necrovore
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Posts posted by necrovore
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1 hour ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:
The contrast between Rand's and Kant's theories was to show the difference between an individualistic moral theory from the Enlightenment that teaches people to think for themselves, and an allegedly individualistic moral theory that only tells people what to think with a set of rules to follow.
I hope that clarifies things. This is original work, so misunderstandings will happen.
Individualism does not equate to being able to rewrite reality.
Ayn Rand did not hand out a set of "commandments," and even wrote that such a thing was offensive.
She did identify principles of morality. She claimed that they were derivable from objective fact. She showed how to derive them.
This is similar to the way Newton identified principles of physics. Newton is not opposed to individualism merely because he came up with Newton's Laws and then claimed they were universal and not subject to individual choice.
Newton, like Rand, showed how he came up with his principles. The description of how is more important than the principles themselves, but his work would have been incomplete if he had merely described the "how" and left the principles themselves to implication. So it is with Rand.
The identification of Newton's Laws was a major breakthrough in Enlightenment thought because it showed, on a scale never before seen at that time, the power of the mind to grasp reality. Ayn Rand's morality does the same thing (although historically later).
Her principles are not meant for the kind of "blind obedience" that religionists encourage from people. If some people take her principles that way, it's because those people have probably grown up with religion and they don't know any other way to handle such principles. People new to Objectivism sometimes enthusiastically graft it onto what they already "know" without realizing that they're still acting on unidentified anti-Objectivist principles. (Then others observe their behavior and think it's Objectivist behavior when it isn't.)
Newton was obviously not meant for blind obedience, either, and it was not the final word on physics. Future discoveries made Einstein possible (and necessary). The same thing is probably also true with Rand. There are probably moral principles yet to be discovered, that apply in situations Rand didn't consider, but they would still have to be validated by reference to reality and the requirements of human life.
(Besides, applying the principles correctly, to your own circumstances, can require considerable amounts of "thinking for yourself.")
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9 hours ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:
Beyond that, my extensive experience with Objectivists indicates that they are apparently
Hold it right there... Ayn Rand is not responsible for misunderstandings or misrepresentations of her views, even popular misunderstandings.
Unfortunately it is fairly common for some people to misunderstand her views, and then for some others to hold that those misunderstandings are actually her views, when they are not.
It is better not to accuse people of holding certain ideas unless you know what you are talking about.
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10 hours ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:
Rather than taking one person's word for it, and Peikoff's if you include his mimicry, it's always best to consult several sources - If the issue is important to you.
As I said, I think the refutation of Kant is just a sideshow.
10 hours ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:I don't think this is as important an issue as Objectivists make it out to be. They may consult several expert sources with a financial question. But for philosophy, they are all "I BELIEVE RAND!" people, and refuse to look any further.
Speaking for myself, I feel like I did my further-looking before discovering Objectivism. Kant, I suppose, had his chance.
Objectivism isn't rooted in Rand, it's rooted in reality, or at least it's supposed to be. I suppose it is possible to claim that Objectivism is wrong about reality. Some Objectivists are wrong about reality from time to time. This occasional wrongness is actually normal, coming as it does out of human fallibility. I think the correct answers will come out in time.
But that is not the same thing as claiming that reality is inaccessible (or that certain parts of it are inaccessible).
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Here's a good article from John Eastman, who represented Trump before the Supreme Court concerning the 2020 election, about some of the information he was given in the course of doing his job:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/most-secure-election-american-history-john-eastman
QuoteWhen the major law firms were backing out of taking on any of the election challenges, President Trump called me and asked if I would be interested. Texas had just filed its original action in the Supreme Court against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan -- four swing states whose election officers had clearly violated election law in those states and with an impact that put Biden over the top in all four.
Two days later, I filed the motion to intervene in the Supreme Court in that action. The Supreme Court rules require the lawyer on the brief to have their name, address, email address and phone number.
Nobody in the country at that point really knew who Trump's legal team was, but all of a sudden people had a lawyer and an email address. I became the recipient of every claim, every allegation, crazy or not, that existed anywhere in the world about what had happened in the election. It was like drinking from a fire hose.
Interesting read!
