IsaacL

13 ms·

61.
by IsaacL 9y ago
I am struggling to understand your point - your last sentence is a masterpiece of unclear grammar - yet as you're now referring to "religious texts" and "blind devotees" I don't think you have any interest in r
62.
by IsaacL 9y ago
I used the word "nitpick" intentionally. I was referring to your point questioning whether "a zillionaire capitalist accepting a token amount of gold for performing unskilled labour represents a functioning market". This
63.
by IsaacL 9y ago
I posted these links elsewhere in the thread, but I think they'll be of special interest to HN readers, who might want to know about the more technical aspects of her philosophy. An index of her thoughts on many topics: http:/&#x
64.
by IsaacL 9y ago
The Ayn Rand lexicon is a good jumping off point. http://aynrandlexicon.com/book/conceptual.html Ayn Rand's philosophy goes far beyond the stereotype of capitalism and selfishness. She wrote a ton on consciousne
65.
by IsaacL 9y ago
I don't think you had a deep understanding of her philosophy. "The idea is that the free market is able to solve every problem." Ayn Rand doesn't say this. It sounds more like a stereotypical Republican talking point. Ra
66.
by IsaacL 9y ago
She also includes scenes where the heroes help one another, or even help strangers. (Example: Dagny inviting the tramp to join her for dinner). The scene where "a zillionaire capitalist charges for giving one of the other heroes a shor
67.
by IsaacL 9y ago
Did John Rogers meet many Ayn Rand fans before forming this opinion? Did you? I'm been an active Objectivist for the last two years and I've met dozens of others. They're a diverse bunch (I know Objectivist actors, Objectivis
68.
by IsaacL 10y ago
1. "There is an objective reality". 2. "Reality is consistent". 3. "The human mind is capable of knowledge about reality". These all need to be taken as axioms if any further knowledge is going to be possible
69.
by IsaacL 10y ago
> in the history of science, progress with concepts and causality did well where the new methods would need Nevada full of disk drives of data. E.g., space flight navigation is based, first, on Newton's law of gravity and second law
70.
by IsaacL 10y ago
I think your approach has similar problems to that of Leibniz. This might be of interest: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/concepts.html http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/platonic_realism.html
71.
by IsaacL 10y ago
I've dug into these numbers and it's rarely clear how "subsidies" are defined. Often tax breaks and "unpaid externalities" are included in the total subsidies. "$X of subsidies for fossil fuels" usual
72.
by IsaacL 10y ago
Nice response to my argument with insults. Once you're talking about moral judgement and people being determined, you're in philosophical territory. In reality we have free will. If every action was predetermined, there'd be
73.
by IsaacL 10y ago
People do respond to incentives. Deterrence isn't just about the severity of punishments but also the probability of being caught. The US justice system (I'm not an American) seems to have the worst of both worlds were many people
74.
by IsaacL 10y ago
The fundamental point is that if determinism is true then morality is meaningless. I think we have free will. (This will probably be a controversial point on HN so to expand a little: I think consciousness is both non-mystical and non-mater
75.
by IsaacL 10y ago
The logic is based on the needs of any society. Every society needs a set of rules which everyone agrees to follow. History shows that the smaller the set of rules, the better, but you need to at least prevent people from infringing the lif
76.
by IsaacL 10y ago
Do you know how much people suffer if their house is broken into, if they are robbed at gunpoint, if they are raped, etc? Not just the direct harm, but the ongoing psychological harm?
77.
by IsaacL 10y ago
Revenue is often used as a vanity metric. On the other hand... revenue is tangible, profit is an accounting construct.
78.
by IsaacL 10y ago
One HN user wrote about why she liked them in a previous thread on Nasty Gal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12923367
79.
by IsaacL 10y ago
I was amazed to see this comment, like a meteorite of sanity crashing into HN. My sibling post is on the right lines - a lot of people in tech are chasing a delusional self-image - though I don't think that's true of everyone. Peo
80.
by IsaacL 10y ago
Are there any good books on this topic?
81.
by IsaacL 10y ago
Yeah, I was recently thinking of applying to work at Cambridge Analytica, so I had reason to do some digging on them. Like a lot of people applying data science to problems, they're riding off hype, buzzwords and clients not fully unde
82.
by IsaacL 10y ago
Meh, I usually agree with your comments, but in this case the resentment is towards people who have a lot of money and haven't earned it (not that they're bad people, they've simply been dealt a good starting hand).
83.
by IsaacL 10y ago
Yup. It takes a while to see the abstract pattern underlying their behaviour. Once you see it, its very clear. But for a long time you're distracted by the details of day-to-day events and you think they're just another co-worker
84.
by IsaacL 10y ago
"There are more than five million cubic miles of ice on Earth, and some scientists say it would take more than 5,000 years to melt it all." And it's unlikely we'd keep burning fossil fuels all that time. More context fro
85.
by IsaacL 10y ago
This is not a very good article. Like a lot of writers in the Lesswrong-rationalist sphere, the author is very smart and describes her thought process in great detail, but has too many erroneous premises and ends up with wrong conclusions.
86.
by IsaacL 10y ago
> I did not intend to be offensive, only skeptical and cautious. Cool, that's perfectly reasonable. > We are all guilty of it, no doubt. This might sound facetious, but don't you see the contradiction here? Towards the propo
87.
by IsaacL 10y ago
Fundamentally, I think Objectivism is true, i.e., it is correct on all the essential points. Ayn Rand is a lot deeper than people give her credit for -- much, much deeper than the strawman "capitalism = good, socialism = bad". Wha
88.
by IsaacL 10y ago
The fallacy with dismissing Dalio's advice as survivorship bias, is that building a successful business isn't a one-shot deal. It's not like 100 investment managers all start out with different philosophies, their cards are d
89.
by IsaacL 10y ago
I avoided her for a long time, based on her negative reputation, then finally started reading her books a couple of years ago and was blown away. She's much, much deeper than I'd been led to believe. I always make a point to reply
90.
by IsaacL 10y ago
There's lots of creative accounting behind the recent headlines on the competitiveness of solar. Without an efficient means to store solar power, you can't run an electricity grid off solar alone, and you need a more reliable base

More ›