Hal

Unless youre mainly wanting to know about the reputation or social life that these colleges have, you'd be best posting what it is that you plan on doing. For instance, Rutgers is well known for having a strong philosophy department (as David said), and so is NYU. But this doesnt necessarily mean that these colleges are going to be top class for other subjects. Princeton obviously has the best reputation out of the ones you listed and is well known for its world class grad school, but whether or not it would be best for your undergraduate degree will depend on what you were doing, and what you wanted to get out of it. Also, is price an issue for you? An education at somewhere like Princeton is going to cost you a fair few dollars, and whether this is worth it will depend on your particular situation.

Well, the idea is that government policies normally reflect social opinion and the structure of society - oppressive laws are primarilly a symptom, rather than a cause. For instance, no Western country is going to pass a law tomorrow that discriminates against people with green eyes, because there isnt a feeling in our culture that green-eyed people are somehow 'different'. But there has historically been a feeling that women/blacks/etc are inferior, and this has manifested itself in law. Therefore, campaigning to change the law somehow misses the point - the real changes need to be made in our everyday attitudes, and then the law will fix itself. For instance, look at the way attitudes towards homosexuality have changed over the last 20 years. People are generally more accepting of gays than they used to be, and this has the result that legal discrimination against gays has largely vanished (outside America anyway). This wasnt primarilly achieved through legal campaigning, but rather by successfully shifting the way that the public perceived homosexuals. The laws here were a consequence of common atittudes (although laws probably do reenforce attitudes to some degree), and changing the attitudes changed the law. I think this is the main reason why feminists try to focus on what they see as oppression in day-to-day life - for instance, in language. Again, theres a cause/effect issue - does having a sexist language help produce social sexism, or is a sexist language simply another manifestation of the historical oppression of women? (for those who think the debate over language is irrelevant, read this). Theres also the idea that popular conceptions of women can result in people still tending to perceive women in certain ways (eg as being primarilly housewives), with the result that women in business are viewed and treated differently than men, and so on. All these things probably do add up, although I'm not entirely sure what it is they add up to. edit: I would also argue that it _is_ oppression if, for example, the majority of people in a country arent prepared to employ black people. You could have a legal system which treated people of all races equally, but this wouldnt be much help to someone if most of society was actively against them. Politics (and oppression) goes deeper than government policy alone - laissez faire capitalism is necessary for a truly free society, that doesnt mean it's sufficient. I wouldnt be prepared to describe a country where a signficant minority of people were being actively discriminated against in everyday life as being 'free', regardless of what political/economic system it had. (sadly, most modern feminists tend to be extremely left wing, but thats another issue) Well, it depends on the type of divide. I think there's an unfortunate tendancy within modern feminism to view every single social difference between men and women as being oppressive, even when this is absurd. The fact that women and men are treated different in some situation doesnt imply that women are being victimised - it could actually be that the men are being disadvantaged. For example, its possible to complain that the myth of women as being caring and nurturing is oppressive, since it tends to cast them in a particular 'motherhood' social role. And while there is certainly a sense in this is true, the same idea also has the consequence that men tend to be discriminated against in legal battles over child custody - the perception of the 'mother figure' as being more important than the 'father figure' is often a factor in deciding custody issues. From what I've seen of modern feminism, this sort of thing is fairly rampant, and imo it undermines their main points by making them appear obviously biased (the "feminists hate men" idea isnt _entirely_ a strawman).

