Darrell Hougen

Wolf, Just to be clear, I'm not saying anything about the abilities of individuals though men are clearly stronger on average among other things. I'm talking about the ability of the two sexes to cooperate. As to your list of scientists, only Marie Curie and Ada Lovelace stand out. I'll add another to the list: Margaret Hamilton was an early programmer and her team was responsible for writing the Apollo mission guidance software. But, that doesn't alter my basic point. There have been numerous successful companies that were primarily or exclusively staffed by men. Most armies have been exclusively run by men. Nation states have been primarily governed by men. Part of the success of men is clearly a result of the fact that men are bigger, stronger, and faster than women on average, but my point is that a huge part of their success is in their greater ability and willingness to cooperate. Women are able to fit into and even take charge of an organization that is staffed with a sufficient percentage of men, but most women seem incapable of putting aside their competitive nature long enough to make an organization successful on their own. Darrell

Hi Greg, I started to reply to your comment, but I decided, instead to start a completely new thread. My post is a response to your comment about the feminization of America. Darrell

There was an interesting article recently by a woman who attempted to start an all female production company. That was her utopian dream. Unfortunately for her, it turned into a nightmare. In my view her failure stands as an object lesson. One should not, of course, jump to conclusions based on a single example. Perhaps the women that worked at the author's company were unusual in some way. Perhaps they were mostly young and immature, though their ages are not given in the article. However, it seems to me that it highlights a feature of the female personality that is often ignored. Women are generally not as cooperative as men. That simple fact has far reaching consequences. One of the features of the left that often attracts women is its calls for more cooperation. In fact, it is a staple of the left to claim (or hope) that a society can be built in which competition is eliminated and people are made to act in purely cooperative ways. So, winners and losers are eliminated from childhood games, at least those led by adults. It is often suggested that grades and grading be eliminated from schools and colleges. In fact, the whole communist/socialist package is based on the utopian notion that competition can and should be eliminated. How ironic it is then, the women seem to be so incapable of cooperating toward a common end. Women are often compared to cats while men are compared to dogs. What are the differences between cats and dogs? Generally, cats go their own way and do their own thing. Dogs (or wolves) cooperate to hunt and are known for their loyalty. Ok, female lions also cooperate so the analogy is not perfect. Still, everyone knows the impossibility of "herding cats." Perhaps it is the fact that women are so constantly in competition with each other that causes them to crave more cooperation. However, if the article is any indication, women need men for more than mere companionship. They need men for their very survival. The women in the article, if left to their own devices, would undoubtedly starve to death in the span of a few years. This is not to say anything about anyone's individual talents or abilities. Women tend to be more talented than men in some respects and less in others. But, survival for a single, lone individual is difficult. It is the capacity for large scale cooperation that makes society and civilization possible. One might argue that these characteristics are not features of all women. There certainly have been remarkable women. Ayn Rand comes to mind. However, Rand's life is not necessarily a rebuke to my argument. Indeed, even she fits the mold. She achieved success largely on her own. She was a loner in many respects. Her most loyal students, followers, and defenders were men. Of course, there have also been famous heads of state that were women: Queen Elizabeth, Catherine the Great, Margaret Thatcher. But again, such women were surrounded by loyal supporters and those supporters were mostly men. It is impossible to know whether they could have achieved greatness without a cooperative base of men. In short, if the world were devoid of men --- if women were somehow able to reproduce without men --- would the sisterhood be able to survive? If the article is any indication, the answer is a resounding, "No!" Darrell

It will be interesting to see whether Canada resumes its attacks on freedom of speech: Darrell

Well, you know Michael, us rubes need to be reeducated. It would be a lot easier if they could reeducate us all in one place. Perhaps, they could open up a reeducation camp ... oh wait ... So, I don't know all the details of this story, but it sounds like the Missouri University System President is guilty of not speaking up quickly enough or forcefully enough against racism. I saw a little of his resignation speech where he appeared to humiliate himself by taking full responsibility for all of the racism on campus because, of course, people who don't jump to the PC bandwagon fast enough are as guilty as the actual perpetrators, at least in the twisted minds of the Cultural Marxists. This is starting to remind me of the Cultural Revolution in China. How many more people that are insufficiently PC will be forced to humiliate themselves before this is over? Darrell

Happy Birthday!!! This thread keeps attracting new posts about once a year. I wonder why that is... Darrell

Happy Birthday!!!

