Boydstun

Salva,
Welcome to Objectivism Online.
I suggest that highest goodness of your life has come to consist in having this child. Part of that goodness is the opportunity to love someone so greatly and to have occasion of this special love that nature has set up in the life of humans.
In your life as an agent and as a subject of experience, your own life remains as highest context of your valuations after having a child, as it was before having a child. I suggest that the child and your lives together has become a paramount project within your life as an agent and as one experiencing a human life. But there is more to it. It is for the sake of continued life of the child that you would be willing to lose your own individual life to save continued life for the child. 
When Rand writes in the VoS Introduction that each person should be the ultimate beneficiary of all of their value-pursuits (a proposition she argues for in “The Objectivist Ethics”), I think an exception should be added in the case of one’s children (and perhaps their are other specific kinds of exception-cases that should also be added). That is, what might be called uniform beneficiary-egoism is not entirely correct.
In needing to forfeit one’s continued life for something, one remains in the human business of making one’s life as a whole-story, purposed sequence. What might be called uniform agent-egoism remains correct.
Stephen
 
 

To that one, we might pin a particular story: Plato of Athens: A Life in Philosophy

I am not surprised at the claim, since NPR is sort of famous for making assertions of fact without evidence, but perhaps that have some document that they think supports the belief. Perhaps these sources will help in doing better historical research. This article traces the history of college athletics in the US. As the author notes, college athletics was on the rise well before the Morrill Act was passed. At the time (1840 and onwards), American students were accused (by the British) of being inferior to their British counterparts in manly qualities. Increased attention to athletics was a natural outcome of the growing Muscular Christianity movement. College sports first sprung from the east coast traditional universities, and incidentally was primarily centered around crew, not football, the former requiring water, not land. Once agricultural colleges were well-enough established, they predictably followed suit and like everybody else developed athletic programs.
We can turn to the Morrill Act itself to see why the government passed this law. It was specifically to create agricultural colleges, and then in order to secure passage of the bill after a previous veto, it was expanded to include engineering and military tactics (and was signed into law by Lincoln in 1862). This significantly changed the profile of American university education from a focus on classical studies, eventually leading to what we have now.
If the allegation is true – “we’ve got all this land, what do we do with it?” – we would expect there to be a significant correlation between being a land grant university and having an athletic program. These are the land-grand universities. The hard part, IMO, is distinguishing “developed athletics because of all the land” from “developed athletics because of all of the interest”. The University of Washington is a sports powerhouse, but it is not a land-grant university. Washington State University is a lesser powerhouse, and it is a land-grant university.
I think the idea of universities trying to “fill the spaces” lacks merit, in that there is no need whatsoever for those spaces to be filled. The act was intended to serve as a source of revenue for states to create university systems, and is not just the giving of federal lands so that you’ll have a place to build a university.

What do you think, Infra? What do you think is a correct basis of a right of an innocent human being not to be killed?
Do you think right bases of rights are emotion-free?
Rand took individual rights to rest on the circumstance that individuals are ends in themselves endowed with capability for autonomous thought and direction. Respecting rights of others is from recognition of that circumstance and the rightness of treating things as the kind of things they are. Layers of strategic-game consideration could be added to that in defense of respecting individual rights, but the fundamental is that each life is an end in itself. Do you think this basis for the right of an innocent human being to not be killed is a sound basis?
I think it is. Additionally, proper responsiveness to others (or to oneself) requires operational emotion. There are no human desires, valuations, or thought were all varieties of emotions unplugged. Just as there would be no thought as purported by Descartes in Meditations were it really possible, as he pretended, to unplug entirely from body inputs and sensory inputs.
 
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Welcome to Objectivism Online, Infrabeat.
 

I have to follow in your footsteps. When we built our house I was excited about designing and laying a brick/paver walkway from where the driveway pavement gave way to the front porch 'apron'. I formed the sections and laid under material and tamped the crap out of it , but the job I did only had a two decade 'halflife',lol.
I doubt I'll redo it in brick, just have to figure the elevation change/slope to see how many sections I'll need to pour of cement.

Congratulations on your achievement.

My first lover and I were together for 22 years, to his death 22 years ago today. This then is a remembrance I would like to share today. It is my eulogy for Jerry at the memorial service for him in Chicago three weeks after his death, all those summers ago. The ceremony consisted of alternations of speaking and music, and the music that followed my speaking was the Rachmoninoff Prelude Op. 23, No. 2 in B flat.

