Hugh Miller
It occurs to me that the most basic refutation of Ayn Rand is what would happen if all people everywhere were passionate “objectivists” (her incredibly self-congratulatory name for her “system”). It would be a planet of arrogant lizards hissing at each other.
Rand’s philosophy requires a world pre-populated with the rich and poor already in place so she can align herself with the one and spit on the other. Her own lifestyle, the one she oddly evangelized, requires losers to step on and revile. Besides communists and such though, these losers include everyone who shows some societal concerns and compassion. It includes mother love, family love, friendship, and any impulse toward generosity. Rand and her followers are philosophical and emotional day-traders shorting human relationships. She is the Donald Trump of philosophers, a humorless solipsist locked in combat against growth. Ego death is the ultimate terror. Transformation is failure. Compromise is weakness. Generosity is a character defect.
Her protagonists are epic narcissists held aloft by their contempt for the less self-involved. They don’t grow, they are complete and perfect glittering egos, high on self-righteous indignation at the idea of ever sublimating their hunger for the good of another. The only character arcs of her cardboard thespians are pauses to listen in awe for seven or eight pages to grinding monologues that transform them into perfect compliance with her philosophy. Her stories are a wish-fulfillment Inferno/Paradiso of punishing those who disagree and rewarding those in perfect compliance.
Ayn Rand produced only one consumable that anyone would pay for: That product is a greasy intellectual lotion to be rubbed upon the rich leaving them with a golden glow of complete satisfaction with the status quo. It has a secondary property of encouraging some people who aren’t rich to assert complete justification in behaving like assholes any time they feel like it.
As a totally selfish asshole, Rand realized that a product niche existed and she could fill it very lucratively. The delicious malicious truth is that in her purest, most “objective” thinking she is utterly dependent upon the small change of other people, the dollar fifty contributions of the boring, needy, prosaic people she despised. Her “philosophy/literature” is the artistic portrait of a furious toddler foot stamping or a mean teenage sister with no friends who calls everyone “loser”. Her “art” is the furious muttering self-justification of wounded self-importance lifted out of internal monologue and dribbled across endless pages.
Ayn Rand was Veruca Salt as a 3rd-semester college freshman…every single minute of her life. Her story is the loveless tragedy of a person perfectly applying the philosophy of Ayn Rand to their own life.
One of my favorite philosophers, Robert Anton Wilson on meeting Ayn Rand: “The first new dogmatism I embraced after rejecting the Marxist BS (belief system) was Ayn Rand’s philosophy (not yet called Objectivism in those days.) The Fountainhead had exactly the appeal for me that it has retained, decade after decade, with alienated adolescents of all ages. (The average youthful reader of Thus Spake Zarathustra decides he is the Superman, and the average youthful Randroid decides she is an Alienated Super Genius.) Like most Randroids, I went around for a few years mindlessly parroting all the Rand dogma and imagining I was an ‘individualist.’ “Some years later, after becoming a published writer, I actually was invited to meet Ayn Rand once. (I was ‘summoned to the Presence,’ as Arlen said.) I confessed my doubts about certain Rand dogmas and was Cast Out Into the Darkness forever to wail and gnash my teeth in the Realm of Thud. It was weird. I thought the Trots and Catholic priests were dogmatic, but Ayn Rand made both groups look like models of tolerance by comparison. “I thought she was a clinical paranoid. It was nearly 30 years later that I found out Rand was merely on Speed all the time, which creates an effect so much like paranoia that even trained clinicians cannot always tell the difference, and some even claim there is no difference.”
The next level of complexity is something you are a part of and something you can’t see.
- Visual and hearing processes
- Knowledge of physics
- Fine motor control
- Risk analysis
- Awareness of Traffic laws
- Reading
Zero zero one.
One one one one one zero.
One, zero one one.
There is no “idea” or blueprint of a hive. No ant works or dies “for the hive” No ant is sentient though there is a localized being with some flexibility of response. Scientists have observed a range of “personality” types or at least behavioral types. Some ants are lazy. Some are even by ant standards, dumb. No ant thinks of the past or future.
