Most statements which are sufficiently deviant (from cultural norms) are assumed to be jokes by default. This is a way of protecting everyone from admitting that serious disagreements exist.

For example, if you say, "Thank you so much, you've persuaded me and I've learned a lot. I will completely rethink all my values and take on board the moral values you've shared with me." that reads as likely sarcasm because it would be much more rational than typical people in our culture.

And if you sound significantly less rational than the typical person, it again doesn't read as serious. For example, "I hate you for trying to use logic to share ideas with me that you think would help me. I'm very mad that you could be so arrogant as to think you could know anything useful to me. Did it ever occur to you that I don't want to think?" People will assume someone doesn't really mean that and is just making a joke, perhaps an exaggerated parody to imply the other guy is wrongly treating him like the person in the parody.

Statements which are reasonably normal are taken at face value, but statements which are deviant are frequently not treated as real statements in the usual way. This is a way of denying the existence of deviance and generally suppressing disagreement and pretending it doesn't exist. It's a strategy which helps people irrationally refuse to consider many disagreements and criticism.

Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics is free at this link.

The theory of marginal utility resolved the paradox of value which had been propounded by Adam Smith and which had prevented the classical economists from grounding exchange value in utility. “The things which have the greatest value in use,” Smith observed, “have frequently little or no value in exchange; and on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarce any thing; scarce any thing can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it.”

The only explanation, the classical economists concluded, is that while things must have utility in order to possess exchange value, the actual determinant of exchange value is cost of production. In contrast, the theory of marginal utility made it possible to ground exchange value in utility after all—by showing that the exchange value of goods such as water and diamonds is determined by their respective marginal utilities. The marginal utility of a good is the utility of the particular quantity of it under consideration, taking into account the quantity of the good one already possesses or has access to. Thus, if all the water one has available in a day is a single quart, so that one’s very life depends on that water, the value of water will be greater than that of diamonds. A traveler carrying a bag of diamonds, who is lost in the middle of the desert, will be willing to exchange his diamonds for a quart of water to save his life. But if, as is usually the case, a person already has access to a thousand or ten thousand gallons of water a day, and it is a question of an additional quart more or less—that is, of a marginal quart—then both the utility and the exchange value of a quart of water will be virtually nothing. Diamonds can be more valuable than water, consistent with utility, whenever, in effect, it is a question of the utility of the first diamond versus that of the ten-thousandth quart of water.

I'm not satisfied with the way this passage explains the issue (I don't think I have a disagreement with Reisman about economics here, though). It doesn't mention supply, demand and competition, which I think are crucial. It leaves a reader to wonder: why not charge the value of people's first quart of water? Sure you wouldn't sell the marginal 10,000th quart at that price (they'd find the price higher than the utility), but you could potentially make more profit, with less water inventory, at a higher price. The reason is because other water sellers would compete with you and that keeps prices down, not because of marginal utility. This answer's Smith's question about how something so valuable can be cheap.

Water isn't just cheap because of mariginal utility (the utility of the 10,000th quart is much lower than of the first quart, lowering demand after prior quarts of water are supplied), it's also because a large supply is cheaply available from nature. If the question is about starting a new business to acquire and sell additional water, than the marginal utility of water is the relevant issue. But if the question is about the cheap pricing of current water, I think prices would be raised (despite that meaning fewer quarts sell) if not for competition. (BTW I'm ignoring issues like government regulations and the real-life water situation, and just treating it as a free market commodity.)

If I'm mistaken about any of this, then I'd still say the passage's explanation is unsatisfactory, because in that case it apparently didn't adequately clarify matters for me.

Very soon thereafter, the whole Circle Bastiat, myself included, met again with Ayn Rand. We were all tremendously enthusiastic over Atlas. Rothbard wrote Ayn Rand a letter, in which, I believe, he compared her to the sun, which one cannot approach too closely. I truly thought that Atlas Shrugged would convert the country—in about six weeks; I could not understand how anyone could read it without being either convinced by what it had to say or else hospitalized by a mental breakdown.

