DON’T BE STUPID. Look. Do you understand Locke/Smith/Hume? What about Kant/Marx?

DON’T BE STUPID.

Look. Do you understand Locke/Smith/Hume? What about Kant/Marx? Or Darwin/Menger/Spencer/Nietzche? The history of epistemology? Or Hayek/Popper/Turing? Do you understand the foundations of mathematics, logic, economics? Do you understand the limits of logic and mathematics? What about cognitive science, and experimental psychology? What about the history and logic of the common law? Do you understand comparative institutional, economic, and demographic history? If you do, do you understand one of those series? Two of them, or all of them?

Of course you don’t. You’re a normal person. You’re probably a smart normal person. You might even be a smart well read person. But its nearly impossible to master all of those fields sufficiently to identify how to reform them so that they operate scientifically.

But why the hell, if you don’t understand ALL of those disciplines, do you think you’re going to understand my work in Propertarianism without some serious effort over more than a year? I mean, I cover the *entire* spectrum from metaphysics to aesthetics. Everything. ALL OF IT.

You won’t reduce my work to a single idea that you can easily understand, because the central idea is the completion of the scientific method using testimonial truth – which itself is something you can spend a couple of years thinking about all on its own.

Learning propertarianism is pretty similar to learning law. It requires at least the same intellectual capacity, and at least the same amount of work *UNLESS* you have already been very lucky in life or born with precisely the right combination of personality traits.

And it turns out that some people are smart enough or lucky enough that they can both identify patterns of problems it solves, and learn it more quickly because they’ve had the experience or the raw intellectual talent. But those people are few and far between.

So don’t be a dork. Learn what you can. Learn what you can use. If this was easy someone would have been done by now. It’s a really, really hard problem and some of the greatest minds of the last century didn’t solve it. And the problem has been around for at least 2500 years.

Truth is enough. But understanding what that means might take a long time. Which is why its so important to institutionalize these ideas. Because it’s far better to learn them environmentally then have to learn to CORRECT the errors of thought and RELEARN what truth means – and relearn the entire spectrum of knowledge in new terms.