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Comment by steelstraw | Hacker News Reader

Relevant comment from John Carmack a couple weeks ago:

Atlas Shrugged popped up in a trend, reminding me of the remarkable level of vitriol against it. It is obviously grinding an anti-collectivist axe, and it can fairly be called cartoonish, but if you can't see its archetypes in the world around you, you aren't paying attention.

I can easily understand people not liking the book, but the level of loathing that some show for it is odd, as if someone could go off on a rant and redline judge everyone who enjoyed the movie Wall Street as obviously terrible people.

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1478389565094256642

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“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

[Kung Fu Monkey -- Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009]”

>if you can't see its archetypes in the world around you, you aren't paying attention.

The archetype of a glorious manager who goes on strike which makes everybody very very sorry they ever doubted them isn't one that I'm super familiar with.

I wonder if Carmack has ever looked at a graph of US wealth inequality.

Or played Bioshock.

I wonder if you've ever looked at a graph of wealth accumulation of every economic strata in the US, or just inequality. There's nothing wrong with inequality if the poor are getting richer, have more access to resources, and a higher quality of life with time.

Except they're getting relatively poorer - having less access to housing, lower purchasing power, lesser access to medical care and are dying sooner (even before COVID).

But that's a nice hypothetical you've got there.

Not according to the data.

https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-the-poor-get-poorer-w...

That's not data, that's extremely bad propaganda.

Median wealth was the same in 1995 as it was in 2016 [0].

Median inflation adjusted household income was the same in 1974 as in 2016 [1]. If you go the full range it's gone from $54k to $67k between 1968 to 2021.

That is technically higher, but it's not CPI adjusted.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...

[1] https://dqydj.com/household-income-by-year/

There's these things called citations, there's tons of them throughout the piece, those pieces further cite primary sources for the data.

Learn these things before you try to engage in conversations about this topic:

The difference between income and total compensation.

The difference between income and wealth.

The dynamic nature of economic mobility over the course of someone's life. (Older people have more human capital and therefore more wealth).

Fun fact Denmark is one of the most wealth unequal countries.

> There's these things called citations, there's tons of them throughout the piece, those pieces further cite primary sources for the data.

I clicked 10 or so citations that all went to the same guys blog where he at best had skewered pew research I sourced directly instead.

> Learn these things before you try to engage in conversations about this topic:

> The difference between income and total compensation.

If you have data on median compensation (outside of regular income) we can discuss it. It would however already be represented in wealth data, so it seems negligible.

> The difference between income and wealth.

Which is why I provided both.

> The dynamic nature of economic mobility over the course of someone's life. (Older people have more human capital and therefore more wealth).

How is this relevant to median income/wealth measured over time? It's not measuring one person's wealth growth, but a time series of snapshots of everyone's (meaning all ages).

lol at thinking Daniel Mitchell is just a "guy"

>How is this relevant to median income/wealth measured over time?

Because the age and dominant generation of the population massively affects the median household wealth. It's why the median wealth of Japanese Americans is significantly higher than Hispanic Americans. The median age of the Japanese American population is almost double that of Hispanic Americans.

> lol at thinking Daniel Mitchell is just a "guy"

He's a global warming denialist often citing Daily Mail as a source. I know who he is. "just a guy" would've honestly been a better resume. What he is not is a primary source or a good source of unbiased anything.

> Because the age and dominant generation of the population massively affects the median household wealth. It's why the median wealth of Japanese Americans is significantly higher than Hispanic Americans. The median age of the Japanese American population is almost double that of Hispanic Americans.

Ok, median age in the 1990s was 32.9, and 37.9 in 2016 [0], so the wealth being the same means it actually shrunk even more since older people should have more. Got it. Thanks for clarifying.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/241494/median-age-of-the...

>What he is not is a primary source or a good source of unbiased anything.

Oops I guess the Senate finance committee fucked up then

https://medium.com/beyond-pen-and-paper/the-poor-arent-getti...

So from blog to medium post, this isn't getting stronger. Make a statement and link a source, or disprove the ones I made.

I have repeatedly, your inability to observe data from the CBO and BLS is not my problem

> I have repeatedly, your inability to observe data from the CBO and BLS is not my problem

So we have this scenario where either

1) you can't explain how my points are wrong, and direct me to read some blogs you like.

2) you don't want to

In either case, why are you even responding? If everything on the internet is self-explanatory, everyone should agree. So why aren't we? This is why we explain how something is wrong, and support it using data from mutually reliable sources. You repeatedly sidestep this, for whatever reason I don't know.

Mate there's CBO, BLS, Journal of Economic Research, IMF, and several academic study citations in the video, post, blog, and all over the internet.

It's a myth that the poor get poorer. Market economies are not zero sum. Whether or not you want to explore that seriously or just participate in an exercise of confirmation bias is, again, not my problem.

All you've provided are ad hominems against sources that directly counter your initial contentions without sincerely examining the information or data contained within. I'm not interested in hearing your regurgitated, scripted nonsense on this topic that every ignorant believer in this myth spews out. I've participated in this conversation too many times to be surprised by how it goes or the points made. Nothing you've stated is new, unaccounted for, or unexplainable if you'd spend 5 minutes challenging your world view. It's not my job to provide sources only you approve of.

>> This is why we explain how something is wrong, and support it using data from mutually reliable sources. You repeatedly sidestep this, for whatever reason I don't know.

> Mate there's CBO, BLS, Journal of Economic Research, IMF, and several academic study citations in the video, post, blog, and all over the internet.

Yet the only thing you've linked is a blog and a medium post, not IMF, or BLS or the sources you seem to agree are reputable. Why is that? Is it because they don't say the things your blogs claim they do?

