"Postmodernism has created a generation of semi-psychotic, semi-neurotic, ignorant, and hostile whim-worshippers."

Philosopher Stephen Hicks writes on the long reach of postmodern philosophy, its insistence on the social construction of reality, and its practical results in the Arday tragedy. 

If influential philosophers teach that “reality” is merely a social construct, then what happens to us in the next, taught generation? We focus primarily on the social — on doing whatever we can to construct social reality according to our wills. We focus on what everyone is thinking and feeling and saying, and “real” reality becomes less significant, even irrelevant, to our psychology. And whenever “reality” is being obstinate — “facts” intrude upon us — that just means we have not been social-constructing hard enough. ...

Phrased neutrally: After first-generation (1960s-1980s) postmodernism’s anti-realism, social subjectivism, and conflict collectivism, the second generation (1980s-2000s) applied the high philosophical theory to their teaching (and non-teaching) in history, law, journalism, education, and politics. We (2000s-2020s) are [now seeing] the third-generation result.

Phrased uncharitably: Postmodernism created a generation of semi-psychotic, semi-neurotic, ignorant, and hostile whim-worshippers.

"What's far worse than the Arday tragedy is the philosophical state of higher education that erodes all of this."

"[W]omen, men, of all backgrounds discover, invent and create in ways that uplift themselves and others, thousands, millions ... applying reason, thought, research, enquiry and philosophy to humanity, the world and the universe. ...

"[W]hat's far worse than the Arday tragedy is the philosophical state of higher education that erodes all of this."

~ Liberty Scott from his post 'The real tragedy of the Jason Arday story'

"Your needs don't automatically become claims on somebody else's effort"

"Capitalism says inequality can exist, but your needs don't automatically become claims on somebody else's effort. You produce, trade, improve yourself, or persuade others to help voluntarily. 

"Socialism teaches the opposite moral lesson: need itself creates an entitlement and someone else's success creates the corresponding obligation. Follow that premise far enough and failure never teaches self-reliance, it merely produces another person to blame and another demand to make."

~ Rock Chartrand

Wealth taxes

"Defenders of a billionaire tax need to show that government officials would better allocate the relevant resources than billionaire entrepreneurs themselves," says Chris Freiman, "but I’ve yet to see any of them make that case."

Discuss.

"Freedom of speech includes the freedom not to agree, not to listen and not to support one's own antagonists." But not to ban them.

 

"[T]he substantive issues of the case [are] whether four blog posts Bradbury made on his site, 'The Daily Blog,' about O’Brien breached the Harmful Digital Communications Act. ... The details of the posts can still not be publicised. ... She [O'Brien] said she had never sought to 'prevent Martyn Bradbury from criticising my politics, opinions, or public work'."

~ STUFF: '‘Not a free speech absolutist’: FSU board member Ani O’Brien defends using legal action to take on high-profile blogger'

"Freedom of speech means freedom from interference, suppression or punitive action by the government—and nothing else. ... Freedom of speech includes the freedom not to agree, not to listen and not to support one's own antagonists. [But not to have them banned.]"

“It's a curious post-modernist trend for laws to be created not to protect rights based on well-worn principles of individual rights and freedoms … but to 'prevent harm' - to have laws to sanitise life so that 'everyone' is protected."

~ Liberty Scott from his post' Harmful Digital Communications Act indeed'

"Q: What do you think of libel and slander laws?

"A: They are appropriate laws because the freedom of ideas does not permit you to lie about a particular person. Under the older interpretation of the courts, truth was your defense. If you knew something defamatory about some person, but it was true, then you have the right to say it. But today you can practically say anything, so long as your supposedly not motivated by malice. ... There are some standards, but they're not very clear, not very practical.

"This type of law is strictly to protect individuals; it has nothing to do with ideas. It is an issue of 'did you or did you not lie about some person and cause him damage'."

