Harrison Danneskjold

I think that's a very good question. You're totally off the mark on this specific thread, as I outlined above. But it's still a good question. Is that struggle for life irrational? Put it another way - what is the relation between that struggle for life and the struggle for true knowledge? Well - yes. Not to get too far off the point but notice the difference between the treatment of such a "closed" philosophy and how we view physics, or any other field of human study. I can't remember quite where (it may have been the ITOE or the Logical Leap) but I've read an Objectivist philosopher's explanation for why Einstein didn't really "disprove" Newton; how Einstein's equations of motion are an expansion on Newton's (and incrementally closer to the facts of reality, in their details) but they aren't really a refutation of his work, any more than the full text of a novel is a refutation of its summary. This is strikingly different from Peikoff's description of the body of knowledge we call Objectivism. What a Libertarian sentiment. Well, yes, but we have to try to act a bit like silicon chips if we want to reason properly and accurately. That's not always easy for us (fleshy meat-brains don't automatically behave that way) but that is what good reasoning looks like, and that's why we developed things like syllogisms or the scientific method. I can't automatically divide 117815117 by 315, the way a calculator can. Biological brains don't work that way. If you give me some blank paper and some time, though, by choosing to adhere to a certain method I can eventually compute the correct answer. So it is with reason. Yes, but individual cells do not philosophize. In a very technical and restricted sense, yes, but you seem to be taking this in directions that aren't justified by that. Technically, yes, consciousness (including all thoughts, feelings and reasoning) is what brains do. There is overwhelming evidence of that truth and zero evidence for any disembodied thinking thing, as detached from the brain. And brains are made of cells. In a broader sense, if you asked me what E=MC^2 means and I handed you a video of some brain cells firing, you would be very confused. Even if you knew exactly which brain cells were firing and how the rest of Einstein's brain cells were arranged (which would not be the same as anyone else's arrangements) there is a sense in which the meaning of E=MC^2 still has nothing to do with brain cells; its meaning has to do with energy and matter. Does it? Again, I see what you're getting at and, again, it's true in a very strictly limited sense that the laws of physics give rise to the laws of biology. But if we taught freshman biology courses by handing out physics textbooks and telling the students to figure it out, I don't think a single student would ever pass. So you're already stretching that very limited sense of that truth with the term "explains".

What do we mean by "rational goals"? In the first place, although it is true that the act of reasoning takes effort and is rarely (if ever) undertaken without some underlying emotional valence, this cannot be taken to mean some sort of limitation or flaw in reason, itself. It suffers from the very same problem as determinism. If it is true that beliefs can only be justified by reference to the facts of reality, and if it were true that our beliefs were predetermined by forces beyond our control (such as drives, libido or the passions) then we could never justify any belief, including that one. The very concept of "knowledge" implies and requires that we are free to choose between various beliefs, regardless of our feelings - and any proposition which abolishes that possibility thereby refutes itself. I believe Aristotle pointed this out but I'm not 100% sure of that one. It's been a while since I've gotten into this stuff in any real depth; please don't quote me on it. In any case, although it is true that we usually care about the things we reason about and although it is also true that we all have feelings (which may, from time to time, make it more difficult to reason properly) reason is in the service of truth. Anything else defies the very concept of "truth" and must therefore be immediately discarded. In the second place, is it irrational to serve the libido, id, drives or passions? This touches on Hume's is/ought problem (which most modern academics do, indeed, accept uncritically) and I think Sam Harris demolishes it beautifully in about twenty minutes. It may seem a bit off-topic (he's discussing "morality" instead of "rationality") but for Rand the moral is the rational and the practical. A man's rational faculty is his moral faculty. It is not irrational to eat food on a daily basis. Sure, it's not a consciously justified policy for most people, but if they were to sit down and form a conscious strategy about it they'd probably end up with the same one their bodies had been urging them to act on anyway. Now, there are urges that people act on which do not end up helping them in the long run. Drugs, promiscuous sex, eating disorders, etc; one doesn't have to look very far to find such behavior. Is a rationally considered thought process the hallmark of such self-destructive impulses, though? Or is it the other way around?

