Enjoyed this one! My explanation for the popularity of Ayn Rand is that it allows people who have made, or inherited, a lot of money to escape the cognitive dissonance that makes them feel like they should maybe use their wealth to help others. It’s a very convenient worldview for that.
I also get similar vibes about the MIRI style AI doom people, I feel like the reality will be less black and white and more confusing. But, whatever happens it’s going to be dangerous and chaotic.
Or it's popular among the people who neither inherited nor made a lot of money, yet they want to justify selfishness and cling to the belief that they are in control (there is a reason libertarians overlap with modern republicans). Of course, they have another shared quality - the failure to recognize that Rand's arguments are a product of bad logic. Independent of the correctness of her theorems, one can't help but notice that those don't follow from her own axioms, which often aren't even axiomatic.
Libertarians overlap with modern Republicans because the Republicans will tolerate them and the Democrats won't. There's plenty of left-leaning libertarians.
Very thought provoking post! I definitely agree there is a deep flaw in most logical systems that inevitably leads to some a negative result when they are taken to the extreme. I do have one question/bit of push back, how is capitalism a stable system? Its econ 101 that capitalism is a system in crisis, the crisis is just pushed onto things/people that have no power to resist (colonies, natural systems etc...)
Hah, I think that depends heavily on where you take Econ 101.
I agree capitalism is a system in crisis, but it's a breakpoint, once-in-many-generations crisis. The crisis is coming after several centuries of thriving and spreading. It's also handily survived past crises (e.g. the great depression).
It's not dissimilar to authoritarianism--the system is super stable until it reaches a breaking point. Under a ruthless dictator, things have to get bad enough that people will risk their lives in a revolution. Under capitalism, things have to get bad enough that e.g. people risk their livelihood to strike (or so bad that you hit ecological collapse, etc).
To keep building on the structural metaphor: the most rigid materials will hold their shape for a long time, but once you reach a certain amount of weight, they snap.
Read Atlas Shrugged first time when I was about thirteen **bad idea**. Read it a second time in my mid twenties; my views had already softened a lot. Noticed on that second read that the heroes all hated their families and did not have children.
This was a great analysis. I think most inquisitive people encounter Rand and fall in love with her ideas at some point. I teach high school English and it’s interesting to see how a young mind will take her ideas and assume they’re the “good” guys. Rand’s ideas are charismatic, we want to believe them because it simplifies the world. It makes us feel bad to think we’re lucky so we must be deserving. Just like the Puritans we’re “anointed” in some sense. I took a grad class on film history and we watched Triumph of the Will and Birth of a Nation. Both films were actually good and that was the scary part. These were objectively nauseating ideas and philosophies that were made attractive because of the way they were dressed up. I don’t think Rand is that bad, but I put her ideas in that category. Again this was great!
I appreciate the concepts of the post a lot! For further reading on the role of reason when logical argument and emotional appeal are mixed, my recc is Baggini's The Edge of Reason.
Very important note: a false dichotomy only invalidates one proposition, not an entire propositional law. Rather than throwing out Non-Contradiction, we should exercise rigor when creating propositions with hidden dichotomies-- which may not be propositions at all but rather sets of propositions that have multiple truth values (or none). (Saying we should exercise rigor and knowing how to exercise rigor are whole different things of course, not the most helpful.)
Going from there, ironically, provability and truth value are a false dichotomy. Provability decides information about sets of truth values not a single truth value-- EVEN IN THE CASE that all members of a set have the same truth value, these are still NOT equivalent. A set can't be reduced.
Likewise, probability & truth value are usually not a dichotomy, with many probabilities deciding sets of propositions and others never deciding any propositions at all. The only instances in which we could consider a probability equivalent to a truth value is when a probability is a set of one: 0% or 100% probabilities. (Things do actually get muggy when we are examining probabilities that are infinitely close to 0 or 100 and converge, so if I really want to earn my wise-sage badge, I suppose I could make a statement about how infinite truth is equivalent to no truth at all.
I'm not actually a wise sage; I simply spent two years in an apartment with a hardcore marxist, a hardcore libertarian, and a clown. From a fourth-party perspective, it was really obvious that the libertarian and the marxist were no more logical than the clown. Thankfully, their friendships have outlived their beliefs.)
Adding Edge of Reason to my list! Appreciate the rec.
I also appreciate the technical points on provability, probability, and truth. I do think it's worth emphasizing though that mainstream interpretations of QM do deny truth value to some commonsense propositions like "the particle is in location X". The amplitudes/probabilities they assign aren't indicators of epistemic uncertainty, but aleatoric uncertainty.
And I really I wish I'd gotten the chance to visit that apartment.
Ah, pardon, QM is a great example of a proposition that is actually multiple propositions! I didn't realize this until my buddy got really drunk and borrowed my white board for a lecture that was somehow a lot more clear than any professional material I've looked at: basically, superposition is described by a linear combination of a series of vectors, so to transform a solution to logical statements, we'd say "the particle is at A, the particle is at B, the particle is at A and B", and we will get definitive truth values of either FFF, TFF, FTF, or TTT. The really fun part is when the linear combination of vectors yields some value that isn't physically possible from a single vector, and particles Just Do That, thus yielding FFF or TTT, which manages to wrap all the way back around to how we commonly think of "being at a location" only yielding T or F-- yet being far more arcane than superposition.
&& Thank you for the clarification regarding what context you were providing examples of probability! While not negating a propositional law, outlining a few types of uncertainty (provability being regarded as a third in some contexts if I understand correctly) is a great way to understand the limits of logic. Sure, we can make a set of statements for the face value of a rolled dice, "it will be 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6", but without more context, this could be indicating the literal number of faces of equal probability, buuuut this could be a weighted dice, this could be a dice that only has 6s painted on it, it could be a d4, or maybe the statement is indicating some dice with between 1 and 100 sides all marked between 1 and 6 will be rolled, and it hasn't even been determined which yet.