I have to admit I like reading Mark Steyn's columns. I read them virtually every day. It sounds like a United passenger was also a big Steyn fan. Unfortunately for him, he was surprised to find that of all the websites he was able to access while flying on United, he was not able to access Steyn's rather innocuous little site. Since when have businesses been so politically correct that they won't allow their customers to read material with which the business owners disagree? Imagine staying in a hotel and not being able to access conservative, libertarian, or objectivist websites using the hotel WIFI. I'm not saying the business doesn't have a right to do such things, but I'll certainly be boycotting those that do. The article linked here describes this particular patron's experience at the end of the article. Darrell

I sincerely hope that sites such as this survive. As Stephen noted above, sites like this are searchable. Facebook really isn't. Many of the discussions on here have been pretty informal and probably aren't worth saving, but there have been some serious discussions of philosophical topics with a lot of high quality contributions that should be preserved. Sites like this are conducive to ongoing conversations. Facebook, in particular, has a way of ignoring contributions to old threads -- at least that is what I sense that it is doing. In my experience, if I write a reply to an old thread, no one ever responds to my post. That makes me think that they never see it. It could be that the typical Facebook user thinks that the conversation is dead and doesn't want to continue the discussion, but one way or the other, it makes it difficult to have a serious discussion on such a forum. Serious replies sometimes take several days or weeks, especially for people with busy schedules involving work and family. Sites like this are accessible at work. Although people are posting links to increasing numbers of videos that are difficult to watch at work, the basic thread of a serious conversation can be followed. Sites like Facebook are swamped with ads and other high bandwidth media that are frowned upon at a place of work. Being accessible at work is a big plus for me because my wife wants my attention when I'm at home and doesn't understand my penchant for philosophizing. At the office, I can take a little break from what I'm doing and read an interesting discussion on a site like this. Anyway, I appreciate people like Michael Stuart Kelly who take time to run "Objectivist Living" and sites like it.

Marcus, There is a distinction within Objectivism between basic sensory responses of pleasure and pain, and cognitive responses of joy and suffering. Our pleasure and pain responses are innate. They result from the stimulation of nerve endings in a particular way. We have no choice about our experience of sensory pleasure or pain and Objectivism doesn't claim that we do. Sex, at the most basic level leads to pleasure at a sensory level while hitting one's thumb with a hammer leads to pain. It is the fulfillment or loss of our values that lead to the emotional responses of joy and suffering. Values are held at a conceptual level and are the result of a process of reason. A man who holds his life as his standard of value, holds those things that are conducive to his life as valuable and those things that are destructive of it as disvalues. Thus, an immediate sensation of pleasure or pain is not as important as the long term consequences of his actions in relation to the attainment of his goals. A man may be willing to stay up late studying though that will cause him to experience tiredness, fatigue, and possible muscle, joint, and other forms of pain if it helps him to achieve his goal of learning as much as possible and graduating with a high GPA. He may also forego the opportunity to experience the pleasure of sex with a woman if that woman has no value to his long term goals of running a successful business and having bright, successful children. As for your last few points, they actually serve to undermine your original contention. You said that 80% of people are married or have been married by age 40. Yet, not everyone has been and it seems reasonable to guess that some of them have not been married because they do not value marriage highly. That is, those people have not chosen marriage as a value. Now, if a high percentage of people do get married, it may be because marriage is objectively valuable to most people. Although people aren't always reasonable --- certainly most people are not Objectivists --- people tend to do a pretty good job over time of determining what is valuable to them --- to their lives --- and a high percentage of them have concluded that marriage would be beneficial to them. In other words, marriage is not an innate value, but rather an objectively positive value for most people. That is why it is chosen with such high frequency. --- Darrell

Hey! Happy Birthday!!!

