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Comment by nikdaheratik | Hacker News Reader

Well considering that the quote was the entirety of the post, I don't see how you can then claim that responding with a second quote discrediting the first is in some way responding to the person and not the argument. There was no argument being made and if they tried to do the work of the commenter for them and make an argument, you'd then say they were putting words into the person's mouth.

IMO, if you are relying on a work of mid-20th century fiction to make your case that corporate corruption in the U.S. in the 21st century is somehow going out of control, then your argument has already defeated itself.

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> considering that the quote was the entirety of the post, I don't see how you can then claim that responding with a second quote discrediting the first is in some way responding to the person and not the argument

The first quote laid out a case using a narrative as a metaphor. It explicitly states its position, and as such is an appropriate use of a quote.

The second quote is entirely composed of appeals to emotion and its sole purpose is to ridicule the author of the first quote as well as any readers who might agree with it. As such it is not an appropriate response.

An appropriate response would have first established the premise of the first quote, then argued for or against it.

> "mid-20th century" "21st century"

The age of an idea has no bearing on its quality. To an extent, humanity refines and builds on ideas over time but the basis of Western civilisation dates from Antiquity. To take your specific date range, this post is typed on a browser, operating system, machine, and global network that all date from ideas from the mid 20th century which themselves build on a few centuries of reasoning.

>The first quote laid out a case using a narrative as a metaphor. It explicitly states its position, and as such is an appropriate use of a quote.

Tell us more about the appropriate uses of quotes.

Apparently when a quote doesn't explicitly state its position, but it makes it implicitly very clear, it's not appropriate?

No. My premise is that of "rational" argument (and I know the word is loaded in the context of Ayn Rand), that of seeking a better understanding of the world.

My position is that emotional manipulation leads to a worse understanding of the world and decrease net welfare by encouraging people to be less rational. As such arguments that abuse emotion are not desirable (perhaps "appropriate" is the wrong word: any argument is appropriate on HN so long as it is civil, according to moderation and history).

To go deeper into the subject would require a discussion of whether the end justifies the means, which I'm not willing to spend considerable time and mental effort on right now (otherwise I'd have commented on the article at the top of this page already).

>* My position is that emotional manipulation leads to a worse understanding of the world and decrease net welfare by encouraging people to be less rational.*

That's circular reasoning. "Emotional is bad because it's less rational" (given that rational is the opposite of emotional).

Why would emotional be worse? Or generally worse? It is itself a useful way of deciding, that originated from evolution. In fact there would be a thing as being too rational. Besides, if the ultimate goal is one's happiness (and rationally, there's no way to objectively establish any other goal over it), that's something inherently tied to emotions anyway.

Here's some food for thought:

The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions—mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illus...

The work is still fiction and the characters described in the work become less and less helpful over time as it becomes difficult to try to fit them into the context of today's society. This becomes more true the further you get from the time the novel was written and it is this lens of time passed which allows us, as a society, to filter out many of the mediocre ideas that are no longer helpful and hold onto the works that are more fundamental.

So yes, time matters as does the context in which the works were written. The world itself has become more integrated and capital much more mobile and the role of government is also less clearcut than it was in the middle of the 20th century. Many of the dangers of overreach in government that the writer was worried about have been reduced but at the same time new dangers, including those of global corporations overreaching into our daily lives, have increased.

TL;DR: Snowcrash is probably more helpful to understanding this story than Atlas Shrugged.

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