Hi guys, I'm writing under the influence of three cups of strong coffee and no sleep whatever, so forgive my uncouthness today.

I'm a third-year student at the SUNY at Buffalo. Was majoring in computer science before I came here; decided I didn't want to work in a cubicle and am now majoring in international business, hoping to go to grad school for economics because I still love math. Strange for me to want to enter a social science. I don't even like the word 'social' and tend to hate anyone who doesn't measure up to what I consider elite standards (see below) but for whatever reason economics is something I'm very good at and continually interested in.

Philosophically, I would certainly fit labels such as skeptic, objectivist (as opposed to Bayesian subjectivist), rationalist but! (and this a big 'but'), I believe in moderation. Anyone who believes that empiricism is the answer to everything is fooling himself. I don't read publications like Wired anymore because it seems futurist predictions are getting more and more facile every year, and I'm concerned that our scientific / engineering culture in higher education is churning out lots of twenty-something white male basement-dwelling goobers whose only (tangential) exposure to philosophy is through formal logic in their required two semesters of digital design principles. Now we have a spate of crap, like transhumanism, which puts on a really nice shiny scientific veneer but, at its core, is really another kind of whiny, dogmatic, rabid fundamentalism. It's nearly as bad as cretinism, to the point that it's developed its own annoying jargon with words like 'deathist' and 'the Singularity'. I can't wait for 2045 to roll around so I can see the look on the geriatric, wrinkled transhumanists' faces when Rapture 2.0 is still vaporware and they realize that their life of monastic asceticism (I'm sure you know full well what I mean by this) in pursuit of digital salvation was a waste of time, just like collecting mint condition copies of every Star Wars comic ever released.

As far as supernatural religion goes I consider myself a gnostic or Neoplatonist or something but as you might have guessed I'm not really 'devoted' to these beliefs. I lied about being a devout Buddhist when I was a party full of Indian people so I could have an excuse not to drink that everyone would respect, so that's my 'official' religion. (Specifically my cover story is that I belong to the Theravada sect so that I can still eat meat.)

As far as ethics go, the Socratic argument that it is possible to have objective ethics without bringing a god or gods into the discussion is theoretically appealing. James Rachels made a very good case for it too. However in practice I don't really give a crap about ethics: I won't do anything I am going to feel sh*tty about tomorrow but I won't really go out of my way to help anyone unless I perceive an expected benefit to myself. And I mean 'expected' in the sense of 'expected value'. Basically my view of the human race, myself included, is that we are really only ... rational (?) agents going around trying to maximize utility, with no genuine sense of ethics, except that many, perhaps most of these agents are woefully stupid and not only fail to satisfy their own utility but put up stumbling blocks for intelligent people to do so as well. I believe, furthermore, that any superficial resemblance mutual arrangements bear to genuine altruism is strictly incidental. Twenty years of leaving with an autism spectrum disorder plus being a victim of circumstance on a number of occasions have left me bitterly cynical and I refuse to entertain appeals to 'fellow-feeling' as per Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ideas on 'moral goodness', humanism, etc. ... it's a whole lot of crap. My guiding principles are "look out for #1" and "odi profanum vulgus et arceo" ... when you come down to brass tacks, most people are full-blown morons with whom there is no benefit in associating. If they were on fire, I wouldn't piss on them to put it out. I'm in favor of tossing the masses a few nickels if it shuts them up but really all other government policy should be geared towards the elite, with allowances for upwards mobility ... if you can earn it. Also we're a doomed species

btw, I was slouching deeply as I wrote this post ... could you have guessed?

And that's about it