Sign in Subscribe

Philosophy of Nature

The Long View: The Stopping Problem

This was the first thing I ever paid John for. He had a Paypal donate button on his site, and I paid him $5 for this short story. This is on my short list of favorite works by John Reilly. John had a fascination with Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, the Turing

Personality Traits as Natural

Personality Traits as Natural

See part I, Personality Traits as Potentia. A further difficulty I have encountered when talking about personality traits such as conscientiousness is their heritability. When I say that a personality trait like C is about 50% heritable, I am often greeted with unbelief. How can this be so? This is

Personality Traits as Potentia

Lately, I've been thinking of personality traits such as those quantified by the OCEAN model. A major conceptual difficulty I run into when talking to people about these traits is their innate imprecision. For example, the Openness to Experience trait is correlated with political liberalism, but you probably don't have