Radical Individualism: Difference between revisions
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''You should not have a gun put to your head in order to extract yourself money to pay for things like basic research. That's a very understandable perspective. On the other hand, I view it differently, which is, I'm not allowed as a mathematician or as a physicist to lay claim to the fruits of my labors under the intellectual property system. And so I'm in a bad spot. And I think that those aren't your taxpayer dollars, they're my [[Physics Dollars]], right? Because my [[Physics Dollars]] bought the development of the semiconductor, they won World War Two at the end, they created the World Wide Web out of CERN. And so all I want is a little bit of a licensing fee, so I can extract money out of all of you for coming for using all the great things that we developed. So when you say well, why should my tax dollars be used to pay for your physics habit? My point is, Are you kidding? Why should my [[Physics Dollars]] be supporting your lavish lifestyles, when I'm not able to chargeâyou got the best deal in history for extracting a rent from me because I'm unfairly disadvantaged. So there's all sorts of ways of turning this around. You can look at public goods, you can look at any place where price and value gap in a market. And the problem of course, if we're all getting, let's fast forward, because the easy stuff is an interesting, the question is the problems of fixing it using a tool, whether it's blunt, or even surgical and incisive, versus the problems of leaving it alone. And it's in some sense, it's type one versus type two error, there are two different ways to go wrong. And in general, the reason that objectivism is so powerful, is that it gives a permanent thesis or antithesis in the dialectic, so that everybody who wants to use the tools has to confront the people who don't want the tools used. And the question here is, would we be better off in a universe in which something like objectivism prevailed generally, or is the use of objectivism is its highest and best use as part of a dialectic to constantly bring us to a more meaningful synthesis between two different systems with two different sets of problems? And I would also say that in terms of like the non-initiation of force, it's always strange to meet Israelis who, you know, believe the non-initiation of force because of the 67 War. I mean, there's, there's situations in which you can pretty much see what's coming, and you got to do what you got to do, because surviving a calamity is much better than a self-extinguishing strategy. | |||
''So I think that all of these things require refinement, they require a location within dialectics. And these tensions are fascinating. What's going on with Google, I think, is that we're slowly waking up to the idea that free speech, free markets are not sufficient paradigms. In the case that we built these machines, where these are now merely heuristics, we can't figure out what is the best way forward to capture the essence, the intent, of free speech and free markets, becauseâand what we are agreed on on this panel, I think, is that ultimately any system that doesn't value the [[Radical Individualism|Radical Individual]] with a better idea than the rest of society and shackles that individual to collectivism, right, is not optimal. We need some situation in which the [[Radical Individualism|Radical Individual]] can say "No" to tens of thousands or millions of people and produce something of great value and great beauty and grace for all of us, or for themselves, and any system that doesn't have that aspect to it is not a system that I want to be part of. | |||
''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 cameâI 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 selectionâsometimes we act at individual level, but we can also do family level, group level, national level, memetic levelsâbut 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 excellenceâmany 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'tâsometimes 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. | |||
- '''Eric Weinstein''' on [[Free Speech, Free Minds, Free Markets (YouTube Content)]] | |||
</blockquote> | |||
== On X == | |||
{{Tweet | {{Tweet | ||
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* [[Anti-Expert]] | * [[Anti-Expert]] | ||
* [[The Idealism of Every Era Is the Cover Story of Its Greatest Theft]] | * [[The Idealism of Every Era Is the Cover Story of Its Greatest Theft]] | ||
* [[Physics Dollars]] | |||
* [[FU Money]] | |||
* [[The Precariat]] | |||
* [[Jim Watson]] | |||
* [[The War on Excellence]] | |||
[[Category:Concepts]] | [[Category:Concepts]] | ||
[[Category:Sensemaking]] | [[Category:Sensemaking]] | ||
Revision as of 20:44, 2 January 2026
You should not have a gun put to your head in order to extract yourself money to pay for things like basic research. That's a very understandable perspective. On the other hand, I view it differently, which is, I'm not allowed as a mathematician or as a physicist to lay claim to the fruits of my labors under the intellectual property system. And so I'm in a bad spot. And I think that those aren't your taxpayer dollars, they're my Physics Dollars, right? Because my Physics Dollars bought the development of the semiconductor, they won World War Two at the end, they created the World Wide Web out of CERN. And so all I want is a little bit of a licensing fee, so I can extract money out of all of you for coming for using all the great things that we developed. So when you say well, why should my tax dollars be used to pay for your physics habit? My point is, Are you kidding? Why should my Physics Dollars be supporting your lavish lifestyles, when I'm not able to chargeâyou got the best deal in history for extracting a rent from me because I'm unfairly disadvantaged. So there's all sorts of ways of turning this around. You can look at public goods, you can look at any place where price and value gap in a market. And the problem of course, if we're all getting, let's fast forward, because the easy stuff is an interesting, the question is the problems of fixing it using a tool, whether it's blunt, or even surgical and incisive, versus the problems of leaving it alone. And it's in some sense, it's type one versus type two error, there are two different ways to go wrong. And in general, the reason that objectivism is so powerful, is that it gives a permanent thesis or antithesis in the dialectic, so that everybody who wants to use the tools has to confront the people who don't want the tools used. And the question here is, would we be better off in a universe in which something like objectivism prevailed generally, or is the use of objectivism is its highest and best use as part of a dialectic to constantly bring us to a more meaningful synthesis between two different systems with two different sets of problems? And I would also say that in terms of like the non-initiation of force, it's always strange to meet Israelis who, you know, believe the non-initiation of force because of the 67 War. I mean, there's, there's situations in which you can pretty much see what's coming, and you got to do what you got to do, because surviving a calamity is much better than a self-extinguishing strategy.