(Or rather, exactly as your article explains, a long book providing logic with limited context or even outdated context may not be very useful in reality, and opposing logic regarding AI safety without emotional context isn't useful either. One may even say leaving out the emotional context is dishonest, but again I can only say this as the not-so-sagely third party that got involved in AI in an entirely different context than AI Doom folks.)
Forgive the bad joke, but if you had visited the apartment, I would've given it a fair probability either way whether it would've been a delightful visit, uncanny to the level of existentially disturbing, or both. Our clowning friend liked to wrap spoons in tinfoil and throw them on the apartment floor, our marxist friend believed that labor was a job for machines (I know) resulting in instances like the raw biscuit dough I found stuck between two of my plates, and our libertarian friend had crusader axes and swords sitting around in random corners. (I promise they are all lovely people!) Then, bear in mind that I easily introduced the most chaos into the space. To explain without tattling on myself, with a simple combo of propositions: I am much more organized now than I was in the past. I currently have one half of a sofa in my dining room. The other half of the same sofa is on the porch.
Because one or more arguers have "lost their minds" does that mean their argument is necessarily false? A crazy dude could tell you the world is round...that does not prove it is flat.
The highest form of argument is attacking the central point...not the arguers.
You assert that the argument for AI doom is elusive, perhaps making it too hard with which to engage.
Try engaging with this form of the AI doom argument:
1) AI companies are building large neural networks which have shown signs of intelligence.
2) AI companies admit they do not know how to control them. They have initiated hail mary technical projects to try and do so.
3) No one knows if or when the large neural networks will hit a ceiling on intelligence.
4) Humans control the destiny of all other species on earth, not because of our strength, but because of our intelligence.
5) If we become the second most intelligent species on earth, we will be at the mercy of something we do not know how to control.
There, you no longer have to go down rabbit holes.
Now, let me assist you in attacking that argument. You might counter:
Intelligences high enough to cause catastrophe for humans will necessarily be very kind to humans because humans are above a universal, important threshold of sentience. (Personally, I find this Human Worth Hypothesis anthropocentric and optimistic...given what humans do to primates and whales.)
Current LNN architectures will hit a ceiling and stop improving. This will slow us down decades during which we can find a miraculous way to control something smarter than us. (Please make a measurable prediction about what LNNs will not be able to do. Also make a prediction about alignment success.)
There is something special about human intelligence which can only be implemented in meat brains in a way we cannot duplicate. (To assert this, you need to explain what intelligence is beyond computation.)
Catastrophe by AI sounds like science fiction and is therefore not true. (Just because something sounds like science fiction does not mean it is false. By that logic, we'll never have a nuclear war because people have written novels about nuclear war.)
___
I admit to emotion and potential risk-aversion bias on this topic which I must monitor in myself so that it does not impair my rationality.
I have three daughters. I care about them very much.
I am constantly baffled by the "science fiction" objection. The *point* (one of them) of science fiction is to try to predict the future, and warn us about possible futures! So when I hear, "sounds like science fiction," my reaction is, "oh, so you think it's plausible then?"
Let me take a mild swing at a possible oversimplification of Rands framing of capitalism.
"But fortunately I don't need to do all that. Rand undermines her own “greed is good”5 argument in two ways. First, the main characters—heroic inventors and industrialists—aren’t driven by greed, but by the sheer love of seeing their creations come to life."
A capitalistic society is probably the best model we have developed so far, if the point is to deliver high quality for the most reasonable price. A truly capitalistic society implies a meritocratic society whereby the potentials in each individual is sought maximized. Rand detests the corrupt, the freeloaders the regulators of bad conscience. In other words, she hates communism and by implication crooked capitalism (Which is what we have most places, do enlighten me on any specific instance of true capitalism in practice.)
Thus as with communism, all "new" marxists simply claim the "old ones" were not properly following the doctrine, but if only they came to power it would all be swell. Well, most capitalist societies would likely degrade into crooked capitalism over time. But it likely would provide a longer timeframe of relative superior quality of life for the inhabitants before devolving.
Since I do not subscribe any longer to the idea that material wealth provides "contentment" as there is no internal cup of contentment to "fill up". I do not buy any concept of pure capitalism = utopia. I do however believe it is the superior construct for new development of ideas and conversion into quality goods.
Naturally, my framing/interpretation might be completely off ;)
Yeah I mostly agree with you--I'd much rather live under pure capitalism than pure communism. But I'm also able-bodied and generally driven to build things. If I were disabled to the point of not being able to work, I'd rather live under pure communism, where I'd be slightly better off (even if most people would be much worse off).
With even a little bit of welfare/charity/altruism, capitalism starts to get pretty good.
My preferred economy would tax at about 50% of GDP, with 2/3 of that (33% of GDP) going towards entitlement spending. The US is currently around 18%, so a little more than half of what I'd like to see. France is very close to 33%.
I you touch the core of the matter. Many conclude a purely capitalistic society to be devoid of compassion. Is that a natural conclusion? Both from a purely pragmatic stance, but also from how the system overall would influence people. Let me try to illuminate my rationale.
Pragmatic: Without a substantial "welfare" state, as neighbors, we would have a natural motivation to get along. I look after your house and the other way around. I am subjectively better off if you are better off. From a purely egoistic level I would actually be encouraged to more altruistic attitudes because it benefits myself in a multi iterative prisoners dilemma. When this "dependence" is broken by an "external" or big society structure, this motivation is subtly or not so subtly reduced. My neighborhood is better off if people take care of each other.
Any system that reduces friction, or allocate resources efficiently. Thinking very broadly here. Implies encourage finding peoples talents and enabling their growth. That is how you get "most out of them", but in a way that does not crush them but through them growing. This is massively different in a crooked capitalist setup, where we are motivated to a large extent by the same things as communism (to take a bigger slice of an exceptionally slow growing cake). People that feel empowered (internal sensation) through working with what they actually enjoy and find valuable will overall be more content. Contentment brings more altruistic behaviors', if for nothing else than it does feel good to actually help others.
