Physics Dollars: Difference between revisions

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 ''The key question is, what should the substrate be below that? And objectivism has never been tried at a national scale, so far as I know, but the question is, what is its role at the dinner party of interesting ideas? Should it take over the dinner party? Should it be invited? Is it so dangerous that it needs to be kicked into the shadows? And that's what I think we're here to explore.
-''But what unifies us I think, in part is the, you know, and I said this in a tweet before I came—I felt very strange being invited to an Ayn Rand Institute event, because my two critiques are that, one, she was not sufficiently aware of the problems of multi-level selection—sometimes we act at individual level, but we can also do family level, group level, national level, memetic levels—but the other thing is that I found her insufficiently radical in defensive of individualism. Right? Her heroes are sort of sympathetic. They're people who want to do brilliant, beautiful things. And if you read an article that I wrote, called the War on Excellence, I am against excellence—many of you are for it. I believe that excellence crowds out genius, and a lot of the geniuses that we that we deal with, let's say the transistor, on which everything rides now, you know, is largely a development of Bill Shockley, the famous eugenicist. Our three-dimensional structure of DNA was adjusted by Jim Watson. I just spent a week with him not too long ago. Let me tell you, that guy has points of view that you cannot take anywhere. We have to celebrate these people. And you know, we were just talking in the green room about my time at Hebrew University. It was very interesting to me that we talked about the Bieber Bach Conjecture, we talked about the Stern Gerlach Experiment and Pascal Jordan's Jordan Algebra. All these people are Nazis, right?
+''But what unifies us I think, in part is the, you know, and I said this in a tweet before I came—I felt very strange being invited to an Ayn Rand Institute event, because my two critiques are that, one, she was not sufficiently aware of the problems of multi-level selection—sometimes we act at individual level, but we can also do family level, group level, national level, memetic levels—but the other thing is that I found her insufficiently radical in defensive of individualism. Right? Her heroes are sort of sympathetic. They're people who want to do brilliant, beautiful things. And if you read an article that I wrote, called [[The War on Excellence]], I am against excellence—many of you are for it. I believe that excellence crowds out genius, and a lot of the geniuses that we that we deal with, let's say the transistor, on which everything rides now, you know, is largely a development of Bill Shockley, the famous eugenicist. Our three-dimensional structure of DNA was adjusted by [[Jim Watson]]. I just spent a week with him not too long ago. Let me tell you, that guy has points of view that you cannot take anywhere. We have to celebrate these people. And you know, we were just talking in the green room about my time at Hebrew University. It was very interesting to me that we talked about the Bieber Bach Conjecture, we talked about the Stern Gerlach Experiment and Pascal Jordan's Jordan Algebra. All these people are Nazis, right?
 ''We celebrate Nazis in Israel with the names on their achievements. It's an absolutely radical idea that we don't—sometimes we say, may his name be cursed, but we still use the name. We don't sanitize it. You know, when I visited Rome recently, I went to the Arch of Titus, and I held up my middle finger because it celebrated the destruction and looting of Jerusalem. But I don't want to burn it down, right. So the idea that we should burn, you know, The Merchant of Venice because it's against my people, all of these collectivist impulses have to be silenced. We have to figure out how to fight them and make better cases and make these voices go quiet, not through force, but through humiliation. Right? Because these are terribly destructive ideas. The world has birthed all sorts of fantastic things. Many of these things were created by people whose hands were not clean. And if we keep trying to sanitize everything that human beings have done, and make it all brilliantly heroic, we're doomed. So we need a more radical defense of individualism than I think Ayn Rand could afford.