West

Oh hey. Johnathan13's post that I downvoted got voted back up to 0, and my post got downvoted to -3. Someone who insults expert Objectivists has his comment upvoted, while my post is downvoted by three separate individuals. A person cannot vote on their own posts, so someone besides Johnathan13 thought his post was good, and a minimum of two people besides him thought my post was bad enough to vote down.

Which proves the point I was making when I made my post. Why should a major Objectivist subject himself to coming here when a culture like this has taken root? When a user on this site disagrees with an expert on how to apply Objectivism, they don't try to understand their mistake. They just insult the expert, who knows more than them, for calling them out on it. Peikoff-bashing has become a semi-common pastime in the chat now, because heaven forbid Objectivism have identity and an expert dare tell someone that their conclusions contradict Objectivism.

The chatroom (not the forum) of this site was the last bastion of reason (that I know of) for online Objectivist social sites. Why? Because we were allowed to pass harsh judgment on people who insulted the experts we look to for guidance. When it was shown that you can get into trouble with the administration for passing harsh, deserved judgment on people like that, it set a precedent. The more consistent of an Objectivist you are, the more you have to keep your judgments to yourself in the face of people like that, and the more common they become on this site.

The rule on this site about not coming here to insult Objectivism is what preserved this site for so long. Insulting Objectivism's experts is basically a loophole to that rule. If you're going to allow people to insult the experts, at least allow the better, more consistent Objectivists on this site to stand up for them.

Why don't any Major Objectivists participate in online forums? Observe the cultural state of this and the other online forums for a potential answer.

Ed Hudgins of TAS posts on OL, SOLO and Rebirth of Reason, as did Robert Bidinotto when he was working for TAS. Barbara Branden posts on OL, and she used to post on SOLO until she was no longer willing to tolerate the the owner's abusiveness toward members.




I think that fear probably plays a part in it. I think that they want to limit and control the types of questions that they're asked, and minimize their exposure to informed, scholarly criticism.




I think they fear that the students would no longer be "Students of Objectivism" if they saw their teachers being "taken to school" on a level playing field.

J

I agree with the main point of the post, though I disagree with aspects of the proposed alternative approach (or maybe it's just the specific application?). While I agree that people don't ask enough questions, the alternative of asking too many can be just as bad. In other words, asking question after question of a person won't necessarily lead them in any kind of meaningful direction. Questions are a tool, like any other pedagogical instrument in your tool box. They don't necessarily fit every situation, just as one can't use a hammer on just any old task. Often, as I think is demonstrated in that post, a student* gets into the habit of just thinking of ways to shoot down the question without really thinking about it.

Of course some judgment is necessary to know what questions to ask, but often there are premises that need to be nipped in the bud or exposed. For example, at one point in that post you asked T-1000 if deceiving someone makes it impossible for them to act in their self-interest. He replied that "It makes it more difficult for him to act in his self interest but does not make it metaphysically impossible." The proper response here could be in the form of a question, but it shouldn't be one that keeps things on this highly abstract level (because of course he can just reply with an equally abstract response that shoots it right down, viz. one about Kant's categorical imperative). The problem is, who knows what anyone is talking about there?

There needs to be some kind of examination of the concepts used, and concretes that the concepts are scoping in on. What is 'self-interest'? Why should one care about the interests of others? These questions require a lot of thought in order to properly answer, and it's likely one can get stuck on them for quite a while. That's not a problem though; that's where things should be, especially if someone is new to these kinds of topics. But further, if the discussion seems like it's veering off into uncharted territories or if the answers to the questions appear to be too vague or unnecessarily polemical, then the blueprints need to be brought out to guide the discussion better. Sometimes questions won't work, and the person generally in the 'question-asking' role will have to state why they think a different direction should be taken, then ask if that makes sense to the person.

Just to tie things back together, the Socratic method is situationally useful. It can be used to make discussions more concrete, but like any other tool, it can be used in such a way as to cause further unclarity.




*Though the relationship doesn't necessarily have to be the student-teacher kind. It's a matter of communicating well in general.