~ Ayn Rand from Ayn Rand Answers 

“New Zealand MPs are so keen to be seen to be 'doing something' about cyber-bullying that they are about to pass a poor piece of law that will do something terrible. If the  Harmful Digital Communications Bill passes, MPs who feel sad because of a media story can have the publisher [or blogger] jailed.” 

~ composite quote from 2015 from No Right Turn and Tim Watkin 

“[Given] that defamation would [otherwise] have applied ... [o]ne wonders whether the point of the [Harmful Digital Communications] Bill, in the view of some MPs, was to silence critics.”

~ Eric Crampton from his 2015 post 'Harmful Digital Communications and chilling effects'

Poverty

"I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer."

~ Benjamin Franklin from his 1766 essay "On the Price of Corn, and Management of the Poor"

"Sometimes both institutions and people pick up a firearm and blow both feet off. Cambridge University has done so with its gross mismanagement of the Jason Arday affair."

 

"Sometimes both institutions and people pick up a firearm and blow both feet off. 

"Cambridge University has done so with its gross mismanagement of the Jason Arday affair. ...

“The idea that historically disadvantaged groups are entitled to extra civil rights – coupled with social preferment – over and above those held/enjoyed by people considered their oppressors is inimical to the rule of law, specifically the principle that people should not be punished for crimes they did not commit. We do not inherit criminality from our ancestors. This is in turn derived from the larger principle of treat like cases alike, which was first articulated in its modern form by the Roman jurist Ulpian. ...

“Jason Arday got his job in large part because a lot of people – and especially humanities and social science academics – think it’s reasonable to punish whites (and sometimes East Asians) who have never wronged blacks by making it harder for them to get into university or gain employment. This punishment of whites/East Asians who have done no wrong is undertaken to compensate blacks who have not been wronged for wrongs committed by other white people against other black people in the past. This logic is the basis of all affirmative action schemes and preferential hiring regimes (provision for which exists – albeit in limited form – in the UK’s Equality Act 2010). It is also the logic of inherited vengeance.

“It took humans centuries to work out that the law should punish individual wrongdoers rather than members of their family, their descendants, or their extended kin group for crimes or civil wrongs. One only need read some of the world’s great literature, both ancient and modern – from Njal’s 'Saga' to 'The Godfather' – to gain imaginative entry to a world where intergenerational and kin-based revenge are norms.

“May I suggest that the world of medieval Iceland or a New York dominated by the Five Families are the sorts of places you probably only want to visit in fiction? We stopped basing punishments on vendetta – a long, slow process of legal evolution starting in early Republican Rome – for good reasons. Societies based on vendetta are places of violent horror and boiling intergenerational resentment.”

~ Helen Dale from her column 'L’affaire Arday'

Economic regulation: coercive rule by political appointees vs. freely negotiated prices

"[M]ost people hold, explicitly or implicitly, that without regulation, markets could, and sometimes would, spin off into disastrous excesses of one form or another.

"The operative image of economic regulation is that of a huge truck without steering or brakes. 'We have to have those instruments of control, or the truck will go careening off the side of a cliff.'

"The truth is that government regulation is precisely the cutting of the brake lines and the seizing up of the steering column.

"The actual alternative is: government regulation vs. market regulation---which means coercive rule by political appointees vs. freely negotiated prices.

"On a free market, when price relationships begin to diverge from economic reality, they are brought back in line because of greed. Speculators, arbitrageurs, and other "profiteers" swoop in to profit from any misalignment.

"Their activity acts to eliminate the very misalignment with reality that created the profit opportunity. ... Whenever prices, including interest rates, diverge from economic reality, there is money to be made in correcting the prices by the appropriate buying and selling.

"And here's the best part: those with the best judgment of economic reality are the ones who make the most money, which means they have the most influence on the market. It is the buying and selling of the Warren Buffets (and their more speculative counterparts) that keep the economy aligned with the facts. ...

