The Genius in My Basement (2011)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
https://www.thejc.com/news/obituaries/obituary-simon-norton-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO0iyzYUTgo
Make sure you watch all of it, there's some bombshells in there.
It sounds like he had a relatively severe stutter. I hope the university didn't fail to renew his contract on that account.
In the case of NGOs I suppose the history of the Lifestraw would be illustrative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LifeStraw
I'm really curious what your criterion or threshold for genius is. I realize it's likely a fuzzy topic and we don't need to get into a tangent about the philosophy of intelligence (although I'm not opposed to it, just trying to avoid a larger discussion), but you must have some way of deciding that the person you are referencing is a genius. How did you determine that?
I'll try to pin it down, but it will be an approximation. The depth of insight gained from simple observations that turned out to be undeniably true over a long span of time is the thing that convinced me of this. It wasn't luck of the draw or something like that just piercing thought aiming at the heart of the problem and never at the symptoms. It's mostly about clarity rather than anything else. And I only realized the level of insight that went into this years after the fact, at the moment it did not even strike me as particularly special. So think of that as a label tagged on much later.
I don't think a genius need necessarily be rude. It's really just of part of how he made it to maturity with his gifts intact. Once he is sufficiently shielded then he may relax and become a bit nicer, perhaps.
"agreeable: quite enjoyable and pleasurable; pleasant."
People in general are scared of being singled out for disapprobation by the group and so they self-censor and don't create new ideas in the first place.
Not necessarily. As long as they are civil and able to articulate their differences in a good way chances are the viewpoints will be shifted and possibly converge.
It's a problem when people become so invested in their viewpoints and opinions that they become a part of their identity. That's one way to become a person who is going to react in a not-so-nice way to seeing those viewpoints and opinions challenged.
"In the present state of science the most universal standard of length which we could assume would be the wave length in vacuum of a particular kind of light, emitted by some widely diffused substance such as sodium, which has well-defined lines in its spectrum. Such a standard would be independent of any changes in the dimensions of the earth, and should be adopted by those who expect their writings to be more permanent than that body."
On the other hand, Kliman is at the forefront of post-Samuelson heterodox economics today, and his extremely influential theories have spawned a great deal of debate. It's hard to imagine that debate happening if he were "quieter".
[0] "M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest French economists. Being both German and economist at the same time, we desire to protest against this double error."
[1] "Mohun and Veneziani (2009: 278) state that we “conjecture that [his paper’s logical and factual errors were] not apparent to Veneziani because of a psychological a priori commitment to the falsity of the TSSI, in turn founded on a psychological a priori commitment to the demonstration of the internal inconsistency [...]"
It's clear that Marx mastered a certain rhetorical strategy that made him disproportionately influential -- the rhetorical strategy of the bully. People love the bully. Who doesn't want to be the bully, rather than the bullied? Freud used a similar strategy, to similar effect. I'm not surprised that Kliman has turned to the same strategy, but at least Marx was animated by the great events of his day, but all Kliman can hope for is to defeat his rivals in argument over interpreting Marx. As someone once pointed out, it is philosophers who interpret the world. The point is to change it.
Not really. Hilferding's reply to Bohm-Bawerk so early on showed that many of Marx's critics still misunderstood him, and Marxist economists have dealt with those criticisms time and time again, not only philosophical misunderstandings but on the transformation problem too. The most outrageous is the charge of inconsistency between Vol. 1 and Vol. 3 - luckily Marx isn't charged with such inconsistency any more (only the failure to transform values to prices in the specific context of competing capitals) but Kliman is partly responsible for that turn. Bohm-Bawerk's objections to Marx's value theory gain new life in fancy terminology (such as "Generalized Commodity Exploitation Theorem"). The degenerative research program actually seems to be in the responses of philosophers and economists to Marx[0].
>Kliman now pretends that everyone between Marx' time and now read Marx wrong, and only he, Kliman, has uncovered the key to decode Marx.
The idea of the TSSI was about before Kliman, and it'll be about after him; the point I was making is that he was the first one to be loud enough about it to attract attention. Kliman at least attempts to make a convincing case based on textual exegesis of Marx's works that shows misinterpretation, which is not unreasonable in a world dominated by equilibrium economics and thereby equilibrium responses to Marx. His only contention is that Marxian economists had surrendered too much ground. Further, in several places his claim is not that Marx is correct, only that the charge of inconsistency is misplaced.
>that the response to more serious scholars (even serious Marxist economists) is repulsion.
That's not true; the TSSI is as popular as it is criticized. For every explicitly anti-TSSI scholar I can probably name a pro-TSSI one. I'm sure you'd agree that Marxists tend to like orthodoxy and established traditions just as much as anyone else, which shows in the responses (by Marxian economists) to the TSSI and also to Okishio's theorem. There are plenty of good mathematical and philosophical objections to the TSSI on Marxist grounds, but very few claim it is as philosophically bankrupt and divorced from reality as you seem to make it out to be. Veneziani and Mohun's objections are mathematical, not "practical". The charge of a vacuous theory divorced from understanding the dynamics of capitalism usually falls on the New Interpretation rather than the TSSI.
>As someone once pointed out, it is philosophers who interpret the world. The point is to change it.
