Political systems and success

In a comment on my previous post “History is not the case against collectivism”, Mark asked
I also just realized, that a system/ideal can be judged from a moral standpoint separately from a history: then is it possible for an ideology that is inferior from a moral standpoint to actually succeed in history?
The question is important enough [...]

History is not the case against collectivism

In an analysis of a newspaper article by David Brooks on China and collectivism, Mark writes
When we consider criticisms of Collectivism, we almost automatically associate it with the past experiences of Communism, Socialism, and Fascism, and how the societies based on these collectivist systems we’ve seen have either failed or stagnated.
…
Taleb calls history a fallacy [...]

Satyam chairman Raju’s crime and the Times’ reaction

About a couple of weeks back, I had a very interesting conversation with a friend (and former classmate). The converstion started off with him telling another friend that “a day will come when you will look for a meaning, a larger purpose in your job/life”. I enquired what he meant by a larger purpose and the conversation [...]

A lesson in epistemology

I first learnt programming (in FORTRAN) in an introductory course on Computer Science in my first year of engineering. About an year after that I took on a project that required some ‘C’ programming with no knowledge of the language. I did that project moderately well. Some time after that, I learnt C++ from Bruce Ezekiel excellent book [...]