Paul Ehrlich can’t admit he’s wrong

Paul Ehrlich can’t admit when he’s wrong. In his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, Ehrlich predicted that “in the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death” due to unchecked population growth. Instead, people started farming more efficiently.
Then, Ehrlich famously lost $576.07 to Julian Simon in 1990 when he made a 10-year bet that five basic metals would increase in price. The five-metal basket actually fell in price by an average of 36 percent, despite the global population increasing by 800 million…

The lesson for Ehrlich and company is don’t bet against human beings that are free to create and innovate. While there are still lots of problems on our planet, we have made astonishing progress in lifting ourselves out of poverty and feeding one another.

The Intellectual That We Deserve

A Critique Of Jordan Peterson By Nathan Robinson,

Phd student in Sociology and Social Policy at Harvard.

If you want to appear very profound and convince people to take you seriously, but have nothing of value to say, there is a tried and tested method. First, take some extremely obvious platitude or truism. Make sure it actually does contain some insight, though it can be rather vague. Something like “if you’re too conciliatory, you will sometimes get taken advantage of” or “many moral values are similar across human societies.” Then, try to restate your platitude using as many words as possible, as unintelligibly as possible, while never repeating yourself exactly. Use highly technical language drawn from many different academic disciplines, so that no one person will ever have adequate training to fully evaluate your work. Construct elaborate theories with many parts.

Draw diagrams. Use italics liberally to indicate that you are using words in a highly specific and idiosyncratic sense. Never say anything too specific, and if you do, qualify it heavily so that you can always insist you meant the opposite. Then evangelize: speak as confidently as possible, as if you are sharing God’s own truth. Accept no criticisms: insist that any skeptic has either misinterpreted you or has actually already admitted that you are correct. Talk as much as possible and listen as little as possible. Follow these steps, and your success will be assured.

This article first appeared in

Current Affairs On 14 March 2018

Size IS everything

Professor brings in 10MB hard drive from the 1960s.
My first Apple Mac had a 0.75GB hard drive. The latest Mac OS wouldn't fit on that!

My Latest Audible Downloads

Tuberculosis: The Forgotten Pandemic

Nowadays, BCG is given to more than 100 million babies each year, primarily in the developing world, and saves tens of thousands of lives. But it provides incomplete protection, and TB remains the number one infectious killer on the planet. It is estimated to have wiped out 1 billion people in the past 200 years, including 1.4 million in 2019 alone.

Japanese Book Repair

Japanese craftsman restores a battered old dictionary for a man to give his daughter as she enters university. Watch the incredible craftsmanship
of this book repairer.

My Latest Audiobooks

My latest downloads from Audible

The Great Bechet

The wonderful Sidney Bechet, the greatest ever soprano saxophonist and one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time. Playing here with the Claude Bolling Orchestra in France, with Bolling on the piano. Look at the adoring faces of the other band members as they listen to the genius of Bechet.

“Sidney Bechet to me was the very epitome of jazz. Everything he played in his whole life was completely original. I honestly think he was the most unique ever to be in this music”.
Duke Ellington