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NickS (WA)'s avatar

I enjoyed the essay and, just as a tangent, I wonder if Nathan Myhrvold's cookbook would be an example of a rationalist approach to becoming a great cook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernist_Cuisine

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Michael Rushton's avatar

Its being described as “the cookbook to end all cookbooks” is about as rationalist as one can get.

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NickS (WA)'s avatar

Ah for the days when a tech millionaire would spend their time writing a modernist cookbook . . . :)

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Franklin Einspruch's avatar

Let's appreciate too that Oakeshott could write like a demigod. There's an amazing amount of quotable Oakeshott. Your choices are apt.

Your framing of Elon is a trenchant criticism. That granted, he did just discover that an eye-watering $4.7 trillion had departed the Treasury without notations that would have caused the payments to be traceable. So while he may be destroying institutional knowledge and continuity, a lot of people had become entirely too comfortable with the prior arrangement, enjoying what Robin would be obliged to characterize as privilege.

There's a necessary interaction between continuity and change. Too much continuity and the worst aspects of your society stay bad. Too much change and your society devolves into meaningless chaos. To have a politics is to occupy a point between the two and to know why. The poles of that spectrum are not politics but creeds.

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