The number of companies involved is not the problem; the only reason I mentioned the number of companies involved was because you were mocking the very notion of collusion between big tech and big pharma. I don't think that, in itself, is a problem at all. The problem is the suppression of speech, regardless of the number of companies involved in that suppression. It'll be very interesting to hear you attempt to justify that. I've been thinking about how this applies to newspapers with clear editorial guidelines. I think that's the steelman position in favor of controlled speech, isn't it? If there was a newspaper which paid its contributors for their articles and only accepted articles from a clearly Marxist viewpoint, although its Marxism would be gross, it shouldn't be illegal. And perhaps that is the best way to think of any Tweets from 2020 to 2022 - as excerpts from a dirty, collectivistic rag. And if Twitter billed itself as just another dirty rag then I would actually have no problem with it (at least no more than I do with The Huffington Post, The Guardian or any other dirty rag). HOWEVER: Is the product "people talking to people"? If that is the product then preventing certain people from talking to people depending on the ideas they hold is pretty fucked up on many different levels. It's a bad business practice, in addition to being morally wrong and gross. As much as I dislike the publisher-platform distinction this does seem to be the difference between when the product is a limited number of viewpoints from a select group of people and when the product is just "people talking to people". Suppressing good ideas from the former is bad but suppressing any ideas from the latter is a whole new kind of bad. And note that I'm talking about ideas, here (just as Twitter was); not the way in which those ideas are presented. We're not talking about whether these ideas are outlined in a clear and concise way or whether it's just some jackass shouting incoherently into the void; we are specifically talking about the content of what's being said. And that is specifically what makes this such a fucked up thing for Twitter to have done. Yes, it is each individual's responsibility to decide in which situations it's appropriate for him to attempt to share his ideas. Totally. But again, we're not talking about "hostility" or "abuse" (which would be the manner in which those ideas are expressed); we are specifically talking about the content of the ideas which are being expressed. Do we suppress certain specific ideas on OO? Do you think this forum (which is a place for "people talking to people") would be a better forum if we did that? Let's try out a little thought experiment. Let's say that you were a moderator on OO and the FBI contacted you to say that there's probably going to be some Russian disinformation to the effect that Twitter is working together with Pfizer to suppress speech which cuts into Pfizer's bottom line. Let's say that this made quite an impression on you (it's not every day the FBI contacts a guy to personally request his help in preventing international counterintelligence attempts!) and so, when you saw someone on OO declare that Twitter and Pfizer actually have been doing precisely that, you didn't respond "LMAO where's the evidence"; you simply deleted the post and made sure to delete any subsequent posts which attempted to suggest any such thing. If we then learned that this was actually the truth all along, would you be completely responsible for suppressing the truth? Maybe you'd bear some responsibility; sure. But if it also became public knowledge that the FBI knew all along that they were feeding you some bullshit, would you still bear full responsibility for that suppression? Let me ask you a simpler question. Let's put that one aside and just think about something else for one second. What kind of investigation requires the suppression of somebody else's speech? In what way could that ever conceivably lead to the solution of any sort of mystery? *sarcasm* I don't know. Who can say what sort of misinformation might have proliferated if all the details had been immediately made public on day one? The resulting confusion probably could've hurt people. *end sarcasm* I mean, do you agree that it is morally wrong to attempt to decide which ideas aren't worth allowing some third party to even be exposed to? If not then there's nothing much in the Twitter files and the manner in which they're being presented shouldn't really matter, because the files themselves do not matter. If so then the manner in which they're being presented does matter - and so does every other thing I've mentioned thus far. That is unironically true. Probably the only thing in that post which I agree with, but I'm 100% with you there.

