brent comments on Guardians of Ayn Rand - Less Wrong

57 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 18 December 2007 06:24AM

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Comment author: brent 18 December 2007 10:43:20PM 0 points [-]

Great post.

Sure, let's say we accept that Ayn Rand turned out to be a mega-bitch mad control freak in later life?

Does that mean that 'A is A' is somehow wrong?

Can anyone say 'ad hominem fallacy'?

Comment author: gwern 11 November 2009 06:34:14PM 6 points [-]

No one is saying A is not A because Rand was a control freak. What we're saying is that a lot of the superstructure of her philosophy supposedly founded on 'A is A' is rubbish and the most obvious example is her personal life; it's a reductio. 'Rand presumably was the person with the best understanding of Randianism, and these absurd actions & statements reflect her understanding; QED, Randianism is absurd.'

Comment author: pnrjulius 05 June 2012 04:25:11PM 6 points [-]

As an acquaintance of mine put it, "No, I'm sorry, Objectivism is not a theorem of the predicate calculus."