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thomblake comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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Comments (1430)
I would normally downvote an out-of-context wall of text like the above, but upvoted in accordance with Welcome post norms.
My apologies. I looked for rules, but couldn't find any.
"If you've come to Less Wrong to discuss a particular topic, this thread would be a great place to start the conversation." seemed to indicate that this is where I should start.
Hey! Welcome to LW. I've upvoted you too, but if you're looking for feedback on your OP, I'm too stupid to be having this conversation. :-)
Edit, since you mentioned you're an objectivist, you might be interested in the general prevailing opinion on Rand around these parts. That being said, LW does have a number of members who were, at one point, or perhaps still are, respectful of Rand.
Howdy!
I'm not sure strict Randian Objectivists would agree that I'm an Objectivist; I use the term pretty broadly to describe anybody who ascribes to the philosophy, not necessarily the ethics. I take Ayn Rand at her word when she says people should think for themselves (the closest she got to a proscription in any of her works), and am not terribly impressed by much of her fan club, which refuses to.
That said, I'm not particularly impressed by that criticism, which, like most criticisms of Ayn Rand, revolves mainly around her personal life.
If you're interested in more recent discussion of that article, you can find some here.
Hm. I don't necessarily agree it revolves around her personal life. The main gist of the post is A. Rand acknowledged no superior, B. If you don't acknowledge some way in which you are flawed you can never improve, so C. This is kind of a stupid thing to say.
I used to call myself a neo-objectivist, mostly because it was a word that had no definition, so I could claim I meant whatever I wanted. And I have a lot of respect for many of the conclusions that Rand came to. But the arrogance of her system is pretty off-putting to me.
Related, "Mozart was a Red", a play Murray Rothbard wrote parodying the time Rand invited him to come meet her.
I've yet to meet somebody better than me at arguing politics; that doesn't mean it's impossible for me to get better, however, which is one of my motivations in continuing to do so. I'm not sure that A logically leads to B.
Are you measuring this in times that you think you lost a political argument, times your opponent thought you won a political argument, or times you learned something interesting by discussing politics?
I measure this in terms of a personal judgement that an objective or hostile third party would declare that my opponent has failed, which is not the same as "winning." It's impossible for me to win an argument, only to lose it. "Winning" would imply that there's no additional argument which could not be constructed to defeat my current argument. I can't prove the nonexistence of such an argument.
(I argue against the ideal, not the opponent; my opponent can lose, but my argument cannot win.)
There's a difference: you (presumably) acknowledge that it's possible for you to get better at arguing politics. Rand did not. Rand believed it was impossible for anyone to be better than her.
No reason to take my preferences as generally normative.
Though I do.