gwenhwyfaer

Someone else has come along and downmodded every single post I made in this thread. Result? Instant karma drop of 10%. By one person. Because I said something they didn't like.

pg, please delete or disable my account forthwith. I am not prepared to stay in a place where that's acceptable - and by allowing the behaviour, you make it acceptable. I would do it myself, but news.yc doesn't even allow me to change my fucking password. (I hope you're not storing them as plaintext.)

Considering that one of his "results" is a philosophical proof of the existence of God, I'd say he might have gone up a bit of a garden path...

> Many philosophers can be criticized as developing rational arguments for positions they hold intuitively.

Indeed, but the key is doing so from a position of trying to prove your intuitively-held position wrong, and I'd suggest that this is what distinguishes philosophers. Some of them - for instance, Wittgenstein - even manage to do it.

Going back to the science analogy, new hypotheses are accepted not once supporting evidence is found - even UFOs have supporting evidence, after all! - but only for as long as attempts to produce confounding evidence fail.

> Please provide a reference.

See above. The books in which I could have located a reference are long gone; but it's in one of her short essays (if pushed, I'd suggest that it might be found in For the New Intellectual... but wouldn't want to be held to that).

> What definition do you like?

From wikipedia: "Different philosophers have had varied ideas about the nature of reason, and there is also disagreement about the subject matter of philosophy." If not even the people who do it professionally can agree on a definition, it would be presumptuous of me to try.

Nonetheless, you misread my objection. I am objecting to the assertion that Rand's work is without question philosophy, using the definition of philosophy by which Rand identified herself as one. It's tautological; it begs the question.

Likewise, my criticism of Rand is not that her conclusions are not reasonable conclusions (although I have my own opinions on that). It is that the methods by which she reached those conclusions are not those of a serious philosophical investigation. Rand's entire "philosophy" was carefully contrived to justify the conclusions she wanted justified, and that makes it worthless as philosophy - and inherently dishonest, to boot.

> You still leave open the issue of whether Rand's work is in fact pseudophilosophy.

I haven't even presented a definition of pseudophilosophy, let alone one you have agreed upon, so it's hard to see how you can assert that I haven't proved my case. So:

: I define "pseudophilosophy" as "justification masquerading as philosophy" - or, to elaborate, "a contrived rationalisation of a priori conclusions, constructed primarily to justify those conclusions rather than to examine their validity".

: I claim that the evidence of Rand's flight to the US from revolutionary Russia, and the emotions expressed in her early fiction (primarily We the Living and Anthem, but even back as far as The Husband I Bought) demonstrate the a priori nature of her strident individualism and anti-collectivism. I do not criticise this; indeed, I have a lot of sympathy with it.

: I note that her philosophical oeuvre developed over the next few decades, from its clumsy emotive (and none the worse for that) beginnings in Anthem, through its 30-year gestation in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, to its expression in direct form in works such as For The New Intellectual and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

: I therefore conclude that in this case, she contrived her philosophical justification to fit her a priori conclusions about the rightness of capitalism and the abhorrence of altruism.

Note that I remain in sympathy with the feelings that drove her; indeed, I would go so far as to say that I share them. But to look upon her rationalisation of those feelings as anything other than a rationalisation, the self-justification of a woman who could not allow herself to simply be, is something I find absurd.

> then one where you assert without any evidence that her work is bullshit?

I didn't assert that, I implied that in the course of asserting something else.

> You think you can just dismiss an entire body of thought by throwing out ad hominems?

Yeah, actually I do, if it's a very small body and hasn't done much thinking.

> comparing me to a "Christian fundamentalist"

Again (and this is REALLY getting tedious), I didn't compare you to a Christian fundamentalist, I compared Objectivist arguments that I have heard before (and predicted that you would use, partly in order to ensure that you didn't) with those of Christian fundamentalists.

> I know that you're smart enough to know that I'm a pretty smart guy

Er, no - at the moment that is a conclusion I simply cannot draw. Your thinking displays evidence of being muddled and irrational, with little grasp of logic or ability to distinguish between claims made of the argument and claims made of the arguer.

I have no doubt that you think you're a pretty smart guy, and I bet you didn't have to work too hard at school to achieve results. But I also think that because of this, you tend to interpret criticism as a personal attack, and you are slow to recognise when someone really does have something to teach you, especially when you don't think that person is as bright as you think you are.

> In fact it wouldn't surprise me if you haven't read any of her work.

Try "all her novels and at least 4 books of essays". In fact, I seem to have read more Rand than many Objectivists. It was a while ago, though, and the books have long since left my possession.