I agree with the main point of the post, though I disagree with aspects of the proposed alternative approach (or maybe it's just the specific application?). While I agree that people don't ask enough questions, the alternative of asking too many can be just as bad. In other words, asking question after question of a person won't necessarily lead them in any kind of meaningful direction. Questions are a tool, like any other pedagogical instrument in your tool box. They don't necessarily fit every situation, just as one can't use a hammer on just any old task. Often, as I think is demonstrated in that post, a student* gets into the habit of just thinking of ways to shoot down the question without really thinking about it.

Of course some judgment is necessary to know what questions to ask, but often there are premises that need to be nipped in the bud or exposed. For example, at one point in that post you asked T-1000 if deceiving someone makes it impossible for them to act in their self-interest. He replied that "It makes it more difficult for him to act in his self interest but does not make it metaphysically impossible." The proper response here could be in the form of a question, but it shouldn't be one that keeps things on this highly abstract level (because of course he can just reply with an equally abstract response that shoots it right down, viz. one about Kant's categorical imperative). The problem is, who knows what anyone is talking about there?

There needs to be some kind of examination of the concepts used, and concretes that the concepts are scoping in on. What is 'self-interest'? Why should one care about the interests of others? These questions require a lot of thought in order to properly answer, and it's likely one can get stuck on them for quite a while. That's not a problem though; that's where things should be, especially if someone is new to these kinds of topics. But further, if the discussion seems like it's veering off into uncharted territories or if the answers to the questions appear to be too vague or unnecessarily polemical, then the blueprints need to be brought out to guide the discussion better. Sometimes questions won't work, and the person generally in the 'question-asking' role will have to state why they think a different direction should be taken, then ask if that makes sense to the person.

Just to tie things back together, the Socratic method is situationally useful. It can be used to make discussions more concrete, but like any other tool, it can be used in such a way as to cause further unclarity.




*Though the relationship doesn't necessarily have to be the student-teacher kind. It's a matter of communicating well in general.

Insisting this movie is good by any objective standard is impossible. Insisting that it is good anyway is itself an emotional, defiant, oppositional stance where the opposition is to objectivity.

It is possible to like a bad movie. It is not the case that if you like a movie that must mean it is good.

?? I haven't seen a fly yet on FB. Not even picture of a fly yet, though there is bound to be one.

I'm confused at the point you are trying to make here... are you saying that FB isn't useful to anyone or just not to you? Are you saying that all 600+ million users are wrong, that FB isn't useful to them any of them other than for childish antics?






I've used FB for a while now and it has never chosen a friend for me, I've always chosen my friends myself too.


I see this whole dislike of FB thing as not liking hammers over screwdrivers. It's a tool, there are other tools, and you can choose to use the tools that are most effective for you needs. If FB isn't the tool for you, great, but for other folks it is the best tool for their needs. But disliking the tool because it doesn't fit your needs just doesn't make much sense to me.

Totally uncalled for and outright rude. Also, your reasons against facebook are other people complaining about something you don't understand, and privacy issues over keeping things you can only imagine private. And it is obvious to me at least that this thread doesn't represent all internet users, probably your acquaintance/friend base, and definitely my acquaintance/friend base.
Because I am in the mood to argue over something trivial (and because you were rude): according to internetworldstats.com, (facebook and possibly internet numbers have likely increased since):

344,124,450 estimated population for Northern America in 2010.
266,224,500 Internet users as of Jun 30/10 and 77.4% penetration rate.
149,054,040 Facebook users on August 31/10, 43.3% penetration rate.

No, there are two people posting in this tread, alone, not on facebook.

You presume, and arrogantly insist on it when called on it. Go to Hell.

The easy fix here would be to just sign up for facebook.

I saw it. I hated it. Nicholas Cage makes better movies than this. I was cringing from practically the first moments when John Galt is speaking his absurdly badly written lines to recruit people to his strike. This is invented dialog that Ayn Rand never wrote, and never could have written.

I caught myself staring at the back of seat in front of me several times instead of watching the movie. It was a continual struggle not to leave the theater.

The movie consists of a bunch of rich people talking at parties and in offices. There are more talking heads in this movie than in a submarine movie like Das Boot or Crimson Tide, but I'll grant it has more outdoors transition shots than 12 Angry Men (a movie that takes place entirely within a jury room) so that it can establish that this next set of talking heads is now in a different building. The movie is boring because it has almost no action.

