Commenter Mitchell alerted me to Vichy’s abandoning electronic communication for arboreal primitivism. Au revoir!
A little later I found that Ilkka Kokkarinen has ended his year-and-a-couple-months vacation. I haven’t read any of his posts since (who’s in charge of letting us know when absent bloggers return?) and complained about how much better 16 Volts was before he left, but welcome back anyway.
UPDATE: The first thing I have to share with you that I found from one of his new(er) posts is a fisking of Aristotle.
UPDATE 2: For a while I had wanted to fit this from the Economist on how superior math courses are into a post, but wanted more to go with it. Ilkka provides. I probably do read and enjoy a lot of unmathed writers, but its suspicious that even a number-light one like Unqualified Offerings/Highclearing is written by two physics professors. I broke out some of my rusty discrete math (ick) and maxima-finding (hooray!) tools here.
Entitled to an Opinion 
August 28, 2009 at 1:05 am
I dunno….
Vichy a.k.a. ‘All-in-All’ always struck me as phony.
This is how she described herself in answering some survey about the average person in the Steveosphere:
Race: Korean
Gender: Female
Socioeconomic: Lower-Middle income bracket
Religion: Atheist
Politics: Apolitical, libertarian anti-state leaning
Education: Highschool Dropout
Family: Single and no children
Favorite HBD Site: iSteve
Occupation: Clerical & etc.
Age: 20
View on “Game”: No opinion
View on Feminism: Enlightenment nonsense
View on Abortion: Apathetic
View on Eugenics: Transhumanist
View on Gay Marriage: Apathetic
View on Illegal Immigration: I don’t recognize ‘teh law’, and I don’t care about general statistical trends I have no control over.
View on Affirmative Action/Diversity Initiatives: Enlightenment nonsense
View on Republican Party: Populist Douchebags
SWPL: http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/20/11-asian-girls/
Obama: Typical Delusional Progressive, with power
Elites: Slightly vague term, but generally a bunch of nitwits, with power.
Diet: Traditional diet, eschews vegetarianism, veganism, and high-carbs
IQ: Mid-140’s
Environmentalism/Global Warming: Most people with an opinion have no epistemic right to one on this. Also, don’t care.
MSM: Typical Progressive Universalists
Motivation: Personal gain
Hmmm…..a 20 year old Korean girl high school dropout, ultra-libertarian/reactionary, hardcore Austrian econ nerd who’s apparently read every work of Austrian econ ever including QJAE articles and the works of obscure living Austrian economists like Boettke and Salerno. Who’s abandoning electronic communication for arboreal primitivism and in order to “be up in the forest reading books.”
Is such a thing even possible?
Am I the only person that suspects “Vichy” is really Mencius Moldbug pulling a fast one on us for his own perverse amusement? Or some other older dude with a fetish for posing as a 20 year old Korean girl online?
TGGP, as you know well some of those libertarians and Mises Institute cultist/nuts can be pretty weird. I wouldn’t put something like this past them.
August 28, 2009 at 1:43 am
And I was just getting acquainted…
August 28, 2009 at 2:23 am
Vichy referred to himself as a “habitual curmudgeon” in the comment section of The Sociological Imagination blog. I doubt he is a 20 year old Korean woman.
August 28, 2009 at 7:44 am
I’ve also expressed skepticism about Vichy’s self-description. Note that I don’t refer to any of it in my comment above.
“Arboreal primitivism” is an exaggeration, but I wanted to use it anyway.
I don’t think MM is Vichy. MM doesn’t seem familiar with Stirner. Vichy expressed contempt for ethnocentrism in the thread Ethel started at the left-libertarian forum (a place I wouldn’t expect to find MM) and has also used some Britishms.
August 28, 2009 at 2:57 pm
“I don’t think MM is Vichy. MM doesn’t seem familiar with Stirner. Vichy expressed contempt for ethnocentrism in the thread Ethel started at the left-libertarian forum (a place I wouldn’t expect to find MM) and has also used some Britishms.”
Interestingly enough, at the left-libertarian forum (have to register/login to view) she introduces herself as someone whose “primary interests are philosophy (esp. logic, ontology and metaethics), history (esp. WW1 and WW2) and economics (typically of the Austrian variety).” Doesn’t sound too different from Mencius Moldbug to me……
That being said, if I had to put my money on it, I would say Moldbug isn’t Vichy. Moldbug seems (relatively) normal to go in for this kind of thing. He’s had a skilled profession, held down a steady job, has a family, wife, kid, etc.
But if you’ve ever been around the libertarian/anarchist/transhumanist types (not to malign them all or anything; I sympathize with many of their views) on the web long enough, you’ll realize that there are more than enough creepy weirdo types out there among them to get off on pretending to be a 20 year old Korean girl.
I imagine it’s some other older guy who’s tired or otherwise needs a break from his little fetish.
August 28, 2009 at 9:23 pm
I agree about weirdos on the net. A little while back I went to check back up on a forum I used to frequent at and found that nearly half the “women” currently active there were trannies. As one of them put it, on the internet everyone is a man, including the women.
