IsaacL

I used the word "nitpick" intentionally. I was referring to your point questioning whether "a zillionaire capitalist accepting a token amount of gold for performing unskilled labour represents a functioning market". This is the kind of arbitrary criticism someone comes up with when they're not interested in honestly understanding the author's message.

"The real purpose for Dagny's dinner with the tramp after all ... [is] for the tramp to lecture"

This is another example of your nitpicking. You know that I was not talking about that one particular scene, but illustrating that Rand has nothing against charity and she has many scenes in her novels where characters help people in need. That is, Rand does not teach "never help others", as you imply.

"And yeah, the symbolic nature of having to pay for everything rather than do favours is the heroes believe [in maintaining the illusion that] those deserving of their support are evaluated not as individuals but based on their ability to produce interchangeable tokens of past effort...."

And nope, you're still misunderstanding the message. The heroes are not asking who is "deserving of their support" then evaluating them "on their ability to produce interchangeable tokens". The heroes want to live by their own effort. Living with others who also want to live by their own effort makes life easier, because you can specialise and trade the products of your labour for the products of their labour. Production and trade are essentials of any human community, charity isn't, which is why there is no charity in the valley.

I posted these links elsewhere in the thread, but I think they'll be of special interest to HN readers, who might want to know about the more technical aspects of her philosophy.

An index of her thoughts on many topics: http://aynrandlexicon.com/book/conceptual.html

A graduation speech which summarises her views on philosophy in general: http://fare.tunes.org/liberty/library/pwni.html

Her most technical work, her theory of concept-formation (and the book that sold me on her ideas): https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Objectivist-Epistemology...

The Ayn Rand lexicon is a good jumping off point. http://aynrandlexicon.com/book/conceptual.html

Ayn Rand's philosophy goes far beyond the stereotype of capitalism and selfishness. She wrote a ton on consciousness, concept-formation, the psychological function of art, and so on. Click around that link above and you'll see what I mean.

If you want to dive in at the deep end, this is her most technical work, and is the book that convinced me (and many others) that she's on to something big. https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Objectivist-Epistemology...

I don't think you had a deep understanding of her philosophy.

"The idea is that the free market is able to solve every problem."

Ayn Rand doesn't say this. It sounds more like a stereotypical Republican talking point.

Rand would say that the only thing that can solve problems -- can, not will -- is an active individual mind. (This doesn't rule out people working together in groups, provided the group is made up of active individual minds). Laissez-faire capitalism would not solve all problems, but it would leave individuals free to work on solutions to whatever problems they saw fit.

She also includes scenes where the heroes help one another, or even help strangers. (Example: Dagny inviting the tramp to join her for dinner).

The scene where "a zillionaire capitalist charges for giving one of the other heroes a short ride in his car" is symbolic. The characters in the valley wanted to uphold the ethos that everyone there lived by the product of his or her own effort.

Ayn Rand didn't include that scene for people like you who want to nitpick everything. She is writing for the kind of readers who think "hmm, having to pay for everything sounds annoying -- but on the other hand, it means you're not constantly dealing with requests for free favours. What kind of people would live in a place where everything had to be paid for? Would I want to live with those people?"

Did John Rogers meet many Ayn Rand fans before forming this opinion? Did you?

I'm been an active Objectivist for the last two years and I've met dozens of others. They're a diverse bunch (I know Objectivist actors, Objectivist musicians, Objectivist academics, Objectivist finance guys, tons of Objectivist programmers), but in general, I'd say they're way more friendly, less cynical and more optimistic than the majority of people I meet. They're fun to be around and are usually working towards some personally meaningful life goals.

I do think that teenagers probably shouldn't read Atlas Shrugged -- they're too likely to take away a shallow understanding of the message. I first read it just before my 25th birthday, and I think it's best read in your mid-20s, when your youthful idealism starts crashing into practical reality.

1. "There is an objective reality". 2. "Reality is consistent". 3. "The human mind is capable of knowledge about reality".

These all need to be taken as axioms if any further knowledge is going to be possible.

There's a book called Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology which covers this in much more detail. (Ayn Rand gets a bad rep, but few people know about her theories of concepts and knowledge. They indicate the path to solving many of the issues in philosophy of science).