The Alberta Human Rights Commission is charging Ezra Levant with a crime for calling it "crazy". Canada's free speech protections are not as robust as those of the United States but perhaps they should be. Canada has previously criminalized "hate speech" though the law was mostly defanged a few years ago due to a case involving Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn. Now, the commisars have found another reason to harass Mr. Levant. You can read the full story here. You can sign a petition calling the AHRC all kinds of names here. I signed and I noticed that Ed Cline had signed. I'm not sure who else of note might have signed. Edit: I should add that although they're only looking for a thousand signatures, I think it would be great if tens of thousands of people signed. There is strength in numbers. If more people sign, it is harder to anti-free speech types to single out individuals for harassment. Darrell

I didn't know the GOP and the Democratic Party were one and the same. I mean, I've heard libertarians say that, but I was totally in the dark. Darrell

Hi Derek, You've sort of set yourself up by offering to answer questions about black culture, but here goes: 1. Why do 95% of black people vote Democratic? 2. Why is the murder rate among the black population so high? I haven't known a lot of black people in my life. There are a few at my place of work. Some computer programmers. One guy was in management but moved to another company. I got to talking to him a little one day and asked him if he had ever read Thomas Sowell, but he said he'd never heard of him. Darrell

Michael, Your daughter-in-law is very smart and very brave. Darrell

Again, you're trying to use a specific example and not looking at the expected payoff. For every Mao, there were 100 would-be Mao's that failed. You wrote, "I will simply assert, without proof at this point, that cheating, lying, stealing, murdering, etc., are never in a person's self interest." I cited Mao as a disproof. You responded with irrelevant statements about expected payoffs and failed would-be Maos. Yet Mao's life shows, among many other things, that at least one person in history did advance his career and build wealth and power through cheating, lying, stealing, murdering. It upends your bald assertion about crime never paying. And as for payoffs, for every successful actress in Hollywood there are a thousand would-be stars. But the existence of overwhelming numbers of failed hopefuls does nothing to prove the claim that being a successful actress is never in one's interest. Mao's life doesn't show anything. I don't know that much about Communist China, so let's talk about Stalin instead. Stalin lived well, but what happened to Lenin? What if Stalin had been Lenin? Lenin succumbed to his injuries after he was shot. What happened to Trotsky? He was murdered with an axe. What happened to Zinoviev? He was executed? What happened to Kamenev? He was executed too. What happened to Bukharin? He was executed. Most of the original members of Politburo and more than half of the members of the Central Committee were eventually executed or murdered. Most of them probably thought that they were important, just like Stalin. They probably thought they were little kings or nobles, just like Stalin. In the fight for power, someone is going to come out on top, but Stalin had no realistic way of knowing he would win, though he undoubtedly thought he would. History is replete with similar examples. Half the emperors of Rome died violent deaths. Half the emperors of the Eastern Roman empire met a similar fate. Many of the Merovingian rulers died violent deaths. I could go on. Between Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, Hitler met a violent end, so looked at that way, the odds of survival would only be 2/3 and I'm only counting people who already made it to the top. I'm sure Stalin's odds were much lower when he was first attempting to gain power. If Lenin (or any number of others) had realized what a power-hungry SOB Stalin was, they could have had him removed and possibly shot much sooner. Many people believe that Arron Burr was a power-hungry SOB. If he hadn't been widely discredited by killing Hamilton in a duel, he might have become President. As it was, the odds were against him and he never achieved power. Expected payoff absolutely is the issue. Individual examples of people that got lucky mean very little. People have survived going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, but I wouldn't recommend it. Same problem. For every person that succeeds as a sleazy politician, there are 100 that don't. And, even politicians have their limits. A lot of them end up going to jail. Look at the recent history of governors of Illinois. Me: Bill Clinton cheated, lied and stole, and now lives a comfortable life. You: There's a problem with your example because the governor of Illinois went to jail. Me: ??? You're giving examples of people that got lucky. I'm giving examples of people that didn't. The whole argument is over whether violating other people's rights is in a person's self interest, so you can't use that as a point of argument. I disagree that stealing a necklace is in a person's self interest. You described the prudent predator's behavior as unprincipled. I merely pointed out that the principles she adhered to happen not to be your particular principles. Something can't be a principle unless it is practiced virtually all the time. A person that stole constantly would soon be caught. Being honest doesn't require calculating the odds. Lying does. "Twaddle" being defined as any argument that you disagree with. Again, the issue is expected payoff, not the payoff in one instance. Hindsight is 20/20. (I guess, as a determinist, you know the outcome before there is one.) You wrote, "I will simply assert, without proof at this point, that cheating, lying, stealing, murdering, etc., are never in a person's self interest." If a person manages to increase her wealth and advance her self-interest through stealing, the expected payoff is irrelevant. It is the actual payoff that matters in my example of a successful thief. That example directly contradicts the claim that stealing is never in one's self-interest. Furthermore, it wasn't hindsight that told the thief that the owner of the necklace was demented, that there were no other witnesses in the house, that no one regularly checked on the contents of the jewelry box, or that other caregivers visited on other days of the week and thus obscured any particular leads for detectives. Your post is an example of a person clinging to a failed theory by claiming that reality must be in error. I'm afraid you're the one clinging to a failed theory. I know several investors who have done extremely well by picking winners and not blindly following the choices of a major fund. In any case it is the exceptions I'm talking about, and your claim did not admit exceptions: "I will simply assert, without proof at this point, that cheating, lying, stealing, murdering, etc., are never in a person's self interest." [my emphasis] Yes. The odds are against the liar, cheater, or thief. Would you assert that it is a good idea to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel because some people have done it successfully? What if someone offered a million dollars to anyone who was successful? Darrell