The movie violates basic axioms of movie story-telling such as "show don't tell". The movie opens with a big chunk of narration and is regularly interrupted with fake newscasts throughout the duration. I think Agliaro stole his technique here from Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers. The movie gives no clue why I'm supposed to be rooting for Hank Rearden, he is just another rich guy with a Washington lobbyist until the controversy over Rearden Metal starts being a plot point more than halfway through. Hank Rearden gains the reader's respect in the novel by being a self-made man but there is no hint of any of that in the movie. Also unlike the novel, here Rearden is utterly unconflicted in sleeping with Dagny. An unconflicted Rearden necessarily leaves "the role of the mind in man's existence" an abstraction for politics and economics with no relevance for anyone's personal life. The giant sucking sound you hear is all the drama being vacuumed out of Rand's story.

The ham-handed way John Galt swoops in to steal people is compounded by the screen going to black and white freeze frame picturing the latest person to disappear, augmented with text on the screen. Text on the screen breaks the "fourth wall" and is contrary to Rand's style. That is pure unforced director failure. It also sucks all the mystery out of "who is John Galt?", the audience knows John Galt is the strike instigator from practically the first frame of the film.

Why is Ellis Wyatt announcing to the world that he is on strike in a voice over at the end of the movie? Wyatt leaves a message at his oil refinery he could be reading, but this alternate text he reads comes out of nowhere and is not anything any character in the movie should know about.

I am not criticizing this movie from a purist or fan perspective. It does not matter that Eddie is Black or Dagny is blonde or Dan Conway gets no screen time. What matters is that the movie is inarticulate. The puppet show on screen mocks the sequence of events as they happen in the novel but without any explanation or motivation and as a result no drama. There is no discernible theme, no case being made.

Miscellaneous bitching:
Why is Dr. Robert Stadler speaking with a non-American accent? Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne makes a better fake playboy than the no charisma nobody cast as an unkempt (why?) Francisco d'Anconia. For all the scenes of people eating and drinking I can see the Food Network optioning this movie to play overnights when there is no infomercial to play. The scene of Dagny and Rearden attempting to techno-babble bluff their way through the scene of discovering the remnant of Galt's motor was badly written and badly acted, but the lines were so bad they would be a challenge to sell by any actor.

I hadn't read Ebert's review until I saw the movie myself. I think he was too kind, and even too bored to properly hate this clumsy stupid movie. I can believe he hates Ayn Rand, but since this movie is bad that satisfies him so there is a distinct lack of outrage on his part.

I do not want part 2 or part 3 to be made. If you haven't seen the movie yet, strongly consider not going.

spoiler: Dagny Taggart's last line of dialog is ripped off from a far superior film:

I didn't realize Roderick was a member of oo.net. I've seen his posts on "objectivity" on FaceBook recently via his blog. His most recent one was posted to his blog, but I don't have the link. So, if you are on FB, you can look up his profile and get to them that way. In my opinion, he has introduced too many other thinkers into his latest blog on "objectivity" and that detracts from the primary content. I tried to get down to the fundamentals without going into the history of the concept and who else might have discussed it (including Aristotle). My essay is basically a shortened version of the chapter in OPAR.

*** Mod's note: Merged with a previous topic ***
 
Although i`m a very objective person, and starting my journey towards a more objective life, there is something that I do not agree. I see nothing wrong with wanting to be social and having more friends, even just for the sake of “having more friends”. I don’t see nothing wrong with having friends whose view of the world are different from mine – what matters is if we have fun together and enjoy each others company. For instance: Peter Keating was social, everyone liked him and he could have any girl he wanted (nice!). On the other hand, Roark didn`t have any friends in school, and was lonely like a baby in the womb. What was Roark`s problem? Why couldn`t he go to a party, have sex with girls, and have fun for gods sake? I personally value these things very much, even though there is not a important and serious purpose behind these activities.

Whenever Roark entered a room, people felt uncomfortable, and his face was closed like a vault. What is the advantage of being like that? I don`t see why he couldn`t be social, have a lot of friends, join the fraternity, and still be loyal to his principles, and still stand for his ideas, do you guys get my point? Does living objectively in the context of human interactions means having just few friends who share your views, just sitting by their side doing nothing and acknowledging their existence? That seems pretty boring to me.

