If [Ayn] Rand really wanted to build an individualist sub-culture, she would have done so in an evolutionarily informed way. If people naturally care about the opinions of others, jumping on people is a good way to get dishonest conformity, but a bad way to get an honest exchange of ideas. Instead, an individualist sub-culture must be built upon tolerance and honesty. I'd suggest three key norms:

1. Don't think less of people who sincerely disagree.
2. Do think less of people who insincerely agree.
3. Do think less of people who think less of people who sincerely disagree.

--Bryan Caplan

Reference: Guardians of Ayn Rand

Actually I'm going to save you the effort and provide the cite myself:

... if we were to be at all times punctiliously truthful we might often become victims of the wickedness of others who were ready to abuse our truthfulness. If all men were well-intentioned it would not only be a duty not to lie, but no one would do so because there would be no point in it. But as men are malicious, it cannot be denied that to be punctiliously truthful is often dangerous... if I cannot save myself by maintaining silence, then my lie is a weapon of defense.

(Lectures on Ethics)

Specifically, in the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant states that "not suffer[ing our] rights to be trampled underfoot by others with impunity" is a perfect duty of virtue.

For example, he infamously suggests not lying to a murderer who asks where your friend is

Actually, Kant only defended the duty not to lie out of philanthropic concerns. But if the person inquired of was actually a friend, then one might reasonably argue that you have a positive duty not to reveal his location to the murderer, since to do otherwise would be inconsistent with the implied contract between you and your friend.

To be fair, you might also have a duty to make sure that your friend is not murdered, and this might create an ethical dilemma. But ethical dilemmas are not unique to deontology.

ETA: It has also been argued that Kant's reasoning in this case was flawed since the murderer engages in a violation of a perfect duty, so the maxim of "not lying to a known murderer" is not really universalizable. But the above reasoning would go through if you replaced the murderer with someone else whom you wished to keep away from your friend out of philanthropic concerns.

Kant's point is not that "everyone doing X" matters, it's that ethical injunctions should be indexically invariant, i.e. "universal". If an ethical injunction is affected by where in the world you are, then it's arguaby no ethical injunction at all.

Wei_Dai and EY have done some good work in reformulating decision theory to account for these indexical considerations, and the resulting theories (UDT and TDT) have some intuitively appealing features, such as cooperating in the one-shot PD under some circumstances. Start with this post.

you can think about that formulation of the CI as referring to a possible world where the maxim is followed like a natural law.

This is what Kant seems to do in practice whenever he illustrates normative application of the CI. But his notion of a priori does appear to preclude this. Then again, Kant also managed to develop Newtonian physics a priori, so maybe he just knew something we don't. <sarcasm/>

I'm just jettisoning the entire justification and calling a preference a spade.

Good point. There is a lot of fuzziness around "preferences", "ethics", "aesthetics", "virtues" etc. Ultimately all of these seem to involve some axiological notion of "good", or "the good life", or "good character" or even "goods and services".

For instance, what should we make of the so-called "grim aesthetic"? Is grimness a virtue? Should it count as an ethic? If not, why not?

Our trainer was explaining something (the tracert command) but I didn't understand it because his explanation didn't seem to make sense.

Could you clarify? To properly understand how traceroute works one would need to know about the TTL field in the IP header (and how it's normally decremented by routers) and the ICMP TTL Exceeded message. But I'm not sure that a tech support drone would be expected to understand any of these.

The person who voted this down is a moron.

you seem very confident about that, did you downvote your own post? how do you do that.

Is there any significance to how OSC avoids using the standard terms for gay, but instead uses a made-up in-world term for it that you have to infer means "gay".

wtf? that's the kwyjiboest thing I've ever seen. omg lol