"But ... [t]o the extent there is government intervention, the minds of the profit-seekers are thwarted and rewards go not to the Warren Buffets but, at first, to the ward heelers and power brokers, then as the system devolves, power over the economy goes increasingly to those who are better at conning the public. Then, they are replaced by those more willing to use compulsion. The ruthless displace the relatively timid punks, and destruction reigns.

"So, people have it backwards. 'Unregulated' means reason sets the terms and 'regulated' means reason is quashed by political power."

~ Harry Binswanger from his post 'One contradiction in the fear of laissez-faire'

"Children in households with the same low income suffer hardship disproportionately if their parent is on a benefit."

"The source of income matters. A lot.

"Children in households with the same low income suffer hardship disproportionately if their parent is on a benefit. ...

"[The so called Ministry for Social Development] publishes a Child Poverty Report by Bryan Perry and has done so for many years ... The latest edition features a section on Children in 'working' and 'beneficiary' households. ...

"For children in poor working households their material hardship rate was 17 percent; for children in poor beneficiary households, their hardship rate was 47 percent.

"That is a significant difference. ...

"Based on the data ... a child in a poor benefit family is more than three times more likely to be in material hardship than a child in a poor market family.

"Whatever the personal circumstances, it is impossible to build a broad-based case for children growing up on welfare rather than in a working household. ...

"If the Left (Labour, the Greens, TOP and the Maori Party) was sincere about reducing child hardship they'd stop ignoring crucial evidence."

~ Lindsay Mitchell from her post 'What the Left constantly ignores'

"He builds elaborate Keynesian models that treat consumer spending as the engine of prosperity..."

Paul Krugman: "He builds elaborate Keynesian models that treat consumer
spending as the engine of prosperity, ignores the capital structure of
the economy, and then acts surprised when manipulating
aggregate demand produces distortions in real production. 

"Paul Krugman has spent three decades telling you that government spending cures recessions, that deficits don't matter when interest rates are low, and that anyone who warns about inflation is a crank.* 

"Then 2021 happened. 

"The Biden administration pumped $1.9 trillion through the American Rescue Plan in March 2021. Krugman called inflation fears overblown. By June 2022, CPI hit 9.1 percent, the highest since 1981. Krugman's response was to move the goalposts and call it a soft landing when the Fed started hiking rates. [Similarly, here in New Zealand, CPI hit 7.3% in June 2022, a 32-year high, after Grant Robertson's own 'rescue plan' pumped $70 billion into our own small pond.]

"This is the pattern. He builds elaborate Keynesian models that treat consumer spending as the engine of prosperity, ignores the capital structure of the economy, and then acts surprised when manipulating aggregate demand produces distortions in real production. 

"The villain is IS-LM thinking that strips out time, entrepreneurship, and the price signals that actually coordinate economic activity. When you flatten the economy into aggregate demand curves, you produce policy advice that consistently mis-prices risk and encourages central banks to suppress interest rates well below what voluntary savers would accept. 

"Krugman won a Nobel in 2008 for trade theory work that genuinely mattered. But he abandoned rigorous analysis for political performance years before that prize arrived. His New York Times column became a vehicle for justifying whatever the Democratic Party needed justified, with the academic credentials attached as decoration. 

"Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek built their entire framework on the impossibility of central planners processing dispersed local knowledge. Krugman's worldview requires exactly that kind of central management. The [central bank] sets the price of credit for the entire economy, guided in part by intellectual cover that Krugman provides. 

"You pay for that cover every time your purchasing power erodes. But the man with the Nobel told you it was fine."

~ Handre

* Bernard Hickey put on a similar performance here, but without even the pretence of economic acumen. At least people have the excuse of a Nobel Prize and good work in the past for taking Krugman seriously. Galt knows what Hickey has done to deserve attention.

'How to Lose $35 Billion with Philosophy'

"What are the odds that the clueless young bro who created the
biggest financial fiasco of the year is connected to the clueless
young bro who created the biggest financial fiasco of the decade?"

