I don't think it's actually possible to be less skilled than Ayn Rand.

It's odd; I've heard these kinds of swipes a lot, and yet I really like Rand's fiction. It raises an interesting question: do tastes in literature vary so much such that whether someone is a great writer or unskilled (!) is wholly in the eye of the beholder? Or is there an anti-halo effect going on, where people think, "Rand's philosophy is wrong, therefore she must be bad at writing, too"?

Spoilers...

Was anyone else jarred by the way Burt spoke so cynically about how he and the narrator would never leave their bleak Terrafoam prison because their lives in the 2030's were historically analogous to people living on a dollar a day in 2005, when people rich enough to help others out of third world squalor didn't do anything because they they were distracted by how amazing it was to swim in a pool! Burt argued that they had no more realistic prospects for improvement than people in the slums of Calcutta because no one who owned capital would take the time out to help them.

...and then after the deus ex kicks in at the end to save just them, neither Burt nor the narrator care in the slightest to help anyone they'd just spent months or years living with in the Terrafoam housing projects. Missing any old friends? Nope, not in the slightest! And in their new world no one seems to clearly understand the mechanisms of the new prosperity nor do they seek to use that prosperity to help those with whom they should notionally be able to empathize.

I fear that the author actually believes this stereotyped and non-reflective content is not humorous as propaganda but is somehow actually inspiring and visionary. This hypothesis would suggest that the author is kind of like Ayn Rand, except less skilled.

On the other hand, the author might just be playing out this game with a straight face, like Jonathan Swift where the idea is to aim high and hope some people get it rather aiming low in the fear that someone might not. However the message I get when I interpret the story this way involves breathtaking levels of misanthropy and hopelessness... which is somewhat inconsistent with high artistic aspirations.

Did I miss something obvious?

There's strong reason to believe sweatshop labor is a positive thing, actually- both conditions and pay tend to be superior to other options available in that location, and sweatshop owners expand the middle class. Similarly, the push to exclude child labor in sweatshops hurts children (and their families) in developing countries, because the choice is rarely "work or go to school" but instead "work at a good job vs. work at a bad job."

Which is one of the reasons why something like this would very quickly devolve into a political battleground: there are legitimate differences in opinion (even if there aren't illegitimate ones will get presented) and who comes out on top has real-world implications.

As for the terms "rationalism" and "rationalist," they have a strong established historical meaning quite different from the way they're commonly used by many people here. The first thing that occurs to me when I hear them is the old philosophical notion of "rationalism" as opposed to "empiricism."

Also, it's important to note that historically these have never been terms of uncontroversial and unambiguous praise. In many contexts, they have been traditionally understood to convey criticism, not compliment. For example, when Michael Oakeshott titled his essay Rationalism in Politics, he definitely didn't aim to make the reader positively disposed towards the subject from the title. Whether and to what extent people on LW tend to commit the same errors and hold the same unsubstantiated beliefs that have traditionally been connoted by this term is certainly a complex and amusing question.

As the bottom line, the "rationalism" terminology is probably too deeply embedded in the LW folklore to ever be abandoned, but I would certainly advise against using it when talking to outsiders. Even if people understand the term precisely the way it's used here, describing oneself like that explicitly is a status-lowering way of qualifying oneself.

I used to participate in a forum that was easily 50% trolls by volume and actively encouraged insulting language, and I think I got a more nuanced understanding of politics there than anywhere else in my life. There was a willingness to really delve in to minutia ("So you'd support abortion under X circumstances, but not Y?" "Yes, because of Z!"), which helped. Oddly, though, the active discouragement of civility meant that a normally "heated" debate felt the same as any other conversation there, and it was thus very easy not to feel personally invested in signaling and social standing (and anyone that did try to posture overly much would just be trolled in to oblivion...)

Multiple pages have the advantage of being easier to remember where one finished if one is forced to stop reading mid way.

I'm slightly confused here. RSA could be viewed as an implementation, but it could also be viewed as an entirely abstract, platonic algorithm. While I agree it wouldn't have been discovered by someone only interested in pure maths rather than applications, it is a strictly pure mathematical object, so you can write proofs about it which are just as absolute as any other.

I believe RSA can only be cracked by prime factorisation with the same certainty that I believe the primes are infinite. The only scenario in which they are false is one in which I am insane.

EDIT: The second paragraph is innaccurate, it can be safely treated as what I would say if I had a proof, which I thought I did until 5 minutes ago, (I never bothered to check it closely before because I thought it was knwon to be trivially true). Thanks to CipherGoth for pointing this out.

Since there are already factions identified as scientific and not, I don't think faction not identified with the word feels guilty about the lack of identification, which is what I think you're saying. I think this is just snubbing their opponents' label. (cf jfm)

Many groups take up the word "science" as a PR move. I suspect that it is sometimes (in particular in anthropology) also a bit of "dark side epistemology" or at least to help them act more indignant. (cf Jayson)

That is surprising. It seems that using 'blackmail' to refer to extortion isn't even a corruption of the original use.

I don't think it counts as dark side epistemology. As one of the anthropologists opposing the change was quoted in the Psychology Today article as saying, it's more a matter of cultural anthropology coming to see itself as a kind of esoteric journalism than a rejection of empirical data as such. It's also part of an ongoing intradisciplinary conflict between cultural anthropology and the other three fields of anthropology: archaeology, biological anthropology, and linguistics. The Chronicle of Higher Education article is a little clearer and less polemical than the PT blog cited, though the author has his own credibility problems.

It's entirely possible that the end result will be the Society for Anthropological Sciences seceding, and the AAA won't be the professional association for anthropologists anymore. It's already the case that archaeologists and biological anthropologists rarely attend the AAA annual meetings.