Atlas Shrugged ch. 3 Close Reading
My Atlas Shrugged ch. 3 Close Reading is now available for a dollar. If you haven’t seen them yet, chapters 1 and 2 are free. These contain major spoilers and are intended for people who have already read the book.
Philosophy Side Quests
People get stuck for years on the philosophy main quest while refusing to do side quests. That is not how you play RPGs. Side quests let you get extra levels, gear and practice which make the main quest easier to make progress on.
An example of a side quest would be speedrunning a Mario or Zelda game. That would involve some goal-directed activity and problem solving. It’d be practice for becoming skilled at something, optimizing details, and correcting mistakes one is making.
Links
I blogged about Goals & Purpose. If you play video games – or do much of anything else – you should have (written) goals, act purposefully, and have criteria of success and failure (non-success). If you’re doing something where you can’t fail, you can’t succeed either.
I blogged: Accepting vs. Preferring Theories – Reply to David Deutsch. DD doesn’t understand Yes or No Philosophy. I hope this helps.
My blog post, School Mistreated Edward Thorp, shares quotes about how a smart kid was cheated and screwed over in school. The quotes explain gross unfairnesses and grade falsification. I also share a story of my own.
Economics article: Income Inequality: Who is the Least Cost Avoider?. Suppose income inequality is bad. Who should do something about it? This perspective on the issue is worth being aware of.
More good posts from the same blog, GrokInFullness: People Actively, Deliberately Spurn Opportunities to Earn More Income and How Good are Modern Vital Statistics?.
Also from GrokInFullness: Richard Thaler’s Nobel Prize. I think he overrates people like Kahneman and their work. Here’s the primary content of the post, which I like:
What bothers me is how Thaler’s work is sometimes used in arguments. “People are irrational, therefore none of these economic models work at all.” Or “People are irrational, therefore markets don’t work very well. Therefore, we need government intervention in the marketplace.” I get that people sometimes make bone-headed decisions. I understand that we don’t have a strictly ordered set of preferences, such that if A is preferable to B and B is preferable to C, then A is always preferable to C. But it seems like the “humans-are-irrational” crowd are giving up far too much. Shouldn’t we assume that people want things, and that they somehow try to get what they want? What’s the alternative here? Should we assume people act randomly? That they pick the course of action that is most contrary to “getting what they want”? It’s fine to tell stories about how perfect rationality breaks down, but this can be taken too far. I imagine the “humans-are-irrational” crowd looking into every shopping basket, laughing hysterically and saying, “It’s all wrong!” Maybe the contents of the basket don’t make total sense. Maybe there should be fewer cookies and more vegetables. Maybe they shouldn’t have made those impulse buys. Maybe they should be buying batteries in bulk rather than two-at-a-time at inflated prices from the rack at the checkout lane. But it mostly works to look at the items in someone’s basket and say, “That person wants those things.”
I often see versions of the “People are irrational, therefore we need government interventions in the marketplace” argument. I don’t know what the proponents of this position are thinking. These irrational people apparently can’t be trusted to make decisions for themselves in the marketplace, where they are directly harmed by their own poor decisions. But these same people can be entrusted to elect competent politicians? These irrational actors in the market will become a super-rational electorate, incisively analyzing government policy and strictly disciplining policymakers? I don’t think so. The consequences of poor decision-making in the political marketplace are less keenly felt than the consequences of poor decision-making in the marketplace for goods and services. (Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say most of the cost of your bad decisions are keenly felt by other people, who probably fail to connect the harm to a specific bad policy that you voted for.) Government turns decision-making into a commons, in which everyone else bears the burden of your poor decisions. Likewise, if you do rigorous policy analysis, the benefits of your hard work accrue mostly to everyone else in society and not to you. Maybe people who are making this argument think that the market will be regulated by an apolitical bureaucracy staffed with society-optimizing technocrats? That this will be relatively immune to political tampering when “the wrong party” gets in power? I’m really not sure. If this argument has been fleshed out somewhere to answer these points, I’d like to read that full version.
Politics
Video: David Horowitz Unveils The Left’s Agenda Of Destruction. Great explanation of the left and the threat to America.
Article: 3-D Chess: It Only Looks Like Trump Is Throwing Away His Presidency!. Things have been looking pretty bad for a while. Where’s the wall?
Article: We Used to Care About One Another. Ann Coulter quotes the NYT and various Democrats making reasonable statements about immigration in the recent past.
Article: Israel Built a ‘Wall’ and Is Deporting Illegal Aliens. America Can Learn. The wonderful Caroline Glick explains how Israel addressed its illegal immigration problem. For example, building a wall reduced illegal immigration by 98%. Israel also passed some helpful laws, such as withholding 20% of the wages of illegal immigrants – they can only receive the money by leaving. Interestingly, the majority of pro-illegal immigrant activists in Israel are American, leftist Jews.
|
