Want more content? There are lots of great posts to read at the discussion group. I write lots of them. It's like reading blog posts, but there's more!
Want more content? There are lots of great posts to read at the discussion group. I write lots of them. It's like reading blog posts, but there's more!
Rewriting Rand is a long article about how Mayhew and others have made changes to the Rand archive material which has been made public. Books like Ayn Rand Answers don't actually present Rand's original words.
Mayhew also left out a bunch of interesting material include this:
To a question about the ideas of maverick psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, Rand replied, in part, “He seems to be for individual rights, but I cannot always follow his argument—I have questions, I have certain serious questions about some of his premises—therefore, I have not read enough to criticize him. All I can say is he’s promising” (Ford Hall Forum 1976, 40:55–41:32).
I like to find comments by my favorite philosophers about each other. They're interesting. I'm glad Rand recognized that Szasz was promising and was in favor of individual rights.
I wonder why Rand didn't write Szasz a letter and ask her questions. I'm confident he would have answered.
Discuss anything in the comments below.
The four best books are The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity by David Detusch (DD), and Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (AR).
Update: See my unendorsement of the Deutsch books.
Everyone should learn this stuff, but currently only a handful of people in the world know much about all four of these books. This material is life-changing because it deals with broad ideas which are important to most of life, and which challenge many things people currently think they know.
However: they’re way too deep and novel to read once and understand. The ideas are correct to a level of detailed precision that people don't even know is a possible thing to try for. The normal way people read books is inadequate to learn all the wonderful ideas in these books. To understand , there’s two options:
1) be an AR or DD yourself, be on their level or reasonably close, be the kind of person who could invent the ideas in the first place. then you could learn it alone (though it’d still involve many rereadings and piles of supplementary material, unless you were dramatically better than AR or DD.)
this is not intended as an option for people to choose, they're like one in a billion kind of people. and even if one could do it, it’s way harder than (2) so it'd be a dumb approach.
2) get help with error correction from other people who already understand the ideas. realistically, this requires a living tradition of people willing to help with individualized replies. it’s plenty hard enough to learn the ideas even with great resources like that. to last, it has to educate new people faster than existing people stop participating or die. (realistically, this method still involves supplementary material, rereadings, etc, in addition to discussion.)
What is the current situation regarding relevant living traditions?
for the DD stuff, there’s only one living tradition available: the Fallible Ideas community.
the most important parts of the DD material is based on Karl Popper's philosophy, Critical Rationalism (CR). there’s some CR-only stuff elsewhere, but the quality is inadequate.
besides reading the books, it's also important to understand how the DD and AR ideas fit together, and how to apply the cohesive whole to life.
there's lots of written material about this on my websites and in discussion archives. the only available living tradition for this is the Fallible Ideas community.
for the AR stuff, there are two living traditions available which i consider valuable. there are also others like Branden fans, Kelley fans, various unserious fan forums, etc, which i don’t think are much help.
the two valuable Rand living traditions disagree considerably on some topics, but they do also agree a ton on other topics.
they are the Fallible Ideas community and the Peikoff/Ayn Rand Institute/Binswanger community. The Peikoff version of Objectivism doesn’t understand CR; it’s inductivist. There are other significant flaws with it, but there’s also a lot of value there. It’s has really helpful elaborations of what Rand meant on many topics.
patio11 comments on Hacker News:
I think "Repeating close variations on your usual theme unlocks far more value than you'd expect given minimal novelty value" is a surprising result. I utterly buy it.
The advice I give which has produced the single biggest deltas in outcomes is "Charge more." It is so simple that I could literally print it on T-shirts and wear it to any event which discusses pricing. People know it is my catchphrase and sometimes I get knowing laughter when I say it...
... and then a few minutes later they've agreed to try charging more, despite having an accurate model which suggests "Hah, I bet when we ask Patrick about our new pricing he is going to ask us what it is, think about it for less than five seconds, and then suggest charging more." They knew what I'd say before I even got in the room, but even the tiniest marginal connection to their own pricing grid / customers / data pushes them to actually try it.
These are great points about how passive people are. Their low initiative is immoral! (It's making their lives worse, and morality is about how to live well.)
patio11 omits criticism or judgement. He doesn't point out that people are mistaken to be this way and should change. He focuses on how to deal with people as they are – keep repeating himself to people who already know what he's going to say, but are irrational.
