The Curse of Ayn Rand's Heir
theatlantic.com
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I met Peikoff at an ARI event in 2009. He was surprisingly warm in person, but you could see the weight of being "the heir" in how defensively he responded to even mild questions about Rand's work. Now reading about the fracture with his daughter over the estate, it's like watching Atlas Shrugged's plot play out in real life: the bitter disputes over Rand's intellectual property mirroring the novel's battles over physical resources.
What's most disturbing isn't the personal drama but what this reveals about how Objectivism operates in practice. For a philosophy obsessed with reason and independence, its institutional guardians seem remarkably focused on excommunication, loyalty tests, and controlling access to primary sources. The gap between preaching individualism while demanding conformity has always been the movement's central contradiction.
Maybe it was a product of her original linguistic/cultural extraction, but when I read Rand's "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" as a teen it reminded me very much of Stalinist or Trotskyite tracts I encountered around the same time. Different positions, same tone of absolute certainty and similar polemical flourishes.
All of which to say, it all strikes me as more theological than philosophical.
Ayn Rand herself died while collecting Social Security and Medicare.
And you may believe that this would be a greater good, and a proper role of government... different people may think differently about that, and discussions can be held. Don't gloss over the fact, though, that the only alternatives to voluntary charity are either no charity or involuntary charity.
The same society that upholds these constructs can also create others — such as human rights and the idea that everyone deserves dignity. In early societies with limited resources, survival often took precedence, and it was sometimes accepted that the old or disabled be left behind. Today, however, we have an abundance of resources — so much so that, in theory, hunger shouldn't even exist.
Yet we live under an individualistic and selfish ideology, where some argue for a return to a brutal indifference toward those in need, despite society's capacity to care for everyone. All this in the name of a self-centered ideology.
>She opposed self-sacrifice but she wasn’t against charity. She supported it when it came from a genuine personal desire to help others (as opposed to a moral duty).
These do not seem like contradictory statements. They are just different ways of phrasing the same concept: There is no moral duty to help others, and if people can't get somebody to desire to help them, they deserve to die.
"She wanted to let kids die from accidental drownings so she'd be able to have a pool."
vs
"She wanted pools to be legal."
I suspect that it was the latter.
It's like blaming a slave who believes that slavery shouldn't exist, for eating his master's food.
Oh yes, when marxists debate about the interpretation of the holy words of the manifest and how dictatorship is not bad, if only the right people with the right ideological mindset are in charge, then it always annoyed me, that they claim to be rational scientists.
(But maybe not the right place and I don't have my arguments at hand, has been a while that I engaged with marxists)
There are lots of flavors of Marxism out there, the one you're describing is often called "Orthodox Marxism" or the closely related "Marxism-Leninism".
It's now considered pretty outdated, with most of Marxist thought having moved on to less rigid modes of conceptualizing history and geopolitics, like Western Marxism (Frankfurt School), Autonomist Marxism, Eco-Marxism, Libertarian Marxism, Structural Marxism, etc.
There is a reason that "leftist infighting" is a century-old meme. Leftism is fundamentally a political movement grounded in moral philosophy, but since moral philosophy is an unsolved and likely unsolvable field, fractionalism is guaranteed.
I think that's not true. It is incorrect to compare the practice of Marxism-Leninism, and it's philosophy formed with such practice, with purely imaginary pink-glass-self-reflection fantasy.
Let them seize power in somewhat large country and hold it for at least a couple of decades - and then say how these movements are "less rigid". Or compare the voiced fantasies with Lenin's pre-revolutionary fantasies (remembering that they were practical enough to seize power and push it's philosophy on half of the planet), if you really want to show the difference between them and outdating of the latter.
1. Marx and -- various political-economic thinkers who came after him inspired by him -- who were analysts of capitalism and modern society. Maybe also dabbling in prescriptive aspects -- but a lot less than laymen would think. Just full on boring economics or political philosophy concerned with analyzing the present, not describing any future.
2. Eastern bloc & Maoist "Marxist-Leninism", Stalinism, or whatever which became official state ideology in eastern bloc countries with simplifications of some of the above along with a series of rationalizations for the "way things were" in the USSR and related countries. Usually mangling some form of #1 to do that.
3. Various Marxist political action/groups/parties/sects which merged varying aspects of #1 and #2 along with whatever else, in various combinations and permutations, to intervene in politics at either an activist level or in political parties, or armed groups etc.
Especially people who grew up in the eastern bloc definitely perceive I think a lot more correspondence between #1 and #2 than I'd personally say is valid. A whole educational industry was built around it there for the purpose of ideological legitimation of some Really Bad Stuff. With some of that leaking into the west, too.
And I don't feel it's really a "no true Scotsman" type of statement to say that either. Marx himself had little to say about the future, and just a lot to say about the present (which is still our present). What #2 said about themselves doesn't bear much resemblance to #1 because it wasn't actually the concern of Marx or many of the thinkers who came after. They were critics of capitalism, not prophets attempting to come up with recipes to be used as justification by Slavic autocrats for crimes against humanity...
But I also did met various other marxists and I did read some of Marx books, or rather some pages.
And I do remember him speaking of the utopian future. And also the part where he thinks, concentration camps for the enemies of the proletariat (everyone who does not want to have his property taken) will likely be necessary.
So gulags would not be a Stalin invention then.
(I think I read that in some of the letter exchanges with Engels, will look up)
My standard question would be to ask, what would you do different, then all the previous experiements?
I think she never stopped being a child of the Russian Revolution. It was the formative event of her youth.
because that is exactly what it is. Rand idolized and worshipped great men and industrialists the way the Soviets taught you too, except through an American funhouse mirror.
Her individualism wasn't an authentic lived inner freedom of for example Tolstoy (in a religious way) or Stirner (in an atheist way) but simply worship of individuality and particular individuals. It's why it made for a fantastic mass movement and fandom of sorts.
What it feels like to me is the leaders of the Objectivism movement are all narcissists and the followers are paradoxically not Objectivists because they’re following a philosophy instead of being guided by the self.
Being a peak Objectivist would be to not care about being an Objectivist or not, basically making it impossible to be an Objectivist if you follow the philosophy, even at the top of it because you are dependent on your followers for influence, status and power.