"In the last few days, you may have heard about Leopold Aschenbrenner—the wonder kid hedge fund manager who lost tens of billions over the course of a few days. It’s the biggest financial fiasco of the year.

"If you didn’t read about it in the news, don’t worry. Hollywood will certainly make it into a movie. This 25-year-old hot shot’s financial empire was literally collapsing while guests were showing up for his blowout wedding at a fake Tuscan villa in Carmel, California. The screenplay practically writes itself....

"This tyro’s investing strategy looks more like gambling addiction than high finance. Aschenbrenner borrowed to the hilt, using four time leverage to buy AI stocks by the truckload. Then he added to his risk by shorting companies he was sure AI would replace. In other words, instead of hedging his AI position—which is standard practice (and why they call them hedge funds), he doubled down, setting himself up for a failure of Biblical proportions.

"When you take chances like this, even a small downturn in AI stocks will wipe out your entire capital. That’s pretty much what happened last week.

"I wanted to learn more about the young man behind this collapse—so I went to his Wikipedia page. There I discovered his connection to fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried and the latter’s Effective Altruism philosophy.

"What are the odds that the clueless young bro who created the biggest financial fiasco of the year is connected to the clueless young bro who created the biggest financial fiasco of the decade?

"But there it is.

And—another coincidence!—the woman who assisted Bankman-Fried, and served 14 months in prison for fraud and money laundering, also helped run her college’s Effective Altruism club.

This is getting to be a trend.

"But, of course, none of this is coincidence...."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'How to Lose $35 Billion with Philosophy'

"If Effective Altruism was a movement that simply called on charities to more rigorously measure their impact, they would be an unequivocal force for good in the world. But that is not all that it argues for. Effective Altruism is a crusading movement that argues you have a moral obligation to 'do the most good' in the world, and it defines 'the most good' in strictly utilitarian terms.

"'The most good' means promoting humanity’s well-being. Morally, you are to be indifferent between your own life and the lives of others. Since those others vastly outnumber you, this means in practice a demand for radical self-sacrifice.

"No, Effective Altruists don’t take this to its ultimate, consistent conclusion. You don’t have to literally turn yourself into a meal for others to feast on. But the closer you can strive to lower your own standard of living in order to raise the standard of living of those worse off than you, the better. (See “Peter Singer is Truly Awful.”)

"And it’s not just your wealth that you’re supposed to sacrifice. You’re supposed to sacrifice the irreplaceable moments of your life: instead of choosing a career that you love, Effective Altruists urge you to choose a career that will maximize your earnings so you’ll have more wealth to give away. You’re even supposed to give away your internal organs to strangers. (See “How Many Kidneys Does Sam Harris Have?”)

"In short, the basic moral premise Effective Altruists crusades for is that you don’t have a right to exist for the sake of your own happiness—you exist as a tool to serve others.

"But that raises a troubling question: why bother saving lives in the first place? So that there are more servants to serve servants to serve servants? If more people exist, but exist in the soul-crushing state of living death Rand describes in [her early novel] 'We the Living,' is that really a victory? If the happiness of a single individual is not sacrosanct, if we are all to throw away our lives to maximise some 'general good' that is good for no one in particular, then what the hell is the point?

"Effective Altruists may be reducing deaths—but they are enemies of life. And, actually, it’s not even clear they are reducing deaths...."

~ Don Watkins from his 2023 post 'Has Effective Altruism done anything good for the world?' [emphases in the original]

Crypto scammer Sam Bankman-Fried in his proper place

"Sam Bankman-Fried [CEO of the fraudulent FTX cryptocurrency exchange], was a leading advocate for and financial sponsor of the 'effective altruist' movement. ...

"Whatever the role of Bankman-Fried’s philosophy in FTX’s collapse, effective altruism is increasingly influential and warrants scrutiny. In essence, effective altruism stresses the importance of using a [long-term] rational, scientific approach to calculate the most efficient way to help the most people, especially through charitable giving, as opposed to giving your money away for sentimental reasons. It attracts an audience of highly intelligent, scientifically oriented, secular people.

