Hacker News Reader

Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

Something life and then later therapy has taught me is that intellect can paper over a lot of shortcomings, but it’s just paper. At the end of the day situations that involve humans always involve feelings. And you stunt your growth (personal or organizational) if you try to pretend it isn’t the case.

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.

View on HN

I fell into Rand in high school and it took me a few years to climb out.

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.

Most of our choices aren't thought out and logical. Our emotions and lizard brain drive most of our actions, but some of us are very good at quickly coming up with justifications and rationalizations for what we've just done that are plausible enough that we end up feeling in control.

Great post! I think it all comes down to self awareness. The more you are aware of your conscious and unconscious biases, you are the more empowered to mitigate the resultant rational failures.

Yeah, “think for yourself, and if you disagree with me that means you’re doing it wrong” is a heck of a way to run a school of philosophy. It’s no wonder she hates Plato, he’s constantly challenging people in their settled beliefs.

Why did she (explicitly) hate Plato so much?

> The "extreme realists" or Platonists, . . . hold that abstractions exist as real entities or archetypes in another dimension of reality and that the concretes we perceive are merely their imperfect reflections, but the concretes evoke the abstractions in our mind. (According to Plato, they do so by evoking the memory of the archetypes which we had known, before birth, in that other dimension.)

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.

something I've always wondered about but never fully grasped about Platonists before. thank you for the wonderful explanation.

Not sure if you are joking, but that’s not a clear summary of platonism.

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.

Right. I want to make it clear I wasn't saying "I support Ayn Rand's thought's on Platonism", what I wanted to convey was my interpretation of what Rand/Piekoff Wrote and why I think they read Plato and had the reaction they did.

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

Yes, I understood you. Plato has a lot of deliberate vagueness — it’s a dialectical communication, where the knowledge is communicated through the challenges of processing it

> 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.

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.

Despite heading in more and more romantic directions in my thinking—from a very-analytic start—I don't find the core problem with Rand's thinking to be primacy of reason, but sloppy (or, motivated—it can be hard to tell which) reasoning that leads to ultra-confident conclusions. A consistent pattern is you'll see a whole big edifice of reasoning out of her, but peppered about in it, and usually including right at the beginning, are these little bits that the cautious reader may notice and go "wait, that... doesn't necessarily follow" or (VERY often) "hold on, you're sneaking in a semantic argument there and it's not per se convincing at all, on second thought" and then those issues are just never addressed, she just keeps trucking along, so most of the individual steps might be fine but there are all these weird holes in it, so none of it really holds together.

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.

I don't think it has anything to do with being right wing -- Rand despised and was despised by much of the right wing -- but more to do with her traditionalist method of doing philosophy. I'd even call it Russian-influenced. I think Rand approached her philosophy from a literary perspective, and viewed her philosophy as a grand treatise that addressed every important aspect... an entire philosophical system. The overbearing rigidity and confidence sprung from this. It is very 19th-century in feel.

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).

I've always considered reason to allow for emotional motivations, as opposed to rationality, which does not.

Edit: Iain McGilchrist makes a useful distinction here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUJDsdt7Pso

I had what I thought to be an immensely successful 25+ career and personal life based upon my intellect.

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 can't imagine what your career was.

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.

I (along with others) created pricing optimization software for the multi-family housing industry.

Let me gather some pitch forks..

A good apology requires:

- 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.

As someone who has dabbled in real estate, this doesn't sound all that bad.

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.

> It seems fine as long as they follow the regulations related to price fixing

This would be the "if it's legal, it's also ethical" fallacy.

You're getting some flippant, dismissive responses, but I applaud your perspective and your acceptance of the partial responsibility you (and most of us) bear. It takes courage, introspection, selflessness, and a broader, empathic worldview. If more people were like you, the world would be a far better place. Thank you.

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).

Thankfully, it is not difficult for me to see a past version of myself in the flippant or dismissive responses, which makes them considerably less painful. I can only hope the authors are faster studies than I was.

Thank you for the kind words. They were uplifting and appreciated.

Working for a megacorp famous for blatant anticonsumer practices, I have to scratch my head to think of an innocuous IT position inside it. Maybe infrastructure? Even seemingly innocent roles like design have dark patters at their core that use things like green bubbles and social pressure as part of their sales strategy.

I’m sure the employees of Bayer and their suppliers told themselves the same thing during WWII. We’re just making tools and equipment that let the bad guys do their work. We aren’t actually involved in the bad stuff.