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15 minutes ago, KyaryPamyu said:
This kind of thing is on a par with a Creationist's misinterpretation of Darwin. It's not a good look, but thankfully many Objectivists think on their own feet and don't base their judgements on "Rand wrote" or "Peikoff said".
PWNI doesn't mention Kant by name. It does illustrate the practical consequences of certain philosophical ideas -- if and to the extent that you take them seriously and try to apply them in a given situation.
Even Kantians can somehow manage to make it to the store and buy groceries, even though their minds allegedly are incapable of understanding the store and the groceries as they really are, and can only understand them as they appear to be.
In a sense the astronaut is an exaggeration just to make the point.
In another sense, though, the whole problem with certain philosophical ideas is that you can't take them to their logical conclusions without causing disaster to ensue... and if that's the case, there must be something wrong with those ideas.
I don't think that's "vilification." That's just calling attention to a problem.
(Of course I don't think the real intention of those bad philosophical ideas is for people to go all-in with them -- rather, it's to use them as an excuse or an escape hatch whenever they want to do something irrational.)
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9 hours ago, tadmjones said:
Is it true that none of Rand’s conclusions or arguments are in anway similar to Kant’s arguments or conclusions? No original ideas of Kant would or could have been incorporated into any of Rand’s formulations, ideas that Rand may not have considered attributable to Kant?
I am not going to say that it is, because it would require a very large scale full-text search of both Rand and Kant.
Peikoff did say that Kant had "occasional fig leaves," which means we can't say that Kant was wrong about everything. (I suppose a complete lie would be more easily rejected than one that verifiably tells the truth some of the time.) We can say that Kant was wrong about fundamental ideas -- like the whole division into noumenal and phenomenal worlds. On fundamental ideas, Rand and Kant are completely different.
If Kant were right about something, his fundamentals would tend to undermine it (sort of like if someone were saying that 2+2=4 because of extraterrestrials).
Rhetorically, at least, I'm sure there were places where Rand would take the other side of one of Kant's formulations. But if she were to say that 2+2=4 she would probably (rightly) leave Kant out of it, even if he said the same thing at some point or other.
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In the above quote, Ayn Rand lists a series of facts, but she does not do any deduction, she does not apply any abstract principle, so there cannot be any "fallacy."
Also, you won't get anywhere by starting with Kant. A valid argument starts with reality -- not in the middle of anyone's philosophy (Kant's or Rand's).
My understanding is that Kant's noumenal realm was just a space that he intended to be filled with faith and Christianity. He himself claims there is no way to reach it from reality, which is why he thinks faith is necessary, but that need for faith is probably why more secular-minded philosophers rejected it.
However, it doesn't matter, because Rand's philosophy doesn't depend on Kant at all. Her arguments against Kant are a sideshow made necessary only by the popularity of Kant; her philosophy stands on its own even without those arguments (and without Kant).
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34 minutes ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:
A more rational move than creating neologisms would be to simply remove Productivity from the list of virtues. The value of a particular case of productivity is context-laden. Unless all productivity leads to a benefit, theoretically for humanity, the out-of-context concept of "productivity" can hardly be considered either a virtue or a vice because it depends on what's being produced.
Productivity itself is context-laden, and in fact it is you who are taking it out of context.
Something that causes a loss is not productive, it is counter-productive.
28 minutes ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:Excessive pride leads to arrogance.
False. There is no such thing as excessive pride. Arrogance is false pride, it's a pretense, because it doesn't have the reality to back it up.
29 minutes ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:Excess rationality leads to emotional repression.
False. Emotional repression is false rationality, it's a pretense that consists of evading one's emotions.
30 minutes ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:Excess productivity leads to a workaholic lifestyle and eventual burnout.
False. A workaholic lifestyle is a pretense, not an excess, and it does not lead to productivity.
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48 minutes ago, monart said:
No, one cannot, but can one, over time, become the other?
All I have is my own history, which is only one data point. I was raised with Christianity, but ended up rejecting it. I went through seven or eight (philosophically) tumultuous years before discovering Objectivism, and I discovered Objectivism by accident.
I never went through a phase where I thought the two were compatible.