The following winter, Rothbard, Raico, and I, and, I think, Bob Hessen, all enrolled in the very first lecture course ever delivered on Objectivism. This was before Objectivism even had the name “Objectivism” and was still described simply as “the philosophy of Ayn Rand.” Nevertheless, by the summer of that same year, 1958, tensions had begun to develop between Rothbard and Ayn Rand, which led to a shattering of relationships, including my friendship with him.

That Rothbard letter can be found here. I think it may be Rothbard's most interesting writing.

I agree with Reisman that Atlas Shrugged should have persuaded the whole country in about six weeks. That it didn't is one of the largest and most important unsolved philosophical problems. (Note I'm thinking of this problem broadly. Why didn't Popper's work persuade more people? Mises? Szasz? Deutsch? I consider those the same issue. Atlas Shrugged is the best, but there's a lot of good work which should have persuaded a lot of people but has only had limited success.)

13. Cf. Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty (New York: Macmillan, 1973). In that book, Rothbard wrote: “Empirically, the most warlike, most interventionist, most imperial government throughout the twentieth century has been the United States” (p. 287; italics in original). In sharpest contrast to the United States, which has supposedly been more warlike even than Nazi Germany, Rothbard described the Soviets in the following terms: “Before World War II, so devoted was Stalin to peace that he failed to make adequate provision against the Nazi attack. . . . Not only was there no Russian expansion whatever apart from the exigencies of defeating Germany, but the Soviet Union time and again leaned over backward to avoid any cold or hot war with the West” (p. 294).

I already had a very low opinion of Rothbard. He has a lot of really awful views, such as anti-semitism and children-as-property. I didn't know this specific thing. (Some of his writing about economics is actually pretty decent.)

It is the division of labor which introduces a degree of complexity into economic life that makes necessary the existence of a special science of economics. For the division of labor entails economic phenomena existing on a scale in space and time that makes it impossible to comprehend them by means of personal observation and experience alone. Economic life under a system of division of labor can be comprehended only by means of an organized body of knowledge that proceeds by deductive reasoning from elementary principles. This, of course, is the work of the science of economics. [emphasis mine]

I disagree with this epistemology, which thinks you have some foundations and deduce the rest. For info on my epistemology, see my David Deutsch and Karl Popper reading recommendations, and my own writing on my websites.

Here is a conversation I had on Twitter, in order. This is fine:



And here's my main Twitter feed. Notice how Twitter has taken the same conversation, shown it as four separate parts, which are out of order and incomplete. And Twitter put things together which don't go together (my reply to @Spiff is linked to @asymco's tweet). It's extremely confusing and terrible.



I've noticed other major problems with Twitter threading too. (Threading is how it puts together multiple tweets into one conversation. An example of an OK method is chronological order, like my first screenshot. Split into parts, out of order, with some messages omitted, is an example of a very bad method.)

No Context

Often I view a tweet which replies to something, but when I click through to details I cannot see what it replies to. Ugh... Twitter please get your act together. (Or better yet, someone make a better website and replace Twitter. Thanks in advance.)

Here is an example. Ann Coulter replies to someone talking about a school censoring "this word", and suggests "raghead" instead. But what word was it? I don't know and there's no reasonable way to find out because Twitter's threading is broken: it doesn't show me the prior tweets in the conversation.

The graph @asymco tweeted is normal enough. Focus your attention on the reply from @Spiff.

The reason some of the revenue data looks compressed on the current revenue scale is because it is. Trying to change that is trying to mislead viewers.

What @Spiff proposes is an example of How To Lie With Statistics. He's intentionally trying to make the graph look different than it normally would to meet an agenda of his and give the viewer a different impression.

His tweet may seem innocuous but it's really bad. He's a bad scholar wannabe. Stuff like this is not OK. Bar graphs for typical quantities should use a linear scale, starting at 0, unless there's a damn good reason to do otherwise. If you do something else, the bars are no longer proportional to each other in the intuitive way, so it misleads viewers.

For example, suppose the graph started with revenue at $50,000,000 instead of 0. Then all the bars would be shorter. This would make the smaller bars shorter by a large percentage, and make them look even shorter compared to the big bars. That'd be really bad! When someone looked at it and thought "this bar is twice as big as this other bar", that would no longer be a valid way of reasoning due to not starting at 0.

