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Comment by IsaacL | Hacker News Reader

Modern academic philosophy won't help because it's dominated by certain false ideas.

The problem with physics today is rationalism - constructing theories with only partial reference to experimental data. Some fields, like psychology, have the opposite problem - empiricism - where they accumulate countless statistical correlations but fail to integrate them into consistent theories.

I suggest anyone who's seriously interested in a solution to these issues to listen to the following, then look up Leonard Peikoff and David Harriman's other writings on the subject.

https://campus.aynrand.org/campus-courses/understanding-obje...

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> The problem with physics today is rationalism - constructing theories with only partial reference to experimental data. Some fields, like psychology, have the opposite problem - empiricism - where they accumulate countless statistical correlations but fail to integrate them into consistent theories.

"Rationalism" is still serving us very well in pretty much every other field of physics except unification theories. We're still coming up with great new theoretical models based on working with the laws we have, sometimes driven by the need to explain existing experimental results and sometimes to look for new places to do fruitful experiments. There's a much better balance between the two for physics as a whole than you're making it out to be.

I'm not sure how wrapping in Ayn Rand's theories with all their politics is going to streamline physics.

I think then, that by IsaacL's definition, those other parts of physics where theory and experiment are well balanced don't suffer from (excess) "rationalism", which he seems to define as a reliance on theory without experiment.

> Modern academic philosophy won't help because it's dominated by certain false ideas.

Care to tell us what they are?

Check out his URL's domain name, then make the usual assumptions.

> make the usual assumptions

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean or imply in this context, but it seems to be a classic HN response asking people to judge a book by it's cover instead of its contents/arguments, which is even less helpful.

Objectivism is basically built on a bunch of strange axioms, and to a large part completely denies that they're arbitrarily chosen axioms instead of hard facts. They treat logic built on other axioms as inherently wrong.

The nice thing about a book cover is that it tells you which book is inside, saving you the trouble of having to read it every time.

It's sometimes reasonable to judge books by their covers.

I'm offering the opportunity to try to convert me to objectivism. :-)

There's enough randian evangelism on this forum without inviting more.

Interesting. I suppose I haven't been here enough to see it.

It's hard to summarise. Read "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" which contains the fundamentals of a theory of knowledge, specifically a theory of the nature of concepts. That's the part which is relevant for this discussion and is also the foundation for everything else.

Ultimately you have to read Rand rather than read about her, as so many of her critics enjoy a somewhat loose relationship with reality. For example, the comment in this thread about "randian evangelism" on HN. I've encountered two other Objectivists on HN, whereas every week we have multiple hundred-comment threads on how fantastic an idea universal basic income is. That's pretty ineffective evangelism.

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