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Cases in which forgeries that intuitively appear real but later are discovered through analysis to be frauds are fairly common in the art world.

Intuition means different things to different people. To some it refers to a sudden flash of insight, or even the spiritual experience of discovering a previously hidden truth.

The idea that hunches can outperform reason is neither unique nor original to Malcolm Gladwell, of course. Most students and professors have long believed that, when in doubt, test-takers should stick with their first answers and "go with their gut." But data show that test-takers are more than twice as likely to change an incorrect answer to a correct one than vice versa.

The finding that people fail to notice unexpected events when their attention is otherwise engaged is interesting. What is doubly intriguing is the mismatch between what we notice and what we think we will notice.

If you believe you will notice unexpected events regardless of how much of your attention is devoted to other tasks, you won't be vigilant enough for possible risks.

In the vast majority of cases in which DNA evidence exonerated a death-row inmate, the original conviction was based largely on the testimony of a confident eyewitness with a vivid memory of the crime. Jurors (and everyone else) tend to intuitively trust that when people are certain, they are likely to be right.

To determine whether two events are truly associated, we must consider how frequently each one occurs by itself, and how frequently they occur together. With just one or a few anecdotes, that's impossible, so it pays to err on the side of caution when inferring the existence of an association from a small number of examples.

But more than a dozen large-scale epidemiological studies, involving hundreds of thousands of subjects, have shown that children who were vaccinated are no more likely to be diagnosed with autism than are children who were not vaccinated. In other words, there is no association between vaccination and autism. And in the absence of an association, there cannot be a causal link.

The kouros example is effective because it capitalizes on our tendency to generalize from a single positive association, leading to the conclusion that intuition trumps reason. But in this case, a bit of thought would show that conclusion to be unlikely, even within the confined realm of art fakery. Think about how often experts throughout history have been duped by forgers because intuition told them that they were looking at the real thing. It is ironic that Gladwell (knowingly or not) exploits one of the greatest weaknesses of intuition—our tendency to blithely infer cause from anecdotes—in making his case for intuition's extraordinary power.

Rand seemed to have gotten many of her ideas, both political and otherwise, from Isabel Paterson

Objectivists benefit from the social bonds in the society around them, many of which they regard as irrational (such as the bonds defined by common law, family “duty,” social “obligations,” etc.). But if (per impossible) Objectivism became dominant in a society, many of those bonds would be dissolved. The result would be a social order in which most people (including, perhaps, many Objectivists) would not wish to live. It would be a society dominated by intellectual bullies who would use their aggressiveness and their ability to rationalize their (unconscious and unacknowledged) need for respect and status to manipulate and stomp over their weaker brethren.

Within the social world of Objectivism, the belief that the “rational interests of men do not clash” renders it nearly impossible for Objectivsts to settle differences amicably.

precisely because Objectivists tend to regard all disputes as arising out of contradictory fundamental premises, personal disputes are framed as philosophical disputes involving metaphysical, epistemological, and moral arcana.

Fortunately for Plasil, the Objectivist community is only a small sliver of society: there was a larger non-Objectivist community that she could appeal to for justice and support. But where would she have turned in a society dominated by Objectivists, where Objectivists ran the courts and administered justice?

Indeed, in such a society, everyone would be on their own and those who could not fend for themselves would be regarded with contempt, as Plasil is among Objectivists to this day. Who would want to live in such a world?

From Rand’s views of history and psychology, she concluded that bad arguments do more harm than outright opposition.

In short, even those who sympathized with Rand’s political ideals found her arguments unpersuasive. Imagine how galling that must have been to Rand that even people who shared her political convictions found her arguments unconvincing!

Perhaps Rand simply resented that some defenders of freedom and capitalism had more success or were taken more seriously than she was.

she wrote, “[The Road to Serfdom] had no base, no moral base. This is why my book is needed.” [ibid, 104-105] This final boast suggests that Rand regarded Hayek as a rival, and that jealousy may have played a role in her overwrought denunciations of his book.