The irony of it all, turns out a philosophy based on self sufficiency is as big of a grift as a political movement trying to convince everyone that in this day and age self sufficiency is the best move, mostly cause they can’t fathom sharing.
One of the _most_ ironic bits being that if everyone were truly self sufficient there would be no social hierarchy and no money anymore.
That said, she wanted to let the disabled starve to death so I don't think anyone really has to be fair to her at all. Empathy is only for the empathetic.
There are also tapes of her saying that the retarded should not "be allowed to come near children," and that children cannot deal with the "spectacle of a handicapped human being."
[loud noise which sounds as if it represents a point where the tape has been edited]
Rand: [mid-sentence] "...for healthy children to use handicapped materials. I quite agree with the speaker's indignation. I think it's a monstrous thing — the whole progression of everything they're doing — to feature, or answer, or favor the incompetent, the retarded, the handicapped, including, you know, the kneeling buses and all kinds of impossible expenses. I do not think that the retarded should be ~allowed~ to come ~near~ children. Children cannot deal, and should not have to deal, with the very tragic spectacle of a handicapped human being. When they grow up, they may give it some attention, if they're interested, but it should never be presented to them in childhood, and certainly not as an example of something ~they~ have to live down to."
- Ayn Rand, The Age of Mediocrity, Q & A Ford Hall Forum, April, 1981
*EDIT* Youtube video: https://youtu.be/Q1HD8KXn-kI
There's an irony in here, since this is more of less a summary of the ideology that wants "safe spaces" in schools.
Just, you know, with an entirely different set of things that proponents want to shield children/young adults from.
Some people believe that their ideals are important enough to live up to even though life can be brutal.
So basically objectivism is the punk of the philosophical world?
I think Objectivism fails because at least in part it doesn't establish solid enough foundations, and takes as fact unproven things that rely on mountains of suppositions and not always reliable evidence.
For example, whatever you think of "laissez-faire capitalism" (as supported by Rand), it's very weird to make its defense part of a philosophy, more so as a kind of axiomatic statement. Imagine someone were deep into some math book, say a dense Algebraic Geometry textbook, and it was just declared out of the blue that "laissez-faire capitalism is an ideal system" or something like that. That could even be true within some context, but I think it's out of place. It also relies on so many assumptions and is far from conclusively proven (the way capitalism is implemented also varies considerably today, and I don't agree that being maximally "laissez-faire" turned out to be better, at least not obviously)[1]. I would even understand she divulged her political ideas, but kept separate from the basis of a philosophy.
Also, like many philosophies, I don't think objectivism survives a closer scientific scrutiny. I suppose there was no firm grasp on what the mind was, or the nature of conscious (there is still some uncertainty, but much more clarity). I like how Dr Rachel Barr (a neuroscientist I follow on social networks) put it: old philosophies, specially about the human mind and soul, made great observations some of which unfortunately (such as that the 'Pineal gland is the principal seat of the soul' as regarded by René Descartes) can be "swept away" and basically definitely disproved by science from a better understanding of the nature of our brains and minds. Some assertions about perception and consciousness seem to be outdated.
I particularly object (no pun intended) to the basis of ethics as individuals. As I've argued previously[2], we now understand the nature of consciousness to, in my view, not justify an ethics that is based solely on the primacy of self-interest. We are part of a giant network of interactions, and although the self seems like a very important concept for our society, metaphysically it doesn't make much sense to prioritize the self at all costs (even when this prioritization includes some strategic concessions for altruism), though I think it's important that we take care of ourselves for pragmatic reasons, because we basically are the ones that understand ourselves the most and live with ourselves 24/7.
I think Objectivism (although again I am no specialist, I haven't studied it profoundly) has merits around notions of reality being singular and shared by everyone in one way or another, and (hypothesis mine) if everything derives from a singular reality, by understanding this singular reality we should be able to in a certain sense understand everything (including ethics, art and morality, which I think is highly counterintuitive) -- because our brains and minds which form the basis of such questions are part of reality, as well as any internal processes within those that enable subjective perception and subjective reality.
I wrote more about this here[3]. Please take a look if you're interested.
[1] Not to mention, we hardly got to try out 2 (or maybe 3) political systems in any serious way: capitalism and socialism (also perhaps social democracy), although there are a myriad of variations to experiment with as well (forms of voting, systems of regulation, the design of various institutions) that aren't considered when talking about "political systems". Who knows if something else could be better? I think a more general view of society as a whole as a kind of giant system is necessary to understand how to design better societies in general.
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43528352
[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1iv1x1m/the... Please see the questions where I expanded a little upon those ideas :)
While I think your math example is basically right, it would be surprising there, I don't think economic order emerging out of moral and philosophical reflections is particularly surprising.
But this is a violation of Hume's Guillotine. You cannot derive "ought" statements from "is" statements. There is only one reality, and science can tell us how it is, but science cannot tell us how it ought to be, how much we should like it, or in what ways we should want to alter it.
Rand and her followers fail in their attempted logical chain by leaping from "humans evolved rationality as a tool to survive and enhance their lives" to "enhancement of each individual's life via self-interest is the standard of moral value", which is non-sequitur. Rationality is the ability to make plans and accomplish goals, the fact that it exists does not tell us which goals we should use it in the service of.
She smuggles in her own pre-existing moral preference when she defines individual flourishing as the ultimate moral good. You can see this very easily if you take the exact same syllogism and substitute "community interest" for "personal interest". In fact this modified version of the argument may be even more valid, since a defining feature of humanity even more than our rationality is our unique community organizing power, which is also evolved, and thus community service also serves perfectly well as an evolution-informed yardstick of moral value.
That's not how the Objectivist ethics works, at all. There are no "ought statements" because ethics, in Objectivism, is a system of judgement and reasoning. It's applied epistemology.
So, no, you won't find a mythological ethics in reality. But you can learn how to identify the nature of things and judge how they relate, positively or negatively, to human life. And that's the essence of Objectivist morality.
When the objectivists try to define "human life" as their yardstick for moral good, again, they smuggle in those preexisting preferences. There is no real principle that means "human life" should be condensed down to individual hedonistic comfort. It is very easy to argue that human life is better served by collective comfort, and thus the best actions are the ones that are self-sacrificing in service of the community, because these are the ones that do the most service to human life.