Or suppose the graph used a log scale like @Spiff proposed. A log scale mean the revenue would be labelled like $0, $1, $10 $100, $1000, instead of like $0, $10 million, $20 million, $30 million, etc... See how misleading that could be? What it means is, again, when someone compares the sizes of the bars he gets the wrong idea. When he thinks, "This bar is about 20% higher than the bar before it", he's being played for a fool.

Don't play people for a fool. Don't try to trick them. Don't have an agenda for how you want your graph to look and then adjust things to achieve it. Just make a simple graph that makes sense and then leave it alone and let it speak for itself. Tinkering with your graph as @Spiff proposes is dishonest (or clueless and still harmful).

Scholarship, please.

Update: @asymco says:

Share prices are frequently graphed using log scales by default. I don't condone the practice.

I'm sad to hear how common bad scholarship is. That's terrible. But I'm glad @asymco understands this and does a better job. Thumbs up to him! Here's @asymco's blog which I read regularly.

Update 2: @Spiff now agrees with my point about log scales (I think).

Update 3: Here is an example of a very bad article advocating bad use of log charts. It looks mainstream and has a tone of sharing uncontroversial knowledge.

Many people say they are too busy to learn much, or learn well. And don't have time to read books.

These same people typically don't know how to speed read. Why not? If time is the issue, why not learn speed reading and then read more? Because they are lying and the real issue is they don't want to read or learn.

Regardless, I want to discuss some aspects of how speed reading works.

The most powerful form of speed reading is RSVP. It's easier to see what it is than explain – click here. You see 1 to 5 words at a time and the computer updates them quickly.

It's very reasonably achievable to read twice as fast with RSVP compared to regular book reading. So you can read a book in 3 hours instead of 6 hours. You don't have to read many books to pay back the time invested in learning to use RSVP. Actually the time investment is pretty near zero – the best way to learn RSVP is to start using it at speeds only a little faster than your normal reading (and I'd recommend 3-4 words appearing at a time to start with, not 1), and work your way up as you practice. Since you learn while reading, it doesn't cost you any time if you were going to read anyway. It starts saving a little time right away, and a lot more later.

Reading costs resources other than time. For example, if you use RSVP to read twice as many books, and you buy your books from Amazon, you'll have to pay Amazon twice as much money. But books are cheap, I hope you'll forgive this "problem" with RSVP.

Using RSVP software requires e-books. If you have a paper book, you can't read it with RSVP. This is the biggest difficulty with RSVP due to DRM. E-books like Kindle books are easy to get and exist for many, many books. And they are typically cheaper than paper books. The problem is when trying to prevent you from giving copies of the book to your friends (or strangers), they also try to prevent you from reading the book in anything but their official software (which doesn't support RSVP). To read a book with RSVP, you need it without copy protection. So you have to read from a limited pool of free books, or use torrents or book download websites, or use software to remove the DRM. This is not hard, but unfortunately you can't just get started reading any book from Kindle in 5 minutes. It might take you a couple hours to set up DRM removal software, or half an hour to find a book downloading website or get a torrent program.

Buying e-books and removing the DRM so you can read them in your own choice of software is completely reasonable and moral. If you don't distribute the books to others, you aren't doing anything wrong. You pay for the book, and then read your book, that you own, with the software of your choice. That's it. What's wrong with that? Nothing. It also offers the best selection of books available. People should learn how to do this. It isn't very hard.

Mental Energy

So with RSVP you read a book in 3 hours instead of 6 hours. Is that harder or easier, once you know how? Easier. It leaves you less drained, less fatigued, less mentally tired. But how much easier? Since you spend half as much time reading, does that mean it takes half as much mental energy? No. For every hour using RSVP, you get more mentally tired than one hour of regular reading.

With RSVP, you get less mentally tired per page read, but more tired per minute of reading.

A rough estimate is that while you're saving 50% for time, you're only saving 25% for mental energy.

Say regular reading finishes 100 words in 100 units of time and uses up 100 units of mental energy. Then RSVP would read 100 words in 50 units of time and use up 75 units of mental energy. This is a good thing.

Busy People

Let's hypothetically suppose that RSVP used up 125 mental energy units instead of 75. Then you'd be saving time but spending more mental energy per word. Would that be good?

