Charles R. Anderson

If Dagny were to have a problem it would not be due to any lack of mechanical or other ability. It would be due to here mind wandering off to deal with more interesting and challenging issues.

Victor, It works, but how did you make the artistic decision that Chris' smile would not stretch from ear to ear?

The two sports I have most enjoyed playing are football (tackle, of course, flag is worthless) and handball. I loved the hitting in football. Handball was the best as whole-body exercise and involves a great deal of player strategy. Unlike racket games, it makes you use both hands (arms and shoulders) as well. Since there are few handball players, racquetball is a tolerable substitute and still good exercise and full of strategy. Basketball is a good game, including one-on-one. Biking, hiking, canoeing, and sailing are all fun. If one does consider sex a sport, then I would make that my favorite. But, it is hard to think of sex as merely a sport. No sport ever seemed to be a necessity of life. Football and the Olympics are about the only sports I ever watch. Again, excepting sex! :devil:

The DIM hypothesis? Uhh.....This is still an hypothesis and not yet a theory? So, it is an idea being prepared for experimental testing and is not yet proven? ARI is to offer 6 lectures on this? Maybe the experiment should be done first? Oh, yeah, I am catching on now. Experiments only need to be performed if reality is primary. When theoretical analysis is primary, then experiment is not needed. But, then what meaning would hypothesis have? Wouldn't that just be this: I would call it the DIM theory if I had confidence in it, but since I do not, I call it the DIM hypothesis. There is something dim-witted going on here!

Judith, These are all good points. I will add a couple of comments to them. First, Dagny would have become bored very quickly with being a locomotive engineer. The task would have been too repetitive for her and she soon would have become very unhappy and grouchy. While I am very good at solving problems in a lab, there are many things I would hate doing. One is being a plumber. It would drive me up the wall to have to contend with all those unreliable plumbing connections. Worse yet, I would hate to try to be a translator (little ability for learning languages), a filing clerk (I would fall asleep standing up from boredom), a stage actor (I could not memorize the lines), a credit card executive (I could not charge outrageous fees for a payment 1 day late when I knew I would also be charging a 30% rate of interest on that money anyway), or a parole officer (I would find it too depressing to work with criminals). A society of Charles Andersons would not work. On the other hand, a society without Charles Anderson would be missing a useful ingredient.

Abraham, If a dog's tail is to be called a leg, then what we used to call legs are not legs. Therefore, the dog has one leg.

Life forms are often intriguingly complex and they certainly function well. There is a sense in which life can reasonably be called intelligent design. This does not imply that there is an intelligent designer, presumably a god. It only implies that there is a process which seeks those chemical systems that replicate themselves proficiently. Many chemical and material systems use physics to form ordered systems. Fewer of these replicate themselves, but more and more the pathways that evolution has used to create more complex life forms are coming to be known. These pathways are sometimes random branches among choices, but not always. The fact that we cannot yet reconstruct the complete pathway of any significantly complex life form's development, does not belie the fact that we have an understanding of various segments of those pathways. Meanwhile, we have no evidence of any actual intervention of a god in the process of life development. It is clear that the most that those who claim an Intelligent Designer can accomplish is to create excuses for those who desperately want to believe in a god. It comes down to: Well you cannot prove that God did not play some role in the development of life. True enough. We cannot. So, what is God and what did God do to develop life? Well, we do not know who God is and we do not know what God did to develop life. Oh, and you find that satisfying? Why? Their answers to these questions are then very revealing, usually of fears and personal character weaknesses.

Chris, The first time I had that same thought strongly was in the early 1970s when I would pass by John Hay High School in a poor black neighborhood off Euclid Avenue next to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland where I was a graduate student. The kids were constantly hanging out the windows and shouting. It did not at all seem to be a brief between-classes phenomena. I realized that there could be no teaching and no learning going on there. The school's only purpose was as a holding pen to keep the kids off the streets, temporarily. I heard something very chilling on the local news yesterday. Prince George's County, the county next to mine and the other MD suburb county to Washington, D.C., announced that it intends to put tracking devices on children who are chronically absent from school. The report did not say whether these devices were the irremovable ankle devices now put on criminals or whether they were planning to implant RFIDs. I suspect this is the start of a trend to start with the ankle devices and later move to the RFIDs. Yes, very chilling!

