Mopologetics and Converting “Great Men”

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Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: Mopologetics and Converting “Great Men”

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

Gadianton wrote:
Wed Aug 24, 2022 4:17 am
… I'm not sure I'm really understanding his points.
I don’t, either. I read the essay twice trying to figure out if he had a firm point, but alas it just muddles around the issue of, uh, I guess government overreach? Perhaps the dangers of too much individual liberty necessitating government collaboration, but watch out because the government has an ipso facto use-of-force mandate?

Cool that he got about $5,000 in today’s dollars, though. I’m sure he enjoyed a nice trip and some food as a result.

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Re: Mopologetics and Converting “Great Men”

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Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:
Wed Aug 24, 2022 4:08 pm


I don’t, either. I read the essay twice trying to figure out if he had a firm point, but alas it just muddles around the issue of, uh, I guess government overreach? Perhaps the dangers of too much individual liberty necessitating government collaboration, but watch out because the government has an ipso facto use-of-force mandate?

Cool that he got about $5,000 in today’s dollars, though. I’m sure he enjoyed a nice trip and some food as a result.

- Doc
Same. It was well written, sure. But what the hell is it really saying? He just touches on a few points and then has a weird drop at the end.
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Symmachus
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Re: Mopologetics and Converting “Great Men”

Post by Symmachus »

Gadianton wrote:
Wed Aug 24, 2022 4:17 am
I maintain that it's better than anything I wrote in High School.
Same here! It's even better than what I was writing in elementary school.
I can tell you the theorists at George Mason University have explored this topic many times. Why voting on prices brings efficiency but voting in politics doesn't. I've seen links to the papers when browsing around, but was never inclined to read them.
I am sure it has been solved. I only raise it because it seems this prize-winning essay was just about to stumble into the problem, ultimately finding surer footing in the polemical thesis that the one true economic theory was yet to be implemented—and this because of the designs of wicked men entrapping ordinary people (a Relief Society sister in Parowan, say) in their conceptual snares.

Or in other words, the shape of all of his writing is already here lying thickly beneath our feet, once you clear away the ponderous overgrowth. Le style c'est l'homme!
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Re: Mopologetics and Converting “Great Men”

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Symmachus wrote:
Tue Aug 23, 2022 3:47 pm
Yet one wonders what the other essays that scored lower were like if this was the winner, because if young Peterson's sub-erudite pessimism is justified, then it suggests a paradox resulting from one of the core ideas in classical economics: the free market functions on the assumption that individuals are best able to determine their own interest, so why have individuals seen it in their best interest to vote in statist politicians to regulate and over-regulate the market? Does Daniel Peterson understand their best interest better than they do? Answers to a question like that are way beyond my ability, but I would have expected an essay winning a prize associated with such eminent political economists would attain at least that level of self-awareness. The main strengths of the essay are the correct use of the word "sybaritic," the presence of the Latin phrase "ipso facto"—italicized no less—references to all the right people, and lots of commas to give you a rest through all those needlessly long sentences. These remains the hallmarks of that Petersonian style so beloved by us all....
LOL. The one element of Petersonian style that I didn't see in the essay was random words being italicized.

I also noted how religious the essay was--it's written from the perspective of a true believer in the one true theory of economics bearing his testimony to other true believers. The revelations given to Adam Smith (peace be upon him) have been proven true, in both the classroom and the laboratory. The only outstanding questions are why doesn't everybody see the light, and what happens next?

The religiosity of the essay extends to its use religious language. The very first sentence refers to the theory of the invisible hand as Adam Smith's most famous "doctrine." The second sentence refers to meddling with the free market as reaching out to "steady the economic ark" by people who can't see the "preternatural" power that Adam Smith "believed he saw." It makes me wonder why he couched the language this way--is it because Adam Smith didn't produce 11 witnesses that also saw what he saw?

Going back to the Interpreter story, Peterson said the following about his trip to Scotland:
One evening, my next-door neighbor in the university dorm where we were staying — an economics professor from Colorado, I think, whose name I’ve forgotten — suddenly dragged me off to a late-night gathering of something called “The Invisible Hand Society,” the main point of which seemed to be alcohol and bonhomie. There were about ten of us there, including Milton Friedman and a few others. The fellow who invited me had warned me at the last minute to put on the Adam Smith necktie that each attendee at the Mont Pelerin meeting had been given and that, it tuned out, each member of the Invisible Hand Society was supposed to wear. This was lucky for me, because one poor soul showed up without it and was immediately fined ten pounds by the chair. (And he had to pay.) At one point, each of us in the room had to tell what we had done during the past year for the cause of the free market. I felt hopelessly inferior, because I was just an undergraduate student (in classics, no less), and all I had done was to write my essay. But that was deemed sufficient, and I passed. Another member of the group reported that he had debated John Kenneth Galbraith at Princeton. He was fined twenty pounds for mentioning Galbraith’s name.

One day, we made a pilgrimage to Canongate Kirkyard, on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, where we were to place a wreath on Adam Smith’s tomb. But it turned out that nobody had actually brought the wreath. Everybody had thought that someone else had it. So, later that afternoon or early evening, we gathered on the battlements of the ruined St. Andrews Castle to watch Friedrich von Hayek cast the wreath into the surf below, expressing the hope, just before he did so, that Adam Smith’s famous “invisible hand” would take the wreath where it needed to go.
One of the big advantages Peterson had in the essay competition is the fact that his essay confessed that he was a true believer in their cult.
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Re: Mopologetics and Converting “Great Men”

Post by Moksha »

Dr. Peterson wrote: (This guy is always confident about my motivations and the sources of my ideas, and, curiously, his explanations always make me look stupid and dishonest. I’m sure that dishonesty is just coincidental.)
Excellent point about the coincidental, although that dishonestly might find some parallel in the Book of Mormon.
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Re: Mopologetics and Converting “Great Men”

Post by Doctor Scratch »

Seems fitting to bump this thread, since Dr. Peterson is recycling his own blog post that inspired it.
"If, while hoping that everybody else will be honest and so forth, I can personally prosper through unethical and immoral acts without being detected and without risk, why should I not?." --Daniel Peterson, 6/4/14
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