Ayn Rand seems to be, continually, the most hated author in academia. And why is that...

Not a reply to the op or any rands stuff.

But was she just a bitter leg beard of her day??

I'm genuinely curious, was she the tumbler ima of her day???

Could we think about this for a second please.

I know labelling people and ideallgodies isn't normally considered "kosher" here, but this is the vibe I'm getting from Andrew Ryan,

>in academia

Noone cares about her in academia.

She was actually extremely successful, well-liked, and wasn't particularly controversial, pretty much all modern zealot hatred of her stems from Futurama.

Here you go. Bitch is dumb af.

Ahhh I see I see.
Gunna be honest haven't seen much of that show, I appreciate your reply user. sorry for spelling and grammar on a mobile autocorrect.
bless you brosef.

she believes in things that don't really exist.

Well I hate Nietzsche even more than her so there.

t. butthurt nobody

t. brainlet

only buzzwords, not a single real argument, she's not even into Nietzsche, seems like you need a bigger fedora

Why should I be anything other than self-interested? Most "moral" things I do are not done because "it's the right thing to do" but because in our society we have a mutually beneficial agreement to treat each other with respect.

Outside of my friends and family I really don't care about other people, so why should I want my resources to go to them? Saying that we should be more selfless is blatantly illogical.

Veeky Forums is usually pretty lefty
for them it's all about emotions and fancy buzzwords
she's too smart for this board, i think you should go to History & Humanities, Science & Math... damn even Business & Finance is better than this

If you're incapable of being your own boss then working for your boss is probably in your best self-interest.

>arbitrary property rights
Do you think the proletariat should seize the means of production, comrade?

t. never read Ayn Rand

>this

Check out some of Jordan Peterson's lectures to learn why, rather than being unexceptional and replaceable, each of us is of vital importance. It's up to each of us to fulfill our responsibility to our fellow man. It's either that or shrink away from it and make excuses to console ourselves.

>respecting property rights
Where do you think we are?

>Where do you think we are?
I don't know desu. I come to this board maybe 1-2x a year out of boredom.

>Randfag barely uses Veeky Forums
Makes sense

>>Randfag
Yeah nah. Like I already said earlier, I've never actually read Rand nor am I a fan.

>It's up to each of us to fulfill our responsibility to our fellow man.

Why? I don't give a shit about most people. It's only worth helping others when you get something out of it.

>Why?

Because if we all worked together in good faith, then we could be living in paradise instead of relative squalor.

Oh i thought your 't' was sarcastic and directed at the person you replied to since you are already talking like her in your post. Anyway property rights are pointless if you are championing self-interest above all else. And self interest doesn't necessary mean selfish and not altruistic

If labourers really felt like they were being denied ownership of their labor, then why don't they quit and have full ownership of products they create? It's probably because they don't have the tools, or skill, or design, or business acumen, or land, or ability to sell their products. All of these things are provided for them by the person they are working for. There is generally a reason why higher-up people make more money, and that is because they are less replaceable, have more expertise, and take on a higher risk.

I guess, but that would still require us to create hierarchies of skill and capability, but it wouldn't make any economic sense to pay a simple laborer as much as someone who designs schematics, because then no one would have any incentive to take on any skilled work. Why would anyone bother going to medical school to learn how to be a doctor, if they could make just as much pounding nails into wood?

No, it's because they don't understand that if they organized and stopped fighting amongst each other, they could relatively easily seize the means of production.

You might want the government to coercively tax and redistribute for multiple reasons, including:

- the provision of a social safety net that prevents you from being bankrupted or dying because of bad luck when you contract a severe illness, even if it means you give up a little bit of wealth in the eventuality where you never fall ill
- the provision of an adequate educational environment for all children, which in the long term reduces crime and increases technological development by sufficiently enough that the upfront cost of redistribution is completely outweighed by the long run benefits to all

I'm as self interested as people come and I think this is pretty straightforward. We can disagree on the empirics, but you can't disagree that I could be right in principle.

I want to live forever in a transhumanist future. That future is brought about more rapidly in a country with good public services (so that the nezt Einstein doesn't end up having to drop out of high school to support his family by working at the factory, say). My preference for this eventual outcome is worth sufficiently much that at the margin I would be happy to have the government subject everyone to more taxes to bring about such a future.

>Why would anyone bother going to medical school to learn how to be a doctor, if they could make just as much pounding nails into wood?

Because doing useful work for the community is intrinsically rewarding, because most people have a sense of empathy. Some people will be drawn towards carpentry, while others will be drawn to health care.