Peter, I agree with you completely. The humanities in schools seem to work very hard at isolating children within a constructed world which is not rational. In this world, rationality is not very efficacious, which I have to suspect is what the "educators" often want. In the US school systems used to be very much smaller and a substantial fraction of the children's parents actually sat on school boards or you had a neighbor who did. Parents have lost more and more control of the schools as the school districts have grown larger and their populations have grown greatly. This means that most school board members now are those endorsed by the teacher's unions and are no longer personally known to the parents. Well, it is hardly surprising that they serve the teacher's unions primarily now and have little interest in the parents.

Having been the oldest of 6 children and the parent of three daughters, this makes nothing but great sense to me. It is an excellent statement.

As Kat notes, we can most easily convince NT personality types to join us and in reality we may have to first gain many more NT Objectivists before very many other personality types are likely to take us seriously and borrow many of our ideas. Many people really want to fit in, even many NT types. As a result, Objectivism has to acquire enough people that they form a community large enough that other types can feel that they are fitting in with a real group. Many people assume that any small group is a cult, whether it is or is not. Unfortunately, there are real cults within the Objectivist movement, which makes this problem more severe. It really is important that at least a couple of percent of people become Objectivists, so the community has the rich offerings for social life that many people require. Note how difficult it is even for Objectivists to find a husband or a wife among the 0.1% of the people who are Objectivists or near Objectivists who may exist today in America.

I appreciate all the feedback and I apologize for the fact that this is an aside on this thread. Michael, The people here have so many perspectives and so many good ideas, that while I had thought of the possibility that others thought I had expressed an idea so well that they might have nothing to add, I dismissed it as a thought that would be an expression of megalomania! I thought you guys always had something to add, both given history and my regard for your intelligence and the richness of your experience in life (and that of many other posters here). James, That no else picked up on the mistakes post above was also a disappointment to me. It was largely a take-off from your prior post, which triggered my interests in the complexity of reality and toleration as a tool for learning. The creative thinking process and its needs very much crosses the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy and psychology. I tend to think of Objectivism more as a worldview and a framework for thought than only as a philosophy, though I have called it a philosophy as a shorthand notation. It seems to me that the promotion of creative thinking lies at the very heart of Objectivism. It seems that it is easier for scientists to understand the role of mistakes in learning than it is for many people in other fields, so it is important for us to pass this understanding on, with its implications for toleration as a rational concept (it often being used in irrational and even contradictory ways). As scientists, we test our hypotheses against reality fairly rigorously and identify those which are mistakes and throw them out, but in other fields, the mistakes do often take on a longer lifetime. Nonetheless, they still should be regarded as hypotheses that did not work and tested against reality and then thrown out when they are shown to fail. Thanks for your comments. Robert, It is wisdom that I have most aspired to achieve in life, so your comment was the most positive comment I could hope to hear. Thanks for your interest in my viewpoints. When you do have a reservation on any of my ideas or viewpoints, I am particularly eager to hear about them, even those cases where there is a difference in nuance rather than a fundamental difference. I would think that there are times and topics when your role with TAS must cause you not to enter the fray on some topics, which I will try to understand. But because I think you (and David and Ed) are among the wisest of men, I am always eager to hear what you have to say. Ellen, The Talent thread sounds like an interesting topic and I would certainly find your views on that very interesting. I see that it was a hot topic from 2 Nov through early January when the press of work in the lab was out of this world heavy and I had to totally deprive myself of the pleasure of visits to OL. I am sorry to have missed it. Where I have sufficient knowledge to evaluate what you say, I almost always find your comments to be wise and interesting. Where I might have supported your side in that discussion, I am sorry to have let you down by not being there. I am sure it would have been a pleasure. Issues of talent go far beyond the usual talents for music or drawing that are commonly given as examples of talent. You are certainly one who is not tethered to Ayn Rand's writings and I greatly admire your independent thinking and your spirit. Thank you all for your re-assurances that I am not throwing my ideas or my time into a black-hole. That many of the people I most admire here have responded so positively is very much appreciated.

There is a tendency for Objectivists to look down on those types very different than the NT range types. That we find other NTs generally more interesting to us and like us is fine. But, people at the other end of the spectrum of types did develop, very likely with evolutionary assistance, so the fact that they exist may confer some advantages to societies of men. Aside from the fact that in a democracy they get as many votes per person as we do, we may have a tendency to underestimate their value to societies. Perhaps a better understanding of what those advantages are that come with this wider range of individual natures would also provide us with more motivation to convince them of the advantage to a society organized upon Objectivist or at least nearly Objectivist principles.