When you delegate "welfare" to the state, you loose a massive amount of the energetic and creative people. It sucks to work in a bureaucratic papermill, you see that compassion cannot be bought, and people become products/tools that must be fixed through whip or carrot. Over time society becomes colder and less humane.
I live in one of those countries you find "ideal". This society becomes an instagram version of life, where the surface matters more than the substance. Incompetence rules to the degree that at least 1/3 of resources simply goes to waste. Old people are treated by the system as crap, even if you have heroic instances of workers doing their best. (most resources go towards the administrative class, rather than the front line). Few of true meritocratic background want to mingle in political circles as it is a vicious dogfight without an objective to find the best method vs positioning for power and pushing though their form of ism.
Wealth taxes are massively expensive and inefficient taxes and directly sucks the life forces from the system. Much better with higher corporate profit tax rates, dividend taxes.
But hey, who said running a perfect system should be simple. The irony though is, I truly believe that running a better society is vastly simpler than a corrupted one.
What conflict is there between capitalism and charity? Why would you not have charities that help take care of disabled people, etc., in pure capitalism?
A different flaw in Ayn Rand's work is that her practical ethics don't seem to follow from her meta-ethics. Pure egoism/selfishness without any concern for others would suggest an attitude more like some Ayn Rand villains: if you can "get away with" doing things that benefit you at others' expense, such as theft, you should do them.
It's hard for me to understand the common sentiment that Communism is rooted in optimism. I mean, if a strong conception of the labor theory of value were true, then whenever someone opened a restaurant, hired some cooks and servers for wages, and gained a profit on the business, then one person would be an insidious thief and the others all a combination of dupes and slaves. Exploitation would be going on everywhere, right in front of our eyes, appearing consensual and mutually benefical. That sounds very fucking pessimistic to me.
Not quite. More like, the employer-employee relation is something people are highly inclined to agree to and themselves regard as mutually beneficial. Calling this inherently exploitative seems highly pessimistic about human nature. An analogous example would be those radical feminists back 8n the day who regarded penile-vaginal sex as inherently violent and oppressive. Isn't it pessimistic to see hidden oppression in widespread behavior that most of the supposed victims themselves regard as freely chosen?
Yeah, as a knowledge worker who has loved every one of his employers, I sympathize with this. But when I talk to low-skilled wage earners (which admittedly isn't often), they almost always describe their relationship with their employer in adversarial terms, regardless of their politics.
For me, employment is very much mutually beneficial, and if my employer started exploiting me I'd just peace out trusting I could find another job whenever I wanted. For a lot of people, their current job is the only thing standing between them and homelessness. You could still call that "mutually beneficial", but it's only mutually beneficial in a society that withholds housing, food, and healthcare.
The r/antiwork subreddit is an interesting place to lurk if you don't get much interaction with wage-based workers. Politically one-sided for sure, but there are a lot of great examples of the bullshit you have to deal with when you're 100% replaceable.
I agree. But you seem to be making a case that both someone who says the nature of employment (in the U.S., say) can't get any better, and someone who believes that the Labor Theory of Value is true, are highly pessimistic, whereas the optimists are innovative, trial-and-error sorts of social democrat.
Oh to be clear: I'm not so much saying that the people are pessimistic/optimistic, just pointing out the game-theoretic assumptions made by a capitalist vs communist system: a communist system assumes everyone will act altruistically (it's "optimistic" about human behavior) while a capitalist system expects everyone to act out of self interest (it's "pessimistic"). Not saying there aren't optimistic capitalists or pessimistic communists out there, or that the system as a whole is characterized by optimistic/pessimistic attitudes. Just this one assumption about how humans act by default.
I'm not so sure about that. The old-school type Communists I know most closely in meatspace seem to primarily be motivated by something akin to my own self- and family-protecting attitude about being stolen from. They just combine it with what I consider economic fallacies, and conclude that insidious theft of "surplus value produced by labor" is happening all over the place. In other words, I think they have the same major premise as most other people about defending our nearest and dearest against theft, but they have some crazy minor premises about what constitutes theft. Maybe my sample isn't representative, but I lean toward the view that while Communist propaganda has been altruistic (like the propaganda of many other systems), the real driving force was more like normal morally constrained self protection combined with an intuitively plausible but profoundly false theory of value.
While most people read Ayn Rand, virtually nobody reads Karl Marx, and so they rely on other peoples' (usually negative and simplified) depictions of his work without actually reading what he wrote. The "From each..." passage is a favorite, taken out of context from Marx's *Critique of the Gotha Program*. However, if you read the entire thing you would find passages like this:
"One man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. … Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal [share] in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal."
So, the difference is, one is a caricature, the other is an accurate representation of what the person actually wrote. Not sure those are equal.
The ability/need quote seems like an accurate summary of the longer quote you mentioned--unless there's something I'm missing?
This piece wasn't really meant to deal with Marxism in earnest, more to use Rand as a lens for the folly of naive logic. But I've never really heard a good response to the perverse incentives argument--if Marx deals with it directly I'd love to know more.
Edit: actually, I take that back--the best Marxist argument I've heard is also in novel form: The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. I hope to review it someday. And I'll definitely be kinder to Le Guin!
Yeah, I suppose you are right. The point, I think, is that the first phase of a communist society will necessarily be unequal until production is sufficient to achieve a "higher phase" where the "from each" ideal can be realized. The full context can be found here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
If you want another interesting fictional counterpoint, you could check out Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy and it's response by William Morris, News from Nowhere. All of these are also polemical utopias based around common ownership.
The fact that the ability/need principle incentivizes people to be needy, and disincentivizes productive behavior. Why work harder if it doesn't get you anything? Especially if you look around and see other people slacking.
Reason is a means, and means are coloured by their ends and take the normative vector of said ends. It is the Consequent that is key. And so given that understanding:
Emotion and its incorporation (or lack thereof) is ultimately dependant on what sort of pursuit is generated by said move.