In Atlas Shrugged, the playboy life Francisco was having seemed pretty cool and exciting. Why couldn`t someone lead a life with a lot of fun and parties and girls and still be productive and objective?

For instance yesterday I decided to learn to surf. I live In a coastal city and it would be fun to surf. Then I asked myself: why do you want to surf? And I didn`t know a reason, besides: I just want it, it must be fun! According to Roark, he would say: since there is no reason for me wanting to learn how to surf, besides my wish to do it, I wont do it.

I remember a time in the book when Keating called Roark to go out and have a beer. Roark said: what for? For gods sake, what was the problem of going out for a beer????? He would stay home doing nothing anyway!!!!!

I don’t want to realize with 80 years old that I lived my life as a lonely bastard who didn`t have fun at all.

Do you guys understand what i`m saying?

Welcome abroad... I am an avid reading myself. There are tons of books you can read and here are some of my favorites.

1. Harry Potter
2. Power of Now by Eckhart Toller
3. William by Richmal Crompton
4. Perry Mason by Earl Stanley Gardner
5. Autobiography of a Yogi by Yogananda Paramahamsa
6. Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch

I can suggest many more, but not sure if the above list will suit your taste. I read Fountainhead too.

Another update: Following Shea Levy's lead, Rory Hodgson (a former regular on this forum) has also resigned from the OAC program, and encourages other OAC students who are worried about the anti-academic environment of ARI to follow suit, in hopes that they will change their policies. The crux of his concern:

Craig,

I have subscribed to your publication, The Objective Standard, for the last four years. However, I will not renew my subscription on account of your recent denigration of Leonard Peikoff. Below I describe what I consider to be the more relevant facts which led me to this action. However, out of respect for this forum’s policies, I have edited out most of my analysis and all of my evaluations of those facts, which I suspect would get me punished or banned if I included them. If you, or anyone else, wants to see my full argument, you can contact me through my personal website.

1. Does Peikoff provide evidence to support his conclusion?

In your article, Justice for John P. McCaskey, you claim that:



I believe this is your main objection: that Peikoff fails to provide any evidence for his moral condemnation of McCaskey. However, in the email to Arline Mann, Peikoff emphasizes the point that while serving as a member of the ARI board of directors, McCaskey was simultaneously denouncing an ARI-sponsored book that is not only based on ideas formulated by the founder of ARI, but also approved of by him. This is a piece of evidence that Peikoff provides before his moral condemnation in the next paragraph, and immediately before his conclusion that either he goes or McCaskey goes. Yet it is the only substantive part of the email which you do not quote or mention in your article.

2. Should we assume that Peikoff has no evidence?

After claiming that Peikoff provides no evidence, you then write this:



If I understand correctly, here you assume to be true that which you admit cannot be known--because it only exists in Peikoff’s mind. Put another way, Peikoff has not revealed his evidence publicly, and he ignores your private emails, so therefore you are correct in concluding that no such evidence exists. And since, on this view, Peikoff is morally condemning McCaskey without possessing a shred of evidence, he must therefore be acting nonobjectively and unjustly. This is the assumption-based evaluation you make of the man who “fueled [your] intellectual development more than anyone except Ayn Rand.”

3. What does “good reason” mean?

You repeatedly use the phrase "good reason" as perhaps a synonym for evidence. I note that you only use this phrase when referring specifically to Peikoff's alleged non-evidence regarding his moral judgment of McCaskey. At other times in the article, mostly while making general statements, you prefer the word evidence.

For example, you make this general statement about arbitrary claims:



And then in the very next sentence, you make a similarly formulated statement, only it is applied specifically to Peikoff:



It appears that the word evidence suddenly becomes “good reason” when you denigrate Peikoff. Perhaps this is done only for stylistic purposes. But if that is the case, then it seems very strange that “good reason” is reserved solely for Peikoff and appears in none of the general statements.

Good bye,

Sean Green (aka William Swig)

Regarding Craig Biddle's statement on the resignation of John McCaskey. I think it belongs in this thread, since the resignation was over "The Logical Leap." Craig's statement can be found here. I think he is missing a crucial point, and that is that one can take Dr. Peikoff as not only a credible witness, but an expert witness, if one is going to handle this like a trial. What did Dr.Peikoff witness?

