Malcolm Gladwell versus Ayn Rand: Who is right?
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The article misses that Rand's books are romantic, whereas Gladwell is a journalist. Rand writes fiction; Gladwell writes theories based on anecdotes and statistics. For an analogy, that'd be a lot like saying "Pablo Piccasso, or xyz modern photographer: Who is right?"
The guy's synopsis of Rand is pretty telling --> "Atlas Shrugged is a similar story. In it a group of scientists and tycoons decide in equally petulant fashion decide that they will "simply take their ball and go home" when society refuses to capitulate to their capricious demands."
Rand misses some points, the world isn't so black and white. But her general message is pro-individualism, hard work, anti-politicking, pro-competition, etc. It's anti-interventionism, anti-socialism, anti-labor, etc. It also mocks the hell out of people who come from opposite backgrounds, and interprets their motivations as scared and selfish. It makes for a good read, but makes her books hard to discuss with people from those viewpoints.
In reality, most people who are pro-collective, pro-socialism, etc. are decent folk with great intentions. Free marketists and socialists just happen to violently disagree on how to build the best world. Unfortunately, Rand's ruthless treatment of people who disagree with her all being nincompoops makes the books hard to discuss with someone who doesn't already have some of the underpinnings of her philosophy.
This, to me, is a cop-out. Most proponents of Objectivism never make something excellent, they just talk a lot about how they could, maybe, if only things were different. Or, in an amusing variation, they can just declare themselves to have achieved excellence (Ayn Rand once declared herself "the best writer today") in spite of the opposition.
Both of these approaches seem to sidestep the very real challenges of making something great and enduring. While I think the comparison to Gladwell is apples to oranges, I much prefer his attempts to quantify what make someone exceptional to Rand's ineffable "greatness".
The world has a history of cocky jackasses who succeed because they're entirely certain that they're right, because they are. Rand tapped a few of them to write her novels, actually.
Rand is rude when she dismisses some of her critics because she often refuses outright to admit that any of them have valid points.
Hence the blogger's comment:
"Atlas Shrugged is a similar story. In it a group of scientists and tycoons decide in equally petulant fashion that they will "simply take their ball and go home", when society refuses to capitulate to their capricious demands. So what happens? Well, according to Ayn Rand everything in the world grinds to a halt. In her bizarre world view, no replacements are available amongst the rest of humanity to rise up to the occasion and take over from the cry-babies who have gone home in a snit."
Yes, in real life others would have stepped up to the plate.
In real life as it stands today, Atlas Shrugged is not a plausible scenario. The trick to reading it without casting it aside in horror is realizing that Rand knows that, and that she's drawing things to their extremes to make a specific point about how she thinks human beings work. People who mock Atlas on that point are missing the point of the book.
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It's like reading Asimov, who judges most of his characters by their approach to logic. There's an advantage to illustrating a single facet of a human being. It lets you focus and create characters that revolve around a theme. If Rand had made her books more involved, they'd have lost the focus on the attributes that she writes about.
I don't think she is the end-all be-all. I voted Obama, who will expand the government in many ways and demand some altruism from everybody. But I think that compromise is a necessity: that altruism is a necessary evil rather than an end unto itself.
The immature one is the one who dismisses somebody's argument because they choose to support a flawed person. Frankly, I'd much rather talk with an Objectivist than a Nihilist - that despite Nietzche's being a much more influential and agreed-with writer. I'm trying to argue my points expressively, and to respond to people who disagree. You're either being immature or a troll.
Is that what they teach you in the Rand Club?
But seriously. What am I doing that's rude? I said that I thought that Rand was misread, and that I thought it wasn't necessarily bad that she writes in black-and-white terms. I also said that I think it's a mistake of the people who follow her more seriously to assume that the world really is black-and-white. I don't think I was being rude or an asshole. Am I wrong?
The fact that you use similar phrasing in all your posts, comment in unsimilar threads with quick, brief responses, and have similar disregards for things like two-way, interesting debates, tend to make me a little suspicious. I could be wrong, but with all due respect, at this point I rather doubt I am.
