Maintain Our Expectations of One Another. the Big Ideas Are Difficult or They Would Have Been Solved.

Mar 29, 2020, 11:30 AM

—“Not sure why [censored] JFG, would bring up Manhattan distance something which he clearly doesn’t understand. You were correct in – and multiple times caught him cascading off to some absurdity, as he did against M.”—Hans Hermeme Hoppe @LLaddon

I like JFG for many personal reasons, but he is an “opiner” (commentator), and entertainer, not a public intellectual (scholar, thought leader, idea generator), and that is one of the reasons his followers are attracted to him – that he speaks to them in their voice (I dont).

You can try to nudge an opiner and the audience a bit but you can’t really educate them. And thinking about the big questions is hard enough, discussing them with those who don’t or can’t is far harder, and in my case also trying to get people to think in systems is impossible.

I’m sure JF is a good researcher, but the purpose of learning philosophy is developing a skill in how not to err. After that you need to know enough fields not to err. Knowing math, physics, cog sci, economics, law, and history is hard. … So people rarely learn not to err.

And we all defend our investments. Because our conceptual investments – especially if they are error loaded – form a map of the conceptual world we cannot travel through life without.

So loss aversion kicks in and we defend our priors.