Saturday, July 20, 2002 Rants and Raves By Diana Hsieh @ 6:02 PM Ah, I must have been possessed by the devil to write the following small rant on agnosticism in response to these comments on belief in God from Eric Olsen: Okay, I'm going to be blunt here. Agnosticism of any variety is damn stupid. Eric writes, "I agree with Andy that there is no compelling logical reason to believe in God, but there isn't any compelling logical reason not to believe either." Do you believe every wolf-boy story pictured on the cover of the Weekly World News too? Why not? I mean, sure the advocates haven't proven their case. But the skeptic hasn't disproven the existence of the wolf-boy either... How about elves? goblins? invisible pink elephants? Agnostics (whether theist-agnostics, atheist-agnostics, or just plain old agnostic-agnostics) carve out a special exception for God. But the burden of proof applies just as well to God as it does to unicorns, goblins, and wolf-boys. If people wish to believe in God, I don't care much, so long as they are honest about the lack of rational justification for their belief. But to distort the rules of reasoning used so well everyday for the sake of putting a rational veneer on that belief is wrong -- and, well, stupid. I'm usually nicer than that. Perhaps my cantankerous attitude is the result of reading Eve Tushnet's blog this afternoon. In writing about Christian forgiveness, she quotes extensively from an e-mail from Kairosperson, a portion of which is reproduced below: Of course, an extraordinary person in the final seconds of his life may forgive his killer, but most ordinary people need at least a little time to reflect on something before offering forgiveness. That we are called to forgive unconditionally and automatically, but often do not, makes it very much worse, as a moral matter. Though I don't for a moment believe it to be true, it is possible within our theology (because there are so many mysteries in it) that the bank teller gunned down swearing at the thief would be damned on the spot for not forgiving the killer. The victim of rape or torture at least has the time and opportunity to consider forgiveness. (I believe--hope--that the merciful God can create a way in which the victim of a murder is really given a chance to forgive, but there is little comfort on this sunject [sic] to be found in Scripture.) What sort of monstrous perversion of a morality would damn the victim of a murder to hell because of insufficient time (here, measured in seconds) to forgive the (unrepentant) murderer? Augh! Evil, evil, evil! In 2001, I gave a lecture on forgiveness and redemption, so I've thought a fair amount about the issues surrounding moral wrongs. Oh, and while I'm not exemplifying the non-virtue of humility, I may as well mention that I've lectured on arguments about the existence of God before too. Link / Noodles / Trackback More on Objectivists and Libertarians By Diana Hsieh @ 8:49 AM Ari Armstrong has some excellent comments on the recent blogosphere debates about Objectivism and the Libertarian Party. Being completely unobjective, my favorite bit was: In terms of presenting new material that advances libertarian theory, Diana's speech was far and away the best presentation at the convention. Her views are not "rigid" -- they are sophisticated and insightful. They are "rigid" only in the sense that they are intellectually consistent and they adhere to the forms of good argument. Walter and everybody else should read Diana's excellent speech -- it is at http://www.dianahsieh.com/philosophy/politics/meta-politics/philosophical_underpinnings_of_capitalism.html. Oh, I always like being "sophisticated and insightful"! Link / Noodles / Trackback Friday, July 19, 2002 Not So Quick Quickies By Diana Hsieh @ 6:24 PM Much thanks to various folks for interesting and thoughtful comments about my report on the Colorado LP Convention. Here are a few quickies in response, some not so quick. 1. In the comments, Noho-missives asks: "Is it not rational for me to give money to the government in exchange for setting and enforcing fair rules of trade?" Well, I'm not an anarcho-capitalist, so the question really boils down to what is meant by "fair rules of trade." Governments certainly do have a legitimate role in banning fraud, enforcing contracts, prosecuting theft, protecting property rights, and so on. But as for all the rest of government regulations of business, the answer is a short and sweet but forceful "No!" All people have the capacity to determine what sorts of trades with others are or are not in their best interests. Poor people are not made stupid or helpless as a result of their poverty. No government bureaucrat (or army thereof) has special knowledge or understanding of the world that makes his interference in the voluntary trades of others legitimate. So the "fair rules of trade" are pretty limited in my view. 2. Noho-missives also comments on whether the Right and the Left do actually hate capitalism. Ah, clarification seems to be in order. Neither the Right nor the Left defend consistent and principled capitalism, which