Thank you for your comment. To be clear, I am not an objectivist as stated above. Also, I did not know Hume's Guillotine, thanks.
I believe in fact Hume's Guillotine (henceforth HG) can be definitely disproven with what we know today. The root at what's wrong with HG is that feelings are actually real.
To understand why, I like to open with Alan Watts quote: "If nothing is felt, nothing matters.", and also "The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. (...)".
Suffering is a real phenomenon, even though it is manifested in our brains and minds. All sorts of joys and good feelings are also likewise real. If something really is bad to experience (deep suffering), than that's essentially a fact about reality, and subjective experience is part of reality. If something feels bad, it feels bad, and if something feels good, it feels good (even though our desires and judgements about what feels good and what feels bad have serious issues and limitations we should be keenly aware of). This implies we can (at least in theory) understand the nature of those feelings, and understand what feels good and bad. This constitutes the "ought" -- I would say Hume is right in the sense that oughts derive from feelings (defined in the most general way possible), but wrong in the sense that oughts are inaccessible from "is" or science in general. Feelings, emotions, the character of our inner world all forms various "is"es -- essentially "What you felt, you felt".
The meaning of life is to curate and promote good feelings on everyone's minds, and logically we should be able to defend it couldn't be otherwise. If nothing is felt, nothing matters. Consciousness is an experimental fact, and given we observe it and conclude it's real, it provides a unique sole basis of morality and theory of action. A theory of morality that defends fundamentally something that is besides or disregards consciousness (say claim 1: "The meaning of life is arranging rocks in geometric patterns; humans and sentient life don't matter") is inconsistent with the reality of subjective experience -- bad feelings are bad as an experimental fact and good feelings are good as an experimental fact. A being that asserts Claim 1 is disregarding facts of nature.
In Buddhism one of the Noble Truths recognized by Siddhartha is that suffering exists. In other words, suffering is real. So if an action of mine provokes suffering (conversely if it provokes joy/good feelings) then that provides a solid and definite basis for morality: not all your actions are arbitrary, at least they should avoid causing suffering (and more generally, promote good inner lives).
(Note: Again, finding out what really is good with high certainty is actually difficult and our judgement caries risks and imprecision. I discuss about how to find what is good in the link below)
See more about this here: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1iv1x1m/the...
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As a final concession, I suppose you could deny that, although feelings are real, and bad and good feelings exist, that we "ought" to promote good feelings is a "fact" about existence, even though I think that is really inconsistent:
How could a bad feeling factually exist and promoting this bad feeling be good or neutral? If a feeling is said to be bad, that is fundamentally associated with a negative valence of its existence. Negative valence of its existence logically implies it should be avoided in any theory of action or value.
But even if you reject that argument (which I believe in a sense definitely wrong!), once you accept the primacy of consciousness instead of a fact as an axiom/"passion", then I believe you need no more "passionate oughts" in your theory, given you accept subjective experiences to be real, as well as accepting the rest of science and logic of course. Basically all oughts would follow essentially from this single axiom which really makes utmost sense to accept (and as I argued I really think is a fact, or an "is") -- otherwise you might be defending the geometric arrangement of rocks in a dead/unconscious universe, which I really think is absurd and indefensible (both in the sense of our "passions" and to me in the sense of factually false). But it should be fine to take the primacy of consciousness as an axiom or Near-Universal Passion of the Reflective Mind, because we then should agree with everything that follows in any case :)
Is it only the gatekeepers of Rand's legacy that exhibit this discrepancy, or was it contradiction from the beginning? I seem to remember the first Objectivist herself accepted assistance from the Federal government near the end of her life.
Anyway, to someone with a distant outsider's view of this movement, it can seem that it misses something fundamental about the human psyche as it evolved to operate in co-dependent groups.
On a similar subject, she believed disabled people (or more generally, people unable to work) should not receive any help other than from "voluntary charity" [1], a fact I find absolutely disgusting and should discredit this ideology to any sane person.
You can verify her position from https://courses.aynrand.org/works/the-question-of-scholarshi.... She views taxation as theft. Those who agree and advocate against this theft, may morally accept government largesse as restitution. But those who accept both the taxation and the redistribution become complicit in the theft, and are therefore immoral.
There is a lot to criticize in her views. But this piece of it is not inconsistent. Only bizarre to someone who doesn't understand her.
My favorite (or least favorite?) example is from Jennifer Burns' biography Goddess of the Market, which charges that title "The Fountainhead" was a haphazard last second choice, selecting a word that never appears in the novel. But slight problem with that, a climactic conversation about ideals, perhaps the climactic articulation of values in the book, occurs between two main characters who use the term "fount" as a stand-in term for the wellspring of human creation, value, and meaning. Fountainhead, then, is who the main character is, and nothing other than typical artistic restraint in selecting a title that simultaneously points to the intellectual center of the novel without being browbeating about the term itself. I actually emailed Jennifer Burns and pointed this out at one point but didn't hear back.
I do think the collapse of many of Rand's closest interpersonal relationships, the depression and drinking that her husband went into, as well as the legacy of her institute and estate, are quite damning. As of course is the shallow treatment of complicated topics, the fundamental misunderstanding of Kant that inspired the name of the whole philosophy, and the inapplicability of principles to mortals who wrestle with personal flaws. Those are real, but the social security thing isn't.
But this is not just a problem that faces non-Objectivists. For example consider how Ayn Rand rejected the scientific evidence for smoking causing harm. She never had a logical argument. What she had was such an overwhelming emotional commitment to smoking being good that she would latch on to any plausible sounding argument against smoking being bad.
For a more current example, look at Alex Epstein's arguments on global warming. It quickly becomes apparent that he has such a strong emotional alignment with the great good caused by fossil fuels that he easily accepts any argument, no matter how flawed, that they might also cause harm. Compounding the trouble, global warming presents the exact kind of tragedy of the commons that undermines the economic theories by which Objectivism should lead to an economic utopia. This fact adds to the emotional dynamics for ignoring evidence that reality doesn't actually work in the ways that Ayn Rand claimed.
I do see how you can squint and feel that there's something there, after all Rand imagined a capitalist utopia. But it's not at all a crazy argument to understand accepting the benefits as a recovery of resources that were rightfully yours to begin with. It's actually refreshingly coherent and responsive, and a huge contrast with how modern public figures don't even pretend to address instances of personal hypocrisy.