Yeah, this needs emphasising; 'feminism' can mean many different things - there is no one 'feminist' position. AR was certainly a "liberal feminist" in the same uncontroversial (in modern terms) sense as (eg) J S Mill - she believed that women should have the same political rights as men. But she rejected the more radical academic forms of feminism, that the word is normally used to refer to today. The strange thing is, she would probably have agreed with some modern feminists on several factual points - that Western society is patriarchal, that women are somewhat subserviant to men, etc etc. But she would have evaluated them in a very different way - she believed that they were generally good things which reflected natural differences between men and women, rather than cultural problems which required fixing. The main disagreement is the direction in which the arrow of causality points - although everyone agrees that males and females do act and think noticably differently within modern society, they disagree over whether this reflects nature, or whether its a result of the structures of our particular culture.. AR believed that social differences between men and women are a result of natural ('metaphysical') differences between the 2 sexes. However, many modern feminists would claim the opposite - that the idea of men and women being naturally difference is a false narrative which is used to legitimise both the social inequality of women and the oppressive gender roles which we have constructed (similar to how slavery was justified through the narrative that people of slave races were 'naturally different' from the race of slave owners). I think modern feminist study tends to investigate the mechanisms of oppression in general, with the oppression of women really being a specific case (hence the close affinity it tends to have with {eg} Queer studies and various 'race studies'). AR didnt seem to have much time for this sort of thing, since I think she tended to view oppression as being purely something primarilly carried out by the government, rather than seeing it as something that was built into society at all levels, in a 'bottoms-up' sort of way.

Although I'm not familiar with the details of this case, corrupt politicians are a far greater threat to the country than renegade motorists - and sentencing should reflect this. The leniant sentence you propose would in no way serve as a deterrant for others who find themselves in similar situations.

Does this apply to everything, or just fantasy? Whats the moral or intellectual purpose of comedies, such as the novels of P G Wodehouse, or Seinfeld? People enjoy comedies because they like to laugh. Similarly some people enjoy horror novels because they like the feeling of being scared. Deep fear is a very powerful emotion, and to experience it within a controlled environment may be cathartic for some. Is this not purpose enough? For what its worth, I've never particularly liked the horror genre. But I'm not going to condemn those that do.

Well perhaps, but you could say this about anything (maybe if Einstein had went into biology he would have made greater contributions to science than he did as a physicist. Perhaps Microsoft could have achieved more had they focused on telephones rather than computers.). However, given that the internet is probably one of the most important inventions in humanity's history, it seems unlikely that private industry would have managed to do anything as productive with the money - I suppose its possible, but its a fairly arbitrary claim. In general though, I would agree that the market does a better job of allocating resources than the government. The government funding/creating the internet may have worked out well, but theres been countless billions wasted on other projects which havent. My point was just that you cant say every single government initiative is doomed to failure (or doomed to do worse than the market) because this simply isnt true. However, you can correctly say that the government has no right to do these things, regardless of what consequences they might have.

The government could create long-term high paying jobs in our present context by (eg) giving tax breaks to companies which employ highly paid workers, or encouraging companies not to outsource jobs overseas (again via tax breaks or subsidies etc). In other words, by removing restrictions that are currently in place. More abstractly, bear in mind that the internet started as a government creation (DARPA), and this has resulted in a very large number of highly paid jobs. Along the same lines, the state could fund scientific research which was likely to produce highly paying jobs in the future (quantum computing perhaps?). This would obviously involve a gamble. Obviously I'm not saying that the government should do this, just that they have the power to.

Indeed, although to be precise you need to specify a reference frame too, since time measurement will vary with the observer. However, its worth pointing out that the debate over whether time (and space) should be taken as relational or as absolute has a long history in philosophy/science, going at least as far back to Newton and Leibniz who clashed over this topic. When only philosophical arguments are used, both sides seem to think that their position is obviously correct - hence just asserting that "time is relational" is unlikely to convince anyone who intuitvely thinks it is absolute (and vice versa). The strongest arguments that Ive encountered against the absoluteness of time probably come from relativity theory - if time is absolute, then why can 2 people measure different time intervals between the same 2 events, and see these events happening in reversed orders, and so on.

This isnt the same problem, because here you know there are 1 million balls in the bag. Imagine you had no idea how many balls were in the bag, and you draw out the ball labeled #1. You now have to guess how many balls there were. My argument here is that a reasonable guess would maybe be "between 2 and 10", but that this is only justified because we know in advance that people who make ball guessing games arent very likely to put 4 million balls in the bag. If we lived in a culture where most ball guessing games normally involved around 500 balls, then guessing '500' might be more justifable than guessing '10', even if you draw the ball labelled #1. edit: here's a good example - you are told that in the national Turkish lottery last sunday, the first ball to be drawn out of the machine was labelled '#2'. Given this, how many balls do you think were in the machine? Here I would guess '50', because I know that the British lottery uses around 50 balls, and this strikes me as a normal number for a lottery game. In other words, I'm using the prior knowledge I have about lotteries in order to form a reasonable guess (this is the essence of Bayesian inference).

