The Curse of Ayn Rand's Heir

> The ironic thing is that becoming a better thinker is not done by studying logic, but instead by learning to recognize and respect your own emotional responses.

This is the single thing that in my opinion both the young and also the naive miss. But people who are wise usually seem to understand.

Not everyone learns it with age, but it usually takes some amount of life experience for people to learn it.

Yeah, “think for yourself, and if you disagree with me that means you’re doing it wrong” is a heck of a way to run a school of philosophy. It’s no wonder she hates Plato, he’s constantly challenging people in their settled beliefs.

Most of our choices aren't thought out and logical. Our emotions and lizard brain drive most of our actions, but some of us are very good at quickly coming up with justifications and rationalizations for what we've just done that are plausible enough that we end up feeling in control.

Great post! I think it all comes down to self awareness. The more you are aware of your conscious and unconscious biases, you are the more empowered to mitigate the resultant rational failures.

Despite heading in more and more romantic directions in my thinking—from a very-analytic start—I don't find the core problem with Rand's thinking to be primacy of reason, but sloppy (or, motivated—it can be hard to tell which) reasoning that leads to ultra-confident conclusions. A consistent pattern is you'll see a whole big edifice of reasoning out of her, but peppered about in it, and usually including right at the beginning, are these little bits that the cautious reader may notice and go "wait, that... doesn't necessarily follow" or (VERY often) "hold on, you're sneaking in a semantic argument there and it's not per se convincing at all, on second thought" and then those issues are just never addressed, she just keeps trucking along, so most of the individual steps might be fine but there are all these weird holes in it, so none of it really holds together.

I've even, after complaints about this were met with "you just didn't start with her fundamentals, so you didn't understand", reluctantly gone all the way to her big work on epistemology(!) and... sure enough, same.

I find similar things in basically anything hosted on the Austrian-school beloved site mises.org. IDK if this is just, like, the house style of right wing laissez faire or what.

I've always considered reason to allow for emotional motivations, as opposed to rationality, which does not.

Edit: Iain McGilchrist makes a useful distinction here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUJDsdt7Pso

I can't imagine what your career was.

I was a programmer at Apple and have to really scratch my head to think of any way I might have even slightly worsened someone's life.

I know some people are pushing back on Thinking, Fast and Slow’s assertions but whether everyone’s brains work that way or not, there’s at least a visible minority of people whose brains do, and I’m among them.

We do many things based entirely on intuition, and then afterward gin up a reason for having done them that doesn’t make us sound insane, or like five year olds. It’s part explanation/excuse and part description, but presented as description.

And if you’ve read anything on anger management, there’s a split second where the angry individual is experiencing some other emotion, like vulnerability or betrayal, before they sublimate it into anger. The problem is in how fast and to what degree they perform the substitution, and often even they miss the event, which takes away their own agency in the response. Recovery involves clawing back that agency.

> any hopes for a human society that place reason above emotion are fundamentally unachievable

If you haven't read it, you may enjoy Robert Sapolsky's "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will". I haven't yet finished it (only halfway through the book) but I found it a very fascinating read so far, no matter whenever one agrees with the conclusions or not. And I think it resonates and kind of confirms your comment, coming at it from a neurological viewpoint.

The book basically outlines which parts of the brain are responsible for our decision making. While I understand that he's drastically [over]simplifying things for readers' sake (as it's always the case with pop-sci), it provides a nice overview (a bunch of fun facts, with references to the actual scientific research where they came from) of how our decisions are heavily influenced by a lot of various things, in the context of your comment specifically - the processes going on in our brains that we can roughly call "emotions".

> What I am trying to say is that any hopes for a human society that place reason above emotion are fundamentally unachievable.

What is sad is that you label this with cynicism, whereas everyone else considers this fundamental to life.

> any hopes for a human society that place reason above emotion are fundamentally unachievable.

Hopes for mutual checks and balances between the two might be, for some if not all.

we spend most of our lives playing iterated prisoners dilemmas, a game which presumably can be cracked by some godlike intellect, but which is far beyond the capabilities of our current philosophy. Emotions, put well to use, do well at this task.

I’m talking to a group of people I assume to be substantially software developers, and the facts on the ground are that many of us are attracted to this field by logic, and we are all encouraged in college and for a few years after to invest every spare moment into CS and not any other endeavors. Don’t socialize without an agenda, don’t develope your EQ, just computers and logic all the time.

That consumes most of the years when your prefrontal cortex is still malleable.

Once you understand that, the consequences are everywhere you care to look.

And while it’s true we have twice the density of the general population of neurodivergent people, we nearly all of us make ourselves neurodivergent in the pursuit of this field, whether we are born with it or not. When we eventually find time for hobbies and charities we find out we don’t think like everyone else, and often not in a good way. We have “missed out” on experiences others take for granted.

Right, and I think there has unfortunately been an avalanche of low effort gotchas along these lines.

