[rocketraman]

This comment is profoundly ignorant. You're dismissing her philosophy because of two descriptive words (and not even the best two, which would probably be "rational selfishness"), which you have decided are the "opposite of good" simply because history says they are? That's just an appeal to tradition: plenty of people have been wrong about plenty of things throughout history, especially in the areas of morality and ethics.

You clearly know nothing about Rand's philosophy. You would do yourself a favor to correct that error. Even if you ultimately disagree with her, she has very many intelligent things to say and, if you give her a chance, she will challenge many of your preconceptions about morality, ethics, and their postcursors of economics and politics, and raise the level of your discourse significantly.

[srah763]

Yes this happens to not be one of those cases, espousing the virtues of selfishness isn’t up for debate anymore. It’s wrong, and has been shown to be so time and time again. To have to rehash such foolishness is pointless.

[manfredo]

Proclaiming that something is not up for debate and refusing to engage meaningfully is an extremely easy way to lose the debate.

[tripzilch]

Actually, it's stratagem no.32 for winning a debate. http://coolhaus.de/art-of-controversy/erist32.htm

Of course it's fine for you to dismiss their entire point with derailment even further into meta-arguments because, after all, they started it /s

[AnimalMuppet]

It's a way to try to win the debate on the cheap. Whether it works or not depends on the other party in the debate.

[llcoolv]

and on the mental and cultural capacity of the spectators :)

[chillee]

See social shaming here[1].

>Social shaming also isn’t an argument. It’s a demand for listeners to place someone outside the boundary of people who deserve to be heard; to classify them as so repugnant that arguing with them is only dignifying them. If it works, supporting one side of an argument imposes so much reputational cost that only a few weirdos dare to do it, it sinks outside the Overton Window, and the other side wins by default.

> Nobody expects this to convince anyone... People who use this strategy know exactly what they’re doing and are often quite successful. The goal is not to convince their opponents, or even to hurt their opponent’s feelings, but to demonstrate social norms to bystanders.

[1]: http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/08/varieties-of-argumentat...

[Confusion]

Allowing yourself to be dragged into the same argument over and over again, because some people are just not listening (creationism, flat earthers, moon hoax believers, ...) is a waste of time. Publicly reminding the readers about the majority view on the situation and then letting the argument go is fine as a response.

(And yes, the majority view is that Rand is not worthy of any special attention as either a philosopher, political theorist, economist or author. Not more worthy than any other random member of those groups of people.)

[obmelvin]

There is absolutely merit to discussing ideas that you disagree with. And in particular to this context, I personally found lots of value in Atlas Shrugged. Often it lead to me disagree with her philosophy. If anything, reading things that you disagree with allows you to intelligently refute claims instead of vaguely claiming that someone is incorrect and refusing to engage. That is a sure fire way to make people dig into their beliefs.

[TooBrokeToBeg]

> It’s wrong

...and natural and efficient. ie Not wrong or right. I'm not sure where you get your ideas from.

[tunesmith]

The Nash equilibrium is also natural, efficient, and non-optimal in many cases. Which, in the face of "optimal", could be described as "wrong" if the belief is that optimal is desirable.

[tripzilch]

Just because something is "natural" doesn't mean it can't be ethically wrong. We have another word for things like that--they're called "amoral" and it literally means there is no ethical choice being made. The concept of "natural" is orthogonal to this.

Lots of things we consider "natural", we also pride ourselves on the ability to choose not to give in to.

Vice versa, there could be things that are "not natural" which--oh wait, no there aren't. To be "natural" is one of those really stretchy concepts that can include anything if you argue it the right way back.

For instance, this discussion is about a copyright bill. Is that natural? Is copyright natural? Is economics? Politics? Rationality?

We also have a word for such terms in an debate: inconsequential.

Not to speak of the idea that anything that is "efficient" must be amoral. In my opinion exactly the opposite is true. Most things which are "efficient" read pretty damn strong on my right/wrong moral compass--either I think they're pretty cool, or I think they're pretty terrible. There's really very few efficient things that make me feel "yeaaaahhh, it's efficient sure, but meh. you do you".

Things that are efficient you need to consider extra carefully exactly because the efficiency can swing the needle on the moral compass rather dramatically!

[Confusion]

Killing newborn cubs and impregnating the mother with your own is also very natural and efficient. I hope you agree it's also very wrong and that the argument from nature is an amazingly awful argument.

[bendbro]

> Yes this happens to not be one of those cases, espousing the virtues of selfishness isn’t up for debate anymore

In your selflessness, perhaps you'll consider espousing my view instead of yours? In return, I promise to dutifully, comprehensively, and correctly represent your view, as you can see I've done here now.

[tunesmith]

I've always seen objectivism as a branch of consequentialism. Utilitarianism is a different branch of consequentialism, in that it seeks to maximize the greater good for others. Objectivism seeks the maximize the good for the self. "Rational selfishness" is a fine enough description, I suppose, except for the cases where the two words conflict, like in tragedy of the commons.

[michaelmrose]

Philosophy is too kind a word. If I invent a new kind of math which encapsulates obvious stuff like addition,subtraction and multiplication before going off the rails and spewing nonsense the fact that I reiterated arithmetic isn't much of a point in my favor.

She was born to wealth she didn't earn and saw the confiscation of such when the communists took over Russia.

She forever thereafter decried all taxation for the common good not seeing a substantive distinction between the communists taking all her families shit and a democratically elected government taxing to pay for hospitals and roads.

Her ideal man was a criminal to kidnapped a little girl, extorted her father for money, then took the money and ditched the little girls dismembered body and took the money and ran because he refused to live by societies rules.

She gushed over him before dying dependent upon the social security she didn't want anyone else to have.

[ubernostrum]

I find Ayn Rand to be quite similar to Karl Marx.

Both use cherry-picking and unfalsifiable approaches to history and sociology to construct a narrative in which there are two classes: the noble, heroic people who produce all the value; and the awful, leeching parasites who attempt to co-opt that value for their own use.

The differences between them are rooted entirely in which class each views as noble and value-producing versus which is parasitical.

[tripzilch]

Waaaaaaaitaminute--aren't parasites "natural", too?

Problem solved. Shall we talk about the copyright bill, now? :)