Hmmmm, I think I see what youre saying. If X is the total lifespan of the human race, and P(Y) is the probability of you being born in the first Y years, then for any fixed Y, P(Y) increases as X becomes smaller. If so, this is correct in a sense. Its like saying that if youre choosing a numbered ball out of a bag with B balls, then for any N<B, the probablity of drawing ball N increases as B decreases (theres more chance of drawing '47' when you have you 100 balls than when you have 1000). So the question is whether you can make a reasonable inference about how many balls are in the bag, given that you have drawn some number N. Its an interesting question, and I'm not sure if theres an answer. If I drew ball #43, would I be more entitled to conclude that there are 100 balls in the bag than that there are 10000? Intuitively, it does seem like this should be the case. But lets do the math. Let B be the probability of there being B balls in the bag, and N be the probability of me drawing ball N. We are interested in P(B|N) (the probability that there are B balls in the bag given that I draw ball N). Using Bayes Rule, we have P(B|N) = P(N|B)P(B)/P(N) But the problem here is that we dont know P( - we dont know the prior probability of there being B balls in the bag. Without this, we cant possibly get a figure for P(B|N), hence we arent entitled to conclude anything about the total number of balls in the bag, regardless of what we draw. (edit: to clarify, P( is the probability of there being B balls in the bag, before we draw anything. Ie given that we only know there is a bag with some balls in it, what is the probability of there being B balls?) Now, in real life when it comes to drawing balls, we actually DO have some idea what P( is. If someone randomly asks you draw balls out of a bag, its fairly unlikely that there are going to be 20 billion balls - what kind of lunatic would even own this many balls? And how big would a bag have to be to fit them all? Realistically, not many people are ever going to use more than a few thousand balls. So we can reasonably put an upper bound on B, say B < 10000 and then guess an appropriate prior distribution P( (we wouldnt really have to specify a definite upper bound, we could just choose a distribution where P[b>10000] was quite small). And the calculation we made using this distribution would probably justify our assumption that there are more likely to be 100 balls than 10000 balls given that we have drawn ball #47 But when it comes to esimating the lifespan of the human race, do we have any grounds for deciding what the prior probablity of the human race lasting for X years is? I dont think so - we dont know anything about any other advanced civilisations, so we have no real empirical grounds for saying how long a civilised species is likely to last. And without this sort of knowledge, we cant really justify any choice of prior. So no, I dont think you can justifiably infer anything about the lifespan of the human race from the fact that you are born within some particular period of time. But if we managed to somehow study alien civilisations and find out how long they lasted, this would change. Its an interesting question anyway.

I think your probabilities are wrong. This is impossible to calculate without information about the birth rates and death rates because the answer is indeterminate. For instance, we could have 5 billion people at the start (now), which drops to 1 million next year due to nuclear holocaust, before experiencing exponential growth and working its way up to 20 billion. In this case, your probability of being born within the first 50 years would be fairly low. Alternatively, we could have linear growth for all the way (unlikely), in which case your probability of being born in the first 50 years would be a lot higher. Even with knowledge about the birth/death rates, this would still be a non-trivial probability calculation and may involve solving non-linear differential equations (I'm too tired just now to think properly about this). I dont understand what youre calculating here.

edit: post removed, I misunderstood what was being said.

Good point - it might be instructive to define what we mean by 'wealthy', especiallly since you mention starving artists. Its hard to base things on income alone since a person might be sitting on a large sum of inherited wealth, but I normally wouldnt say that anyone making a 5 figure sum was wealthy (unless they lived in a place where costs of living were insanely cheap). I agree that most people dont need to live in poverty unless they choose to, but not being poor (<$20000?) doesnt equal being materially well-off.