The lack of such a phase could have been in part because the flavor of Christianity I grew up with was fundamentalist; it guarded itself jealously against other flavors of Christianity; it rejected the other flavors as "people making up watered-down versions of Christianity in order to allow themselves to commit their favorite sins." So I could not entertain the idea of compromise. I had to be "in" or "out." I could not unsee the problems I saw, so I was out.
I did try to hang on to the idea that God might exist, even if not the Christian conception of God -- until Objectivism showed me otherwise.
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3 hours ago, KyaryPamyu said:
When a snowflake ceases to exist, due to melting, its remains continue fine!
Technically, when a person dies, their remains continue fine, too!
I think Galt is contrasting inanimate matter to life itself, not to animate matter. Living matter can die, but it is the life which goes out of existence, not the matter; the matter remains but is dead.
Matter (or more precisely mass-energy) can change its forms but it cannot cease to exist. Matter can become part of a living organism or can become no-longer-part of a living organism.
But a life can come into existence, e.g., when a person or animal is born, and it can go out of existence, when the person or animal dies.
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There is such a thing as "agreeing to disagree" but this requires both sides to give up the use of force.
Giving up force means that persuasion has to be used instead, which gives the long-term advantage to reality and reason.
Some people don't want reality and reason to win.
Others just don't want to wait; they think they have the advantage when it comes to force, so they seek to use it.
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21 minutes ago, Boydstun said:
I'm not inclined to accept the idea that free will arises out of limited knowledge... I do not think my free will is based on my ignorance of those internal mechanisms.
I'm not really talking about ignorance per se, I'm talking about the unknowable.
In order for your free will to "go away," you'd have to know the unknowable. That's an entirely different thing from learning new facts of which you were previously ignorant.
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2 hours ago, Boydstun said:
It says that all things always have complete states in reality, and, given that that is the case for them, they can do only one thing in their complete state at any time.
As far as I know, the claim that determinism is "useless even if true," is my own argument. (I don't see it in the Objectivist literature either.)
A useless determinism does not convert free will into an "illusion." Saying that it does is the same sort of argument that says that, because tables and walls are really made of atoms which are mostly empty space, the solid tables and walls that we see are "illusions." They are not.
The solidity of tables and walls is a fact that arises out of the nature of the entities involved -- the atoms, the forces between them, and the fact that our bodies are also made out of molecules.
Free will is a fact, too, even if it's a fact that arises out of our inevitable lack of the omniscience necessary to exploit the universe's determinism.
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Even setting aside the fact that one's own free-will is self-evident, I think the whole concept of "determinism" is flawed. It proposes that "if you know the entire state of a thing, you can predict exactly what it will do next."
Although nature follows laws, these laws are averages, and there are always sources of noise. The gas laws for example arise from the random motions of innumerable particles. They are an average. There's no way any conscious could "know" the positions and velocities of all those particles. The amount of information is too big, even without accounting for "quantum weirdness."
Some systems such as analog computers are capable of "unpredictable" behavior such as "strange attractors," where the system amplifies variations that started out being too small to measure, and thereby becomes unpredictable. This is also known as the "butterfly effect," wherein a (hypothetical) butterfly flapping its wings in Africa could eventually cause a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico.
It is possible to use the thermal noise of a resistor to generate unpredictable random numbers.
As for humans, there's no way you could know the state of someone else's brain -- in your own brain. Is your brain twice as big and only half-full, to have room for the other person's brain-state? How long will it take you to memorize it? But even that wouldn't be enough because you'd need additional brain-power to think about the state of their brain, to make your prediction. That doesn't even cover their sensory input, which is also a factor in what they do next. Also, they would carry out the action you are trying to predict faster than you could predict it.
We can form and use abstractions. Abstractions throw information away. We can use them only when the information thrown away (or not known in the first place) is demonstrably unimportant. If you want an exact prediction, you can't throw anything away, because of the butterfly effect.
So when they say, "in principle, if you knew the state of someone's brain," or "in principle, if you knew the state of every particle in the resistor that is being used to generate the random numbers," that's like saying "in principle, if two were equal to three..." because nobody could know the state of someone's brain or the state of all the particles relevant to the resistor noise. The "principle" of determinism is therefore useless.