I agree! As it happens, so do Kliman's co-authors. From Alan Freeman:
>I conclude that it is a legitimate political and research project to attempt to understand capitalism on the basis of the Marx’s own work. The persistent denial of its validity, on the false grounds that Marx’s theory has been proven incoherent, should be resisted by the political movement. Whatever the personal motivations of individuals that subscribe to this view, its actual effect is to deny access to Marx’s own economic views. To persist in promoting it now, above all, as is usually done, as an incontrovertible truth, must be treated as an unscientific act of censorship. Before beginning I want to lay before the audience the exact nature of the debate. First, it is not a scholastic debate. An audience of trade unionists, political activists, and professional intellectuals represents a genuine encounter, in Gramsci’s words, between those who think because they suffer and those who suffer because they think. It is a debate whose purpose is to change the world.
[0] http://burawoy.berkeley.edu/Marxism/Marxism%20As%20Science.p...
After Samuelson's famous article on the transformation problem, most people concluded that Marx' system could not be rescued, and moved on with their lives. Up until the 70s Marxist economics was a vibrant field, but after that it's only a few dead-enders. Kliman himself laments this in an article that I can no longer find online. Philosophers and economists don't spend much time on Marx for the same reason chemists don't spend much time on phlogiston, and physicists don't spend much time on aether theory.
Your analogy would be more apt if it turned out that the refutations of phlogiston or the aether were flawed, both in the model used to construct the premises in the refutation and the refutation didn't hold much (if any) water. As it turns out, scientific revolutions can be just as politically motivated as anything else. But even then, Kliman and others are more than happy to work given the premises constructed by Samuelson. Okishio, at least, admitted the imperfection of the model his theorem is based on. Samuelson, even after contemporary early critiques from Paul Mattick, Geoffrey Kay, Ben Fine, and others never did. At some point Samuelson's conception of Marx's theory as one purely of prices and "proving" the notion of exploitation shows just how shallow the analysis goes. You can determine prices without reference to labour values (as Sraffa showed) and you can demonstrate exploitation in capitalist society without reference to the traditional (Marxian) labour theory of value (Nitzan & Bichler, Roemer, Veneziani & Yoshihara, Arthur DiQuattro, Hardt & Negri, even Bowels & Gintis). In fact, the only conclusion you really throw out is the falling rate of profit.
Even if nothing I said is true, the neoclassical paradigm was attacked just as much in the Cambridge capital controversy to the point where if we were to use the same standards you are using for Marxism, it would be just as dead. At best, neoclassical economics is the phlogiston, and Marxism is the aether. Sraffa would be happy, at least? Marxism as a mainstream question started dying while every other heterodox opinion was moribund too. Ironically, Marxist polecon is the only radical economics that still lives. That, at least, should show its resilience. What you said can be said three times over for Post-Keynesians, Sraffians, neo-Ricardians and pretty much everyone else on the sidelines.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08969205155717...
Your final paragraph has a basic misunderstanding of the Cambridge capital controversy that is surprisingly common among the heterodox. There was a primitive theory of capital to which the CCC applied. But modelling improved, and this theory was completely superseded by the 70s. But somehow the heterodox have inflated it into being the core proposition of all of mainstream economics. The modern theory of capital is completely immune to the arguments of the CCC.
My argument wasn't that neoclassical economics should be discounted as a result of CCC, but rather the grounds upon which it took place, where Marxian (well, labour accounting) economics took just as much of a hit as neoclassical economics did. My argument was that if your proposition is that the status of a discipline should be counted based on what transpired between 1960 and 1980, Marxian economics would only be as poor today as neoclassical economics was. Neoclassical economics improved its models, and Marxian economics either attempted to salvage an orthodox interpretation of Marx or to move on to other research projects (Analytical Marxism, Rational Choice Marxism) that do away with his "mystical shell".
I suppose when one thinks of trying to salvage Marx as trying to prove Fermat's Last Theorem (in fact, it is very much like that with the Fundamental Marxian Theorem), what Kliman et al. are doing given the models and notation set out by Samuelson and Leontief, or what Veneziani and Yoshihara are doing given neoclassical methods is a whole lot less objectionable. Neoclassical economics isn't dead because of Sraffa, and Marxian economics isn't dead because of the century-old presumption that Marx was an equilibrium theorist, or the presumption that he was a physicalist.
every time there's some kind of comment like this it always strikes me as self-serving or projection. i have always believed and argued that if you're smart enough for the difficult things (arbitrary tough stem thing) then you're smart enough for the simple things (pleasantries).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bardeen
[2] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2003-01-25-030125...
I think that this is purely an illusion due to a selection effect.
People associate (technical, scientific, artistic) talent and intelligence with mental illness because the people with mental illness that they are aware of have to have compensating qualities in order to be noticed, achieve notable things, and/or lead anything near a normal life. But the ones that don't, are essentially invisible or easily dismissed (criminals, homeless, not working, etc). It doesn't matter if you're a genius or not, you'd be better off not dragging around a ball and chain.
Btw, not advocating those behaviours nor trying to spot geniuses. Can't identify a genius except by his record of creative achievement (as judged by workers in his field).
It's called the autism spectrum. These are not features.
Source: on it.