Joseph Norris

Ok so hustle your hustle. Sure you've gotta keep the rent paid. There are ways out of the situation. You should spend as much of the rest of your time as you can looking for them. It's important not to convince yourself that you can't change the situation. Remember loads of other people have been through hard times - yes it's hard, and the path is often hidden, but if other people can do it so can you. Here's some directions you could take: * Change your accomodation - it's surprising how often people make irrational excuses to avoid this, but whether it's moving somewhere cheaper (even in another city) or finding some sort of cheaper shared accomodation, if that reduces your pressure to hustle then you can free up more time to spend improving your income - leading to: * Develop some high-value skills - there are a lot of high value skills that you can learn even for free, programming is something anyone can learn if they stick to it, or writing, journalism. If you prefer more hands on work, save money to take a training course in a trade skill and find steady work there. If you can't save any money... * Budgeting - Most people waste a lot of money on non-essentials e.g. pets, going out, dating, expensive food, expensive clothes (n.b. there's an important distinction here between flashy expensive and durable expensive - good quality long-lasting clothes are a good expense), alchohol and other drugs. There are lots of things people convince themselves that they need to survive, but they never actually try going without and finding out for real. If you're in a situation where you are having to hustle every day, it's worth taking a long hard look at all your expenses and identifying anything that you could cut out (even if it's just for the time when you're improving your accomodation/employment situation and you plan to go back to them later). As long as you have: somewhere safe to sleep and study, enough food and water to not die, and access to learning and connection tools (i.e. a smartphone, a computer or other access to the internet which is #1 the cheapest and most accessible way of learning) every other expense should be considered for cutting.

That would be ideal. I guess the question on this is: is it worth trying to make it a profitable venture rather than a nonprofit passion project? I don't know if there's a market for that. It's something I would be interested in doing either way. But knowing if there's a market to make a profit on it is really important to how I go about it i.e. if I'm looking at a large budget or not. There are ways of making good games on high and low budgets, but it's a piece of information that needs to be there from the conception of the game. It also affects whether I can make it a full-time employment for myself, or whether I would approach it as a hobbyist. So, to be clear up front: I absolutely do not want to take Objectivist ideas and soften them to have general appeal. If I can't find a way to include them that has general appeal, I would rather run it as a nonprofit. But if I can think of a way to honestly represent Objectivist ideas in a game, without compromising them or apologising them, and still have general appeal, that would be the best case scenario. One way of kind of side-stepping this issue is a game with Role Playing elements. I'll briefly summarise as you're not a big gamer. Basically the player takes the position of the character in the world, and is presented with choices about how to proceed at important decisions often in conversation with non-player characters. One thing I know I find intrusive when I play games with any attempt at serious ideas is when I (the player) am forced to silently tolerate ideas that I strongly disagree with and have no way of saying in game "this is wrong, you're terrible people". I assume this would be equally annoying for people who disagree with Rand, but if they were exposed to characters that had ideas like hers but weren't forced to accept and agree with them (and could, say, tell them they disagree, and choose not to talk to them so much in the game) they could still enjoy the game. It would then mean that pro-Rand people would have a character that they could enjoy interacting with in-game, and people who are new to the ideas could have exposure and possibly learn about a new better way of viewing the world. That of course hinges on writing the character well but that's a whole other problem. If that's the case it wouldn't pose a problem. I love puzzle games as much as action games (the Half-Life games are great examples of games that do both). I've played a number of terrible puzzle games, where the puzzles are actually fine and interesting but I found I had to grit my teeth through the narrative which was full of very bad philosophy trying to pretend at great and insightful. I think in principle it's a great idea for a way to make a game, and a game that actually contains good ideas in the narrative could be a significant success. Yes I absolutely agree, if I were to do a game like this independently I'd focus on principles. That said - the Daily Wire are working on their Atlas Shrugged movie. They've already published one game (a tabletop family social game) too, so they're certainly open to branching into new markets, they're at least open to spreading Ayn Rand's ideas even if they don't agree with her entirely, and they've already got the connections for negotiating rights. I've considered approaching them about a video game, but I would need to go in with a solid pitch ready. This is something I've actually thought about. Yes, except for the final confrontation when they rescue Galt in AS there's very little exciting gunplay. But I think action and combat is very often a useful symbol and metaphor for a conflict of ideas, and if combat in a game is done in the purpose of good ideas (such as defending yourself from attackers) it can carry good ideas (though possibly not as well as when there's some degree of serious discussion). There's also the possibility of something more political, there are many such games out there. I had an idea for a game where the players each represent major industrial giants, and part of the game mechanics would involve potentially trying to manipulate the government to favour your side. So players could choose between trying to push for restrictions that hurt their opponents so they can peddle in pull, or taking problems honestly and dealing with them in terms of objective worth and capital. This would again be a more indirect expression of the ideas - there wouldn't be a whole lot of explicit discussion of ideas involved. The joke (I have a dark sense of humour) is that if the players do decide to peddle in pull, use blackmail and foster corruption to enable crony capitalism, the whole economy does worse and it's impossible to get as high a score if players do this instead of playing honestly. I'm aware of the classic gamification tactics. However I think this is a bad way of making a game. I'm a very serious believer that, like ideas, like people, and like buildings, a good game needs integrity. To have that, it needs a clear guiding idea. The correct mechanics and features and story for that idea must all be created with that idea in mind. There are important functional reasons for this. That said, if it's acceptable within the integrity of the game, then sure I'll gamify the hell out of it. My point is, the game idea needs to come first before working on gamification strategies if I want to make a game that treats Rand's ideas with due respect. I have some moral uncertainty about exploiting this sort of thing. I'm not 100% sure where I stand on it. I do think that e.g. gambling (in casinos and lotteries and the like) is immoral because it's exploiting the ignorance of people and manipulating a dishonest excitement out of them. But games should be fun and exciting, and it's hard to delineate between gaming excitement and gambling excitement. Also I think you have a bit of a pessimistic take here. I don't think a game is doomed to fail if it doesn't exploit addictive behaviour and use microtransactions and so on. There are a lot of successful games that don't use it. Could they be more successful by exploiting people? Well perhaps. But they are successful without it. I appreciate the thoughts and understand wanting to test the waters before wanting to go further. I hope your uncertainty is answered.

