Objective Standard Institute vs. Ayn Rand Institute

[Mark]

The Ayn Rand Institute comes out on top. 

OSI vs. ARI

The good stuff is in the footnotes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Mark,

Once again an excellent article documenting the flaws and inconsistencies in the official Objectivism world.

It's weird to me to see a kerfuffle over Peikoff's courses. But there it is.

As speculation, I imagine a good part of the disagreement is over the price of the lectures. At Peikoff's age, if he follows most of mankind, his personal priority issue has shifted from money to legacy. One argument is that a free price will spread his legacy farther and faster than paid will. Maybe. Actually, it's more complicated than that.

But that could account for his final decision to go with ARI.

btw - Lot's of people--famous people--do both, that is they charge for their stuff, but they also allow it to be pirated on the Internet without much fuss. Not to mention the practice of giving out free samples. I've even heard some of them say that the people who pirate their stuff will never buy it, but they will spread their names. So they give a blind eye just so long as the piracy doesn't go overboard, thus cut into their paying customers. They consider this part of their marketing and guide the process to get the most value from it, seeing that it is a big pain in the patootie to fight it in a black-and-white manner anyway.

I personally know of several famous Internet marketers who use pseudonyms on black hat forums and often give their works away there. It doesn't matter that everyone knows who they are. They still use pseudonyms to keep up appearances for the rest of the public.  

I doubt that concept would ever penetrate into official Objectivdom, though. And, even getting away from piracy, they don't seem to grock how to milk free samples for maximum return.

This is an odd blindness for a system devoted to capitalism, but it signals to me that their issue is not about money or ideas. It's about control.

A head's up: The links to images in Footnote 1 do not work.

Michael

[Mark]

43 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

The links to images in Footnote 1 do not work.

Thanks.  They're fixed now.

[Mark]

- deleted -

 

[Mark]

Added a footnote.