And if it becomes clear that the community needs more of a certain type of labor, I have no doubt that good comrades will step up to take care of the problem.

>If labourers really felt like they were being denied ownership of their labor, then why don't they quit and have full ownership of products they create?
Spooks, but also that they don't know their own importance. They also don't need a boss to work and coordinator with each other. Even if a manager is needed, he is as much a labourer as the rest of them

>Even if a manager is needed, he is as much a labourer as the rest of them

Right. There can be leaders within a socialist society, but those leaders are followed because they are respected, not fear. Their authority stems from merit, not force.

Nobody is saying that we should pay all people the same wage, which is obviously a dumb idea. But a strong argument can be made that providing everyone with the means to live a dignified life (clean water, nutritious food, simple housing that isn't infested by vermin, etc.) is a policy that makes everyone better off in the long run.

A libertarian argument can even be made for making such a guarantee unconditional rather than conditional on e.g. means testing or passing drug tests: I don't trust the government to set good conditions on these basic guarantees. I think there should be a guarantee,
and we need the government for that, but I want to minimize government interference, so no thanks to legislators setting rules on who can or can't get this assistance. (This is also an argument for a universal basic income in favor of a package of predefined goods and services -- people know what goods and services they have an immediate need for, the government shouldn't decide that for them.)

>Nobody is saying that we should pay all people the same wage

I'm saying that.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

Was arguing for an anarchist standpoint... all authority, whether from state or private property comes from force after all

This is a bad theory. Nietzsche said as much, and he gets taught, read, and cited. So if academics hate Rand, it's must be some other reason.

I mean, it's just not that strange of an idea. It's just materialist Calvinism, you know?

That's a retarded idea because the price signal is useful.

To elaborate, nobody is capable of magically divining what the community needs more of and to what extent it needs more of it (see: the calculation problem). Prices naturally and dynamically capture this information.

>all authority, whether from state or private property comes from force after all

I'm arguing from an anarchist standpoint as well. And a father of anarchist communism would disagree with you.

This is "you vote with your wallet" argument. But should people who control more capital get more "votes" than those who control less? What if they only only reason they control more capital is because their great-great grandfather violently took over an estate 200 years and his descendants have been able to leverage that capital ever since?

That's an argument for the estate tax, redistributive taxation in general, and total subsidization of healthcare, not fkr abolition of the pricing mechanism. I'm fine with e.g. rich men being able to buy more caviar and wine than poor men find everyone's basic needs are met.

>I'm fine with e.g. rich men being able to buy more caviar and wine than poor men find everyone's basic needs are met.

Well, I'm not. I think we should be democratically deciding how to use our resources so we can do next level shit like go to space and make hyper realistic virtual reality and also have a shit-load more time not slaving away so rich fools can eat fucking caviar and spray champaign on each other.

Oh then our definition of authority is slightly different in this conversation. Not to say i didn't agree with your previous statements, but when you said 'leaders' i assume some semblance of a statehood is involved

That is retarded, no one is going to go through years of training because it is intrinsically rewarding to serve their community

So you don't think there are any doctors that genuinely find intrinsic satisfaction in saving people's lives?

I think "next level shit" does not happen via democratic division of resources. Some points to consider:

- Most people are just dumb, period, and have no idea how to even decide which scientific authorities to follow, let alone reach a sensible consensus on how to allocate funds for research.

- The success of places like Bell Labs, Tesla, and Silicon Valley in general points to "capitalistic forces + government subsidization + really large corporations that can fund basic research" as something that works well for making "next level shit" happen, which is pretty different from what you seem to be suggesting.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to live in a world optimized for scientific progress, but I don't think your proposal is going to get us there.

It is worse because stupid people think they are important or their opinion is worth anything.

I live in a small town and a few years ago we had only two oral and maxillofacial surgeons and one of them (who I knew) was complaining about how hard it was to work in the municipal health system because of it being "managed by illiterates" and that he was only working there because people needed it.
(keep in mind that because of the lack of surgeons he had way more than enough pacients and he could just sit on a pile of money from private clients)

Believing that anyone can actually know what is in their net self interest is a spook. It may be one thing to acknowledge that we are replaceable but can you also acknowledge that we are limited in the knowledge of our actions amidst the chaos and ever changing Dynamics of this universe? In fact I would go a step further and claim that there is no such thing as a net positive action of self interest. Yet we need our spooks to help us fall asleep at night.

>Most people are just dumb, period

Maybe this has something to do with the fact that they're forced into wage-slavery before they have a chance to properly develop their mental faculties, and also because our education system is designed to produce productive workers and not free, empathetic thinkers.

