Steve Sailer on Tom Stoppard’s ‘The Hard Problem’

Steve Sailer writes:

This surprisingly short play references a remarkable number of concepts utilized by 21st-century right-of-center intellectuals—the story opens, for example, with the heroine’s tutor explaining the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the standard introduction to theories of how altruism could evolve.

Other longtime fascinations of the Edge.org crowd featured in The Hard Problem are the replication crisis in psychology, the larger implications of the financial crisis of 2008, and adoption. The nature-nurture implications of adoption are of natural interest to Stoppard, who only discovered in his 50s that he wasn’t roughly a quarter Jewish as he had assumed, but was entirely Jewish.