Whereas nerds stand to benefit, even more than normal people, from becoming more assertive, outgoing, optimistic, obamalike in temperament, and all those other good things,<\/p>\n
Whereas the fundamental problem with nerds is that they’re constantly overthinking everything,<\/p>\n
Whereas this means nerds are regularly beaten in life by people who think less than they do,<\/p>\n
Whereas it also means that nerds can’t read self-help books without coming up with dozens of (generally sound) reasons why everything they’re reading is a load of crap,<\/p>\n
Whereas there’s therefore a large unmet need for self-esteem-boosting, personality-improving materials that would somehow fly under nerds’ radar, disarming the rational skeptical parts of their brains,<\/p>\n
This holiday season, as my present to all my nerd readers, I’ve decided to start an occasional series entitled Nerd Self-Help.<\/strong><\/p>\n Today’s installment: What should you do when you find yourself asking whether you have any “right to exist”?<\/em><\/p>\n Pondering the problem this morning, I hit upon a solution: Ask yourself whether the integer 8 has any right to exist.<\/em><\/p>\n In first-order logic, existence is not even a property that can be predicated of objects.\u00a0 Given a universe of objects, you can ask about properties<\/em> of those objects: for example, is there a perfect cube which is one less than a perfect square?\u00a0 But it’s simply assumed <\/em>that when you use a phrase like “is there,” you’re quantifying over everything that exists.\u00a0 (As many of you know, this was the basic insight behind Kant’s refutation of Anselm’s ontological proof<\/a> of the existence of God: the notion of “a being that wouldn’t be perfect without the added perfection of existence,” said Kant, is gobbledygook.)<\/p>\n Similarly, I claim that if you were to formulate a theory of human rights in first-order logic in any “natural” way, then whether you have a right to exist is not even a question that would arise within that theory.\u00a0 Such a theory might include your right to not be murdered, to get a fair trial, to engage in consensual sexual activities, to own property, etc., but not<\/em> your “right to exist”: that “right,” to the extent it even made sense, would simply be presupposed by your being part of the universe of persons that the theory of rights was quantifying over.\u00a0 In other words, the sequence of words “do I have the right to exist?” seems to me to dissolve on analysis, an ill-formed non-question.<\/p>\n Now, I don’t doubt that there are plenty of logical, metaphysical, and legal objections that might be raised against the above argument.\u00a0 But here’s the key: don’t think about it too much!<\/em>\u00a0 Just trust that there’s a rational-sounding argument for why you shouldn’t doubt your right to exist, and be happy.<\/p>\n Merry Christmas, everyone!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Whereas nerds stand to benefit, even more than normal people, from becoming more assertive, outgoing, optimistic, obamalike in temperament, and all those other good things, Whereas the fundamental problem with nerds is that they’re constantly overthinking everything, Whereas this means nerds are regularly beaten in life by people who think less than they do, Whereas […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nerd-self-help"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}