"But the more we learn about the causes the effective altruist leadership has embraced, the more we should question the moral foundation of the movement. As we’ll see, this is something that even the movement’s fiercest critics have been unwilling to do. ...

"[Some] critics of longtermist altruism claim that its obsession with sci-fi hypotheticals is inexcusable when there are real people suffering and dying in our world today. ... Still others claim the problem isn’t amoralism, but excessive idealism ... None of these critics seriously consider the intellectual content of the ideal of altruism itself ... [especially] longtermism’s call for all of us to sacrifice to the distant future. ...

"Remember, 'the future is big.' If altruism is to be understood in the popular utilitarian way, by looking to consequences of one’s actions for the largest number of people, why wouldn’t one look to the very long-term future where most of the other people will be? ... [after all] a utilitarian concerned with the impersonal consequences of our actions should regard distance in time as no more morally significant than distance in space.

"Although they’re criticised for reaching absurd conclusions, longtermists like MacAskill and Bankman-Fried are just following the logic of the path that’s been laid down by eminent moral philosophers. To simplify that path: morality is really about caring more about others than about yourself, since there are so many more others than you who need your equal attention. And the best way to be concerned with the most others who are far away from your rather insignificant, fragmented self is to concern yourself with the vast future beyond your interests.

"If longtermism is absurd, but the longtermists are just following the logic of the altruist moral ideal, we should take seriously that this ideal is the real source of longtermist absurdities. ...

"In the wake of the FTX scandal, [Bankman-Fried's teacher] William MacAskill himself weighed in on Twitter to condemn Bankman-Fried, arguing that serious effective altruists do not use naked 'end justifies the means' reasoning, and instead value integrity and honesty. Yet, as one philosopher responding to MacAskill noted, utilitarians who see some utility in “common sense morality” can be reliably counted on to say we can suspend it when there are big enough stakes.

"Any philosophy is subject to cynical use and manipulation by insincere advocates. But a philosophy that gives a pass to anyone who is not acting for his own sake but only for the sake of others is uniquely subject to abuse. A philosophy that says give up what you love and work for others is a tool in the hands of anyone who is willing to speak on behalf of others to gain power over those willing to give up what they love. It’s an especially dangerous tool when those who gain the power convince themselves that it is noble to use it, not for their own sake, but for the sake of a nameless, faceless future [for which they claim to speak].

"How, indeed, would one apply such a philosophy without abusing the lives of the people who practice it? Ayn Rand put her finger on the essence of the altruist morality long before advocates of altruism began to make their meaning as explicit as the effective altruists now have. In her novel 'Atlas Shrugged,' she puts these words in the mouth of one character whose workplace has adopted a similar philosophy: 'Do you care to imagine what it would be like, if you had to live and to work, when you’re tied to all the disasters and all the malingering of the globe? . . . To work — on a blank check held by every creature born, by men whom you’ll never see, whose needs you’ll never know, whose ability or laziness or sloppiness or fraud you have no way to learn and no right to question — just to work and work and work — and leave it up to the [altruists] of the world to decide whose stomach will consume the effort, the dreams and the days of your life. And this is the moral law to accept? This — a moral ideal?'"

~ Ben Bayer in his 2023 explanatory post 'Effective Altruism’s Faith-Based Sacrifice for the Future'

"It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master."

~ Ayn Rand from her chapter '"The Soul of a Collectivist,' in her 1963 book For the New Intellectual

Universities do not exist to engage in social justice activism."

"Universities do not exist to promote 'marginalised voices.'

They do not exist to promulgate social engineering experiments.

"They do not exist to engage in social justice activism.

"A university exists to expand the boundaries of human knowledge, to defend truth, and to create an ecosystem for intellectual enrichment. Once a university optimises the wrong variables, we end up with the parasitised minds that we now see populating academia, business, politics, journalism, culture, etc.

