One of the problems with trying to apply the Objectivist view to a situation like this is that often experts need to tell their patrons true things they don't want to hear. I'll leave any sociological or economic examples aside and say, to pick a couple that Ayn Rand herself didn't believe, that smoking causes cancer and air pollution is bad for the human body. If the patron doesn't want to believe this new fact they have been told, they might feel taken advantage of. They might feel that if a science department got public funding only to come to those conclusions, that the scientists should be fired.
I don't think that's what people have been taking away from the idea of stereotype threat at all. I think it's been much more likely for people to think, "Oh, instead of unchangeable genetic traits, the difference in outcomes might someday be reduced through deliberate social change.
I'm picturing bumper-to-bumper traffic on a highway with a cloud of drones overhead. Each person in their individual car using their individual drone to all report back the same thing: that everything is moving slowly because there are just too many cars on the road right now. With luck, the drones only crash into each other every once in a while, just like the cars below.
That reminds me of the difficult constraint they must have had in making art and architecture for the game The Witness: nothing could ever accidentally seem to be, from any viewing place, one of the world's simplest shapes. Only by design.
It's weird how, in the the second-to-last paragraph, the author takes the opportunity to attack a few unrelated composers he just thinks are overrated. Almost as if they were guilty by an association that exists entirely in his mind.
If we want to open the floodgates on being too pedantic, I think there are uncountably more irrational numbers close to any rational number than there are rational numbers close to an irrational number. But in both cases, it's definitely a bunch.
> If we want to open the floodgates on being too pedantic
It's math. There's no such thing as "too pedantic", as long as you're being interesting and not mean about it.
> I think there are uncountably more irrational numbers close to any rational number than there are rational numbers close to an irrational number.
I think that's right.
Irrationals near a rational are almost certainly uncountable, as otherwise I think we can force all the irrationals to be countable by bucketing them. I think that concern is countered if any bucket has to be uncountable, but if it's not all that makes some rationals special in a way they probably aren't.
Rationals near an irrational is definitely countable, as all the rationals is countable.
The article goes on further to explain that, "Shipwrecks create richer habitats that in turn boost fishing conditions, but only as long as the wreck is preserved."
Well, since lack of bank regulation almost destroyed the economy a little while ago, having a job that comes with incentives to reduce regulations is qualitatively different than those other options: more morally complicated, more dangerous.
The interviewer may have expected that fact to be self-evident to his readers, and that Barney Frank's unwillingness to engage with it, and to try to deflect in order to "win the argument," would speak for itself.
Maybe that was their plan, yeah. Barney’s argument seemed to be “if you’re tough on banks as a legislator it’s good to go work at a bank after leaving Congress; if you’re soft on banks as a legislator it’s bad to go work at a bank after leaving Congress”. If you approach it with sufficient distrust of politicians/bankers and insufficient understanding of the regulation I can see that argument being unconvincing.
(Unimportant nitpick: one option being more morally complicated and more dangerous than the others is a quantitative difference, not a qualitative difference.)