is of the laissez-faire variety. The Left is openly hostile to it for the most part. The Right appears to defend some form of capitalism, but does so with arguments that only give ammunition to the critiques by the Left. Of course, some people from both sides of that political spectrum have a better grasp of the delights and wonders of freedom of trade than their compatriots, but they are rarely (if ever) consistent defenders of laissez-faire. Just as an example, politicians on both the Left and Right support government schooling, the welfare state, environmental regulations, and so on. They might quibble over the details, but the underlying support for these programs never questioned. However, none are consistent with genuine capitalism. QED. :-) 3. While I still would say that the income tax and all its accoutrements is the greatest violation of rights we suffer here in the US, I've at least been convinced that the Drug War likely comes in second. Having known too many druggies and drug dealers, I'm still not too concerned about people's right to get high, but the Drug War does certainly serve as a convenient justification for all manner of tyranny. Pondering the matter from my comfy philosophical armchair, I would guess that the various regulation of business (through the EPA, OSHA, licensing, the FDA, minimum wage laws, and so on) probably comes in third. These burdens are obviously unevenly distributed onto business owners, leaving the rest of us blind to their likely substantial effects upon prosperity and innovation. 4. Walter in Denver posted some interesting commentary on my report too. I agree with his comments about the need for activists. Philosophers like me tend to like to stay in our cushy armchairs, thinking about the public good problems of political activism. :-) However, I do have qualms with the following objection to the basic premise of my speech: There are many ways that a person can come to a generally libertarian viewpoint, that people have the right to do as they please, as long as they don't interfere with others' right to do the same. Well sure, people can come to a libertarian viewpoint from all sorts of ways... but will they stay there? Let me explain... Speaking philosophically, people's new ideas about politics tend to be abandoned over time as they come into conflict with more fundamental philosophical views. So a person might initially gravitate towards ending welfare based on economic arguments about poverty and private charity, but return to their original position as moral considerations of fairness ("everyone has to pay their fair share") and universality ("we can't let anyone fall through the cracks") reassert themselves. This scenario is particularly likely if the person encounters any one of the multitude of arguments for statism designed to pump people's (misguided) underlying philosophical intuitions, like that kindness means supporting welfare or that opposition to racism means supporting affirmative action. That being said, I have absolutely no problem with people coming to the libertarian ideal from any number of directions. I'm not arguing that a person must start in a rational metaphysics, work their way through epistemology, then ethics, and finally derive their political conclusions. That would be silly. I'm not even saying that Libertarians ought to be Objectivists. That's an unnecessarily deep philosophical commitment as far as politics are concerned. Rather, I'm saying that Libertarians need a basic understanding of the philosophical foundation of libertarianism. They need to make sure that their underlying philosophy is not at odds with their political ideals. If they don't, those libertarian political ideas are unlikely to endure. Such a process of philosophizing isn't onerous, as there are just four key philosophical ideas that I identified in my talk: reason, egoism, mind-body integration, and harmony of interests. (David Kelley made a good case that arguments for liberty are untenable without the first three in his famous lecture Objectivism and Struggle for Liberty.) Gosh, it is really a big problem for people to ponder questions like "Are people fundamentally irrational? Do they have the capacity to determine their own best interests?" and "Is pursuing my own happiness a moral and worthy goal? What should I do when others object that I'm being selfish?" on their commute to work? Given that these issues come up in daily life all the time anyway, I hardly think so. Now, someone might object to this line of reasoning, as Walter in Denver so presciently did in arguing along the following lines: Neither Democrats nor Republicans really have a deep understanding of their own underlying ideology, so why should the Libertarians? Or, in his own words: Go to a gathering of Democrats and poll them on the theories of Keynes. See how many respond, "Who?" Try a similar experiment at a Republican convention. Ask them if they've read Goldwater's 'Conscience of a Conservative.' Well, sure, Democrats and Republicans might not be well-versed in the literature. But, as I've said, I'm not arguing that Libertarians