> in the history of science, progress with concepts and causality did well where the new methods would need Nevada full of disk drives of data. E.g., space flight navigation is based, first, on Newton's law of gravity and second law of motion, not on fitting massive of data via deep learning.

If you're thinking about conceptual reasoning vs. purely data-driven reasoning, you'd really get a lot of value from reading Ayn Rand's theory of concepts. Yes, she's very unpopular amongst modern philosophers, so all I'll say is you should read her writings and judge for yourself.

https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Objectivist-Epistemology...

Two people used her philosophy as a basis for a book on induction and the history of the scientific method:

https://www.amazon.com/Logical-Leap-Induction-Physics-ebook/...

Here's a free taster: http://aynrandlexicon.com/book/conceptual.html

I think your approach has similar problems to that of Leibniz.

This might be of interest: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/concepts.html

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/platonic_realism.html

I've dug into these numbers and it's rarely clear how "subsidies" are defined. Often tax breaks and "unpaid externalities" are included in the total subsidies. "$X of subsidies for fossil fuels" usually does not mean the gov't gave $X to fossil fuel companies.

Nice response to my argument with insults. Once you're talking about moral judgement and people being determined, you're in philosophical territory.

In reality we have free will. If every action was predetermined, there'd be no point judging people.

People do respond to incentives. Deterrence isn't just about the severity of punishments but also the probability of being caught. The US justice system (I'm not an American) seems to have the worst of both worlds were many people evade justice and others are hit with overly harsh sentences. Countries with effective police forces (e.g. Japan, Singapore) have very low crime rates.

Rehabilitation makes sense for petty criminals and economic criminals, and possibly "crimes of passion". Some individuals are simply beyond redemption, though. I'd say attempting to "rehabilitate" anyone at category 11 or above on the following scale [1] is an injustice to their victims. People like Charles Manson [2] are capable of retreating into a delusional fantasy world and never acknowledge what they've done.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_Evil#Scale_and_criminals (warning: no graphics, but extremely unpleasant content)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-qWLlER1N0 (Manson starts one of his monologues at about 8:20)

The fundamental point is that if determinism is true then morality is meaningless. I think we have free will.

(This will probably be a controversial point on HN so to expand a little: I think consciousness is both non-mystical and non-material - the mind is entirely natural, mind and matter interact, but the mind is not the same as the brain, and is not made of atoms. Qualia and the binding problem [1] cannot be explained in material terms. Furthermore, if our thoughts are merely deterministic neurons firing, then we don't have any reliable knowledge of reality, making any debate meaningless).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_problem#The_combinatio...

The logic is based on the needs of any society. Every society needs a set of rules which everyone agrees to follow. History shows that the smaller the set of rules, the better, but you need to at least prevent people from infringing the life and liberty of others.

The simple reason for retribution is deterrence: there should be a negative incentive to committing crimes. The deeper reason is to make the kind of world people can live in. When everyone sees that criminals are punished, it tells would-be criminals to think twice, and it tells law-abiding citizens that someone is looking out for them.

I don't think punishment should be excessively cruel, prison is probably sufficient, and excessive solitary confinement is probably unjustified. But many people on this thread seem to think punishment in general is always unjust.

I think the underlying this is the modern belief that no-one is responsible for their actions, and that criminals are the product of social forces who need compassion and understanding. The argument against that is the standard argument against any form of determinism - if people are determined by outside forces, so are judges and prison guards, who similarly cannot help themselves from punishing criminals, and so should not face moral judgement. It's contradictory to judge judges but forgive criminals.

Do you know how much people suffer if their house is broken into, if they are robbed at gunpoint, if they are raped, etc? Not just the direct harm, but the ongoing psychological harm?

Revenue is often used as a vanity metric. On the other hand... revenue is tangible, profit is an accounting construct.

One HN user wrote about why she liked them in a previous thread on Nasty Gal:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12923367

I was amazed to see this comment, like a meteorite of sanity crashing into HN.