If anything, something sub-rational (like emotion) certainly has its time and place; but the other pieces moving with it need to likewise be properly calibrated.
“Reason” in general (as per its formal etymological breakdown into its initial PIE roots of *re- and *ar-) has already failed.
This is because its ends these past few centuries or so have diverged radically from the primordial notions contained in aforementioned roots:
[In particular, the notion of “to fit together” is long dead.]
“Reason” properly exercised has given rise to fundamental dogmas which are so repugnant to the Human Being, that is it any wonder that people look elsewhere? So pursuits of the Sub-rational (i.e. Emotion) and the Supra-rational (i.e. Revelation) are making a comeback onto the scene.
However, whether or not they are relevant overall when it comes to generating certain normative outcomes; that differs widely and ought to be examined critically whenever possible
A wealthy heir living great without working is very different from someone living great by exploiting others. So "pure Capitalism is just as perverse as pure Communism" seems excessive (at least not supported by the argument provided).
The problem with "communism bad; opposite of bad is great; capitalism is the opposite of communism; therefore capitalism is great" is not logic but "conceptualization". When we say comm is bad, we use bad as an adjective, we don't mean that comm is identical to evil itself. Therefore it's mistaken to assign to communism all the properties of evil itself (like its opposite being good). The idea that capitalism is the opposite of communism is also somewhat problematic.
You have to be careful w/ household vs individual income, but the sofi data seems to be for "single income households". There's also a distinction between salaried and wage-earning workers--the Sofi data seems to point to "salary" but doesn't explicitly say it's excluding wage earners.
I also wonder if the ~$38k number factors in zero-earners? Which on the one hand is fair (e.g. a stay-at-home-parent and a working parent effectively split the working parent's income) but is also misleading.
But I think more relevant to the post is the other points I was making:
The problem with "communism bad; opposite of bad is great; capitalism is the opposite of communism; therefore capitalism is great" is not logic but "conceptualization". When we say comm is bad, we use bad as an adjective, we don't mean that comm is identical to evil itself. Therefore it's mistaken to assign to communism all the properties of evil itself (like its opposite being good). The idea that capitalism is the opposite of communism is also somewhat problematic.
A wealthy heir living great without working is very different from someone living great by exploiting others. So "pure Capitalism is just as perverse as pure Communism" seems excessive (at least not supported by the argument provided).
I also agree with your point re: conceptualization. Though I'd generally lump the practice of conceptualization in w/ rationalist/logical thought--it's hard to construct logical systems that don't deal with discrete concepts.
I'd push back on "a wealthy heir living great without working" being non-exploitative. Their exploitation isn't as obvious or direct, but they are draining value from society. Every person who makes their clothes or serves them food is exploited in the process.
But if that person builds something valuable, those workers (or people economically connected to them) receive some benefit in return.
People selling food or clothes to wealthy heirs are not being exploited, because they are paid for their services (and voluntarily choose to work on those occupations). They are very happy to sell to a wealthy heir (or to anyone else).
Non-working heirs do drain value from society, but they can do so only because some ancestor of theirs supplied more value that he consumed, and this "value credit" was passed on to the heir. So no exploitation here. You can shay the heir himself did not earn his wealth, but not that he exploits anyone.
I think this gets into a semantic argument over the word "exploit", and I'm not particularly attached to that word.
My problem with the rich heir is that he/she *continues* to get richer, while doing nothing. That excess value is being created by people who actually work, and yet the heir gets to sop it all up and spend it on yachts or whatever.
I'd have less of a problem with the rich heir slowly frittering away their inheritance. But the fact that merely owning capital entitles you to a steady stream of more capital is what I call "perverse".
There might be something relevant beyond semantics here, which might be interesting to flesh out.
Owning capital entitles you to a steady stream of more capital because capital is productive, i.e., machines can be used to produce stuff people want and the procceeds can be used to buy more machines. The proceeds can also be used to consume, so it is (mainly) the existence of this return that incentivices saving and investment, which in turn lead to growth and the rise of living standards.
I think what irks you is that some people get richer by doing nothing. 2 points o that:
1. Note that they do something (forgo consumption)
2. In doing so they help others (firms are very happy to have access to their capital, which also impacts workers, suppliers and so on).
So I would not call this "perverse".
You could say rich heirs haven't earned what they have or that they are lucky, but so are smart or beautiful people
I liked the quote abt extricating yourself. For instance I seek the physical everyday because ideas like Freudianism live in my mould. In fact i never plan to get shut of Freud because of what you and Dostoyevsky say: it seems a good enough system. I could not build one like it. Good title, funny, i thought one if my local crack addicts would make us all despair of tge efficacy of daily work. Likely i was catastrophizing. Thanks for this letter. For instance i just got off the phone with my pop and after my year of holding forth in this vein he says it was all greek to him. Too bad for this baby. Fuck it, i could have guessed he would. A super liberal who never the less fell for the drumming for war after 9/11. At the end of my ye a r I kind of threw in the towel telling my readers to read Black Swan by Taleb for a new friend.
Enjoyed this one! My explanation for the popularity of Ayn Rand is that it allows people who have made, or inherited, a lot of money to escape the cognitive dissonance that makes them feel like they should maybe use their wealth to help others. It’s a very convenient worldview for that.
I also get similar vibes about the MIRI style AI doom people, I feel like the reality will be less black and white and more confusing. But, whatever happens it’s going to be dangerous and chaotic.
Or it's popular among the people who neither inherited nor made a lot of money, yet they want to justify selfishness and cling to the belief that they are in control (there is a reason libertarians overlap with modern republicans). Of course, they have another shared quality - the failure to recognize that Rand's arguments are a product of bad logic. Independent of the correctness of her theorems, one can't help but notice that those don't follow from her own axioms, which often aren't even axiomatic.
Libertarians overlap with modern Republicans because the Republicans will tolerate them and the Democrats won't. There's plenty of left-leaning libertarians.
