Absurd Sex, Suicide, Migration, and Ugly Apple

Tyler Cowen asks “What is your most absurd view?” and gets an absurd number of comments.

Yes your comment should be crazy but serious too. It should refer to a view which you actually hold, but many other smart people consider untenable and bizarre.

Four of mine:

Sex and its pursuit is the cause of most personal troubles and most people would be happier with zero sex drive. Watch nearly any movie. If the characters weren’t horny they wouldn’t be in any trouble!

Through most of human history the most rational act for most individuals at any point in time was immediate suicide, given the suffering they should have expected to endure.

With respect to movement, residence and employment all humans should be as free to disregard international jurisdiction borders as they are to disregard intranational (e.g., U.S. state) borders and anything less is morally the same as South African Apartheid.

Nearly every user interface and product from Apple has been aesthetically and functionally ugly, from the orginal MacOS to iTunes. I don’t think I can blame Steve Jobs, as NextStep was wonderful. (Yes, I know OS X is derived from NextStep. They ruined it.)

Note that to the extent readiness to host certain beliefs is under evolutionary pressure my first two beliefs and perhaps the third would be strongly selected against.

Mostly I am an absurd hypocrite: I have a sex drive (but I gather it is less out of control than the average person’s), I have no intention of committing suicide, immediately or otherwise (but I think it is not absurd to expect relatively little suffering in wealthy parts of the 21st century), I live in the national jurisdiction I was born in (do I get any credit for 2000 miles away?), but I have never owned an Apple product.

5 Responses

  1. […] Apple’s penetration of the geek market over the last give years or so has bugged me … for that long. It has been far longer than that since I’ve read a comp.*.advocacy threadflamewar, so stumbling upon Mark Pilgrim’s post on dumping Apple and its heated responses made me feel good and nostalgic. […]

  2. […] Like other Apple products, the iPhone is eye candy (ugly to me), but not revolutionary. […]

  3. […] Even I have to admit Steve Jobs’ DRM-bashing letter is pretty good: The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music. […]

  4. […] I’m sure. Apple’s penetration of the geek market over the last five years or so has bugged me … for that […]

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