need to read Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. But more to the substance of the prescient objection, Republicans and Democrats (respectively) do tend to share a core ideology. The driving force behind the Right is the pre-Enlightenment ideals of faith, family, duty, and tradition. The driving force behind the Left is the anti-Enlightenment ideals of subjectivism, communal self-expression, emotionalism, egalitarianism, ludditism. Of course, not every Republican or Democrat agrees with all of these ideals. (But then again, the Republicans and Democrats are more interested in attracting the necessary numbers to get elected than in being consistent or principled.) Nevertheless, these pre-Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment ideas are definitely the dominant themes in the ideologies of the Left and Right. In contrast, the dominant theme of the Libertarians ought to be the same Enlightenment ideals of reason, happiness, individualism, progress, and so on that gave rise to limited government in the first place. And yes, the unjust expansion of government power can be fairly clearly traced to failures to understand and defend these core Enlightenment ideals adequately. (The "three cultures" idea comes from David Kelley and is explained in this interview.) So the basic point of all that was simply that people do need at least a basic understanding of their philosophical premises in order to remain committed to libertarian ideals. Such understanding is also essential for convincing others of the validity of those ideals -- in other words, for political activism. After all, people are not convinced of libertarianism by mere assertions that people ought to do as they please, so long as they leave others free to do the same. There needs to be some argument, some rationale for adopting that proposition. So people who can articulate clear reasons for that libertarian ideal, both moral and economic, will be in a much better position to actually win over others to their viewpoint. Looking at the darker side of this issue, we can see that bad justifications for libertarian ideals may lead others to the erroneous conclusion that there is no decent philosophical justification for liberty. For example, many libertarians rely upon the skeptical subjectivist argument for liberty. That argument says that we can't ever be certain that an idea is true or false or that an action is moral or immoral, so we ought to leave people alone to make up their own minds and choose their own actions, so long as they don't interfere in the liberty of others to do the same. But this argument is self-defeating in a very important way: If we are genuinely ignorant about truth and morality, then there can be no reason for me to refrain from initiating force with whomever I please. Who is to say that initiating force is wrong if we can't know right from wrong in the first place? The skeptical subjectivist libertarian might attempt to argue for parity between people, but if I'm mighty and you're weak, why should I care about any sort of parity? A thinking person will see through these self-defeating skeptical subjectivist libertarian arguments -- and probably not bother with libertarianism again. So bad philosophical foundations for liberty can inhibit the spread of libertarian ideas. Whew! That's all my musings for the moment! Link / Noodles / Trackback Thursday, July 18, 2002 A Small Thought About Academic Philosophy By Diana Hsieh @ 12:21 PM Tom Stone (of Episteme Links) sent me a thoughtful note about my blog entry about switching my focus from ethics to epistemology, pointing out some the upsides and downsides of either choice. While writing my reply, I came up with this pithy formulation: The danger in ethics (and politics, to some degree) is that the Objectivist ideas are regarded as obviously false and evil. So we hear stupid objections like that egoism can't be a moral theory since moral theories concern restraining self-interest or that the egoist would want everyone else to be altruists, and so on. The danger in metaphysics and epistemology is that Objectivist ideas are regarded as passé, as already having been considered and rejected. Debates about realism in perception or about grounding knowledge in experience often take this form, even though the Objectivist view is similar to, but not the same as, those viewed discarded by history. That's hardly the whole story of Objectivist ideas in academia, but it is an important part, I think. Link / Noodles / Trackback Wednesday, July 17, 2002 Powerpuff Girls! By Diana Hsieh @ 10:38 PM Part of my luxurious vacation has involved watching the surprisingly delightful and funny Powerpuff Girls on the Cartoon Network. So I just had to take the quiz. Of course, I wanted to be Buttercup, so I wasn't exactly objective. Link / Noodles / Trackback Honesty, Social Construction, and Personal Questions By Diana Hsieh @ 1:09 PM My post to OWL on honesty, social construction, and personal questions was finally distributed! (There is a big backlog at the moment.) Link / Noodles / Trackback Tuesday, July 16, 2002 