Apologists for Rand might insist that conjectures two through four must be wrong, because Rand was incapable of vanity, jealousy, and resentment. This, however, is a rather implausible assertion difficult to find creditable. Vanity, jealousy, and resentment are emotions deep within the warp and woof of human nature.

Rand’s claim that she didn’t have these disagreeable emotions because, after all, she was a woman of self-made soul, is no more creditable than someone denying that his or her organism produces disagreeable body odors.

Any sort of analysis, including the analysis that yields the Objectivist axioms of existence, consciousness, and identity, presupposes the reliability of memory.

People tend to accept any argument, no matter how suspect, when it is used to defend core beliefs. To argue that a principle is “self-evident” and “axiomatic” because it cannot be “denied” without first assuming it involves presuppositions that can easily be doubted and challenged.

There are two problems with Obama becoming a foreign policy president.

There are many actions that would satisfy Obama’s accomodationist inclinations, but those would not serve well in portraying him as decisive in foreign policy.

So far, Obama’s policy toward Iran has been to incrementally increase sanctions by building a weak coalition and allow the sanctions to create shifts in Iran’s domestic political situation. The idea is to weaken President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and strengthen his enemies, who are assumed to be more moderate and less inclined to pursue nuclear weapons. Obama has avoided overt military action against Iran, so a confrontation with Iran would require a deliberate shift in the U.S. stance, which would require a justification.

The most obvious justification would be to claim that Iran is about to construct a nuclear device. Whether or not this is true would be immaterial.

As STRATFOR has argued in the past, destroying Iran’s nuclear capability does not involve a one-day raid, nor is Iran without the ability to retaliate. Its nuclear facilities are in a number of places and Iran has had years to harden those facilities. Destroying the facilities might take an extended air campaign and might even require the use of special operations units to verify battle damage and complete the mission. In addition, military action against Iran’s naval forces would be needed to protect the oil routes through the Persian Gulf from small boat swarms and mines, anti-ship missile launchers would have to be attacked and Iranian air force and air defenses taken out. This would not solve the problem of the rest of Iran’s conventional forces, which would represent a threat to the region, so these forces would have to be attacked and reduced as well.

It would strengthen the Iranian regime (as aerial bombing usually does) by rallying the Iranian public to its side against the aggression. If the campaign were successful, the Iranian regime would be stronger politically, at least for a while, but eviscerated militarily.

Iran could launch a terrorist campaign and attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz

We have argued that a negotiation with Iran in the order of President Richard Nixon’s reversal on China would be a lower-risk solution to the nuclear problem than the military option. But for Obama, this is politically difficult to do. Had Bush done this, he would have had the ideological credentials to deal with Iran, as Nixon had the ideological credentials to deal with China. But Obama does not. Negotiating an agreement with Iran in the wake of an electoral rout would open the floodgates to condemnation of Obama as an appeaser. In losing power, he loses the option for negotiation unless he is content to be a one-term president.

First, Obama will be paralyzed on domestic policies by this election. He can craft a re-election campaign blaming the Republicans for gridlock.

The other option for Obama is to look for triumph in foreign policy where he has a weak hand.

The term existence, when Rand first introduces it, is equated with the content of consciousness.

Both the elephant at the zoo perceived by onlookers and the pink elephant perceived by the drunken sot “exist” according to the logic of Rand’s statement.

The only way to escape this conclusion is through equivocation, i.e., by claiming that the drunk does not in fact “perceive” the pink elephant, but merely hallucinates it.

It's also amusing to see how Rand unashamedly chose the viewpoint of the primacy of consciousness when she quoted approvingly the line "I will not die, it's the world that will end", a nice illustration of solipsism...

What's even more annoying is that when you try to engage an Objectivist in an intelligent discussion of the axioms and why they are not what they are hyped up to be, the usual result is having a bundle of epithets tossed in your direction related to your capacity for rationality.

Now what exactly is this “existence” that Rand declares as “primary”? Rand’s equation of the term existence with the term reality hardly improves matters, since Rand does not go on to define very clearly what she means by the term “reality."