Um - yes? The dude has already had a lasting impact on the world we all live in, today (I assume you're familiar with PayPal?) and he's spending most the remainder of his time trying to further shape the direction of that world - not by coercing anyone into anything at all, but by building many different private companies in order to drive our technological progress further than it otherwise would've gone. SpaceX alone has single-handedly revitalized an entire industry which had decayed to the point where we are no longer even capable of sending men to the moon. I guess I'll have to track down whatever Yaron Brook recently said about Musk but if Elon Musk isn't what a modern-day Hank Rearden or Ellis Wyatt look like then I really can't imagine who would - except that I can say that none currently exist at all. The government DID try to force everyone to get the COVID vaccine; it would have done so if the Supreme Court hadn't struck it down. Yes, the conspiracy theories are pretty weird (it'd be a pretty significant technological leap forward if we could build microchips that'd fit through a syringe needle) but I don't believe it's any of the government's business what I do or do not inject into my own veins. Have you forgotten when they outlawed work because of COVID? That would've been the same time when they cheered on rampant lawlessness, looting and burning while simultaneously maintaining the abolition of work. That also would've been the time when Elon Musk tweeted 'I'm breaking this law and opening my factories back up. I'll be in my Tesla factory if you want to arrest me'. If that was born of whim-worshipping then I can only hope everyone else is capable of a little bit more of it, because there was little enough of such defiance that I'm fairly certain they will get away with it next time! I'm sorry. I am still very pissed off about 2020 and I think I have a goddamn right to be. Which part of the fuss, precisely, do you not understand?

To be clear, I think that Elon Musk is the closest thing I have ever seen to a walking, breathing Randian Hero. That matters to me. I would follow Elon Musk to the gates of Hell if he ever asked me to, and I'd thank him for the privilege afterwards. I would agree that this cooperation wasn't deceitful or manipulative in a way which should be illegal. It's annoying and gross, certainly, but nobody's rights were violated. I don't want to get bogged down in the difference between "collusion" and "cooperation" (since "collusion" itself smells to me like a collectivist term for "bad cooperation which we should hate") so for the purposes of this post I'll be using them interchangeably. Firstly, though, the "collusion" bit started because of an article which you couldn't take seriously because it suggested "collusion" between big tech and big pharma. I pointed out that if there is any such collusion it'll come out in the Twitter Files and, sure enough, that precise thing happened a week or two later. Does your original dismissal of that article still stand for the same reason? Secondly, I don't agree that the suppression of speech can ever be a good thing. To be clear, this suppression of speech is not censorship (not when it's only between Twitter, Pfizer and Alex Berenson) but it is still a suppression of speech. And whether that speech contains good ideas or bad I think it is always worse to have it suppressed. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, isn't it? When you suppress the expression of bad ideas you only convince those who hear them that they hold some special legitimacy, since you've shown that you're unwilling to discuss them openly. You make them look stronger than they are - and that's assuming that you know which ideas are good or bad. Deciding which ideas are bad enough that they aren't even worth hearing is an inherent responsibility that each of us has to himself. It would be one Hell of a thing to attempt to take up that responsibility for another if they offered it and downright immoral if they didn't. I like science. This is part of why I'm one of Elon's Musketeers and also why I routinely engage with flat-Earthers and young-Earth creationists: because sunlight is the best disinfectant for bad ideas. But shutting down the expression of bad ideas is the opposite of communication, and doing so in which the way Twitter has been is the opposite of scientific thinking. Like any local Heroin addict, it should not be illegal, but it is far from a good thing. No, it is censorship. You do not catch criminals by suppressing what they have to say. Far from it; a remarkable number of criminals have been caught, over the years, by simply buying them a drink or two and listening to the stories they tell. Even if the suppressed accounts in question were actually outlets for legitimate Russian disinformation (as the FBI full well fucking knew they weren't) the practice of silencing such accounts would be far from a clear-cut moral good. The Federal government instigating a company into the suppression of its own citizens' speech IS censorship. It's censorship, and censorship is the bright red line at which a violent revolution (according to Ayn Rand) becomes justified.