I might raise a little bit of an eyebrow but I don't see the knockdown gotcha, and if you do, well, you've gotta make the argument.
I rather suspect Rand's politics didn't include giving land back to Native Americans, or paying reparations to slaves.
But one comment ago the subject was social security, and I don't think the charge of hypocrisy sticks on that one.
But that difference is the hypocrisy!
"I get to have this… because it was taken from me! No, that doesn't apply to your thing, because… uh..."
What's essential to that argument is what's contained in Rand's philosophy about taxation and her personal actions in electing to receive the benefit. Broadening the scope of the argument to include Native Americans in order to sustain the charge of hypocrisy is an indicator that the Social Security argument is not able to stand on its own.
For example consider this case. When we become dependent upon another's largesse, it is easy to emotionally deal with it by holding the other in contempt. Thereby making it emotionally comfortable to accept the largesse, and hiding from any potential feeling of guilt. For example Ayn Rand did an excellent job of portraying this dynamic on a personal level with the example of Lillian Reardon. Who holds Hank in contempt exactly because it keeps her from having to face how much of a parasite she has become.
I've seen Objectivists fall into exactly this dynamic. When their contempt for the government becomes a way to avoid thinking about how dependent they have actually become on said government, continuing to spout Ayn Rand's justification becomes hypocrisy. And as long as the underlying emotional reality is ignored, it remains hypocrisy no matter how logical and reasonable the explanation may be.
I used to follow a lot of RSS feeds and the political blogosphere when that was a thing. And one of the best was Brendan Nyhan, and he had a routine segment criticizing op-ed sections for fabricating internal monologues of political actors, making assumptions about internal states of mind that could never be disproved and proceeding to analysis that depended upon such unfalsifiable speculation.
I think it was a good principle against which to judge media accountability, and I would generalize by saying that such speculation involves relaxing the norms that usually apply to critical thinking writ large. At the level of genre, this category of speculating I would say does not enjoy default legitimacy due to its departure from normal critical thinking principles relating to substantiation and a fundamental lack of interest in responding to arguments on their merits.
I do personally know some Objectivists who I believe are hypocritical on this matter. But that is based on years of interaction, and I wouldn't expect you to be convinced of that simply because I said it.
How is this possible? Creating a tax free society requires more than getting rid of the government. It requires you to build a cooperative society where people willingly help each other out with no expectation of a return. Ayn Rand is the archetypical enemy of such a society.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ayn-rand-social-security/#...
> Pryor: I had read enough to know that she despised government interference, and that she felt that people should and could live independently. She was coming to a point in her life where she was going to receive the very thing she didn't like, which was Medicare and Social Security.
> I remember telling her that this was going to be difficult. For me to do my job, she had to recognize that there were exceptions to her theory. So that started our politial discussions. From there on - with gusto - we argued all the time the initial argument was on greed. She had to see that there was such a thing as greed in this world. Doctors could cost an awful lot more money than books earn, and she could be totally wiped out by medical bills if she didn't watch it. Since she had worked her entire life and had paid into Social Security, she had a right to it. She didn't feel that an individual should take help.
Emphasis added. If a successful writer, who built their success on their supposed keen insights on business, the economy, and their relation to the government, if that writer could be totally wiped out and feel the need to take Social Security, what chance do the less successful have? Or should they just die?
In fact, she instructed her fiduciary to not apply for it on her behalf because she didn't need it, and her detractors would use her participation to smear her.
Her fiduciary convinced her to be enrolled by citing her own "restitution" argument and the fact that, as a fiduciary, she had an obligation to pursue all of her client's financial interests to the extent of her ability under the law.
That's what you just cited above. At Rand's death, her estate was estimated to be worth somewhere between $500,000 to $2 million dollars. Rand didn't feel she needed it. Her fiduciary did risk management for her.
Check out Adam Curtis's documentaries for work that zeroes in on this.
The problem with intellectualizing is that it’s very good at employing itself to avoid all other options. If you get too old pretending otherwise, the road back is full of brambles and many would rather double down than accept it.
Once you understand this it’s easy to see the hollowness in what Rand offers, if it wasn’t already patently obvious to you before.
My more cynical take is that humans are emotional beings first and foremost, and reason is a distant second at best. And even our pretenses to reason can't be trusted, as they are often just emotion masquerading as reason, and the most insufferable of the reasonpilled are those that refuse to understand this.
I'm not trying to say emotion/reason are good/bad. What I am trying to say is that any hopes for a human society that place reason above emotion are fundamentally unachievable.
We do many things based entirely on intuition, and then afterward gin up a reason for having done them that doesn’t make us sound insane, or like five year olds. It’s part explanation/excuse and part description, but presented as description.
And if you’ve read anything on anger management, there’s a split second where the angry individual is experiencing some other emotion, like vulnerability or betrayal, before they sublimate it into anger. The problem is in how fast and to what degree they perform the substitution, and often even they miss the event, which takes away their own agency in the response. Recovery involves clawing back that agency.
The general gist of the core idea: that there are multiple modes of thinking and some of them are more likely to produce the most rational decisions than others in a given circumstance, is pretty trivially true.
I think where Kahneman's book does harm is in the implication (intended or otherwise) that "fast thinking" is bad. It's not. Thinking is expensive in time, attention, effort, and skill. We have instincts and emotional reactions for good reasons, they help us navigate crises when there isn't time for deep thought, and they are the consequences that reverberate through the complex web of interpersonal relations that makes up society.
Your note about anger management is really interesting though. I think there may be a tendency for people to generalize emotions that they feel into flavors that are more externalizable and less actionable. Vulnerability and betrayal are things that inspire changes in behavior, like building up defenses or reorienting loyalties, but when you're angry, well then you're just angry, and the only thing that will make you stop being angry is the world being different.
I think there's another version that I experience often, where I see my partner doing cool fun things with other people, and my brain triggers jealousy, which like anger is externalized and inflictive. If I slow down and spend some time with that feeling and drill down into it, I usually conclude that what I'm actually feeling is envy, which is more actionable: i can go get/do the thing that I am envious of (like make a plan to do the cool fun thing with my partner or somebody else in the future) and then I won't be envious anymore, without having to make the world change for me.
