Dragonfly

equations may or may not be relevant. In any case, I find it curious that people are so eager to dismiss a book that they haven't even looked at, much less read.

That is probably because they're already acquainted with Harriman's idiotic ideas, some of which I've mentioned on this forum before, for example that Einstein's general theory of relativity is an "unphysical rationalistic floating abstraction" or that quantum mechanics "is not a physical theory" or that physicists with chaos theory "have given up causality" or speaking about the big bang: "I believe that theory came more from the metaphysics of Augustine than that it did from observational evidence". Well, we don't have to take such a fool seriously, do we? So even if I've not read his new book, I'm sure that it is not much better than what he's uttered before. I'd like to dissect the book if anyone sends me a free copy, but I'm certainly not going to waste my money on it.

An interesting series of examples of cognitive dissonance. "He was nice", "I liked him", "He was an Objectivist/libertarian [whatever]", "I agreed with his posts", so if you read that he was caught in a serious crime, that cannot be true as that would mean that your judgment was incorrect (boy, would that be embarrassing!) and that you were deceived by him. Well gentlemen, that is exactly the strong suit of con men, to deceive you so that you like them and trust them, and that is why they will always find new victims.

How much do you expect from a book on physics with only four equations?

One of which no doubt is A = A.

> It's not about calling him [Hume] a skeptic or an arch-skeptic (a very honorable viewpoint by the way), but about calling him [Kant] the most evil man in history

DF, I thought you could tell from the context of my post talking about philosophical viewpoints that I was talking about her being right in essentials ...about philosophers qua philosophers. Not her moral evaluation of them.

But I was talking about her cheap moral evaluation of them in a reaction to the discussion between Neil and Jim about her marginalia, so who is hijacking the discussion?

2> [Rand said] "observe what Bertrand Russell was able to perpetrate because people thought they “kinda knew” the meaning of the concept of “number” ..." (without any further clarification about what she meant with that murky and incomprehensible sentence).

She's talking about his philosophy of mathematics and about Principia Mathematica..."an attempt to derive all mathematical truths from a well-defined set of axioms and inference rules in symbolic logic" - which is absurd.

It turned out that this was not possible, but at the time it was certainly not an absurd idea. That would be like deriding Newton because his idea of an absolute time was absurd - easy to do now from your armchair, saying "observe what Newton was able to perpetrate, because he "kinda new" that time was absolute". It was Gödel who showed with his incompleteness theorems that such an undertaking by Russell and Whitehead was not possible, but Gödel was vilified by Objectivists like Peikoff exactly for that discovery, so Objectivists should be a bit more modest in their condemnations. Anyway, that was your interpretation of Rand's saying, but do you have any evidence to back up that claim? Rand wouldn't have understood one iota of Russell's mathematical ideas anyway. Nothing wrong with that in itself, nobody can specialize in every subject, but then she should also have refrained from judging those ideas.

> After quoting Emerson incorrectly, she called him "a very little mind"

Did you think he was a major, original philosopher? That transcendentalism makes sense or is original?

Do you think that justifies the nasty and contemptuous description of him being "a very little mind"? Is that the way a rational philosopher discusses colleagues? I think it's rather an indication that Rand herself was a very little mind.

> You mean, like her remarks about Kant, Hume, Russell or Emerson in her official publications?

There is an urban myth perpetuated by libertarians like GHS and JR and others that Rand was wrong about these thinkers. Usually she was right in essentials - Hume was an epistemological skeptic is only one example. She doesn't deal with - and for her purposes doesn't have to - the occasions where the thinker said something contrary to or inconsistent with his main position. For example, Hume was a classical liberal. But that is a claim of certainty inconsistent with his withering skepticism.

Yet it's correct to label him as a skeptic. For a whole host of reasons.

It's not about calling him a skeptic or an arch-skeptic (a very honorable viewpoint by the way), but about calling him the most evil man in history, the man whose ideas supposedly led to Nazism and the holocaust and all other kinds of evil in the world.

I'm not sure what you are referring to in regard to Emerson and Russell - hardly first rank philosophers.

Whether they're first rank philosophers or not is not relevant here, we were talking about the fact that Rand wrote, let's say, rather loose comments about different writers and philosophers. Jim argued that we shouldn't forget that these "gut feeling" comments were not meant for publication, so I mentioned some examples where she did publish similar comments in official publications.