Jerry D. Crawford (11 October 1948 – 17 June 1990)

I finally finished it yesterday. There was a ten-day interruption, as I needed to be in Colorado a while due to death of a nephew,* but finally these old hands got the job done.

I suggest that moral responsibility for training and education of children lies firstly with the child's parents, although not as part of a package of responsibility attaching merely to having caused the child's existence. That Objectivist position focussing on causal relationship, down from the era of N. Branden in the 1960's, was off the mark. Moral responsibility for training and educating the child lies firstly with the child's parents, I suggest, because of the moral goodness of responsiveness to persons and the potential person they may become, responsiveness to persons as persons.
That responsiveness is, I say, the core of moral relations among people (and indeed, differently, relations of a self to itself). That is the preciousness that is the moral in a social setting. This position is a cashing out of the concept of moral justice, treating a thing as the kind of thing it is—that moral virtue. What a thing is includes its internal systems, but as well its distinctive external relations, actual and potential. The relations of responsiveness to persons as persons have a specially intense and distinctive character in the relation between the persons who are parent and child (natural parent most strongly, of course, but strong with adoptive parents as well).
Additionally, there is a moral goodness in the benevolent protectiveness—that responsiveness—between any adult and any child. That such responsiveness fosters continuance of the species human as human may well be the underlying biological reason for this responsiveness. But that is not the reason the responsiveness of parent or other adult to the child and responsiveness of the child to them as persons is moral. Rather, the nature of value in the life of individual humans together, which is their best situation in the world, is the source of the moral goodness of such responsiveness to persons as persons. 

"If a mother buys food for her hungry child rather than a hat for herself, it is not a sacrifice: she values the child higher than the hat; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of mother whose higher value is the hat, who would prefer her child to starve and feeds him only from a sense of duty." Ayn Rand
I suggest we read between the lines and remember what kinds of values Ms. Rand deemed to be valid, and just how human Ms. Rand actually was.
 

I suggest that moral responsibility for training and education of children lies firstly with the child's parents, although not as part of a package of responsibility attaching merely to having caused the child's existence. That Objectivist position focussing on causal relationship, down from the era of N. Branden in the 1960's, was off the mark. Moral responsibility for training and educating the child lies firstly with the child's parents, I suggest, because of the moral goodness of responsiveness to persons and the potential person they may become, responsiveness to persons as persons.
That responsiveness is, I say, the core of moral relations among people (and indeed, differently, relations of a self to itself). That is the preciousness that is the moral in a social setting. This position is a cashing out of the concept of moral justice, treating a thing as the kind of thing it is—that moral virtue. What a thing is includes its internal systems, but as well its distinctive external relations, actual and potential. The relations of responsiveness to persons as persons have a specially intense and distinctive character in the relation between the persons who are parent and child (natural parent most strongly, of course, but strong with adoptive parents as well).
Additionally, there is a moral goodness in the benevolent protectiveness—that responsiveness—between any adult and any child. That such responsiveness fosters continuance of the species human as human may well be the underlying biological reason for this responsiveness. But that is not the reason the responsiveness of parent or other adult to the child and responsiveness of the child to them as persons is moral. Rather, the nature of value in the life of individual humans together, which is their best situation in the world, is the source of the moral goodness of such responsiveness to persons as persons. 

It depends on what colleges are available, how much real knowledge they teach, how much Marxist indoctrination they push etc.
It may be worth the money to self learn, hire persons with knowledge, private tutors, mentors etc.
 
Good parents do everything in their power to launch their children as high and as far as they wish to go, sometimes that is something more spiritual than economic, like a small business, or career in art... it depends greatly on the context of the child's wants and needs and realistic dreams, and the means of the parents, good people work this out and do their best.
 
Rationalizing falling short of this is usually confined to people who really would rather have the "hat" than feed the child...[paraphrasing]
but really that was one of THE wisest things Rand ever said in her writings.

Arguendo "wanting" to have or keep raising children MEANS being prepared for, and earnestly and genuinely loving and caring for another person who starts out deeply dependent.  Whether it fits any philosophical standard, humans DO literally need love to grow into a sane and moral adult.. it is not a psychological luxury, it is a deep human necessity.
Perhaps it is only moral to "have" and/or be the guardian of anyone, if and only if you actually WANT to be one, with everything that entails, and ALL that it means.
 
