Serious Students vs. Degenerate Objectivists

[George H. Smith]

"And then either to be satisfied with 80% rather than 100% - or to make ... and sometimes believe ... some sort of excuse or rationalization or have some sort of defense mechanism about it. " ===>

A. Defense Mechanisms:

PLAYING DUMB -- Post #2, Mikee: "What is your purpose in making these observations?"

PHONY, EXAGGERATED, OR FALSE COMPARISONS -- Post #3, MSK: (A) "I wasn't too good at church...find a prophet to follow". (B) "someone will suggest excommunications and witch hunts."

B. Logical Errors or Excuses/Rationalizations:

FALSE ALTERNATIVE -- Post #3, MSK: "I'll take a person who thinks and chooses for himself...over a person who tries to fit his life into a set of rules designed by another person"

SUBSTITUTING A DIFFERENT CONTEXT -- Post #4, Shayne: "I was trying to think of what the professor would be saying next and why...[while others were] wasting their time taking notes"

UNWARRANTED HYPOTHESIS/PSYCHOLOGIZING -- Post #5, Shayne: "note-taking friends' problem is that they didn't really trust their own mind's ability to understand"

FALSE UNDERSTANDING OF NOTE-TAKING -- Post #5, Shayne: "focus more on understanding, and less on being a recorder...[don't] regurgitate."

C. Willful or "Humorous" or Psychologizing/Insulting Distortions:

WILLFULLY SARCASTIC DISTORTION OF NOTE-TAKING -- Post #6, George H. Smith: humorous video making fun of guy who takes notes on picky, stupid, inappropriate or 'social metaphysical' stuff.

PSYCHOLOGIZING ABOUT MOTIVES -- Post #7, "Ninth Doctor": "It’s his way of asserting his superiority."

PSYCHOLOGIZING ABOUT MOTIVES -- Post #8, George H. Smith: humorous video making fun of an animal who tries to puff up his own importance.

. . .Conclusion: Why am I not surprised at all these ways of twisting, dodging, sliming and insulting the messenger, saying anything to not have to admit a single one of the points I made from this group of hostile clowns (GHS, ND) and unclear or 'defensive' thinkers (MSK, Shayne)?

Hmm...Does the shoe pinch too tightly? :-)

Defense mechanisms to not allow into consciousness something truthful but unpleasant???

Reality is the only "defense mechanism" that one needs to deal with your rambling, childish, egomaniacal post. Do you actually think about this stuff before you write it, or does it spill out spontaneously from your brain when you are feeling especially passive-aggressive?

Ghs

[merjet]

Phil conflates two things in post #1 -- taking notes and doing one's homework. He obviously believes his method of furiously taking notes is superior. Maybe and maybe not. Suppose the lecture follows textbook material that one can read later (maybe even already read) or is being recorded and can be read/watched later. There are good substitutes for furiously taking notes.

The other case where furiously taking notes might appear to be advantageous is when the aforementioned substitutes don't exist. Even here there is a good alternative to writing/typing and trying a near verbatim transcript of what the lecturer says. That is taking less copious notes, but ones that essentialize what the lecturer says.

Suppose you have not attended a lecture and have the chance to read the notes of two people who did -- one a furious note-taker and the other a good essentializer. Which notes would you rather read? Obviously a furious note-taker has less time to think about essentializing.

[George H. Smith]

I have never been able to take notes if my life depended on it, and can't read them if I did.

First, having a highly unreliable memory, and then a short and unpredictable attention span, I had to also focus intently (called "hyperfocus" in ADHD parlance) to go straight to central principles, and quickly absorb them before dreaminess sets in.

It has its merits - the principles 'stick', and then one has to do plenty of follow up thinking to expand them - but I wouldn't recommend it unless there were no other way.

The advisability of taking notes depends on the person, the situation, the subject, and the teacher. I always got A's in math classes, but I never took notes because the textbooks covered the same material as the teacher. I usually didn't take notes in college courses, except to jot down topics that I thought might be included in a test. One exception was three classes on the history of science. The professor had invested a lot of time in course preparation, and he read his lectures, which were well organized and very "meaty." I took detailed notes because I didn't think I could get the same material from other sources. I wanted the information for my own purposes, but it turns out that I never consulted them. I read more books instead.

During the seven years that I taught my Fundamentals of Reasoning courses, I specifically instructed participants not to take notes. I did this because note-taking can sometimes prove distracting, and I wanted people to focus on what was going on in class.

