Showing results by author "J.-M. Kuczynski" in All Categories

Bureaucrats (e.g. professors and government employees) are paid so little not because they work for non-profit institutions, but because, were they paid more, their performance (or lack thereof) would be scrutinized.

Sometimes, intellectual specialization is about intellectual depth. Sometimes, it is about lacking of substance attempting to appear legitimate. In the latter case, the specialist responds to inquiries about his area of specialization defensively and narrowly. In the former case, the specialist responds cooperatively and inclusively.

A key difference between psychopaths and non-psychopaths is identified.

Cro-Magnon Man was smarter and generally more capable than we are. So why did he go extinct? Precisely because he was so capable. Whereas members of our species are weaklings who rely on others, members of his species had it in them to be rugged individualists; and that is what they did. But then, when circumstances became too severe, they had no social support and thus went extinct.

A short piece about the psychology of non-buyers.

It is argued that the quantum realm is deterministic.

A compendium of some of Kuczynski's more readable work on philosophy, scientific methodology, and the theory of knowledge.

To have integrity is to be true to oneself. Someone who is half an upstanding citizen and half a criminal is not true to himself and therefore lacks integrity. Someone who is completely an upstanding citizen or completely a criminal is true to himself and therefore has integrity.

Academic journals are clogged with gratuitous scholarship. This prevents the advancement of the corresponding disciplines in many ways, five of which are identified in this short work.

Geekdom is not only not a sign of intelligence, but is a sign of its absence.

One of the ways in which we rationalize bad work on the part of eminent persons is explained.

Don't fight your pychopathologies. Get them to work for you. Identify a course of action in which your psychopathologies are an asset, not a liability. In this way, you will get them to work for you and against themselves.

Evil is displaced antipathy towards one's own superego, whose strictures one has failed to satisfy and which one is therefore trying to overthrow.

Evil is anti-conscience and therefore presupposes conscience.

Had John Cage been a professor at a community college, he would have been laughed out of a job. But because he was at Harvard, people read depths into the rubbish that he produced. Resist the temptation to see depths in junk. Junk is junk, and that's the end of it. The rest is projective rationalization.

It is not double-think and self-deception that have to be explained, but rather their absence, as the mind's aboriginal condition is one of disunity, and consequent incoherence, not of unity and coherence.

The objective of terrorism is more terrorism. Therefore, terrorism is never justified.

The world is getting small and cramped. We are becoming a race of cowards and bureaucrats. In order to become conquerors once again, we must move beyond the pathetically narrow corridors of Earthly existence; and the most obvious way to do that is to colonize Mars.

Academic journals exist to prevent, not to encourage the growth of the corresponding academic disciplines.

It is proved that there is unconscious mental activity.