounds to consider plain and simple prejudice as the trigger?
Disgust reactions are frequently based on prejudices that should be challenged and rebutted. People frequently describe male sexuality in strikingly similar ways to how prejudiced people describe (typically male) homosexuality. You know, it’s disgusting, it’s ridiculous, it’s wrong in some indescribable way, it’s threatening and dangerous in some abstract, unfalsifiable sense. Except it’s not taboo to talk about male heterosexuality that way. Men are pigs, after all, and that they want to have sex is ridiculous and wrong ipso facto. We should question and challenge rather than try to rationalize these impulses. Maybe the validity of this kind of reaction shouldn’t be automatically assumed. Maybe the icky wrongness is hard to articulate because you’re trying to implausibly rationalize a slippery gut reaction, not trying to describe an elusive actual moral principle.
Here’s an interesting interview with Martha Nussbaum on related topics: http://www.reason.com/news/show/33316.html