This is much better covered in Haidt's "The Righteous Mind". He goes into detail on when this happens and when it doesn't.
What studies have shown (and jives well with my experience): For topics you believe involve morality, this is precisely what happens: You make the decision, and the rationale follows. It happens so fast even you believe the rationale comes first.
One of the ways they tested it was by showing that moral decisions tend to have no cognitive load. If you ask someone something that requires cognitive load (e.g. analyzing some data), they slow down significantly while multitasking with trivial activities (e.g. putting lots of food in an organized way in the fridge). But when posed with issues of morality, they show no slowdown.
Hopes for mutual checks and balances between the two might be, for some if not all.
If it is accurate to consider the philosophical concept of a valence as a fundamental building block of emotions, then I think I'm fairly comfortable going a step further from just the evolutionary explanation of emotions to a more positive directive around emotional development within ones self and the support of that development within others as being a deeply moral action as well.
What is sad is that you label this with cynicism, whereas everyone else considers this fundamental to life.
If you haven't read it, you may enjoy Robert Sapolsky's "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will". I haven't yet finished it (only halfway through the book) but I found it a very fascinating read so far, no matter whenever one agrees with the conclusions or not. And I think it resonates and kind of confirms your comment, coming at it from a neurological viewpoint.
The book basically outlines which parts of the brain are responsible for our decision making. While I understand that he's drastically [over]simplifying things for readers' sake (as it's always the case with pop-sci), it provides a nice overview (a bunch of fun facts, with references to the actual scientific research where they came from) of how our decisions are heavily influenced by a lot of various things, in the context of your comment specifically - the processes going on in our brains that we can roughly call "emotions".
And, as you mention, I grew older, wiser, and realized it was not at all what I thought it was. In my professional life alone I have caused immense harm. Indirectly, sure, but no less real, serious, harm and death. Being unable to escape this fact has caused depression and massive disruption to my personal life.
But I am not unhappy that I have learned what I have, about myself, about this world. It's horrible, but a more clear, diverse understanding is worth the pain. And as a person, even with the pain, I'm far more comfortable with my newfound place in the world and I'm a far, far better person to the people around me.
I was a programmer at Apple and have to really scratch my head to think of any way I might have even slightly worsened someone's life.
- overt recognition that I have harmed someone else
- following through on whatever reparations I can make to undo part of the harm
- actively trying to change myself to avoid making the same type of mistake again.
--
It sounds like you have taken this to heart.
Yes, some (most? not sure) such companies did some wrong stuff - and perhaps you were involved (you don't really say, so I'm guessing).
But the category itself? It seems fine as long as they follow the regulations related to price fixing.
When you said you caused great harm in your professional life, I was thinking more along the lines of "being a terrible person to work with", which is probably more in line with the original person you responded to was thinking.
This would be the "if it's legal, it's also ethical" fallacy.
That said, I am sorry you've been burdened to the point of depression and personal struggles. It can be a natural outcome of difficult realizations and guilt, but I don't wish it upon someone for longer than necessary to make positive changes in their life (which you seem to have achieved, given your openness).
Thank you for the kind words. They were uplifting and appreciated.
I took a job at Boeing when the 787 was being built, with those fancy engines and airframe designs that improved efficiency considerably. But I did the math and I want to say you still have a bigger footprint in the new planes than driving a family of 3 to the destination in a private car, and that’s before you include Jevon in the picture. Never mind rail or other forms of transit.
I left that place much less proud than when I arrived. I left before that turned to shame, however.
However, after taking a good hard look at my past career contributions, it was impossible for me to not apply the same moral framework to my involvement at AWS. And while it wasn't quite as direct harm in the way of my MFH optimization work, it still wasn't difficult for me to see that if I succeeded, while the bits would flow fast and the metrics would rise high, I wasn't doing good. I was, at best, furthering an exploitive system.
While I don't feel the same level of regret for my contributions to AWS, I don't feel good about my contributions either.
I made it about three months in that industry. The pay was great but I was hardly sleeping by the end of the first month.
I found my limit, I guess.
I'm glad you did not last long in the industry, for your personal and our collective goods. I hope you're in a good place today.
I regret my involvement here as well and am sorry I did what I did.
If you were responsible for itunes I could give you a few examples.
v.good image, thank you
That works for some people.
I read Nietzsche after rand and I thought his philosophy had some similarities to rand but from a more emotional perspective. They say very similar things about being yourself and being selfish, but one from rationality the other from emotions.
For me the difference between musk and Steve jobs demonstrates this. One is an engineer entrepreneur the other an artist entrepreneur. Both incredibly successful but couldn’t be more different, but of course both are assholes too and took what they wanted from the world.
That consumes most of the years when your prefrontal cortex is still malleable.
Once you understand that, the consequences are everywhere you care to look.
And while it’s true we have twice the density of the general population of neurodivergent people, we nearly all of us make ourselves neurodivergent in the pursuit of this field, whether we are born with it or not. When we eventually find time for hobbies and charities we find out we don’t think like everyone else, and often not in a good way. We have “missed out” on experiences others take for granted.
Could you expand a bit on this statement for the young and inexperienced.
The problem with believing in the primacy of reason is that it's incredibly distortionary. In reality, we all think and reason with respect to our ego and our emotions, and so if you believe that you are engaging in pure reason, it can lead you to pave over the ways in which your emotions are affecting your line of thought.
In this way it can quickly become a very dogmatic, self-reinforcing way of thinking. The ironic thing is that becoming a better thinker is not done by studying logic, but instead by learning to recognize and respect your own emotional responses.
I think the concepts of forms and shapes rubbed her the wrong way.
Here's a quote from Piekoff that I think explains why much better than what Rand would have written.
> Momentous conclusions about man are implicit in this metaphysics (and were later made explicit by a long line of Platonists): since individual men are merely particular instances of the universal "man," they are not ultimately real. What is real about men is only the Form which they share in common and reflect. To common sense, there appear to be many separate, individual men, each independent of the others, each fully real in his own right. To Platonism, this is a deception; all the seemingly individual men are really the same one Form, in various reflections or manifestations. Thus, all men ultimately comprise one unity, and no earthly man is an autonomous entity—just as, if a man were reflected in a multifaceted mirror, the many reflections would not be autonomous entities.