Let me guess - your next argument will be "you didn't understand it then". If so, we're done here, for the same reason I don't argue with Christian fundamentalists who claim I don't understand Christianity.

edit: Sorry, some of your other assertions amuse me.

> Also, it's interesting that you don't try to reconcile the fact that the Y Combinator is one of the most successful startup incubators ever, and that there is a large presence of Ayn Rand fans on here.

I guess you found "maybe the ability to believe bullshit... is a strength" confusing. I chose the word "strength" for a reason, although "advantage" would fit well too.

I also covered that in another thread, where you were perfectly welcome to reply. Nobody did.

> Do ya think there might be a connection there?

Correlation? Not without better data. But even if there is a correlation, that is not causation; and I find it hard to take someone who would assert otherwise seriously as a thinker.

So here's one for you. What proportion of successful YC startups were founded by Objectivists? What proportion of failed or abandoned ones were?

> In my experience it's very rare to meet a person who calls themselves an Objectivist who isn't way above average in intelligence and ambition.

In my experience it's very rare to meet a person who ridicules Objectivism who isn't way above average in intelligence, perceptiveness and sensitivity.

Shall we get into a pissing match about whose experience is better, or shall we simply agree that personal experience is not a useful data point?

> All the guys I knew from university who were Objectivists are now either working at Google

...so no self-compromise there, then...

> some big time law firm

...where integrity is so highly prized...

Two wrongs don't make a right. I'd say it's more important to stop teaching pseudoscience in science classes than to use it as a justification for teaching pseudophilosophy in philosophy classes. And in general, novels should be taught in literature classes, not philosophy classes - although the example of L'Etranger suggests that there is room for crossover.

(Anyway, the majority of Rand's work takes the form of non-fictional essays. Her novels made her name, but it's clear she saw them only as means to an end.)

No. Dishonesty is dismissing any argument with which one disagrees as "dishonest" without actually making a substantive counterargument.

If you don't understand how people can make the claim, fine - but please do grasp that all this demonstrates is the paucity of your understanding.

> On what grounds would you call Rand's work "pseudophilosophy", rather than philosophy proper?

Well, for a start, there was the fact that she reviewed, and dismissed on "philosophical" grounds, a book of Immanuel Kant's after she read the back cover. Sure, that's an example, but by no means an atypical one. She dismissed nearly everything after Aristotle, usually on superficial grounds. Such wholesale dismissal of the established field, such grandiosity of claims (especially in the face of such shallow thinking) has direct parallels with pseudoscience.

> I would personally say that to qualify as a philosophy, something must be a system of thought that proposes a notion of metaphysics, epistemology, and a system of ethics. Rand's "output" obviously qualifies

...for a definition of "philosophy" you have pretty much quoted verbatim from her work, but without admitting that or even acknowledging the existence of alternative perspectives? You do see the problem with that, don't you...?

> Intelligent design and time cube theory ought not to be taught because they can be objectively verified as false.

No. They can't. That's the whole point of pseudoscience - if their claims were verifiable but wrong, it would just be forgotten. But pseudoscientists make unverifiable claims precisely in order to claim that because their claims have not been disproven, they should be given parity.

As for teaching Thales, how does one teach that Socrates was an advance if one does not teach what he was advancing from? Similarly, the Rutherford model of the atom is still mentioned in science classes - by your logic it should be forgotten as pseudoscience, but it wasn't. One cannot teach science without teaching that models are superseded by better models as they are created - that is the very nature of the scientific process. And the reason science and philosophy were commingled until a couple of centuries ago is that it's at the heart of the philosophical process too. One rejects models because one can demonstrate that an alternative model better fits the observable reality; one doesn't superficially reject them without bothering to understand them first because one finds their implications in disagreement with the conclusions one is seeking to prove!

Plus it makes you sound like qwe1234. We don't do that here, either.

If Rand's fans accepted that she was worthless as a philosopher, but half a century ahead of the self-help curve, they'd be a lot less annoying.

Considering that the people on this site are more or less exactly the kind of people with whom Rand surrounded herself, and anyone who fancies themselves at all creative or exceptional is likely to identify with the Roark or Galt characters (who are, nonetheless, only ever described from an external perspective) - and frankly, the more likely to so identify the less their achievements tally with their self-estimation - I'd say it's not at all surprising.

I'd also say it doesn't bode well for the future. From my perspective, being a Rand fan is a demonstration of an unfortunate lack of either insight or critical thinking. Maybe the ability to believe bullshit, so long as it's positive bullshit, is a strength in an entrepreneur. But being unable to distinguish harsh truth from desirable illusion is not a strength in someone who is truly creative, whether in thought or in anything else.

