Clockwork

A Fallacy of Ambiguity, or some kind of Non-Sequitur

The film has good points and bad points, but the project venus part was crazy! I smiled when they explained Project Venus. It's a pie in the sky dream that isn't tied down to reality. It's an enormous blank out. Who is going to build this huge city with its state of the art transportation? Who is going to provide maintenance to it when things go wrong and break down? Who is going to manufacture the parts that are used? Who is going to design it? Who has input to design it? If someone wants to have something that not everyone can have, such as a lavish, expensive suit, then how will he be able to get it? He wont. The project venus guy talks about putting a pendulum in cars to prevent drunk drivers from driving, installing radars so cars cannot hit each other, installing anti-slip pads in the roadways. Who will research, design, build, install these things? Who will run the wastewater facilities, the garbage collection, the water supply system, the landscaping, the street sweeping, the manual labor? Robots? Who will design the robots and repair them when they break? Other robots? Until he can design a machine that produces human thinking - an artificial man that humans can enslave instead of putting chains around other men - he'll be stuck putting the chains around other men and saying it is their duty. He's struggling to envision a society where nobody can aspire - where equality reigns supreme. Where everyone is mediocre and can never rise above it. ...and I just watched the final section of it. Deepen the voice a bit and it could have been Toohey!

Some people think that not voting will make a point. How and to who though? Even if both are terrible choices, one has to be worse than the other. Define by your standards what you judge to be the better (or less worse) of the two and vote for them. Either that or start up a gulch in the mountains. If that latter is taken as your plan of action, send me an invitation.

The problem sounds, to me, like a confusion between the nature of posted prices and non-posted prices. The painters price was posted in his own head based on his usual rate, so DavidOdden might suggest that a comparable scenario would be if he owned a publication with posted prices that he'd taken down momentarily to wipe down or something when a man came in and offered 3x the price for the publication - I'm supposing he would suggest that the 3x price should be cut down to its stated price despite the price display not having been shown. He would still have a posted price that he would feel obligated to uphold, but not if he was a door to door salesman with no established price and an "I'm going to get as much for this as I can based on what others will give for it" attitude that professional salespeople might have - and I'm not intending to use that as a negative statement if it sounds like it. Pardon me for putting words in your mouth, David. I'm only seeking clarity. If I'm wrong, please correct me and call me a profane name.

Kendall, you just HAD to go and upset my mental applecart by making a point like you did in your last post. Jerkface!

I've been thinking a bit about this after reading your answers. I'm trying to form a concept that addresses issues like these and accommodates the following seemingly conflicting points: 1. A rational man is responsible for being honest and rational in his interactions. 2. A rational man is not responsible for ensuring that everyone else acts rationally. The seeming conflict would come in when an irrational person would want to make a deal with our rational man. Imagine if a man came to Roark with the intention of hiring him to design an 8' by 6' shed. Roark thinks that it would be fun, but completely unnecessary, to design something as simple as a shed and knows that his design wouldn't add much to the shed when compared with a store-bought shed at the local Home Depot, the latter shed costing him notably less than a professionally designed shed. There are a few different endings that might violate one of the above points. If the prospect was not informed or did not know he was making a bad decision concerning sheds, Roark would be possibly considered as deceiving him through omitting an obvious truth were he to simply agree to take the job. If the prospect knew about the other sheds and didn't want them, it's not Roark's responsibility to try and convince him to act rationally. If Roark refuses the commission, he's not acting in his own self interests if he wants to provide his designs and services where they are desired. How about this though - If Roark simply said "You should probably do some more research on sheds before you make a decision, but if you'd like to hire me to design you one I'd be happy to take the job." In that sense, he's being honest about the transaction by letting the prospect know that he might be doing something stupid, acting in his own self interest by saying he'd like to do the job, and he's not taking taking the other person's failure to be rational as an obligation on himself. He'd be making the other person aware of his error (being honest), but not going out of his way to solve it (being rational). With this applied to my initial three scenarios, the answers would be as follows: "You may not be as informed on painting services as you should be, but if you'd like to pay me $600 to paint the two rooms I'd be happy to." "Studies have shown that this doesn't work on humans, but if you want to buy it I'll sell it to you. Be aware that once it's been opened it cannot be returned." "I don't think that I'll continue to purchase your product after the free trial. With that being said, if you're offering this deal I'd be happy to sign up." What do you guys think?