My question is: why? Are you the blog's author/submitter? I've noticed junk accounts pop up more when I mention my distaste for the article this was written about. You make similar comments to KrisZolar, who submitted this article. Every single response defending this post appears to be made from a spam account: KeshRivya also seems to be in this category. And every single one has the same anti-Rand stance as the original post, and writes in the same style.
The one thing that fascinates me is that a lot of these seems to have been made months-if-not-years ago. That takes a lot of effort. And I wonder why go to all the effort.
I'm sorry if it does turn out I'm raving and wrong, but I flagged this post. I don't know if there's a way of matching IPs, but the evidence all seems to point to a massive amount of throwaway accounts.
Not sure what profession has to do with a comparison of beliefs.
Gladwell opposes Rand. But they still hold fast in certain things. The opposite of Rand is not the person who says that people aren't responsible for their success. It's the person who says that civilization isn't a success, that human beings are beasts, that the solution to our problems is to go back to being savages. Similarly: I think Rand would disagree with Gladwell's claim that nobody is responsible for their life, but she wouldn't dispute his findings. She would just argue that they aren't as relevant as Gladwell thinks they are.
The post contributes to an important societal debate over whether or not the successful owe anything back to society, such as taxes.
Obviously it's stimulated a lot of heat.
I read the NYmag article. Gladwell in that article does appear to be Rand's favorite villain. However, the blog post doesn't use those points. It doesn't contrast Gladwell's "cutting down the great man" to Rand's points. It brings up Rand, attacks her, brings up Gladwell, draws no conclusions whatsoever, and then says that the author can see a connection. The fact that a good argument as come up is because of the various Hacker News factions, not because of any merit that article had whatsoever.
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That claim is not backed up.
If I asked the question "Who is our savior: George Bush or Boy George?", then I would be making a specious claim: that either is a savior. Or, if I ask "Who is right: George Carlin or Lewis Black?", the specious claim is the two oppose themselves. In that case, my follow-up post to the question needs to explain exactly how the two oppose one another. In this case, there is somewhat of an argument to be made, but it's not one that the blog post makes.
The guy simply asked a question. A question which then led to this long tirade by Rand groupies.
Well, according to Ayn Rand everything in the world grinds to a halt. In her bizarre world view, no replacements are available amongst the rest of humanity to rise up to the occasion and take over from the cry-babies who have gone home in a snit.
Then, citing Gladwell out of context:
Then there's the question of why so many Asian students excel at mathematics:
And then there are the math geniuses who, as anyone can’t help noticing, are disproportionately Asian. Citing the work of an educational researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, Gladwell attributes this phenomenon not to some innate mathematical ability that Asians possess but to the fact that children in Asian countries are willing to work longer and harder than their Western counterparts. That willingness, Gladwell continues, is due to a cultural legacy of hard work that stems from the cultivation of rice. Turning to a historian who studies ancient Chinese peasant proverbs, Gladwell marvels at what Chinese rice farmers used to tell one another: “No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich.”
Elsewhere in this thread was an argument from somebody who saw this and assumed that Gladwell was being racist and saying that working in rice paddies make Chinese people hard-working.
Then it sums up:
So the question is then: Are the successful truly independent of the society within which they grew up or do they owe their success, at least in part, to the benefits, attitudes, and advantages it bestowed upon them?
Read the entire article, Why Success Is More Circumstantial Than Personal.
Who is right? Malcolm Gladwell or Ayn Rand?
It doesn't add anything of interest. It doesn't make an initial comparison. It doesn't argue about how they're opposed in any way. We the commenters did that.
To me, the interesting thing about this story isn't the presentation of the thesis (using Ayn Rand), but to question the thesis itself: Is success more circumstantial than personal? http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/52014/index6.html
The hockey player example creates a subset of advantaged people (i.e. those born nearer the start of the year), for which evidence is claimed.
I'm not sure about the "rice fields" causation, but I have observed, and it's well known that students who are culturally asian study harder. But again, "asian students" is a subset of all students.
In contrast, Bill Gates and the Beatles are subsets of one each. What about all the other bands who played Hamburg (Ringo wasn't there anyway)? Was there a wave of "Hamburg" bands?
