khaight
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Posts posted by khaight
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Yeah, I had already decided on the book, Ive had my eye on that one just waiting for a while now. Have you finished it yet?
Not yet. I'm a little ways into chapter 2. It may take me a while as I don't have a whole lot of free time. (I still haven't read Winning the Unwinnable War, and I'm a full year behind on TOS.)
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They're a bit YA, but check out the "Great Brain" books by John D. Fitzgerald.
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Dr. Peikoff is currently, in my opinion, the most salient authority on Objectivism. However, he is fallible like the rest of us, so don't be surprised if you disagree with him occasionally (as I do, on minor things), or even frequently. Just be sure that you are thinking whatever the issue through fully and thoroughly. Then make your judgment and do not be afraid to voice it, just back it up with your reasoning.
Yep. Peikoff's endorsement of the Democrats in 2004/2008 was certainly controversial within the Objectivist movement. Peikoff is generally pretty hostile to the Republicans because he views the rise of religion as the greatest long-term threat to freedom in the United States. (We're talking about a time-frame of decades here.) He made his most detailed case for this in his OCON 2010 lectures earlier this month, and it's certainly a sobering argument for a frightening future, and should not be dismissed lightly.
That said, I believe he has endorsed voting Republican in the upcoming mid-term elections "just this once". I agree with this, because I think it's important in the short term to maintain a close balance of power between the two parties. We need gridlock to buy time for cultural and intellectual activism. The important point to grasp is that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are friends of freedom.
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Im thinking about "Unity in Epist. and Ethics" by Peikoff, has anyone completed it?
I've listened to it. Some parts are better than others. The lecture on dual definitions was good, as was the one on whether morality is easy or hard to practice. I was less impressed with the one exploring how everything is interconnected.
Rr perhaps something on induction, does anyone have a hands down favorite, a real must have? the one with the most "ah ha" moments? Some are quite expensive as you know, any suggestions for getting a bang for my buck are appreciated.
At this point I'd say that the most "bang for the buck" work on induction in the Objectivist corpus isn't a lecture at all: it's David Harriman's new book The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics. It's based on Peikoff's lecture course on the same topic, but you can pick up the book for eleven bucks at Amazon.
I'm leaning toward epistemology/ethics more than politics.
Have you listened to Greg Salmieri's course Objectivist Epistemology in Outline? If not, I highly recommend it.
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Amazon said mine was shipped yesterday.
They had a limited number of copies on sale here at OCON 2010 -- I picked mine up bright and early on the morning of July 3rd. It is now sitting on the desk in my hotel room with Harriman's signature on the front page, waiting for me to have time to really dig into it.
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Regardless of how I feel about his policies I do not believe in disrespecting anyone, and by publicly ignoring his handshake shows a sign of disrespect in my opinion.
This treats politeness as an intrinsic value regardless of context. It isn't. There's an old saying that a gentleman is someone who never gives offense unintentionally -- acknowledging implicitly that sometimes treating someone rudely is the correct thing to do. Putting the point bluntly, I do not respect Obama. I don't think he respects me either. So why should I pretend otherwise?
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I'd snub him. I have no desire to treat him (or other politicians of his ilk) as though they are civilized men, when they clearly are not. That said, I'd be polite about it -- not because I think I have an obligation to him, but because I have an obligation to myself.
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So, I've been pondering for two months now since writing a term paper on personal identity about what a strictly Objectivist answer would be to the problem of persistence/personal identity. How do we identify the numerical identity of person X through time? I expect some intuitive answers to come about that some people often come back with, that have been shown to not be a logical basis for what we can call the essential of an individual through time. I actually think a very refined and interesting response flows very nicely from the principles of Objectivism, but I'd like the thoughts of the forum first.
Back when I was a child, it always seemed to me that no matter what topic came up my mother had a book on it. I'm feeling very much like her right now.
The Rand-influenced philosopher Carolyn Ray wrote her dissertation on identity theory: "Identity And Universals: A Conceptualist Approach to Logical, Metaphysical, and Epistemological Problems of Contemporary Identity Theory". If you're interested in the topic you might want to check it out. There's a copy available on the web here.
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More importantly, in an Objectivist society, why should we tolerate such fraud?