"The West in general and the US in particular were founded on a set of key ideals that are unique to human history. Do not presume that these ideals are the default reality. There is always a tsunami of miscreants who are working day and night to end our liberties and freedoms, and destroy these ideals. Be vigilant. Fight for our civilisation. Activate your inner honey badger."

~ Gad Saad

"One wonders whether the point of the Harmful Digital Communications Act, in the view of some MPs, is to silence critics.”

“New Zealand MPs are so keen to be seen to be 'doing something' about cyber-bullying that they are about to pass a poor piece of law that will do something terrible. If the  Harmful Digital Communications Bill passes, MPs who feel sad because of a media story can have the publisher jailed.” 

~ composite quote from 2015 from No Right Turn and Tim Watkin 

“[Given] that defamation would [otherwise] have applied. One wonders whether the point of the [Harmful Digitical Communications] Bill, in the view of some MPs, was to silence critics.”

~ Eric Crampton from his 2015 post 'Harmful Digital Communications and chilling effects'

More on those envy taxes

"Those who claim our tax system is unfair and fosters inequality typically quote Scandinavian countries as operating superior tax systems. The interesting thing is the top 10% of taxpayers in New Zealand pay a bigger share of the tax burden than their equivalents in the Nordic countries, at over 45%. Our northern counterparts have their top 10% shouldering less than 40% - even as low as 35% - of all income taxes paid.

"The same shrill calls for a heavier tax burden on the wealthy rarely want to look at the “net” position of taxpayers. We know that the top 10% of taxpayers are contributing as much as 75% of the tax burden after transfers for Government outgoings are netted off.

"Of that 10%, the top couple of percent are [already] carrying an enormous load. ...

"The level is already in the danger zone when relocation is factored in. It is very easy for the wealthy to move out, taking their innovative, entrepreneurial, employment-creating skills, leaving the rest of us to pick up more of the tab.

"Here's something for promoters of a capital gains tax to consider. The CGT tax collected in Australia in the last couple of years has fluctuated wildly, with as much as 70% swings. Meanwhile the cost of raising a dollar of CGT in the poor years has exceeded 75% or $0.75 cents for every $1.00 raised. Avoidance levels are running over 30% against a pure model, with significant distortions emerging having a negative effect on investment decisions.

"Taxing capital may make the envious feel better, but it doesn't do much for the country."

~ Owen Jenning from his post 'Tax is a means to an end, not an end in itself'

'It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.'

"Adam Smith’s most famous sentence remains one of the clearest statements in all of social science: 

"'It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.'

 "The point is simple and profound. We do not rely on the kindness of strangers to put food on the table. We rely on their self-interest. 

"The butcher supplies meat because he profits by doing so. 

"The baker rises early because customers will pay for bread. 

"Their desire to improve their own condition leads them, without any central direction, to serve ours. This is the central mechanism of a market economy. Self-interest, channelled through voluntary exchange, produces cooperation on a vast scale. No one has to love their customers or share their political views. They only have to respond to incentives. The result is a system that regularly feeds, clothes, and houses millions of people who will never meet. 

"Many ... still struggle to accept this. ... Yet the historical record is clear: societies that suppress self-interest in the name of [allegedly] higher motives tend to produce shortages, stagnation, and coercion. [Whereas s]ocieties that allow people to benefit from serving others tend to produce abundance. ...

"That simple alignment of interests remains the most powerful engine of social cooperation ever discovered."

~ Creative Deduction

Who actually carries NZ’s tax burden?

 

"[W]ho actually carries their share of New Zealand’s tax burden. [Let's see] how unfair and disproportionate New Zealand’s tax system is on higher earners.

"The top 20 percent [of income earners] pay nearly two-thirds of all personal income tax.
The top 10 percent pay more than the bottom 80 percent combined.
And the top 1 percent contribute more [tax] than the entire bottom half of [income earners].

