There is no single task in making a pencil that requires rocket science, but there are lots of tasks that require the opportunity to do something in an optimum return situation. A lone pencil maker would have to switch jobs and be proficient in each. But in the real world it is not practical for the person who harvests the wood to also fashion the lead and to formulate the paint and affix the eraser.
Tag: world
Roll Your Window Down
These glass bubbles are nice for comfort, but they’re terrible for letting us experience the thrill of movement and travel. If we want the full thrill of travel, we (from time to time) need what motorcyclists take for granted: wind, sun, air. We need to let the untamed outside world touch us.
Powerful Courageousness: Practices to Expand Yourself & Your Gift
Imagine a woman who has a powerful gift to give to the world, a song to sing that will lift others up … but she only lets herself give that gift when the sun is shining and she’s happy and the moon is in perfect alignment with Jupiter. The world would be robbed of her song. Her narrow range of when she’s willing to offer her gift would be a devastating loss to those she serves.
Fear of Modernity and Progress?
The contention, held by many libertarians, of expertise isn’t in the accruement of specialized knowledge by dedicated and brilliant individuals. The contention lies in the contemporary social belief that these individuals knowledge shouldn’t just be a tool in our choices to refine ourselves, our lives, our companies, our products, and our world around us, but rather unquestionable truth with overt or covert implications on social norms and government policy.
There is No “Third Way” Between Cooperation and Destruction
Every such “third way” turns out to be at best a dead end of stagnation, and at worst a highway to social disintegration, and sound economic knowledge is the most reliable means of avoiding both.
A Great Deal of Ruin
Probably the only thing that keeps a country from going full-frontal totalitarian at once is that the negative economic effects of the government’s actions can take such a toll that people begin to give some weight to that consideration, even though they rarely see through any of the grasping, brutal programs the government carries out, even the most ruinous ones.
For Preventing Abuse, Public Schools Are Not a Good Model for Homeschooling
Horrific crimes and violent acts tug at our collective heartstrings. When other humans are harmed, we rightfully feel empathy and anger. We should use these moments as opportunities for reflection and conversation, but we should be careful to not make policy based on emotion. Some are using the egregious case of alleged child abuse by a California family charged with starving and torturing their children in a so-called private school to call for greater regulation of all homeschooling families.
Partitions IX — Abstract
As a software engineer, I learned that there are only two things that you can do with entities, combine them or separate them, sort them or collect them. In the real world, one has a third option, leave them alone. This works well as long as there is no principled reason to engage with them.
A Strictly Scientific Worldview is Incompatible with Moral Responsibility
Many scientists hold to a worldview that is strictly scientific, one in which “free will” is taken to being an illusion or an old superstition. These same scientists will also maintain that we have moral and ethical responsibility for the actions we take. These are incompatible stances.
Partitions VII — The Iron Curtain
Joseph Stalin always had the annexation of the world — the Iron Curtain — in mind. It was at the Yalta Conference where he finessed FDR and Churchill to make his dreams come true. Maybe it was because he had the home court advantage, since Yalta was the major resort city in Crimea, Ukraine, USSR.