I think the question is whether the 'lie' in question rises to the level of a libel or slander. In general we don't want the government to prosecute simple lies because that places the government in the position of backing up its view of the truth with force. Would you want the Obama administration to be able to prosecute a broadcaster who spread what it considered to be lies about, say, the effects of the health care reform law?
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However, it sounds like you are saying that the essential or defining characteristic of "investment" is the financing of future production. Or is it financing of the needs of production? (is there a difference?).
The definition you cite strikes me as a bit vague in its use of the phrase "expectation of any kind of profit". If I buy a government bond, for example, there is a sense in which I am expecting 'profit' -- I expect to get my money back plus some more in the form of interest. But if I'm expecting the government to consume the money I give them, and then pay me back my principal and interest via future taxation, there is another sense in which I am not expecting profit -- I am not expecting any kind of increase in the overall supply of wealth in the economy for which I can trade my money. So a great deal turns on what is really meant by 'profit'. If we understand profit in terms of real wealth, then I think that other definition is quite similar to Rand's -- investment as the use of capital (unconsumed wealth) with the intention of making a profit (producing additional wealth in excess of the capital consumed). On the other hand, if we understand profit in purely monetary terms we can confuse receiving money with receiving real wealth when the two are not in fact the same thing -- particularly under a fiat currency regime.
The addition of intention is a good refinement. It's obviously possible to make a bad investment -- to deploy your savings in a way that you think will produce wealth but which in fact does not. Webvan stock, anyone?
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Of course, this definition's purpose is just to differentiate between investing and speculation.
I'm still mulling over whether investment and speculation are always mutually exclusive.
A stock is commonly known as "fractional ownership of a business." But, the basis or fundamental quality of 'ownership' is 'ability to control.' Yet, owning a stock doesn't mean you can control a fraction of the equity. All you can do is vote.You own the share of stock, and you have total control over it. You can keep it, sell it, use it as security for a loan, bury it in the yard, whatever. One of the things that ownership of a share of stock allows you to do is vote in shareholder elections, and you have full control over your vote. The assets of the corporation are deployed in accordance with the results of the aggregated votes of all the shareholders.
In principle this is no different from any other kind of joint ownership. My wife and I hold title to our house in joint form -- to sell or mortgage it requires each of us to consent. So neither of us has the ability to control the use and disposal of the house on our own -- but clearly each of us owns something. We stand in a different relationship to the house than, say, you do.
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What I am looking to "chew" over is the concept "investment" and then how it relates to "residential real estate" or "owner-occupied real estate" or however you wish to phrase it.
I think you need to start, as Rand implicitly does, with the closely related concept of "savings". Savings is wealth produced and not yet consumed. Investment is savings used to produce further wealth. There are other things you can do with savings -- you can just keep them, for example, and consume them at a later date.
Note that 'used to produce further wealth' may include non-obvious behaviors. Consider speculation -- the process of acquiring a good in the present because you believe it will be more valuable in the future. Depending on the reason for the projected increase in value this may well constitute investment -- speculators shift the consumption of goods through time in exactly the same way that shippers shift the consumption of goods through space, and the process of moving goods to places and times where they are more valuable is productive.
In general, this view suggests that things like owner-occupied real estate and government bonds are not strictly speaking investments, even if they do typically increase in value or return an income stream. 'Increasing in value' is not a defining characteristic of an investment. In a division of labor economy the trade value of a good is a function of what others are willing to give you in exchange, and that can change even if you just stuffed the good under your mattress for 20 years.
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Is it bad for ISPs to favoritise? Ethically, I would say so.
Turn it around. You have a website which is very important to you, and you are willing to pay a premium price to your internet service provider to get a prioritized connection which makes your site load more quickly. Should you be able to purchase such priority service from an ISP? Net neutrality says no. Would there be anything ethically questionable about an ISP selling different levels of connectivity at different price points? I don't think so. There's an implicit egalitarian premise lurking behind net neutrality which is really indefensible once it is dragged into the light.
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I hadn't even heard of net neutrality until I read that article a couple of years ago. I think the title of the movement is confusing because of the word neutrality. Who wouldn't want neutrality, right? That is, until one looks to see what it's all about: an internet neutral to property rights--a "stupid internet."
I really should be more on top of this issue than I am -- I work for Cisco. Creating a smart internet is my job.