Fire Them All! By Diana Hsieh @ 11:56 AM Shame on the State Department for their complicity with totalitarian governments in oppressing innocent American citizens. Amjad Radwan is an adult American citizen who was taken to Saudi Arabia as a child. She wishes to leave, but is unable to do so, thanks to the American Embassy's "Sure I'll bend over and drop my pants" approach to the Saudi government. So with a State Department like ours, precisely what is the point of citizenship?!? Fire all the bastards, starting with Colin Powell. From what I've read, much of the lack of responsiveness to these cases stems from promise of lucrative jobs with the host country after these officials leave the State Department. So why piss off your future employer for the sake of some individual person? Obviously, this situation creates huge conflicts of interest. Perhaps some limits on who former State Department employees can work for are in order? Link / Noodles / Trackback Imprison the Innocent! By Diana Hsieh @ 11:26 AM Anyone who has ever said "Better ten guilty men go free than one innocent man be punished" is hereby required to go read Jonah Goldberg's article on cliches. Of course, I disagree with Goldberg on the immorality of making arguments about rights that appeal to self-interest. Upholding the rights of all people is a self-interested endeavor! However, upon a moment's reflection, it seems that some of the "they'll come get you next" arguments for rights are self-interested in a rather shallow way, which is surely suboptimal. But there is certainly nothing wrong and much right with showing that upholding the rights of all people is in all of our interests! For a good explanation of the self-interested case for rights, go read Will Thomas' 1996 paper "Rights, Egoism, and the Trader Principle. Here's the abstract: Ayn Rand's approach to rights is derived from her argument for the Trader Principle as the core social principle of her ethics. This argument, as it appears in the writings of Rand and Leonard Peikoff, is quite abstract, and has neither been well understood by scholars nor expounded with an attention to detail. While not exegetical, this essay provides a more detailed justification of the complex view of social ethics that underlies the Trader Principle. Rights-respecting behavior is argued to be strictly in the self-interest of any person. The utility of force is different contexts is discussed and physical harm is distinguished from emotional and economic harm on fundamental grounds. The revocation of the rights of criminals, and the partial rights of incompetents and children are considered, as are some possible criticisms. Link / Noodles / Trackback Monday, July 15, 2002 Fallacies and Reasoning By Diana Hsieh @ 8:59 PM I just updated the web site with a few tidbits. I added my lecture notes from this evening's speech to Toastmasters, "Fuzzy Thinking." Since that speech concerned fallacies, I have also revived my old file of Definitions of Fallacies. Enjoy! Link / Noodles / Trackback An Overdue Report on the Colorado Libertarian Party Convention By Diana Hsieh @ 1:42 PM Back in May, I gave a speech to the Colorado Libertarian Party Convention on the philosophical underpinnings of capitalism. I wrote up some thoughts on the experience immediately afterwards, but just never got around to editing and posting them. So now I've done both... First off, kudos to Ari Armstrong for putting together an excellent convention. Apart from the (apparently usual) Libertarian time delays, all went smoothly. Ah well, one minor gripe, of which Ari was aware: The microphone was attached to the podium, so speakers were forced to boringly stand in a single spot during their speeches. During my speech, all of my Toastmaster training was screaming in protest at my lack of movement. Unfortunately, the more mobile microphone was of fairly poor quality, so stuck we were. I was pretty pleased with my speech, in that I wasn't just regurgitating the usual libertarian dogma. I argued that there are four philosophical ideas that serve as "pillars" of freedom of trade: reason, egoism, harmony of interests, and mind-body integration. Rejection of any of these pillars leads to a particular form of statism (respectively): the paternalistic state, the welfare state, the egalitarian state, and the theocratic state. People who deny any of these philosophical ideas see economic arguments about the prosperity of capitalism as irrelevant; only philosophical arguments can save the day. So, as I said, it wasn't just the usual libertarian blah-de-blah. (I might propose an expanded version of this speech for the TOC summer seminar in 2003.) Before I arrived at the convention, my basic worry was that I was presuming too little, that these philosophical issues would be old hat to most people. But after a few casual conversations and a sampling of the other lectures, I began to worry that perhaps I was presuming too much, that these philosophical issues would be foreign and undigestible to many. My flip-flop was largely the result of my total lack of contact with purely Libertarian Party folks. I'm