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Comment by spython | Hacker News Reader

Quoting Ayn Rand at face value in a scientific paper - that disqualifies it for me.

Judging a message by the messenger has its downsides. Personally I try to learn can even from people I generally feel negative towards (Thiel, Hilton). It is especially egregious when the topic is science: accepting disagreement is one fundament of scientific thinking.

I thought the quote was insightful:

  You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality. —Ayn Rand

Putting your head in the sand likely won't help you.

Sometimes people with bad ideas also have good ideas now and then. Rand falls in that category.

Sure, it's a harmless observation, which doesn't explain much about the intent in selecting it. Here's a similar quote from Phillip K. Dick "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." There are lots of others. But this is a paper about intelligence, so choosing Rand seems important, and in fact makes it worthless.

PKD is a strange choice to quote about reality! Much of his fiction is about exploring unreal situations: that reflects a little on reality but he usually cares more about the story than hard sci-fi. E.g.:

  So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos.

https://urbigenous.net/library/how_to_build.html

Of course, I'm unsure whether Ayn Rand is a shining example of rational thinking either!

https://www.scifiblog.org/2023/03/philip-k-dicks-intriguing-...

Face value? More like facetious value. I think you missed the supreme irony. It took the author quoting Ayn Rand in a paper about how stupid people miscalibrate financial expectations as deliciously snarky. (Her delusional followers will indignantly disagree, but that's kind of the point, isn't it?) Using Ayn Rand's own words to call her and her followers idiots.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38541723

Wow, talk about an ironic quote:

>"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality." —Ayn Rand

Well that just about sums up the Libertarian mindset and its unintended, unavoidable consequences, doesn't it?

In conjunction with the conclusions of the paper, it's not very flattering to Ayn Rand's or her followers' cognitive abilities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com