4 ms·

I really, really wish all objectivists had been born (actually) underprivileged.

maxharris 13y ago
It is better to take cognizance of how things really are rather than how you really, really wish them to be. Where you start in life doesn't matter, but how big a jump you make in improving your lot does, and that's something that's entirely up to you. Please lay off the Rawlsian stuff - it doesn't square with the things I've observed in my own life. Nor does it square with the experiences of many of my friends that started life out poor, and chose to make something of themselves. At this point, some might say, "you didn't earn your brain/parent's money/etc." I say that's nonsense, because the entire idea of "earn" arises in order to distinguish real people who choose to act toward a goal from those that choose not to. To do that, we have to look at adults - lots of them, ranging from bums to billionaires, across time and professions, on and on. Then at young adults, then at small children (to fully see the contrast with adults). Choice is the crucial thing here: nobody could arrive at the idea of "earning" or "deserts" or "justice" by studying newborns or fetuses. Relying on "earn" (which depends on the idea of choice and free will, as I've indicated above) in a statement intended to undermine the idea of choice and free will is bogus. EDIT: I am making some serious points here. Disagree all you want in comments, but downvoting me reflexively does not refute my argument.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  >>Where you start in life doesn't matter, but how big a jump you make in improving your lot does, and that's something that's entirely up to you. How big a jump you can make in improving your lot is a function of where you start in life. It is significantly more difficult for someone born into a poor, single-parent household to bootstrap and "choose to make something of themselves" compared to someone who is born into a white middle-class family.
  - maxharris 13y ago
    "How big a jump you can make in improving your lot is a function of where you start in life." Says you, but my experience contradicts it. You have not convinced me. "It is significantly more difficult" So? Why does that matter? None of us are equal in any way, and none of us ever will be. You might as well decry the fact that some people are taller, or have an eye color that you prefer, or keep a head full of hair into old age. In a just (my definition of that word, not necessarily yours) society, we are equal in one respect alone: equal before the law. Before you rattle off a point about "justice," see my amended comments in the post above. The concept of justice pertains to choice, and applying it to situations where there is no choice involved (e.g., who your parents are, how much money they have) is not a valid use of the concept.
    - gems 13y ago
      "Says you, but my experience contradicts it. You have not convinced me." Your experience is dependent on several factors including how willing you are to listen to and engage people with different lives than your own. I can close my eyes and shout that there are no colors, but that doesn't invalidate everyone else's experience. Don't pretend like you have an authoritative background to make general conclusions.
      - maxharris 13y ago
        I'm not invalidating anything you've observed - I'm just challenging your conclusions. One of my friends left home (when he was ~19) with little more than the shirt on his back, a pickup truck, and ruined credit. He managed to rebuild his life, and he did it all on his own. This was ~15 years ago. Great guy! I don't want to get too autobiographical on you, but I didn't have the smoothest time myself: I bombed out of college before my first semester was up. I spent years working (and not on anything that you could call high-paying). I went back to school as an adult, graduated with distinction, and got a better job. I'm 32 now, and I've met enough people to know what I'm talking about.
        gems 13y ago
        That's your evidence against the statement made by enraged_camel. Does that mean that the statement is false? No.
- saraid216 13y ago
  > It is better to take cognizance of how things really are rather than how you really, really wish them to be. > it doesn't square with the things I've observed in my own life. > To do that, we have to look at adults - lots of them, ranging from bums to billionaires, across time and professions, on and on. Then at young adults, then at small children (to fully see the contrast with adults). I like that you've indicated your own confirmation bias right there.
  - maxharris 13y ago
    I like that you've indicated your own confirmation bias right there. Does that really make any sense? Everyone, including you, has beliefs and hypotheses. I've summarized some of what I've considered in coming up with my conclusion, and all you've done is to throw a convenient label on me. You'll have to try harder than that.