no neophyte to the libertarian movement, but my associations have been almost entirely though think tanks like The Cato Institute. (In fact, my only prior LP event was the Colorado LP's annual banquet last fall.) So, up until very recently, any big-L Libertarians I knew were also either Objectivists or super-smart policy wonks. Of course, I had heard all the usual stuff about the suits and freaks of the LP. But I expected the vast majority of attendees to be at least fairly well-educated about the substance of libertarianism. But many more than expected seemed to be fairly clueless. (Don't get me wrong: I'm not looking to bash LP folks as a whole, as lots of people there were clearly smart and informed.) Most noticeably, far too many people seemed to be more anti-government than pro-freedom. Perhaps the most popular speech I heard was Douglas Bruce talking about his multiple fights and lawsuits with the government. The immense delight of the audience, I think, came largely from his tweaking the big bad authority of government, rather than his actually accomplishing anything worthwhile in the fight for freedom. It all smacked too much of the glee of an adolescent rebellion against authority. (And really, I don't have anything against Bruce, despite his stupid comment about my talk being sponsored by Enron.) (As a contrasting side note: Shortly after the convention, I read this excellent piece by Ari on the dangers of the big brotherish ideas promulgated in a popular anti-methamphetamine video. Unlike Bruce, whose presentation focused almost entirely on his personal fights with government officials, Ari's commentary was all about the facts. His unpleasant run-in with the Larry Blunt, the News4 anchor who contributed to the video, merely served as an amusing and puzzling epilogue. That's the way it should be done.) Also noteworthy was the fact that ending the war on drugs seemed to be a top priority for a great many people. Let me rephrase that: gaining the freedom to get high seemed to be a top priority for a great many people. Now, I'm all for ending the drug war. People have the right to put whatever substances they want into their bodies. And the drug war, like prohibition before it, promotes crime and fosters the worst in government. But the drug war is hardly the worst violation of rights we suffer here in the US. So by focusing heavily on the drug issue, Libertarians come off as a bunch of druggies just looking for an easier high. Of course, I suspect that that's precisely what a great many of them are. Overall, I have to admit that I left the convention underimpressed with a great many of the participants and with the Libertarian Party as a whole. But I am grateful for the invitation from Ari to speak. Perhaps my speech got a few people thinking about some deeper philosophical issues. Link / Noodles / Trackback Sunday, July 14, 2002 Tasty Treats By Diana Hsieh @ 10:37 PM Andrew Breese pointed me to this excellent article on paleo versus modern diets. Seeing the modern low-fat, high-carb diets get a righteous whooping in the mainstream media is quite a tasty delight! Just read this tidbit: Few experts now deny that the low-fat message is radically oversimplified. If nothing else, it effectively ignores the fact that unsaturated fats, like olive oil, are relatively good for you: they tend to elevate your good cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein (H.D.L.), and lower your bad cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein (L.D.L.), at least in comparison to the effect of carbohydrates. While higher L.D.L. raises your heart-disease risk, higher H.D.L. reduces it. What this means is that even saturated fats -- a k a, the bad fats -- are not nearly as deleterious as you would think. True, they will elevate your bad cholesterol, but they will also elevate your good cholesterol. In other words, it's a virtual wash. As Willett explained to me, you will gain little to no health benefit by giving up milk, butter and cheese and eating bagels instead. But it gets even weirder than that. Foods considered more or less deadly under the low-fat dogma turn out to be comparatively benign if you actually look at their fat content. More than two-thirds of the fat in a porterhouse steak, for instance, will definitively improve your cholesterol profile (at least in comparison with the baked potato next to it); it's true that the remainder will raise your L.D.L., the bad stuff, but it will also boost your H.D.L. The same is true for lard. If you work out the numbers, you come to the surreal conclusion that you can eat lard straight from the can and conceivably reduce your risk of heart disease. Yeah baby! Lard straight from the can! I've been a big advocate of paleo diets for a number of years. Personally, I have followed The Zone (sometimes more strictly, sometimes less) for the past three years or so. The diet put an end to my miserable rollercoaster rides of blood sugar, eliminated afternoon lethargy, and (most importantly) eliminated my daily afternoon migraine. So horray for paleo! One interesting subtext of the article is a