What his meaning is? And what he proposes by all these curious researches?

When he awakes from his dream, he will be the first to join in the laugh against himself, and to confess, that all his objections are mere amusement, and can have no other tendency than to show the whimsical condition of mankind, who must act and reason and believe;

Pursing doubt to its ultimate end, Santayana challenges self-consciousness, discourse, logic, change, memory and time. In doing so, he goes well beyond Descartes’ doubts to discover the ultimate certainty, the perusal of a passing datum, a mere instance of awareness.

Knowledge does not arise until intelligence arrives on the scene and connects these instances of awareness into larger, meaningful wholes, which can then be interpreted as symbols of a posited, external reality existing in time and space.

this animal faith is by no means an entirely groundless or “arbitrary” inclination, but one which is tested and corroborated during every moment when intelligence holds dominion over our lives.

Critical to Santayana’s view is the notion that some views are biologically inevitable, so that philosophers who deny them are not being altogether sincere.

the nature of truth is correspondence, the test of truth is pragmatic

in relation to these issues, often equivocates between rationalistic speculation (e.g., the Objectivist axioms) and an extreme empiricism (e.g., basing all knowledge on the “evidence” of the senses)

Let me emphasize the idea that it “began to shift,” not that it is now a strategic asset. This is an unfolding process. Its importance depends on three things: the power of Russia; Russia’s power over Ukraine; a response from some Western entity.

Seventy years after the partition, Moldova has become more than a Romanian province, far from a Russian province and something less than a nation. This is where geopolitics and social reality begin to collide.

In the Eastern European countries, the Soviet era is regarded as a nightmare and the Russians are deeply distrusted and feared to this day. In Moldova, there is genuine nostalgia for the Soviet period as there is in other parts of the former Soviet Union.

For a large part of the Moldovan population, Russian is the preferred language.

three-way tension between Romanians, Moldovan Romanian speakers and Russian speakers.

The real struggle is between those who back the communists and those who support an independent Moldova oriented toward the European Union and NATO.

There is consensus on what it is not: It is not going to be a province of Romania. But Moldova was a province of Romania and a Soviet Socialist Republic. What is it now? What does it mean to be a Moldovan?

It is said to be one of the poorest countries in Europe, if not the poorest. About 12 percent of its gross domestic product is provided by remittances from emigrants working in other European countries, some illegally.

we have a paradox. The numbers say Moldova is extremely poor, yet there are lots of banks and well and expensively dressed young women.

The first is that remittances are flooding the country

The second is that there is a massive shadow economy that evades regulation, taxation and statistical analysis.

The third explanation is that the capital and a few towns are fairly affluent while the rural areas are extraordinarily poor.

From the Moldovan point of view, at least among the pro-Western factions, Moldova’s strategic problems begin and end with Transdniestria

The Russian view, driven home by history, is that benign situations can turn malignant with remarkable speed.

Regardless of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians are the ones concerned about things like a defensive river position while the Ukrainians see the matter with more detachment.

If geopolitics were a theoretical game, then the logical move would be to integrate Moldova into NATO immediately and make it a member of the European Union.

Romania is still there. It is not a perfect solution, and certainly not one many Moldovans would welcome, but it is a solution, however imperfect.

I have been accused of thinking like an old Cold warrior. I don’t think that’s true. The Soviet Union has collapsed, and U.S. influence in Europe has declined. Whatever will come next will not be the Cold War. What I do not expect this to be is a region of perpetual peace. It has never been that before. It will not be that in the future. I want to understand the pattern of conflict that will occur in the future. But for that we need to begin in the past, not with the Cold War, but with World War I.

he Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires collapsed, the Russian empire was replaced by the Soviet Union, and the German empire was overthrown and replaced by a republic.

The Carpathian Mountains form a rough boundary between the Russians and the rest of Europe from Slovakia to the south.

The northern part of Europe is dominated by a vast plain stretching from France to Moscow.

Following World War I, Poland re-emerged as a sovereign nation.