And what about all the other kids who had a computer lab - for one thing, Bill wasn't the only kid in that school.
Circumstance (obviously) can provide providential assistance - though it's worth noting that the aid given in all the above cases was not a gift, but more work. And I certainly agree with that - skill comes from practice.
It might be that your potential is set at birth; and there is nothing you can do about it - you cannot affect it in the slightest, no matter what you do or how hard you try. But there is no way of knowing what that potential is... except by practicing as hard and as long as these guys did and finding out.
I strongly recommend voting up the original article so that we may refocus the discussion (I did not submit it):
On HN, I've also heard that Seth Godin suffers from "confirmation bias" - but if we generalize about the person, instead of examining each specific thesis (and their support for it), it is an ad hominem argument - however kindly, balanced and reasonable the tone.
If you disagree, I'd love to discuss. But let's do it by actually making arguments back and forth. Let's put an effort into it.
Ayn Rand says no; Gladwell says yes.
I expect that if Ayn Rand were actually pressed on the issue of "do the successful owe at least part of their success to their upbringing" she'd be forced to admit that yes, they do.
Peter Keating (the shadow or antagonist of Howard Roark in the Fountainhead, with comparable ability but different choices) provides a counter-example: he loves painting, but doesn't practice it until after many years of ("aw, hell") architecture. When he eventually does turn to it, Howard Roark gently tells him "it's too late".
Yes, her heroes' ability (brilliance) and loves (values) are already in place - but in this, they are no more gifted than anyone else. What differentiates them is their consistent choice to apply their ability to what they love, seek mentors, etc. As a personal choice, it is within their power, and does not come from their upbringing. It comes from them - as do your choices (of course, they also have many blessings and opportunities - as do you).
Steve Jobs was not and is not a huge computer hacker. Not like Bill Gates. But still, he was able to conceive of the idea of a personal computer, before anybody else had the idea. How did he get 10,000 hours working into that? From his own words, he got the idea by dropping acid and deciding that people weren't using this new technology in a way that could change the world. He repeated this again and again with the iPod, the iTunes store, the iPhone, even with how he changed Pixar.
Jobs is unquestionably talented. However, it isn't shown that he's talented solely because he practiced at what he did heavily. I think that part of what makes Jobs as great as he is is his unbridled ego, his belief that he alone is right until proven otherwise. And that's something that you can't entirely pin on the society around you.
One of his abilities, absolutely, is the ability to spot which people are incredible at what they do, and to put them in a situation in which they can do it. In Pixar, he created the central hub that got people interacting with one another. (I forget the article that talks about this - anybody have the link?) He has a genius ability to fix things, to make them better.
I argued once that if Jobs hadn't found Woz, he'd have found somebody else capable of doing what he needed done. And I think the end result would be largely the same. Woz was a programmer. Jobs was the visionary and the designer.
I agree that not everybody can "remove everything but the essentials" - but I think that everybody can try to do it; can practice it. The difficulty is in knowing what the essentials are, which requires knowing what you are really doing, and what it needs. Through practice, we improve.
Could it be as simple as believing in your intuition? I mean: to consider what you believe is essential, and then act on it And find out if you were right or not. Then repeat many times. Without loss of enthusiasm...
It's likely that Jobs saw this early on.
EDIT I see now you were part of the sockpuppet trolling rampage. Now defeated and deleted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360128
http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/52014/
The blog post adds nothing to the discussion and the title chosen by the submitter makes things worse.
Gladwell and Rand don't contradict each other. They barely overlap at all. And if there is a connection, it's not one that this article points out.
Sorry if I'm beating a dead horse.
It's obviously blog spam of the worst kind. Using Rand for bait is a nice touch.
In what recently underdeveloped nation do people NOT work like mules? Where in the developing world do parents NOT push their kids hard to study?
China, India, All of Eastern Europe?
There's nothing magical about rice.
Gladwell is a great writer, but this point is not him at his best. I'm married to a Chinese-born woman and we have plenty of Chinese friends and co-workers. They are indeed a hard-working people, but there are no rice paddies in northern China (too cold), where they work just as hard and do not eat much rice. Their preferred cereal grain is wheat, eaten primarily as noodles and buns. Unfortunately for point cited, it's also the preferred grain of much of the rest of the world.