During the late sixties, Xerox copies of detailed notes of Peikoff's course on Objectivism's Theory of Knowledge (I don't know who took them) were floating around, and I found them useful, since I didn't have access to the lectures themselves. Had I heard the lectures first-hand, I probably would have taken my own notes, since the material was not then available in print. But things have changed since then.

As for books, I always make marginal notations for future reference, but these merely call attention to significant passages or to passages that I may want to quote later on when writing an article or book. Some people find this procedure helpful, and some do not. To lay down rules, as Phil does, and then to attribute "degenerate" Objectivism to a failure to follow these rules is typical self-serving, anal-retentive B.S. by Phil.

Your policy of focusing on essentials, rather than taking notes, is excellent advice for everyone, especially in the field of philosophy. Once you understand the essentials of a given philosophy, you can often reconstruct the corrolaries and other details from the premises. This is not always possible, of course, but if a lecture consists of more than a laundry list of indiscriminate details, if it explains instead what a philosopher was attempting to do and how he went about it, then listeners are better off putting down their pens and pencils and focusing on the lecture itself.

The same is often true of books. I have become so habituated to making marginal notations, which require frequent pauses, that I sometimes need to tell myself to stop and first read an entire section or chapter without any distractions. To section off or emphasize a specific passage before understanding the overall perspective of a philosopher can sometimes generate a misleading impression of his views.

Ghs

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

One thing's for sure.

We're talking about Phil again, with a hot-button issue embedded in something totally nonessential.

It's almost as if this is by design.

Actually, come to think of it, I'm sure it is by design.

Michael

[Jonathan]

And after a summer seminar, when our Oist club tried to have people give little mini-summaries of the lectures or courses which most impressed them, pretty universally they didn't remember very much and what they told us was on the order of "It was good". Or a one-liner like: "He advocated X and denounced Y."

I've seen the same type of thing here on OL. For example, there's this one person, let's call him "Shitstain," who sometimes intrudes on conversations and makes idiotic comments and judgments while not having read or properly paid attention to the posts. I wish he'd take notes. Shitstain "pretty universally" doesn't remember very much of what's been discussed, but "psychologizes" and gives all sorts of advice anyway. It's embarrassing.

I'd define a "degenerate Objectivist" not as someone who is morally degenerate but as someone who has over the years or decades slipped away or distanced himself from the true aspects of this philosophy or from making the effort to continually rigorously apply it.

When you say that certain people don't "continually rigorously" apply Objectivism, are you talking about people like, say, Peikoff, for example? If so, I know what you mean. He really does "slip" a lot and "distance himself" from Objectivism with some of the ridiculous crap that he says and does. Do you think that the problem is that he wasn't diligently taking notes while teaching courses in Objectivism?

It's not a moral issue, because it can just be a mistake. (Ron was a hard working guy. Like me he got into an Ivy League college. He worked is ass off, I suspect and became a doctor. Ron actually thought he understood the geometry chapter after doing half of the homework assignment. He didn't. Not fully. Not in the thorough way I always did in my math classes.)

Ron may have failed to understand the subjects that he was studying, but I've thoroughly grasped many subjects without taking notes. I've often taken courses where I've thought of solutions to problems that the teacher (or the writers of the course's textbook) hadn't been aware of, all while lesser minds were taking notes and not fully comprehending the material.

It's hard to do a scientific study, but there seems to be a correlation between those who have slipped away from Oism -- either in terms of a) living their lives according to it -or- b) considering themselves Oists in philosophical fundamentals and those who didn't take all those courses, read and take notes on every single book, or put that much effort into getting 100% mastery of every issue, application, or wrinkle.

I think that in many cases, those who have "slipped away from Objectivism" have done so not because they've failed to study and take notes as well as you have, Phil (btw, congratulations on being so proud of how good you are at taking notes), but because they've done something that you haven't, which is to study ideas outside of Objectivism. When they read other thinkers (and take notes while doing so!), they recognize that Objectivism doesn't have all of the answers that it claims to have.

The natural human tendency is to slack off after doing the first 6 or 7 problems at the end of the math chapter.

I think the natural human tendency is to stop doing classroom or textbook exercises when one has successfully grasped the material. It's an issue of natural efficiency and the fact that not all people think alike or have the same learning needs or styles. How many problems at the end of a math chapter are the proper amount of problems?

And then either to be satisfied with 80% rather than 100% - or to make ... and sometimes believe ... some sort of excuse or rationalization or have some sort of defense mechanism about it.