I think it's important to state there's a problem here. Passive people can't be expected to figure that out on their own! But some would wish to improve if they realized they had a problem. Not everyone realizes they could try to change, rather than just taking their approach to life for granted.
Guys, you should try to get better at connecting general concepts to your own situation. You should put effort into doing that. That's something you can improve at. You don't have to just sit around and wait for one of the world's few active people to tell you (which usually doesn't happen). You can try to figure things out yourself and try to get better at using and applying principles.
I wrote:
I can break anyone. I can ask questions, criticize errors, and advocate for more progress until they give up and refuse to speak. No one can handle that if I really try. I can bring up enough of people’s flaws that it’s overwhelming and unwanted.
Anne B. asked:
Have you done this? Would you do it again? It seems mean and not very productive.
Thanks for asking. I think lots of people have issues with some things I say or do, but don’t discuss it. That silence is lame and non-truth-seeking.
I have been sufficiently critical in discussions that people no longer wanted to discuss.
Sometimes this happens by accident. I barely say anything and they already hate discussion and leave. Sometimes it happens with people who didn’t even speak once, they just read half of one of my blog posts or FI essays and that was it, they’re done, time to slam their mind closed and never ever think about my ideas.
Sometimes I’ve been persistent with bringing up issues and pointing out issues. What do you do when someone says “I am 100% honest, I love criticism, and I know everything! Prove me wrong!?” It’s hard to just say, “You’re a liar, so I won’t discuss with you.” Then (if they didn't just get offended and leave) they'd accuse me of evading the issues, not having arguments, etc. So what I’m more inclined to do is actually argue the points. And if they keep going, I keep going. And then, well, they hate it and get fed up with it after a while (even when I hold back the majority of criticism I could say).
It’s hard to get out of discussions when people claim to be willing to discuss, because I claim to be willing to discuss too. So if we both are serious thinkers who want critical discussion, then who will end the discussion and why? I’m genuinely happy to discuss the issues, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise. So if I stop the discussion, then what do I say? That I’m stopping the discussion because of some flaws I accuse the other person of having? But they’ll dislike that even more than the impersonal discussion we were already having... But if I just keep discussing the issues with zero personal comments, many people get more and more upset and unhappy until they reach a breaking point and halt discussion.
A good example is my recent discussion with Robert Spillane. He initially pretended to be a rational thinker who can deal with criticism and who is interested in thinking. That was a lie. And after a while he totally wanted out of the conversation, but wouldn’t admit it clearly because his desire to quit the conversation contradicted his self-image. He wanted to keep thinking of himself as a rational intellectual, and he didn’t want to do anything that clearly contradicted that. So he started looking for excuses to blame me and quit. That general pattern is common.
Should I declare halfway through a conversation that the other guy is irrational – which he totally denies – and stop discussing the issues and ignore his lies? :( Or perhaps refuse to discuss the issues and only participate in the meta discussion of whether he’s a liar? But he’d like that discussion even less. If I even mention he’s dishonest, that bothers people, but it’s the truthful explanation of why I stopped discussing... Alternatively I could just go silent and not explain, but that sucks. Or I can keep discussing – since they are giving clear consent and participating and claiming they want it – while suspecting they’re a bad person who actually dislikes it.
And my Paths Forward material is, in a way, a threat to people because it criticizes the rationality of the method of just refusing to discuss stuff, and criticizes the common excuses people use. Paths Forward is not about any particular person, and it’s true and important ... but it can also be scary and upsetting for people with various common flaws and irrationalities... What should I do about that? Especially with people who deny having those flaws and irrationalities.
My attitude is: I can and should continue doing reasonable stuff, and if some people interact with it in a way where they get upset, feel bad, reach a breaking point of not wanting to think about FI anymore, etc, that’s their problem. It’s sad and I’d like to do something about it, but I don’t think it’s my responsibility, and I don’t think there’s much I can do about it.
I want to be publicly available for discussion of ideas.
I don’t want to drop discussions for no reason given.
I don’t want to lie about why I stop discussing to protect others. I don’t want to come up with the lies they want to hear so they feel good, and basically try to manipulate them in just the right way so that they’re happy (despite their ongoing conflicts with reality). I don’t want to offer a safe space at all, let alone offer what people want even more: to pretend they are having real discussions, but then I somehow make it a safe space for them while they feel brave...