A more important question is "why have the Chinese suddenly become more productive in the last 25 years?" The culture is much the same now as it was then. What changed? Economic freedom and the decline of economic authoritarianism.
"Having to give something back to the society that developed you" is exactly the argument that the Soviets used to justify prohibiting emmigration, etc. Nice.
So, yes, it's a silly word, but by that same measure Objectivism is a silly philosophy.
Similarly, I doubt anybody would call Gladwell's writings a "philosophy." He doesn't write all his books with a single, unified theory around them. Each one pursues a separate venue.
Bad questions lead to bad answers.
Malcolm Gladwell and Ayn Rand are both wrong.
Contra Gladwell, most great successes have great ability; they succeed where mediocrities would fail. Contra Rand, most great successes have great luck; they succeed where the unlucky would fail.
Indeed, if both ability and luck are major factors in success, the truly great are those who are both lucky and good. This leads to what I immodestly term Hartl's Law:
Since great success requires great luck, everyone great is overrated.
This includes, by the way, both Gladwell and Rand---as, I suspect, Gladwell would readily concede, but Rand (were she alive) would surely not.
Gladwell takes it a bit too far, in my opinion. The NYmag was the first interview I read of his, and he seems too determined to avoid taking the credit. It doesn't make him evil per se, not like Rand would say, but it does annoy me when I read his interview.
Man these guys have it all figured out. Bunch of shit both of them. Know why Bill Gates succeeded? Cause he worked hard. Know why Chinese kids do better in Math? Cause they usually start from nothing, parents come over here start a new life and tell them to work hard to make it. Cause of the Chinese tradition of strong family the kid listens.
People who start from the bottom work harder to get out, people who start at the top sit around and do nothing until they've been passed up.
These are of course generalizations of a majority of these social groups.
This isn't to say that absolutes are always wrong (or right), but taking absolute positions on so many different items lends itself to arrogance and the inability to incorporate new evidence.
Simply put, it's both nature and nurture. It's what you do (by nature) and your circumstances (nurture) that determine success.
A question.
Did Roarke have the moral or legal rights to destroy the development after the owners changed the design?
Samuel Beckett, possibly the best writer since Joyce, insists that if you perform his play, you do it precisely according to his directions: you use his setting, you follow his directions, you don't edit a line. It is his idea. In Beckett's case, thanks to copyrights it was both legally and morally his right to demand that.
In Roark's case, he did not submit the plan under his own name. Therefore, he couldn't have a legal right to it (Peter's confession is legally shady ground). However, it was his idea and therefore his right to demand that it be created without compromise. I think the ending of that book is a fantasy that would never actually happen, but if I were on that jury, I'd vote to acquit.
Followup question: What if Roark were a lousy architect? (But still thought he was brilliant?) Of course we know he wasn't because the book never gets tired of telling us how brilliant he is, but what if his original plans actually did kinda suck and the alterations were actually improvements? (cf. the Sydney Opera House).
If the original plans sucked... well, I think that morally he still has the right. But the point of the novel is that if they sucked he wouldn't BE in that situation. He submits plans because he wants to help the middle class, which will get hurt vastly by this plan. And his plans are good enough that his absolute worst enemy agrees with how practical they are.
Dynamite is the only way to remove architecture, especially if the rights to building it are removed from you. A playwright can choose to remove his play from circulation. An artist can rip apart a painting. Roark can't do that so easily. And I think he has the right to remove his idea even if it's brilliant. In particular, he and Peter signed a contract that Keating would get it built exactly to standards, and Keating broke that. So there's some moral precedent: signs of his anticipating this happening. It's not a random act. Similarly, playwrights can choose to retroactively deny you performing rights if you go to far. It's happened before. There was controversy over Pinter performing a Beckett play a year or two ago, where Pinter changed one of the core parts of the play. It was resolved in Pinter's favor only because Pinter was Beckett's good friend, and understands his work thoroughly.
What's this about the Sydney Opera House? I don't know this story.