My sibling post is on the right lines - a lot of people in tech are chasing a delusional self-image - though I don't think that's true of everyone. People can make the effort to be self-aware and honest with themselves. I think the rapid expansion of tech in the last few years attracted many, many youngsters, hucksters, delusional types, and so on, and people with maturity and experience became a minority.

Are there any good books on this topic?

Yeah, I was recently thinking of applying to work at Cambridge Analytica, so I had reason to do some digging on them. Like a lot of people applying data science to problems, they're riding off hype, buzzwords and clients not fully understanding what they're doing.

One reason I didn't end up applying is, though I lean to the right politically, I'm not at all a Trump supporter and couldn't bring myself to work on getting him elected. The second reason is that, even if I was working on a non-Trump project, it wasn't clear that their product added that much value. Some media references to them agreed with this, pointing out that, e.g., their model requires campaigns to create multiple adverts targeting different personality profiles, but most don't have the resources.

Meh, I usually agree with your comments, but in this case the resentment is towards people who have a lot of money and haven't earned it (not that they're bad people, they've simply been dealt a good starting hand).

Yup. It takes a while to see the abstract pattern underlying their behaviour. Once you see it, its very clear. But for a long time you're distracted by the details of day-to-day events and you think they're just another co-worker with some annoying habits.

I'm confused why so many commenters are quick to shout "B.S" on this article (are they BSers in hiding?) but maybe he is oversimplifying too much. True S-W types are pretty rare and are probably evidence of some extreme psychological disorder. (E.g., malignant narcissism or sociopathy. Robert Hare is a researcher in criminal psychology and wrote a book on such people: https://www.amazon.com/Snakes-Suits-When-Psychopaths-Work/dp...).

"There are more than five million cubic miles of ice on Earth, and some scientists say it would take more than 5,000 years to melt it all."

And it's unlikely we'd keep burning fossil fuels all that time.

More context from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise :

"Sea level rise has been estimated to be on average between +2.6 millimetres (0.10 in) and 2.9 millimetres (0.11 in) per year ± 0.4 millimetres (0.016 in) since 1993[3] and has accelerated in recent years.[4] For the period between 1870 and 2004, global average sea levels are estimated to have risen a total of 195 millimetres (7.7 in), and 1.7 millimetres (0.067 in) ± 0.3 millimetres (0.012 in) per year, with a significant acceleration of sea-level rise of 0.013 millimetres (0.00051 in) ± 0.006 millimetres (0.00024 in) per year."

If sea level rise continues at its current rate of 3mm/year, we'd expect to see 30cm (1 foot) of sea level rise by 2100. If the rate doubles to 6mm/year (as some expect), expected rise will be 60cm (2 feet). That's unpleasant but not an existential risk to humanity.

The maps in the article look dramatic, but they're predictions for the year 7000AD. People can move and adapt in that timeframe.

This is not a very good article. Like a lot of writers in the Lesswrong-rationalist sphere, the author is very smart and describes her thought process in great detail, but has too many erroneous premises and ends up with wrong conclusions.

I understand her conclusion as "people study old philosophers, not to learn about their views, but to learn about their thinking techniques". In contrast, I would say that the primary reason for studying old philosophers first-hand is to properly understand philosophy.

(I wouldn't start by studying the old philosophers - I would start by reading modern summaries, especially those that focus on the actual philosophical problems. Study the old philosophers only if you want a full understanding).

You have to understand what philosophy is. It's studying the fundamental nature of reality and our thoughts about it. When you get down to fundamental issues, there are often a very small number of plausible answers, and much of philosophy is extrapolating the consequences of those answers. These issues are timeless and still relevant.

The pervasive modern belief is that philosophy is mostly meaningless word-games that can be dismissed, and science should be the basis of everything. But collecting more observations of reality does not help answer these questions. Furthermore, without knowledge of the implications of certain answers, you easily wind up advocating positions that don't actually hold up. (E.g., many people think neuroscience has disproved the existence of consciousness, when all it has proved is that consciousness is closely related to the brain).