  - javert 13y ago
    He's actually doing it the right way: looking at lots of empirical evidence and forming the right abstractions from it. That's how science is done, and it's how philosophy should be done. You are free to present contradictory evidence and conclusions if you think he's made a mistake. He's not talking about evidence limited to his personal, one-on-one interactions. He's talking about all the evidence available to us, about people in society.
    - saraid216 13y ago
      Yes, he agrees with you. I got that.
    - saraid216 13y ago
      It is better to take cognizance of how things really are rather than how you really, really wish them to be. Where you start in life matters. It squares with the things I've observed in my own life; hardworking people who spend every waking hour working for the betterment of their friends and family are nevertheless constantly battered by mischance and bad fortune. I've learned to differentiate the good luck that I possess in my own life from the bad luck that others have. Despite my continued work in supporting them with financial aid, useful contacts, and marketable skills, they are still forced by circumstance to end up destitute. At this point, some might say, "you didn't earn your brain/parent's money/etc." I say that's nonsense, because the entire idea of "earn" arises in order to distinguish real people who choose to act toward a goal from those that choose not to. And of course, that is the point. None of these things were earned. This is a basic framing problem[1], and the entire basis of chaos theory[2]. Initial conditions matter. A proper scientific experiment includes a control group measured against an experimental group, and both of these groups are impossible to meaningfully distinguish at the beginning of the observation. If this is not the case, say because one group is more intelligent by some accepted measure of intelligent, then the measurement of a variable, say the application of choice to arrive at earnings, becomes utterly nonsensical. The causative agent could be either the initial difference or the experimental variable. Using simplistic philosophical bases for one's beliefs is tantamount to unexamined religious dogma and in no way demonstrates any kind of empirical basis. Furthermore, claiming to have surveyed "bums to billionaires" without proof is merely, in the sophistic style of javert, a logical fallacy. But it's cute you two believe you have any grasp of epistemology, rhetoric, or logic. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(social_sciences)#Experimental_demonstration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(social_sciences)#Exper... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
- gems 13y ago
  "Where you start in life doesn't matter" How can you possibly say that?
  - javert 13y ago
    I'm not the guy you're asking, but I'll weight in. I think happiness is much more related to self-esteem and self-efficacy than it is to how much money you have. For this reason, I think it's common for people born at any station in life who are successful relative to that starting point, to be happier than people born at a higher station that are not successful or are motivated by the wrong things.
- javert 13y ago
  Since you look like you could use some support, I just wanted to drop in and say, that was a really, really good comment. What I like is the focus on looking at empirical evidence and then forming the right abstractions based upon that evidence.
  - maxharris 13y ago
    Thanks!
javert 13y ago
I'm calling you out. Attacking the arguer instead of the argument is a logical fallacy. What you're actually implying, which wouldn't be a logical fallacy, is that my view is subjective, because of the circumstances of my (middle class) upbringing. I don't think that argument holds water. The subjectivity or not of things is probably too big of a discussion to really tackle on hacker news, though.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- chrisrhoden 13y ago
  a) I wasn't attacking you. An ad-hominem attack in this case would be, "Javert is an idiot, therefore this viewpoint is wrong." I don't believe that you're an idiot. On the contrary, I believe that you are probably a smart person who has had a particular set of experiences. b) The statement was made to draw attention to what I perceive as weakness in your argument. c) Notwithstanding the points made by others in the comments below, it should be said that I completely understand how and why people are objectivists. If, as I proposed, all (or even most (or even a significant number of)) objectivists had been born underprivileged, I think that I might be more inclined to agree with it. d) > If you want to see what happens to an economic sector as the government becomes more invasive, look at the finance sector, which is the most controlled sector in the US, or look at the "federal telecom bureaus" (AT&T, Time Warner and Verizon). In the finance sector, people broke the rules or rushed to fill in spaces where the rules were rolled back. Then things went really bad. In the telecoms, they are breaking the rules but not being held accountable by the government. In both cases, the fact that they are not following the rules is the actual problem. I'm not sure how this supports your claim.

