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Rereading Atlas Shrugged
Isaac Lewis120

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 att... (read more)

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2Vaniver
My prediction, having read a few of these, is that I will agree with them more than I disagree with them; when she points to someone making an error, at least 90% of the time they'll actually be making an error. I think the phrase 'anti-pattern' is more common on LW than 'anti-concept', but they seem overall the same and to have similar usages. (37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong feels like the good similar example from LW.) That said, there's a somewhat complicated point here that was hammered home for me by thinking about causal reasoning. Specifically, humans are pretty good at intuitive causal reasoning, and so philosophers discussing the differences between causal decision theory and evidential decision theory found it easy to compute 'what CDT would say' for a particular situation, by checking what their intuitive causal sense of the situation was. But some situations are very complicated; see figure 1 of this paper, for example. In order to do causal reasoning in an environment like that, it helps if it's 'math so simple a computer could do it,' which involves really getting to the heart of the thing and finding the simple core. From what I can tell, the Objectivists are going after the right sort of thing (the point of concepts is to help with reasoning to achieve practical ends in the real world, i.e. rationalists should win and beliefs should pay rent in anticipated experience), and so I'm unlikely to actually uncover any fundamental disagreements in goals. [Even on the probabilistic front, you could go from Peikoff's "knowledge is contextual" to a set-theoretic definition of probability and end up Bayesian-ish.] But it feels to me like... it should be easy to summarize, in some way? Or, like, the 'LW view' has a lot of "things it's against" (the whole focus on heuristics and biases seems important here), and "things it's for" ('beliefs should pay rent' feels like potentially a decent summary here), and it feels like it has a clear view of both of them. I
Rereading Atlas Shrugged
Isaac Lewis*200

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 episte... (read more)

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2TAG
Are there concrete examples of the usefulness of the epistemology?
Vaniver110

Thanks for the links!

Basically -- the element of Objectivist philosophy that is by far and away the most useful is the epistemology.

I find this interesting, since I think epistemology is one of the most well-developed parts of the "LW view." If Objectivism has something to add, we should definitely incorporate it; if Objectivism has a major challenge for it, we should definitely address it.

I have memories of reading IToE, or at least leafing through it, in my college days when I hung out with a bunch of Objectivists, but I think this was before ... (read more)

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