Because despite not placing an especially high premium on material success, I think that reason and virtue have a lot to do with other things I value. The only way to achieve both perhaps, but that isnt the issue here. Anyone reasonably intelligent can become 'materially rich' despite their philosophy and morality. It isnt particularly difficult; just become a generic law school grad/banker and you'll almost certainly be a millionare when you retire. Become rich while doing something you genuinelly want to do is quite another matter however. Well, lets take musicians for instance. The easiest way for a musician to become rich is to make the sort of fifth-rate crap that fills the popular music charts. However, serious musicians will almost certainly find it harder to become rich, since there isnt as big a market for their products - most violin players, composers, and talented indie groups are significantly less wealthy than pop-stars. If youre a musician whose primary goal is to become fabulously wealthy, the best way to do so is by selling out. Academic careers are another great example. Most people working in universities get paid very little compared to what they could make elsewhere. Someone who has a postgrad degree in mathematics, for instance, could choose to become rich by going into finance (quantatitive analysis etc), or stick with a research career and earn very little money. In general, its an either/or choice - professors are not normally rich people. I didnt mention power, and Keating only goes spiritually bankrupt - he is wealthy throughout the novel (as in Guy Francon, Gordon Prescott, and all the other characters who pursue wealth and popularity as primary goals). In contrast, most of the 'good' characters are poor (Roark, Mallory and Mike) - and Roark speaks negatively of people who put money first. Its also implicit in his actions when (eg) he turns down the contract to design the bank near the start of the book, since he feels it would violate his principles. ARs novels are full of stories which show characters contemplating achieving material wealth at the cost of selling their soul - the short story about the fiction writer included at the end of the Romantic Manifesto is another good example.

The first part doesnt describe me at all, and the second is vague enough to describe anyone :/ Also, I suspect that I would pick different colours depending what mood I was on.

I think this is absurd. Theres a good chance that someone who pursues his values will end up being fairly poor - the average scientist (and other academics) isnt particularly wealthy, nor are most writers, artists, and so on. On the other hand, I would think that most people who just want to get money for the sake of getting money, rather than pursuing their values, can generally succeed assuming they are reasonably intelligent - someone who is fairly bright will probably make a good living in the business world, and will likely earn more than a talented research physicist or musician. There's a good fictional example which shows how this works in an extreme case - Howard Roark vs Peter Keating in the Fountainhead. One of the characters pursues his values without particualrly caring about money, and as such he remains poor throughout the novel. The other one wants money for its own sake, and succeeds in becoming wealthy. I doubt that theres any correlation whatsover between {rationality, integrity, morality} and wealth.

Why are we discussing the law; Blizzard weren't threatened with a lawsuit here (or at least that article never mentioned one). The players of WoW have the right to ask Blizzard to provide them with whatever they want, and Blizzard have a right to either grant their requests or deny them. In this case, Blizzard obviously felt that the bad PR they would have received from banning the guild outweighed the risk of annoying some homophobes. Theres no difference between WoW players demanding that a gay guild be accepted, and me refusing to do business with a shopkeeper who discriminates against black customers; its purely a free-market issue. Well, would you want to go to a bar/club where there were no women? Even if you arent openly looking for a partner, its still nice to be able to do some light flirting with people that you could conceivably see yourself dating. I would guess that gay people like to associate with other gays for similar reasons as why, all other things being equal, I would prefer hanging out in a group that contained some girls than one without (both in real life, and in online communities). I assume that it also saves them the awkwardness of asking men whether or not they are gay, especially since this still offends some people.

Well its my position anyway; I'm not entirely sure what Rand would have said and I could be misinterpreting what she meant by 'open-ended'; I dont think she discussed this question explicitly. However, if you dont know the boundaries at any given time, then who does? The writers of the Oxford English dictionary? God?

