He should. His work has political and cultural significance, and only that: no literary value. I say that as someone who put too much time into reading Bloom County when I was younger.
I'm baffled by all the people saying this is good writing. This is self-indulgent, showoff writing by someone who cannot maintain a consistent voice. If you liked it, give the credit to Béla Bartók, who provided the topic that held your interest, and to the Transylvanians who have conserved and preserved an ethnic culture that provides endless fascination.
My immediate reaction is to doubt some of this: isn't it what you'd expect to read about someone who agrees to testify against a well-funded, well-connected defense contractor? It was a time when the press was the undisputed king of information. But then I read that the case against General Dynamics fizzled and the one against Veliotis did not; maybe I should look at it as a caution against excessive skepticism.
I love to see people doing things I've never even thought of that embrace history and culture, and that they take pride in doing. This is exemplary of the respectful attitude we ought to have toward more of our activities.
LEGOs makes sense; a LEGO is an indivisible entity, of which you can have a certain number. Calling the material simply LEGO makes it sound like an undifferentiated mass, like sludge, or cheese.
> You can make exactly the same case about tonal voice leading rules too.
You really can't. They aren't laws of nature, but they are based on observation: "When I have two voices proceed in parallel fifths, it's as though one voice ceased to have an independent character. Unless I want that effect, I should avoid that." "When I frustrate a leading tone, it makes the harmonic effect less clear."
Schoenberg's system starts with the arbitrary: pick a tone row and use it! But there are rules based on observation there, too: if you use tonal constructions in atonal music, it frustrates the listener's expectations, so don't do that. The ear can recognize the rows when transposed, reversed, and altered by other techniques, so those are good. Serialism is less fully-developed and lacks the deep cultural background of tonal music, but it's not entirely arbitrary either.
James O'Keefe's minor infractions seem out of place on this list. It sounds to me like Forbes might be disappointed in him for other, more philosophical reasons.
But if that ML tool is trained on modern video, depending on its capabilities it may subtly modernize aspects of the video in ways that lessen the "past is a foreign country" effect, leading us to believe that the past was more like the present than it in truth was. It's a trade-off between removing technological barriers between us and the person, so we can connect to their recorded legacy, and removing sociological barriers, which we probably want to preserve.
That's an amazing test, if what you want to evaluate is the candidate's immersion in the wellspring of Western culture (and some math). I'm struck by how little fluency the Greek test requires, though: it looks to me (with my "small Latine and lesse Greeke") like it's mostly grammar work, since the difficult words are all supplied.
I would have loved living among people whose elites valued Western culture so highly.
I wonder how much the actual average level of education has changed, though the topics may be different. Could those 4th-grade dropouts read and understand a newspaper, calculate how many pounds of barley it takes to plant the south field now that we cleared that new area, and work out a 1-in-10 slope for the new shed roof? I bet most of them could, and that a lot of the time the average person spends in school now is not as well-directed toward their likely life needs — which may be less easily ascertained.