Summary:  Have a kid you don't want and/or cannot care for? Just  f#@&ing give it up for adoption as soon/early as you know, so someone else can do so.  Our world would be a MUCH better place, and so many people SO much better off, if everyone followed this.

If the very nature of your method causes errors, then yes, you lose the ability to attain any kind of certainty.
But Objectivism doesn't portray rationality as a matter of finding an absolute truth and anything short of that is an error. Certainty is instead about knowing you use a method that brings you closer to hitting the mark every time. Using an objective methodology doesn't cause errors, or at least, it's a method that doesn't take you further away from the truth or what is the case. If objectivity by nature caused errors, there would have to be something pervasive about human reasoning that completely prevents you from even getting closer to the truth.
Say you wanted to make a cheese omelette. There is a basic method to it, with variations in technique and skill that lead to different qualities of omelettes, but there is nothing about the basic omelette making technique that by its very nature prevents you from making a successful omelette. You could apply the methods incorrectly, but that's not because the methods necessarily cause you to do it wrong. There are different wrong ways to do it though, that by nature will always make a failed omelette. You can't crack the eggs into boiling water to make an omelette, you're always going to end up with poached eggs. No matter how much you try, if you cook eggs that way, you will never make an omelette. You might make something that resembles one, but it will always be an "erroneous" omelette.

I think at least in the 'chat bot' versions of "AI" it's like having all the 'words' in text as weighted tokens and the prompting computes an algorithm and outputs a 'response', the discernment being the  the running of the algorithm on the data set. I don't imagine it 'sees' or 'knows' the prompts are different from the responses ?
A vaguely remembered anecdote, I think about John von Neumann describing what could be done with accumulating the largest and most detailed data set of the particulars of the atmosphere , an almost perfect digitalized 'copy' of the world's atmosphere and how that would facilitate answering questions of atmospheric science and concluding that the data itself would be useless, as the same questions would remain.
Chat bots that 'speak' without prompting is what to look for , and I don't think that is yet (?)

Only indirectly, as a reaction to the horrors of AI “reasoning”. Of course I am using “can” in the standard Objectivist way, as “possible, based on evidence”, not “imaginable, where anything is possible” and one can “imagine” A and Not A being simultaneously true. I have wasted some time trying to understand the “epistemology” of ChatGPT, and conclude that its greatest weakness is that there is little if anything that passes for a relationship between evidence, and evaluation of evidence.
I was puzzled about how something so fundamental could be missed, but then I realized that this is because the system doesn’t have anything like a conceptual system that constitutes its knowledge of the universe, it has a vast repository of sensory impressions – a gruel of “information”. But furthermore: it cannot actually observe the universe, it can only store raw experiences that a volitional consciousness of the genus homo hands it. If you ask about the basis for one of its statements (ordinary statements of observable fact, not high-level abstractions), it just gives templatic answers about “a wide variety of sources and experts”. It does react to a user rejecting one of its statements, apologizing for any confusion, embracing the contradiction, then saying that usually A and Not A are not both true. It is perfectly happy to just make up facts. Sometimes it says that there are many possible answers, it depends on context, then if you give it some context it will make up an answer.
Human reasoning is centered around conceptual and propositional abstractions that subsume observations, where the notion of “prediction” is central to evaluation of knowledge. Competing theories are central to human knowledge, so when we encounter a fact that can be handled by one theory but not another, we have gained knowledge that affects our evaluation of the competing systems. These AIs do not seem to evaluate knowledge, or even data. Instead, they filter responses based on something – it seems to be centered around "the current conversation".

A recent fine composition from Marc Champagne:
Kantian Humility and Randian Hubris?

I'd like to add another link to a paper (2019) examining the Gibson affordance concept in perception: On the Evolution of a Radical Concept: Affordances According to Gibson and Their Subsequent Use and Development. 

