"Recently, I have been a great deal about two communities that have put forward idiosyncratic ideas about the world. Less Wrong claims to be “a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality.”  Eliezer Yudkowsky, a proponent of the singularity, began the blog in 2009 and used it as a space to broadcast his views on, well, just about everything but primarily artificial intelligence, epistemology, and ethics. Yudkowsky and the Less Wrong community often base their speculations on ‘rationality’ on research in cognitive science, behavioral economics, and related disciplines. I’ve also been interested for some time in chemtrail conspiracy theorists, a community that is more decentralized. Chemtrailers believe that contrails, or lines of condensed water left in an aircraft’s wake, are in fact, um, chemtrails, chemicals sprayed into the atmosphere by the government or some other malignant group. Chemtrail theorists have carried out their own experiments to verify their intuitions. And they have become the scourge of those proposing research on geoengineering (like these people haunting a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science [beginning @ 1:50]).

Thinking about these communities reminded me of Lovecraft’s earlier interactions. In some ways, amateur journalism and epistolary circles of Lovecraft’s day were not unlike the blogs and webpages that Less Wrong and the chemtrailers use. (Yes, I know the dangers of cross-temporal and cross-technological comparisons.) Still, I think there is much to explore about how such groups produce and distribute their knowledge against the background of an epistemic status quo. If scientists have their journals—as Alex Csiszar has been exploring—the laity have their amateur journalism and their blogs. And such spaces give historians of science and technology and STS scholars a chance to examine and probe the practices of epistemic subcultures.

"Did the Maya really predict that the world would end in December of 2012? If not, how and why has 2012 millenarianism gained such popular appeal? In this deeply knowledgeable book, two leading historians of the Maya answer these questions in a succinct, readable, and accessible style. Matthew Restall and Amara Solari introduce, explain, and ultimately demystify the 2012 phenomenon. They begin by briefly examining the evidence for the prediction of the world's end in ancient Maya texts and images, analyzing precisely what Maya priests did and did not prophesize. The authors then convincingly show how 2012 millenarianism has roots far in time and place from Maya cultural traditions, but in those of medieval and Early Modern Western Europe. Revelatory and myth-busting, while remaining firmly grounded in historical fact, this fascinating book will be essential reading as the countdown to December 21, 2012, begins." --- They're speaking here on Nov. 28th, but I suspect I won't be able to make it.

"in the spirit of a pop psychology of the masses, let me offer the diagnosis that a large segment of the US population may be experiencing something somewhat similar to the Capgras delusion. That is, when they switch on their TVs and watch the news, they see someone who has all the trappings of a President, acts like a President, lives where the President lives, is treated by everybody as the President, signs bills like the President, gives a State of the Union address to Congress every year like the President… But these people at the same time have a clear and vivid intuition that: _This man is not the President_"  --- That a president who was _more_ stereotypically black than Obama would have _less_ trouble with people denying their legitimacy seems remarkably implausible to me.  It might, however, be done via less outlandish myths.

The silly ESP paper is not actually a methodological outlier --- and that's a problem.

To be fair, without a similarly-constructed list for earlier times, this does make it hard to say whether the problem is actually getting _worse_.

Ladies, gentlemen and distinguished others, your major party vice-presidential candidate of 2008.

"The encyclopedia of extraordinary social behavior".

See if Pitt's library has a hardcopy?

Or: how Teresa Nielsen Hayden got excommunicated from the Mormon Church.

(Traded obsidian was in fact used for knives in Mesoamerica; I don't know about North America.)

Speaking as someone who's just finished a paper where Egorov's Theorem was a key tool: WTF?!?

Later: reviewed: http://bactra.org/reviews/naming-infinity/

Would it be irresponsible to do this? It would be irresponsible not to!

N.B., he means the early 20th century emergence, not the 17th century one!

I am really a bad person for finding this funny. Sheldrake is a quack, but doesn't deserve to be stabbed by crazy people. But I can't help grinning. I am a bad person.

"The state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. That is, from a distance, a fractally wrong person's worldview is incorrect; and furthermore, if you zoom in on any small part of that person's worldview, that part is just as wrong as th

Or: X-files in the outback.

Wesley Snipes, "tax resistance", Nuwaubians...

Michael Lind calls Pat Robertson on being a crazy conspiracy theorist, as well as an apocalyptic kook.

"During the nineteenth century, Lemuria was imagined as a land that once bridged India and Africa but disappeared into the ocean millennia ago, much like Atlantis. A sustained meditation on a lost place from a lost time, this elegantly written book is the

On the latest (genuinely sad) twists La Rouche saga

Mr. Pot on Ms. Kettle