1. Yaron Brook is asked if it's reasonable to use the new weight loss drugs considering that (according to the questioner) the mechanism for their result isn't known. Brook says nothing wrong with that because you don't need to know the causal relationship to conclude that something works. I guess he hasn't learned the basics of Objectivist epistemology as explained by Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff. Both Rand and Peikoff famously said that it was irrational to conclude that smoking tobacco "caused" cancer before the mechanism was discovered.
2. Jerry Kirkpatrick has a new book, Epistemological Foundations of the Free Society: Ayn Rand’s Theory of Universals Applied to Science, Sigmund Freud’s Psychology, and Ludwig von Mises’s Economics.
3. The latest from the Ayn Rand Archives is that they will put up typewritten transcripts of Rand's papers over the next "few years." As I've said before, I'll believe it when I see it.
--Neil Parille