I've always preferred to go beyond 100%, and to discover new territory that teachers hadn't thought of. And it's always sad to see the intellectually slow people plodding along, diligently taking their little notes, and only getting 100%. How can they stand being inferior like that?

J

[sjw]

Interesting, sounds familiar.

I have never been able to take notes if my life depended on it, and can't read them if I did.

First, having a highly unreliable memory, and then a short and unpredictable attention span, I had to also focus intently (called "hyperfocus" in ADHD parlance) to go straight to central principles, and quickly absorb them before dreaminess sets in.

It has its merits - the principles 'stick', and then one has to do plenty of follow up thinking to expand them - but I wouldn't recommend it unless there were no other way.

Tony

While my memory is not unreliable in the sense of remembering wrongly (and perhaps that's not what you meant), my memory is not very good in the sense of simply not remembering certain details. But when I do remember my memory quite reliable. (Some people seem to have a "good memory" when really they're good at fabricating memories).

Ever since I was very young I had a disdain for memory-oriented learning and instead preferred principle-oriented learning -- if I can predict or derive then I don't need to remember. This is partly why I tended toward science/engineering. I don't know whether the disdain caused a somewhat poor skill at remembering details, or whether the poor skill at remembering details caused the disdain.

George obviously has an extremely good memory for details, so perhaps he can offer insight as to how that developed.

I don't have a short attention span per se but if the subject is not interesting then I'd rather daydream. Perhaps you too didn't have a short attention span but simply weren't interested in the subject being taught. I had a particular "problem" in elementary school of not listening to the teachers and would get in trouble for it quite often. In kindergarten, one teacher thought I was mentally deficient, so they brought in a psychologist, who concluded that I was smarter than the teacher and simply bored with what she was saying and therefore didn't listen.

Shayne

[George H. Smith]

George obviously has an extremely good memory for details, so perhaps he can offer insight as to how that developed.

My memory may be a little above average, at best. In some areas, such as recalling the names of people I have met, it is abysmal. In other areas, such as recalling books and their contents, it is very good. Why the difference? Because I generally find books more interesting than people. If I can interest myself in a topic, then I can generate a natural enthusiasm that brings a good memory in its wake.

There is a problem, however. Over a span of 45 years, I have read so much in such a wide variety of topics that it is nearly impossible to recall all relevant details except in the area in which I am currently working. This is why I make a point of owning a "core library" on every subject that interests me, and why I mark in books so heavily. When a topic comes up that I haven't considered for a long time, I have the tools at hand to revive memories of work that I did years ago. I can usually do this in a day or so. Detailed memories are stored in the subconscious, and it is a matter of enticing them to rise to the surface.

OLers will know that I frequently post excerpts and fragments from unpublished essays. I have written literally hundreds of these unpublished essays, some of which are more polished than others. I will typically write such an essay when I feel that I have sufficiently mastered a topic to say something significant about it. Then I will move on to something else. These informal essays become very useful years later, when I wish to return to the topic, because they present my best judgment about that topic when my research and reading of that topic were at their peak.

While going through thousands of old files in order to weed out personal information for my Files Project Discs (something I advertised on OL a long time ago), I am often surprised by what I find -- many dozens of mini-essays that I had completely forgotten about. Some of these are surprisingly well-worked out and read like final drafts. Others, in contrast, consist of "brainstorming," so their value to me today is more limited.

In short, I have known since my teenage years that my memory is nothing special, so I consciously developed compensatory techniques. Most of them have worked pretty well, at least in the academic area. I still have a terrible time with names. I have tried various mnemonic methods over the years -- I have even read a few books on the subject, including some stuff by Harry Lorayne, a remarkable magician and memory expert, during my teenage years (when I was an amateur magician) -- but nothing has worked.

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

Speaking of a "core library" -- I am often asked to recommend books on American history. If we are talking about pre-20th century American history, I recommend almost any volume in the "The New American Nation" series, many of which were published in the 1950s and are available as Harper Torchbooks. (Murray Rothbard also liked and recommended this series.)

In particular, I recommend The Coming of the Revolution 1763-1775, by Lawrence Henry Gipson (an expert on British colonial policy); The American Revolution 1775-1783, by John Richard Alden (one of the best general treatments ever written); The Cultural Life of the New Nation 1776-1830, by Russell B. Nye; The Growth of Southern Civilization 1790-1860 (a more sympathetic account than would probably be written today); and The Impending Crisis 1841-1861, by David M. Potter (a superb narrative of the many conflicts that eventually erupted in the Civil War).

