Science marches along. Today, we know that markets are likely not efficient, thanks to P likely being smaller than NP, along lines sketched by Nash and Gödel ov

Science marches along. Today, we know that markets are likely not efficient, thanks to P likely being smaller than NP, along lines sketched by Nash and Gödel over half a century ago. We should be careful to conclude lessons from such anecdotes. After all, we could just as easily choose Robert Pirsig as our example academic. Pirsig was grading philosophy papers and wanted to know what made some papers better than others (in his words, which papers "had more Quality"). Eventually he was asked to debate his colleagues on the subject of Quality. While he may have won that debate, he was still ostracized by his peers and fell into a downward spiral which only ended when his personality was destroyed by electroshock therapy. Oh, and Pirsig would have been the "leftist" here, the non-conservative. The rest of the department were classicists who knew their Plato and Aristotle back and forth, and Pirsig felt himself forced to take the path of Socrates, deliberately destroying the fruits of his career in order to save his intellectual integrity. If we say that cancel culture belongs only to one side or one group, then we are deluding ourselves.