Commenting Guidelines

Having suffered more than enough irritation at the hands of commenters with little regard for what constitutes reasonable discourse, I hereby offer the following suggestions for readers inclined to comment here:

• If you don't know what falsificationism is, then you'd best get yourself a copy of Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery before engaging me in argumentation about matters scientific. It isn't worth my time to argue science with people who don't even understand how the thing works.
• Expanding on the previous point, if you want to advance a theory about the world, and entertain any hopes of my taking what you have to say seriously, avoid at all costs tacking on auxiliary hypotheses to "explain" away every data point that runs counter to your theory, as I've no intention on wasting precious moments of my existence disputing people whose claims have been immunized against falsification.
• If you insist on repeatedly indulging in fallacious arguments despite having your errors pointed out to you, expect to get banned in short order. I have no interest in suffering foolishness indefinitely, and I don't give a damn how anyone else feels about it.
• In particular, it does not constitute "censorship" if I refuse to entertain any response someone or other wishes to make. I am not the American government.
• Empirical claims about the world are best backed up with hard evidence, i.e, references to actual books or papers that substantiate your assertions. If the best you can do is popular magazine articles, then you'd be well advised to qualify your claims appropriately, and if all you have to go on is memory, don't argue as if you had a stack of peer-reviewed research papers by your side.
• For references related to medicine or human biology, PubMed is your friend: use it.
• You'll find that I have a bit more patience with what you have to say if you actually leave a real name rather than a pseudonym, or at least if you have a website with your reputation attached to it, and there's more to your site than endless permutations on rants about innate shortcomings of certain races or the conspiratorial nature of particular minorities. Fly-by-night commenters do not deserve to be given the benefit of the doubt, and they won't receive it from me.
• Antisemites, racists, "revisionists" [sic] and advocates of mass-murder under any guise are not welcome here. This isn't Stormfront, VDare, the Institute for Historical Review [sic] or any other such cesspool.

My general philosophy is "pauca sed matura", "few but ripe"; I'd rather hear from a few highly intelligent and morally decent old-timers than host discussions that deteriorate into empty flame-fests spurred on by anonymous newcomers, and as a rule the higher the sustained quality of your comments over time, the more leeway I will be inclined to give you. I'm an intellectual elitist: sue me.

Comments

[Factory]

Hmm you could do more mathematics articles, there's not alot of ppl going around arguing that sine is more worthy than cosine (although I do find that sin(0)=0 to be a quite a useful property).

[Abiola Lapite]

Worthless little trolls like "mac in japan" are the reason why I have so little patience with GNXP commenters [thanks for confirming that I was right to ban you in the first place, moron]. I'm not interested in cleaning up every time some fourth-rate idiot decides to shit his little brain-turds onto my blog.

[Abiola Lapite]

"Hmm you could do more mathematics articles"

I've thought about it often, but there are two big problems:

1 - It's difficult to use mathematical notation without MathML support.

2 - I'm not really enthusiastic about writing stuff that virtually no one reading will understand.

[praktike]

No math!

By the way, I am becoming increasingly disturbed by the legitimization of white supremacist and VDare columnist Steve Sailer, who apparently can now be quoted approvingly in the New York Times. I'm not sure what the best way to marginalize a guy like him is, but I think it must be done. Pseudoscientific crankery like his can be and has been abused for quite nefarious purposes in the past. And, though I can't prove this, I feel that there is some sort of white supremacist revival going on right now.

[chris w]

"And, though I can't prove this, I feel that there is some sort of white supremacist revival going on right now."

It also seems to have been embraced by significant portion of libertarians, as is evident by the anti-immigration, pro-confederacy neofeudalists at lewrockwell.com.

[Delmore Macnamara]

Please post more maths articles. There's plenty of places online to get quasiconservative punditry but few where one can get decent maths (as opposed to tech) news.

BTW, where did you study Maths?

[Abiola Lapite]

"Please post more maths articles."

I thought no one would ever ask!

"BTW, where did you study Maths?"

Dartmouth. I studied for the BA and the MA simultaneously.

[Celticbear]

With reference to the item on 'The Love that Dare not Speak its Name' may I say that the first thing that sprang out at me on reading it was the probability that this woman had been having sex with her father for a long time. In other words she had, I suspect, been a victim of child sex abuse.
It used to be said - and still is - that incest was the last taboo. I wonder.
It is my considered opinion - and I have had the misfortune of having to work in this field - that paedophilia is the new 'last taboo'.
Incest may be aesthetically and morally repugnant. As long as it doesn't result in genetically flawed offspring it is difficult however in these allegedly-postmodern days to to outlaw it in an era when (nearly)anything goes.
A relationship founded in an abuse of parental power and continued on into adulthood is very likely to be severely dysfunctional. I would wager that the woman in question is seriously psychologically damaged.
At the very least her sense of boundaries has to be seriously impaired.