Also excellent are a number of volumes in the more recent series, "The Oxford History of the United States." The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution 1763-1789 is superb, as is Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, by James M. McPherson. I recently read another volume in this series, What God Hath Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848 (2007), by Daniel Walker Howe, and I recommend this book as well. The period of time covered in this latter book is difficult to treat fairly -- the Jacksonian era is especially controversial -- but Howe does a good job. If you have bought into the Rothbardian BS about how great a president Jackson supposedly was (owing to his opposition to the Second Bank of the United States), then Howe may change your opinion.

Ghs

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Here is a memory "sticky" technique I have used with success that I learned from Internet marketing studies, but I don't know how well it would work for something like history.

When you are reading or going through an audio or video and a new fact comes up, you pause, then imagine applying that fact to something you can use if for in your life, especially something important. Visualize it.

Later, when you are in such a situation (or a related one), or if someone asks you a related question, the theory is that your subconscious just serves up the fact all by itself.

That's actually the way it works with me. I have gotten good results with this method.

You can't use it at a live lecture too well, though.

I suspect this method has a lot to do with George's memory, especially due to his habit of writing mini-essays for himself. I see this habit as a variation of imagining how to use new facts for pursuits important to you.

Michael

[Philip Coates]

> years of trying to make Objectivism work regarding psychological, social and political reality, but I didn't get there studying Objectivism the way you are championing, but by taking in the whole world in-so-far as I could regarding human being and trying to make all work regarding what I regarded as right and true philosophy, whatever that philosophy might turn out to be. I'm still working on this.

Brant, nothing I wrote suggested that one shouldn't do this. I think people shouldn't -stop- with Objectivism but should master it and then integrate it with a wide range or other knowledge and experience. And they should challenge and question each point along the way until they've 'proven' Objectivism to themselves. And applied it, including - especially- to their own lives.

My problem with the Orthodox Oists is they largely never go enough outside of Objectivism and learn about the wide world of other issues.

My problem is with the Neo-Objectivists and people who tend to populate Objectivist Living are good examples is they largely never fully master it. Or try to apply it fully to their lives.

> I have never been able to take notes if my life depended on it, and can't read them if I did. [Tony]

I certainly wouldn't say that is the only way to master the material from a lecture.

> Phil conflates two things in post #1 -- taking notes and doing one's homework. [Merlin]

It was just an example: but the proof that it helps is that those of us who took notes were able to reconstruct some of the key points of the summer conference lectures at the community club "recap" meetings amonth later. If you don't take notes or don't replay the tape, especially in a conference where so much is going on, you tend to forget much of it.'

Just as an experiment, get one of the more meaty Peikoff lectures and try it out. See how much more it helps you retain. This assumes that you are skilled at note-taking without it distracting you.

> Obviously a furious note-taker has less time to think about essentializing. [Merlin]

I wouldn't want anyone to accuse me of immodesty, but I'm pretty good at it. It actually helps me essentialize later on. Especially when I go back over the notes. I tend to write down too much rather than too little. the virtue of that is that you can go back and underline or highlight the important stuff.

With Peikoff, talking a mile a minute, it was often the "non-essential", the telling example which had greatest values. Especially if I already knew the basic principle. The devil is in the details, especially in Objectivism, very often.

> I judge [Phil] to be religious about Objectivism.

Nope.

> Ron may have failed to understand the subjects that he was studying, but I've thoroughly grasped many subjects without taking notes. [Jonathan]

You misread my post. My point about Ron was not that he didn't take notes in Geometry class (wouldn't have been necessary - it was all in the textbook, which is not true of Objectivism). It was that he didn't do the homework.

> I think the natural human tendency is to stop doing classroom or textbook exercises when one has successfully grasped the material. [Jonathan]

I think the natural human tendency is to think one has successfully grasped the material when one is at the eighty percent level rather than the ninety-nine percent level.

[Philip Coates]

> Here is a memory "sticky" technique ...When you are reading or going through an audio or video and a new fact comes up, you pause, then imagine applying that fact to something you can use if for in your life, especially something important....I don't know how well it would work for something like history. [MSK]

Yes, that's a very useful technique!

Here's how something similar works well for history:

--Connect it to something parallel happening today (the growth of government, how a leader acquired power)

--Think of how the historical event developed out of the previous events and might have been different if they had changed (the logical stages in the rise of the golden age of Greece, or the decline and fall of the Roman Empire)

--Contrast it with how things developed in another era or part of the world (e.g., contrast Latin American colonial history with American)

--Connect it to lessons that can be drawn in areas that interest you (how the impact or spread of Objectivism differs from that of Christianity or the decline and rise of Aristotle)

Each of these types of connection has helped me a lot in my history reading and recall. History has way too much detail to retain all of it and this 'assist' is necessary. The last case is similar to MSK's 'personal usefulness' example.

