Comments for Isegoria

Comment on What, in all this world, could bring the greatest happiness? by James James

James James — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:05:23 +0000

This version of the quote comes from “Genghis Khan: The Emperor of All Men” (1927) by screenwriter Harold Lamb. The original comes from Rashid ad-Din’s “Compendium of Chronicles”, according to Wikiquote (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan).

Comment on The brain is not designed for thinking by Phileas Frogg

Phileas Frogg — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:29:25 +0000

“Total freedom, then, is the enemy of creativity, and constraint its companion.”

This is why boredom is so valuable. Boredom is usually a consequence of an oppressive combination of physical constraint, social constraint, temporal constraint, and cognitive constraint, like sitting in a 2-3 hour faculty meeting, a boring high school class, or a superfluous but mandatory training workshop. The mind, thus confined, suddenly begins to produce truly astonishing imaginations and scenarios in a desperate bid to entertain itself.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then boredom is the mother of imagination.

Comment on More headline-worthy results followed by Isegoria

Isegoria — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:22:05 +0000

There is, David Epstein explains, a very bright side to the scientific carnage:

The so-called replication crisis over the last decade has been painful for many scientists, but researchers in every discipline have been learning from it and working to improve their fields. It was, after all, scientists themselves who raised the alarm about their colleagues’ work (and in some cases their own work) in the first place. Increasingly, researchers now share or formally preregister their hypotheses at the start of a project. They can still deviate from the plan to explore unexpected findings, but the deviations are transparent.

Comment on School is not vocational education’s only venue by Jim

Jim — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 01:10:06 +0000

The question, perhaps, is what to do with the boys and young men once they have been freed from bondage. Bryan Caplan, low-T Catholic mischling and natural-born slave that he is, proposes unpaid labor accruing to the Boomer and Israeli owners of the occupational gigacorporations. After he is sent to the Idaho potato farms established to permit the United State’s lipservicedly reformed academics, lawyers, traders, and assorted other Boomerregime water-carriers to perform honest labor for the first time in their miserable lives, we can simply stop enforcing the nightmarishly totalitarian horror regulatory state and burn the Code of Federal Regulations, that unfathomably large and impossibly quickly growing officially unofficial law by which the Congress has purported to delegate its legislative power. Then, after various other reforms to relegalize competition, the boys and young men will be able to compete Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street et al.’s profits away, destroying the Fortune 500 and obliterating the Boomerreich by virtue of their sheer natural superiority as they restore the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and vindicate Karl Marx at last.

Comment on School is not vocational education’s only venue by Jim

Jim — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:47:24 +0000

At first glance, it’s difficult to see how the schooling apparatus, operated as it is by the least-competent white-collar workers in United State society, could be more exploitative than the relentlessly metastasizing tumor that is Corporate America, but its open secret weapon is that the very worst crime available to the inhabitants of Earth is simply to waste boys’ and young men’s precious, fleeting, and unrecoverable time.

All education-related policy proposals not opening with “fire everyone in the current system and figure the rest out afterward” is fundamentally unserious. That’s the cold reality of it.

Comment on Vocational ed stands out because it prepares students for common jobs by Isegoria

Isegoria — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 14:48:47 +0000

Caplan isn’t recommending that we forbid science, math, and engineering classes. In fact, he’d probably recommend teaching those subjects much more thoroughly to the handful of students who expect to use the material beyond school.

Comment on Vocational ed stands out because it prepares students for common jobs by Curious

Curious — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 02:09:08 +0000

How does Caplan plan on creating the next generation of scientists, mathematicians and engineers? And given the important nature of the research performed by academics in the sciences and engineering, does he support having them them funded by the government, working in academia, and their work freely available in academic journals?

There have been several excerpts from his book, but none of them discuss these issues.

Comment on Cutting classes is far more common than crashing classes by Gaikokumaniakku

Gaikokumaniakku — Sun, 31 May 2026 02:04:51 +0000

The marrow is the culture that values the knowledge that can be preserved in books. Colleges still have some of their old books of knowledge, but I question whether the people in charge of the colleges are teaching students to engage with the knowledge. It seems the desire to learn things that are both true and interesting was carried out of the colleges by nerds as soon as Internet access became available to run-of-the-mill civilians. The people sucking on the broken bones of college seem to be sucking on dry bones, not marrow bones.

The energetic disgruntled thinkers are building their own RAG/LLM systems to operate retrieval index services for their home-server data hoards. And then we have the heroic figures, like Alexandra Elbakyan, and those heroes will one day be remembered like the monks of Lindisfarne (875 A.D.) or the Buddhist monks who concealed the Mogao Caves (1000 A.D.).

We may be on the brink of a new Dark Age. Let us hope we have enough monks to save some of the knowledge.

Comment on More headline-worthy results followed by Gaikokumaniakku

Gaikokumaniakku — Sun, 31 May 2026 01:45:01 +0000

“‘Science!’ has died and been buried…46 years of my life…”

It is better to struggle for a worthy vision of truth discovery than to surrender and willingly embrace ignorance. This gives us a small measure of cold comfort as we endure the collapse of civilization.

The spirit that moved Galileo is not dead. We may not live to see it manifested. We may die in the smoldering ruins of decadence, but the spirit will prevail even if we might not live to see it.

Comment on Lower attendance is what we’re going for by Gaikokumaniakku

Gaikokumaniakku — Sun, 31 May 2026 01:36:45 +0000

So bankers trick young people into getting loans in order to chase useless diplomas. But Caplan does not suggest hanging the bankers. Why does Caplan love bankers so much? Perhaps he should be persuaded to write a follow-up book titled The Case Against Usury.