My favorite (or least favorite?) example is from Jennifer Burns' biography Goddess of the Market, which charges that title "The Fountainhead" was a haphazard last second choice, selecting a word that never appears in the novel. But slight problem with that, a climactic conversation about ideals, perhaps the climactic articulation of values in the book, occurs between two main characters who use the term "fount" as a stand-in term for the wellspring of human creation, value, and meaning. Fountainhead, then, is who the main character is, and nothing other than typical artistic restraint in selecting a title that simultaneously points to the intellectual center of the novel without being browbeating about the term itself. I actually emailed Jennifer Burns and pointed this out at one point but didn't hear back.

I do think the collapse of many of Rand's closest interpersonal relationships, the depression and drinking that her husband went into, as well as the legacy of her institute and estate, are quite damning. As of course is the shallow treatment of complicated topics, the fundamental misunderstanding of Kant that inspired the name of the whole philosophy, and the inapplicability of principles to mortals who wrestle with personal flaws. Those are real, but the social security thing isn't.

That's still very self serving. The taxes she paid were spent on something else, the largesse she received was stolen from somebody else. I guess receiving stolen goods was ok in her philosophy?

The ability to explain away hypocrisy is not the same as a lack of hypocrisy.

Exactly - theyre all non-conformists, and you can be a non-conformist and join them in their commune if you act just like them in every way.

[dead]

That’s pretty funny. It goes into my drawer with jokes like: I’m a biologist, and biologists never generalize!

I read "Atlas Shrugged" but I found it to be a frustrating read, mostly because of how simplistic its worldview is. When I read it, I felt like the complex issues it tries to tackle—capitalism, government, individualism—were reduced to black-and-white moral arguments, without much room for nuance or ambiguity.

The characters didn’t help either. They came across as one-dimensional: the so-called heroes are always right, always rational, while anyone who disagrees with them is portrayed as either stupid or evil. That kind of writing makes it hard for me to take her "philosophy" seriously.

Yes that is something you said. And no I don’t think it’s true.

If you don’t have an answer to the question of what should be done in life, you have no framing for other dependent moral questions.

Aside from Galt's Gulch, there's also Dagny's brief stint on her own, during which she more or less magically automates everything that needs to be done.

Her non-fiction isn't any more rigorous or convincing, incidentally.

AKA fiction

The department of education is not a service provider.

It is a conduit through which funding flows and is a standards and enforcement body.

They (or at least, they used to) insure that "state's rights" advocates don't implement curricula that teach children that the world is 6,000 years old and flat. They are in the process of being dismantled.

One's local school district is responsible for a vast majority of one's critical thinking skills and it has been this way in the United States since at least the early 1800s when people realized that only wealthy parents had the time, energy, and money to hire private tutors to impart critical thinking skills on their children.

I imagine that in other countries, especially western countries, the story is the same.

We can look back far into history to see that people have used state-run or sanctioned institutions to teach critical thinking skills since well before the Platonic Academy, from which much of our modern system is derived, based on evidence of organized vocational education ranging from Siberia to Ancient Egypt to city states that dotted the land prior to the Old Babylonian Empire.

The main difference between those ancient systems and today is that, for now, all children get the chance to have a formal, standardized education, instead of just the children of the wealthy, well-connected, or lucky.

You literally put words in my mouth; I said nothing about the DoE.

Look at what happens in poor areas of less developed countries. Honor killings, deification of dictators, rampant scamming and crime, cartels and gangs... all still things.

Your questions betray an ignorance of how a significant plurality of the world still lives to this day. You need to get out more, and not just at the resort towns.

And new problems are cropping up in the foremost developed nations, like depression due to social media addiction, that we'll also need to think critically about, instead of reverting to medieval religious remedies.

Alternatively, maybe you just think we're better off because we're intrinsically better kinds of humans? Gods chosen few? No doubt many people actually believe that.

This is not how it works.

Did you ever use the streets in front of your house? Ever went to a public park? Ever relied on police to protect your property? Ever needed the help of public health services? Firefighters?

It's funny that you get money stole from you (while you certainly use a ton on infrastructure society provides), but never once considered leaving it behind and go live as a hunter gatherer in some remote place.

After all, you are posting here.

I love capitalism and am a former Rand fan.

But I don't think taxes are in and of themselves immoral.

A human being is a social animal, and each gets a lot of value from the people around us.

These are nice to have:

- clean streets

- police

- non-corrupt judges

- a stable legal framework

- living among educated people

- fire department that just shows up

- not getting bombed and invaded by a foreign army

- much more

These are "true expenses" in that if you didn't pay for them... you'd eventually pay the price for them when you're the victim of crime, fire, or exposure to the illiterate.

If you lived in Galt's Gulch or some gated community in an anarchic society, you'd pay a regular fee for these services, like voluntary taxes.

Taxes are infamously as inevitable as death because the expenses it's meant to pay for are also inevitable. We might as well set up a system.

Government waste is held up as an example of immorality, and some/most governments certainly should be leaner, but some waste & inertia would happen in any large organization, public or private. The only other time a government could be straight-up immoral is if it's persecuting innocent citizens or foreigners for no reason. Thinking through the implementation details of Galt's Gulch makes me think taxes aren't so bad after all.

It's all fun and games until you don't have paved streets anymore.

What makes taxes immoral? People want their government to provide certain services. Those need to be paid for. What services should be funded depends on who you ask. It's interesting how the Nordic people are fine with paying more for strong social safety nets. They see it as an investment in society.