Thanks Chris. I do not seem to be getting much feedback lately on OL. I seem to be putting up a lot of dead-end posts lately. Makes me think my failure to quote Ayn Rand might be making me seem like a low signal-to-noise poster to many people. Actually, I am pretty sure that some people do make that assessment, but I thought they were mostly from other viewpoints on Objectivism than are prevalent here. Or maybe what I think is interesting is just too quirky lately. Take the zero responses to my post on the genetic diversity article in the Science section as an example. As individualists, I believe that scientific finding is fascinating. Then because the focus on the Trucinski article What Went Right? was only on the role of philosophy in history and I thought that other issues he raised were interesting, I started a thread called Pessimism or Confidence in Others in the Objectivist Living Room. Few readers and no comments on the problem of pessimism in the Objectivist movement and how it is coupled with a low regard for non-Objectivists. Apparently, I have wandered off into left, no right field lately and whatever I write is irrelevant to most people's interests. Perhaps I have become too old and settled deep into my own quirky ruts. Hmm... I should start a new thread asking for everyone's evaluation of just how strange and irrelevant I have become! Or, have I just wandered too far outside the closed system bounds of Objectivism and most people feel uncomfortable exploring these interests of mine. The tether to Ayn Rand is becoming too weak? I do not mean to imply that Robert, who made the low signal-to-noise comment about Objectivist forums, was directing that comment at me, mind you. It is just that his phrase stuck in my mind as being applicable in a different context. At least I hope it is different! :devil:

I have read Trucinski's TIA Daily for about 9 days now and I am finding it interesting reading. I expect to convert my free 30 day trial subscription into a paying subscription.

Like James and Robert, I agree that it can be a very good thing to emphasize the personal development of an understanding of Objectivism. There comments seem to be directed at the corrupting influence that some others interested in Objectivism may have on you. Some of them do and it is helpful to avoid contact with them when in the early stages of learning about Objectivism. But, more important yet is to emphasize the importance of using one's own knowledge, experience, and reasoning powers to evaluate every tenet of Objectivism before you accept it as true and that you make this an on-going process. I read The Fountainhead in 1964 while a senior in high school at the suggestion of a friend who had just finished reading it . My friend devoured The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged very quickly and told me he was an Objectivist. When he went to college, he soon found out that he could not hold up his ideas in debates and he soon fell away from Objectivism. This is actually a very common pattern. I paced myself very deliberately through both novels and found that they were mostly consistent with my thoughts already, that they greatly helped me to integrate many of my different ideas, and that they helped me to identify some errors and find new areas that I needed to think about. But, my approach was always to test all of Rand's ideas and conclusions against my own experience and all that I had read. Admittedly, I had not read much philosophy, but I had read a lot of history and I had read newspapers, newsweeklies, and business magazines for many years. Each of Rand's ideas had to be tested against everything else I knew and I worked very hard at making that evaluation late in my senior year and through the summer before going to college. When 14 and 15, I had been committed to my variant of Christianity, which on moving to Tulsa, I discovered was quite inconsistent with the religion that most people practiced. I found that I had no respect for that religion and was starting to re-evaluate all of my own ideas of religion when I started reading Rand. I had already been a committed capitalist and believed in very limited government. I acquired all of the back issues of The Objectivist Newsletter and read them and carefully evaluated every article. I never forgot that only my evaluation could determine which of Rand's ideas were right and which were not. I knew that there were definitely nuances of understanding on which we differed, but I was very impressed with the totality of her ideas and very grateful to have been exposed to them. At college I quickly found myself in many bull sessions with most of the other freshmen being of decidedly more socialist persuasion, while a minority held religious and more conservative ideas. For months, I was the only Objectivist, until Larry Bellows, an applied math major, heard about my bull sessions and introduced himself to me. Larry was mostly interested in the politics of Objectivism and was a very intelligent guy, and he became a friend. Larry then met a philosophy major named Roger Donway and brought him over to introduce us. Roger was an extraordinarily well-read freshman and it was very interesting to discuss issues with him, though we often saw things from somewhat differently nuanced perspectives. Contact with Roger was rather limited, however, until we were juniors and he met David Kelley and introduced him to Larry and I. Especially in my freshman and sophomore years though, I spent a lot of time as the sole Objectivist discussing issues with one or very commonly several students, most of whom were socialists or at least highly mixed economy people who believed in altruism. These self-induced trials of first testing myself and my ideas in a very deliberate way against Rand, both her and me against everything I knew about reality, and then the many, many debates with other students served me well. But through this all, there was never any question but that it was my analytical and critical judgment that was my foundation, it was not Ayn Rand's work. Her work was immensely valuable only as an aid to my understanding things, but it was not understanding unless it was consistent with what I knew of reality. However highly I regarded her judgment, it could never be better than mine. I do not mean when I say this that without her I would have exceeded her understanding of reality in time. I mean that the only means I ever had to evaluate and judge her understanding was by means of my own understanding. Whether I agree or disagree with Ayn Rand on a particular matter is not of fundamental importance to me. This is the major reason that I very rarely quote her. Doing so relieves me of no part of my responsibility to defend my viewpoints and ideas. So, for those who wish to learn Objectivism, my posts are pretty useless, if Objectivism is taken to be the same thing as Rand's ideas. But because I mostly agree with Rand's ideas, I find that there are people at OL who are interesting to discuss ideas with and who are able to give me ideas well worth my giving more thinking to. I do not come here primarily to learn about Objectivism, I come here to learn about reality. I happen to think that as schools of philosophy go, Objectivism has the best handle on reality, especially if one holds it to its central principles and allows it to continue to develop as a means to integrate much of our knowledge of reality. If it is a dead philosophy, as some would have it (the closed philosophy crowd), then it is only of historical interest and all rational men are philosophically isolated individuals. The only alternative is to define a new word for a growing, open philosophy which largely starts off from that time when Objectivism was closed and identifies carefully such ideas of Rand's as were wrong. I still think that Objectivism was too good a start to be shut down, however.