Again, you're trying to use a specific example and not looking at the expected payoff. For every Mao, there were 100 would-be Mao's that failed. Same problem. For every person that succeeds as a sleazy politician, there are 100 that don't. And, even politicians have their limits. A lot of them end up going to jail. Look at the recent history of governors of Illinois. The whole argument is over whether violating other people's rights is in a person's self interest, so you can't use that as a point of argument. I disagree that stealing a necklace is in a person's self interest. "Twaddle" being defined as any argument that you disagree with. Again, the issue is expected payoff, not the payoff in one instance. Hindsight is 20/20. (I guess, as a determinist, you know the outcome before there is one.) Actually, it might be instructive to look at the stock market. There are plenty of money managers out there trying to predict whether the market will go up or down. Some of them do quite well, but on average, they under perform the market averages. So, a better strategy is to buy and hold an index fund. The thief is like the money manager, trying to guess what will happen but under performing the average honest person. So, a better strategy is to be honest. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, but personal gain is not a good reason to be dishonest. People who are dishonest or violate people's rights in other ways tend, on average, to do less well in the long run. Darrell

Maybe because there is a fundamental difference between "possible outcome" and "outcome"? The first is in the future and the second is in the past. This is the determinism time travel fallacy I see all the time. Determinists imagine the characteristics of the future must be identical to those of the the past. Why? Just because. Simply untrue. I challenge you to cite one determinist who says "the characteristics of the future must be identical to those of the the past." To take such a position one would have to suppose that the world is is perfect stasis: that milk in the jug never reaches the glass, that trains never leave the station, that the moon is never less that full. Your straw men are invariably original, whimsical and entertaining. FF, Your insults are invariably original, whimsical and entertaining. You clearly didn't understand what Michael was saying. Go back and read it again. Darrell

Perhaps, I misstated my position initially, so allow me to be more clear. It is never in a person's self interest to live an unprincipled life. To the extent that your example works, it works only by severely limiting the time and place where there is a supposed benefit to being bad. Your argument is basically that a person can live an unprincipled life, being a liar, cheater, thief or brute whenever it is convenient, and being an upstanding citizen at other times. However, my argument is that it is impossible to simply turn the dark side on and off like a light switch, whenever it is convenient. Once a person has justified evil acts to himself, it becomes easier to do it the next time. And, each time he does it, it becomes easier still until the person has completely abandoned moral principles such as honesty, fairness, respect for property rights, and respect for the lives of others. Having abandoned such principles, a person is very likely to screw up at some point, get caught, and suffer the consequences. Back to the Germans: part of the reason for the death camps was that German soldiers didn't like and complained about having to shoot down scores of innocent people. The death camps were set up to relieve the typical soldier from the burden of having to murder people. So, it is not at all clear that members of the Wehrmacht were all amoral brutes. Most of them fought on the front lines in a war that they thought was just, having been convinced of as much by Hitler. I'm not evading the issue. You're just not understanding my point. My point is that it is difficult to live well without principles and a principled person wouldn't commit the crime. An isolated example of a person getting away with something doesn't prove anything. How do you know the thief didn't do it before and wouldn't do it again? Let's say the woman really did get away with $100,000 when her annual salary was only $20,000. That means the necklace was worth five years of her salary. If she worked for 40 years, from the time she was 20 till the time she was 60, the value of the necklace would be 12.5% of her lifetime earnings. Looked at in that light, it's not really that much. By the way, it is usually hard to sell or pawn stolen jewelry for anything close to its original value, so a million dollar necklace might only fetch the aforementioned $100,000. If the original value was only $100,000, its street value might only be $10,000 to $20,000, not several times the thief's annual income and probably something like 1-2% of her lifetime income. Now, this same woman, thinking that she had gotten ahead of the game by stealing the necklace, is likely to try to steal something again in the future. She managed to justify it to herself once, so what is to prevent her from doing it again? And, what are the odds that she will get away from it again? She got lucky (and your family was unlucky) in the case you cited because there were several caregivers over the course of several months. But, she had no way of knowing that would happen and no control over how many care givers there would be, so her odds of getting away with the crime were probably not that great. Actually, if you don't know who stole the necklace and haven't recovered it, how do you even know it was stolen? Perhaps, it was just lost. Also, how do you know she wasn't looking for opportunities to steal things? She might not have been at your relative's place very long, but it seems likely to me that she was a thief before she was hired and is probably still a thief. So, in all likelihood, she will trip up at some point and get caught. And, whether that particular woman is ever caught doesn't really matter because one has to look at the average across all women that engage in that kind of behavior to see what the cost/benefit equation tells you a priori. At any rate, I simply don't find your examples convincing. Darrell