"Taxpayers’ Union spokesperson Tory Relf said: 'Politicians like Chlöe Swarbrick push a myth that successful New Zealanders are not paying their fair share [sic]. The evidence tells the opposite story. The truth is that wealth taxes, capital gains taxes, inheritance taxes, and higher income tax rates are harder to justify if politicians were truthful about how the tax system works right now.' ”

~ Taxpayers' 'Union' [sic] from their post 'Tax Inequality: Who Really Pays Their Fair Share?'

"With this information in hand, you might ask the next person who says the rich do not pay their fair share of taxes: Exactly what percentage of total federal income taxes should the 1-percenters pay? I seriously doubt whether you will get any kind of coherent answer. 

    "By the way, since 1-percenter income [in NZ starts at around $225,000], it might be pointed out that [$225,000 or even $450,000] a year is not even yacht or Learjet money. Plus, if one has two [children at university], a big mortgage and car payments, I doubt he would declare himself rich."

~ Walter Williams from his column 'What Is The Fair Share Of Taxes?'

“Since this is an era when many people are concerned about 'fairness' and 'social justice,' what is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?”

~ Thomas Sowell

"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."

~ PJ O'Rourke

Q: Is there a recipe for success?

"Q: Sixty million American readers here fascinated by one thing—success. That is the aim of every American. Is there a recipe for it?

"A: ... I think it is a mixture of having a flair for the thing that you are doing; knowing that it is not enough, that you have got to have hard work and a certain sense of purpose.... 
    "[N]atural feelings are never enough. You have got to marry those natural feelings and tendencies—to marry them with really hard work—but the hard work comes more easily when you are doing things that you want to do ... You must be fundamentally attracted towards it."

~ Margaret Thatcher in a 1986 interview with Parade magazine

"The 'AGI-is-near' community keeps committing the same logical fallacy over and over. Every time there’s an advance, I see the same error."

"Astra, a new model that OpenAI is testing internally, is amazing. No denying that:

"But at the same time, a whole raft of people, some fairly prominent, are running around making a deeply flawed argument about the implications. ...

"[One] tweet went so far as to claim that “the species just crossed a one-way threshold”; Elon Musk took it as evidence that we had reached The Singularity.

"Each is making essentially the same error.

"The fallacy has a name; it’s called the fallacy of composition. ...

"What’s the manifestation of the fallacy in the current case? Thinking that a system that is great at a certain kind of maths problem is great at all maths, great at science or even quite possibly great at everything. The 'AGI-is-near' community keeps committing the same logical fallacy over and over. Every time there’s an advance, I see the same error.

"Here’s how the fallacy works.

1. Someone pretends that all cognition is created equally. (Totally untrue.)
2. Whenever AI achieves success on some form of (fancy) cognition, they want you to believe that success on all forms of AI is imminent. 

"You don’t have to be a cognitive psychologist to realize that this inference just doesn’t follow."

~ Gary Marcus from his post 'OpenAI’s amazing — but vastly oversold — new model Astra'

Even people *with* a sense of humour should be barred

 

"I don’t think people without much of a sense of humour should be allowed to determine what people with a sense of humour are allowed to laugh at....
    "If you don't like something, don't watch it."

~ John Cleese

"Universities are, today, the most dangerous institution in this country.”

 

“I feel that this country is being destroyed by its philosophy. Specifically, by its universities: the most dangerous thing in this country today are the universities, because they are teaching the kind of ideas that would necessarily have to lead to the destruction of this country.... 

"[T]oday, when all those institutions ... are preaching collectivism, mysticism, and above all altruism -- self-sacrifice of yourself ... the disgusting kind of ideas that the whole world has been nurturing for centuries, then when they do that this country cannot [long] survive....

"[W]ith all the faults in American intellectual equipment and there were a lot of holes, at least people were taught pride in their own country and in the good aspects, the great achievements of this country. Today you're supposed to apologise ... because you are ... prosperous. Because you've earned your money you have to feel guilty and apologise for it. That's what we're being told."

~Ayn Rand, from her interview with Tom Snyder [from 14:00]