People need more than knowledge. They need wisdom.

 People need more than knowledge. They need wisdom. And by that I mean an understanding of what life is all about. This is the role that the Bible used to play in the lives of people. But when the Bible became disenfranchised, people find other things to fill that gap in their lives. And the new myths are most often teaching lessons that are pernicious. Thus you find in the Bible the fact that sufferings has  a reason--sufferings are an unavoidable part of the  human condition. We all suffer and cause others to suffer. In the Bible, the reason is simple: What goes around, comes around. But when people lack that wisdom, they find other reasons for their  plights and dilemmas. For women, that is men. For the "woke" it is being born in the wrong body. The list goes on.  

professors of gender, race studies, psychology. ...

 STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics ] and labor [working people] make a coalition in liberal capitalistic societies. Who is left out?  The Intellectuals, the pseudo enlightened, the Humanities professors that can't compute, can't do the math, can't make anything that people want. So what do they do? They claim secret knowledge that supposedly everyone needs. That is the university professors of gender, race studies, psychology. philosophy. literature, etc., that no one needs  or wants, and can not make anything that people need. Theirs's is the politics of resentment.  Everyone wants people that can do stuff; can go to the moon, can make computers, that drive trucks. Who needs the pseudo intellectuals? 

 I was walking out side the other day and saw printed on the back of someone's sweater "שומר אחי" ("My brother's keeper").That is in reference to what Cain asked God, "Am I my brother's keeper?"(This was just  after murdering him.)  This reminds me of the attitude that everyone had toward my son, Izhak (also known as Nahman), when he was begging for help and everyone's answer was "Am I my brother's keeper?" Everyone's answer should have been just what was printed on that fellow's sweatshirt:  "שומר אחי" ("My brother's keeper")

 za6 midi file

The subject of string theory

The  subject of string theory came up recently so I thought to write down my thinking on this. Mainly it is appeal to authority. Feynman worked long and hard on gravity and saw that quantum gravity has no chance since it is not renormalizable. So if there is any way to reconcile QM with gravity, it has to be something else. Then there is the remarkable fact that String Theory has a two spin particle which arises  naturally in the equations; and for  along time that was thought to be a strike against it until someone realized that the graviton implied in General Relativity is  a two spin particle.

't Hooft has a synopsis of it, and also Siegel at Stony Brook in NY. 

I am nothing, but a layman, but this I how I see things. Maybe I am not qualified to offer an opinion but neither are most of the enemies of string theory. They are certainly not in the major league like 't Hooft or Siegel or Susskind at Stanford.

Musar approach of the Rishonim

I might have just gone with the Musar approach of the Rishonim except that their framework is faith {sinai} with reason {Aristotle}. That works for me to some degree except for the problem pointed out by Berkley that there is nothing of the heat of the fire or the sharpness of the sword that enters the mind to give an idea of heat or fire. To see that point clearly it helps to read Thomas Reid, the common sense philosopher. [There are also problems  in Aristotle's Metaphysics.] So the purely Aristotelian approach is not possible except with some sort of modification. Thus, the three critiques of Kant are a necessary development. That leaves me however with some problems in Kant which were noticed almost before the ink was dry. From that emanated a few schools. To me the one that makes the most sense is Jacob Fries and Leonard Nelson. ["Why not Hegel?" you might ask. For me, the reason is the dialectic method is a tool of reason, but not the only way reason progress. Empirical evidence is needed. There is the problem of pure reason alone that Kant pointed out.

Roughly the Kant Fries school of Leonard Nelson https://www.friesian.com/nelson.htm"> makes the most sense to me, but not exactly because of an issue in Kant. I,e, Kant accepts Hume's critique of reason to some degree and does escape from it. I however have an issue thus: I think Hume was wrong from the start. Reason is not limited to figuring out contradictions based in definitions like: bachelors are not married. Why did Hume make this mistake? Because in his day, Euclid had authority almost equal to the Bible. And in Euclid, reason is to see when a result of a hypothesis contradicts one of the five starting axioms. Hume says over and over that that is the only function of reason, but with no proof. He assumes it. But that is an arbitrary limitation. Kant did break out of that prison, but limited reason to the realm of possible experience. That is true to some degree, but still assumes that there is no knowledge outside of reason or empirical experience. But that too is too limiting. For even if we start with Euclid, from where do the axioms come from? Why are they reasonable? That is the starting point of Fries and Leonard Nelson: non intuitive immediate knowledge I owe a debt of gratitude in understanding this to Kelley Ross for his web site on the approach of Leonard Nelson and in particular his PhD thesis there. Also To Michael Huemer in his books and essays and Brain Caplan and Steven Dutch whose web it is back after being down for year.