Boydstun

False alternative. The first thing you have to do is identify the reasons behind your emotions and check them against reality by means of reason.
The reason for an emotion is a generalization over your past experiences and your value-judgment of them, applied to your present situation. This subconscious generalization may be correct or incorrect. (It can sometimes even be surprising because the generalization may draw from experiences you have not thought about recently.)
If you figure out that the reason for an emotion is false -- and I mean really figure it out, not just try to talk yourself into it -- then the emotion will go away. If it does not, then there may be other reasons for it that need to be investigated.
If the reason for an emotion is true, then you have to deal with reality: change your situation, move to a different situation, or pick an activity where the situation doesn't matter as much.
You can train your emotions over time by getting more experiences and judging them accurately. (Reason is the only way to know if you are judging your experiences accurately.)
(Sometimes too you may have to recognize times when your emotion is incorrect because your experience, though real, was atypical, and is not really indicative of what's likely to happen next time.)
Trying to pressure yourself is pointless because it doesn't create any of the conditions necessary for success. But sitting around relaxed and doing nothing doesn't create them either.
The conditions seem to be, first, an opportunity, and second, the skills needed to exploit it. So build up a lot of skills and then look for opportunities. Put yourself in places where opportunities are likely to be found.
Both of these are hard problems. Philosophy is probably too general to solve them by itself; you need the "special sciences."

I read what you wrote and enjoyed it.
The umph, is you. What you are going through does not get addressed through ruminating (purely mentally) about your situation.
It's like an ice wall in your path that you need to melt.
The other side of the wall is what is beautiful, wonderful, pleasurable, and fantastic.
But the wall will not let you reach out and touch the magnificent, or be moved by it.
The umph is being moved by the beauty. But it requires that you allow it to move you. That is a great risk.
But the wonderful "what" can be taken away, and destroyed and you are left with the deep pain of loss, disappointment, humiliation, etc. Here one has to express emotions to melt the wall. The repressed painful emotions are the wall. Consistent writing helps, but art is the great melting tool for that ice wall in your way. Striving for what is beautiful is what creates the umph. But as you say, knowing it is not enough.
What you are doing, writing about the problem is effective if you keep at it. Discussing it is usually helpful as long as you are not told to shut up.
But knowing, feeling the dream beyond the wall is what melts the wall. The ice is protecting you against the evils of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is sometimes, good and sometimes not good. There are instances of enthusiasm that you regret. So you can't simply count on enthusiasm. It's the passion for " the what" that counts.
But the inspiration, the initiation is you. You are the spark, the start, the initiator. The cause. You are cause.
Being reminded that I am "cause" immediately is the necessary jolt.