pathetic tale of the failure of government science: It was Ancel Keys, paradoxically, who introduced the low-fat-is-good-health dogma in the 50's with his theory that dietary fat raises cholesterol levels and gives you heart disease. Over the next two decades, however, the scientific evidence supporting this theory remained stubbornly ambiguous. The case was eventually settled not by new science but by politics. It began in January 1977, when a Senate committee led by George McGovern published its "Dietary Goals for the United States," advising that Americans significantly curb their fat intake to abate an epidemic of "killer diseases" supposedly sweeping the country. It peaked in late 1984, when the National Institutes of Health officially recommended that all Americans over the age of 2 eat less fat. By that time, fat had become "this greasy killer" in the memorable words of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and the model American breakfast of eggs and bacon was well on its way to becoming a bowl of Special K with low-fat milk, a glass of orange juice and toast, hold the butter -- a dubious feast of refined carbohydrates. In the intervening years, the N.I.H. spent several hundred million dollars trying to demonstrate a connection between eating fat and getting heart disease and, despite what we might think, it failed. Five major studies revealed no such link. A sixth, however, costing well over $100 million alone, concluded that reducing cholesterol by drug therapy could prevent heart disease. The N.I.H. administrators then made a leap of faith. Basil Rifkind, who oversaw the relevant trials for the N.I.H., described their logic this way: they had failed to demonstrate at great expense that eating less fat had any health benefits. But if a cholesterol-lowering drug could prevent heart attacks, then a low-fat, cholesterol-lowering diet should do the same. "It's an imperfect world," Rifkind told me. "The data that would be definitive is ungettable, so you do your best with what is available." Some of the best scientists disagreed with this low-fat logic, suggesting that good science was incompatible with such leaps of faith, but they were effectively ignored. Pete Ahrens, whose Rockefeller University laboratory had done the seminal research on cholesterol metabolism, testified to McGovern's committee that everyone responds differently to low-fat diets. It was not a scientific matter who might benefit and who might be harmed, he said, but "a betting matter." Phil Handler, then president of the National Academy of Sciences, testified in Congress to the same effect in 1980. "What right," Handler asked, "has the federal government to propose that the American people conduct a vast nutritional experiment, with themselves as subjects, on the strength of so very little evidence that it will do them any good?" Nonetheless, once the N.I.H. signed off on the low-fat doctrine, societal forces took over. The food industry quickly began producing thousands of reduced-fat food products to meet the new recommendations. Fat was removed from foods like cookies, chips and yogurt. The problem was, it had to be replaced with something as tasty and pleasurable to the palate, which meant some form of sugar, often high-fructose corn syrup. Meanwhile, an entire industry emerged to create fat substitutes, of which Procter & Gamble's olestra was first. And because these reduced-fat meats, cheeses, snacks and cookies had to compete with a few hundred thousand other food products marketed in America, the industry dedicated considerable advertising effort to reinforcing the less-fat-is-good-health message. Helping the cause was what Walter Willett calls the "huge forces" of dietitians, health organizations, consumer groups, health reporters and even cookbook writers, all well-intended missionaries of healthful eating. Yikes. Link / Noodles / Trackback Report on the 2002 Summer Seminar By Diana Hsieh @ 4:35 AM So now for my long-awaited report the 2002 Summer Seminar of The Objectivist Center! In the three days before the regular Summer Seminar, I attended the small graduate-seminar-style Advanced Seminar. On the second day (6/27), I presented my paper "Excuses Excuses: Undermining Moral Growth in the Concealment of Wrongdoing ." My 15 minute presentation at the opening went fine, and the discussion was good as well. We mostly focused on self-deception, particularly on the validity of the psychological literature indicating that self-deception is an integral part of high self-esteem. On the whole, the other participants seemed pleased with my paper, both in argumentation and scholarship. My only regret about the session is that it was not recorded, as I find my memory of it (despite my notes) far too fuzzy to be of any use in editing my paper. If only I had thought to bring my tape recorder! (I wonder how well it would have picked up sound in the room.) I very much enjoyed the other five sessions of the Advanced Seminar. The quality of the papers has improved every year, which has in turn improved the quality discussion. I was particularly excited to see good papers