metacreation

ty People who hear about Rand for the first time can still dislike her writing style or her 'interview personality' after looking her up. And that's fine; even if you agree with her ideas 100%, you don't have to force yourself to read novels or essays you don't enjoy. I personally was immediately impressed by Rand's writing when I came across it about 8 years ago with The Fountainhead and loved everything I found after that too. I had not come across any information about her before then. But I suppose I don't know what proportion of people in general would have that response and what proportion would choose to dislike her, and that's part of deciding what approach to take. I expect that second-handers that look for bloggers or other media personalities to make their opinions for them would generally dislike her because I think that the majority of public opinions about Rand are negative, and I also expect that people like that would make up a substantial proportion of people. Of the people that come across her and choose to dislike her interview personality or ideas very quickly, I'm doubtful that there's going to be a high success rate in changing their minds. But I don't know the statistics. Suppose 80% of people are second-handers who dislike her immediately and 20% are not and are open to her ideas, I think you'd have a drastically better success rate focusing on introducing the 20% to her ideas. If you suppose that 80% of the 20% can be convinced of Oist ideas, and a 20% of the 80%, then it's even in terms of output (16% of all target people are affected by each strategy). But the negative impact of the 80% of the 80% (64% of the total) possibly spreading more negative misunderstandings would make targeting the open-minded 20% more effective. If it's instead a 50% success proportion with the second-handed 80% then, even with a 100% success rate on the open-minded 20%, it would overall be much more effective to target the message to the 80% (with 40% of the total population convinced vs 20% by targeting the open-minded). In conclusion, there's some audience research needed to get an idea of which strategy is most effective before heavily committing to any specific strategy.

Beginner as in an on-and-off hobbyist designer for 25 years while doing other work, and now focused on becoming a full-time professional game designer.

I agree. Another area is gaming. I'm a beginner game designer (mostly using C# and the Unity game engine) and I'm interested in creating games that feature Oist ideas. I think roleplaying games in particular would be a good place to attempt a new work based upon Oist ideas, as they revolve around giving the player choices (if very limited choices) and characters they interact with which could be a good way of introducing Oist ideas (in a non-player character who acts upon them, and choices the player can make some of which are in line of Oism). Then the choices the player makes in ideas they act on and characters they interact with could reach their natural conclusions.

I agree that it's better to market the philosophy than the personality in a general sense. But I don't think it's worth marketing to people who dislike her as a person or find her writing style obnoxious (I wouldn't call these people "non-fans" though as it's too broad a term, maybe "opponents" or "detractors"). I think marketing Oist ideas to people who don't know anything about Rand is a better option, as it wouldn't have the fundamental "road bump" of their preconceptions against her.

Greetings I first came across Ayn Rand a few years ago and have read quite a lot of her books now. It sparked my interest in philosophy in general and I've read others as well since (notably Mises and Popper). Learning about Oism really changed my life and I've had a lot of work to do (and a lot more work to do) integrating my mind. I'm now at a stage in life where I have freedom to make whatever changes I need to, and I came here while looking for places to meet and discuss with others on how to live a good life to be better informed for the life choices I have ahead. My other interests include maths, programming, games and AGI. -MC