I’m here just as much to think out loud as I am to hear from you all, so bear with me.
I'm starting to get this sense that there is something fundamental to Objectivism that is, despite all the intellectual work I've done, frustratingly out of reach for me. It's somewhere in the vicinity of the Benevolent Universe Premise, I think. For starters, I would not say that I am or have ever been much of an optimist. I have my moments, but it doesn't take much to discourage me. Now, the thing I'm hoping to zero in on is somewhere in the overlap between the concept of the BUP and the concept of free will. It shouldn't surprise anyone that in addition to being a pessimist, I have a ton of sympathy with determinism.
This thing I'm referring to could be called "push" or "umph" or "gusto". It's like the basic unit of something like "grit" or "sticktoitiveness". I'm interested primarily in two aspects of this "push":
1) its nature/its relationship to reason
2) its implications
Its existence is not really that controversial in my opinion. Common vernacular is littered with it. It's the currency of purposive action. For example, "get over yourself" or "hump day" or "Just Do It". One aspect of Objectivism that really attracted me in the beginning was the fact that Ayn Rand treated this concept or set of concepts as philosophical and worth discussing at length, as against the very traditional (think conservative, middle-aged, hard-knocks) custom of saying things like "tough luck, kid".
This traditional approach can be hard to understand for children. I know this because I used to resent it and because I see the effects of it all over the place. While it's meant to convey the primacy of existence and the power of free will, it comes off as authoritarian and duty-laden. For me, it clashed with my need for answers to life's questions. For example, I still struggle (as a 28-year-old) with my mom's "because I said so" approach to parenting. I've never gone to her for advice on important decisions. As far as I could tell, she didn't know jack. This coupled with being raised Catholic and a Boy Scout was a recipe for a rebel-without-a-cause. Anyways, I learned to believe that motivation ought to be inspiring as well as convincing (the 'convincing' part took a backseat during high school and college, when I was a Jesus Freak). Unfortunately, "sorry, that's just the way it is" continued to be true in a lot of cases, whether or not I was inspired to accept it. Spoiler alert: I wasn't.
A pivot towards Ancient Greece: Socrates said, "No one knowingly does evil." Ayn Rand appears to disagree, per her doctrine of free will and of evil, and Leonard Piekoff has explicitly opposed Socrates by name on this point. What is less unequivocal to me is this quote from Rand which seems to align her with Socrates: "I'm not brave enough to be a coward; I see the consequences too clearly." So what is the relationship between free will and reason? LP has said, if memory serves, that Rand considered volition to be a 'corollary' (that is almost certainly not the word he used, but it's the closest I can get) of man's reason. On the other hand, Objectivism is explicit about the volitional focusing of the mind being a prerequisite for the use of reason. On this second assertion, it would appear that simply knowing what morality consists of and what values are achieved by living morally does not guarantee that someone will act morally. I could read every word Ayn Rand has ever written and even want to be like one of her heroes yet still lead an irrational life. It's actually been asked - during a LP question period, I believe - whether Howard Roark or John Galt could choose to do evil. The answer was something along the lines of "They just wouldn't," which was not exactly a satisfying answer. It's a good question, I think. In what world would Howard Roark ever do wrong knowingly? What exactly does it mean to "be able" to do something?
In addition, LP says in his course on thinking that bad contexts must be "banished" from consciousness in order to allow good contexts to take root. And I have seen posts on this website stating that one might become more rational simply by changing his habits (I have also seen posts stating that laziness and stupidity are one and the same, but that seems a little reductive). This all seems to suggest that there is an "umph" factor - something cognitive but non-intellectual, something metaphysical or even physical, something to close the gap between mind and matter - that is necessary for being a successful Objectivist/human being. Of course, emotion plays a role. The closer one's subconscious is to being objective, the easier it will be, not just to think rationally, but to act rationally as well. However, the belief - one which I have often held - that the rational man is in a state of perpetual zen and of being "one" with the universe does not seem to be supported by Objectivism, if her heroes are any indication.
A little about my own situation: I have always struggled with my emotions and have turned out somehow juggling a mixed bag of unconscious repression, impulsive honesty, horrible sensitivity, and suicidal thoughts. I oscillate between refusing to fight my emotions and refusing to feel my emotions. There's something about acting contrary to my emotions that feels false or dishonest, yet there is something terrifying and nauseating about giving in to them. Unfortunately, these habits have manifested as indulging my depression and pushing away any feelings of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm causes me to feel out of control of myself and leads inevitably to shame or embarrassment. Meanwhile, pessimism feels like a good hedge against disappointment.
Of course, Objectivism discourages both repression and emotionalism, but I struggle to see a third way. I've noticed that this issue is actually referenced a lot in Atlas Shrugged. Rand loves to depict her heroes at the precipice of exhaustion, where their emotions become stronger than their wills. I haven't quite figured out how to frame these scenes in terms of her philosophy. Personally, I can barely imagine what it would be like to push a negative thought to the back of my mind (sometimes for a span of years, I think in Dagny's case) in order to get my work done. I've done it before, but it was excruciating and I hardly do it anymore. These days, I find myself in an awful rut as a result. I'm trying to become a real adult, but there are a few regrets/disappointments that zip to the front of my mind as soon as I sit down to try and make some progress. And the thought of pushing past them makes my stomach turn. In fact, I think some of them have morphed into ugly sources of motivation. For example, I obsess over my ex-girlfriend, who I admired immensely and who is doing very well in her career, however, thinking about her is like a knife in the heart. Still, I find myself thinking about her most often when considering my own goals in life. She does represent (albeit symbolically) a number of my most important goals/values, but her memory is doing just as much lifting me up as it is beating me down.
All in all, I've turned out seriously unmotivated. In some areas, this isn't the case. I've dedicated a hell of a lot of time to various projects over the past few years, all of which I'm very proud of, but none of them have ultimately lead to any substantial progress in the more material or demonstrable aspects of my life. I'm currently unemployed and living with my parents. My point is that it feels to me like all of philosophy is worthless without the "push" I've referred to. I've learned so much, but I worry that my subconscious is still a mess. Then again, the theme of 'laziness' seems to permeate my struggles (giving up too easily on goals, taking a breakup lying down, ADHD, smoking pot, avoiding eye contact). I know something big has to give if I'm to have any hope for the future. Right now, I worry that my life will turn out feeling like one chore after the next, or all work and no play. I worry that if tragedy strikes - perhaps financial or physical or mental - instead of finding a new lease on life, I'll just shrivel up. I've reached my wits end, but I wonder if maybe there's something I haven't tried - such as, well, trying.