No, it's for the same reason that intelligent design isn't taught in biology classes, or that the timecube theory isn't taught in physics classes, or that homeopathy isn't taught in med school. Rand's output was pseudophilosophy.

How is the Acumen Fund funded? How was it initially funded?

Charity may not work, but there's plenty of evidence that charities do; they exist as organisations to convert money into exactly the kind of progress that you argue is necessary.

As long as it took to demonstrate supporting evidence - more precisely, to verify a prediction made by the Copernican model. Have at it.

(ObFrTed: Down with this sort of thing.)

> I believe that ID gets unfairly maligned.

Yeah, those nasty mean judges.

Perhaps, then, you should be applying to churches for funding? They have interests in common with you - in both "figuring out what God is up to" and the "wanting something for nothing".

Come to think of it, those ideas might themselves be directly related.

> "One very common thing is that often very brilliant children stop working because they're praised so often that it's what they want to live as--brilliant--not as someone who ever makes mistakes," she said.

Exactly my experience. I've been trying to figure out how to motivate myself to actually do anything for my whole adult life (and a good bit before), because in my formative years I basically got As for showing up - not only did I never have to figure out how to work at something, when I did find something difficult I instantly decided I was a failure at it and stopped trying.

Any suggestions on how I can break out of that cycle would be very gratefully received... but I'm scared that at 33, it's too late for me to learn how to learn - or how to fail.

I was always in the library, because I had no interest in what I was being taught, and (I didn't realise it then, but) I couldn't bear being in a roomful of people for lectures. I wish I'd done something like an Open University (is there a US equivalent to this organisation?) course instead.

"Reference ODF implementation" seems like a fair niche to occupy going forward too, especially when considered in the light of the traits you mention.

It's the beginning of a pattern.

You're absolutely right, in some aspects. Some things will always be better done locally; it's ridiculous to contemplate writing a 3d game without access to a 3d API, for example. And it's silly to have a ton of cheap processing power sat under your desk pretending to be a 3270.

So I wonder if the future is going to be client-server at all? Perhaps the arrangement will be that in exchange for using the services of webapp X, you contribute your processor to act as part of the distributed processing for the backend part of that webapp. Your request might end up being processed on your machine, or it might be processed three thousand miles away whilst your machine is processing someone else's request... If peer-to-peer file transfer applications (or, you know, natural history) have taught us anything, it's the value of distributed, decentralised, cellular systems. The webapps we're seeing right now are incredibly primitive, and have barely scratched the surface of such things - but when they do, when people start talking JSON or AJAX or some other ETLA to each other's browsers rather than to centralised servers, when the only difference between a web browser and a web server is that the browser has the GUI loaded - then we'll really see the value of webapps...

...hmm. Excuse me, I may be a little busy for a while...

> the really intensive javascript apps just use way too much memory in Firefox, especially when you have 12 hour Firefox sessions

I suspect that huge improvements in the state of Javascript interpreters will really start to change the equations. If JS is Lisp in disguise, there's no reason why JS engines can't start to benefit from the decades of evolution put into Common Lisp runtimes.

Come to think of it, what if a JS engine got fast enough that the browser itself could be written in Javascript?

Oh fuck off. Arrrrr.

Er, no, Oliver Sacks wrote the article. The article is about Clive Wearing.

I'd contend that the vast majority of the world pretends to be genuinely religious, and is genuinely superstitious.

Because "asocial networks" tend to be kinda small?

> my married friends complain that they feel like hermits

I'm a hermit, and I never feel married. There's something fundamentally unfair about that. :)

Not everyone. Just the people in a position to do something about it.

(We need new people in those positions.)

Wait until you write the second webapp, and see which bits of the first one you really do reuse without modification?

I don't think there's a tech-specific downturn on the way. I think the lessons have been learned from last time, and the arrival of widely available always-on connectivity (some of it at halfway-tolerable speeds) has made the web as valuable as it wasn't quite last time around.

However - I think there's a much more general economic downturn right around the corner. The sense I get about the economy in general is that it's all built on smoke, mirrors, and a whole lot of playing cards... we might still be in good times, but only in the sense of everyone being so scared of the hangover that it's safer to stay drunk, but the booze is really close to running out, and there aren't any more friends to bring fresh kegs around. And I fear that no matter how strong it is internally, the tech world will end up being dragged down when the rest of the economy crashes.

The bright side of starting up during a recession, of course, is that if your business can survive the recession, then you know it's pretty damn strong. :)