Sublime

The core of John Kelly’s philosophy of risk can be stated without math. It is that even unlikely events must come to pass eventually. Therefore, anyone who accepts small risks of losing everything will lose everything, sooner or later. The ultimate compound return rate is acutely sensitive to fat tails.

Source: Carlo Cipolla, The Basic Law of Human Stupidity

Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

Mill held that truth emerges from an unfettered competition of ideas and that individual character is most improved when allowed to find its own way uncoerced. That vision was insufficient for 20th-century American liberalism.

obtuse.

Godkin, “The Rights of the Citizen: IV—To His Own Reputation,” The Nation, December 25, 1890, 496–497; Warren and Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” 193.

A bigger story is neither better nor worse than a smaller one. As Julia Laite argues, “if it is the big-story historian’s job to shake complacent policy makers, it is the small-story historian’s job to convince people that the small stories from the past that have moved them are unfolding in myriad ways today as well; to encourage their sentiment

Yet such a development would deal a mortal blow to the liberal belief in the sacredness of human life and of human experiences. What’s so sacred in useless bums who pass their days devouring artificial experiences in La La Land?