Fermilab Tighter Measurements in Muon g–2 Experiment

Stephen
I think Floyd was responsible(ultimately?) for his own death. He refused to allow the officers to arrest him and detain him in a vehicle, those actions resulted in the officers' subsequent actions of restraint. The toxicology reports showed Floyd had ingested chemicals that actively reduce respiration which likely exasperated the effects of what was determined to be a negligent level of force applied by the arresting officers. The jury was left to decide the distal and proximate causes. The prosecution argued that a healthy person would have died due to the subdual and restraint: prone position while handcuffed and subject to weight/pressure from the officer's position and objective disregard of Floyd's medical status in the moment.
In Chauvin's civil rights convictions he was charged with violating Floyd's right to be free of excessive police force along with violating a 14 year olds' right to be free of excessive police force when he restrained him a similar manner for 14-15 minutes an event that did not result in the death of the young male. I would say he was bad/dangerous cop and that he unintentionally caused a major contributory threat to Floyd's life , legally defined as second degree unintentional murder.
As to the quasi-ritualistic actions of Pelosi, Schumer etal. in the Capitol , I say they were shameless. The theatrics of that escapade stoked resentment of a false charge of rampant racism against blacks perpetrated by all law enforcement. It was almost demonic in its irony, old mostly white public officials miming the 'lethal act' festooned in the 'colors' of an African nation( tribe) known for subjugating and enslaving neighboring tribes. While properly social distanced and masked ! The rot is so entrenched and so deep that 'most' would apologize for it , them . Every two years since 1987 the majority of people in California's 11th district elect her to the same office, obviously the uniquely and single best person in the district to hold the office!

It was towards the end of the book where they had captured him and they were asking him to rebuild the economy for them, and he was saying that he couldn't work with them. Near where they offered him a "cool, neat, billion dollars."
-- Actually it's "Fire your government employees." I didn't remember it word-for-word.

More inter webs serendipity, I’m currently listening to an audiobook version of Whitehead’s Process and Reality. Just experienced a section on a critique of Descartes, Hume , Locke and Kant and theories of perception and resultant conceptualization theory.
This nascent exploration into his thought has caused ( or in Whiteheadian vernacular the actual occasion of my understanding has satisfied the apprehension of the thought or contextually notion) that Existence exists is more satisfyingly felt as the universe is the state of being.
 
This exploration is putting a lot more meat and flesh on the bones on my previous conception of existence as and metaphysics.