As is common with bureaucracy, the INS has no ability to distinguish the important from the unimportant. It also has no appreciation for the value of American's time. James, congratulations to you and Rita.

Tolerance should be the virtue of respecting the effort that goes into creating and developing ideas. This respect carries over to the individual who has created and developed an idea. If the idea is inconsistent with reality, then we are evil if we willfully ignore that inconsistency. Moral men should point out when an idea is observed to be inconsistent with reality. The tolerant man does not maintain that ideas that are inconsistent with reality are to be either embraced or that they are unimportant. On the contrary, he is highly concerned with creating and testing ideas against reality to find out if they are valid. The difference between the rational, tolerant man and the intolerant man is that the former is happy to make objective evaluations of ideas tested against reality, understands that mistaken ideas are often a part of even rational lives, and that the only really evil act is the refusal to create ideas and then to correctly assess them against reality. In some Objectivist circles, any idea inconsistent with reality is termed evil. Since few choose to be evil, there is a great fear of making a mistake or of creating an idea, which might prove inconsistent with reality. So, they create few ideas and they test few ideas against reality. This is an insult directed toward reality. It also hugely crimps their ability to learn about reality. An atmosphere in which men grant one another the occasional mistake, is much more conducive to learning and makes society much more creative and efficient. Ayn Rand was motivated to formulate the philosophy of Objectivism because she had a vision of highly creative and independent thinkers living very efficacious lives by strictly committing themselves to identifying reality in a society that valued thinkers and creators. We do not actually get to see very much of the creative process in Atlas Shrugged, with the exception of Hank Rearden and his long and arduous path to creating Rearden Metal and his subsequent change of plans for Dagny's bridge design. If mistakes are part of the technical process, they surely must be a part of the political and generally social relationships process too. We do get to see something of the creative process with Howard Roark too, where again he makes mistakes in the art and engineering of his building designs, only to improve on many of them. Mistakes are an essential part of the creative life and rational people recognize this. Any good work group should be tolerant of mistakes as long as members of the team are learning from them in an efficient manner. Objectivists should become such an efficient work group. Making a mistake is not evil. The failure to objectively evaluate an idea for its consistency with reality may be due to limited intelligence or it may be due to an evil intent. We all have limited intelligence, but we need to have the firm intention of making reality primary in our lives. The failure to do this is what makes a man evil. If one were to make Rand's philosophy one's primary, this would be evil. All ideas must be tested by man for consistency with reality.