If I end discussions honestly by saying the other person isn’t good enough, people don’t like that and will try to debate how good they are. That will get into meta discussion criticizing their morality, scholarship, thinking methods, etc. This will bother people more than the initial, impersonal discussion of some topic like capitalism.
If I end discussions honestly by saying the other person doesn’t want to discuss, they will deny that. They are open-minded, super rational, and want truth-seeking discussion, they claim... (Not everyone but this comes up a lot with the kind of people who’d even begin a discussion.) So then I have to call them dishonest, go silent, or else this method of ending the discussion didn’t work. Plus I don’t like the possibility that I misjudged someone and I’m ending a discussion with a genuinely better person just because I thought I saw some subtle signs something was going wrong, and then I assumed they weren’t good enough to discuss the potential problem openly.
It’s really hard to tell how upset people are or aren’t about discussions because they put a lot of effort into hiding it, and they lie. This is especially true over text so their voice tones and facial expressions don’t give them away. And even if they type out some angry stuff as an initial reaction, they can delete it before sending their message, so I never see it. And I hate to judge people as bad without it being really clear. I’d rather give people the benefit of the doubt ... but then when I treat them as a decent person that actually doesn’t go well for them if they aren’t a decent person...
Suggestions? (BTW even asking for suggestions is dangerous. It encourages people to make suggestions which I've already thought about way more than them. Then they can get hurt when it turns out their suggestion isn't valuable, and I respond with criticism instead of thanks. But it's also awkward and problematic to try to say "Really good suggestions?" And if I say that, then it's even more risky for someone to make a suggestion, because then they're claiming their suggestion is really good by posting it, and then they look even worse when they receive criticism and it turns out to be crap. Similarly I've run into problems asking people for advice, tips, etc, because I'll go ask someone who thinks he's good at something which I think I'm bad at, and then when we talk it turns out I'm way better at it than they are, and I also have much higher standards, and that's embarrassing for them. And people don't want to face realities like this.)
More thoughts:
I only share criticism and comments in hopes of positive reactions – e.g. the person learning something or pointing out a mistake I made. But I've realized that no one else thoroughly likes criticism, and therefore they'll all break if I openly, honestly and persistently share my best ideas (including challenging dishonesty I spot, while optimistically thinking they'd want to find out about and try to solve the problem).
This situation sucks for me. I don't want negative interactions. People are both bad and dishonest about communicating what would and wouldn't be a negative interaction. I have to guess a lot. I like discussion but I strongly prefer to focus on thinking about the issues instead of managing the fragility of others. But people find rational, critical discussion overwhelming and unwanted, so normally I hold back over 90% of what I could say.
People are less threatened by educational material outside the context of a discussion, especially when it has severely inadequate guidance for applying it to their own lives. I can speak more freely in that kind of context, without hurting people, because it doesn't make much difference to people.
This is an open, large problem which no one else is helping with much. DD ran into the same problem with the world and it broke him even though he at least had one person (me) available to speak openly to without having to shelter me.
https://www.apple.com/apple-events/september-2017/
lame solar power virtue signaling.
97% watch customer satisfaction. so high!
the activity rings stuff is for manipulating passive people. i don’t use them.
watch OS 4 doesn’t look like a big change.
watch series 3 has built in cellular. big change. could go outside without your phone!?
watch to watch phone call to girl on paddle board out in the water was neat. apple has a good history of live demos (not pre-recorded), like when Steve called starbucks for real to demo the iphone.
umm they have a no-cellular series 3 watch you can buy. eww lol.
i wonder if i want to upgrade (i have the original sport). my original guess was i’d upgrade to series 4, but cellular is a big thing. but when do i actually want to leave my phone behind when i go out?
for lots of people, they listen to music when out, and they can stream that. but i listen to books. i need voice dream player or speedup player, plus enough disk space for the files. i doubt i’ll be able to do that with the watch right now.
so my initial thought is don’t upgrade.
apple tv update: i don’t really care. i don’t use a TV. and i don’t want to unless it reaches feature parity with VLC + bluetooth keyboard.
Sky game looks pretty neat. i can get it on iPad though.
Tim talking about iPhone now. i’m excited to find out if i want to upgrade my 6s! if i don’t, i expect to upgrade in a year instead.
iphone 8 gets true tone display stuff and some better aluminum and glass.