After quoting Emerson incorrectly, she called him "a very little mind", and about Russell she wrote: "As an illustration, observe what Bertrand Russell was able to perpetrate because people thought they “kinda knew” the meaning of the concept of “number” ..." (without any further clarification about what she meant with that murky and incomprehensible sentence). A lot of condemnation but no argument at all.

He had a high input on OL,

Yes, like a spammer.

and above all, was usually benevolent and responsive.

He was quite malicious and thin-skinned and it doesn't surprise me at all that he turned out to be an evil crook who swindled people. But sure, as long as someone parrots Objectivists slogans, he can't be too bad, can he?

Can we really conclude from Rand's margin notes not meant for publication in some given book she was reading what her considered judgment was of the author or the book beyond an initial gut reaction? Rand was an insightful cultural critic, if not always a nuanced one. That she did not publish something from her journals or her marginalia also says something. It says that she had a thought that she did not consider worthy of publication.

You mean, like her remarks about Kant, Hume, Russell or Emerson in her official publications?

Prescott has had a field day with Rand's Journals and other posthumous sources.

Don't blame the messenger, blame ARI and Mayhew (I can't help wondering how much Mayhew may have rewritten even Rand's marginalia, with that man you automatically suspect that they must have been even worse in the original version).

Why doesn't he get to the meat and consider her published arguments directly or indicate someone whose arguments, in totality, he finds more convincing?

But he does, elsewhere. For example here about Rand's "solution" of the is-ought problem.

I was just checking out the new site, and came across this, I hadn't seen it before, it's just hilarious.

Nothing new, we have such things here for years already. Reinventing the wheel...

At least they finally got rid of that silly statement that they are "the world's most respected independent source of information about Ayn Rand (author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead) and her philosophy, Objectivism".

If I'd heard that phrase, I'd have said "speak for yourself". It implicitly accuses the audience. That's fine for a bible-thumping preacher, but not for a President of the United States, whom you'd expect to inspire his audience, not to berate it.

So who’s Pk? I read L=Leonard Peikoff, Pe=Edith Packer, H=Harry Binswanger. It’s not consistent (Packer ID’d by last name), but it seems to be the best fit for the data. I think he also meant to include Peter Schwartz. I perceive two distinct possibilities: First, Phil has a clever code translation that I haven’t thought of; Second, Phil bungled it. I’m sure he’ll be letting us know which PDQ.

It is a confusing code. I think it is:

L = Leonard Peikoff

Pe = Leonard Peikoff

Pk = Leonard Peikoff

H = Harry Binswanger

Peikoff seems to be overrepresented in this scheme, however.

Driving off the 3rd example, we come to the experience of "sacrifice." What we might label as feeling like a "sacrifice" (e.g. I sacrificed my happiness to help people I don't know) may not be a sacrifice as it is defined objectively (choosing a lesser value for a higher value).

Ha ha ha! You mean the Randian definition, there's nothing objective about that, your example in fact shows how impractical that definition is.

Why should one be alarmed by the fact that she _cited_ the writings of a nazi? Leonard Peikoff cited the writings of numerous nazis, including Hitler, in his book _The_Ominous_Parallels_. Everyone who's ever written about Hitler in a scholarly context has done the same. And frequently in non-scholarly contexts too.

I know nothing about that woman, for all I know she may be the Devil Incarnate, but that article is downright silly. It is written by fundamentalist morons who think that just citing someone with bad ideas is in itself a sign of being evil. With such "friends" you need no enemies.

Induction - apples falls!

Deduction - must be a force called gravity

That's no deduction, it is a hypothesis that is arrived at inductively.

Induction - planets rotate around the sun!

Deduction - planets must get captured by the gravitational pull of stars.

Planets must nothing, this is again a hypothesis that is arrived at inductively. Deduction would for example be when you start with Newton's model for gravitational forces (inversely proportional with the distance between two massive bodies, etc.), then you can deduce mathematically that under certain conditions such bodies orbit each other, Kepler's laws, etc. It does of course make sense to look for a model with deducted properties that are confirmed by empirical evidence.

You think the sign is photoshopped? The rest of it looks like a genuine scene from the Florida wetlands. They need to be preserved!

The perspective of the sign and the poles is wrong (it looks like one of those impossible figures) and the color saturation/contrast of the sign is different from the rest of the picture. My first impression was that it didn't belong to the picture, but was an extra caption over the image. Well, that is in fact what it is.

