Leader of the Martians

It’s not his fault, but it’s annoying how people now use “performative” all the time to mean “just for show” instead of the correct meaning “something that is done by the speech act.” When the judge says “guilty!” it is performative in the second sense, but not the first!

I'm always surprised to read how many great minds served in WWII. Granted most of them didn't see combat, but their lives took a drastic change. Here is a guy living a quiet life teaching philosophy at Oxford and all of a sudden in charge of planning the D-Day invasion...? That sounds wild to me.

For Nagel it appears to have been a positive factor:

"Rowe contends that his war experience had a profound effect on his personality and his approach to the subject. Before the war, he had been a guarded and solitary scholar. Now he was ‘much more openly ambitious: he had enjoyed having power and influence in the army, and he now wanted power and influence in his civilian career.’"

Maybe it was common in those days to sacrifice for the common good. Not to be that guy, but these days it feels like most people are far too self-absorbed to set aside their own ambitions for an ideology, perhaps myself included. I can't envision today's intelligentsia (influencer-istas) laboring over military documents and making government salary. "How do I monetize this" would probably be most people's first thought.

Maybe I'm just salty today.

I assumed until reading the article that it was about "The Martians" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)>, the Hungarian Jewish emigres that included Teller, von Neumann, Erdos, and Szilard.

(I think some ridiculously high portion of them attended the same high school in Hungary.)

Good essay on the philosopher John Austin, not what you would expect from the rather silly title (the reason for it is explained in the piece).