So I think that all of these things require refinement, they require a location within dialectics. And these tensions are fascinating. What's going on with Google, I think, is that we're slowly waking up to the idea that free speech, free markets are not sufficient paradigms. In the case that we built these machines, where these are now merely heuristics, we can't figure out what is the best way forward to capture the essence, the intent, of free speech and free markets, becauseâand what we are agreed on on this panel, I think, is that ultimately any system that doesn't value the Radical Individual with a better idea than the rest of society and shackles that individual to collectivism, right, is not optimal. We need some situation in which the Radical Individual can say "No" to tens of thousands or millions of people and produce something of great value and great beauty and grace for all of us, or for themselves, and any system that doesn't have that aspect to it is not a system that I want to be part of.
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 cameâI 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 selectionâsometimes we act at individual level, but we can also do family level, group level, national level, memetic levelsâbut 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 excellenceâmany 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'tâsometimes 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.
- Eric Weinstein on Free Speech, Free Minds, Free Markets (YouTube Content)
On X
Astrophysicist/Luthier @DrBrianMay hosts acoustic analysis of the false vocal chords & irregular vibrato of F. Bulsara: https://brianmay.com/downloads/FreddieMercury_acoustic_analysis_of_speaking_fundamental_frequency_vibrato_and_subharmonics.pdf
And how great were the vocals of failed dentist R. Taylor on the B-side to Bohemian Rhapsody:
#BestGeeksEvah
Growing up in LA in the â70s none of my friends were aware of all Queenâs differences. We thought Freddie Mercury was straight, ethnically English and just liked Fat Bottomed Girls long before Sir Mix-a-lot. Even the name Queen didnât trigger any inquiries. We were that clueless.
I watched the movie last nite. I turned 7 the day before the Live Aid show so too young to have a clue but now I am wondering how teens and adults viewed Freddie
@KrisAbdelmessih Honestly, Queen was sort of incomprehensible. Listen to songs like âSeaside Rendezvousâ or ââ39â. These guys didnât give a shit about confusing you. They were the least needy band.
They contributed to my love of radical individualism. Heroes to me really: https://www.google.com/search?q=%2739&rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS718US718&oq=%2739&aqs=chrome..69i57.5293j0j9&hl=en-US&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
Why the Left is focused on Climate & Vaccines even Beyond Legitimate Interest in Climate & Vaccines.
Let me say first why I hang out with libertarians despite being anti-libertarian. I enjoy liberty. I like personal freedom and think of personal responsibility as a core virtue.
It feels to me like conservatives and libertarians are all we have defending individuals from collective force. So I enjoy their commitment to one of my core beliefs: radical individualism and liberty.
Ok. So why be anti-libertarian? Because collective action is always an issue.
In my experience, libertarians pretend that the interaction terms linking the effects of our behaviors on each other are weak. This is crazy making.
OTOH, Lefties tend to exaggerate the interaction terms as being enormous making everything they donât like into a communal issue.
So with climate and vaccines, the case for collective action is *strongest*. âIf you donât want to pollute, you go right ahead while I belch spent fossil fuels. To each his own!â Is an obviously nonsensical argument for freedom to pollute according to individual choice and taste.
So we are seeing climate & vaccines doing the job of clearing a path to authoritarian communalism:
Passports
ToS/Trust&Safety
Deplatforming
Access To Banking
And Iâm chilled. There *IS* a strong case to be made for carbon & vaccines. There isnât for office Woke indoctrination.
So I follow the following:
I tell Libertarians/Conservatives that weâre more connected than they might want to acknowledge.
I tell Communalists that they generally exaggerate our connectedness outside of a few places in order to push for *general* mechanisms of social control.
Is this fun?
No. It kinda sucks. But climate and public health, like defense or national culture needed to support a shared legal system say are *legitimate* issues of collective action. *Not* pretending woke contradictions are fine is *also* a matter of collective action.
So what am I? I believe in libertarianism most of the time & strong collective action sparingly when it matters.
This is not a good bumper sticker; itâs a bad slogan. But itâs why we are not progressing. Our positions require taste not absolutes, and this moment is not for that.
That said, we have to give each other wide room for personal liberty whether we like what our neighbors like or not.
The reason this doesnât go away is that communal action is both an essential tool for survival of free peoples as well as devilish temptation leading to tyranny.