August 28, 2009 at 9:50 pm
All right, I confess, it was me all along, the low-IQ welfare-dependent Duncius Dolebug. I guess you guys really ARE too smart to fall for such a simple trick.
August 31, 2009 at 1:52 pm
I wonder whether for most people natural science isn’t better to learn than math. (In terms of intellectual purposes I mean, not vocational ones.) I started my bio major after finishing my math minor. Bio revolutionized my life, and math and a little analytic philosophy didn’t. In bio I experienced the great lesson of believing or suspecting XYZ and turning out to be empirically wrong, again and again – dozens of times. So I stepped up my game and got the religion of reality.
But my experience might be rather highly unrepresentative. First because I did way more extracurricular thinking about bio than most people, second because I was by birth a good deal less disciplined and a good deal more idealizing in my mental habits than most people – kind of like a typical nontraditionalist artist type personality. I used to get terrible grades on high school essays for rambling on in the most inane and bombastic “visionary” mode about things I knew almost nothing about – which came very naturally to me – nor was I quite cured midway through college.
As for math some is mo’ superior than others. The hardcore high school curriculum runs up to BC Calc. I would remove things like
– finding the surface area and volume of rotated curves
– the two or three most arcane of the integration techniques such UV integration and integration by parts
– anything having to do with way-obscure curves like catenaries
– most of the study of particular polar coordinates curves such as cardioids, though I’d retain polar coordinates and especially conversion between polar coords and cartesian coords
– from precalc, remove advanced trig
Those topics have no particular use. They are very challenging mind games, and useful for that. But they are disconnected dead ends.
I would replace those topics with stats and real analysis. Stats is highly practical. Analysis (complete with writing of proofs, of course) is the ultimate mind game: deep, systematic, teaches the purest and sweetest ratiocination – much like geometry but way better. It’s the epitome of non-empirical thought.
August 31, 2009 at 2:31 pm
“In bio I experienced the great lesson of believing or suspecting XYZ and turning out to be empirically wrong, again and again – dozens of times.”
Isn’t this more the result of doing lab work and experiments, being actively engaged in the process of scientific work, rather than the subject matter of bio itself?
That is, if you just read bio textbooks without ever doing experiments or lab stuff, would you have the same judgment about bio relative to math, analytic philosophy, etc?
August 31, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Fields that use math are also good (by Ilkka’s criterion), which is why I mentioned the physicist-bloggers. The study I mentioned just compared them to reading classes.
I found the area/volume of rotated curves interesting, though perhaps not very useful. I can’t remember how UV integration went, but I remember it being very useful for later calc courses. I wish I had taken a stats course, and think it would be best if every high-schooler did. I HATE HATE HATE trig. Didn’t like geometry either.
August 31, 2009 at 1:59 pm
I don’t know though. I was getting a good deal less dumb before starting in on bio. Some of it was just age I guess – I think I got a fair amount less stupid around age 21, for no particular external reason.
August 31, 2009 at 10:12 pm
> I can’t remember how UV integration went, but I remember it being very useful for later calc courses.
Yikes, I hated calc III like you hated trig. Dropped it twice, once at each of two schools, before finally grinding out a low B – and so did my best friend from high school. So hard, so calculatory, and no new fun – in calc BC you command the unbounded with the hauteur of an alchemist, doing infinite integrals and taking infinite limits; in calc III you get no new lofty powers by my count. As for actually using it, I’m sure one would in serious physics and maybe chem; I haven’t used it.
While I did not enjoy UV integration I have to admit hard core freestyle integration is one of the most challenging puzzles of them all, since you don’t even know how to begin. Actually, with those on my homework I preferred when possible to start off with five minutes of nominal efforts, ending in a request for a clue from this crystal eyed, high cheeked west-ashkenazi bombshell who was doing BC as a sophomore… no doubt she maxed out the SAT without even trying – she was appealingly dorky-light to top it all off, in the perfect degree – in short a girl for an alpha, out of my league and then some.
Anyway, now that we’ve unburdened ourselves of our views, it remains only for the Sec of Ed to check your blog and promulgate our curricular changes at once. I think Steven Pinker also agrees with us about putting stats in high school – how exciting for him.
September 1, 2009 at 11:41 am
It wasn’t really lab research, so much, that made an impression on me. It can be very hard indeed to get techniques and experiments to actually work. I quasi held my own, but I definitely did not flourish, and so I gained limited experience. It’s not all about intelligence; it takes “hands” to succeed. I think it’s kind of like driving a car. My driving is pretty spotty (so I drive quite slow). I have also done below-median in working at a landscaping contractor and in a restaurant.
But so much information is out there, in biomed, that you can build tons of different ideas and then see if they float or sink. Just like you can come up with 20, 40, 60 ideas about human behavior and government and then check them out using the GSS, history, sociobiology, results from experimental psychology, etc. I’ve spent thousands of hours doing that kind of thing in biomed.
September 1, 2009 at 7:26 pm
I was terrible in chem lab, and I’m a lousy driver too. I never took a really advanced bio course, so maybe I’m missing out.