It is better to take cognizance of how things really are rather than how you really, really wish them to be. Where you start in life doesn't matter, but how big a jump you make in improving your lot does, and that's something that's entirely up to you. Please lay off the Rawlsian stuff - it doesn't square with the things I've observed in my own life. Nor does it square with the experiences of many of my friends that started life out poor, and chose to make something of themselves. At this point, some might say, "you didn't earn your brain/parent's money/etc." I say that's nonsense, because the entire idea of "earn" arises in order to distinguish real people who choose to act toward a goal from those that choose not to. To do that, we have to look at adults - lots of them, ranging from bums to billionaires, across time and professions, on and on. Then at young adults, then at small children (to fully see the contrast with adults). Choice is the crucial thing here: nobody could arrive at the idea of "earning" or "deserts" or "justice" by studying newborns or fetuses. Relying on "earn" (which depends on the idea of choice and free will, as I've indicated above) in a statement intended to undermine the idea of choice and free will is bogus. EDIT: I am making some serious points here. Disagree all you want in comments, but downvoting me reflexively does not refute my argument.

enraged_camel 13y ago
>>Where you start in life doesn't matter, but how big a jump you make in improving your lot does, and that's something that's entirely up to you. How big a jump you can make in improving your lot is a function of where you start in life. It is significantly more difficult for someone born into a poor, single-parent household to bootstrap and "choose to make something of themselves" compared to someone who is born into a white middle-class family.
- maxharris 13y ago
  "How big a jump you can make in improving your lot is a function of where you start in life." Says you, but my experience contradicts it. You have not convinced me. "It is significantly more difficult" So? Why does that matter? None of us are equal in any way, and none of us ever will be. You might as well decry the fact that some people are taller, or have an eye color that you prefer, or keep a head full of hair into old age. In a just (my definition of that word, not necessarily yours) society, we are equal in one respect alone: equal before the law. Before you rattle off a point about "justice," see my amended comments in the post above. The concept of justice pertains to choice, and applying it to situations where there is no choice involved (e.g., who your parents are, how much money they have) is not a valid use of the concept.
  - gems 13y ago
    "Says you, but my experience contradicts it. You have not convinced me." Your experience is dependent on several factors including how willing you are to listen to and engage people with different lives than your own. I can close my eyes and shout that there are no colors, but that doesn't invalidate everyone else's experience. Don't pretend like you have an authoritative background to make general conclusions.
    - maxharris 13y ago
      I'm not invalidating anything you've observed - I'm just challenging your conclusions. One of my friends left home (when he was ~19) with little more than the shirt on his back, a pickup truck, and ruined credit. He managed to rebuild his life, and he did it all on his own. This was ~15 years ago. Great guy! I don't want to get too autobiographical on you, but I didn't have the smoothest time myself: I bombed out of college before my first semester was up. I spent years working (and not on anything that you could call high-paying). I went back to school as an adult, graduated with distinction, and got a better job. I'm 32 now, and I've met enough people to know what I'm talking about.
      - gems 13y ago
        That's your evidence against the statement made by enraged_camel. Does that mean that the statement is false? No.
saraid216 13y ago
> It is better to take cognizance of how things really are rather than how you really, really wish them to be. > it doesn't square with the things I've observed in my own life. > To do that, we have to look at adults - lots of them, ranging from bums to billionaires, across time and professions, on and on. Then at young adults, then at small children (to fully see the contrast with adults). I like that you've indicated your own confirmation bias right there.
- maxharris 13y ago
  I like that you've indicated your own confirmation bias right there. Does that really make any sense? Everyone, including you, has beliefs and hypotheses. I've summarized some of what I've considered in coming up with my conclusion, and all you've done is to throw a convenient label on me. You'll have to try harder than that.