Concepts arent fully listable because their extension isnt fixed at any particular point in time in the idealised (mathematical) sense you require; concepts are open ended and can have fuzzy boundaries. There are many objects which the average English speaker would simply be unsure whether to classify as 'chairs' or 'table'. Go out and ask 10 people whether a beanbag is a chair, and youll probably get several 'yes' answers, several 'nos', and several "I dont know, I never thought about that before"s. The same thing applies to tables; if I have a circular piece of wood with no legs that sits on the floor, and I eat off it by kneeling crosslegged in front of it, is this a table? Again, different people will answer in different ways. And these are just basic concepts; when you move into more complex concepts, it gets worse. In order to form and use the concept of 'table' or 'chair', I dont need to decide in advance whether every single object in the world is or isnt a table or chair; I'm perfectly free to leave the boundaries open and decide things on a case-by-case basis (or even leave them undecided). All I need is a rough knowledge of the essentials of the concept ("tables are for eating off, chairs are for sitting in"), not an absolute (mathematical) decision procedure which can determine through some application of a formal rule whether or not entity X is a table. Hence talking about concepts being 'fully listable' is misleading; theres no absolute fact of the matter whether a listing of the concept 'chair' would include beanbags or toilets. If you want to equate concepts and sets, youre going to need fuzzy set theory.

Could you clarify what you mean by 'rejecting the idea of reference'? I think that there is a common sense meaning of the word 'reference' where its obviously wrong to deny that concepts/words refer to things. When I make a statement about my mother, I am referring to her (if someone asks me who I am referring to, I can point at her and and show them). When I say that the sky is blue, I am referring in a fairly uncontroversial way to the sky. When a farmer starts talking about cows, he is referring to cows rather than horses. If this is the sort of thing you want to deny, then I think you need to explain what you want to replace reference with, because this saying that 'reference doesnt exist' strikes me as incoherent. If this isnt the sort of thing youre denying, then I think you need to be more specific about what it is youre opposing. I realise that there are more philosophical uses of the word 'reference' which are rather dubious; theres a tendancy within academic philosophy to treat reference as being an almost occult process which stands in need of a formal theory. But denying particular theories of reference is different from denying that 'words refer to things', where the word 'refer' is being used in a fairly standard (non-analytic-philosophy) sense.

Could you give an example of a non-relational property? (bear in mind that in physics, 'mass' is generally defined as a capacity to affect/be affected by objects in certain ways, 'length' is defined operationally in terms of effects on measuring instruments and varies with the reference frame, and so on)

The most insightful discussion of this occurs in ITOE, but theres also a discussion of it in Peikoff's "Analytic/Synthetic Dichotomy" included in the same volume (I would recommend Rand's discussion over Peikoff's though). The main issue here is what it means to say that something 'could have been otherwise'. Rand claims (correctly imo) that this sort of talk implicitly presupposes the Christian worldview, where God created the world one way but was equally free to create it a different way. So the laws of physics could have been different because God could have made them different. And this was indeed the way that the distinction arose historically, with Leibniz using it is theory of possible worlds. The notion of 'logical possibility' just secularizes this; there are many 'logical possible worlds' (ie worlds which arent internally incoherent), but only one of these is actualised in reality (ie God chose to made this one and not those ones) But if we accept that the universe wasnt created, and its existence is just a brute fact, then its unclear (to say the least) how most physical things could have been different. How could the universal constant of gravitation have been anything other than what it is? By what process could there only have been 2 planets in the solar system? And so on. The uncritical overuse of phrases like 'possible' and 'could have been' is a glaring defect in contemporary philosophy (and has been amplified in recent years due to the rise of modal logic).