Austin's remarks in full: Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark A. Milley Hold a Post-Ukraine Defense Contact Group Press Conference, Ramstein Air Base, Germany
 
In a fuller context:
Now, we also heard today from the European Union on its proposal to speed up the production and delivery of ammunition for Ukraine, and more countries are thinking about how they can increase industrial production not just for the near term, but also for the medium term and the long term, and that is a powerful reminder that we stand with Ukraine's defenders for the long haul. 
You know, Putin made a series of grave miscalculations when he ordered the invasion of Ukraine more than a year ago.  He thought that Ukraine wouldn't dare to fight back, but Ukraine is standing strong with the help of its partners.  Putin thought that our unity would fracture, but Russia's cruel war of choice has only brought us closer together.  And I'd note that Finland, which has long taken part in this contact group, is here today as a new NATO ally.  I expect that Sweden will soon follow, and that makes something crystal clear — Putin's war of choice is not the result of NATO enlargement, Putin's war is the cause of NATO's enlargement.
 You know, when I first convened this contact group, I saw nations of goodwill that were eager to help Ukraine resist Russia's imperial aggression, I saw a coalition that stood united and firm, I saw countries determined to stand up for an open and secure world of rights and rules, and all of that was just as true at Ramstein today as it was a year ago. 
The Ukrainians are still standing strong in their fight for their freedom and they have the courage and the capability for the road ahead and we will have their backs for as long as it takes.
Alternatively, imperialism of the Russian kind is not popular in the West. If the supreme ruler of the Russian Federation had not miscalculated ... 
More war reporting from the folks at Kyiv Independent:

https://kyivindependent.com/tag/russias-war/

Among my favorite fiction books of all time are: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte  , The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Christophe by Romain Rolland, Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil , and A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood.

Such people do exist, and the Republican party does pander to them. I grew up with such people.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that religious fundamentalism isn't real or that it's a fringe thing. It's real.
Both political parties have "fundamentalists," and each party's fundamentalists say that freedom leads to the other political party's fundamentalism, and therefore should be blocked. Fundamentalists can't understand why a government should allow someone to make a "wrong" choice; they understand only dictatorship, and the way they see it, it's either their dictatorship, or someone else's, and they'd rather it be theirs.
Both kinds of fundamentalists want to ban "sins," whether they be abortions or gas stoves.
Even Ayn Rand observed that the two political parties only grant freedom in areas they don't care about. But when they realize that everything is interconnected, they reject freedom.
That's like saying that the purpose of ARI's essay contest for The Fountainhead is to facilitate the exposure of high school students to the "rape scene."
There's a lot more in The Fountainhead than that, but for religious people, if they see one thing they object to, nothing else in the work exists. (And, yes, there are plenty of religious people who don't want their kids exposed to The Fountainhead, even if those kids are 16 or 17... or 18...)

What on earth is a broad qualifier , while I think children in ninth grade could be intellectually mature enough to handle exposure to descriptions of sexual hedonism  and even perversions as thy occur in culture in a more abstract presentation , I do wonder about those who produce fiction to facilitate the exposure.
 

Here is a link to an article about one success in restraining the power of the administrative state: https://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-court-rules-against-ftc-sec-in-jurisdictional-fight-f63f1c0b?st=xr51uj3q44n7m8t&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Philosophy, Engineering - a life, a mind
Interview of me: 
 

Concerning Core

Two of Rand’s ideas I find true, original, and important are these:

The first is Rand's idea that concepts of any particulars can be fashioned according to a principle of suspended particular measurement values along certain magnitude dimensions shared by particulars falling under those concepts. This conjecture is important as a distinct position in the theory of universals. It has implications for metaphysics and for philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science. I continue to develop the measurements-omitted theory of universals* and to put it to work in problems current in the philosophy of mathematics and science.

The second is Rand's idea that value occurs only on account of the existence of life. Where there is value, there is life; and where there is life, there are values.* The first thinker who really got some grip on this idea was a philosopher of whom Rand likely knew little. Shoshana Milgram has informed me he was being taught at Rand’s university, but Rand did not take that course. His name is Marie-Jean Guyau. His theory of ethics was individualistic, against Utilitarianism, and purely secular. His book presenting this theory is A Sketch of Morality without Obligation or Sanction (1885). His concept of what biological life fundamentally is was somewhat different than Rand’s, and that is one reason for the differences between his ethics and Rand’s.

I think Rand was mistaken in these ways:

Metaphysics – Rand’s is overly deterministic. (a, b)


Epistemology – Rand’s is overly to the side of the subject.

Ethics – Rand’s is overly egoistic (a, b).


Since you are interested in political philosophy, I will mention also that although there is some room for interpretation of Rand on the point, she may have made the error of assuming that individuals come to the state with their property rights in land (in the economic sense) already perfected, like their rights in their person. Murray Rothbard explicitly made that error. The corrective is here: a, b.

Dormin111, what do you find true, important, and distinctive to Rand in her writings? What of significance do you find incorrect?