In 100 million years no ant has ever imagined or thought of a hive. There is no hive except through the combined actions of essentially unconscious operators. And yet, operational responses to various situations flow naturally with seemingly coordinated group efforts to collect food, care for larva, fight off enemies and rebuild walls. What the hell is the model in the brain of a worker ant rebuilding a broken wall that says: “OK, I’m done.” ?
The hive is the emergent whole of its tiny individual parts. It doesn’t exist without them and they don’t exist without it.
What are you a tiny constituent of? What emerges from variations of YOU multiplied a million times? Can you see it? Can you think of it?
I ran a couple of photos through Google’s Deep Dream software. It attempts to recognize patterns using a buttload of heuristics about characteristics that would indicate various things; buildings, animals, landscapes,etc.
It can be sort of gently psychedelic and beautiful or if you turn the levels up a bit frankly horrifying. In its nicer form It reminds me of things I’ve seen when responsibly ingesting socially acceptable pharmaceuticals…or something. This feels more like what I imagine schizophrenia might be like. Here’s the worst before and after ever.
In an interesting way this is a computer emulating the very human trait of constantly seeing things in the world around them that are mental projections. Like “Doesn’t that cloud look like a bunny attacking Abe Lincoln?” This trait is keyed into our ability to recognize anything but also to our ability to recognize types of things. Like recognizing a letter of the alphabet in a strange distorted font. Or like recognizing a building as a bank or a school without seeing a sign. It’s probably also related to the neurological blinders we develop with which we see exactly what we expect to see and don’t see anything we don’t expect to see.
The role this plays in scientific discovery seems clear cut to me. The role this plays in various kinds of bigotry and blind prejudice seems clear too. Continue reading
Built to fail
As a software teacher/trainer I am amazed by something. Every company and institution in the US apparently has the budget to subsidize ~65% of their employees being shit with computing…forever… but only a few of them can scrape a budget together for training. And when they do, it’s designed by middle management in a way that almost always misses the actual problem in favor of some oversimplified guess about what is wrong.
Whenever I have taught corporate groups I sense about a dozen issues other than the one I am there to teach going unaddressed. And if I try to get at those problems I’ll be seen as not teaching the right subject.
Usually, power users are mixed into the same class as the weakest users. The result is that the material will be wrong for part of the group no matter what… unless you teach “right down the middle” in which case it might be right for nobody. Also, the power users are forced to sit through such basic material that it wears out their goodwill and\or the “baby” users sit through advanced material that makes them feel stupid and hopeless. All of this crystalizes the idea of training as ineffective in the mind of management.
To get it right, do better research on the problem you are fixing.
- Don’t be superficial or complacent about imagining what the problem really is. Details matter.
- Identify your “power users” and find out what they need to know and why.
- While you’ve got them, ask what they consider to be the baseline skillset for the software in question in the context of this office. Compare notes on these assessments.
- Ask them (and any IT support people) what problems the focus group of employees seem to get stuck on. The power users and IT staff get hit up regularly for help and they have a lot more data points than you will get by asking the group what they need.
- The group doesn’t really know what it needs. The problem is concealed in the mist above their comfort zone.
- If it is possible to have the trainer come in for a chat with some representative students ahead of time, they will be able to target the actual need far better.
- “But the cost!” It’s going to be expensive either way. Do you prefer an expensive success or an expensive failure? Besides, if you do this correctly you will be saving real money and increasing real efficiency. Doing it wrong is mismanagement.
- Consider a break with form. If the trainer is open to it, propose working with smaller groups with a shared problem and consider doing this in the area where the work is done rather than a classroom. The trainer will almost always spot problems and growing out of local issues which would not come up in a classroom.
http://sourceforge.net/
(Disclaimer: This is the opposite of news, most of these songs have been around a long time.) One of my favorite musicians of the last decade or so is Jonathan Coulton. His tunes are clever, infectiously catchy, piercingly beautiful at moments and funny. They are also beautiful snapshots of various pop genres.
For some reason he’s made a slew of songs about monsters, often from the monster’s point of view and these are some of his best work. They also seem to speak of the horror in ordinary life in a way that is chilling and witty.
Chiron Beta Prime – https://youtu.be/B3DyxaCYlfg
The best new Christmas carol in many years.