Maybe so. There certainly is an unnecessary risk I'm taking by remaining unvaccinated; it's an extremely small risk (proportional to the danger of COVID, itself) but it does exist and I do have the power to remove it. So it may ultimately be a selfless thing to do. That's not how I frame it when I'm thinking about it, though. The terms I consider that decision in are the same ones which went through my mind when I kept asking my employer to permit me to break the lockdowns and return to work: that no hazard can ever be worth the renunciation of our own freedom. Maybe I'll change my mind if nobody dares to utter the words "vaccine mandate" for a year or two.

Maybe it's a security thing. It does look a bit weird, though, doesn't it? I mean, since things like Photoship exist I don't think it exactly proves anything conclusively at all. But it does look a bit odd. And what would it prove if some of Joe Biden's speeches were actually given by a body double, instead of the man himself? I could see that being a reasonable security precaution (there are plenty of people who'd like to assassinate him) and maybe that could explain why some days he seems capable of speaking in complete sentences, and some days he doesn't.

Yep. In August of 2021 Alex Berenson retweeted "It's now clear #COVID19 natural immunity is superior to #vaccine immunity, by ALOT. There's no science justification for #vax proof if a person had prior infection" which had originally been tweeted by Doctor Brett Giroir (who is, in fact, a proper medical "doctor"). On August 27th of 2021 Doctor Scott Gottlieb (who is both a proper "doctor" and a Pfizer board member) brought it to Twitter's attention, writing in an email: "This is the kind of stuff that's corrosive. Here he draws a sweeping conclusion off a single retrospective study in Israel that hasn't been peer reviewed. But this tweet will end up going viral and driving news coverage." This prompted Twitter to prevent anyone from ever liking or retweeting what Giroir had said. The word for the kind of activity this represents, between Pfizer and Twitter, is "collusion". Obviously the collusion between Twitter and Pfizer is not the same kind of thing as the collusion between Twitter and the American government; it's not going to end Western Civilization or anything. But score one more for the conspiracy theorists. I agree about the relevant details. I don't know what reason there is for not dropping them all right now but I also don't know how to simultaneously run five or six companies without destroying them all (I probably couldn't even run a single one). If Elon Musk says that this is how you build a revolutionary new kind of rocket then I'll take his word for it, and if he thinks that this is the way to make the Twitter files public then I'll take his word for that, too. And I would bet actual money that all the naysayers who've been making fun of him over Twitter will suddenly fall very silent about it within the next year or two, and pretend to forget that they ever had anything negative to say about it at all. Ignorant herds are fairly predictable like that.

Actually, I specifically said that the shot-for-shot recreation would be without the permission of the IP owners. And I said that for a reason - because permission is the entirety of the difference between what makes "distribution" okay but piracy not okay. We can transfer that to covers of old songs if you like. Is it a violation of IP to cover a recently-composed song which somebody else wrote without their permission? It may currently be legal (I'm not sure) but should it be legal to benefit from the mental labor of their composition without their permission? I won't ask if it's a violation of IP to perform Hamlet without permission. Shakespeare has been dead for a while, now; so I know that's a moot point. Would it be a violation of IP to recreate Squid Games without the permission of the authors? @KyaryPamyu said that creating a shot-for-shot copy of a movie was valid "reproduction" instead of "distribution" as a way to demonstrate the difference, and that "reproduction" is not a violation of IP. I thought this was a pointless red herring (both false and also largely irrelevant to the question) which is why I asked in more detail if "reproduction" WITHOUT THE AUTHOR'S CONSENT truly doesn't constitute IP infringement. You were the first one to mention replicators.

