1. Ron Paul peddling a white guy mythology? (a mythological space occupied mostly by white guys?) He doesn't seem to serious or coherent here in this interview. He seems markedly different to me from how real economists who flirt with this (like Arnold Kling) handle the topic when they're being serious, and offering serious criticisms of the bailout.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mHuoHGBNcg
2. M Paravich,
I won't comment specifically on Chalmers because I'm not expert in the area, but I think you have TGGP pegged wrong.
TGGP performs an excellent service on the internet, he's an extremely effective cross-pollinator of intellectual bloggers (I have no idea how he ended up a paleoconservative or a libertarian or whatever he claims to be, since it doesn't seem rooted in being a dummy or having an obvious chip on his should for havng ended up a 2nd tier academic elite).
TGGP is frankly, probably one of the most broadly literate people in the world. I think it safe to say that his broad intellectual literacy is a least 1 in a thousand. I personally suspect that it's closer to 1 in 10 million, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's closer to 1 in 100 million. He can write literately on topics I have close to zero knowledge of, and yet he's completely literate on the topics I more narrowly focus on.
He may be a prisoner of his own myth if his back story is true, that he'd rather be some guy working as an entry level programmer than getting credentialed as an intellectual thought leader.
But he's no douchebag and furthermore, I doubt his line about Chalmers came from being uninformed bullshit -although it may have been swaggering bullshit.
TGGP can be a pain in the ass, but if that's what gets him up out of bed, that's great. Because he's adding a lot of value (although much like liberals say about the Wall Street Journal, it may come from his reporting rather than his opinions).
Chalmers does have a strong Math Olympiad/AI background, and does good work in most philosophical areas. In the area of consciousness, he has cleverly dismantled several widely circulating (among philosophers) muddled arguments against supernatural consciousness.
His dualist views, while I believe them to be mistaken, come about in the face of an extremely powerful intuition that results from a flaw in the design of the human-brain (even Chalmers admits that the intuition on which his books are based, i.e. the intuition in his brain, is not truth-tracking). Newton spent much of his time on alchemy, and even if it turns out that Chalmers is severely confused in his area of specialty, he is still a very unusually clear thinker in most domains.
Posted by: Carl Shulman | January 10, 2009 at 08:11 AM
Yeah, Ron Paul is not an economist and often not very coherent. I judge him relative to other politicians though. I actually scoffed like many others at the perma-bear predictions of Austrians and Austrian-wannabes and then felt stupid when the mortgage meltdown happened. I didn't see the salience of him being a "white guy" in that interview though. Things occupied "mostly by white guys" is a pretty broad category.
rooted in being a dummy
Haldane wasn't a dummy either. We can be smart and stupid in ways at the same time.
his own myth
I don't get quite that. Are you claiming I'm deluded by false consciousness and would REALLY prefer being a 2nd tier academic? For what my claims about myself are worth, I didn't especially like being in school and I'm confident that if I'd stayed the full 4 years I'd be less happy than I am now in the "real world".
Posted by: TGGP | January 10, 2009 at 10:37 AM
Basically, TGGP, he wants you to become an "intellectual thought leader" so you can lead him to immortality.
If that doesn't work, he'll strap you to an operating table and rummage around in your viscera with a rusty X-acto blade.
Ow!
Posted by: John Sabotta | January 18, 2009 at 08:01 AM