Sunday, February 12, 2017

Professor would not distribute his brain

The NY Times has an obituary of a mathematician:
Professor Smullyan said that to be paid so much was unfair.

“I said, ‘Raymond, isn’t it true that you’re more intelligent than most people?’ ” Mr. Kotik said during a phone interview. “ ‘Yes,’ he said. So I said, ‘I think that’s unfair. We should take out part of your brain and distribute it to people who could use it.’

“He was silent for a minute, and finally he said, ‘I can’t give you any reason, but I wouldn’t do it.’ ”
Funny. Yes, there are limits to academic leftist egalitarianism. He just cannot articulate a reason for it.

2 comments:

  1. Roger,
    The blind spot of all leftists is sports. Try and convince a leftist that no superior athlete should be allowed to make more than any other ordinary athlete and watch the fur fly. Try suggesting a superior athlete should also be handicapped so they don't have 'an unfair advantage', or mentioning that the athlete 'didn't do that, his luck of the draw DNA' did, or that said athlete 'just got lucky'. Each of these arguments is used regularly by left leaning politicians, academics, and pundits to justify their appropriation of someone else's wealth in the name of 'fairness' or 'social justice', whatever that means.

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  2. This Nike Equality video has had millions of hits in the last couple of days. I am not sure what the point is, as Nike pays a lot of money to athletes, and it certainly does it on an extremely unequal basis.

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