In each case, you remember something better by an act of -integration-. By connecting it to something so it resides in more than one place in your mind and is thus richer. Any sort of "connection" usually does this.

Someone mentioned having difficulty remembering names. One can often use "connection" for such purposes: Sally is always talking and venturing opinions on every topic. I can better remember her name by connecting it to the phase "sally forth".

[Philip Coates]

> You can't use [connecting to other issues] at a live lecture too well, though. [MSK]

No. There's not enough time.

But if you've taken notes, then you can go back and process the material again and make a whole new set of connections.

[william.scherk]

It strikes me odd that the initial analogy was "look at studying Objectivism as if it were Mathematics." This hidden premise is faulty, not applicable, so any conclusion seems a case of petitio principii ...

[George H. Smith]

My problem is with the Neo-Objectivists and people who tend to populate Objectivist Living are good examples is they largely never fully master it.

And just how do you know this, Phil? A number of "Neo-Objectivists" on OL have shown a greater understanding of O'ism than you ever have. The fact that they may disagree with parts of O'ism frequently shows independent thinking -- something you noticeably lack -- not some kind of degeneracy.

You speak of the O'ist canon as many Christians speak of the Bible. After all, if you have not read the entire Bible, studied it in detail, and taken notes during Bible Study classes, then how can you possibly say it is not the word of God? In addition and per your advice, read supplementary books, by all means, but only after you have mastered the Bible. I think you will find that people who follow these guidelines are the most devout Christians, whereas those who do not are more likely to become degenerate Christians. Whoop-de-do.

How you manage to exclude even a modicum of common sense from so many of your posts is nothing short of amazing.

Ghs

[sjw]

I think the most relevant question for Phil is: Just what have you done with your deep knowledge of Objectivism? What have you created?

And I used to wonder why there was so much "Phil hate" around here. But I don't hate Phil, he's too pathetic.

Shayne

[George H. Smith]

Someone mentioned having difficulty remembering names. One can often use "connection" for such purposes: Sally is always talking and venturing opinions on every topic. I can better remember her name by connecting it to the phase "sally forth".

Let's try this method with your name....

You are full of hot air, or gas. When I think of gas, I think of what my father used to say at gas stations, "Fill 'er up." Fill=Phil.

Hey, that might work!

Ghs

[sjw]

Phil missed his calling. He should have been an ARI philosopher.

Shayne

[anthony]

Your policy of focusing on essentials, rather than taking notes, is excellent advice for everyone, especially in the field of philosophy. Once you understand the essentials of a given philosophy, you can often reconstruct the corrolaries and other details from the premises. This is not always possible, of course, but if a lecture consists of more than a laundry list of indiscriminate details, if it explains instead what a philosopher was attempting to do and how he went about it, then listeners are better off putting down their pens and pencils and focusing on the lecture itself. Ghs

My policy? If only that it were so, Ghs, but thank you. No, I had little choice in the matter, I'm afraid.

Otherwise, you have accurately depicted the process I knew so well: from essentials to corollaries to details.

Anything else would make me mad with boredom. ( Boredom, that I thought for ages was the root cause of my condition, only to find out that it was an effect.)

Tony

[Xray]

It's hard to do a scientific study, but there seems to be a correlation between those who have slipped away from Oism -- either in terms of a) living their lives according to it -or- b) considering themselves Oists in philosophical fundamentals and those who didn't take all those courses, read and take notes on every single book, or put that much effort into getting 100% mastery of every issue, application, or wrinkle.

This is a typical argumentation of a closed-system advocate: it rest is on the implicit premise that the philosophical system advocated is flawless and that it takes a 100 percent effort to fully grasp its 'sublimeness' ...

[Xray]

Here's another passage that reveals "closed and infallible system" thinking:

[Phil]: I'd define a "degenerate Objectivist" not as someone who is morally degenerate but as someone who has over the years or decades slipped away or distanced himself from the true aspects of this philosophy or from making the effort to continually rigorously apply it. It's not a moral issue, because it can just be a mistake.