Platonism does believe that forms exist separate from material instances; like, perfect spheres or triangles are “real,” even if there are no perfect spheres or triangle in the material world. That is a statement for the reality of the immaterial world, for platonists.
However, there are more than just these idealized forms in the immaterial world of forms. There aren’t just right triangles or perfect spheres, there are also forms that have complexity exceeding anything in the material world.
The world of forms might be thought of as the world of information, if that helps. However, it is subtlety different, since information is materially instantiated — and there appear to be hierarchies within the world of forms that somehow take precedence. Eg, the concept of 1 takes precedence over 363279.
The point is that there are forms of individual people, too, in platonism. Plato is vague about this in dialectic, but I believe Plotinus addresses it directly.
I'm not a professional philosopher, but I think the nebulous nature of how Plato addresses forms and shapes is difficult for someone from a Randian Materialistic viewpoint to accept.
I think that even at it's weakest interpretation, the concept of forms and shapes at least provides an avenue for aspirational meditation as we can discuss what an "ideal" of a thing (food, medecine, political ideaology, etc) might be
This is the single thing that in my opinion both the young and also the naive miss. But people who are wise usually seem to understand.
Not everyone learns it with age, but it usually takes some amount of life experience for people to learn it.
I've even, after complaints about this were met with "you just didn't start with her fundamentals, so you didn't understand", reluctantly gone all the way to her big work on epistemology(!) and... sure enough, same.
I find similar things in basically anything hosted on the Austrian-school beloved site mises.org. IDK if this is just, like, the house style of right wing laissez faire or what.
It is very different from a modern, more scientific approach, where we would view the system as a work in progress which would be refined over time. It would have been better for Rand to say about (for instance) free will, "it may function this way" or "we can make at least these statements about it", but I think Rand was not constitutionally able to couch her beliefs with qualifiers. It hurt her philosophical arguments, while at the same time perhaps made her a more interesting author.
I'm not an Objectivist, despite being sympathetic, because Rand created it and wouldn't agree that I was one. The reason is because I would tweak her philosophy. I'd incorporate some Bayesian probabilistic arguments into her metaphysics and epistemology, which she would despise. I'd modify her ethics with findings from game theory. I'd fold insights from cellular automata and chaos theory into her philosophy of consciousness. The broad swaths would be mostly the same, but it would no longer by Ayn Rand's Objectivism (tm).
Edit: Iain McGilchrist makes a useful distinction here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUJDsdt7Pso
- Maya Angelou
This applies to so many things ... people don't remember what happened, or what's true. They remember how they felt! [1]
And it makes from a psychological perspective - emotions are basically an evolutionary shortcut for remembering. You can compress a 5- or 10-year experience into an imprecise feeling
[1] For anybody who thinks they are rational or objective, try keeping a journal for a few decades, and then reading it. Your memory is very selective!
The irony and tragedy is broader and encompasses both the cult leaders and the cult detractors who are both unwilling separate the ideas from the people.
There's lots to say about how Objectivism oversimplifies and attacks caricatures, and doesn't address itself to sophisticated economic thinking. You can get good out of it (I read it during the Bush admin and felt like it was making the same warnings against the excesses of state power that 1984 was), and it's not terrible to expose a person to the virtues of philosophy, and critical thinking. In my case it opened my eyes to moral realism, at which point I traded in any interest in Objectivism for that instead.
Even if you want to take the novel on its own terms that it has super-intellectual heroes, how humans work is every bit as much a part of reality as the physics of inventing a new metal. And the talent of administering human organizations is never present. It also never really models how mere mortals can reconcile their imperfections to the standards articulated, and is not self aware enough to speak to the population of mere mortals who would misdiagnose themselves as misunderstood heroes.
The problem is that this causes them to believe that their conclusions are purely logical, even when they are not. Therefore any disagreements are "proof" that the other is being illogical and should be rejected. This leads to an intolerance of disagreement, that in turn leads to the excommunication, loyalty tests, and so on. All of which will be expressed in the rhetoric of the philosophy, which is designed to appeal to reason while connecting to emotion.
It is perfectly predictable emotional behavior. As is the inability to process inconvenient information that does not align with what the philosophy wishes to believe is true.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines...
See ep-1 "Love & Power," on contradictions of Ayn Rand's life versus her philosophy; can be found on yt / vimeo
Series supplies interesting history for any nerd interested in systems analysis and provides a survey of California Ideology.
His documentary on the legacy of Henritta Lacks' immortal cells and biology, "The Way of All Flesh" is also interesting food for thought on systems analysis.
ideology. People pervert everything into ideology.
> its institutional guardians seem remarkably focused on excommunication, loyalty tests, and controlling access to primary sources. The gap between preaching individualism while demanding conformity has always been the movement's central contradiction.
that can be said about any ideology. Ideologies can be different yet those guardians and the gap between declaration and practice is always the same.
Raised christian but feeling burned out by the contradictions, the emptiness of trying to live for others (it's killing for relationships I can tell you), the mental struggle to rationalize all the rules, I too felt that spark. I realize dogmatism is always bad but that voice inside keeps saying: It's not when the theory is perfect! The truth is knowable and can be discovered through reason. How super comforting (and damn that Incompleteness Theorem I learned about later).
I don't know what it is, my hunger for a system? For rules to make sense of the world? Whatever it is, Rand's philosophy remains so appealing. It's probably the reason I started a company, walk into meetings now boldly, with a goal, why I enjoy things now, just to enjoy myself. As a rational, healthy human, there is nothing wrong with that, in contrast to what my upbringing tried to instill in me.
Perhaps that's it, it liberated my from a confining worldview. Perhaps another worldview could have done the same.
Someone else was burned one too many times. It's fine and dandy until you notice a pattern: others who lack conscience will always work your convictions against you. Though the religion admits as much - it eschews 'worldly wisdom' - i.e. what you need to make anything of a life in this world.
At least, that is how I experienced it.
Uf, that sounds horribel. Reminds me of the mother in C.S. Lewsis Screwtape Letters
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwtape_Letters
I at some point it becomes performative and false. And not very Christian at all
Karl Popper called it "monocausotaxophilia". Humans want everything to have a single cause.