Skullcrusher Mountain – https://youtu.be/9jn1Gf4AGdY
An evil scientist’s love ballad. “Isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?”
Still Alive – https://youtu.be/Y6ljFaKRTrI
This song accompanies the ending credits to the brilliant video game, Portal. Singing is GlaDOS, a passive/aggressive sociopathic computer who starts by seeming like a helpful guide promising cake as a reward and turns out to have already murdered everyone at this evil research corporation but you. Turns out you didn’t really manage to kill her.
RE: Your Brains – https://youtu.be/v04H7_fFC90
Your office manager and most of the staff have turned into zombies. They want to come in and he won’t stop talking in manager buzzwords.
I crush everything. – https://youtu.be/oJAlFyKHp_M
A sad introspective ballad about change, hope and loss sung by a giant squid.
Blue Sunny Day – https://youtu.be/PNuTEUUUZ4k
A vampire contemplates suicide
YouTube is the most successful disaster on the WWW.
YouTube is the 24/7 Meth Santa of distraction and it’s so successful at its drunken confetti flinging approach to video sharing that a meaningful redesign, let alone a socially responsible reimagining, is a distant possibility on a galactic scale of distance.
It’s sort of ridiculous critiquing YouTube; it’s such an irreplaceable, giant hub of internet life that a shrug and “well, what can ya do?” might be a sensible place to leave this. But I’m not sensible and we all know an intervention is needed.
This year I’d like:
- Fewer suggestions. I know you are infatuated with your supposed ability to detect my heart’s desire and serve it up to me, but you are not actually good at this. The fact is I really don’t WANT your suggestions. I want my subscriptions and whatever I feel like searching for and nothing from you unless I ask for it…This is part a.
- And this is part B. Your suggestions suck and may even pose a danger to society. This is because your system of competition between channels and your resultant ranking of those channels drives them to endlessly inflate drama and conflict. In ordinary video channels, this just results in lots of stupid talk, overstatement and ginned up make-believe conflict but with your political channels this is further dumbing down the national dialogue, widening our dangerous divide and making the search for accurate news at YouTube impossible as titles claim lurid or thrilling content and drama that doesn’t exist anywhere BUT the title. This is disinformation. You are driving a race to stupidity and you don’t suffer a single qualm.
- I want you to stop showing me right-wing political videos just because one time I watched a right-wing guy.
- Not surprisingly, I want at least the OPTION to change my homepage within youtube away from your recommendations and to my subscriptions, by default.
- A little x button (or thumbs down) on every recommendation that would let me exile it forever. I want to make some of those suggestions go away FOREVER. If I want them, I’ll go looking.
- A little check button (or thumbs up) on every recommendation that means “More like this please”. But I worry because you make bad guesses. You guess wrong a lot more often that you should. You’re like a crazy girlfriend generously giving me plaid shorts, black knee socks and 142 jars of green olives. Why just why?
- I’d like a “Please pretend I never watched this” button on every video I watch. YouTube, most of the time when I visit you I’m just indulging a vague curiosity in a Reddit link or letting a friend show me something funny they want me to see. I don’t WANT you to learn anything about me from it. YouTube, I really want you to stop interpreting each of these moments as equal to the things I search for on your site. I want to be able to communicate with you. I want to be able to say “Ignore this…this isn’t me.”
- And YouTube, someone has to tell you, uncomfortable as it is…your search algorithm…stinks. You need to clean it up. Honestly, everyone’s been talking about it for years and you’ve been in denial. YouTube, you give search results like someone hard of hearing answers questions. When I type in “Yogscast xephos and honeydew the walls episode 12” I’m actually telling you quite a bit about what I’d like to see. You can use this information to return a list of things that could be …related to those words. For example, the list could only include those words or even just most of them. Are you with me? When my list of results come up and 75% of the entries don’t even have those words in them and the others will be every other episode of the series in random order scattered over 3 pages of search results with mine at the top of page 4… I feel…disappointed, YouTube. I feel like you aren’t listening or maybe that you are just sort of… well…stupid?
Well, thanks for listening…what’s that? What did you say? Gerbil eats first piece of broccoli? Drunk kid gets knocked out? Too fat to get out of bed?
*sigh*