6-core cpu with 4 low power cores. better gpu and camera ofc. i don’t use camera a lot.
still have to get a plus (which i don’t want cuz of its size in my hand) for dual camera.
better video compression is good. some of that stuff will apply to desktop video creation.
Augmented Reality stuff is kinda neat but doesn’t look that useful to me currently.
the AR game strikes me as motion controls (like Wii) but even worse. it’s way more precise and fast and better to control games with buttons than waving your hands around or walking around a table. games like this aren’t very serious/competitive.
WIRELESS CHARGING. uhh there wasn’t much info on when/where i’d actually be able to use it.
64gb/256gb versions. price of 256 not mentioned. i wouldn’t get 64. i think it’s good they got it down to 2 options and the bottom one is good now. the minimum was 16 for a long time which was pretty shitty even for non-power-users.
don’t think i’ll buy this. no killer features. could just wait a year, no big deal.
IPHONE X!
edge to edge screen. glass back. dual camera. super retina display. OLED. might buy this!
home button replaced with gestures and Face ID.
i find find touch ID doesn’t always work for me and i have to type my PIN sometimes, which i don’t like that. Face ID might be more reliable for me, especially when sweaty from exercise.
heh @ emoji based on your own facial expression. ppl sure like facial expressions. (and many of them want me to use a webcam in my videos.)
+2 hrs battery life.
AirPower is a wireless charging mat that you can set your iphone x and apple watch 3 on. hm but i want to charge my watch by my bed and i more often charge my phone by my computer. so where would i put the charging mat?
ok so the BIG features i’d actually buy this for are the screen and face ID.
64/256 gb. price 999 and ??? for 256, they didn’t say it again. fuck this i’m pausing the video to look it up. 1150 for 256gb iphone x. same extra $150 for the 8.
well that’s not bad. there were rumors it’d be higher. that’s like the bottom end of the speculation.
that’s interesting cuz i thought i remembered paying only $100 to get a 256gb 10.5” ipad pro. so i checked. it’s 650/800 now for 64/256gb, but it was 650/750 on launch. they raised the price of the new ipad pros! so the 64->256gb is the same standard $150 used on iphones. (i’m a little disappointed cuz, remembering the price of that upgrade for ipad, i thought it might be the same on iphone!)
to check my memory, i found this article and you can see the 749 price in the picture:
https://www.cnet.com/products/apple-ipad-pro-10-5-inch-2017/preview/
wow! apple really rarely raises prices of stuff after launching it. like nothing else comes to mind for them ever doing that (except raising the price in some other other currency cuz of exchange rates).
so 1150 primarily for the larger screen while the phone is only a tiny bit bigger. secondarily, face id, faster cpu, better camera, 256gb (i have 128 now but my phone isn’t full, i feel confident 128 is ok for me for another year). i wonder if i’d get more RAM. looking it up... 6s has 2gb. iphone x has 3gb. (iphone 8 is 2gb, 8+ is 3gb).
https://thenextweb.com/apple/2017/09/11/apple-doesnt-think-iphone-x-needs-ram-probably-right/
apparently the RAM is also 10-15% faster.
hmmm idk about buying it. post your thoughts in the comments!
I made a new screencast (82min) where I try to parse sentences from the first exercises in Leonard Peikoff's course, Principles of Grammar.
I don't really know what I'm doing, so you can see how I handle things I'm bad at. I stay calm. I'm pretty persistent, though I'm also willing to move on without knowing everything perfectly. I'm not afraid to make quick guesses, get things wrong, and correct them. The main purpose is to think about the material before hearing the right answers in lecture 2. I want to get some stuff wrong first and be corrected so I have some thoughts to relate Peikoff's explanations to.
Watch me make mistakes and be confused, which isn't scary or painful. Ignorance shouldn't be an embarrassing secret to hide! I'm not making a fool of myself; it's not foolish to go through a learning process; you should actually be trying to learn and practice all the time.
I'll learn the most from feedback on these unrefined thoughts now. I'd learn less from doing the whole course with no feedback, then asking for criticism afterwards.
You may also learn something about grammar by watching. If that interests you, I'd suggest getting the course first, listening to the first lecture, then trying the homework yourself, then watching this video.
I enjoyed using my new Apple Pencil for this video.
Update:
I published my notes on the grammar course! Learn about note taking or grammar! Get help understanding the course! Pay what you want pricing!