Warg Franklin

The Overton Window and Political Control The Overton Window is a concept in political sociology referring to the range of acceptable opinions that can be held »

Suppose you want to understand human society. You should; you're in one! What I mean by "understanding" is a strong enough independent understanding of the dynamics »

The other day some terrorist in France ran a trailer truck through a crowd for a mile or so, killing about 80 people. That's pretty big, »

When we think about matters relating to the operation of society - what is right and wrong, how society works, what we should do to improve »

The other day I was trying to break down some of our theories of power interactions within empires to simpler and more mechanical dynamics that would »

Rudyard Kipling writes, in the second jungle book: Just to give you an idea of the immense variety of the Jungle Law, I have translated into »

Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles. -common saying The fact is, sometimes the right thing to do is stay quiet when everyone else is »

Men and women are different. These differences are significant to the function of social groups. There are many examples of social groups, especially in politics and »

In the West in the 21st century, things basically work and we have it pretty good. We are for the most part basically good people, fed, »

[This occasionally comes up, so I thought I'd explain it, but it's not particularly important.] Much woo has been spilled over Godel's incompleteness theorem. Playing a »

A friend and I analyzed doctors thus: There are two functions of a doctor: Expert Mechanic. Uses superior domain knowledge to actually repair damage to your »

In one graph: The world is getting better every year, they tell us. Fewer people dying in war, poverty lifting, education increasing, and most importantly, monotonic »

"Postrationalism" is our reaction against some of the silliness of modern conceptions of "rationality", while keeping the strong emphasis on correct thinking, skeptical evidence-based inquiry, and »

Apparently, this is what Mormons actually believe. It's pretty weird. On the other hand: This is the Mormon temple in Oakland. It's not really my kind »

If we speak in broad strokes and ignore fuzzy edge cases, we can divide people into three different levels of social agency throughout history and across »

These are the official population projections. My understanding of Africa is not great, but I don't think they're going to get away with this without running »

I think one of the major errors of modern Western thought is the idea that there are dogmatic principles that can apply to every circumstance. "Women »

Science and the Press are broken. Somehow politics has crept in and distorted what they say and what they teach and what we are allowed to »

In his "Gentle Introduction, Part 9a", Mencius Moldbug introduces a neat little political methodology he calls "Passivism", and a Procedure to replace the current political machinery, »

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's work is excellent. There's one poem of his, "The Ladder of St. Augustine", that I find particularly compelling: Saint Augustine! well hast thou »

Back in 2010 or so, I used to hang out at /r/anarchism on Reddit. It was a neat place to talk about how different strains »

Sometimes people think of politics as this far-away thing that's about elections and Democrats and Republicans. They imagine that if they simply don't talk about elections »

I'm afraid I don't have a source, but these are allegedly headlines from the French Newspaper "Moniteur" in March of 1815, on the subject of Napoleon's »

Julia Galef, a prominent member of the "Rationality" community, responded in one of her videos a while ago to an argument very like my Structured Argument »

An argument for traditions: The space of possible human cultural practices is large. The subspace of 1 which is well tuned, robust, compatible with human flourishing, »

It has not been apparent until now, but this is actually a group blog, composed of a small group of people with similar ideas which are »

At my previous job, I worked with an interesting man. He was not all that intellectual or cultured, but there were a few key facts that »

Glorious Chinese propaganda. Makes me want to treat my elders well and live a virtuous life. »