>The success of places like Bell Labs, Tesla, and Silicon Valley in general points to "capitalistic forces + government subsidization + really large corporations that can fund basic research"

Maybe these people who worked in these institutions would have been able to make even cooler/more useful stuff in an even more socialist society.

...

>they're forced into wage-slavery before they have a chance to properly develop their mental faculties

Is that true?

slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/19/teachers-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/

>In summary: teacher quality probably explains 10% of the variation in same-year test scores. A +1 SD better teacher might cause a +0.1 SD year-on-year improvement in test scores. This decays quickly with time and is probably disappears entirely after four or five years, though there may also be small lingering effects.

tweelingenregister.org/nederlands/verslaggeving/NTR-publicaties_2016/Zeeuw_LID_2016.pdf

> In general, individual differences in
educational achievement were to a large extent due to genes and the influence of the family environment was negligible. Moreover, there is no evidence for gender differences in the underlying etiology.

The picture that seems to be emerging is one where intelligence is largely fixed by your genes, with environmental aspects playing a very negligible effect (note that the second link is a study from the Netherlands, not the US).

>our education system is designed to produce productive workers and not free, empathetic thinkers

This is true, but because intelligence has such a strong genetic component, I think fixing this would make people much more mentally healthy (which is a good thing, naturally) but not very much more competent.

>Maybe these people who worked in these institutions would have been able to make even cooler/more useful stuff in an even more socialist society.

Maybe. It's in principle possible. But I'm more comfortable with the position of "incrementally changing society as it is today based on what historically has seemed to work well and based on our slowly improving understanding of economics" than the position of "we need to radically reorganize things in a certain fashion which has either historically not worked well or historically simply not existed in comparable conditions because it has some theoretical advantages". I don't think my position is unreasonable.

Your position is entirely reasonable. I'm probably just more attracted to the high-risk/high-reward option because I'm not personally very satisfied with my life. I would argue that things are not necessarily working well now; I feel that we're on an unsustainable path that isn't even that great while it's lasting.

I also find that study very hard to accept, jut because in my own life I can recall specific experiences that I have learned a great deal from, although, indeed, I feel I got very little actually "education" from school. But I did learn a lot about how people think/act from school, and there were a few good books I was exposed to.

But for a simple example, if you never take an algebra class/do algebra problems you will never be able to do algebra, which would make you significantly less competent than someone who can.

>I think we should be democratically deciding how to use our resources
a.k.a. I think people with bigger social skills and the biggest demagogues should be able to seize other people's resources and convince other people that what they want to do with those resources is the right thing to do

This is how your post reads in real life
there is no "property of the community". Anything that is supposedly "everybody's" is actually nobody's and somebody's at the same time. As in, it's nobody's, because there isn't a single individual that takes the risk for owning such a thing (as in, if the community's tree falls over somebody's house, nobody can be held accountable for it), and it's somebody's, in the sense that the people with bigger "political skills" have all the actual control over it. Society becomes a huge tug of war, where you have to actively care about what other people think, or else your property will be used in a way you don't like. In the end, it's shit and completely not worth it. It's also the kind of logic that birthed nowadays' completely obnoxious activists.

>In the end, it's shit and completely not worth it.

Says the property owner! But what of the wage-slaves, who are the majority. Might not it be worth it to them?

And the people you're reducing to "demagogues with political/social skills" might actually be empathetic people of vision who are making strong philosophical arguments to convince people to freely act in the interests of the community.

Whereas in the system you're advocating for property owners and the State that violently enforces their property rights force people to act how they want or else starve.

she's a hack author, who never had the discipline to formalise her "philosophy", for teen, american, middle-class, college edgelords who have lived a very sheltered life.

its quite telling that she never expressed her ideas in an academic manner.....its because she knew they would never stand up to rigorous, academic scrutiny

You're making complete leaps in logic but I assume you knew this bc the guy you're arguing against isn't very bright

You wanna see my SAT scores? I'm in the 99th percentile, brah.

But you probably think Marx was dumb too.

>And the people you're reducing to "demagogues with political/social skills" might actually be empathetic people of vision who are making strong philosophical arguments to convince people to freely act in the interests of the community.
Yes because we'll just trust people to be virtuous and everybody to be properly able to judge who to trust and who to not trust. And I'll have to give a shit about how smart people are to do that. Surely that'll make up for a great society.
Also, the "wage-slaves" are all property owners as well. A society that upholds the value of property is beneficial to everybody.

>Also, the "wage-slaves" are all property owners as well.