In a perfect world an interaction would occur between two people like so: One informed, rational person agrees to make a trade with another informed, rational person to their mutual advantage. The world isn't perfect though, and sometimes several of the above traits aren't included in transactions. I'm wondering what is proper for a person to do in these situations where something is missing. ----- Situation 1: The other person is not informed. You are painter and a man approaches you to paint two rooms in his house. You are about to say that you'll paint the rooms in his house for $100 each for a total of $200, a fair price, when he says that he'll give you $600 to paint the rooms. You're obviously the first person he's been to and that he has not researched at all. You know the price he's offering you is far more than the work is normally worth and that he could get a much better deal. Are you obligated to inform him or, because he feels that he is gaining value from the transaction and you are as well, is it fair game to agree and do the job without saying anything further and shouldn't feel bad about it? ----- Situation 2: The other person is not rational. It is rumored that a very expensive flu medication that cures pig flu instantly works on humans as well. You know this to be false because you've been made aware of several studies disproving it and several people who have bought the flu medication at your pet supply store have had no results from the medicine. A man comes in and asks for the medication. As you go to get a bottle he mentions that he's getting it for his wife, who has the flu, and that he's seen all of the studies that show that it doesn't work, but thinks he'll get it for her anyway because he wants her to get over the flu as quickly as possible. Are you obligated to try to persuade him NOT to buy it? If you do and he still wants is, should you refuse to sell it to him because you know he is simply wasting his money? ----- Situation 3: It is not to mutual benefit. You are approached by someone offering a free month trial service for their product, with an added catch - they will give you a free $100 gift card to a store you frequently shop at if you agree to the trial. You know that their plan is for you to agree and then not cancel before the end of the month either through laziness or guilt from reciprocity, and they'll make their money back based on the following months where you will be paying for the service. You aren't interested in the service and you know that you'll cancel before the month is over, but you do want the gift card. Knowing this, is it wrong to agree to the trial for the gift card and then cancel the next day, never paying for the service but abiding by the contract and taking the free card? ----- Situation 4: A reversed scenario. Suppose you are the person on the other end of the deal and you are either poorly informed, irrational, or agreeing to something that is not to your mutual benefit. The situation doesn't turn out to your satisfaction in the end (You find out you could have paid less, you realize that what you predicted isn't realistic, or you wasted money on a deal that didn't turn out how you wanted it to), do you have a right to be angry at the other person for accepting into the deal, or is the fault yours? I suppose my real question underlying all of this is "Is it wrong for a rational person to make deals skewed to their advantage due to the other party's irrationality?" and "Is a rational person obligated to try and correct another party's irrationality during an interaction?" because if one limits themselves to only interacting with other rational people the world would get pretty small. I look forward to your responses because I'm genuinely puzzled! - Clockwork

I have the audio book by Edward Herrmann, which is abridged at 10 CDs long. He has a great voice that, I feel, does the characters justice in the compacted version of Atlas Shrugged. I've ordered the Christopher Hurt unabridged audio book (forty-something CDs long), but I haven't gotten it yet. I do have the Christopher Hurt version of The Fountainhead though, and he does a great job as well... with the exception of a few mispronounced words which don't affect the overall feel of the book. One thing to note in the audio books is that the interpretation of the emotion that the characters use is predetermined by the narrator. There were a few points in The Fountainhead that I felt should have been emphasized differently, but for the most part the emphasis and tonality in the reading was spot-on and I can't wait for the full version of Atlas Shrugged to listen to while I work. I'd recommend getting the full version of Atlas Shrugged by Christopher Hurt, he did a great job with The Fountainhead and I expect him to do another with Atlas Shrugged. Be warned though, if you mention to a friend that you got a copy of the Atlas Shrugged audio book and that it's really good, they'll give you strange looks when you give them a nasty glare after they say "That sounds great, why don't you burn me a copy?" I just pulled up the YouTube video of Galt's Dramatization and it's making me excited to receive the full audio book of Atlas Shrugged. If you'd like a sample of Edward Herrmann's voice, a modified sample of him reading Galt's speech shows up as the first item under if you search for "Atlas Shrugged" on YouTube. On a side note, the grainy quality of the audio on the Christopher Hurt YouTube video made me recall my favorite one of Andrew Ryan's statements from BioShock that made me smile when I heard it: "On the surface, I once bought a forest. The parasites claimed that the land belonged to God, and that I establish a public park there. Why? So that the rabble could stand slack-jawed under the canopy and pretend that it was paradise earned. When Congress moved to nationalize my forest, I burnt it to the ground." Andrew Ryan, BioShock