> If she's on record as having a strong opinion on a certain subject, and then the person whose ass she's kissing disagrees, she politely states that she's reconsidering her previous views and giving much thought to the deeply complex and intelligent arguments that her esteemed mentor has made

Do you have some exact quotes and/or links to show that there is a pattern of this? Or are you just slinging mud?

In an earlier post I'd reproduced some of Hsieh's statements from some time ago. You'll see that she then was quite outspoken in her criticisms of his ideas. When I compare that with her fawning admiration of Peikoff after her reform, when she only writes about him in superlatives without any criticism, I perceive a horrible stench.

Another possibility is that she was caught with her pants down this time. After emphatically agreeing with Peikoff's fatwa of a few years ago (vote Democrat, otherwise you don't understand Objectivism!), she was remarkably silent when Peikoff recently made a turnaround on his previous statement. Openly agreeing again with Peikoff would be a bit too obvious, and disagreeing openly was not a good tactic for her career. But in this last case she had just published a very outspoken defense of the priority of property rights (dogmatic and therefore safe, she would have thought) and now Peikoff a few days later turns out to be much more pragmatic (apart from his emotional appeal to bomb the mosque out of existence), and even uses the same argument from intimidation - if you don't agree, you don't understand Objectivism. Now keeping silent would also have been too obvious, so she was forced to disagree (but of course very respectfully) openly now.

I've seen better Photoshops.

Perhaps we can start a new thread "The Kremlin ARI Watchers".

Are you serious? If one is proposing -- as Rand was -- an abstract code which can serve as a guide for each human individually, it has to be practice-able by all humans, each individually, without contradiction. Sure, anyone can follow any code he or she pleases, but a code which, if followed consistently by all humans, would soon result in the demise of all humans does have its drawbacks as an abstract guide.

That's what I call the baker fallacy. The fact that if all humans became bakers this would soon result in the demise of all humans is no argument against becoming a baker. Hypothetical situations that will never arise are not relevant. There is no logical reason that a morality should be egalitarian, i.e. for everyone the same. You may prefer such a system (so do I), but that is a personal opinion, not something that can be proven as being "the best" for humanity (however you want to define that in a non-circular way).

I listened to Peikoff's podcast, and surprisingly I didn't find it as bad as I'd expected. He turns out to be less dogmatic about absolute property rights than many of his devoted followers, like that Hsieh woman. That makes it very funny, she must already have had problems with Peikoffs volte-face with regard to his election fatwa (and her silence on that subject was one of the most deafening things in the world), but in this case she had just vehemently defended the right of the muslims to build a mosque on the site of ground zero and now her guru tells her a few days later in fact that she doesn't understand Objectivism! Ha ha ha! Impossible for her to revert on her previous stance, so she was forced to disagree politely with Peikoff (do I see a new schism in Objectivism emerge?).

I agree with Peikoff that the US government should just refuse permission to build that mosque, there is no need to be officially at war to do that. But then he goes over the top by claiming that the government should bomb the mosque out of existence when they should nevertheless go ahead with building it. That is cheap rhetoric based on primitive emotions (like nuking unthreatening countries out of existence). There isn't any need to "bomb" that building, if you deny permission to build it, there isn't much violence needed to enforce that prohibition if necessary. But Peikoff is probably dreaming of a Fountainhead bombing made real. BTW, he sounds old on this podcast in comparison to his DIM talks, his voice has become shaky and tremulous, or was it perhaps suppressed rage?

As to parasitism, it's only successful as long as the hosts aren't killed off. Human parasitic living only works as long as some humans are living non-parasitically sufficiently often so the parasite has something to parasitize. The ethics of a parasite can't successfully be universalized.

But why should they be universalized?

Perhaps this article may be interesting in this context.

Why does neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn't good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million -- if water isn't at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.

The claim that Rand meant by tabula rasa only the absence of innate ideas is incorrect. She claimed that nobody is born with any kind of talent, implying that for example Mozart's accomplishments were only due to diligent practice and had nothing to do with an innate talent; elsewhere she claimed that someone with an IQ of 110 can raise it to 150 if he wants. See for example this discussion.

I think Mayhew and ARI were not amused and are now trying to suppress embarrassing evidence. I agree with Jerry that this smells of Scientology tactics.