Yep there was a lot of misunderstanding there. I think I might have messed up too. Never mind.

I concede that was a bad metaphor. Your metaphor also falls flat. The pitcher can objectively measure that his skill is improving. I don't think you can measure that meaningfully with ChatGPT. Do you mean that because I tested it and it failed, that I must think the future will always be like the past? I think that's a very big stretch to draw that conclusion about me and it's a very inaccurate conclusion. The problem with your point is it you can't make decisions and approach the truth using information from experiments then you're saying pretty much all pursuit of truth is meaningless as testing your ideas in reality is a very important part of approaching truth. Ok so your underlying point seems to be: There is a skill to using ChatGPT and you think I lack that skill. My (main) problem with that assumption is: How can you tell if your ChatGPT results are improving in a meaningful way, rather than improving because you fluked into a run of good results like you just kept going back to the "psychic" until they got it right? If you want to measure how accurate your results are, you need to ask it a prompt then research the subject independently to see what results you get and see if you get the same answer. Have you done this experiment repeatedly? If you want to use ChatGPT in a useful way, you need to be able to use the result without having to then go and research independently (because if you have to do that anyway, what's the point of using ChatGPT at all?). So how do you decide that you have reached a skill in using ChatGPT that you will get good results in future? In other words, what objective principle or measure do you have in using ChatGPT that allows you to have any confidence that it will give results you don't need to go and check anyway? Like the pitcher who knows if they've put the ball where it needs to go because they can measure that result.

I've been a gamer almost all of my life, long before I begin to really learn about philosophy. I think there are very few games that have any Objectivist content. The only clear example I know of is a negative one - the Bioshock games series, in which the antagonists are clearly what the writers think Oism will produce (a bunch of violent savages, basically). I've seen occasional games which speak positively of self-worth and capitalism. But the vast majority of the gaming world seems to either desperately avoid anything that can be clearly interpreted as a philosophical idea, or pander to the self-destructive altruistic socialistic types. So I'm interested in designing games, I suppose you could say they're my art, but I don't know if there's much interest in them having Oism content and ideas. Does anyone here have an interest in games, or know anything about Oism (or really any good philosophy) in gaming?