Pilsudski is an interesting figure

The Russians defeated the Ukrainians and turned on Poland. Pilsudski defeated them.

His vision was something called the Intermarium — an alliance of the nations between the seas built around Poland and including Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Finland and the Baltic states.

Pilsudski’s Intermarium makes a kind of logical if not historical sense. It is not historical because this borderland has always been the battleground for others. It has never formed together to determine its fate.

As always, the Intermarium is caught between Russia and Europe.

the entire question of the price and value of the European Union became a central issue in Germany.

For Poland, the specter of a German-Russian entente is a historical nightmare. The last time this happened, in 1939, Poland was torn apart and lost its sovereignty for 50 years.

The question in Ukraine is whether their attempt to achieve complete independence is over, to be replaced by some informal but iron bond to Russia

The area east of the Dniester, Transdniestria, promptly seceded from Moldova

Moldova is the poorest country in Europe. Its primary export is wine, sent mostly to Russia. The Russians have taken to blocking the export of wine for “health reasons.” I think the health issue is geopolitical and not biological.

Romania is oriented toward the European Union but is one of the many countries in the union that may not really belong there.

as its power increases in the Balkans, Turkey will be one of the forces that countries like Romania will have to face.

It is a theory that argues that the post-Cold War world is ending. Russia is re-emerging in a historically recognizable form. Germany is just beginning the process of redefining itself in Europe, and the EU’s weaknesses have become manifest. Turkey has already taken the first steps toward becoming a regional power. We are at the beginning of a period in which these forces play themselves out.

First, Turkey is deeply divided

Second, the Islamism of the Turkish government cannot possibly be compared to that of Saudi Arabia

This is not a time of clear strategic thinking in Washington. I find it irritating to go there, since they regard my views as alarmist and extreme while I find their views outmoded and simplistic.

I regard NATO as a bureaucracy overseeing an alliance whose mission was accomplished 20 years ago.

The Intermarium countries remain infatuated with the European Union and NATO, but the infatuation is declining. The year 2008 and Germany’s indifference to these countries was not pleasant, and they are learning that NATO is history.

Washington still thinks of Russia as the failed state of the 1990s. It simply doesn’t take it seriously. It thinks of the European Union as having gone over a speed bump from which it will recover. But mostly, Washington thinks about Afghanistan. For completely understandable reasons, Afghanistan sucks up the bandwidth of Washington, allowing the rest of the world to maneuver as it wishes.

Nothing could be more to the purpose along these lines then an empirical examination of how reason works to solve disputes within an organization run by leading Objectivists.

Differences of opinion can be settled by "reasoned" discussion.

Peikoff admits, for example, that "Ultimately, someone has to decide who is qualified to hold such positions [on the ARI board] and where the line is to be drawn."

Within the Objectivist ideology, the idea of context is used as a kind of conceptual escape hatch to explain, for instance, why a moral absolute may not apply in all instances (because moral absolutes are "contextual") or why an individual may be certain yet wrong (because certainty is "contextual").

Those with a wider context of knowledge will (presumably) achieve a higher level of "certainty." They will know more and will hence be in a better position to make rational decisions.

Different contexts lead to different assessments of interests, even among rational men; and differing assessment of interests will inevitably lead to conflicts.

Neither Rand nor any of her disciples have ever provided us with a detailed description of how to distinguish a rational interest from a non-rational interest. If we go by Objectivist writings, a "rational" interest is merely any interest that Rand and her disciples approve of, while a non-rational (or "irrational") interest is an any interest they disapprove of.

Objectivists are not supposed to be concerned with status. It is a product of that horror or horrors, social metaphysics. It reeks of authoritarianism and the appeal to faith. Yet status can no more be exorcised from man's "emotional mechanism" than sex or hunger can.

The "formal" meaning is the literal, conscious meaning; it's the rationalized meaning, meant to persuade and deceive both the rationalizer and his audience. The "real" meaning accords with the unconscious motives that are prompting the whole business.