from some of the younger Objectivists: Jason Raibley, Jason Walker, and Christopher Robinson. (Those papers should be made available through the TOC web site sometime soon.) The increasing success of the Advanced Seminar makes me hopeful that the TOC can effectively cultivate and support young scholars. So now onto the regular six-day Summer Seminar! Since I'm an egoist, I'll once again start with a report on my own lectures. :-) I gave seven lectures in the six days of the seminar. Starting on Sunday (6/30) and ending on Friday (7/5), I gave a one-hour lecture every morning at 8:30 AM for my "Objectivism 101" course. On Thursday (7/4), I also gave my one-and-a-quarter-hour lecture "White Lies, Black Lies." It was, without a doubt, a grueling week. Merely gearing myself up to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed every morning was difficult enough. But the stress and difficulty was compounded by the fact that I was finishing up these lectures throughout the week. As a result, I was almost unbearably sleep-deprived over the course of almost two weeks. But despite these difficulties, my lectures went very well. I was personally very pleased with the results, both in terms of content and presentation. Those attending my lectures seem to have been pleased too, as I got an almost overwhelming amount of praise for my work. I certainly didn't expect or even dream of such an enthusiastic response! (Of course, I'll find out what people really thought in reading the comment cards...) I have to attribute much of the success of the lectures to my seven months in Toastmasters. Cultivating my skills of public speaking at Titan Toastmasters every week has provided me with some obvious benefits: weaning me from my lecture notes, reducing (but not yet eliminating) ums and ahs, cultivating my skills of speechwriting, improving eye contact and purposeful gestures, and so on. All of these improvements were a critical part of the quality of my lectures this year. But the deep-down benefit of Toastmasters was that these skills have become so habitual that I could speak confidently and easily despite the intense stress and inadequate speech practice. (I only practiced each of my speeches once or twice, if that, instead of the normal six times.) My speaking this year was really a mind-bogglingly dramatic change from the previous two years. I still have much work to do in Toastmasters, but to so concretely see my progress was absolutely delightful! As for the overall experience, I would say that the seminar was something like giving birth, in that the memory of the pain was washed away in a huge rush of endorphins afterwards. So on the one hand, the seminar was definitely extraordinarily difficult, both mentally and physically. Wednesday night, the night before my "White Lies, Black Lies" talk, was particularly horrendous. I was trying to finish up my lecture notes, but I was simply too nauseated to think, thanks to the previous week of sleep deprivation. I remember thinking something along the lines of "a body can't feel much worse than this and still function..." (And that means something from someone who regularly suffers migraines!) But in the aftermath of my lectures came a huge endorphin rush, thanks to my own and others' pleasure in my performance. That rush dulled and faded all those horrible memories of the pain, such that what stands out in my mind is now just the pleasure of the accomplishment. As far as other Summer Seminar lectures, here's a few (in random order) that I would particularly recommend buying on tape when they become available through TOC Live: The Psychology of Belief: Reason, Faith, and the Human Mind" by Ken Livingston. A remarkable explanation for why religious beliefs are so prevalent and why people claim those beliefs to be based upon reason and experience rather than faith. "Virtue Ethics" by Shawn Klein. A clear overview of virtue ethics, including its strengths and shortcomings with respect to the Objectivist ethics. "The Cardinal Values of Reason, Purpose, and Self" by Will Thomas. A great theoretical and practical explication of one of the great mysteries of the Objectivist ethics: the three cardinal values. "An Objectivist Account of the Nature of Numbers" by David Ross. An insightful and clear look at the way in which concepts of numbers are formed -- and thus why mathematical truths seem more certain than other sorts of truths. "Why Political Beliefs are Irrational" by Mike Huemer. An investigation into the economics and psychology that entrenches people in irrational political beliefs. I heard many good things about other lectures, but I can't comment or recommend since I didn't hear them personally. In sum: I'm very pleased with the work I did for and at the seminar. And I am very much looking forward to next year, when I only have to do some minor editing and tweaking to the "Objectivism 101" lectures. Perhaps then I'll have some time for hanging out with friends in the common room! Oh, and for luxuriously long nights of sleep too... Link / Noodles / Trackback

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