Stephen,
The essential question regarding para 93-97 is, what do they show? In 93, the cited evidence indicates that Trump said "Bottom line—won every state by 100,000s of votes", "We won every state," and "What about 205,000 votes more in PA than voters?". Funny thing is, the third one is not even a statement. The indictment claims that these are knowingly false claims. The fact that senior Justice Department officials disputed the implied statement about PA over-voting is not proof that the statement was knowingly false. For the sake of argument, I will stipulate that it was false. I also stipulate that Bush’s statement about Hussein’s arsenal of WMDs was not proven true, but was also not proven to be a lie, as the lying liars repeatedly insist.

I do not have any evidence that Trump knows the statements (and presuppositions w.r.t. PA) to be false. I firmly believe that Trump is between somewhat and rather delusional, and was willing to not believe a statement made by DoJ officials. As for the proposal to return the question to the states, the question of authority is not even a question of fact, it is a conjecture based on untested legal theories (not a theory that I dispute, but let me remind you that Roe v. Wade was established law until it became unestablished, and it is not fraud to hold that when you take an untested theory to court, you might actually win).

Para 94: again, making a proposal and being advised “that no court would support his proposal” does not make a proposal fraudulent, or even false. Para 96: it is not false or fraudulent to set an expectation that the Vice President has a particular authority.

I don’t dispute that Trump is a delusional megalomaniac, what I dispute is the claim that he attempted to defraud the US government in an official US government proceeding. The smoking gun that would have to be produced is actual evidence that he knew the statements to be false while at the same time entering them into an official proceeding. Not every false statement is a crime. Perhaps there should be a law criminalizing being a delusional megalomaniac in an office of public trust, though that would require a Constitutional amendment since Congress can't add qualifications to those few set out in the Constitution.

The trial could well have the consequence of concretizing the informal conclusion that Trump is a delusional megalomaniac, and I have no problem with people knowing that fact. The problem I have is with misusing law as a tool to achieve a political end. The other problem (one of many) I have is that abuse of law to achieve a political end is not extremely rare.

Unlike defense, interstate commerce, coining money, patents and copyrights, post office etc, “providing education” is not an enumerated power of the federal government. The feds do get a say in how their money is spent, but that power cannot be wielded coercively given the 10th Amendment. It is settled law that 5% of a state’s budget is not coercive (S. Dak v. Dole) and 10% is (NFIB v. Sibelius). However, the only constitutional reach that the feds have is to make receipt of federal funds be contingent on doing something, thus if a state wants to lower the drinking age to 16 at the expense of 5% of its budget, it can, and that would not be (was not) deemed to be coercive.
A flat prohibition is essentially impossible, especially when every state is constitutionally compelled to provide education. To get away with a federal law against state-organized education, a mighty powerful commerce-clause would have to be set forth. They would have to establish that outlawing state-level education is imperative to a compelling federal interest in regulating interstate trade.

Another article summing up what has been discovered so far: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/room-temperature-superconductor-new-developments

Another 500 years of life with mind still cranking!

I've read reports that the paper was published to Arxiv without permission, which may explain why it has errors.
I've also read that Argonne National Laboratories is among those trying to reproduce the results.

Creating Christ – "Did Roman Emperors create Christianity? Archaeological evidence now links the first Cristians with ruling elites of Rome. A conspiracy to end the great conflict between Jews and Rome changed the course of history. This secret revealed here."

https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12008
Looks like three researchers in South Korea have discovered the holy grail of superconductivity.
I saw this on Hacker News. People in the Hacker News comments seem to think it should be relatively simple to confirm or not, and might take a week or so. If it is independently confirmed, it will be big.
If it is not confirmed, it will be the next Cold Fusion.
I think it's exciting, but these days I worry that, if it works, it will fall into the wrong hands, like Project X (the one in Atlas Shrugged, not the Elon Musk one).

That is to say: You already asked that a few days ago, and I took some time to compose a response. Then you post as if the previous exchange never took place. How is this worthwhile? I'll not bother further with this trivia and "talking to hear your teeth rattle."