Very thought provoking post! I definitely agree there is a deep flaw in most logical systems that inevitably leads to some a negative result when they are taken to the extreme. I do have one question/bit of push back, how is capitalism a stable system? Its econ 101 that capitalism is a system in crisis, the crisis is just pushed onto things/people that have no power to resist (colonies, natural systems etc...)
Hah, I think that depends heavily on where you take Econ 101.
I agree capitalism is a system in crisis, but it's a breakpoint, once-in-many-generations crisis. The crisis is coming after several centuries of thriving and spreading. It's also handily survived past crises (e.g. the great depression).
It's not dissimilar to authoritarianism--the system is super stable until it reaches a breaking point. Under a ruthless dictator, things have to get bad enough that people will risk their lives in a revolution. Under capitalism, things have to get bad enough that e.g. people risk their livelihood to strike (or so bad that you hit ecological collapse, etc).
To keep building on the structural metaphor: the most rigid materials will hold their shape for a long time, but once you reach a certain amount of weight, they snap.
Read Atlas Shrugged first time when I was about thirteen **bad idea**. Read it a second time in my mid twenties; my views had already softened a lot. Noticed on that second read that the heroes all hated their families and did not have children.
Loved this post.
Dagny does not hate her family. Just her brother.
This was a great analysis. I think most inquisitive people encounter Rand and fall in love with her ideas at some point. I teach high school English and it’s interesting to see how a young mind will take her ideas and assume they’re the “good” guys. Rand’s ideas are charismatic, we want to believe them because it simplifies the world. It makes us feel bad to think we’re lucky so we must be deserving. Just like the Puritans we’re “anointed” in some sense. I took a grad class on film history and we watched Triumph of the Will and Birth of a Nation. Both films were actually good and that was the scary part. These were objectively nauseating ideas and philosophies that were made attractive because of the way they were dressed up. I don’t think Rand is that bad, but I put her ideas in that category. Again this was great!
I appreciate the concepts of the post a lot! For further reading on the role of reason when logical argument and emotional appeal are mixed, my recc is Baggini's The Edge of Reason.
Very important note: a false dichotomy only invalidates one proposition, not an entire propositional law. Rather than throwing out Non-Contradiction, we should exercise rigor when creating propositions with hidden dichotomies-- which may not be propositions at all but rather sets of propositions that have multiple truth values (or none). (Saying we should exercise rigor and knowing how to exercise rigor are whole different things of course, not the most helpful.)
Going from there, ironically, provability and truth value are a false dichotomy. Provability decides information about sets of truth values not a single truth value-- EVEN IN THE CASE that all members of a set have the same truth value, these are still NOT equivalent. A set can't be reduced.
Likewise, probability & truth value are usually not a dichotomy, with many probabilities deciding sets of propositions and others never deciding any propositions at all. The only instances in which we could consider a probability equivalent to a truth value is when a probability is a set of one: 0% or 100% probabilities. (Things do actually get muggy when we are examining probabilities that are infinitely close to 0 or 100 and converge, so if I really want to earn my wise-sage badge, I suppose I could make a statement about how infinite truth is equivalent to no truth at all.
I'm not actually a wise sage; I simply spent two years in an apartment with a hardcore marxist, a hardcore libertarian, and a clown. From a fourth-party perspective, it was really obvious that the libertarian and the marxist were no more logical than the clown. Thankfully, their friendships have outlived their beliefs.)
Adding Edge of Reason to my list! Appreciate the rec.
I also appreciate the technical points on provability, probability, and truth. I do think it's worth emphasizing though that mainstream interpretations of QM do deny truth value to some commonsense propositions like "the particle is in location X". The amplitudes/probabilities they assign aren't indicators of epistemic uncertainty, but aleatoric uncertainty.
And I really I wish I'd gotten the chance to visit that apartment.
Ah, pardon, QM is a great example of a proposition that is actually multiple propositions! I didn't realize this until my buddy got really drunk and borrowed my white board for a lecture that was somehow a lot more clear than any professional material I've looked at: basically, superposition is described by a linear combination of a series of vectors, so to transform a solution to logical statements, we'd say "the particle is at A, the particle is at B, the particle is at A and B", and we will get definitive truth values of either FFF, TFF, FTF, or TTT. The really fun part is when the linear combination of vectors yields some value that isn't physically possible from a single vector, and particles Just Do That, thus yielding FFF or TTT, which manages to wrap all the way back around to how we commonly think of "being at a location" only yielding T or F-- yet being far more arcane than superposition.
&& Thank you for the clarification regarding what context you were providing examples of probability! While not negating a propositional law, outlining a few types of uncertainty (provability being regarded as a third in some contexts if I understand correctly) is a great way to understand the limits of logic. Sure, we can make a set of statements for the face value of a rolled dice, "it will be 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6", but without more context, this could be indicating the literal number of faces of equal probability, buuuut this could be a weighted dice, this could be a dice that only has 6s painted on it, it could be a d4, or maybe the statement is indicating some dice with between 1 and 100 sides all marked between 1 and 6 will be rolled, and it hasn't even been determined which yet.
(Or rather, exactly as your article explains, a long book providing logic with limited context or even outdated context may not be very useful in reality, and opposing logic regarding AI safety without emotional context isn't useful either. One may even say leaving out the emotional context is dishonest, but again I can only say this as the not-so-sagely third party that got involved in AI in an entirely different context than AI Doom folks.)
Forgive the bad joke, but if you had visited the apartment, I would've given it a fair probability either way whether it would've been a delightful visit, uncanny to the level of existentially disturbing, or both. Our clowning friend liked to wrap spoons in tinfoil and throw them on the apartment floor, our marxist friend believed that labor was a job for machines (I know) resulting in instances like the raw biscuit dough I found stuck between two of my plates, and our libertarian friend had crusader axes and swords sitting around in random corners. (I promise they are all lovely people!) Then, bear in mind that I easily introduced the most chaos into the space. To explain without tattling on myself, with a simple combo of propositions: I am much more organized now than I was in the past. I currently have one half of a sofa in my dining room. The other half of the same sofa is on the porch.