Hence their inability to engage in reasoned discourse with those who disagree with them. Hence their inability to even understand, let alone refute, their critics. Hence their inability to use "reason" to resolve differences among themselves.

Rand actually never bothers to explain, in a clear, detailed, empirically testable fashion, how one goes about using "reason." About as detailed as she gets is the following:

Rand's inclusion of concept-formation in her conception of reason is deeply problematical.

If people like Max Boot want the United States to remain a militarily-dominant superpower, it strikes me that they ought to counsel the development of a social contract that will encourage people to accept the concomitant financial sacrifices over the long term.

Advanced societies control the weather as a matter of course in the worlds of Star Trek and Dune. When it comes to our air and rain, our control fantasies are strong.

We may have to try, but attempting to dictate how much solar energy strikes the planet is a dangerous endeavor, perhaps involving just as much chance as our current course.

Succumbing to the illusion of control would mean replacing one burden — navigating the dangers of today’s climate crisis, and overhauling the world’s energy system — with the much more risky burden of revolutionizing our relationship with the sky itself. The illusion of control — “Everthing’s okay, the scientists have fixed the problem” — could engender apathy at a time when we desperately need to stop pouring carbon dioxide into the sky. It could drive nations apart during a planetary emergency, when they most require unity. It might work in unexpected ways or not at all.

Insisting on God as a cosmic designer -- who intervenes periodically to propel evolution in propitious directions -- inevitably lays the responsibility for the concomitant suffering squarely at the feet of the designer.

If you set in motion a process that inevitably leads to a bad outcome, you are as responsible for that outcome as if you caused it directly. If I drop an anvil from a balcony and it hits someone on the head I do not get to say, “I didn't do anything! It was a natural process, gravity, that did that.”

omehow, “evolution is exciting” does not seem like an adequate response to the billions of years of suffering, death and extinction entailed by the evolutionary process.

Hess is kidding himself if he thinks ID is a specifically evangelical Protestant phenomenon. If the public opinion polls are to be believed ID has widespread support among Catholics, Muslims and even orthodox Jews.

levying taxes was really a way to force everyone to acquire coins, so as to facilitate the rise of markets, since markets were convenient to have around. However, for our present purposes, the critical question is: how were these taxes justified? Why did subjects owe them, what debt were they discharging when they were paid? Here we return again to right of conquest.

Here there is a little story told, a kind of myth. We are all born with an infinite debt to the society that raised, nurtured, fed and clothed us, to those long dead who invented our language and traditions, to all those who made it possible for us to exist. In ancient times we thought we owed this to the gods (it was repaid in sacrifice, or, sacrifice was really just the payment of interest – ultimately, it was repaid by death). Later the debt was adopted by the state, itself a divine institution, with taxes substituted for sacrifice, and military service for one’s debt of life. Money is simply the concrete form of this social debt, the way that it is managed.

Commodity money, particularly in the form of gold and silver, is distinguished from credit money most of all by one spectacular feature: it can be stolen.

the eurozone has thus far been exceedingly economically beneficial to Germany. Berlin’s 151 billion euro contribution to the two bailout funds pales in comparison to the overall boost in exports that Berlin has received since forging the eurozone.

A collapse of a currency — such as those in Germany in 1923, Yugoslavia in 1994, and Zimbabwe in 2008 — is really just a symptom of the underlying deterioration of the political system and is usually followed closely by exactly such a political crisis.

The immediacy of the crisis is the impetus for such radical changes to Europe’s “economic governance.” French President Nicolas Sarkozy actually proposed something similar in the wake of the September 2008 crisis, but Berlin sternly rejected him at the time. The crisis that has followed, however, has changed Germany’s mind.

The bottom line is that Germany and other member states are shelling out cash and breaking EU treaties because it is in their national interests to do so at this particular moment. If they are to institutionalize such rules for the long term, it is inevitable that they will be broken once national interests revert back to the standard concerns of sovereignty over fiscal policy.

Once Germany has paid for its leadership of Europe, will it also be willing to enforce its leadership with direct punitive actions? And if it does, how will its neighbors react?