It only exists because of religion and the religious conception of "punishment," which assumes a God and His followers who should punish people for making wrong choices. Saying that something wasn't your choice is a legitimate excuse. Saying that nothing was your choice is the ultimate generalization of that excuse.
Determinism also seems to require a God who could "know" all this stuff, because no real consciousness could know all of it.
I think it's right to reject the notion of "punishment," but determinism, being useless, is not the right way to reject it.
I do accept free will, and I also accept the notion of self-defense, which requires keeping murderers in prison (as a form of retaliatory force) because they're not safe to let loose. Self-defense also requires exercise of judgment: if you want to prosper, you have to protect yourself and the people and things you care about from crooks and incompetents, which means having to determine who they are and how to deal with them (if at all). But this does not require "punishment."
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The important questions are, where do you get your abstractions from, and how do you know they are correct?
The Christian answer is that you get them from God (sometimes indirectly) and that you know they are correct by means of faith.
The Objectivist answer is that you get them by reasoning from reality, and that you have to check them against reality.
These are very different. It is one thing to reach, for example, egoism, from facts and reasoning, and it's another to reach it from God and faith.
If a Christian's faith causes him to happen to wander into an Objectivist idea, what could make it "stick?" Bible verses? He could wander out of those ideas again just as easily. It's just a question of what seems to be coming from God at any given time. So it becomes completely ungrounded (or grounded, ultimately, only in their faith, only in their feelings).
Some Christians can smuggle in bits of reason and reality (they have to, to survive), but enough of that causes God to wither away. The Objectivist perspective would seem to say, "rightfully so!" but that scares many Christians.
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There is also a skeptical pair of answers, that you make up abstractions arbitrarily, and there's no way of ever knowing if they're correct. Christians and skeptics are usually good at finding the holes in each other's theories, but Christians usually evade the holes in their own theories. Skeptics will claim that all theories have holes, including their own, so they claim the holes as proof that their theory is correct.
Objectivism is the first philosophy that reality can't poke any holes in, although Aristotle's main ideas came close to that and helped make Objectivism possible. Skeptics say such a philosophy is impossible; Christians may say it's a sin, because it leaves out God, but then they want God to be necessary, so then they say Objectivism is impossible, too.
Instead of asking "what could make an Objectivist idea stick in a Christian's mind," you could ask the flip-side, "what could make a Christian drop an Objectivist idea?" Reality can't poke holes in Objectivist ideas even if you hold the Objectivist ideas for the wrong reasons.
But if you don't know why an idea is correct, there are still consequences, such as when the idea ends up contradicting another idea. How do you resolve the conflict if you rely on faith instead of facts? Facts may show that one idea is true and the other false, but if you hold ideas based on faith, ideas that might be clearly different in light of the facts end up being on an "equal footing" with each other. With no reference to reality, you could pick either. Usually people decide based on still other ideas, which themselves may not be correct. For example, some theologians say that, if there's a conflict between reality and God, side with God. What would a Christian do with his Objectivist ideas, then?
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The term "gaslight" comes from a play, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_Light.
The other one, may be defined here? https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Run the Table
I suspect the lack of blogs is because people had to shut down their blogs because of the crowd who believe in imposing "consequences" for speech. It can be dangerous to run a blog if one's views are unpopular with certain people (even more so if the blog can be tied to your real name). I used to have a blog (which I never linked to from this site) but deleted it for that reason.
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There used to be a lot of bloggers aggregated here, but Gus seems to be the only one left.
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I do seem to recall (from some older articles) that many jurisdictions had laws requiring that all real estate agents had to be Realtors, so much so that people began to forget that Realtor was trademarked and not a generic term like "lawyer."
I do not know if such laws are even still on the books, but even if they were or are repealed, it is still likely that the National Association of Realtors would have a lasting advantage from their existence.
If the market is open to competitors then prices should stabilize even if no competitors appear (the mere threat of competition is often enough to stabilize prices).
This kind of arrangement is similar to laws requiring that cars be bought through a dealership, which Tesla has gotten in trouble with, or laws that grant city or county monopolies for cable television.