I don't believe so. In this analogy COVID is the peanut butter, yes? And it makes sense that we properly label products which contain peanut products and separate them from those which don't, because a small number of people could die from eating peanut butter - just as a small number of people could die from catching COVID. So far this analogy makes sense to me. Now how would keeping ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE locked under house arrest for fear of peanut butter tie into this analogy? It's even worse than banning all peanut butter; it's the total abolition of everybody's lives for fear of peanut butter. I've mentioned that I wouldn't mind a forced quarantine for ebola or rabies FOR THOSE WHO'VE BEEN PROVEN to actually be carrying these diseases. This is not only because these diseases are much more lethal than COVID but also because I think there are serious ethical problems with applying coercion to someone for something hypothetical, which we don't even know them to have. It's the difference between banning everyone who has peanut oils on their hands from manufacturing food and banning just everyone from manufacturing food, just in case. And honestly, as long as you agree that safety is not the only value which matters at all, I see the rest of this as derivative. I'm right about how it applies to the details of COVID (and you're wrong about them) but as long as we agree on the yardstick which should be used you will eventually come around to see that.

Yes, trespassing is a much better analogy for IP than theft. Just as I said that the only questions in a case of trespass are whether you entered the physical boundaries of my land and whether you'd been given permission to do so, in any particular case of alleged IP infringement the questions are precisely what the IP in question extends to and whether or not its use was permitted. Saying that you cannot own a spear is sort of similar to saying that you cannot buy up all of the land surrounding someone else's property and prohibit them from entering your land; it's a claim about which kinds of things can be owned in the first place and what that ownership means. I still haven't heard a good reason why the concept of a Tesla can be owned but the concept of a spear cannot be, but thinking of it as trespassing is already proving to be much more helpful than thinking of it as literal theft.

Yes, but we're trying to dig down past the level of laws to the ethical principles on which are the foundation of such laws. When @KateTheCapitalistsaid: I think she had precisely the right terminology. In the kind of prehistoric societies where the spear was first invented, murder was also extremely widespread (I think something upwards of 10% of deaths seem to be because of homicide) and presumably the concept of law, itself, had not been invented yet. Nonetheless, if murder is objectively immoral then it was also immoral in the paleolithic age. "Rights" are the bridge between the moral and the legal. To say that I have a "right to dispose of my own idea" is not only to say that the law ought to protect that right but also that it is morally wrong to infringe on it. If that's true then, just like murder was already immoral in prehistory, it also would've been immoral to infringe on the IP rights of whomever invented the spear (unless there is some alternative reason why such a concept cannot be owned). Is Atlas Shrugged a concrete? My copy of Atlas Shrugged is a concrete. I can touch it, pick it up, drop it, read it or burn it; it's a physical object which I own. The story of Atlas Shrugged is an abstraction which includes every concrete copy of the book, regardless of where in the world they are or what condition they're in. The story of Atlas Shrugged is less abstract and more specific than 'thinkers going on strike' but they are both abstractions. If Atlas Shrugged were a concrete (as my copy of it is) then there would be no issue here and we also wouldn't call it "intellectual property"; it would just be plain old "property". So ... Would it not be IP theft to rent out the same studio where they shot Atlas Shrugged: Part 2 (the objectively best part 😜), call back all the actors involved, repeat all the same performances and camerawork to recreate a shot-for-shot copy of the original without the permission of the IP owners involved? If I were to copy out the entire text of Atlas Shrugged word-for-word into a notebook and give it to a friend for free (without giving a dime to Rand's estate) would that constitute a legitimate reproduction of Atlas Shrugged? Or would it just be piracy with extra steps?

