Daily Archives: 3 July 2014

On the culture that creates wealthy people

Well, as a former member of that set, the thrill of the competition in one’s field, despite that much of it is a lottery effect, is exceeded only by the excitement of meeting and working with increasingly interesting rather than tedious and mundane people, on projects and ideas that are increasingly interesting rather than tedious and mundane.

Nassim dealt with the (exasperating and epistemically challenged) financial sector, but engineers, entrepreneurs, scientists, athletes and artists tend to be fairly interesting – and they fill you with awe and humility. And that experience is as awe inspiring on a daily basis as is the feeling of revelation one experienced from one’s most profound professors.

So we tend to forget that what separates the west from the rest is heroism. Egalitarian heroism. And the absurd excesses of the upper economic classes are a minor side effect of the cultural processes that create them. And that cultural process is what produces, when not suppresses by authority or mysticism, the rapid evolution of western civilization, despite its status as a small, poor, backward people on the margins of the bronze age.

Be glad we produce such extremes, because of the benefits we obtain from the cultural process that creates them.

Revel in it. If there is anything in man that approaches the divine, that is it

On Rationality vs Post Modernism (from a Facebook discussion about the correlation of IQ and upward mobility)

And Pavel, this isn’t about me. It’s not personal. It’s a question of how we treat the world. Does truth/reality exist? Will we face it courageously or succumb to the secular religion of post-modernism, which follows in the Zoroastrian / Abrahamic tradition of attempting to create reality by chanting desirable lies? Universities are the churches and academics are the priests — bitterly denouncing heretics as they’ve always done. It is mysticism threatening to overturn the Enlightenment. It is poison.

Let’s not abandon empiricism, logic, rationality, but “strive to seek to find and not to yield.” We’ll all be better off this way.