Showing results by narrator "J. M. Kuczynski" in All Categories

In order to acquire wisdom, one must confront the world and keep one's identity. If one shrinks from the world, one may keep one's identity but not gain in wisdom. If one confronts the world but does not keep one's identity, one does gain in wisdom. Age does not guarantee wisdom: only those who both confront the world and stay true to themselves grow wiser with age.

It is proven that time travel is not possible.

Bureaucrat professors complain about dumb students. But if students were marginally smarter than they are, these same bureaucrat professors would be out of a job.

Seemingly student-friendly restrictions on professorial conduct undermine professors' ability to teach and therefore undermine students' ability to learn from their professors. Such restrictions are put in place by bureaucrat professors, pretending to be concerned with the rights of students, as a way of thwarting the very professors who would actually benefit those same students.

Philosophy professors, like most professors, are repeating the same cliches over and over again. They are not growing. They are not doing anything. For this reason, they need their students to be incompetent, since, were those students just slightly quicker to understand what these professors were saying, they would quickly see that the latter were not saying, or doing, anything at all.

When an idea occurs to you, it means that an entire constellation of ideas, of which that one idea is merely the conscious representative, is active in your mind. If you write that idea down the moment it occurs to you, each of the links in the corresponding idea-constellation will occur to you as you are writing, the resulting being a significant piece of writing.

By preventing professorships from circulating, tenure prevents ideas from circulating, and it thereby kills academic disciplines.

Professors who have the backing of the institutions get good evaluations, and professors who don't, don't. There is no correlation, positive or negative, between a professor's level of pedagogical merit and his evaluations.

Collectively written academic articles are pseudo-articles

To learn about sociology - in other words, to learn about the forces that govern society - don't study sociology; study the way in which sociology is studied. If, instead of studying within sociology departments, you take such departments as the veritable object of your study, you will discover a fraud far greater than anything exposed by any sociologist, and the depth of your subsequent understanding of human nature will extend as far as that fraud runs deep.

If you speak the truth, you are hated. If you write the truth, you are loved.

Politics is about compromise. Submission is not compromise. Academia is about submission, not compromise, and there are therefore no academic politics.

Successful people don't live in autistic bubbles. Unsuccessful people do.

Skepticism is bureaucratism posing as philosophy.

One's intellect extends only as far as one's impotence. So when you bemoan your inability to destroy the forces that wronged you, remember that there but for your powerlessness go your intellectual acuity and artistic creativity.

An explanation of the psychology of the bureaucrat and of bureaucratic institutions.

How one answers a given question is often less a reflection of one's beliefs than it is of one's attempt to acquiesce to what one believes the operative social norms to be. This known as the acquiescence effect.

Academic journals do not publish content. Rather, they privatize it (or its absence, rather), this being one of many scams and hypocrisies constitutive of the academy.

We take credit for our successes and blame our failures on circumstance. We blame others for their failures and regard their successes as being due to circumstance.

Governments inevitably get big, and a viable conception of government must tell us how a government should be when it gets big. Libertarianism doesn't tell us this, which is why the libertarian movement goes nowhere.