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Aurini comments on Whining-Based Communities - Less Wrong
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I always interpreted the 'Looters and Moochers' differently; a corollary to the 'It's okay to Win,' statement saying 'It's okay that others Lose - they did so by their own hand.' Rather than offering an excuse for Rationalists/Ubermenschs/Super-Geeks to say 'Nice guys finish last,' I read it as an indictment of that very behaviour. Only 'Looters and Moochers' make excuses, blame others, and fault circumstances - the Super-Geek Wins despite all of those.
I'd wager that Ayn Rand would agree with me if I said this to her (if she wasn't too busy denouncing me for being a Libertarian), but what she intended is irrelevant when speaking about the effects of her work; and along those lines I think you hit the nail on the head. The self-proclaimed Objectivists I've met have all given off a creepy vibe. I think it might be due to misinterpreting Rand in precisely the way you described.
They call themselves Winners, imagine themselves as heroic protagonists (far superior to plebs like you) despite never having actually Won anything; it's all society's fault.
They might as well say: "Oh, I was behaving as a good Rationalist, but my opponent was Irrational! It's not my fault!"
Eliezer FTW.
Did they say "I'm a winner" in your presence? How did you know what they imagined? That you felt a "creepy vibe" says more about you than them. Where else have you felt this "creepy vibe"? I don't see a lot of extensional facts in your criticisms of Objectivists. I just see that you clearly don't like them.
The Objectivists I have personally known have been fine, decent, fun people. A married couple that went off to be professors at the University of Georgia. I knew the husband better, and played tennis with him while we were both in grad school. Neither of us were very good, but it was exercise.
They invited me over to their house a few times to play bridge and have drinks with some of their other friends, all Objectivist leaning, if not Objectivists. I always had a good time. They never told me they were "Winners". The discussions were lively, honest, and interesting. They gave me quite a pleasant vibe, of honest, rational people who didn't have a lot of time for trying to getting ahead by snearing at other people.
Even if the winners cheated?
When it comes to the real world rather than games, claiming that there is such a thing as cheating is a form of self-handicapping.
There's no actual cheating?I guess we'd better free Bernie Madoff then.
Doing things other people don't like isn't cheating, but punishing people for doing things you don't like isn't cheating either, and doing things that other people don't like without taking the possible punishment into account isn't rational (= leads to not-winning).
In a perfectly acceptable sense of the word "cheating" Madoff cheated people out of their money.
What sense is that?
Telling lies for profit. Financial fraud.
This is an atypical definition of "cheating".
Hm. *checks a dictionary*
The dictionary says you're right; apparently the standard definition of 'cheating' is that it refers to deceptive behavior. I'd been using it to refer to not abiding by agreed-upon rules, either explicitly or in spirit (e.g. munchkinism). I think this is a more accurate definition, given that there are some games where deception is an expected part of the game, and deception is not considered cheating in those cases (e.g. Diplomacy). In the real world, there are no agreed-upon rules to break (I never agreed not to murder anyone...), so 'cheating' doesn't apply.
Anyone who is convicted in a court of law has failed to abide by agreed-on rules
The point was that the convicted person did not agree to the rules. That some other people agreed on them is irrelevant to Adelene's point.
Also, not all people convicted in a court of law actually did the thing they were convicted of.
I don't think Bernie Madoff was making a principled protest against the inquities of the financial regulators: he was quite happy for other people to abide the rules. (Reliant on that: if everyone cheats, cheaters have no edge). I chose him as an example, rather than, eg Mandela for a reason.
I know. I hoped I could take all the side-conditions about fair trials etc as read.
Yes, exactly this.
It seems reasonable to me to describe laws as "rules that the government acts as if all citizens have agreed to abide by", at least for values of 'acts as if' that apply to the judicial system. The government acting that way results in a system that works reasonably well as far as I can tell, and the fact that the government acts that way makes it generally reasonable to act as if one has agreed to follow those rules. But that's not the same as actually agreeing to follow those rules, and the most rational way of handling the situation is to keep that in mind and actually do a cost/benefit analysis when something illegal seems like it might be worthwhile anyway - and, such a cost/benefit analysis should take all the results of the action into account, including e.g. the possibility of the laws being changed to restrict further behavior of that type, or the possibility of getting a problematically bad reputation, or more subtle issues.
Well if I say: "I will build a hot-air balloon" then it's reasonable to interpret that as agreeing to the rule "I have to build a hot-air balloon", so if I don't, I'm cheating.
And then it's reasonable to extend that to other kinds of statements, like "I built a hot-air balloon"
Speech in Diplomacy, it seems, is not quite real speech. The default position is that speech is true.
That doesn't seem reasonable to me, actually. I interpret it as 'I intend to build a hot-air balloon', which is much weaker evidence about future world-states even if it's true. (It's also stronger evidence about current world-states.)
This strikes me as naive. In my experience, most people don't lie without a reason to do so, but also most people will lie when they do have such a reason, and such reasons are fairly common. Our society is built on that assumption, in some ways, even - it's practically required that one make up an excuse to leave a conversation with an annoying person rather than tell them that you don't want to talk to them, for example.
It doesn't, because rule contravention is not the sole sufficient condition of cheating. Cheating involved 1) breaking rules that 2) others are following for 3) advantage whilst 4) disguising the fact.
The question isn't whether we should free Bernie Madoff; it's whether Ayn Rand would do so (if even that).