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by notahacker
3217 days ago
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A negation of Randian philosophy was necessary to fund the sort of abstract research that lead to the invention of the constituent parts for a world-changing repository of information called the World Wide Web. (funded by revenue obtained from income taxes voted into existence by politicians who freely stated their philosophical position on the merits of public revenue collection - if not their preferences for collecting it - were informed by Henry George) On the other hand Wikipedia is a small subset of that web resulting from a collaboration between two people that met over a still-unresolved argument about Rand's merits or lack thereof, so Randian philosophy wasn't even sufficient for Jimbo to get anything done without the support of someone who thought she was full of shit. (Ironic considering Rand's aversion to diversity of thought). Having been on the web before Wikipedia even existed, I'm going to go out on a limb and say the repository of information would have existed even if Jimmy had never touched a keyboard, or had bonded with Sanger over Dungeons and Dragons instead (would that have made D&D the philosophical root of Wikipedia?). I mean, the idea that neckbeards obsessed with correctness would create an eventually consistent information store via dialectical process isn't exactly a philosophical starting point close to Randian principles, still less one nobody else would have been likely to experiment with. Famed radical non-Trinitarian Bible-nut Newton was driven by the stated belief that he was observing the need for a deity to interact with the universe, but I'm not convinced that unorthodox Scriptural interpretation can claim any particular merit as a belief system on account of being the motivation for an individual influential physicist. Though physics is a lot more impressive than Wikipedia, so it has that going for it. |
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http://savingcommunities.org/docs/george.henry/incometax.htm...