a unranked, unsystematic, partial, random list of stuff I read that deeply influenced me, which inevitably leaves off many I'm not thinking of and many others I wish to keep secret, known only to me
This sentence is why you have become my favorite Marxist writer (other than my own son):
"Remember, Freddie: you can be totally committed to the relief of material need within an ethical, freedom-promoting framework, and still wake up one day to find your comrades have filled a gulag."
The Cult of Smart is a courageous and well written. You should feel pride. I shared my copy with my sister-in-law who is a teacher, and she loved it. I think it's incredibly important.
At the risk of preaching to the choir, your use of an old message board speaks to my own preference of how to communicate online (blogs, RSS - ways to be notified if I want, and to catch up if I want).
And I always wonder if it's a better way to communicate, or not. Like, maybe the ability to be casually nosy on Facebook to other people whom you may loosely know, or don't want to know, takes away the effort needed to be in deeper contact with other close-knit groups of friends.
Glad I’m not the only leftist who thinks all leftists should read The Fountainhead. And I would rather re-read The Fountainhead a thousand times than re-read Being and Time once—I think you’re giving Heidegger’s “genius” waaaay too much credit. The Nazi stuff aside, the man refused to string together a coherent sentence, at least in that work. (Some of his shorter essays are better.) Maybe it makes more sense in the original German, but imo Being and Time derailed continental philosophy for the rest of the 20th century.
I sometimes wonder why this newsletter resonates with me so much. There's something about being an online late-30s American who came of age opposing the Iraq War that leaves a lasting, formative mark on you. It's one of the most horrible things ever done in our name, we completely failed, and unlike some other movements we did not fail gloriously. We just failed.
And the phrases "I am still, in a way I feel utterly uninterested in explaining to anyone, a communist" and "I am a romantic at heart, and I have never quite been able to abandon old Lev Bronstein" are able to allow me to express my own political identity in a way I doubt I could have on my own. Thank you.
Some thoughts for Freddie on his important but flawed book. Dunno if these will interest others.
Here's a brief sloppy version of some thoughts, just to get the conversation going. Maybe at some point we can make this a more polished exchange and you can use it for your blog.
1. Your most important point, which almost everybody fails to understand, is that the 'benefits' usually cited for education are almost all positional, zero-sum effects. They have nothing to do with the actual net social gains from increasing education, much less from increasing educational credentials. Really, really important point!
But here's the big flaw. Big positional terms do not imply that absolute terms are zero. Doing science, I feel every moment how much more I could have done with more smarts, more education, etc. I can see it in myself and in all the people around me, how much we flounder around and could do better. Science and technology are not zero-sum games! If that was ever in doubt, it shouldn't be in 2021. It's not just that vaccines matter, it's that the difference between a clever new vaccine type and clunky old types matters a lot. And differences like that don't just happen without channeling large-scale effort. Even the heroic Katalin Kariko could not have done this by herself.
And this too is implicit in your argument, although I think not consciously. You conclude by dreaming of a sort of utopia, each according to his abilities, etc, with minimal external rewards used to channel people's activities. This dream wouldn't even begin to make sense if there weren't a high pre-existing base level of material prosperity. Where the hell did that prosperity come from? It came from the relatively small (at the individual level) but overall coherent and additive absolute effects of the sorts of things education is needed for.
The need for further material progress is not going away. Even complete redistribution would be far from giving a good level of well-being for the world (although it would work within the US). Even more important, neither the global climate nor infectious diseases nor other unforeseen issues will stand still and let us indefinitely enjoy good lives doing whatever we feel like.
(I always think of Trotsky's response to Stalin's analysis of the economy "ignoring only the foreign trade and military situations" as being like deciding whether to go outside naked in a Moscow winter "ignoring only the weather and the police.")
i'm not claiming that economic inequality at anything remotely like that in the U.S. is good, or that we should continue to torture kids to pretend to become educated. But we do need technological progress even to just keep up with the challenges, and that requires some meritocratic educational institutions.
2. Minor corollary to 1. You do a lot of careful causal reasoning, the sort which would be very helpful to almost anyone in dealing with both personal and political choices. That sort of reasoning can be taught, but it isn't, even in most conventional stats courses. The simple parts don't require the sorts of detailed calculations that keep many students from going far in math. I think you're an illustration of why further education in a selected area would be an absolute good for society.
You also mention that you never learned calculus. I'm just guessing, but I bet you and many others could have learned a bit of calculus-lite reasoning. Enough to understand exponential growth. Unlike politicians from across the spectrum, by Feb. 2020, many of us were saying "Shit. Screw the tiny prefactor, only the exponent matters. We're fucked." It would have been very socially useful if many more people could have seen that. I think that we can teach that to a lot of people, especially if we don't also try to burden them with the full machinery needed to really use the math as a professional tool.