Certainly not for everyone. But for a lot of people, RSVP would still be very useful in that scenario. People who are low on time would still use RSVP to save time. They'd be effectively trading some mental energy for some time. They'd be converting one resource (mental energy) into another (time). If they are low on time, doing a conversion to save time is useful.

Most people, including most "busy" people, only use a fraction of their mental energy each day anyway. They've got a lot to spare. (Many will lie and say otherwise. The issue is not that they are too mentally fatigued to think more, it's really that they don't like thinking, so they say they are mentally fatigued to excuse their choice not to think much.)

But real RSVP saves both time and mental energy. That makes it such an amazing deal. It'd ridiculous that very few people use it. This is a good example of how people make huge mistakes which makes their quality of life dramatically worse.

The only real reason not to use RSVP is if you don't read. Which would be a big mistake, but for different reasons. Thinking and ideas are important! But I won't go into that here. If you want an explanation, you can read Philosophy: Who Needs It or ask at the Fallible Ideas Email Discussion Group.

Different Types of Mental Energy

There's different types of mental energy. If you get tired from reading and are too mentally fatigued to read more, you can usually still do something else, including listen to an audio book. But they aren't totally different: if you can normally comfortably read for 5 hours in a row, but first you get really tired from playing chess for 10 hours, you'll find you run out of reading mental energy faster. All that chess used up the majority of your reading energy. All sorts of different types of mental energy are linked significantly but not entirely – using one uses a lot of the other, but running out of one often doesn't completely run you out of the other.

One consequence is that if you're using mental energy for other parts of your life, and you add in some reading, this is not a zero sum game. Every bit of mental energy going to reading does not mean less mental energy for other tasks. Maybe two thirds of the mental energy for reading has to be subtracted from other tasks, but one third is a bonus.

Audio Books

Audio books make speed reading even more convenient than text books. Lots of audio book software already has an option to turn up the speed. Unfortunately a lot of software only lets you listen at 1.5x or 2x speed, even though a skilled listener can listen at 2.5x or 3x. (A lot of audio books are read very slowly, significantly slower than regular slow text reading.) Please be careful because some software labels 1.5x speed as "2x" and 2x speed as "3x". This mislabelling includes the software from Apple and Amazon (Audible). You can easily test this by playing something at "2x" for 1 minute (using a clock) from the beginning, and then see how far along you are – 90 seconds or 2 minutes in.

Audio book selection is limited, but this can be fixed with text-to-speech software such as Voice Dream Reader. (I use the "Paul" voice.) Text-to-speech software now works extremely well. The only problem is if you buy a book on Kindle with DRM, you can't read it with your own choice of software, like we talked about before. That means no RSVP and also no text-to-speech. Unless you remove the DRM, which isn't that hard.

Some people worry that text-to-speech software is harder to understand than human speech. This may have been true in the past, but it is not true today. Actually, text-to-speech is better and easier to understand at high speeds because it's 100% consistent about pronunciation and pacing. Not every single word is pronounced correctly, but most are, and they are always pronounced the same way, and you can still understand it (and if you're really bothered, you can tinker with it and fix how it pronounces words).

How do audio books compare to RSVP and regular reading? Using the same numbers as before where regular was 100/100/100 and RSVP was 100/50/75, audio book speed reading would be 100 words in 75 time using 40 mental energy (audio books without turning up the speed would be more like 100 words in 150 time using 35 mental energy, there's really no good reason to do that. once you're good at this, if you're tired you can just turn the speed down from 2.5x to 2x or something like that, and it feels very easy, there's no reason to use 1x speed).

Audio books are a great way of reading, even though they are slower than RSVP, because they are less mentally draining and still pretty fast. And it's basically free to learn to listen to audio books at higher speeds: just turn it up a little at a time and you'll learn while reading without any separate practice or training or lessons.

The other great thing about audio books is you can easily mulititask. You can easily listen to an audiobook while walking somewhere, while on public transit, while driving, while exercising, while showering (with speakers instead of headphones), or while eating. It works with some other activities too, such as playing video games, though that can require some skill if it's a hard game. Whereas to multitask an audio book with exercise basically requires no skill, anyone can do it right away.

