I basically follow a network of blogs very closely—the network contains Gene Expression, FuturePundit/ParaPundit, Bryan Caplan (at econlog), Information Processing, Overcoming Bias, and this site. These blogs, in turn, are also connected to sites like Steve Sailer, Half Sigma, and Secular Right (although I try to avoid association with those blogs—I do highly respect Razib’s posts on Secular Right, but I’m not so sure about some of the others), some transhumanist blogs like Accelerating Future, some idiosyncratic ones (like TGGP’s), and some more mainstream blogs like Marginal Revolution (which is probably too mainstream for my taste).
I think that Bryan Caplan and FuturePundit are some of the best advocates of unpopular but sane ideas (their ideas and motivations are so outside the mainstream [and American political discourse] that they don’t attract the “us vs them” levels of passion that frequently stifle honest discussion on other sites that take more mainstream clusters of views along some political spectrum). You could also count Steve Sailer’s ideas as sane, but his ideas tend to attract a different sort of audience that I probably wouldn’t want to associate with. Gene Expression might share some of Steve Sailer’s ideas, but at least it tends to be more discreet about it, since it may lose part of its audience if it says anything political.
Good points there.
I basically follow a network of blogs very closely—the network contains Gene Expression, FuturePundit/ParaPundit, Bryan Caplan (at econlog), Information Processing, Overcoming Bias, and this site. These blogs, in turn, are also connected to sites like Steve Sailer, Half Sigma, and Secular Right (although I try to avoid association with those blogs—I do highly respect Razib’s posts on Secular Right, but I’m not so sure about some of the others), some transhumanist blogs like Accelerating Future, some idiosyncratic ones (like TGGP’s), and some more mainstream blogs like Marginal Revolution (which is probably too mainstream for my taste).
I think that Bryan Caplan and FuturePundit are some of the best advocates of unpopular but sane ideas (their ideas and motivations are so outside the mainstream [and American political discourse] that they don’t attract the “us vs them” levels of passion that frequently stifle honest discussion on other sites that take more mainstream clusters of views along some political spectrum). You could also count Steve Sailer’s ideas as sane, but his ideas tend to attract a different sort of audience that I probably wouldn’t want to associate with. Gene Expression might share some of Steve Sailer’s ideas, but at least it tends to be more discreet about it, since it may lose part of its audience if it says anything political.