Thanks for catching it.
It's been over a decade at this point, but I remember Howard Roarks(?) endless ambitious energy was infectious. Sounds like it's time for another read.
The problem is that for some reason she couldn’t keep it at the fictional level and started thinking maybe the fiction was a good model of reality. That kinda taints a bit the legacy, in my opinion.
The characters didn’t help either. They came across as one-dimensional: the so-called heroes are always right, always rational, while anyone who disagrees with them is portrayed as either stupid or evil. That kind of writing makes it hard for me to take her "philosophy" seriously.
Trying to live in a relationship with a Christian philosophy only works if both parties in the relationship have the same mindset.
It’s a shortcut to being abused if one partner turns the other cheek, and the other keeps on slapping them.
I’m still not sure if this identifies poor partners or a poor outlook.
I now see the conflicts between her and my parents and often she’s like: why don’t they just say what they want? She gets the feeling they do stuff for her/us, but she wants them to do things they like! Of course we really like it if they want to see our children because they like to be with them. Not always because they want to help us out or something indirect. I mean, that’s wat love is right?
My wife is Jewish and was I raised Catholic. I’ve noticed quite recently that she definitely judges actions more in terms of effect and I’m more concerned with people’s motivations/intentions.
And funnily enough I just noticed this explicitly in the Old Testament:
Leviticus 4:1-35 deals explicitly with sacrificial atonement for unwitting offences. The section note in The Jewish Study Bible says: “A basic postulate of Israelite thought is that inadvertent acts are just as harmful as deliberate ones, the need to atone for them just as real, and the desire to do so, once they are realized, greater.”
(In the movie version of The Fountainhead, Howard Roarke's architecture is terrible. His buildings resemble 1960s US housing projects such as the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. There's good minimalism, but that's not it.)
Wouldn't suggest anyone read Atlas Shrugged, saying this as someone who also read Peikoff's "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand"
Just read The Fountainhead and imagine that with trains and the railroad.
"Anthem" is a short read and also pretty solid.
Atlas Shrugged just needed a good editor, or someone else, to cut it down to the same size as The Fountain head
To me- this article is about the social dangers of taking a philosophy to the extreme, and about how easy it is to take advantage of the elderly when estranged.
But then again I would say that, so it's hard to tell if that actually is something I took away from the article or if it's just confirmation bias at play.
> like many tragedies, this one is marked by a dark irony: A man devoted to the principle of individualism has ended up living a life defined by a reliance on others.
The irony is that Peikoff believed himself an advocate of individualism, while simultaneously subjugating himself, saying stuff like “I would let her step on my face if she wanted.”
As someone else put it on Twitter, they are like house cats: absolutely convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don't appreciate or understand.
I don't think that participation in society as it exists should prevent anybody from holding their philosophy of choice.
“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."
Galt's Gulch seems to fit that description.
>none of the characters in her books are self sufficient.
I think they were in the sense that they, within the fiction of the books, had irreplaceable economic skills that made them fortunes. They were (again just in the logic of the books), more than pulling their weight.
Doesn't mean I agree with it as a system but I can see the internal consistency in this respect at least.
This is exactly why Conservatives feel educators are evil; they work to enable the ideals/traits in individuals which run counter to what’s most successful for following Conservative ideology.
Do you feel that it would be impossible to think critically without the department of education?
Do you feel that folks from other countries, who grew up without our illustrious department of education, lack critical thought?
I assumed this was a reference for the conservative push to eliminate the DOE.
Or do you believe that conservatives actually want to eliminate the abstract concept of education?
What do you mean by conservatives? Do you mean my fellow citizens in arms, or certain people who happen to hold power right now?
It is a conduit through which funding flows and is a standards and enforcement body.
They (or at least, they used to) insure that "state's rights" advocates don't implement curricula that teach children that the world is 6,000 years old and flat. They are in the process of being dismantled.
One's local school district is responsible for a vast majority of one's critical thinking skills and it has been this way in the United States since at least the early 1800s when people realized that only wealthy parents had the time, energy, and money to hire private tutors to impart critical thinking skills on their children.
I imagine that in other countries, especially western countries, the story is the same.
We can look back far into history to see that people have used state-run or sanctioned institutions to teach critical thinking skills since well before the Platonic Academy, from which much of our modern system is derived, based on evidence of organized vocational education ranging from Siberia to Ancient Egypt to city states that dotted the land prior to the Old Babylonian Empire.
The main difference between those ancient systems and today is that, for now, all children get the chance to have a formal, standardized education, instead of just the children of the wealthy, well-connected, or lucky.
That is, in my view, a good thing. We should not be a monolithic nation and were never meant to be. If the people of (insert state here) wish to teach their children things I don't agree with, or even things which are outright false, that is their right. Nor does it hurt me in any way.
One of the great problems with our country today is people trying to get the federal government to control more and more things. That is directly responsible for much of the division in our country, as federal elections (especially for president) turn into this big fight over who is going to get to impose their dramatically differing way of life on others for the next 4ish years. To reduce tensions, we need to return to the original design: decisions about government should be made as locally as possible, so that the government can reflect the very diverse needs and cultures that exist across our country.
What we absolutely should be is a nation with a minimum standard of education that all American children capable enough are expected to have by the time they leave school. That standard should include the fact that the world isn't flat.
Providing a minimum standard of quality education is critical to the security and success of the nation because a democracy doesn't function when the population is made up of uneducated people who are easily fooled, can't read, and whose heads are filled with lies that will often conflict with what's been taught to the children one state over.
> If the people of (insert state here) wish to teach their children things I don't agree with, or even things which are outright false, that is their right. Nor does it hurt me in any way
If you don't think that it is possible for you to be harmed by the votes or actions of people who are uneducated, intentionally misinformed, and unable to think critically you obviously still have some learning to do yourself.
Your questions betray an ignorance of how a significant plurality of the world still lives to this day. You need to get out more, and not just at the resort towns.
And new problems are cropping up in the foremost developed nations, like depression due to social media addiction, that we'll also need to think critically about, instead of reverting to medieval religious remedies.
Alternatively, maybe you just think we're better off because we're intrinsically better kinds of humans? Gods chosen few? No doubt many people actually believe that.