TV and Movies

TV and movies can be watched at higher speeds to save time. Again you can learn this gradually while doing it, so it's basically a free skill that saves a huge amount of time for zero downside. The speed you can watch something depends on factors like how fast they talk and whether they have accents. But once you are good, you can watch most TV and movies using from 2x to 2.5x speed, while being completely comfortable and relaxed. And getting up to being comfortable at 1.5x speed comes pretty quickly and is still fast enough to save a lot of time.

Boredom

Another advantage of speed reading, speed listening and speed watching is that it increases the amount of interesting stuff you engage with per minute. It makes the book or show effectively have denser content, so it's more interesting. All the good parts are packed closer together. This is especially valuable if you need to read something for a school class but it's kind of boring. It makes stuff less boring, more interesting. It's also great if you're bored and have trouble finding enough interesting stuff, because it will change some books and shows from too boring to worthwhile.

Skimming

There's other types of speed reading, but I think most of them are inferior to RSVP and there's no reason to use them. Most other methods of speed reading are designed to work with paper books, but the fact is software is more powerful and superior to paper books. And a speed reading method that utilizes software (RSVP) is superior to one that doesn't.

However, there is a notable form of reading, which is sort of speed reading, which is great. It's called skimming. If you don't need to read every word, don't! This can be a lot faster than even RSVP if you can skip over half the text. And there are plenty of reasons to take a look at something but not read all of it. That's really useful. You might want to see what it is and see if you're interested, but instead of just reading the beginning you skip ahead. A great way to get a sense of a book is to go to a chapter that sounds interesting, read a few paragraphs, skip a few pages, read a few paragraphs, skip a few pages, etc. It's better to adjust what to skip, when, depending what you read though, don't just turn pages thoughtlessly.

RSVP turned up to a really high speed has some similarities to skimming. Both are really fast, and in both cases you miss stuff. What are the main differences? With very fast RSVP, you don't miss any sections of text. Say you're trying to find out if the author addresses a particular counter-argument. He might do that in one paragraph somewhere in the middle of the chapter. If you skim, you could easily miss that paragraph. If you use very high speed RSVP, you'll see every paragraph and you won't miss it. If you're reading too fast you might not understand it, but you'll see the topic and stop and then read that paragraph again.

If you ever want to say something like, "the author doesn't cover topic X" you need to read every sentence, even if very quickly so you don't understand every detail perfectly. But most of the time you don't need to say things like that, and it's no big deal if you miss something, so skimming is great.

I think both skimming and very fast RSVP are underrated. People will try too hard to finish the whole book, or something like that. But a lot of books you can just quickly go through the best parts, look for parts of particular interest to you, etc, and miss a bunch, and you get more value for your time/effort than if you read the whole book.

Books don't have a totally consistent level of quality, and not all the material is equally interesting to you. For most books, the less good parts are not as worthwhile to read for you as just reading one of the better parts from another book (even if that second book is, overall, less good or less interesting to you). Since you aren't going to read all the interesting books – you won't run out – don't hesitate to go through a book quickly. If you can get 75% of the value from the book in 50% of the time, that's absolutely wonderful and you should be thrilled and move on to the next book and do the same thing with it too.

I started reading the French economist Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850). So far it's enjoyable – he's good at economics and has a fun writing style (even though it's a translation and he wrote a long time ago). This part struck me as particularly fun: The Bastiat Collection, Part 1, "That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen", Chapter 7, "Protectionism" begins:

Mr. Protectionist (it was not I who gave him this name, but Mr. Charles Dupin) devoted his time and capital to converting the ore found on his land into iron. As nature had been more lavish toward the Belgians, they furnished the French with iron cheaper than Mr. Protectionist; which means, that all the French, or France, could obtain a given quantity of iron with less labor by buying it of the honest Flemings. Therefore, guided by their own interest, they did not fail to do so; and every day there might be seen a multitude of nail-smiths, blacksmiths, cartwrights, machinists, farriers, and laborers, going themselves, or sending intermediaries, to supply themselves in Belgium. This displeased Mr. Protectionist exceedingly.