And, because I've seen your name pop up before, I feel like I ought to tell you that even though we disagree a lot, I've liked every debate we've gotten into. Thanks. :-)
Her heroes likewise see themselves as ubermensch when they are in reality nothing more than pompous assholes.
She's great in that she's concise and accessible. She writes an incredible "gee-whiz" action story.
And, pardon me if this is off the mark, but I've noticed 4 accounts being made in the last hour, all of whom have the same attitude to this conversation, all of whom comment twice. Are these all throwaway accounts? I've never seen something like this happen on Hacker News before.
You're not supposed to read it and decided to move to the mountains of Colorado. You're supposed to read it and then have a fresh look at some of the dynamics that are going on around you and wonder if some change is in order.
Rand believed very firmly in her philosophy. Her fiction, however, is romanticized: Rand says that she portrays things not as they are, but as how she wishes they could be. It pains me when her "followers" take her black-and-white approach literally.
Rand never posited that people are born productive. Productive people are productive by virtue of doing things, in Ayn's world...while a lot of other people are envious of the doing and stand in their way. People can become productive. Individualism requires that people can do whatever it is they want to do, as long as it doesn't harm another. Rand wasn't talking about what childhood occurrences make for a Galt or a Roarke. Perhaps she believed they were pre-destined, but I can't think of a single instance where that was indicated in her writing (and I went through a two year Rand phase in college...I've read just about everything she ever wrote). And certainly not in Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead.
Gladwell, on the other hand, is saying that people we view as stars in their field are sometimes given a more obvious path to becoming stars than others, and thus things society does can help or hinder people who would be productive. I don't think Rand would argue that there aren't people in the world who can help you as well as people in the world who can hinder you.
Note that I'm not making any judgment call on either idea. I'm just not seeing how anyone could come away thinking this article is a useful addition to the subject (or subjects, in this case, since there are two under discussion, and somehow the author believes they contradict one another). I agree with others that this is blogspam, making use of hot button names like Gladwell and Rand. It's almost as if they have a machine that churns out high hit ideas...
It's too bad, really. There is so much good in her philosophy that gets obscured by her personnal flaws and her limited (and self-admitted) lack of understanding of human psychology. _The Fountainhead_ is a great novel, raw and bitter and steeped in human struggle as few books are. It has a dozen flaws, but it's still one of the greatest books I've ever read. There is a scene in it where Roark and Dominique discuss the chemical properties of the different kinds of marble. Boring right? It has to be one of the greatest extended allegories ever written. (TASTE the dialog there. Slippery silibants suggesting sly secrets of the soul.)
People assume that Rand is saying that people are inherently good or inherently evil. That's absolutely not the case. She says that they're inherently imbalanced, that we aren't all perfectly equal, but that we still have the freedom to decide which side of her argument we stand on. Look at Guy Francon in The Fountainhead, who is a fool and a faker but who decides, in the end, to support his daughter. Or look at Fred Kinnan, in Atlas Shrugged, who is talented and bright enough to know that he's doing the wrong thing, who is morally straight, but who decides that compromise is inevitable and that it's worth him sacrificing himself if it means protecting the people underneath him.
Rand has imperfections in her writing, but she doesn't have a lot of the ones that she's accused of. And it makes discussing her online rather difficult. Neither side wants to admit the virtues of the other side.
I believe that there are many contributing factors and possible paths to productivity and success (as well as many ways to measure both).
"And then there are the math geniuses who, as anyone can’t help noticing, are disproportionately Asian. Citing the work of an educational researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, Gladwell attributes this phenomenon not to some innate mathematical ability that Asians possess but to the fact that children in Asian countries are willing to work longer and harder than their Western counterparts. That willingness, Gladwell continues, is due to a cultural legacy of hard work that stems from the cultivation of rice."
That's right up there with claiming that Africans and African Americans excel at athletics because they purportedly once chased or were chased by wild animals: Patronizing and offensive to the extreme. People in entertainment have lost their careers for saying such things.
There are differences between the races and some do stem from environmental factors, a fact that is well documented and is part of the theory of evolution and natural selection.
It's ridiculous to call Gladwell a racist for pointing out one of those differences and theorize on its cause.