What does 'possible concept' mean here? You seem to be making a descriptive claim, that it is somehow impossible for humans to form these kind of concepts. But I doubt that this is true, and it would require some kind of psychological evidence to support it. From my understanding of Rand's discussion of invalid concepts, she wasnt intending to make a psychological claim about what it was possible for humans to do - she was making a normative statement about what they should do. She didnt say that it was literally impossible for humans to form disintegrated concepts like "blonde haired people over 6 foot tall", just that doing so was a bad idea from an epistemological standpoint. When we say that a concept is invalid, we dont mean that a person cant form it, we mean that he shouldnt form it because it has no objective basis in reality. edit: you even said in another thread when discussing the concept formation of children that "[the child] will generally classify the world in bizarre ways orthogonally related to the concepts formed by the people around him". I would guess that some of these bizarre classifications are more arbitrary and disintegrated than "blonde people over 5 foot tall", so there is no real question of psychological impossibility here. Isnt this, as bottom, just the statement that the English language does not currently have a single word for 'violent criminal'? In a different language where there was a single word for each of these categories (violent vs nonviolent), I dont think there would be any ground for denying that these were valid concepts. You could make a strong argument that the concept 'criminal' is itself invalid, since the set of actions which you have to perform in order to be a criminal have nothing objective in common - they are grouped together simply because our government has arbitrarily declared that they should be illegal. A tax-evader has nothing in common with a murderer, and a cannibas user has nothing in common with a rapist. And yet, these people are all 'criminals'. The distinction 'violent criminal' vs 'non-violent criminal' probably comes a lot closer to capturing the objective distinction between 'rights-violator' and 'non-rights-violator' than does 'criminal' and 'not criminal' (the majority of 'non-violent crimes' shouldnt be crimes). I dont think that you could given a language-independent account of the distinction between a characteristic and its lack. For instance, we could say that 'humourous' is a valid concept which describes certain types of sentences, but that 'lacking humour' isnt a valid concept because it is just the absense of humour. But this is just a way of speaking peculiar to the English language rather than being anything particularly deep or metaphysical. Language X could have a word, say "chrand" which they use to describe non-humourous sentences. And they would then describe humourous sentences by saying that they "lacked chrand". So, in their language, "chrand" (='not-humourous' in English) would be the predicate, and "humourous" would be defined as being 'the absence of chrand'. Hence speakers of this language would be entitled to say that 'humour' isnt a valid concept, since its defined entirely by the lack of a particular characteristic (chrand). A more realistic example would be something like 'innocent'. Is this a valid concept? Well it intuitively seems so, but only because English happens to have a single word for it. However, innocent just means 'not guilty'. If the English language didnt have the word 'innocent' and we instead used 'not guilty' to describe innocent people, you could make an argument that 'innocence' isnt a valid concept because its just the absence of guilt. This sort of thing is entirely relative to the language under consideration, and whether it happens to use a single word to desribe something instead of the negation of an opposing term.

Its not clear what the word 'refer' means in this particular context. To go back to the memory example, I can make claims which are true or false about my memories (eg that I can remember a red lego car from my childhood), and even develop a theory of scientific psychology which explains how memories are formed. But none of this depends on (or implies) the claim that there is a queer set of objects called 'memories' which somehow live inside a person's head/mind and constitute the referents of this term. The word 'memory' has a use within the English language and it is a useful tool for explaining certain aspects of human cognition. However, to treat it as a term which refers directly to mental objects seems a misleading way of viewing things. The same thing applies to concepts - we can talk sensible about concepts being formed, but to view the concept of 'tree' as being some kind of psychic object which exists inside the human head in a similar sense to how pictures of trees exist inside art galleries is nonsense.

It wouldnt, I was just clarifying a point about Russell, not making a claim directly relevant to your argument. However to go on topic; what does it mean to say that the word concept refers to 'concepts'? Concepts arent objects which exist in the world like trees or dogs; some people might say they are 'mental objects' (whatever that means), but I think its less confusing to see this sort of talk as being metaphorical. Concepts arent really 'things', and the claim that words 'refer' to them in the same way that the word 'tree' refers to trees is fairly dubious. A similar example would be something like 'memories'. Humans certainly have memories, but to say that a particular 'memory' is some kind of object would be strange. A memory isnt a physical object (although the act of remembering certainly has a physical basis), and to say that it is a 'mental object' just amplifies the confusion. Mental processes arent objects in any widely accepted sense of the word 'object'. Im not sure whether this is consistent with Objectivism, but in the appendix to ITOE, AR does state that she finds talk of mental 'entities' to be metaphorical at best.