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You should check out the Ayn Rand Institute's website. They've got a wide range of information there, from brief textual overviews of the philosophy through to multi-hour video lectures. There are a lot of interviews and speeches on www.arc-tv.com as well. Three good, short, introductory-level books you might want to check out are Objectivism in One Lesson, Capitalism Unbound: The Incontestable Moral Case for Individual Rights, and Loving Life. The first two are by Andrew Bernstein, the third by Craig Biddle. OOL is an integrated overview of the entire philosophy in about 125 pages; it's easier for a novice to grasp than Peikoff's OPAR. CU focuses on the history of capitalism and the Objectivist case for political freedom. LL focuses on the ethics.
You might also want to check out the website for the Objective Standard. It's a quarterly journal that applies Objectivist principles to current cultural and political affairs; many of the articles are free for non-subscribers and PDFs of individual articles can be purchased for less than five dollars each.
If you're going to be picking through Rand's essays directly, the following ones hit many of the central points: "Philosophy: Who Needs It" and "Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World" from Philosophy: Who Needs It; "The Objectivist Ethics" from The Virtue of Selfishness; "What is Capitalism?", "Man's Rights" and "The Nature of Government" from Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.
How much time do you have for your presentation?
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I've been trying to understand exactly what net neutrality is, but every explanation is vague. I know it would bring regulation to the internet, but what kind?
The basic idea as I understand it would be to prohibit internet carriers from providing differential levels of service to different customers. Ray Niles wrote an article for the Objective Standard on this issue: "Net Neutrality: Towards a Stupid Internet" which is available for free; you might want to start there.
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The point is to never hesitate to reduce the interventions of government if you can do it at any given moment in time. To say that "justly, we must gradually reduce program X at Y rate" is fundamentally different than "the fastest I can, in a politically viable manner, demolish program X is at Y rate."
I disagree. If some Plan X is in reality the best way to achieve some life-sustaining end (such as getting rid of Social Security), then Plan X is moral. What you're saying implies a split between the moral and the practical -- justice says we must do X, but practicality requires Y instead.
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It is impossible to do as softwareNerd suggests and go through and take back everyone's property, because the property was thrown into a common pot and redistributed. The original owner cannot be located, and since the present possessor did not commit the crime in question, it can justly be said to be his (as no one else has any higher claim to it). Who has a right to which portion of other people's property cannot be determined in any objective fashion.
I'm not sure I buy this. The government has records of how much money each of us has paid in FICA tax over the years -- it's a key component of the benefit payout calculation. It also has records of the benefit payments it has made to various people. So even on your premises it seems like the information exists to track how much money was taken from each individual and how much was given; from that, it would be possible to reclaim the ill-given benefits wherever possible and distribute the reclaimed funds proportionately to the people they were taxed from. The principle would be that (1) in any case where we could demonstrate that a person received wealth to which they were not entitled, they would be required to relinquish it to whatever extent possible; and (2) the recovered wealth would be returned to taxpayers on a proportionate basis. The result would be that nobody would benefit from past theft, and the victims would be compensated to the extent possible. Much wealth would be lost, and that's just a fact that has to be accepted. (Note that I'm not necessarily agreeing with or advocating this course, merely noting that it seems workable based on your premises.)
To try to phase out social security is to prolong theft.Here's a question. Suppose, for sake of argument, that there were sufficient public support now to start a 30-year phase-out of Social Security, but not enough to halt it cold-turkey. Suppose further that building the public support for a full halt would take more than 30 years. In such a situation, a phasing out of Social Security would actually lead to the full cessation of the program sooner than holding out for immediate and total abolition. Were that the case, would a phasing out be justified? Phasing out Social Security when an immediate abolition is possible is to prolong theft. But what about when immediate abolition is not possible? Surely beginning a phase out is better than keeping the status quo. It reduces theft. The goal is to get rid of Social Security as soon as possible -- but it may be the case, given the beliefs of the American public, that a gradual approach would be a more rapid means to that end.
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Alright, let's examine social security. The person about to retire has been living under this system, expecting, indeed relying, on social security in order to finance his retirement, is complicit in the violation of property rights in the system.
Do you necessarily know that? What about the man who opposed Social Security for his entire life, but was not able to get it repealed until after reaching an age at which he can no longer work to sustain himself? His ability to save for his own retirement was stripped from him by force against his will. (Saying "he should have saved for retirement without expecting any income from Social Security" is non-responsive. Not everybody is productive enough to be able to do that in the face of the myriad burdens imposed on us by the government.) He did not want to rely on Social Security -- he was forced into it. This man is a victim, not a criminal. What, in justice, does he deserve?