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.

Can’t drive a car across the corn, though.

After I left the MFH industry I took a position at AWS. My thinking at the time was this was a safe "infrastructure" position where I could apply myself in relative safety just worrying about bits being pushed around the internet.

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.

It's really uplifting to hear this? If it's not too personal, what shifted your perspective? Have you been able to reach out to people in a similar situation?

I have worked with online gambling. An industry where for most companies the bulk of the income comes from the addicts, not the non-problematic gamblers.

I thought I could dissociate work-for-pay from my sense of self enough for this not to matter. It's all mercenary work, right? I've never cared about most of it, right? What's the difference?

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 too dissociated from my work and I did it for decades. This is not a healthy thing for a human to do and there will be an emotional debt paid, at some point even if only done for weeks, or months.

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.

Sadly and unfortunately, in addition to the MFH ills that I have done, I also was involved with optimization for gaming hospitality as well as systems and tools around slots optimization.

I regret my involvement here as well and am sorry I did what I did.

Is it so hard to imagine areas of the software industry that produce real measurable harm? One doesn't even need to go so nuanced as gambling or other such things - how many software engineers does the 'defence' industry employ?

There's also software engineers that work in ads. Instagram [known to have a causal effect in eating disorders, which is one of the more deadly mental illnesses]. Health insurance [unitedhealthcare was using software to automatically deny people healthcare-- this definitely has killed people].

> 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.

If you were responsible for itunes I could give you a few examples.

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

- 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!

> At the end of the day situations that involve humans always involve feelings.

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.

I know some people are pushing back on Thinking, Fast and Slow’s assertions but whether everyone’s brains work that way or not, there’s at least a visible minority of people whose brains do, and I’m among them.

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.

Thinking Fast and Slow's biggest issues are in the middle chapters that rely heavily on priming research, which has been pretty thoroughly disproven since the book's release.

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.

> We do many things based entirely on intuition, and then afterward gin up a reason for having done them

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.

Or, issues of morality are mostly trivial.

> any hopes for a human society that place reason above emotion are fundamentally unachievable.

Hopes for mutual checks and balances between the two might be, for some if not all.

The issue is that what we often think as our 'reason' is often rather post-hoc rationalisation, which then becomes our beliefs, as our brain hate being wrong. People who can easily and often say 'i was wrong, it's my bad' without throwing shade at other people are nice. People who, during an argument, can say 'you're right, sorry'? Keep them close, or better, marry them.

we spend most of our lives playing iterated prisoners dilemmas, a game which presumably can be cracked by some godlike intellect, but which is far beyond the capabilities of our current philosophy. Emotions, put well to use, do well at this task.

That’s probably why we evolved emotions in the first place. First to create and protect your own offspring and then to allow allegiances against the elements and other creatures.

To add to the conversation:

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 I am trying to say is that any hopes for a human society that place reason above emotion are fundamentally unachievable.

What is sad is that you label this with cynicism, whereas everyone else considers this fundamental to life.

Again without trying to make an overall value judgment on emotion vs. reason, one of the things that is attractive about reason is that it has built-in capacity for self-correction, i.e. we can use logic to prove that our own logic is faulty, and this is an ordinary and non-traumatic event. In contrast, self-correcting an emotional process is something an individual might spend a lifetime struggling with, if they can even identify a problem in the first place. To suggest that people are fundamentally emotional animals is to suggest that individuals cannot be expected to improve themselves.

> any hopes for a human society that place reason above emotion are fundamentally unachievable

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".

I think this exact phenomenon is shown pretty well in the series, Better Call Saul with Chuck McGill.

>the road back is full of brambles

v.good image, thank you

I think you have to consider personality types when discussing things like this. Rand seems to me like she probably had Asperger’s, which explains why she is attracted to rationality, and her heroes are like that too.

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.

I’m talking to a group of people I assume to be substantially software developers, and the facts on the ground are that many of us are attracted to this field by logic, and we are all encouraged in college and for a few years after to invest every spare moment into CS and not any other endeavors. Don’t socialize without an agenda, don’t develope your EQ, just computers and logic all the time.

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.

People certainly can make themselves neurodivergent, but I think most people are born that way. I think there are lots of reasons why CS and tech at large is full of neurodivergent people, but I think people are joinging because they are neurodivergent, not the other way around. That being said, there are lots of neurodivergent people in finance and (the higher levels of) politics, they're just mostly psychopaths.

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com