At first, it occurred to him to put an end to this abuse by his own efforts: it was the least he could do, for he was the only sufferer. “I will take my carbine,” said he; “ I will put four pistols into my belt; I will fill my cartridge box; I will gird on my sword, and go thus equipped to the frontier. There, the first blacksmith, nail-smith, farrier, machinist, or locksmith, who presents himself to do his own business and not mine, I will kill, to teach him how to live.” At the moment of starting, Mr. Protectionist made a few reflections which calmed down his warlike ardor a little. He said to himself, “In the first place, it is not absolutely impossible that the purchasers of iron, my countrymen and enemies, should take the thing ill, and, instead of letting me kill them, should kill me instead; and then, even were I to call out all my servants, we should not be able to defend the passages. In short, this proceeding would cost me very dear, much more so than the result would be worth.”

Mr. Protectionist was on the point of resigning himself to his sad fate, that of being only as free as the rest of the world, when a ray of light darted across his brain. He recollected that at Paris there is a great factory of laws. “What is a law?” said he to himself. “It is a measure to which, when once it is decreed, be it good or bad, everybody is bound to conform. For the execution of the same a public force is organized, and to constitute the said public force, men and money are drawn from the whole nation. If, then, I could only get the great Parisian manufactory to pass a little law, ‘Belgian iron is prohibited,’ I should obtain the following results: The Government would replace the few valets that I was going to send to the frontier by 20,000 of the sons of those refractory blacksmiths, farriers, artisans, machinists, locksmiths, nail-smiths, and laborers. Then to keep these 20,000 custom-house officers in health and good humor, it would distribute among them 25,000,000 francs taken from these blacksmiths, nail-smiths, artisans, and laborers. They would guard the frontier much better; would cost me nothing; I should not be exposed to the brutality of the brokers; should sell the iron at my own price, and have the sweet satisfaction of seeing our great people shamefully mystified. That would teach them to proclaim themselves perpetually the harbingers and promoters of progress in Europe. Oh! it would be a capital joke, and deserves to be tried.”

So Mr. Protectionist went to the law factory. Another time, perhaps, I shall relate the story of his underhanded dealings, but now I shall merely mention his visible proceedings. He brought the following consideration before the view of the legislating gentlemen.

And the proposal was a variation of the broken window fallacy. Or as Bastiat usually talks about it, the issue of the seen and the unseen. All the commerce in the French iron industry resulting from protectionism is seen when evaluating the proposal. The lost commerce in other industries, due to people having to pay more for iron – and therefore buying less of other things – is not seen.

If you're interested, read the rest of the chapter, and perhaps more, in the free book.

Jihad Watch has run this headline:

Obama: Iran has “no aspiration to get a nuclear weapon” because “it would be contrary to their faith”

Pamela Geller has a similar headline:

Obama: Iran Won’t Pursue Nuclear Weapons Because It’s ‘Contrary to Their Faith’

I don't like Obama and don't normally defend him. But this is false, and scholarship comes first. Obama says enough bad things, there's no need to misrepresent what he said and take quotes out of context. It isn't helping anything. It hurts our cause to get things wrong.

The truth needs to come first, and attacking the left second. Attack them when they're actually wrong, not just as a universal policy. And pay attention to the truth so you know when they're wrong, instead of just assuming they always are. Please.

What Obama actually said was, paraphrasing: Iran claims to have no nuclear aspirations because it'd be contrary to their faith, and if Iran is telling the truth about this then they'll be happy to accept Obama's political deal.

Obama didn't say it'd be contrary to their faith for Iran to get a nuclear weapon, nor did Obama say Iran won't try to get a nuclear weapon. The Jihad Watch and Pamela Geller headlines make both of those false claims.

Obama saying Iran claims something that may or may not be true, and Obama believing it himself, are completely different.

Obama was actually careful to emphasize that it was just Iran's claim. Obama used the phrases, "And if in fact what they claim is true" and "if that is true" and "But we don’t know if that’s going to happen." Three times in one paragraph, Obama made it clear that he was talking about Iran's claims which may or may not be true. Yet Jihad Watch ignores that and lies about what Obama was saying.