On AI doom...
Because one or more arguers have "lost their minds" does that mean their argument is necessarily false? A crazy dude could tell you the world is round...that does not prove it is flat.
The highest form of argument is attacking the central point...not the arguers.
You assert that the argument for AI doom is elusive, perhaps making it too hard with which to engage.
Try engaging with this form of the AI doom argument:
1) AI companies are building large neural networks which have shown signs of intelligence.
2) AI companies admit they do not know how to control them. They have initiated hail mary technical projects to try and do so.
3) No one knows if or when the large neural networks will hit a ceiling on intelligence.
4) Humans control the destiny of all other species on earth, not because of our strength, but because of our intelligence.
5) If we become the second most intelligent species on earth, we will be at the mercy of something we do not know how to control.
There, you no longer have to go down rabbit holes.
Now, let me assist you in attacking that argument. You might counter:
Intelligences high enough to cause catastrophe for humans will necessarily be very kind to humans because humans are above a universal, important threshold of sentience. (Personally, I find this Human Worth Hypothesis anthropocentric and optimistic...given what humans do to primates and whales.)
Current LNN architectures will hit a ceiling and stop improving. This will slow us down decades during which we can find a miraculous way to control something smarter than us. (Please make a measurable prediction about what LNNs will not be able to do. Also make a prediction about alignment success.)
There is something special about human intelligence which can only be implemented in meat brains in a way we cannot duplicate. (To assert this, you need to explain what intelligence is beyond computation.)
Catastrophe by AI sounds like science fiction and is therefore not true. (Just because something sounds like science fiction does not mean it is false. By that logic, we'll never have a nuclear war because people have written novels about nuclear war.)
___
I admit to emotion and potential risk-aversion bias on this topic which I must monitor in myself so that it does not impair my rationality.
I have three daughters. I care about them very much.
I am constantly baffled by the "science fiction" objection. The *point* (one of them) of science fiction is to try to predict the future, and warn us about possible futures! So when I hear, "sounds like science fiction," my reaction is, "oh, so you think it's plausible then?"
Let me take a mild swing at a possible oversimplification of Rands framing of capitalism.
"But fortunately I don't need to do all that. Rand undermines her own “greed is good”5 argument in two ways. First, the main characters—heroic inventors and industrialists—aren’t driven by greed, but by the sheer love of seeing their creations come to life."
A capitalistic society is probably the best model we have developed so far, if the point is to deliver high quality for the most reasonable price. A truly capitalistic society implies a meritocratic society whereby the potentials in each individual is sought maximized. Rand detests the corrupt, the freeloaders the regulators of bad conscience. In other words, she hates communism and by implication crooked capitalism (Which is what we have most places, do enlighten me on any specific instance of true capitalism in practice.)
Thus as with communism, all "new" marxists simply claim the "old ones" were not properly following the doctrine, but if only they came to power it would all be swell. Well, most capitalist societies would likely degrade into crooked capitalism over time. But it likely would provide a longer timeframe of relative superior quality of life for the inhabitants before devolving.
Since I do not subscribe any longer to the idea that material wealth provides "contentment" as there is no internal cup of contentment to "fill up". I do not buy any concept of pure capitalism = utopia. I do however believe it is the superior construct for new development of ideas and conversion into quality goods.
Naturally, my framing/interpretation might be completely off ;)
Yeah I mostly agree with you--I'd much rather live under pure capitalism than pure communism. But I'm also able-bodied and generally driven to build things. If I were disabled to the point of not being able to work, I'd rather live under pure communism, where I'd be slightly better off (even if most people would be much worse off).
With even a little bit of welfare/charity/altruism, capitalism starts to get pretty good.
My preferred economy would tax at about 50% of GDP, with 2/3 of that (33% of GDP) going towards entitlement spending. The US is currently around 18%, so a little more than half of what I'd like to see. France is very close to 33%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_welfare_spending
I'd also advocate for a 100% estate tax. Especially before the current proposed wealth tax. Also a Land Value Tax ofc
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progress-and-poverty
I you touch the core of the matter. Many conclude a purely capitalistic society to be devoid of compassion. Is that a natural conclusion? Both from a purely pragmatic stance, but also from how the system overall would influence people. Let me try to illuminate my rationale.
Pragmatic: Without a substantial "welfare" state, as neighbors, we would have a natural motivation to get along. I look after your house and the other way around. I am subjectively better off if you are better off. From a purely egoistic level I would actually be encouraged to more altruistic attitudes because it benefits myself in a multi iterative prisoners dilemma. When this "dependence" is broken by an "external" or big society structure, this motivation is subtly or not so subtly reduced. My neighborhood is better off if people take care of each other.
Any system that reduces friction, or allocate resources efficiently. Thinking very broadly here. Implies encourage finding peoples talents and enabling their growth. That is how you get "most out of them", but in a way that does not crush them but through them growing. This is massively different in a crooked capitalist setup, where we are motivated to a large extent by the same things as communism (to take a bigger slice of an exceptionally slow growing cake). People that feel empowered (internal sensation) through working with what they actually enjoy and find valuable will overall be more content. Contentment brings more altruistic behaviors', if for nothing else than it does feel good to actually help others.
When you delegate "welfare" to the state, you loose a massive amount of the energetic and creative people. It sucks to work in a bureaucratic papermill, you see that compassion cannot be bought, and people become products/tools that must be fixed through whip or carrot. Over time society becomes colder and less humane.
I live in one of those countries you find "ideal". This society becomes an instagram version of life, where the surface matters more than the substance. Incompetence rules to the degree that at least 1/3 of resources simply goes to waste. Old people are treated by the system as crap, even if you have heroic instances of workers doing their best. (most resources go towards the administrative class, rather than the front line). Few of true meritocratic background want to mingle in political circles as it is a vicious dogfight without an objective to find the best method vs positioning for power and pushing though their form of ism.