- javert 13y ago
  He's actually doing it the right way: looking at lots of empirical evidence and forming the right abstractions from it. That's how science is done, and it's how philosophy should be done. You are free to present contradictory evidence and conclusions if you think he's made a mistake. He's not talking about evidence limited to his personal, one-on-one interactions. He's talking about all the evidence available to us, about people in society.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    Yes, he agrees with you. I got that.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    It is better to take cognizance of how things really are rather than how you really, really wish them to be. Where you start in life matters. It squares with the things I've observed in my own life; hardworking people who spend every waking hour working for the betterment of their friends and family are nevertheless constantly battered by mischance and bad fortune. I've learned to differentiate the good luck that I possess in my own life from the bad luck that others have. Despite my continued work in supporting them with financial aid, useful contacts, and marketable skills, they are still forced by circumstance to end up destitute. At this point, some might say, "you didn't earn your brain/parent's money/etc." I say that's nonsense, because the entire idea of "earn" arises in order to distinguish real people who choose to act toward a goal from those that choose not to. And of course, that is the point. None of these things were earned. This is a basic framing problem[1], and the entire basis of chaos theory[2]. Initial conditions matter. A proper scientific experiment includes a control group measured against an experimental group, and both of these groups are impossible to meaningfully distinguish at the beginning of the observation. If this is not the case, say because one group is more intelligent by some accepted measure of intelligent, then the measurement of a variable, say the application of choice to arrive at earnings, becomes utterly nonsensical. The causative agent could be either the initial difference or the experimental variable. Using simplistic philosophical bases for one's beliefs is tantamount to unexamined religious dogma and in no way demonstrates any kind of empirical basis. Furthermore, claiming to have surveyed "bums to billionaires" without proof is merely, in the sophistic style of javert, a logical fallacy. But it's cute you two believe you have any grasp of epistemology, rhetoric, or logic. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(social_sciences)#Experimental_demonstration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(social_sciences)#Exper... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
gems 13y ago
"Where you start in life doesn't matter" How can you possibly say that?
- javert 13y ago
  I'm not the guy you're asking, but I'll weight in. I think happiness is much more related to self-esteem and self-efficacy than it is to how much money you have. For this reason, I think it's common for people born at any station in life who are successful relative to that starting point, to be happier than people born at a higher station that are not successful or are motivated by the wrong things.
javert 13y ago
Since you look like you could use some support, I just wanted to drop in and say, that was a really, really good comment. What I like is the focus on looking at empirical evidence and then forming the right abstractions based upon that evidence.
- maxharris 13y ago
  Thanks!

javert 13y ago

I'm calling you out. Attacking the arguer instead of the argument is a logical fallacy. What you're actually implying, which wouldn't be a logical fallacy, is that my view is subjective, because of the circumstances of my (middle class) upbringing. I don't think that argument holds water. The subjectivity or not of things is probably too big of a discussion to really tackle on hacker news, though.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
chrisrhoden 13y ago
a) I wasn't attacking you. An ad-hominem attack in this case would be, "Javert is an idiot, therefore this viewpoint is wrong." I don't believe that you're an idiot. On the contrary, I believe that you are probably a smart person who has had a particular set of experiences. b) The statement was made to draw attention to what I perceive as weakness in your argument. c) Notwithstanding the points made by others in the comments below, it should be said that I completely understand how and why people are objectivists. If, as I proposed, all (or even most (or even a significant number of)) objectivists had been born underprivileged, I think that I might be more inclined to agree with it. d) > If you want to see what happens to an economic sector as the government becomes more invasive, look at the finance sector, which is the most controlled sector in the US, or look at the "federal telecom bureaus" (AT&T, Time Warner and Verizon). In the finance sector, people broke the rules or rushed to fill in spaces where the rules were rolled back. Then things went really bad. In the telecoms, they are breaking the rules but not being held accountable by the government. In both cases, the fact that they are not following the rules is the actual problem. I'm not sure how this supports your claim.