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As I said earlier, I don't think it would be a good idea to be a soldier if one didn't like that sort of thing, I think being a stripper for money only would be bad as well.
I think it depends on context. What are the alternatives? If there's a different career that you would love and that paid enough to live on, but you decide to do something you don't enjoy because it pays better, that's bad. But you may not have a better alternative. My parents had a friend who as far as I know didn't have a strong career passion. He wound up building a career specializing in helping airlines deal with regulatory paperwork or somesuch -- he didn't enjoy it, he didn't hate it, and it paid close to seven figures a year. He got his enjoyment outside of his profession, and that worked for him.
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I could only get as far as the top of the third page, where he accuses Rand of fascism. I don't mind reading a different point of view, but there is no point wasting my time on someone who lacks any understanding of his subject, or of fascism, a term he blithley uses as little more than a political epithet to attack Rand.
These days many people use 'fascism' as a synonym for "anything in politics that I don't like". Their concepts are so confused that they literally don't know what they're talking about.
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The basic strategy is to avoid any increase in intervention in any way, and to go for the largest gains we can at any point in time, and always make it clear that our goal is their total abolition ASAP. That is the only logical strategy, I should think, but it seems that many suggest that it must be gradual, even in theory/ideal. Or is that an incorrect impression on my part?
I'm a bit baffled by this. To me, going for "the largest gains we can at any point in time" is gradualism, in that it acknowledges that we aren't going to move from our current situation to laissez-faire in a single massive step. It will be a journey over time, making gradual but constant progress. Perhaps you mean something different by the term? I would agree that we should never settle for less than we can get. There is even some evidence to suggest that asking for more can work better than asking for less -- the eastern European experiments with privatization tended to be more successful when they were sudden and large-scale rather than limited and extended over time, for example.
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I disagree with your approach. From a purely political point of view it would be suicide. NB It's not wrong its just many people, even those who lean toward market freedoms would ignore the validity of the argument that those on welfare have no right to someone else’s hard earned money and revert to knee-jerk emotionalism. Like it or not times are tough and with almost everyone knowing someone who has “fallen on hard times” – regardless of if it was their fault or not – your plan would be stillborn.
It took us many decades to get into the hole we're in now; it will take additional decades to climb out. The metaphor provides the key lesson: stop digging! In political policy terms, that translates into the principle 'no new coercion'. Beyond that, we repeal existing coercive policies in whatever order we can generate sufficient public support for, always tying the repeal back to the underlying principle of individual rights.
You might be interested in the final chapter of George Reisman's book Capitalism, in which he lays out a possible political program for the restoration of laissez-faire in the United States.
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It strucks me that Hugh Laurie as the main character in the popular tv series Dr House has much of an objectivist personality at several regards. I got to be a fan of this series, indeed, and each time I watch it I think of Dr House as a personage who shares much in common with characters such as John Galt and Hank Rearden.
I'm a fan of the series (particularly the first season, which was spectacular), and I have a lot of personality traits in common with House, but he's not an Objectivist. He's seriously emotionally damaged, and suffers from a nasty mind-body split in the form of the reason vs. emotion dichotomy. It's very refreshing to see a TV character explicitly espouse the virtue of rationality, but the character is undercut by the package-dealing of rationality with callousness and emotional immaturity.
Gena Gorlin wrote an article "Mr. Jekyll and Dr. House: The Reason-Emotion Split as Manifested in House, M.D." for the Objective Standard, although the full article isn't available for free.
Justice in Superhero Stories
in Literature
Posted
In light of this, I offer up Mark Waid's comic Irredeemable for study. It examines what happens when the world's greatest superhero (a thinly-disguised version of Superman) finally snaps under the burden of conventional 'hero' morality. The lashing-out that results transforms him into the world's greatest villain. Waid is also writing a parallel series called Incorruptible, in which one of the world's greatest villains witnesses the events of Irredeemable and decides that since somebody needs to step up and save the world for the sake of simple self-preservation it might as well be him.
I also have to mention The Savage Dragon, which features one of the more rational responses to a character discovering that he has super-powers and a desire to fight crime: he joins the Chicago police department.