That is to say: You already asked that a few days ago, and I took some time to compose a response. Then you post as if the previous exchange never took place. How is this worthwhile? I'll not bother further with this trivia and "talking to hear your teeth rattle."

The core practice of “scientism”, as framed by Hayek, is that the methods of Science are appropriate in “their proper sphere”, but are not appropriate when they are the “slavish imitation of the method and language of Science”. This applies most pointedly to the social sciences. The questions that immediately should spring to mind is, what is the nature of scientific methods, and to what are they appropriately applicable? If we know that, we might have some idea when the application of those methods to some other sphere of knowledge is “slavish”.
In fact I agree that methods are often applied slavishly, even in the hard sciences. This leads us to our first definition of scientism, as being “the uncritical application of a methodology in pursuit of knowledge, motivated purely because of the unjustified belief ‘that’s how (this) science works’”. I am familiar with various scientific sins in the acoustic analysis of speech, the problem being that numerical methods (signal processing) are often applied inappropriately because “that is how we do it”.
Application of the methods of physical sciences to human behavior suffers from a particular defect that might lead one to conclude that human behavior cannot be studied scientifically. We should pause for a moment to consider what the alternative to science is. You might say that rather than drawing any general conclusions, a social scientist should only passively record what happened at a particular time and place (old-school ethnography). The enterprise of acquiring knowledge – science – is not just limited to making concrete observations, it involves reasoning about causation behind the behavior. The problem with many scientific theories of human behavior is that we can’t plug in a number or equation that accounts for the fact that humans chose their actions (well, their chosen actions, you don’t choose for your blood to circulate, it happens automatically). Some people ignore free will in their attempts to scientifically model human behavior; some people eschew the attempt to devise causal models of human behavior.
One thing that Objectivists bring to this discussion is our epistemological stance, that the universe is knowable; and, we should check our premises. We operate in terms of well-defined concepts, not floating abstractions – Objectivism is the scientific method applied to everything, even art! Science focuses on what objectively is, not on subjective appearance, and so does Objectivism. Hayek’s objection to “inappropriate scientism” is really an attack on a particular view of science which is incapable of yielding scientific knowledge about human behavior. The anti-cognitive, positivist behaviorist view that held sway over social sciences has been beaten back somewhat, to the point that his objections would need to be reconsidered in the contemporary millieu.
Politicized science is really something completely different: it is the rejection of the scientific method in the hard sciences.

As an example of algorithmic ‘serendipity’ , YouTube presented this video to me on Whitehead and though not touching on any politicization of science and obviously nothing on O’ist definitions, the lecture speaks to the connection of science to metaphysics and the role philosophy should play in distinguishing a hierarchy with a view toward how western science has made progress to rational understanding but underscores ,I think, a divide or in-congruency that could lead to “scientism”.
Though I do not know the O’ist stance toward Whitehead ‘officially’ , listening to the lecture is a good exercise in detecting similarities and differences in theories and explanations eg the mechanisms of concept formation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY2vDesht8o
 

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/methodological-individualism/
 
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/friedrich-hayek/
 
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend/
Ayn Rand 1966:
 

It should be noted that the Sharon Statement from 1960 (the foundational document of YAF)  begins:
In this time of moral and political crises, it is the responsibility of the youth of America to affirm certain eternal truths.

We, as young conservatives, believe:

That foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force;

whereas the present statement says
In order to ensure that America’s best days are ahead, we affirm the following principles:

1.      Liberty. Among Americans’ most fundamental rights is the right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force: a right that, in turn, derives from the inseparability of free will from what it means to be human. Liberty is indivisible, and political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom.


 
The similarity is well beyond what might have arisen from like-minded individuals across 63 years expressing common sentiments: the omission of God must have been an essential choice that they made. In the current context of conservatism as even more fundamentally religious as it was 6 decades ago, this is an almost shocking (pleasing) omission.

