David Hunter > Recent Status Updates

Very similar in some of his ideas to Sam Harris, in that he believes there is essentially no free will, and that we do not choose our society, our parents, our genes, etc, and so cannot be individually responsible for our ideas, personalities, and character in general.

They got rid of Hagrid's dragon, we are now entering the home stretch. Still pretty enjoyable.

Rereading this one together with Michi.

I have to say, Fourier far outdoes Rousseau when it comes to bullshit. As one example, he claims that the three bones of the sternum correspond to the three main groups of passions, the 12 ribs to the 5 senses, plus 4 mental desires plus 3 social desires, and 405 muscles of the body to the number of passions/desires further along the branching tree of desire.

He does actually use quite a few examples in the later sections of the good. I can totally see what Jonathan Haidt says when he talked about the high probability of Bentham being on the Autism spectrum.

You can see the influence of Spinoza on the writing, as it is really dry and mostly consists of long lists of abstract categories and types, without much in the way of argumentation or examples.