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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

I guess because I see secular humanism as being rooted in a rationalist outlook, and the a-social claimed rationality of the Ayn Rand rugged individualists just leaves me cold, as does most libertarian rejections of society and social equity, collectivism to me is the highest form of rationalism.

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Collectivism killed hundreds of million of people in the past century alone. This was also rationalized. Rugged individualism is much less a-social from that perspective.

>Collectivism killed hundreds of million of people in the past century alone.

So? The western states killed and enslaved just as many under various names (from christianity and manifest destiny, to democracy and free trade and "the free world").

What happened in the name of an idea doesn't mean the idea is bad or that what happened is an inevitable part of the idea.

I note that your rejection of Ayn Rand's philosophy is that it "leaves you cold", rather than a rational refutation of it.

Ayn Rand begins with axioms, and logically derives her position from there. (Well, maybe. I suspect that at least to some degree, she already had her position, and derived her axioms from there, then argued for her position from her axioms.) So I attack her position by saying that in her third axiom, she mis-defines consciousness, and the rest of her errors follow from her flawed starting position. That's rational. "It leaves me cold" is not a rational response. (It may be an indication that you feel there's something wrong with the position, even if you can't define it or prove it, and that's fine. But it's not a rational response.)

One may argue that the deliberate communicative act of expressively sharing feelings by means of articulated language may very well be a rational response by itself, as long as it's driven by a thoughtful enough intention. Even if at the same time it's fully void of rationalist value.

(Sorry if it comes across overly pedantic and twisted: non-native speaker, not enough sleep, words hard.)

Why do you attack her position? Because you fundamentally, a priori, believe her third axiom is wrong, or because the collection of axioms and conclusions "leaves you cold" and the third axiom is a key place you find to disagree with her reasoning?

Because I didn't think her conclusions were right, and because her system is laid out logically enough that I could trace through and find out where I thought it went wrong.

>Ayn Rand begins with axioms, and logically derives her position from there.

There's no way to arrive "logically" at value judgements.

You can just use logic as a klutch to support your pre-determined positions (and, of course, which is totally rational as a practice, to spread, support and enforce them).

Right, there's a difference between rationalizing and being rational.

http://www.andrej.com/objectivism/ is a beautiful work from an expert in rational thinking.

Not so sure about the actual rationality of this. E.g.:

"Things are what they are. There is only one reality, namely the way things are."

That's only true for the least interesting things: objects and their arrangements in space-time.

On that, the huge majority (besides maybe crazy people) agrees anyway, when they see them, or when they're given evidence of them (e.g. a photo of a laptop on a desk. 99.999% of the people will agree there's a laptop on a desk there).

For anything else, politics, values, claims and the veracity of claims, morality, motives, aesthetics, goals, etc., there is no single way things are, there are ways people perceive them, and there are different interets, worldviews, and ways of interpreting them.

What is the "reality" or "non-reality" of "I'm willing to die for my country"? Or of "I find it OK to make money stealing"? Or "You should treat people well even if you are not forced to|?

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