3. Cult of smart? Many religions forbid saying certain names of their gods but I never heard of one where the central rite was denial of the existence of their god. Sure there are pockets of NY intellectuals, some mathematicians, etc, that still quietly worship Smart. But the current public cult is of The Good Student. In fact, you sort of imply that when you write of the moral disapproval of the weak students, as if it was all due to their bad choices rather than largely just dumb luck. The systematic denial of intelligence by the education establishment serves several purposes, but justifying moral scolding is certainly one of them. Over-promising of what can be done by education is another.
I think this is less a critique of your central point than of the title and some of the wording.
4. Related to that, you at many points say that people don't deserve credit or blame for various things that had causes such as DNA, parental income, etc. But the language makes it sound like there's some residual stuff which is truly due to a "them", for which they do have responsibility. But as you track down causes, everything is causal except for purely stochastic quantum effects. And nobody is to blame for those either! So among the things that are caused are various character flaws, even psychopathy. So the sort of metaphysical responsibility on which you're setting limits just doesn't exist. (Sapolsky, e.g., takes the argument this far.)
What might take its place? Perhaps a more instrumental view of credit/blame. Those should be assigned to the sorts of choices people make which might be affected by that assignment. So that corresponds to some character-like choices but not plain smarts. I think that you agree with this and so I was surprised that you didn't finish the argument but left it dangling.
Some good stuff in there (Trotsky, the two comics,..) and a lot I'm unfamiliar with. But urging people to read the unreadable psychopathic Rand because she also suffered some? JFC. And thinking that Heidegger must be deep because he was not just a Nazi but also incomprehensible? As Pauli often said ""Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch!"
Loved Cum Town years and years ago, and the subreddit was good too. But I absolutely hate that some of my friends have recently discovered them only to swap out their own existing senses of humor with ones modeled on Nick Mullen and Co.
Can't say I've read much on this list but Far Side impacted me greatly as well, and the 10th Anniversary book was especially good. I found it in my stepfather's office when I was in elementary school and was hooked then and there. Personal favorite panel was the one where a scientist spends what I imagine to be years, maybe decades, perfecting a helmet that translates dog barks into human speech, only to discover that they're all just saying 'Hey!'
Saramago was the child of a landless peasant who became a reader at the public library. And a mechanic. And he won the Nobel Prize.
This sentence is why you have become my favorite Marxist writer (other than my own son):
"Remember, Freddie: you can be totally committed to the relief of material need within an ethical, freedom-promoting framework, and still wake up one day to find your comrades have filled a gulag."
Loved this post.
The Cult of Smart is a courageous and well written. You should feel pride. I shared my copy with my sister-in-law who is a teacher, and she loved it. I think it's incredibly important.
Compassion threaded amidst your other thoughts seems most important in these musings
At the risk of preaching to the choir, your use of an old message board speaks to my own preference of how to communicate online (blogs, RSS - ways to be notified if I want, and to catch up if I want).
And I always wonder if it's a better way to communicate, or not. Like, maybe the ability to be casually nosy on Facebook to other people whom you may loosely know, or don't want to know, takes away the effort needed to be in deeper contact with other close-knit groups of friends.
r/cumtown was one of the greatest works of art of the Internet age.
This post is a nice reminder that I need to read a lot more books and a lot less of all the mind-numbing yelling on social media.
I doubt I'll ever get around to reading many, or any, of these, but this was great to read all the same. Thanks, Freddie.
Glad I’m not the only leftist who thinks all leftists should read The Fountainhead. And I would rather re-read The Fountainhead a thousand times than re-read Being and Time once—I think you’re giving Heidegger’s “genius” waaaay too much credit. The Nazi stuff aside, the man refused to string together a coherent sentence, at least in that work. (Some of his shorter essays are better.) Maybe it makes more sense in the original German, but imo Being and Time derailed continental philosophy for the rest of the 20th century.
I sometimes wonder why this newsletter resonates with me so much. There's something about being an online late-30s American who came of age opposing the Iraq War that leaves a lasting, formative mark on you. It's one of the most horrible things ever done in our name, we completely failed, and unlike some other movements we did not fail gloriously. We just failed.
And the phrases "I am still, in a way I feel utterly uninterested in explaining to anyone, a communist" and "I am a romantic at heart, and I have never quite been able to abandon old Lev Bronstein" are able to allow me to express my own political identity in a way I doubt I could have on my own. Thank you.
Where should I buy The Cult of Smart from?
Some thoughts for Freddie on his important but flawed book. Dunno if these will interest others.
Here's a brief sloppy version of some thoughts, just to get the conversation going. Maybe at some point we can make this a more polished exchange and you can use it for your blog.
1. Your most important point, which almost everybody fails to understand, is that the 'benefits' usually cited for education are almost all positional, zero-sum effects. They have nothing to do with the actual net social gains from increasing education, much less from increasing educational credentials. Really, really important point!
