On blogging

Suddenly I realized that writing here (and also writing comments to other people's blogs) is mighty hard for me exactly because I blogged for so long in Russian. And not even because of the language (it's a problem, but an unrelated one). It's because of the difference in cultural biases and assumptions.

In Russian I am habitually controversial and provocative. But I can afford that exactly because I know what the assumptions of my readers are (on average at least), and what they are taking for granted, and what they can tolerate, and what they can't. Every now and then I make a mistake in one direction or another, but overall I know where we are, and where I'd like to lean, so I do it.

But when I try to write in English, suddenly I find that all my "default cultural settings" are wrong! I'm not even sure if what I say is acceptable at all. Because I can never be sure people would understand me. Let me give you one example: I'm really interested in human population genetics, and in human evolution is accelerating over last several thousands years, in ever increasing speeds. And how weird and unpredictable our evolution has become, with all these cities, diseases, personal choices, economical considerations, etc. It's fun, it's interesting, and I think it is a good topic (even if provocative) that can be discussed.

And I know for sure that it is being discussed in some way or another. I know of a great blog on this topic; I know of some books about it. It is possible.

Yet when I feel like saying something, or even worse - try to say something, it turns out quite awkward. Like in these discussions on PhDs having, or opting out of having kids for example:
http://isisthescientist.com/2012/11/14/to-have-or-not-have-children/
http://sciencebysummer.com/2012/11/14/phd-parents-first-to-leave-the-pipeline/
http://rxnm.wordpress.com/2012/11/14/retirement-planning/

I really wonder what the effects of "PhD being the best contraception" could be, in terms of genetic drift. But at the same time I am aware of the long and uneasy history these kinds of questions had in the US, with all this eugenics and other horrible stuff. So can I even muse on the impacts? Or is totally socially unacceptable? On those instances when I talked about human evolution with fellow scientists sometimes I got pretty harsh rebuttals that I feel I did not deserve. And my guess is that mostly it happened because of the different baseline assumptions. It's funny and sad at the same time.

Philosophy

Every now and then on Reddit I try to put my 2 cents in discussions on philosophy. Obviously I don't try to enter any philosophical discussion out there, but only those where I feel that some neuroscience, quantitative psychology, or evolutionary thinking may be helpful. I also always try to make the background of my thought  clear, to prevent possible misunderstanding.

And the result is usually the same: my comments are heavily downvoted. The discussion usually takes some highly theoretical direction, with lots of special words and names I never heard about. And at the same time these discussions are swarming with statements that are just proven to be false! Or, more often, with concepts that do not seem to correlate with anything in the scientific discourse for last 20-30 years already. Be it about subconsciousness, decision making, animal cognition, brain development, or game theory.

So my impression so far is that there exists a whole stratum of highly educated people who live in some artificial world, lagging behind the science, as we know it, and maybe even deliberately distancing themselves from its development. It is not that my comments there are especially nice and easy to read of course, but still the contrast between neighboring discussions of science and philosophy is really striking. Especially if you consider something like /r/AskAcademia , where humanities and sciences technically share the space, but at the same time self-select to some extent within each particular post, depending on its topic.

It is all pretty sad overall.