Like Katja, I used to follow Lesswrong-style rationalism, but after studying different philosophies I concluded that Objectivism made the most sense. (Whatever you may have heard about Ayn Rand, I recommend evaluating her views for yourself). Leonard Peikoff gave an excellent and comprehensive course on the history of philosophy from an Objectivist POV: https://campus.aynrand.org/campus-courses/history-of-philoso...

> I did not intend to be offensive, only skeptical and cautious.

Cool, that's perfectly reasonable.

> We are all guilty of it, no doubt.

This might sound facetious, but don't you see the contradiction here? Towards the proposition "These are the principles Dalio used to achieve success", you are skeptical. Towards the proposition "people erroneously construct narratives regarding cause and effect in their lives", you have no doubt that it applies to all people.

Why not apply skepticism towards the second proposition? Maybe somewhere on the planet are people who are able to examine their lives without constructing false narratives.

The reason I am not being facetious is that skepticism is extremely popular amongst intelligent people, but it leads to such contradictions in practice (e.g., "I know that all knowledge is biased").

Fundamentally, I think Objectivism is true, i.e., it is correct on all the essential points. Ayn Rand is a lot deeper than people give her credit for -- much, much deeper than the strawman "capitalism = good, socialism = bad". What sold me was her non-fiction writings on consciousness and epistemology (theory of knowledge).

Click around here if you're curious: http://aynrandlexicon.com/book/conceptual.html.

The fallacy with dismissing Dalio's advice as survivorship bias, is that building a successful business isn't a one-shot deal. It's not like 100 investment managers all start out with different philosophies, their cards are dealt, and years later we find that 50 have turned a profit and 5 have become super-wealthy.

Building an organisation the size of Bridgewater involves many, many sub-challenges. How do find an opening with this client? How about this other client? How do you close a deal with this client? How about this client? One client now has an issue we're not able to solve. How do you retain them? How do you build a system to manage the sales pipeline and client relations?

Who do you recruit for this position? How do you interview them? How do you track for bad hires? How do you train interviewers so you avoid future bad hires? How do you build a system to handle recruiting and HR issues?

How do you train new hires? How do you decide who to promote? How do you minimise office politics? How do you handle conflicts between managers and teams? Etc, etc, you get the idea.

Once you've faced similar issues multiple times, you can track failures and successes, and figure out the essential actions which usually lead to success in that particular field. These essential rules are principles. Over time you identify meta-principles which apply to all fields (e.g., "be rational", or "avoid wishful thinking").

I assume you didn't intend to be offensive, but your attitude boils down to "someone smart and extremely successful has taken the time to identify what they believe to be the factors behind their success, and I'm going to dismiss their opinion without reading it, because I've decided, a priori, that they must be delusional, and I regard this a-priori reasoning as the scientific and rigorous approach".

I avoided her for a long time, based on her negative reputation, then finally started reading her books a couple of years ago and was blown away. She's much, much deeper than I'd been led to believe.

I always make a point to reply whenever I see her mentioned on HN, because her philosophy helped me out of a very messy series of life crises, and I hope someone else struggling to figure things out sees my comment and is inspired to take a look.

There's lots of creative accounting behind the recent headlines on the competitiveness of solar. Without an efficient means to store solar power, you can't run an electricity grid off solar alone, and you need a more reliable baseload. Not only that, but the base load stations need to be able to raise and lower their own power generation (gas is best for this) to accommodate the sudden spike in solar energy supply.

The article is here: http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ (click 'here' to remove the purple overlay).

I disagree with Graeber. Most "memo-shuffling" jobs serve a purpose -- organising thousands of people takes a lot of administration and management. Of course many of the administrators and managers could be removed, but figuring how to do so takes expert senior managers or management consultants (jobs Graeber decries as BS).

Graeber's basic fallacy is comparing capitalism to his ideal planned economy. In an ideal planned economy, there would be no need for sales and marketing, ergo sales and marketing add no value (he reasons). But planned economies don't work in practice, and most of these "B.S. jobs" exist to help coordinate an economy of independently acting, self-interested agents.

His theory is that we could all work part-time but instead we have created a self-justifying system of unnecessary jobs so we can afford unnecessary products. The glaring flaw in this argument is that people can take part-time jobs if they're happy with a lower standard of living. Many do, most don't.