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djcb comments on May 2012 Media Thread - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: RobertLumley 02 May 2012 01:34AM

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Comment author: djcb 03 May 2012 06:42:34AM 0 points [-]

Agreed, the cultishness/orthodoxy is the overall point of the article, and on the whole I do agree with it. However, I was specifically referring to the part where it says:

Ayn Rand's philosophical idol was Aristotle. Now maybe Aristotle was a hot young math talent 2350 years ago, but math has made noticeable progress since his day. Bayesian probability theory is the quantitative logic of which Aristotle's qualitative logic is a special case; but there's no sign that Ayn Rand knew about Bayesian probability theory when she wrote her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. Rand wrote about "rationality", yet failed to familiarize herself with the modern research in heuristics and biases. How can anyone claim to be a master rationalist, yet know nothing of such elementary subjects?

and I would argue that bayesianism is a typical tool for instrumental rationalism, which is not what Rand was writing about.