"By the way, from the emails I have seen, his [McCaskey's] disagreements are not limited to details, but often go to the heart of the philosophic principles at issue."

Certainly, Dr.Peikoff is a credible and expert witness when it comes to philosophic detection. That we have not seen the evidence ourselves, I think, means that we cannot condemn John McCaskey. But we have to understand Dr. Peikoff as a witness. So, I am most certainly not going to condemn Dr. Peikoff for this supposed injustice. I haven't seen the evidence myself, so I cannot condemn McCaskey; but I also don't have the evidence Craig claims to have that McCaskey is a moral man and an Objectivist in good standing. I know very little about McCaskey, and as far as I know he hasn't written anything about Objectivism, so I don't know his intellectual stature with regard to Objectivism. His writings on Whewell seem to be written from a rational perspective -- that is I don't think McCaskey is a Kantian even though Whewell is -- and maybe it is possible to understand Whewell more rationally. Until I know more about Whewell, I can't say one way or the other.

I do, however, agree with the overall tenor of many Objectivists who want to see the evidence against McCaskey first-hand, but it doesn't look like we are going to be getting that. I do have evidence (McCaskey's review of "The Logical Leap" and his support for William Whewell) to be suspicious of McCaskey, but I haven't condemned him and will not condemn him until I have the evidence first-hand.

Craig Biddle personal statement

I wholeheartedly agree with Craig Biddle on the issue of supposedly "not having enough/complete information to judge" and moral neutrality. (I also personally agree with his judgment.)

When a historian of philosophy discovers a great new insight into his field of study, then yes, he should at a minimum add a large note on his website announcing "The Logical Leap" and Peikoff's course on "Induction in Physics and Philosophy" have solved a very long standing problem in the history of induction. His review on amazon.com gives the book a short shrift as well. So no I won't be supportive of McCaskey until he is more supportive of "The Logical Leap."

I didn't "omit" anything. I was concerned over the fair use of how much of the article I could quote from the SEP, and besides, it's arguments that Whewell was not a Kantian are not in terms of philosophical fundamentals.

As to how McCaskey is supporting Whewell over Dr. Piekoff and Harriman, he is a professor of studies on induction and makes no reference to "The Logical Leap" on the front page of his website. If he was for Peikoff and Harriman, given his background, he would be fully supportive of their efforts and that they resolved the problem with induction. It's shameful that he is not more supportive of those Objectivist intellectuals.

Paul and I published a lengthy NoodleFood post on the facts surrounding John McCaskey's resignation from the boards of ARI and Anthem. You can read it here:

The Resignation of John McCaskey: The Facts

As we say toward the end: "We hope that the information in this post will help others make better-informed judgments of these events. In addition, we hope that discussions of this topic, whether online or in-person, will be conducted with greater concern for the facts, mutual respect, and basic manners than we've seen from many people so far."

Anything not written by Rand is not Objectivism.

This is interesting, and I appreciate the replies to my previous posts. It seems as if some people are reading what I read on Whewell and coming to different conclusions. I basically said: THERE'S A KANTIAN IN THE ROOM! and others are saying: Paleese, he's not a Kantian, he's just mistaken. Even though Whewell seems to take the position that one's ideas control at least our perception of reality, some of you are saying this isn't Kantian. But our mind does not create reality, our physiology does make sensations into percepts, however it is not saying that ideas create percepts, and that is what I am questioning. If our ideas create perception and these ideas are innate, then what about the ideas that we do create as we observe reality? and how would this change our perceptions over time? or doesn't Whewell think this is the way it works? If our conscious mind creates perception, then we have no basis for being objective on the perceptual level without a method. In other words, if our conscious mind of ideas controls our perception, then we are in big trouble without an objective method of perceiving, and Whewell does not offer that in my reading of him. Unless Whewell is rejecting free will and all our ideas are automatic and create perception. But don't you see that if our conscious mind creates perception, then our vision of the world -- our perceptions -- would change as we gain knowledge, and this isn't the case at all. Getting sharper ideas doesn't improve our eyesight or give us super vision. Whewell's position undercuts the whole theory of knowledge, which has to be based on the automatic nature of perception that comes from physiology, not ideas. Ideas do not control, how we literally see the world.