Such things are of course products of the "mixed economy" and are violations of the separation of state and economics (a principle not recognized by law at present).
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1 hour ago, DavidOdden said:
A person who advocates self-sacrifice isn’t acting like an Objectivist anymore. A person who refuses to engage in moral evaluation isn’t acting like an Objectivist anymore. A person who sanctions evasion isn’t acting like an Objectivist anymore.
I do not advocate any of these things.
I think there's a confusion here between what the forum as a whole does (e.g., through moderation) versus what its individual participants do.
Part of this is the recognition that every individual participating here has the right to make their own judgment about which arguments are rational and why, as well as which arguments are worth responding to and which not. (And on the other hand, if they make invalid arguments, their arguments will be judged accordingly.)
I don't think such individual judgment should be usurped by the forum itself such as by banning arguments, which amounts to deciding that the participants shouldn't be allowed to see them or, possibly, that they shouldn't be allowed to make them.
I am aware that the resources of this (or any) forum are privately owned and that the owner can decide how they can be used. However, the amount of these resources for any single post is pretty small (and I'm sure the owners would like them kept small). Providing a public forum is not in fact a moral sanction upon everything people say there, just like giving away sheets of blank paper is not a moral sanction on whatever people happen to write or print on them. Nor can anyone who posts here claim (with any honesty) that their post, merely by virtue of not having been banned, is in agreement with the owners, or with Objectivism, or is any kind of award-winning great achievement.
Further, when the forum owners and moderators decide to exercise judgment about which posts are correct, then they are implicitly asking the participants to cede their right to make their own judgments. That becomes a cost for the participants, just as much as if you were asked to give up other rights you might have. They then have to consider whether it's worth it.
Maybe I helped precipitate this confusion by saying that the forum should conform to the Objectivist epistemology, but the role of the forum in the Objectivist epistemology is not to think for the participants but to make sure the participants are not blocked from thinking for themselves. Once one has decided to offer a forum, this becomes a negative obligation -- not a demand for more resources. (It is in fact banning stuff that requires more resources, because somebody has to make the decisions about what to ban, and those have to be checked for accuracy, etc.; this is why big companies like Facebook end up needing large
censorshipmoderation departments where people look at posts all day, or else they need AIs to make those decisions automatically. It is why larger magazines need editorial departments to pore over manuscripts. It is why the East German Stasi needed so many people to monitor phone calls.)Being open is a large part of what offering a forum is. That is the value it offers. It should be allowed to offer it.
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I should add something: this whole topic about what to allow on this forum is essentially philosophical and, more specifically, epistemological.
If this is an Objectivist forum then it should practice the Objectivist epistemology.
An essential feature of the Objectivist epistemology is the rejection of evasion. Objectivism requires the integration of all facts. It does not countenance the propping up of false abstractions through the suppression of counter-examples or counter-arguments. It rebuts false arguments, by identifying them as false (or in some cases arbitrary or irrelevant), but it does not evade or suppress them.
Rebuttal should not be hard. OPAR shows that it's possible to use abstractions to group arguments and rebut them all in a single blow, e.g., by identifying an argument as "Primacy of Consciousness."
Banning people from the forum because of their arguments is evasion of those arguments, pure and simple. (But it is proper to ban things which are not arguments, such as spam or harassment etc.)
The people who run this forum are free to run it however they want, just like they are free to evade in their own minds if they want. But when they start burning heretics, they aren't acting like Objectivists anymore. (Further, such action incorrectly suggests that Objectivism is no different from any other philosophy or religion).
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2 hours ago, DavidOdden said:
I do not fundamentally object to exploring new ideas, but I do object to any implication that new ideas are intrinsically good.
On the one hand I see your point because maybe 1% of new ideas are good. Maybe even less.
People will disagree about which ones they are. That's to be expected.
People can also disagree about whether an idea is really new. (People may say, "Hey, it was new to me...")
On the other hand I think that good new ideas, rare though they are, are the whole point. There is nothing to be gained by recirculating and repeating the same old ideas; one might as well just read OPAR over and over.
It's like panning for gold. There may be a little gold but there's a lot of mud. If you are afraid of mud, though, you don't get any gold.