But here's the big flaw. Big positional terms do not imply that absolute terms are zero. Doing science, I feel every moment how much more I could have done with more smarts, more education, etc. I can see it in myself and in all the people around me, how much we flounder around and could do better. Science and technology are not zero-sum games! If that was ever in doubt, it shouldn't be in 2021. It's not just that vaccines matter, it's that the difference between a clever new vaccine type and clunky old types matters a lot. And differences like that don't just happen without channeling large-scale effort. Even the heroic Katalin Kariko could not have done this by herself.
And this too is implicit in your argument, although I think not consciously. You conclude by dreaming of a sort of utopia, each according to his abilities, etc, with minimal external rewards used to channel people's activities. This dream wouldn't even begin to make sense if there weren't a high pre-existing base level of material prosperity. Where the hell did that prosperity come from? It came from the relatively small (at the individual level) but overall coherent and additive absolute effects of the sorts of things education is needed for.
The need for further material progress is not going away. Even complete redistribution would be far from giving a good level of well-being for the world (although it would work within the US). Even more important, neither the global climate nor infectious diseases nor other unforeseen issues will stand still and let us indefinitely enjoy good lives doing whatever we feel like.
(I always think of Trotsky's response to Stalin's analysis of the economy "ignoring only the foreign trade and military situations" as being like deciding whether to go outside naked in a Moscow winter "ignoring only the weather and the police.")
i'm not claiming that economic inequality at anything remotely like that in the U.S. is good, or that we should continue to torture kids to pretend to become educated. But we do need technological progress even to just keep up with the challenges, and that requires some meritocratic educational institutions.
2. Minor corollary to 1. You do a lot of careful causal reasoning, the sort which would be very helpful to almost anyone in dealing with both personal and political choices. That sort of reasoning can be taught, but it isn't, even in most conventional stats courses. The simple parts don't require the sorts of detailed calculations that keep many students from going far in math. I think you're an illustration of why further education in a selected area would be an absolute good for society.
You also mention that you never learned calculus. I'm just guessing, but I bet you and many others could have learned a bit of calculus-lite reasoning. Enough to understand exponential growth. Unlike politicians from across the spectrum, by Feb. 2020, many of us were saying "Shit. Screw the tiny prefactor, only the exponent matters. We're fucked." It would have been very socially useful if many more people could have seen that. I think that we can teach that to a lot of people, especially if we don't also try to burden them with the full machinery needed to really use the math as a professional tool.
3. Cult of smart? Many religions forbid saying certain names of their gods but I never heard of one where the central rite was denial of the existence of their god. Sure there are pockets of NY intellectuals, some mathematicians, etc, that still quietly worship Smart. But the current public cult is of The Good Student. In fact, you sort of imply that when you write of the moral disapproval of the weak students, as if it was all due to their bad choices rather than largely just dumb luck. The systematic denial of intelligence by the education establishment serves several purposes, but justifying moral scolding is certainly one of them. Over-promising of what can be done by education is another.
I think this is less a critique of your central point than of the title and some of the wording.
4. Related to that, you at many points say that people don't deserve credit or blame for various things that had causes such as DNA, parental income, etc. But the language makes it sound like there's some residual stuff which is truly due to a "them", for which they do have responsibility. But as you track down causes, everything is causal except for purely stochastic quantum effects. And nobody is to blame for those either! So among the things that are caused are various character flaws, even psychopathy. So the sort of metaphysical responsibility on which you're setting limits just doesn't exist. (Sapolsky, e.g., takes the argument this far.)
What might take its place? Perhaps a more instrumental view of credit/blame. Those should be assigned to the sorts of choices people make which might be affected by that assignment. So that corresponds to some character-like choices but not plain smarts. I think that you agree with this and so I was surprised that you didn't finish the argument but left it dangling.
The only thing on this list want to read is The Far Side. And maybe the King James Bible if my doctor gives me only 6 months to live.
Some good stuff in there (Trotsky, the two comics,..) and a lot I'm unfamiliar with. But urging people to read the unreadable psychopathic Rand because she also suffered some? JFC. And thinking that Heidegger must be deep because he was not just a Nazi but also incomprehensible? As Pauli often said ""Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch!"
Loved Cum Town years and years ago, and the subreddit was good too. But I absolutely hate that some of my friends have recently discovered them only to swap out their own existing senses of humor with ones modeled on Nick Mullen and Co.
Can't say I've read much on this list but Far Side impacted me greatly as well, and the 10th Anniversary book was especially good. I found it in my stepfather's office when I was in elementary school and was hooked then and there. Personal favorite panel was the one where a scientist spends what I imagine to be years, maybe decades, perfecting a helmet that translates dog barks into human speech, only to discover that they're all just saying 'Hey!'