FF, I've argued in other threads on OL that the world is not deterministic. It is tempting to think it is because it is only possible to predict the deterministic elements of some process. However, the notion that it is deterministic just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. I'd rather not repeat all of the arguments I've made before about the physics of deterministic systems, so let me just engage you in the following way: Would you not agree that the human world is more varied, richer, more complex than it was 100 years ago? What about 1000 years ago? What about 10,000? What about 4,000,000,000, years ago before the dawn of life? If the world were deterministic, where did all of this additional complexity come from? Was the existence of the amoeba implicit in the rocks that existed before there was life? Was the existence of the TV somehow implicit in the existence of single celled organisms that populated the earth for at least a billion years before multi-celled organisms came into existence? To me, it seems clear that there must be some source of variability outside of that which can be predicted. Without random permutations, there is simply no way to explain the continuous increase in variety and complexity that exist. BTW, if biological or environmental factors control human choices, what controls biological or environmental factors? Darrell

No problem. I realized that what I said the first time wasn't entirely clear. Darrell

I wonder how he decided that a 'one' meant that he should rape his neighbor. That sounds pretty random in and of itself. Actually, it sounds pretty nihilistic and/or just plain evil. Why couldn't a 'one' mean that he should bake cookies for his neighbor? Anyway, some people's minds are filled with garbage. Darrell

Not all of the kapos were criminals before the war. I do not know that even a majority were. Furthermore, given the economic collapse and widespread street violence that characterized German life after World War I, it is hardly a certainty that joining a criminal gang would not have been in one's self-interest, particularly for one of the millions of unemployed workers. You say, being a kapo would be "offset by the loss that one would expect to suffer both before and after the war by living one's entire life as an unprincipled brute." If by loss you mean regret or guilt, there is no reason to suppose that the men and women who served as prison functionaries instead of fodder for the crematoria suffered from any self-doubts. For a significant part of the population, empathy is an unfamiliar, even unknown emotion. I'm guessing that most of the kapos were criminals before the war given their predilection for violence. If the kapos had been nice guys, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Post war Germany had a lot of crime and unemployment, but a person wouldn't have known before the war which countries would go to war and who would win, so one has to weigh the cost of being an unprincipled person anywhere in the world with the benefit, if any, of being a criminal during or after the war in Germany. When I talk about the offsetting cost, I'm talking about the cost of being an unprincipled person. How well do criminals typically fare in a peaceful society? What is their average income? Setting aside for a moment whether drugs should be legalized or not, I've heard that the average person involved in the illegal drug trade in the U.S. makes about $20/day. Sure, there a few drug lords that make big bucks, but most of their stooges and secondary dealers make peanuts. It is also instructive to look at the odds that any given person will rise to the top of the heap and become a drug lord, because that is the calculation that one has to make going in. A person might be certain he will rise to the top, but wishful thinking doesn't get a person very far. For every tyrant, their are scores of want-to-be's that got cut off at the knees, somewhere along the line. People without principles typically don't do very well. You can probably put together an excellent statistical case against jewel thieves. No doubt the insurance industry has daunting figures on the percentage of thieves that go to prison. None of that is relevant to the case I described. Even supposing that statistically 99% of jewel thieves are caught, if caregiver A finds herself in a situation where there are no witnesses and the victim is incapable of distinguishing illusion from reality and there is no family member to regularly take inventory of valuables, caregiver A may correctly conclude that her chances are not 100 to 1 against, but 100 to 1 for success. And that tiny risk could be well justified by the possession of a necklace worth several times her annual income. Ah, but you're ignoring the cost of looking for such an opportunity. A person could wait 20 years --- she could wait for a lifetime --- for the perfect opportunity to come along, and all that time the person would have to keep looking for opportunities, wasting time and effort. A principled person wouldn't waste her time looking for opportunities to steal something and probably wouldn't even notice when the big opportunity came along because her eyes and her mind would be fixed on other things. In fact, she might have moved from caregiver for the elderly, to a position on the hospital oversight board while her small minded cousin was busy trying to find an opportunity to steal a necklace. We could go around and around on this, but I hope that it is becoming clear that a principled, moral existence really is in everyone's self interest. Darrell