2 hours ago, DavidOdden said:I contend that the intended purpose of OO is not “exploring new ideas”, it is exchange of information about Objectivism and discussion of its applications.
These are not mutually exclusive.
2 hours ago, DavidOdden said:Sometimes the presentation is logically deficient, and there is a point where the abandonment of reason becomes especially deleterious to a forum dedicated to a philosophy that places reason, not emotion, in a central position.
It should be sufficient to identify the deficiency and stop there.
The ban hammer should be reserved for use against spam, harassment, illegality, or attempts to render the forum useless.
2 hours ago, DavidOdden said:Children do not form concepts (her postulations notwithstanding), they acquire them: the concepts already exist in the society, the child has to learn what the extant concepts are in that society.
I think what the child learns is the word for the concept; the child must still form the actual concept on their own. I don't know if there's any requirement regarding whether the word or the concept comes first, but the concept is not complete without the word and vice-versa. A person can receive feedback, not just as a child but all their lives, about whether they have formed the same concept, based on how they use the word in their speech and writing.
2 hours ago, DavidOdden said:Which returns us to the question of the purpose of this forum – anything by way of guidelines that you think is clearly in error. For example, the central purpose of this forum (which I take to be an axiom, yet open for discussion)?
When I say that I don't want the forum to be rendered "useless" I am implying that there is some use for it.
I think, discussion of Objectivism and its applications, its implications, where it fits in, and how to explain it to people.
That should be pretty close to what is already there.
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Maybe there should be a part of everyone's profile page where you can see the posts that they have liked or thanked. Then if you don't like reading the whole board you can possibly find someone, or a few someones, who'll read it for you.
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3 hours ago, DavidOdden said:
I have a general question about Objectivism, of the type “how does one use Objectivism as a tool for living?”. As I understand Objectivism, it is a central premise that man’s proper means of survival is reason, which is reducing knowledge to observation, forming concepts from measurable relationships among concretes then integrating this knowledge by logical rules into propositions.
There can be options in concept formation; the Japanese color 青い covers blue and also blue-green and maybe green in some contexts, and there are probably other examples where concepts in different languages overlap but don't coincide.
If this sort of overlap can happen between languages, it can also be possible between people who share the same language but perhaps aren't using a dictionary or aren't using the same dictionary. This doesn't mean that either one is non-objective, just as the difference in colors between English and Japanese doesn't indicate that either language is non-objective. The result of the difference is a lack of precision but not necessarily accuracy. Obviously, with differences in the units, the accuracy is slightly less, just like a translator might have to determine whether to translate 青い as "blue" or "green" in a particular context.
It's easier to be precise and to agree with things like the "meter" which can be measured easily than with things like the exact line of demarcation where a forum becomes something more like a magazine.
One could ask, what is the essential characteristic of a forum?
I was thinking of "openness" as an essential characteristic, and the reason I think it's essential is that a "forum" that isn't open is useless, not just to me but to everyone else; that's what makes openness essential.
This is not to say that "magazines" are invalid. There may be certain people whose opinions I care enough about that I might want them accurately represented. I might subscribe to their magazines. But it is telling that Leonard Peikoff, for example, hosted a Q&A, where he would answer questions, and he could pick and choose which questions he wanted to answer, and the answers were unambiguously his as opposed to what someone else thought he might say. It was a Q&A, not a "forum." He didn't host a "forum," invite people to post, and then ban opinions he disagreed with.
Also, Peikoff had already built his reputation, so people were interested in what he, in particular, had to say. What if you come up with a new idea? Where do you put it? Assuming you are not famous. Nobody approves of your idea yet because nobody knows what it is. Do you want to take a chance that you will get banned because people disapprove of it? Is it fair that you should have to take that chance? And what if you want to find new ideas that might have been come up with by other people, who aren't themselves famous enough to create their own forums? Where do you go to look for them? How can you find someone who runs a forum that allows new ideas, given that the forum owner has to take the risk that the new ideas might be wrong and that he has therefore sponsored wrong ideas?