I am not a fan of the DOE- I think that the relationship between standardized tests and funding mean that schools prioritize skill development and memorization more than they prioritize critical thought / reasoning.
I am not sure where your line of criticism comes from- it doesn't seem like we're understanding each other
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Now, to your point about standardized testing of skills vs reasoning, I would love to hear a proposal for ensuring "correct" critical thinking is assimilating into student populations. This doesn't scale and is subject to severe bias. Standardized testing measures more objective traits that are indicators for critical thought. IMO a solution must build on top of that foundation, not throw it away. You add a compass, you don't throw out the map.
Did you ever use the streets in front of your house? Ever went to a public park? Ever relied on police to protect your property? Ever needed the help of public health services? Firefighters?
It's funny that you get money stole from you (while you certainly use a ton on infrastructure society provides), but never once considered leaving it behind and go live as a hunter gatherer in some remote place.
After all, you are posting here.
When the budget is questioned the response is always the most popular examples and ignore everything else.
When was the last time you used a sociology research grant? Or an ICBM?
Interesting to hear the military budget is now completely necessary from HNers.
Those things are sort of like having competent IT security. If they are doing everything right, they will seem like they aren't doing anything at all, but when they are gone all of a destruction and doom is always just a day away.
It gets tiresome listening to their "taxes are theft" bullshit.
But part of the problem is the lack of community structure and expectation that we can centrally fund and manage problems. There are whole communities in the US that lived for generations on civic duty and kindness of heart.
But not entirely. Living in the US means they take advantage of the American capitalist system and infrastructure to some degree, which means they benefit from taxation. And obviously they pay their taxes otherwise the men with guns would have shown up.
And again, the free rider problem is intractable at scale. You can't simply build "community structure" and expect everyone to buy in. If that were possible, we wouldn't need laws at all, we could just expect everyone to play nice. And the fact that most people play nice by default doesn't imply laws aren't necessary.
And we can centrally fund and manage problems. That does work. Look at the numerous public work projects in the US like Hoover Dam, NASA, interstate highways, modern agriculture, the internet. None of that happens if all you can depend on is kindness of heart.
Just because a good thing exists does not mean I’m indebted to it. The city may build a really nice park on the other side of town. That doesn’t mean I’m being subsidized or dependent.
The people of Maine did not benefit from the Hoover Dam.
> You can't simply build "community structure" and expect everyone to buy in.
You’re right that we can’t magically recreate communities that were destroyed, but this is actually the default human behavior. Small community cooperate together for common good.
> If that were possible, we wouldn't need laws at all
This doesn’t follow. People’s short term behavior may not align with their long term values.
Crime/sin is traditionally when your passions get the best of you.
Also every society that concentrates power into a larger government through taxation will inevitably invade and destroy or subjugate those who decided they wanted the smallest bare minimum of community support and collective services that leaves them vulnerable.
Why did you lead with police and parks instead?
I think it benefits society to fund academic research.
see how you mentally group all these things under one umbrella. No I don’t think sociology research is on the same standing as physics research and I also don’t think all physics research is equal.
Based on the reports coming from Doge I think there are a lot of bad studies funded in the name of science or academic research.
Is this supposed to be a humorous comment, or are you seriously using the reports coming from doge in an argument, as if they were honest reports?
I realise that this comment might come off as antagonistic, and I apologise. But since I guffawed when I read it, as I interpreted it as the former, I'm now curious to find out if I'm correct.
Regardless of money saved the content of the material is a sampling of the kind of research we are funding - grouped under well intentioned labels like “science” or “academic research”.
Ah nevermind. You are one of those people.
But I don't think taxes are in and of themselves immoral.
A human being is a social animal, and each gets a lot of value from the people around us.
These are nice to have:
- clean streets
- police
- non-corrupt judges
- a stable legal framework
- living among educated people
- fire department that just shows up
- not getting bombed and invaded by a foreign army
- much more
These are "true expenses" in that if you didn't pay for them... you'd eventually pay the price for them when you're the victim of crime, fire, or exposure to the illiterate.
If you lived in Galt's Gulch or some gated community in an anarchic society, you'd pay a regular fee for these services, like voluntary taxes.
Taxes are infamously as inevitable as death because the expenses it's meant to pay for are also inevitable. We might as well set up a system.
Government waste is held up as an example of immorality, and some/most governments certainly should be leaner, but some waste & inertia would happen in any large organization, public or private. The only other time a government could be straight-up immoral is if it's persecuting innocent citizens or foreigners for no reason. Thinking through the implementation details of Galt's Gulch makes me think taxes aren't so bad after all.
Morality is not just being generally nice when it’s convenient for all parties.
One of the themes in the Fountainhead is contrasting someone with this attitude with the individual with a longer term vision and goals.
If you don’t have an answer to the question of what should be done in life, you have no framing for other dependent moral questions.
He is now estranged from his daughter Cordelia -er, Kira - over this.
I’m not sure how you can look at an America where it is largely illegal to build and claim with a straight face that anything is unrestrained.
Living hellish painful lives purely volitionally, from the mental cage they created for themselves.
Must've had extra specially unpleasant childhoods.
A society where the rich destroy the entire world fighting stupid battles against each other, even witholding technology that would aid all humanity because someone other than them would benefit, all the while ordinary men like Eddie Willers are left to die in the desert?
Marx couldn't have laid it out so clear to me as Rand has.
I read on his Wikipedia page that he called Obama's re-election "the worst political event ever to occur in the history of this continent" and "worse than the Civil War".
An estimated 600,000 to one million people died in the war. And many more suffered life-long injuries, had to deal with the loss of their child, spouse, etc. Also seems to me the slave system in the US – where people were born in to slavery with no realistic hope of freedom – is the ultimate in state control and stripping of individual rights that people like him are supposed to be against.
You can dislike Obama, nothing wrong with that. But is having a president you dislike for 4 years really worse than up to a million dead people? And the institute of slavery?
Also denies property rights to Palestinians and native Americans. The notion that individual rights are paramount again goes out of window at the first sign of inconvenience.
So not just unpleasant on a personal level, also morally decrepit and intellectually vapid.
I wanted to see intellectual hero philosophers as the legacy, but what objectivism produced, outside of Nathaneil Branden and David Kelly who were at least interesting, was largely a complete joke.