Arjun Khemani

My conversation with David Deutsch.

We talk about free-will, Taking Children Seriously, anarcho-capitalism, and much more.

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All grades on my report card reflected cooperation, not intelligence.

*Happy Earth Day.

Had Copernicus not gone against the Roman Catholic Church and Kepler not followed in his footsteps, you wouldn’t be able to do something as simple as a web search for the picture of the Earth.

“Why are you working on Sunday?”

> Why do you assume this is work?

“One who makes no mistakes makes nothing at all.”

― Giacomo Casanova

No one discovers anything by being obedient.

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Fun fact: Orville Wright never even completed high school and Wilbur Wright was posthumously awarded his high school diploma on his 127th birthday!

In contrast, the government’s tendency to place its faith in the “expert” is seldom a good strategy.

10/10

The free market is simply a superior playground from which to have all those failures since no single individual possesses sufficient knowledge to be the sole source of solutions.

9/10

No, the free market does not invariably succeed and government subsidies don’t always fail. But the reality is that innovation involves a lot of trial and error. It requires setbacks, failures, and mistakes. And the ability to correct them.

8/10

This story illustrates an interesting competition between government subsidies and the free market as the true source of innovation.

7/10

Nine days after Langley’s second attempt, the Wright brothers made history by managing four successful flights near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

6/10

On its first flight attempt, the Aerodrome failed to fly and dropped into the Potomac River immediately after launch. The scene repeated on its second attempt a couple months later. This time, the pilot very nearly drowned in the river.

5/10

Langley spent $70,000 (over 2 million dollars in today’s dollars) of grant money from the the U.S. War Department and the Smithsonian to develop this piloted airplane, which he called the “Aerodrome”.

4/10

At the same time that the Wright brothers were designing and testing their flying machine, professor Samuel P. Langley, one of the most highly regarded American scientists of that time and secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, was also designing his.

3/10

Neither of the brothers who invented the airplane went to college. The Wright Flyer—the first legitimate airplane—cost the brothers less than $1,000 (about $28,000 in today’s dollars) to construct, which they earned through profits from their bicycle business.

2/10

A narrative on the true source of innovation:

1/10

The popularity of an idea is not a proof of its truth.

i think i’ll just start posting stuff for real. and see where it leads.

how does this work?

yo!