samclemens

Glad you liked it (and I agree on both counts). There's also this shorter piece about the process of finding Jagari that you might interesting:

http://theappendix.net/posts/2014/09/searching-for-jagari

Decided to switch out the actual title of this one ("If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious") for fear that it could seem clickbait-y. In fact I think the actual text is very lucid and thoughtful; for whatever reason, philosophers just seem temperamentally inclined toward "cute" titles like that.

I admire DFW's writing a lot but I have to say that I largely agree with this critique of that speech (from the posted article):

"To me, it’s the least interesting version of himself he ever put to the page. But an unquantifiable number of online readers, millions of YouTube viewers, and thousands of bookstore shoppers disagree. Among the more dispiriting aspects of the Wallace canonization is how much it has been built out of his suffering — the way the cult has revived, for precisely the post-therapy, post-Romantic, self-help-soaked culture Wallace described and intermittently deplored, the Romantic picture of the depressive as a kind of keen-eyed saint."

I'm not a big fan of this article personally (I loved Interstellar), but I do think it makes a decent larger point about science fiction narratives replicating 19th century frontier/imperial mentalities. Somewhat analogous to this article on imperialism and Star Trek:

http://theappendix.net/issues/2014/7/futures-on-demand

"One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a high-throughput distributed messaging system."

I don't think you need to apologize - it's an interesting case study of how the apparatus of a scholarly journal, an academic affiliation and scientific credentials can lead us in sometimes scary directions. Historians and philosophers of science are right: who funds social sciences research, and the backgrounds of those who conduct it, sometimes really does matter. Not in the sense of 90s debates about relativism, but in a more practical sense that research questions in the social sciences don't emerge out of a vacuum and often have political overtones. I think you're correct in suspecting that this is one of those cases.

To those who are saying that this particular paper isn't invalidated by unsavory ties: you're right. But like I pointed out below, there are uncited claims about low intelligence correlating to lower economic status in the early modern period in here that strike me as suspect given the wider context.

Technically yes, but with the advent of academia.edu and the cratering public profile of for-profit academic publishers like Elsevier, it's becoming normal. In my field, at least, there's a perception that Elsevier and Wiley won't further damage their reputations by going after individuals posting papers (although I am surprised they haven't targeted Academia.edu as a whole).

Unrelatedly, the author's odd name "Michael Woodley of Menie" caught my eye. It would seem that he's the heir to a Scottish barony (Menie). I hesitate to even go there, but it's at the very least interesting that the (supposed) decline in general intelligence since the Industrial Revolution is being studied by an ancestral nobleman.

Edit: after reading the article and following up on the author's affiliation, the Ulster Institute for Social Research, this is definitely something to be taken with a grain of salt. The Ulster Institute has ties with "racialist" fringe scientists promoting what is essentially a 21st century take on eugenics. The paper is not necessarily inherently flawed because of this, but certain assumptions in it (like the uncited claim that lower socioeconomic classes have been historically correlated with lower g) seem fishy to me as a result.