Translated:

'Since nothing in the advocated philosophical system itself can be wrong, it follows that all those who have 'slipped away' or have 'distanced themselves' from it (completely or in parts), must be the ones who are wong then. '

[syrakusos]

While they were furiously taking notes, I was listening and thinking. ...

Phil's self-congratulations aside, Shayne's post reflects an interesiting set of circumstances.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education online:

"If single-minded attention is vital to learning, how far should college instructors go to protect their students from distraction? Should laptops be barred at the classroom door?

One prominent scholar of attention is prepared to go even further than that.

"I'm teaching a class of first-year students," says David E. Meyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. "This might well have been the very first class they walked into in their college careers. I handed out a sheet that said, 'Thou shalt have no electronic devices in the classroom.' ... I don't want to see students with their computers out, because you know they're surfing the Web. I don't want to see them taking notes. I want to see them paying attention to me."

Wait a minute. No notes? Does that include pen-and-paper note-taking?

"Yes, I don't want that going on either," Meyer says. "I think with the media that are now available, it makes more sense for the professor to distribute the material that seems absolutely crucial either after the fact or before the fact. Or you can record the lecture and make that available for the students to review. If you want to create the best environment for learning, I think it's best to have students listening to you and to each other in a rapt fashion. If they start taking notes, they're going to miss something you say." [See here on the divided attention of note-takers. MEM]

The very existence of different learning styles is now being questioned (see abstract here). But clearly, different people develop different learning habits. I am a note-taker. But that can range from verbatim scribbling to jotting some words to look up later. Unlike SJW, I do not attempt to guess what will come next. I have a willing suspension of disbelief. I also have an active bullshit detector. Mathematics and science are different from history and philosophy. It is not likely that the math prof is going to slip one past you because he has a vested interest in synthetic division ... But I have had more than a few professors in sociology whose axes to grind weighed them down as they trudged through the halls. And. in fact, my instructor for symbolic logic was a committed rationalist: she was sure that A is A. but not certain that the sun would rise tomorrow.

On my other blog, "CSI:Flint" I offer this yarn, just to say that ethical problems are difficult.

Long ago, in a physics class, the professor got tired of answering homework questions. Students would raise their hands and ask, "How do you do Number 6?" .... "I couldn't get the answer in the back of the book for Number 7?"... "What equation do you use for Number 3?" ... Finally, he stopped. He said that any of us would go out in the backyard and shoot hoops for 45 minutes, not make even one basket, and still claim to have had a good time. "How long did you spend working the problem?" he asked. "What methods - how many methods - did you try?" So it is with morality and ethics.

http://csiflint2011.blogspot.com/

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

And I used to wonder why there was so much "Phil hate" around here.

Shayne,

I don't hate Phil.

I like him.

He just says some really stupid things sometimes to call attention to himself. He has developed this routine and honed it on online forums over years. He can't get positive attention, so he has learned how to get a guaranteed fix of negative attention when the Jones hits

I long for the day when I will be able to tell Phil, "Well done."

I really do.

He's got good stuff in him, but he's got this needy craving for attention that mucks up his communication all the time.

Michael

[syrakusos]

Your policy of focusing on essentials, rather than taking notes, is excellent advice for everyone, especially in the field of philosophy. Once you understand the essentials of a given philosophy, you can often reconstruct the corrolaries and other details from the premises. This is not always possible, of course, but if a lecture consists of more than a laundry list of indiscriminate details, if it explains instead what a philosopher was attempting to do and how he went about it, then listeners are better off putting down their pens and pencils and focusing on the lecture itself.

Yeah, I am not so sure, GHS... Andrew Wyles proved Fermat's Last Theorem over three days to an audience that finally included the science editors of the major media... then, after the peers reviewed it, he had to do it all over again. It took him two years with reams of white paper and cups of Number 2 pencils.

How a proponent or advocate leaps nimbly from one empircal rock to the next rational shallow while crossing the stream he created may remain to be seen. You can derive whatever you want from the premises. You might end up on a different shore.

[Philip Coates]

> You speak of the O'ist canon as many Christians speak of the Bible.

George characterizes with his usual willful stupidity and distortion.

But he's not alone - he's joined by the usual group of clowns...and Degenerate Objectivists.

[Philip Coates]

> The fact that they may disagree with parts of O'ism frequently shows independent thinking. [GHS]

And what would be the strongest example of the errors in O'ism that their independent thinking has managed to uncover?

.

.

.

> you manage to exclude even a modicum of common sense from so many of your posts...Do you actually think about this stuff before you write it [GHS]

By the way shithead, are you ever going to repay the $100 you owe me?