Hi William, thanks for your welcome When I read The Fountainhead the first time it was as an audio book, I remember it had a good (strong, clear, suitable to the voice of a man like Roark) voice actor. I'm honestly rather sick of social media. At the moment I think I'm going to spend any energy that I'd put towards social media into forums like this instead. Though I admit I'm yet to try Gettr or Truth Social. I mostly know C# and (slightly less) C++, with bits of java/html/basic and a number of other lesser known scripting languages. I mostly code to make games in the Unity game engine (and I've started learning the Unreal game engine).

I think "It works" is a bit of a stretch. It sometimes works. Just like a broken clock is sometimes accurate. I think it's having an impact like cold reading, sometimes it'll give someone a few good answers and they might be fooled into believing the "psychic". A "psychic" who is right 1 in 20 times can still be right 10 times in a row. I've tried using it a few times and the degree of accuracy is generally unreliable, and the more precise your question the more incomplete or inaccurate the answer. I've seen it fail at very simple math problems, this hints at some very serious, deep and most dangerously unpredictable flaws in it. I've also asked it for some very simple C# code to try it out and it's failed at that too. I wouldn't rely on anything that comes out of it. I think the best I would use it for is to ask it about a subject, and then do my own research about what it mentions in the answer. It could be useful as a way of creating leads to investigate. On the root subject of "Why?"s - you may have heard of the "Five whys" technique for diagnosing a root cause. I will fairly often think "Why?" about a question. Sometimes people ask wrong questions because they've misunderstood something. Sometimes people are salesmen and I'm not interested so (depending how salty I'm feeling) I answer their question with the question "Is this a sales call?".

Can you explain this assertion? The reason you are concerned for others is not a refutation of her idea - it's just an alternative idea. How did you decide her idea factually incorrect while yours is correct? What do you mean by "psychologically inauthentic"? What is dishonest about her idea? One's own rational self interest is just one of a chain of important ideas, I think you have isolated rational self-interest from all the other ideas that connect to that idea. The idea that other people are valuable comes from rational self-interest. I'm sure Rand would agree that being dishonest is a rotten way to treat a good person. But only because it is in your own rational self-interest to be honest with good people.

A while back I heard this joke on The Simpsons of all places. I was surprised it was actually funny, contained some truth, and is about Ayn Rand (because I very rarely see any jokes about her that aren't just ignorant and mean). From Season 26 Episode 5: Isabel: Conservatives only get more conservative. Because every year they get a little bit further through Atlas Shrugged.

Hi Michael Thank you for your kind welcome. I guess it's true, my past years are not a zero or a waste. There are things I good learned from them as well as bad. I don't think anyone has a life where they never learned anything that they didn't discover was wrong later. I suppose I'm grieving my past in a way. Looking at the years and all the things I could have done if I had just known better or things had gone differently. It feels like a loss. But the reality is, I didn't know better, things went the way they did, wishing otherwise just takes me floating away from reality and I wouldn't want to turn into a floating abstraction. The only thing to do is decide what to do now.

Hello everyone After many misspent years, I first came across The Fountainhead and quickly followed with many more of Ayn Rand's books. I think it was the first clear sign I'd seen in too many years of there being any appreciation for truth and honesty in the world. I guess I had lost hope and it was the start of regaining it. The relationship between Mallory and Roark in particular stuck me and I could feel Mallory's pain, and the relief of finding something good in the world in Roark. I've read a lot more philosophy since (most notably Mises and Popper). I've defeated a lot of my own nihilism and suspicion and started forming good values and connecting back to reality. I still think I have a long way to go. My life is still not in the place I want it to be. But I'm in a position where I can take the time to make the changes I need to. I came across this forum while looking for places to discuss values and ideas, hopefully meet some good people, and work out how to live a good life. I have wasted far too many years of my life, and I want to make the next few years worth something. Other interests include maths, programming and games. I'm English. -Seph