Philosophers have to be taken literally and not figuratively. If Whewell is saying our conscious mind controls perception and perception is our contact with the world, then he is effectively saying that our mind creates reality, which is a Kantian premise.

So, again I lay down this challenge: If you want to defend Whewell as having something rational to say, then the onus of proof is on you to point that out. And if you are siding with McCaskey, and he is supportive of Whewell, then you have to show how Whewell is rational. I don't see it at all, unless one is going to be wishy-washy about the meaning of words. Taking Whewell literally, how is he rational?

Those interested in Whewell, and especially the debate he got into with John Stuart Mill over the nature of induction, may find interesting Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society by Laura J. Snyder, the author of the SEP article. I wrote a review of it for The Objective Standard.

For your discussion about the relevance of an epistemologist's metaphysical views, see especially the discussion on page 131 regarding Mill's idealism. He considered himself a follower of Berkeley -- "To be is to be perceived" -- and defined matter as "a Permanent Possibility of Sensation."

There is now a book that examines the history of the debate over the substance, depth, and breadth of Whewell's Kantianism, Whewell's Critics by John Wettersten. I can't recommend the book generally, but it's a place to turn if you want to study this long-running debate about how Kantian Whewell was and whether it matters.

Also, do not overlook that what makes Whewell so interesting in the history of induction is that he was the most mature in a line of thinkers developing Francis Bacon's theory of induction. Do not overlook Bacon's own Novum Organum and other works in the Baconian tradition, especially those by Thomas Reid and John Herschel.

It's best to see Whewell as he saw himself, as a Baconian struggling with (what we'd call) axiomatic concepts and how it is that perceptions and not sensations are the foundations of human cognition and how it is that new concepts get formed. You'll understand Whewell better that way than if you read him as a Kantian and then try figuring out whether his deviations from Kant were fruitful or not.

John McCaskey Emails

http://www.johnmccaskey.com/emails.html

"For those who don’t know him: William Whewell (1794–1866) was the last major advocate for a conception of induction that gained currency in Copernicus’ time and then dominated the philosophy and practice of science from the time of Galileo and Harvey to that of Darwin and Maxwell. It is too bad a discussion of writings on induction from those times was not part of Mr. Harriman’s book. Comparisons between what the scientists were taught to do and what Mr. Harriman said they actually did do would have helped highlight the new and distinctive features of the theory Mr. Harriman presents."

So, I looked up William Whewell on the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, and here are a few choice quotes:

William Whewell (1794–1866) British Philosopher

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/whewell/#SciInd

"These ideas, which he called "Fundamental Ideas," are "supplied by the mind itself"—they are not (as Mill and Herschel protested) merely received from our observations of the world. Whewell explained that the Fundamental Ideas are "not a consequence of experience, but a result of the particular constitution and activity of the mind, which is independent of all experience in its origin, though constantly combined with experience in its exercise" (1858a, I, 91). "

"Each science has a Particular Fundamental idea which is needed to organize the facts with which that science is concerned; thus, Space is the Fundamental Idea of geometry, Cause the Fundamental Idea of mechanics, and Substance the Fundamental Idea of chemistry. Moreover, Whewell explained that each Fundamental Idea has certain "conceptions" included within it; these conceptions are "special modifications" of the Idea applied to particular types of circumstances (1858b, 187)."

"This is important because the fundamental ideas and conceptions are provided by our minds, but they cannot be used in their innate form. Whewell explained that "the Ideas, the germs of them at least, were in the human mind before [experience]; but by the progress of scientific thought they are unfolded into clearness and distinctness" (1860a, 373). "

The article relates some historian of philosophy consider Whewell to be a Kantian, because of these innate ideas that govern our experience. But the article claims this may not be true because Whewell thought we could gain information about the world using these innate ideas. However, clearly, Whewell is in the Plato / Kantian axis and should not be promoted by any Objectivist. I consider this to be the smoking gun on Dr. Peikoff's dismissal of McCaskey. Since he is promoting Whewell, he has no authority or philosophical credentials whatsoever of serving on the board of directors of The Ayn Rand Institute.

You're groping at straws here. McCaskey was not claiming to be a Whewellian, nor claiming some aspect of Whewell is superior to some aspect of Objectivism.