If people have to censor ideas that they disagree with, people must have been grossly immoral for publishing Ayn Rand's books and ideas, since after all those people could not have agreed with the ideas already, since they were new. (Or else they were taking a chance on being immoral, sort of like shooting off a gun in random directions and being lucky enough not to have hit anyone. Which is also immoral. But anyway...)
3 hours ago, DavidOdden said:Should personal attacks be prohibited, and if so, what constitutes a personal attack? How should we effectively communicate the distinction between disagreement and a personal attack?
A personal attack is an ad hominem, it's a fallacy. But the reason for banning personal attacks is not because they're ad hominem: the fact that they're ad hominem is what allows us to get away with banning personal attacks, because we know we're not accidentally banning any legitimate ideas.
The reason for the ban is because personal attacks tend to turn away the contributors who are attacked, and thus renders the whole forum useless to them, and less useful to others who might have wanted to read those contributions, or other contributions which might have never gotten made.
43 minutes ago, AlexL said:You are free to create such a forum, but you cannot expect that a given forum owner, for example of this one, will tolerate on his premises the broadcasting of views he abhors. Or tolerate irrational behavior in a debate, for example when a person refuses to justify his claims etc.
I don't know if I want to try to run an open forum, because people might join and then demand that I suppress other people's views based on arbitrary criteria. Or if I didn't have time to moderate it myself, I'd have to trust someone else, and then they might start banning people for disagreeing with their views, and they might do a lot of damage before I stop them.
I wouldn't want to run a forum where I banned people for disagreeing with me, either. What if I ban someone on an incorrect basis? It would ruin the forum for everyone and destroy its value.
Wikipedia used to be great, until a cabal of editors formed who decided to take it upon themselves to rid Wikipedia of views they thought didn't have sufficient "notoriety" (because it was embarrassing to them that some articles about popular TV shows were longer than articles about important historical events -- so all they did was go around deleting articles because they lacked "notoriety"). This mostly happened on the English-speaking Wikipedia. Later, another cabal took over, this one consisting of leftists (or maybe it was the same cabal), with the idea of suppressing anything critical of leftism. As a result, Wikipedia has become less valuable and less useful, unless you are a leftist. (You can still use it if you are looking for an idea a leftist wouldn't disagree with.)
That could happen here, too. The site might end up supporting, not Objectivism per se, but a particular flavor of it, and it could easily be the wrong flavor or a distortion, and no one would be able to say anything about it if it were. It would become an echo chamber.
I suppose this is a problem of the culture at large, that people no longer tolerate views they disagree with, and that they wish to silence those views rather than engaging them in debate (and they can't accept the idea of just leaving their opponents alone, either; they have to silence them). The silencing of people is the main thing I am objecting to here; if there is some error in my definitions of "forum" and "magazine" then that error is not essential to my objection.
Maybe this tendency to reject opposing views is a product of the current educational system (because I suspect that a lot of the people calling for this are younger than I am and it certainly aligns well with the leftists who are taking over the culture at large).
Maybe it's also a problem that people don't want to see views they disagree with, so they hope some moderator will step in and ban those views before they have to see them. That sounds like the "safe spaces" that are being promoted in schools and universities, too, and it's the exact opposite of "Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion," which at least requires that you know what those facts and opinions are.
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1 hour ago, AlexL said:
A forum is a space for discussions/debates. What you are describing is an unmoderated forum (= zero control over content). The owner defines what, who and how. It is not "pretty much true by definition" that a form is unmoderated.
No, that's not true -- an unmoderated forum would allow spam and harassment and the like. What I propose is an open forum, where any ideas can be discussed.
There's a similar difference between an anarchy and a free country.
It should be sufficient to require that the ideas have something to do with Objectivism.
1 hour ago, AlexL said:Harmed is that owner who does not want his property to be used in ways he does not desire, for example to spread ideas he hates.
I am not proposing to initiate force against anyone.
But I am also not proposing to have people banned from the board because I disagree with them.
Existence exists. But does this imply that existents exist among other existents? (Boydstun)
in Metaphysics and Epistemology
Posted
Even though things like X-rays are out of the reach of our senses we can infer their existence from evidence.
So what's the noumenal domain needed for? Sounds to me like it's nothing but a cover for bullshit.