Here is the full paragraph that Jihad Watch is talking about, which Jihad Watch is well aware of (they included this text at the end of their article):

And if in fact what they claim is true, which is they have no aspiration to get a nuclear weapon, that in fact, according to their Supreme Leader, it would be contrary to their faith to obtain a nuclear weapon, if that is true, there should be the possibility of getting a deal. They should be able to get to yes. But we don’t know if that’s going to happen.

As you can see, in an epic scholarship fail, Jihad Watch and Pamela Geller grossly misrepresented what Obama said.

Update: I contacted Spencer and Geller by blog comments, twitter, and email. Except Spencer's email button is broken. My blog comment made it through moderation at Jihad Watch, but at Geller's site it isn't showing up and new comments on the post have been approved after mine, so I may have been censored (to make matters more confusing, her blog software is buggy and sometimes reports a post has different numbers of comments in different places, and my comment showed up on the sidebar as a new comment even when it wasn't visible on the post and the link didn't work). Spencer and Geller were at their computers tweeting and it's been hours, and it hasn't been fixed yet. This kind of thing is urgent because most readers see posts when they are new. So after waiting, I just tweeted David Horowitz too, and let them know with the Front Page Mag contact form. Someone better care. I'm going to lose a lot of respect for them if this isn't fixed. I will update again if anything happens.

Update 2: It's the next day and nothing has improved. I think my comment on Geller's cite was censored. My comment on Jihad Watch was flamed by two people. Nothing has been fixed. This is very sad.

Update 3: I've lost hope. No error correction. Very sad. David Horowitz and associates are now on my Scholarship Watchlist. Someone should fact check them with the same format I used for Ann Coulter (and also the regular way of checking things you find suspicious).

Update 4: When reading a new article, I noticed Geller's site says this above the comments:

Comments at Atlas Shrugs are unmoderated. Posts using foul language, as well as abusive, hateful, libelous and genocidal posts, will be deleted if seen. However, if a comment remains on the site, it in no way constitutes an endorsement by Pamela Geller of the sentiments contained therein.

My blocked post did not have foul language, and it wasn't abusive or hateful, and certainly not genocidal. So what happened to it? The site policy is a lie.

Update 5: 2018-06-20

A few years later I had Robert Spencer's attention on Twitter and had a couple small, positive interactions. He was paying attention to various critics and repeatedly asked them for actual quotes to back up their negative claims about him. So I linked him to this post which explains a genuine error of his with a quote. He responded once to deny there was any error and then ignored me after that:

Sorry, those quotes look like...quotes to me, and represent the news item accurately.

David Deutsch posted this story in January 2000 to the public Taking Children Seriously email list. The subject line was "academics". I later wrote my own Anna story. One criticism of DD's story is that it overvalues school, formal education and academics.

---

Eliana WestEmmer asked:

After visiting the "Puzzling Parenting" stuff, I went to the TCS site and read Sarah's wonderful article about math(s).

https://web.archive.org/web/20030224180925/http://www.tcs.ac/Articles/SLMathPhobia.html

It got me wondering. I am imagining a kid, no -- a family of three kids. The kids are, um, 10, 12 & 15. The parents have resisted the urge to push academics on them. They have not done any academic math(s). They play video games, chat on the internet, build lego stuff, build tree-houses, etc.

Would somebody write for me a description of life from here on? Tell me a story, that includes the 15 year old becoming a scientist. I am just having trouble picturing them starting math so late... Would somebody help me with this idea?

And later:

The concern is genuine. Without knowledge, how do we come to be who it is we are "meant" to be? And is there not a point, developmentally, where it can be "too late"?

NO. I am sure it can't be "too late."

What I really want is a way to picture life from here for, say, the oldest one (15, was it?). Does she begin with fractions and decimals

Maybe. Probably not.

and work her way up to algebra, then calculus?

Calculus is almost certain to follow, rather than precede, algebra, yes.

Does she start at the local community college

Quite possibly.

in remedial classes?

No, in normal classes.

What does such a life LOOK like?

Well OK, if you really insist on knowing, I'll tell you. I know all the details except her name, so let's call her Anna.