Jim, I am trying to get a clear idea of what you were saying in your last post. I think it may be that an important route to knowledge and an understanding of reality is trying things out which you have not had the time opportunity to evaluate sufficiently to even expect them to work. That is, to use your time efficiently, as well as other limited resources, you try things to see how they will work in the confidence that some aspects may work and that those aspects that fail will be instructive. In other words, efficient learning approaches expect mistakes and learn from them. This is one of the problems that most philosophers have. They never seem to have the same concern for limited resources such as manpower, time, and money that many other occupations impose upon those who practice them well. In my lab, we have a very limited time in which to produce useful results for our customers and a limited budget. In different cases, we find that their material or their process failed because: 1) Explanation A, which is 95% certain, or 2) Explanation A, which is 60% likely, or Explanation B, which is 30% likely 3) The explanation is not Explanation A as the client expected. In different cases, any of these results may prove very valuable, though none may say that the explanation is such and such with 100% certainty. Generally, with more time and money we could raise the certainty levels. 1) says tweak your process to eliminate problem A and you are probably back in production. 2) says try the path that would correct A as your first choice and if it does not work try B. 3) says that all the resources you are putting into solving the problem on Path A are being wasted, you must look elsewhere for the solution. Such is the real world, where things are complex and we must try various partial understandings out and put them to the test of reality. The fundamental problem with Schwartz was that he does not understand the complexity of the real world, he is afraid of making mistakes, he does not understand that intelligent and rational people use mistakes, often even planned mistakes, to learn and understand the complexity of the real world, and that a wrong idea is not therefore necessarily an evil idea, though we may call it a failed idea. If a failed idea demonstrates what does not work, it is not evil really, however evil it would be to continue using that idea when its failure has been demonstrated. The failure to learn may be an evil act, when the idea was simply unworkable or inconsistent with reality. Saying that socialism is evil is really a shortcut for saying that socialism makes the life of man much less happy than does capitalism and the determined socialist is therefore evil in so far as he has failed to learn that very clear lesson.

Of course, the possibility will be an empty one if all the girls are vacuous. We will have to hope one or more are worthy of interest. Although some men do not like women to be intelligently interesting. It depends on your lower threshold for being bored. I remember some painful dates in high school in Tulsa with some pretty girls who were nice and fairly good students, but could not be enticed to say anything interesting.

Today's Washington Times had a front page article about Prof. Williams being approached to run for President. He laughed, said he was flattered, but made no commitments. He really does not seem to take it seriously and he notes that his wife Conchetta says she will assassinate him if he does think seriously about it. He has not said no, but he says he has not gone to the trouble of forming an exploratory committee. Since his wife of 47 years seems clearly to be very important to him as gauged by his frequent references to her in his editorials and the somewhat reverent manner in which he refers to her and because the Secret Service cannot be brought in to protect him from assassination prior to his declaration as a candidate, we can 100% count him out. Unfortunately. I think he would be great, however. It certainly would be interesting to see what kind of response his straight-forward sense would have when talking to people on the hustings. The voters are mostly sick of the politicians and Walter Williams might be such a breath of fresh air that many would respond to him. He is not an Objectivist, since he is a Christian, but there are no public policies he would advocate that Objectivists would find painful. I would vote for him, which I most certainly will not do for McCain. Williams backs Congressman Ron Paul, who he says is one of only two or three people in Congress that the Framers of the Constitution would even talk to. He added that most members of Congress have a generalized contempt for the values of the Constitution. How true!!!

Learn and learn to think and play enough that learning to think is never tarred with the idea that it is not fun or, worse, that it is anti-fun. Then, because learning and thinking are fun, be committed to doing it the rest of your life, perhaps while playing hard along the way in periodic spurts. Life often goes to the tortoise, not necessarily to the hare. But be sure to really make your choices yourself, so when you realize the consequences, good or bad, you can at least accept them as your own choice and your own responsibility. Be prepared to live with that. As Victor was pointing out, all of life counts and every phase of it can be good. If one phase is not, then you can still hope to make several other phases of life great, as Judith apparently did from college on. So far, I have enjoyed all of my phases, though my undergraduate years were probably my least favorite. I felt as though I was submerged in the most alien atmosphere of my life then, with the exception of the draft army. I went to a good college and then to graduate school, after a side trip from grad school to Vietnam. My thesis adviser was more important than which colleges I went to. Of course, if you do not get a Ph.D., then which colleges you go to matters more. Nonetheless, people have been very successful whether they went to a small teaching college or they went to MIT or Harvard. What you put into your profession is more important than where you went to school.

Robert and James, Well said. Thanks.

Good work Jeff. When they finish the book, some of those girls will have a different view of socialism. Some will be crying, so you may have an opportunity to hold some hands.

As counter-balance to the overwhelming media tale that man is causing catastrophic global warming, Trucinski pointed out two interesting editorials on TIA the other day. First, Jeff Jacoby points to a number of well-respected scientists who do not buy into the anthropomorphic view of global warming in an editorial called Chicken Little and global warming. Deroy Murdoch wrote an interesting editorial on the unintended consequences of subsidized ethanol fuel production. At $0.51 a gallon, this is a big subsidy and it has significantly raised the cost of corn tortillas in Mexico, which can be expected to put more pressure on the poor there to enter the US illegally. It also raises the cost of our food. There is no net gain here. In fact, one has to expect it is a net loss or there would be no reason to have to offer a subsidy. See the editorial yourself.