Procrastinet

"It's not like people say, that I'm dumb..."

filed under: Idle Chatter

Brad DeLong has made it official - I'm not nearly as bright as I think I am.

Now, I usually think of myself as smarter than your average bear. Everyone who knows me will attest to this, probably with snorts of indeterminate but derogatory implication (see? What an ass... who talks like that?!).

And usually when I read about something that isn't in my field, or of which I have an incomplete understanding, I can tease out enough of the edges of the big concepts to get a hazy feel for the gist.

And then I read this post this morning on Brad DeLong's website. And I swear to god, over the course of an entire paragraph, I didn't understand three words in a row. They're not even big words. I'm sure they make sense to anyone who took PHIL-101. But they may as well have been aramaic for all the good they did me.

So I click on the comments, expecting *someone* to say, essentially, "Whoa, look at the big brain on Brad!" But NO - instead there are pages and pages of response, tossed off in the middle of the night in a stream-of-consciousness response to a web posting, by all manner of people to whom this stuff obviously comes EASILY.

So if you want to spend some time seriously stretching out your brain, go check out Bradford and friends. It's like a brain gym.

Here's a sample:

It seems to me that this is not quite right. What the rightwinger needs to deny is the "original position"--everyone in their white robes not knowing who they are going to be sitting around arguing over institutions before they drink from the Lethe and descend to their places in their mothers' respective wombs--and its associated device of hypothetical consent. By denying that you ought to reason morally by putting yourself in an original position, you allow the redistributionists no handholds. And then your position--that what we have, we hold--becomes unassailable.

Posted by rjt at May 21, 2004 10:58 AM