Sometime this year, Anna's previous interest in Lego, treehouse-building, the internet and computer games will all come together and draw her attention to a major TV documentary about how stunts are arranged in movies. She will start building such stunts in the garden, each more ingenious than the last, using all sorts of props and filming them on a video camera. One day, a physics teacher will walk past and see her doing this. Calling to her to give her advice about how to balance a particular arrangement of planks, he will inadvertently cause her to fall fifteen feet onto the grass, fortunately causing only a broken toe.

Anna will have to wait three hours for treatment in the emergency room, which could have been excruciating (because the slightly addled person waiting on her left suffering from chronic whiteboard-marker poisoning will be a mathematics teacher eager to plug the gaps in her home education), but in the event, it will pass quickly because she will get into conversation with the fascinating person waiting on her right, a huge lady called Agnes. Turns out Agnes' ex-husband used to do stunts in Hollywood and she used to help him before she found out about some of the other stunts he pulled -- but that's another story. Anyway, now she owns three successful cafes in town and has just bought two more and wants to go up-market. She's been talking to an advertising agency about making a series of ads for the local TV. She hasn't liked any of their ideas so far, but soon finds that Anna is bubbling with great ideas for how to advertise high-class restaurants using movie-like stunts. Agnes will be surprised and delighted to hear that Anna actually has videos of several stunts she has arranged single-handed (with a little help from her little brothers) and will tell her her to drop by at her office next say.

Next day Anna will hobble along to Agnes' office above one of her restaurants, currently being re-fitted with the new up-market decor. Agnes will love the videos, and will commission Anna to design five stunts for the new series of ads, and execute them for the TV people. Anna will earn three thousand dollars for this, but think no more about it until six months later when the advertising agency will offer her a similar job, albeit for only $500. She will accept, because even though it's a lot of work and the materials alone will cost almost that much, she will enjoy it enormously. The following week, someone will let the agency down and they will phone around in desperation for anyone they know who can do a firework display. Anna will never have done such a thing, and technically it's illegal, but she will agree to step in to help them out. Not only will the display be a great success, but Anna will meet and fall instantly in love with ... the computerised timing device that the agency gave her to time the fireworks. She will ask if she can borrow it, and for the next year it will spend far more time in her garage than at the agency, for she will think of more and more ways to use it to do wonderful stunts, and also special effects. She will also start editing her movies on the agency's professional computerised editing system.

One day in the cutting room, she will meet a pro who is engaged in a science documentary. He will be a mathematics graduate -- who has forgotten all the maths he ever knew and will now be spending all his time filming animals mating. So they won't talk about maths but she will show him how to hide some of the more repulsive aspects of his footage using a difficult timed transition on the editing machine, and in return he will introduce her to his boss, whose next documentary will be about the NASA robots that will one day explore Mars. Anna will be hired as a technical assistant on that documentary, and will dazzle everyone with the exciting stunts she will think of to demonstrate how these robots will behave on Mars. The boss will offer her a permanent job on the team, but she will refuse, because while at NASA, she will also have helped one of the astronomers out with making a promotional movie designed to persuade the government to fund more infra-red satellites. The problem will have been how to display, in an eye-catching and persuasive way, the complex data that demonstrate why such satellites are better than ground-based telescopes. Anna will succeed at this so well that she will have persuaded herself too. She will spend the next two years working for one of NASA'a subcontractors, first in the publicity department, then designing user-interfaces for satellite ground stations, and then even some aspects of the satellites themselves.

All this will involve a lot of interactions between herself and astrophysics graduate students, but slowly the attraction of satellites will wear off, and she will realise that her real love is *theoretical* astronomy. She'll read a book about calculus, do a six-month adult-education course in physics to fill in the gaps in what she's picked up, and then apply to take an undergraduate degree in astronomy, complete it a year ahead of time and then be accepted for a PhD in quasar structure. At that point she will officially become a SCIENTIST.

Meanwhile she will have had two children with the NASA astronomer (who will have left astronomy to become an internet millionaire and failed miserably, but will by that time be blissfully happy again as a home maker), and she will worry that the children won't achieve anything in life unless they have a good grounding in the basics, especially mathematics, but for some unaccountable reason the ungrateful little wretches will be digging their heels in and refusing to listen.

-- David Deutsch
http://www.qubit.org/people/david/David.html