Something to read in Quarantine: Essays 2018 to 2020

Table of Contents
Something to read in Quarantine: Essays 2018 to 2020.......................................................................1
Dedication: Thanks to Riki for their help with proofreading. To Kieran, brightest of us...................1
Introduction......................................................................................................................................4
Part 1. Not politics...........................................................................................................................5
Chapter 1. Philosophy & thinking about thinking...........................................................................6
Four parts of belief......................................................................................................................6
Chesterton’s fence and thinking using sayings...........................................................................8
Recent advances in Natural Language processing- Some Woolly speculations.......................11
The paradox of the book and the robot.....................................................................................15
A consent theodicy....................................................................................................................16
The Paradox of the Crowd........................................................................................................17
Why I left philosophy...............................................................................................................19
Chapter 2. OCD & Mental illness..................................................................................................24
OCD: What I learned fighting mind cancer.............................................................................24
Everywhere you go you always take the weather with you.....................................................24
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and the origins of religion....................................................32
The feeling of disgust in depression.........................................................................................38
OCD: A poem............................................................................................................................39
My method for dealing with anxiety........................................................................................41
Chapter 3. Thinking about people..................................................................................................44
Yvne: The forgotten complement of envy.................................................................................44
The paradox of high expectations: The more you demand, the less you get............................45
The Joyous Hypocrite...............................................................................................................47
The Resurrection of the Dead...................................................................................................48
Chapter 4. Economics and adjacent topics....................................................................................51
GDP undervalues government services....................................................................................51
The efficiency game..................................................................................................................53
Interlude: Aphorisms......................................................................................................................55
Part 2. Political...............................................................................................................................56
Chapter 5. Political Economy........................................................................................................57
The Heritage Foundation Economic Freedom Index is bad......................................................57
Why we can’t (usefully) dismiss concern about the income of others as envious....................62
Chapter 6. Political Strategy..........................................................................................................64
Seeing Like a Communist.........................................................................................................64
Thinking about political persuasion from a left-Wing point of view........................................74
The three organising myths of centrist establishment Democrats and what’s wrong with them
...................................................................................................................................................81
Heading left: The stories of people who have moved from the political right to the left.........84
Against the disposability ideology............................................................................................87
Chapter 7. Political sociology........................................................................................................88
The paranoid style in petite-bourgeois politics.........................................................................88
Musings on the self-organisation of authoritarianism...............................................................89
We’ve done so well, so we mustn't stop now: An ethical & political homily on Peter Abelard
...................................................................................................................................................91
The egalitarian past (and future?) of politics............................................................................92
Chapter 8. Future-gazing and speculation.....................................................................................93
For communism and against foreclosure on the future.............................................................93
On critical social-technological points......................................................................................96
Technological unemployment isn’t the point............................................................................98
Of fake fire-starters and real panic-mongers.............................................................................99
Chapter 9. Political philosophy....................................................................................................100
Against Libertarian Criticisms of Redistribution....................................................................100
Money and the Sceptic: Why arguments for redistribution are probably stronger than you
think........................................................................................................................................107
The Culture Novels and the deaestheticisation of politics......................................................109
Jones’s island and property rights...........................................................................................111
Chapter 10. On identity politics...................................................................................................112
Mistaken identity and misunderstood interests: Haider on Identity politics...........................112
A few theses about “identity politics” and its false oppositions.............................................116
Chapter 11. Intersex people and Catholicism..............................................................................119
The Catholic Church is dangerously mistaken about intersex people....................................119
Part 3. Difficult............................................................................................................................123
Extending the veil of ignorance argument for utilitarianism into an argument for ‘egalitarian’
interpersonal utility comparison..............................................................................................123
Carving up the philosophical terrain around personal identity differently.............................125
Through-going subjective Bayesianism as a solution to the problem of scepticism..............127