In epistemology, parsimony; in ontology, lavishness.

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Why Capitalism is Ending

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THE PRODUCTIVITY BOMB Sorry, Ray Kurzweil , there will be no singularity.  As much as Moore’s Law has become a cliche, it has also become a cliche to point out that exponential growth has no "knee" - that is to say, that an exponential growth curve has no inflection point.  It goes up faster and faster, so that not only is the value rising but the derivative of the value is also rising (that is, the rate of increase is itself increasing) yet at any given point it is still a gradual increase.  Growth that gets indefinitely huger as it approaches a specific point of time, a limit known as a singularity, is not exponential growth but rather hyperbolic growth .  There’s no evidence that technology is growing hyperbolically; it is “only” growing exponentially.  Gordon Moore himself has stated that he doesn't believe in the singularity, or even in the continuation of Moore's Law.   (And Moore's Law is starting to fail, anyway ... )  But it hard
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The Ego Is Not Selfish Enough

    The problem with having an ego is that it may not be selfish enough.   As I mentioned in my previous article, " A Defense of the Ego ," the ego can be understood as an illusion, or more accurately, as a construction.  But that doesn't make it wrong.  (It doesn't even make it untrue, because social constructions are real.)  The problem with the ego is not that it is too selfish (and thus evil).  It's just the opposite.  The difficulty with the ego is that it may come into conflict with your selfishness.  This problem may arise in various ways.  Let's look at some of the most common: Let's say you are trying to eat as much chocolate peanut butter pie as you can.  That is your selfish motivation.  Now let's say there are many strategies for getting chocolate peanut butter pie: strategy 1, strategy 2, strategy 3, etc., etc..  You have landed on strategy number 54, and it's working pretty well.  But unbeknownst to you, there is another strategy, st
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Why Ayn Rand was Wrong

  It is a pet theory of mine that the "greatness" or "importance" of a philosopher is mostly determined by that philosopher's subsequent degree of influence on a government leader.  Would we still talk about Socrates, if his student Critias had not taken over Athens as the leader of the Dictatorship of the Thirty?  Would we talk about Aristotle, had he not tutored Alexander, who later became Alexander the Great and took over a vast part of the ancient world?  Would we remember Rousseau, had not Robespierre declared him "divine"?  Or Locke and Montesquieu, had not the founders of the United States revered them?  The esteem given to the philosophy by professional professors within the academy matters less, and its internal coherence, or insight, or truth matters less still.  By this measure, Ayn Rand is, unfortunately, the most important philosopher of the 20th century.   Even though she is barely noticed by philosophy departments, Ayn Rand is massively
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