Why Atlas Shrugged but not the idea of a novel about 'thinkers going on strike'? Ideas are hierarchical, with some being more abstract and some being more concrete. I've heard it said that more abstract ideas (like "a novel about thinkers going on strike") cannot be owned but the concrete ones (like Atlas Shrugged) can but to this day I have yet to hear any clear delineation of where the line between them belongs, let alone any reasons for it. Furthermore, earlier in this very conversation @RationalEgoist also said that the idea of a spear cannot be owned: However, when I substituted a Tesla for a spear nobody seemed to have any issue with the analogy. What, in principle, is the difference between a Tesla and a spear? One of these products is much more complex than the other, certainly, but they are both manmade products which someone, at some time, originally had to invent. Is it that a spear can be tipped with various different materials for the spearhead and still remain a spear? I'm fairly certain that certain components of a Tesla could be substituted for slightly different components and still remain a Tesla. Even if one omitted the big "T" logo on the front it would still be a Tesla. Why can the concept of a Tesla be owned and not the idea of a spear? Where is the dividing line and why? These are questions which do not arise in the case of literal theft. If you steal MY Tesla or MY spear then you have stolen that physical object from me, and there are no further questions about exactly what constitutes the object that I own. Even in the case of trespassing (which @DavidOdden suggested might be a better analogy) such questions do not arise; if I know the physical boundaries of the land which I own then the only questions are whether you crossed those boundaries and whether I'd given you permission to do so. It seems obvious to me that even if Rand was right about IP (which I don't believe she was) it is, at the very least, a thoroughly underdeveloped aspect of the philosophy. Let me ask you this, though. If someone makes a movie and you pirate it, I agree that you've done nothing morally wrong. But if it's a great movie; if it makes you cry and changes your life, shouldn't you find a way to give something (whatever you can afford, even if it's just a "thank you") to the people who made it? If I copied someone else's spear out of my own materials I agree that I have not stolen anything from them. But if that spear allows me to feed my family through the winter then I'd certainly want to share whatever I could with them, and thank them for giving me such a wonderful idea. But I do think it is much closer to trespassing than theft. That isn't to say that it's real and valid (I still don't believe that it is) but thinking of it that way does solve some of the many problems that arise from thinking of it as theft. You haven't established that you can't own IP. I agree with you but nothing you've said thus far has objectively established it. If I were to try to actually establish that I'd begin by outlining what property is and why it matters, and how scarcity is the key feature of any valid conception of property. If scarcity were the defining characteristic of property then we'd be right, but those who agree with IP here will immediately start poking holes in that idea (holes which would have to be considered and thoughtfully dealt with before you could claim to have "established" anything). You haven't done that yet. You've flatly stated that IP isn't real, picked up on the fact that what you're trying to talk about is "scarcity" and are now claiming to have established something. I'm sorry, but this is not a simple or straightforward issue. You're going to have to explain the reasoning behind your point and be ready to give one hundred million well-thought-out defenses of it if you want to convince anybody of anything.

Well, voting does still seem to work in America. Although... Maybe it doesn't in China; I'm not sure. But ni hao xiao ren! In either case it's not entirely relevant to the socio-ethical point about IP rights. Exactly. In her essay about the ownership status of radio waves Rand specifically stated that the fact that such radio waves are finite is the exact reason why they should be considered a form of property. An idea is not scarce or finite; it can be duplicated into as many different minds as you want without pulling it back out of a single one. @DavidOdden might have a point about thinking about IP more like trespassing than theft. I'm not sure if this fully fixes the problem (since land is also a finite resource) but it certainly is a much better analogy than literal theft. To steal an idea is a bit like stealing air. Sure; it's a grammatically correct English phrase, but since neither air nor ideas are scarce it's weird to think of them as something which can be stolen.

And therein is a big part of the problem. Patent and copyright infringement is supposed to refer to the theft of an idea which only occurred to the perpetrator because of the victim. But short of mind-reading technology this cannot be proven, which means that the only sensible alternative is to ban all similar uses of that idea as if they'd been inspired by the original. This whole conversation would be much simpler if we could read peoples' minds to discover the source of any given idea. When I worked at Boston Scientific that was a standard clause in everybody's contract. I mean, if I'd thought of any way to improve their processes I certainly would've handed it over to the company (as they routinely talked about and encouraged) but less because of that clause and more because Boston Scientific is just a great company to work for. If I'd had a similar insight several years later while I was working at Covidien (which had the same boilerplate clause but was not the best place to work) I probably would've quit my job and then sold my idea to Boston Scientific.