Pretty nice.
One misrepresentation: "But the core of her belief system is quite simple: Individuals are inherently "heroic," while governments only restrict human freedom, potential and happiness."
No. The core of her philosophy, even the human-value part of it, is not anything political. And within the political, it is false that Rand held that all governments "only restrict human freedom, potential and happiness." That is someone else's political view, not Rand's. On this point the author was doing the usual of distorting Rand's views to suit his own or his boss.

Pretty nice.
One misrepresentation: "But the core of her belief system is quite simple: Individuals are inherently "heroic," while governments only restrict human freedom, potential and happiness."
No. The core of her philosophy, even the human-value part of it, is not anything political. And within the political, it is false that Rand held that all governments "only restrict human freedom, potential and happiness." That is someone else's political view, not Rand's. On this point the author was doing the usual of distorting Rand's views to suit his own or his boss.

I spotted this article: https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/five-reasons-ayn-rand-loved-united-states-america-right-live-ones-own-judgment
It's positive and covers the basics for somebody who might have never heard of Ayn Rand before.
I did not know that there was any news outlet that would still publish such a thing. (Many are too Leftist or too Christian.)

A rational man acts according to his nature, which means that he survives by reason. An irrational man does not live by reason: he may behave randomly, in exact opposition to reason, or according to emotion. We have a moral code which we apply to our choices that says what exactly that entails, therefore I know that it would be immoral for me to blow out my brains right now since life is great (that’s a fact about the current context, not the idea of blowing out one’s brains qua absolute). We can apply that moral code to the evaluation of others, and conclude that Putin is, by nature, immoral (not just once, but as a general fact of his character).
I am currently under irrational government compulsion to hand over part of my wealth to the government robbers (multiple governments!). I would not do this if I had a free choice, however, the government threatens me with force if I do not comply. A person’s response to force is by nature outside of the scope of reason – force is the denial of reason. Me paying taxes is not “rational”, it is the best I can come up with in light of reality and my hierarchy of values.
You have drawn a dichotomy between moral and immoral, but there is actually a trichotomy. The actions that another takes when under compulsion cannot be morally evaluated. The slave’s choices are outside the scope of moral evaluation, precisely because of the contradiction created by force. A further problem with your scenario, and with many hypothetical moral philosophy scenarios, is that it isn’t epistemologically consistent, instead it flits between the perspective of the individual and an observer. As an observer, we do not know the slave’s hierarchy of values – his actions cannot be morally evaluated. Evaluating the choices of others in such an epistemologically-impoverished circumstances is not reasonable, I might even say irrational, but I won’t.
The more interesting question is, what would you do in this circumstance, and why? I pay my taxes because even though I value freedom, I also value my life, and I recognize that knuckling under to the demands of government is necessary in order for me to live my life qua me (as opposed to living off the grid in the Sahara desert, where the weather sucks). I recognize that surviving purely by reason is impossible, but I have discovered that living is still possible. That means that the choice to exist, the primary choice, still remains at the very top of my hierarchy of values.
Your scenario adds a strange complication, that the master will free the slave if he engages in a silly symbolic act that he would never otherwise engage in. Equally “applicable” would be the mandate to drink a cup of kombucha in order to gain freedom. At this point, I am starting to think that the slave is not simply “failing to act purely by reason”, I think he is positively insane, in refusing to rectify his enslavement because he has been the victim of force. Change the scenario just a little: a person is subject to improper government compulsion, and he is given the choice of replacing the existing dictatorship with a less-cruel but still not perfectly rational government which still uses improper force. He would ordinarily not choose an irrational government which employs improper force. Since my hierarchy of values is different from that of the slave whose highest value is to not be the victim of force, I have a hard time evaluating this guy.
Since one’s hierarchy of values is chosen, I would conjecture that the person is indeed irrational because he bought into a contradictory philosophy which makes “be free from compulsion” be his primary choice. I would try to get the guy to read Galt’s Speech, to see if that might straighten out his crazy hierarchy of values.