Note: I use the word "altruism" here in its modern, non-Comtean sense. Altruism is that which benefits others.

Who means that by Altruism? Are movie stars altruistic because people enjoy their movies? Anyone who produces something someone else values is altruistic?

The word for that which produces value is productive, not Altruism.

I think so too - the comment on safety was a non sequitur, confusing human in the loop in the department of defense sense with human in the loop as a sensor/actuator for the google AI.

But adding a billion humans as intelligent trainers to the AI is a powerful way to train it. Google seems to consistently look for ways to leverage customer usage for value - other companies don't seem to get that as much.

The main requirements at school are sitting still and being quiet. Perfect for a corpse, not so good for a child. In fact, rather like torture for a child with a natural impulse to move and explore. Pair the torture with enforced learning, and you can condition the desire to learn right out of him.

I've seen a couple of TED talks now where they make computers available to kids with no instruction at all, and they work and work at them until they figure them out, and keep learning the material supplied.

Give your kid a desk where he can stand or sit and work at a computer with Khan Academy, and he'll run circles around the kids crippled in the usual school environments.

I am so jealous of what's possible for kids today, and so happy for them. They're going to make it over the barbed wire and out of the prison camp. They're going to escape.

And she uses the original definition of altruism (approximately: reversed survival instinct),

I don't think that's the definiction she gives, although given the sum of her beliefs, you could say that. Reversed "interests" instinct seems about right. It's about who is the intended beneficiary of the action - if it's them, it's a good action, and if it's you, it's a bad action. Now you put that together with life as your fundamental interest, and you could say "reversed survival instinct", but I think that conveys a too narrow concept for most people.

the meaning of "altruism" in ordinary English, aside from technical discussions of Comte's writings, never seems to have been much like "living for others and not caring at all about oneself"

I disagree. Altruism is almost always put in opposition to egoism. If you care about your family because you love them, and put their needs above the needs of others, that's less altruistic than putting the needs of another family over the needs of your own.

I think Rand is correct on the current usage. One is altruistic to the extent that one sacrifices your own interests to the interests of others.

You can always leave yourself an out with "at all about yourself". Yes, even most people who praise altruism will allow you a moment to do something for your own happiness. How generous they are! But you are praised to the extent you sacrifice your own happiness for the sake of others, and condemned to the extent that you don't. It's not how much happiness you produce in others, it's how much happiness it costs you that matters. If you do exactly as you please but thereby still make millions happier, you are not an altruist by the usual calculations.

Have they redefined altruism it to something nice when I wasn't looking?

Altruism as the desire to help others is fine and dandy. But who means that by altruism?

Everyone seems to mean that slave morality which states that working for the happiness of others is good, and working for your own happiness is evil.

You're right about the rollover issue.

I was mainly picturing collisions. The vehicle with the higher CG more likely sheers up and plows through the passenger cage of the lower CG vehicle. Or so my physics would imagine.

Ha! You mention editing a missing space? My mean edits per post after post are probably 2+, and for more than a missing space. Seems impossible for me to put a coherent sentence on a page in the first try these days.

[edit] Had to edit this one because a dash was recognized as markup, made into a bullet, and indented the preceding paragraph. Ignorance of the markup law is no excuse. And had to edit again to indicate the edit.

Wait! Somebody had been telling me that they could drag the lower right corner of the text edit box to make it bigger, it seemed like it wasn't working for me. But I just did it! Yay! I can see a few sentences at once now. Maybe I won't have to edit my posts again and again now that I can see decent sized chunks at one time.

That's a good point. I'd generalize it and combine it with what I previously said, to finding out what you can do with yourself, and getting good at it. Learn how to make use of themselves, and find the uses their particularly good for.

Free to be altruistic. Wouldn't that be nice. But freedom is precisely what most everyone would deny you, including Rand. Some say you have a duty to be altruistic, while says you have a duty not to be, but both agree that you're evil unless you submit and do your duty.

If you want a philosopher who leaves you free to be an egoist, you want Stirner, the egoist. Egoism isn't the opposite of altruism, it is the opposite of theism, the belief the you were born a slave to a cause not your own. Rand says she doesn't believe in God, but does she believe in Good any less than the most fanatical theist believes in God? Does she condemn those who won't serve her Good any less harshly?

Youtube atheists had a big stink over the definition of atheism - is it disbelief in God, or a lack of belief in God? And round and round they went. And both sides were wrong, because they took belief in the sense of "belief in the existence of", which really isn't the point with respect to theism. There have been no end of people worshiped as gods by other people. It wasn't that these "gods" didn't exist for their respective atheists, it's that their atheists did not believe they were born slaves to these gods. In Paradise Lost, Satan certainly knows God exists, but does it make any sense to thereby call him a theist? Isn't he an atheist precisely for his refusal to be a slave, his Non Serviam?

Rand actually started off very close to really being an egoist. Anthem and We the Living were just assertions of freedom over people and ideologies who demand your submission. IMO, it wasn't enough for her to be free, she wanted to be right, and for other people to be wrong. A will to power, even in philosophy.

And while Nietzsche was all for that, and went about consciously trying to impose his vision on others, I don't think Rand got the joke. She was a true believer in her truth, Stirner would say possessed by it, and wasn't consciously serving her own will, but dutifully served her truth instead.

it asserts that my life belongs to me

Funny you should put it that way. Stirner's "Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum" is alternately translated "The Unique One and His Property", or "The Ego and His Own". It's about what you can own, and what it means to have an attitude of ownership to your own life and the world. Your life may or may not belong to you, but that depends on you and the attitude you take toward it.

The similarity between the two is that both types of students are adjusting the amount of work they need to put in, based on the given standard.

Besides just boring smart kids to insanity, and frustrating dumb kids into giving up, this is the real problem. Kids learn to compare themselves to a standard, instead of learning how to make use of themselves. That's what a kid needs to learn.