Wealth taxes are massively expensive and inefficient taxes and directly sucks the life forces from the system. Much better with higher corporate profit tax rates, dividend taxes.
But hey, who said running a perfect system should be simple. The irony though is, I truly believe that running a better society is vastly simpler than a corrupted one.
What conflict is there between capitalism and charity? Why would you not have charities that help take care of disabled people, etc., in pure capitalism?
There is another system not tried yet. Decentralized capitalism.
We need to decentralize everything, and then have our systems be transparent to prevent corruption.
Communism and Capitalism are both corruptible systems.
Do you understand the LAST HAND ON THE BAT THEORY of systems? Read more here:
https://joshketry.substack.com/p/embrace-decentralized-systems-fear
A different flaw in Ayn Rand's work is that her practical ethics don't seem to follow from her meta-ethics. Pure egoism/selfishness without any concern for others would suggest an attitude more like some Ayn Rand villains: if you can "get away with" doing things that benefit you at others' expense, such as theft, you should do them.
Where does she indicate "without any concern for others"? Her characters definitely care about others.
That's the "practical ethics" part.
How is that contradictory to her philosophy?
I can tell you the short version of the argument for AI Doom if you want?
It's hard for me to understand the common sentiment that Communism is rooted in optimism. I mean, if a strong conception of the labor theory of value were true, then whenever someone opened a restaurant, hired some cooks and servers for wages, and gained a profit on the business, then one person would be an insidious thief and the others all a combination of dupes and slaves. Exploitation would be going on everywhere, right in front of our eyes, appearing consensual and mutually benefical. That sounds very fucking pessimistic to me.
I'm not sure I fully grok your point here. But a lot of people would say this is true of the US today:
> Exploitation would be going on everywhere, right in front of our eyes, appearing consensual and mutually benefical.
Edit: sounds like you're saying "Communists are pessimistic about Capitalism, so it's a pessimistic philosophy." Is that right?
Not quite. More like, the employer-employee relation is something people are highly inclined to agree to and themselves regard as mutually beneficial. Calling this inherently exploitative seems highly pessimistic about human nature. An analogous example would be those radical feminists back 8n the day who regarded penile-vaginal sex as inherently violent and oppressive. Isn't it pessimistic to see hidden oppression in widespread behavior that most of the supposed victims themselves regard as freely chosen?
Yeah, as a knowledge worker who has loved every one of his employers, I sympathize with this. But when I talk to low-skilled wage earners (which admittedly isn't often), they almost always describe their relationship with their employer in adversarial terms, regardless of their politics.
For me, employment is very much mutually beneficial, and if my employer started exploiting me I'd just peace out trusting I could find another job whenever I wanted. For a lot of people, their current job is the only thing standing between them and homelessness. You could still call that "mutually beneficial", but it's only mutually beneficial in a society that withholds housing, food, and healthcare.
The r/antiwork subreddit is an interesting place to lurk if you don't get much interaction with wage-based workers. Politically one-sided for sure, but there are a lot of great examples of the bullshit you have to deal with when you're 100% replaceable.
I agree. But you seem to be making a case that both someone who says the nature of employment (in the U.S., say) can't get any better, and someone who believes that the Labor Theory of Value is true, are highly pessimistic, whereas the optimists are innovative, trial-and-error sorts of social democrat.
Oh to be clear: I'm not so much saying that the people are pessimistic/optimistic, just pointing out the game-theoretic assumptions made by a capitalist vs communist system: a communist system assumes everyone will act altruistically (it's "optimistic" about human behavior) while a capitalist system expects everyone to act out of self interest (it's "pessimistic"). Not saying there aren't optimistic capitalists or pessimistic communists out there, or that the system as a whole is characterized by optimistic/pessimistic attitudes. Just this one assumption about how humans act by default.
I'm not so sure about that. The old-school type Communists I know most closely in meatspace seem to primarily be motivated by something akin to my own self- and family-protecting attitude about being stolen from. They just combine it with what I consider economic fallacies, and conclude that insidious theft of "surplus value produced by labor" is happening all over the place. In other words, I think they have the same major premise as most other people about defending our nearest and dearest against theft, but they have some crazy minor premises about what constitutes theft. Maybe my sample isn't representative, but I lean toward the view that while Communist propaganda has been altruistic (like the propaganda of many other systems), the real driving force was more like normal morally constrained self protection combined with an intuitively plausible but profoundly false theory of value.
While most people read Ayn Rand, virtually nobody reads Karl Marx, and so they rely on other peoples' (usually negative and simplified) depictions of his work without actually reading what he wrote. The "From each..." passage is a favorite, taken out of context from Marx's *Critique of the Gotha Program*. However, if you read the entire thing you would find passages like this:
"One man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. … Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal [share] in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal."
So, the difference is, one is a caricature, the other is an accurate representation of what the person actually wrote. Not sure those are equal.
The ability/need quote seems like an accurate summary of the longer quote you mentioned--unless there's something I'm missing?
This piece wasn't really meant to deal with Marxism in earnest, more to use Rand as a lens for the folly of naive logic. But I've never really heard a good response to the perverse incentives argument--if Marx deals with it directly I'd love to know more.
Edit: actually, I take that back--the best Marxist argument I've heard is also in novel form: The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. I hope to review it someday. And I'll definitely be kinder to Le Guin!
Yeah, I suppose you are right. The point, I think, is that the first phase of a communist society will necessarily be unequal until production is sufficient to achieve a "higher phase" where the "from each" ideal can be realized. The full context can be found here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
If you want another interesting fictional counterpoint, you could check out Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy and it's response by William Morris, News from Nowhere. All of these are also polemical utopias based around common ownership.
What do you mean by "the perverse incentives argument"?
The fact that the ability/need principle incentivizes people to be needy, and disincentivizes productive behavior. Why work harder if it doesn't get you anything? Especially if you look around and see other people slacking.
Why do you need to 'work harder'? Harder than what?
