[btilly]

One of the major reasons why there are so many low effort gotchas is that her message is so emotionally uncomfortable for many. Facing what is legitimate in her criticisms is hard. And so people only consider her views long enough to come up with easily rejected caricatures. The arguments that they then use to reject those caricatures show how they did not actually process her point of view.

But this is not just a problem that faces non-Objectivists. For example consider how Ayn Rand rejected the scientific evidence for smoking causing harm. She never had a logical argument. What she had was such an overwhelming emotional commitment to smoking being good that she would latch on to any plausible sounding argument against smoking being bad.

For a more current example, look at Alex Epstein's arguments on global warming. It quickly becomes apparent that he has such a strong emotional alignment with the great good caused by fossil fuels that he easily accepts any argument, no matter how flawed, that they might also cause harm. Compounding the trouble, global warming presents the exact kind of tragedy of the commons that undermines the economic theories by which Objectivism should lead to an economic utopia. This fact adds to the emotional dynamics for ignoring evidence that reality doesn't actually work in the ways that Ayn Rand claimed.