The fuck are you talking about? Vast majority of them rent their housing and are constantly paying off their car loan. Their landlord owns their apartment and the used car financing racket owns their car. What other property might they own? Certainly not their appliances if they're renting. They're shoes? Their iPad? Please!

>They're shoes

>Yes because we'll just trust people to be virtuous and everybody to be properly able to judge who to trust and who to not trust.

Hence why we need to have a society based on philosophy, so that people have the mental tools to call out bullshit when they hear it! So that we can have these conversations as a community.

Indeed, under the system you're advocating for we are at the mercy of property owners, and have to trust that they are going to use their resources in a responsible and empathetic way, and not in an exploitive way.

Yes. Anything you own is your property. How is this hard? "Wage-slaves" are the ones most harmed by this view of "communal property" where we somehow are eternally in debt with people you don't even know and have to daily get robbed by the state to satisfy this debt. If only their property was respected, they'd maybe have a better life.

>Hence why we need to have a society based on philosophy
My point of view: you only need people to respect the basic idea of property to have a functioning society.
Your point of view: everybody, or at least most people, need to have a good understanding of a field of study that has never been an object of interest by more than 10% of humanity (and that's by a long shot).
Yeah. It'll work.
>to trust that they are going to use their resources in a responsible and empathetic way, and not in an exploitive way.
We don't have to "trust" anything. If they use their property in a way that harms other people's properties, freely built systems of justice will be activated against them. The more they try to be exploitative, the more individuals will take action against these people. We won't be "passing on" the responsibility of our well-being towards any institution such as the state, so we'll have to take things in our hands. I'm just saying, if these kinds of things are truly in everybody's interest, people will notice, and will act upon it.

>Yes. Anything you own is your property.

Right, and wage-slaves don't own their apartment, nor their car. How is this hard?

>The more they try to be exploitative, the more individuals will take action against these people.

Right, like seizing the means of production.

But they own their wage, their shoes, phones, whatever it is they have.
>Right, like seizing the means of production
Do you steal things from people who you think aren't using them properly everyday? That's kind of pathological bro

What's pathological is thinking that a human can own a piece of land and then employ violence to control what happens on that land.

>But they own their wage, their shoes, phones, whatever it is they have.

That's personal property. What they don't own is productive capital, like land, or a factory, or an office.

Ok. So imagine yourself in times before. You found a plot of land. You put seeds in it, take care of it. It soon turns into a productive farm and you have, in your hands, the product of your labor. People come in and say: this isn't yours. You're not entitled to any of this. Also, you know those plants you planted? We want half of it. The rest you can keep. In exchange, we'll defend your farm from being robbed just like we're robbing. Also, you can't decline our service. If you don't give the amount we ask for, we'll come in and take you to jail.
Apparently, to you, there is nothing absurd about any of this. If only the farm owner was a friend of one of those "empathic leaders" huh?

So, as an anarcho-pacifist, I do not advocate for jailing anybody. I agree that what you describe is fucked up. That's why I'm not a Marxist. Although I agree with his critique of Capitalism, I don't agree with his revolutionary strategy, as you describe.

If you mean that my argument isn't rock-solid, yes, I'm aware, I'm just providing a sketch of an argument really, not meant to be conclusive at all; I'm not going to write a research paper on cognitive genomics just to make a post on Veeky Forums.

Mob Psycho 100 is greater that Ayn Rand's whole novels or whatever and the message it delivered is kinda how no one is a special snowflake but we should care for each other so fuck off Rand lover but i will give you a hug if you need it

I think they find satisfaction in saving people's lives, but they still wouldn't do it for free.

It's because when she was growing up in the communist takeover in the Soviet Union, philosophy was mainly used as a vehicle to justify communism and why self-interest was evil. She probably should have reached out more to the philosophy community but I can understand her hesitation.

Let's be real, the majority of people wouldn't fucking know how to make the most out of empty land. They would wait for people with more vision and talent to make it livable and prosperous.

They wouldn't do it for free. Their desires would be provided for by the community.

I've watched all of the Futurama episodes. When is she or her ideas referenced?

They wouldn't have to know themselves how to work the land, they could follow the example/instructions of someone they trust, not because they have to as a wage-slave, but because they want to.

Same desu

Tbh this just reveals one gripe I had with his leaps in logic. The correlation/causation problem of standardized test scores actually being a legitimate indicator of a person's, let's say, potential for critical thought. I'm not arguing it isn't a sufficient indicator towards the positive yet the nuance of the test is that you take them at a young age so using them as proof for a person's future potential? You don't stop learning at 18. Someone may be incredibly bright quicker than others but that doesn't provide sufficient evidence that the others potential is moot