Isaac Lewis

These are good questions.

As an example of something that didn't seem 'beyond' LW, Rand's Razor seems like a useful habit for dispensing with perverse concepts like grue and bleen, but Follow the Improbability feels like the better version of it. Like, how is 'necessity' measured?

Ayn Rand wrote a ton of material on concept-formation: some of it is in ITOE, and some of it is scattered amongst essays on other topics. For example, her essay "The Art of Smearing" opens by examining the use of the flawed concept "extremism" by certain political groups to attack their opponents, and then opens out into a discussion of the formation of "anti-concepts" in general, and their... (read 821 more words →)

Hi - this was a very interesting post to read. I'm an Objectivist and former LW-lurker and rationalist-adjacent, so it's interesting to see how Atlas Shrugged reads to someone from the LW-sphere who is sympathetic to some of the core ideas, but not all of them.

My background (for the curious): I binge-read the sequences a few years ago, along with many other writers in the rationalist diaspora (along with other contrarian thinkers, such as Nassim Taleb, David Chapman, and so on), but was eventually sold on Objectivism after reading Ayn Rand's book on epistemology (linked below).

At one point I wanted to work on a comparison or integration of LW-style ideas with Objectivism.... (read 592 more words →)