Ok remove the word "harder" :) Why work if you don't get anything in return?
Personally, I'd work because I enjoy my work. But who wants to clean toilets or pick up garbage? Why would anyone accept that job?
What incentivizes you to clean your toilet or pick up trash in your home?
Reason is a means, and means are coloured by their ends and take the normative vector of said ends. It is the Consequent that is key. And so given that understanding:
Emotion and its incorporation (or lack thereof) is ultimately dependant on what sort of pursuit is generated by said move.
If anything, something sub-rational (like emotion) certainly has its time and place; but the other pieces moving with it need to likewise be properly calibrated.
“Reason” in general (as per its formal etymological breakdown into its initial PIE roots of *re- and *ar-) has already failed.
This is because its ends these past few centuries or so have diverged radically from the primordial notions contained in aforementioned roots:
https://www.etymonline.com/word/reason#etymonline_v_7347
[In particular, the notion of “to fit together” is long dead.]
“Reason” properly exercised has given rise to fundamental dogmas which are so repugnant to the Human Being, that is it any wonder that people look elsewhere? So pursuits of the Sub-rational (i.e. Emotion) and the Supra-rational (i.e. Revelation) are making a comeback onto the scene.
However, whether or not they are relevant overall when it comes to generating certain normative outcomes; that differs widely and ought to be examined critically whenever possible
I have never understood people that write like this.
"that’s $50k/year, far more than the median American earns."
Seems mistaken, this source says 56k\year https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/average-salary-in-us/
A wealthy heir living great without working is very different from someone living great by exploiting others. So "pure Capitalism is just as perverse as pure Communism" seems excessive (at least not supported by the argument provided).
The problem with "communism bad; opposite of bad is great; capitalism is the opposite of communism; therefore capitalism is great" is not logic but "conceptualization". When we say comm is bad, we use bad as an adjective, we don't mean that comm is identical to evil itself. Therefore it's mistaken to assign to communism all the properties of evil itself (like its opposite being good). The idea that capitalism is the opposite of communism is also somewhat problematic.
Hmm. I got my number from https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N, which seems more authoritative.
You have to be careful w/ household vs individual income, but the sofi data seems to be for "single income households". There's also a distinction between salaried and wage-earning workers--the Sofi data seems to point to "salary" but doesn't explicitly say it's excluding wage earners.
I also wonder if the ~$38k number factors in zero-earners? Which on the one hand is fair (e.g. a stay-at-home-parent and a working parent effectively split the working parent's income) but is also misleading.
It seems the 38K really divides by everyone above 15, while 56K is for full time workers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881500Q
Median household income is more like 78K
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
But I think more relevant to the post is the other points I was making:
The problem with "communism bad; opposite of bad is great; capitalism is the opposite of communism; therefore capitalism is great" is not logic but "conceptualization". When we say comm is bad, we use bad as an adjective, we don't mean that comm is identical to evil itself. Therefore it's mistaken to assign to communism all the properties of evil itself (like its opposite being good). The idea that capitalism is the opposite of communism is also somewhat problematic.
A wealthy heir living great without working is very different from someone living great by exploiting others. So "pure Capitalism is just as perverse as pure Communism" seems excessive (at least not supported by the argument provided).
Anyway I enjoyed reading it.
Good find! I corrected the article.
I also agree with your point re: conceptualization. Though I'd generally lump the practice of conceptualization in w/ rationalist/logical thought--it's hard to construct logical systems that don't deal with discrete concepts.
I'd push back on "a wealthy heir living great without working" being non-exploitative. Their exploitation isn't as obvious or direct, but they are draining value from society. Every person who makes their clothes or serves them food is exploited in the process.
But if that person builds something valuable, those workers (or people economically connected to them) receive some benefit in return.
People selling food or clothes to wealthy heirs are not being exploited, because they are paid for their services (and voluntarily choose to work on those occupations). They are very happy to sell to a wealthy heir (or to anyone else).
Non-working heirs do drain value from society, but they can do so only because some ancestor of theirs supplied more value that he consumed, and this "value credit" was passed on to the heir. So no exploitation here. You can shay the heir himself did not earn his wealth, but not that he exploits anyone.
I think this gets into a semantic argument over the word "exploit", and I'm not particularly attached to that word.
My problem with the rich heir is that he/she *continues* to get richer, while doing nothing. That excess value is being created by people who actually work, and yet the heir gets to sop it all up and spend it on yachts or whatever.
I'd have less of a problem with the rich heir slowly frittering away their inheritance. But the fact that merely owning capital entitles you to a steady stream of more capital is what I call "perverse".
There might be something relevant beyond semantics here, which might be interesting to flesh out.
Owning capital entitles you to a steady stream of more capital because capital is productive, i.e., machines can be used to produce stuff people want and the procceeds can be used to buy more machines. The proceeds can also be used to consume, so it is (mainly) the existence of this return that incentivices saving and investment, which in turn lead to growth and the rise of living standards.
I think what irks you is that some people get richer by doing nothing. 2 points o that:
1. Note that they do something (forgo consumption)
2. In doing so they help others (firms are very happy to have access to their capital, which also impacts workers, suppliers and so on).
So I would not call this "perverse".
You could say rich heirs haven't earned what they have or that they are lucky, but so are smart or beautiful people
I liked the quote abt extricating yourself. For instance I seek the physical everyday because ideas like Freudianism live in my mould. In fact i never plan to get shut of Freud because of what you and Dostoyevsky say: it seems a good enough system. I could not build one like it. Good title, funny, i thought one if my local crack addicts would make us all despair of tge efficacy of daily work. Likely i was catastrophizing. Thanks for this letter. For instance i just got off the phone with my pop and after my year of holding forth in this vein he says it was all greek to him. Too bad for this baby. Fuck it, i could have guessed he would. A super liberal who never the less fell for the drumming for war after 9/11. At the end of my ye a r I kind of threw in the towel telling my readers to read Black Swan by Taleb for a new friend.