Darrell, I come from coal miners (a little town called Coeburn, Va., in Wise County). My grandfather on back, and God know who else among my antecedent family, were coal miners. Back when it was dangerous for real. There is nothing shameful about that profession. Honest work. Good people. Good product. There was nothing wrong with the profession back then, either. It sure beat the dickens out of starving in the backwoods. That was a real reality at the time. If Howard Roark could work in a rock quarry, what's so anti-Objectivist about working in a coal mine? Michael Michael, Being a coal miner is indeed an honorable profession. I just wouldn't advise my sons to go into it because I know the risks --- cave ins, poison gas, black lung disease. There is nothing "anti-Objectivist" about coal mining. Sorry, if I gave the impression that that is what I meant. But, when it comes to giving advice to a person about the career he should pursue, his expected payoff, both in monetary and health terms is important. Living a principled existence is also important, but I would argue that it is important because of how it bears on other considerations, like ones probability of staying alive. In my opinion, people feel a great deal of angst or anguish when they stray from the straight and narrow because they know, deep down, that lying, cheating, and stealing are likely to come back to bite them later. They also know that in abandoning a principled existence, they are likely to become lost --- to not know which way to turn or why. Life without principles becomes a frenetic and bewildering series of calculations about when to lie, cheat, steal, or even kill, that almost invariably leads downhill to destruction. That is what people fear more than anything --- being morally lost. Of course, one wrong turn doesn't mean the end is nigh. The solution is to claw ones way back to a principled life, but that isn't always easy or possible. Darrell

Actually, it is necessary, to some extent, to engage in "what-ifs". The outcome of any particular case doesn't matter as much as the odds of getting away with it. To this point, I have only examined the possible consequences for the kapos after the war, but I realized that that approach isn't really complete. We should be looking at what happened before the war as well. The German guards tended to choose criminals to be kapos because they knew that criminals were more likely to be unprincipled brutes. But, as a person living before the war, what were the odds that living as an unprincipled brute would get a person a job as a kapo during the war? Well, you said that there were several thousand kapos, so let's use the figure 10,000. I'm not sure what the population was in 1940, but it was more than 2 billion, so let's use that figure. Let's also assume that 10% of the population were criminals. Then, the probability of any criminal ending up as a kapo during the war would have been 0.005%. If we postulate, for a moment, that kapos came out ahead during the war by an amount X, then the expected payoff before the war would have been 0.00005 * X. However, that would have to be offset by the loss that one would expect to suffer both before and after the war by living one's entire life as an unprincipled brute. Let's assume that one's probability of being caught were 1%. I don't know what the average jewelry heist nets, but the typical bank robbery nets less than $1,000, so let's use that figure. Now, if a person earns the median income of $50,000, a $1,000 heist won't make much difference to one's life. In order for a thief to generate an income comparable to the typical worker, he would have to commit 50 thefts per year. In two years, that would add up 100 robberies. But, if he correctly calculated that the probability of being caught was only 1% each time, then his probability of getting away with 100 robberies would only be 36.6%. Or, his probability of being caught would be 63.4% in two years. Moreover, during those two years he would live no better than the average person and would have to live in constant fear of being caught in his web of lies and deceit. I would not advise someone to be a coal miner. I'm not sure about the dangers of logging. Objectivists don't usually harp on such things because they aren't destructive to the lives of other people, but that doesn't mean that such occupations are a good choice. Of course, they might be a good choice at a sufficiently high wage, but that's another issue. Darrell