> There's these things called citations, there's tons of them throughout the piece, those pieces further cite primary sources for the data.

The author cites his own blog, which also cites his own blog. Almost all the citations in his blog are to his own blog. One single link in the article did not go to his own blog but instead went to a video at reason.com. This is not a pattern which gives confidence in the material.

First, Dan Mitchell is a primary source. Second, many of the pieces source BLS data or similar entities.

IMO anyone who is sympathetic to AR is doing a disservice by introducing her to people with Atlas. Fountainhead is far more entertaining, main character is better written, and it just gets the point across better.

Atlas is a punchline for a reason.

Actually, her very first book, We the Living, is to me the best of the bunch. Because of its setting, it makes it very clear where Ayn's hatred of collectivism/socialism/communism comes from. Also, it tends to show rather than tell. Ayn was a hard woman. I do not idolize her, but knowing where she came from and what she suffered, which her first book makes clear, goes a long ways towards understanding just why she was so hard. And yeah, The Fountainhead is far better than Atlas Shrugged. An editor called upon to justify his existence, need only to point at Atlas Shrugged.

My favorite short book (non-fiction) covering from the last days the Tsars through the remainder of the Soviet period (the period that shaped Ayn) is A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to the End, by Peter Kenez.

Respectfully, it's horrible writing. Literally no redeeming quality. The fact that it places people into cliche archetypes and misrepresents everything about them is the exact problem with the book.

If you see those archetypes around you then you seriously need to learn some empathy which Rand clearly lacked. Let me sum up the book: "There are people who are so smart, if they left the world would collapse and everyone will die. Let's do that."

The ego of thinking that the whole world depends on you and your big brain is something a lot of people in tech need to grow out of. It's toxic and so is Rand.

> I can easily understand people not liking the book, but the level of loathing that some show for it is odd,

I had a similar reaction when I read Battlefield Earth a few years ago. It struck me as an overly-long, painfully generic scifi novel. It wasn't unique enough on any level to justify either love or hate.

I mean that’s the power of writing? It’s not to write something universally loved. It’s to make people uncomfortable.

Sure, you may not like grammar or the wordiness or the characters but the ideas - those are what you’re reacting to.

Ayn Rend was a closet communist, besides the obvious point of her living on social security, and food stamps, ideas she voiced were very close to what Leninist communism — bolshevism was, to the point some say she was a communist agent in disguise.

Now, a question to HN: who here actually read Lenin, and works of his original party mates?

A picture far from a hippie paradise they draw. The Strong subjugate the Weak through natural right, and those weak are not your poor workers, but your idle intellectuals, nobility, aristocrats, social democrats, and much of white collar workforce, which would've included you.

Muscular proletarians band together to build a dictatorial regime, and go crushing "weakling classes" just because they can.

"Ayn Rend was a closet communist" [Citation needed]

I agree her abhorrent message was "the strong subjugate the weak through natural right", but Ayn Rand very clearly believed that poor workers were the weak and rich white-collar businessmen were the strong that deserved to subjugate them. That's completely different than Lenin's view. There are many flavors of asshole and just because both Rand and Lenin were assholes does not mean they saw eye to eye at all.

Most writers at the New Yorker are going to be the product of expensive liberal arts educations, and in those circles making fun of a strawman a of someone like Ayn Rand is as in-group as it gets. This is just social validation/click-seeking for a writer.

One day they'll be collecting Social Security. Just like Ayn Rand. Perhaps they're not so different after all.

Just as a side note, she didn't condemn collecting social security or other government subsidies. She condemned the existence of the program, but also said it's reasonable to collect benefits since they're taxed from you in the first place.

Cartoons are an excellent medium for pinpointing archetypes in the world around us. I just missed the cartoon drawings in Atlas Shrugged.

Rephrasing: "It should be obvious to anyone who looks that rich, productive people deserve to be worshipped as innately superior god-like humans by the stupid, lazy, and innately inferior under-classes." -- A rich, productive, and lucky person. Lots of respect for John Carmack and what he's done, but I'm pretty sick of the kind of person who's born to a television reporter and given access to computers in the mid 70s having the attitude that everyone who is poor deserves it. If they're so poor, why doesn't their daddy just do another movie? Sometimes kids must be very stern with their daddies. "Please daddy, please! It's 20 million dollars daddy!" And so daddy does the picture.

The ideas espoused by Ayn Rand are absolutely unconscionable and I'd argue anyone who doesn't see the "Atlas Shrugged" effect, where impressionable readers tend to become hyper-assholes for months (or the rest of their lives) after reading it, they are paying less attention than those who don't notice all the John Galts around them. Of course that upper-middle-class white male whose parents are paying for his college tuition is a John Galt, and of course all those Hispanic sons of migrant workers are stupid dirty lazy nobodies who should worship him. Aren't you paying attention!?

This is yet another case of yet another rich person saying we should all be deeply grateful they're bestowing their diving Jobs upon us and we should all worship them and not get angry when they don't pay taxes.

The level of vitriol is proportional to the harms. Ayn Rand's childish philosophy has adherents who have caused significant harm to society. Similarly, if Mein Kampf or Das Kapital had not gained a following, we might not have such vitriol for those books, and we might spend more time discussing if we see their archetypes in the world around us, but they did, and that discussion is rightly not as prominent as the criticism.

I'm curious how you came to that conclusion. How are you measuring the level of harm as a result of her books?

By looking at the policies implemented by her adherents.

Here's the thing though: Obviously terrible people (imo) cite Ayn Rand as a pivotal influence so much that I don't know if I could ever give her work an unbiased read.

Conversely, my favorite people have called her "one of the most evil figures of modern intellectual history", and the like.

And she was clearly a massive, massive hypocrite.

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