The greatest book yet written, Atlas Shrugged is a foundational text of the philosophy of life, reason, and reality. It is dedicated to those who want to “win” and “do the right thing” in general.
The book’s philosophy is expressed in a deep, self-consistent context, and the rationalist reader will find that much of the material is consistent with many other things rationalists will read in completely different subjects along their journey.
It is a book all about rationality, in the LW sense of “rationality”, and the antithesis philosophies thereof, and it draws the logical conclusions of these opposing philosophies out in the full context of the world at large through a terrific story.
This book is a classic. If you are a rationalist, you would be crazy to ignore it if you haven’t read it yet.
I mean come on, that’s a cheap, weak analogy. I haven’t finished yet but I’m compiling all of the good quotes from Atlas Shrugged. The book is full of these awesome quotes and truths that are portable to many other subjects of rationality.
It is far more real and relevant than you are giving it credit for.
How so? What is the meaning of this metaphor? Are you saying Rand’s view is outdated? Or is this a reference to Rand/Aristotle’s use of A priori reasoning? Something else? This kind of comment really does not offer any usable information.
Using an analogy like this seems artful, but does it have meaningful content to someone who does not already hold your view? If not, why bother writing it? Why not just say what you think is wrong with Rand’s view? There is a lot to criticize in Rand’s view of rationality and Aristotle’s physics, this kind of vague declaration isn’t useful to me. I see this kind of thing occasionally in LW, I don’t like it.
The affective death spiral that characterizes most of Objectivist thought is well-documented and discussed, so there’s no need to go through all that again...
However, I will say that reading Atlas Shrugged at age 15 did lead me, eventually, to bigger and better topics in rationality. So, I can’t in good faith down vote the recommendation
What does the cultish behavior of followers have to do with the actual content? Affective death spirals can characterize virtually any group. Idiots and crazies are everywhere.
Why is this so down rated??
I realize that you didn’t vote it down, but using this logic to vote it down would be something like a reverse affective death spiral- you let the visibly obvious ADS cast a negative halo on the entire philosophy, and thus become irrationally biased against the legitimate value in the center of the ADS that got blown up by the over-zealous crazies and idiots.
I love Atlas Shrugged; it’s a beautiful novel that’s definitely worth reading, but I downvoted your original comment because it fails to recognize that Rand really was terrible at rationality, compared to what we know now. (ChronoDAS’s analogy is perfect.) I agree that Atlas Shrugged is full of inspiring prose praising the ideals of reason and recognition of objective reality—but actually recognizing objective reality requires a certain, well, empiricism that Rand just utterly fails at. I mean—laissez-faire capitalism follows deductively from the law of identity and the choice to live? What? Sorry. “Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.”
Calling Atlas Shrugged “the greatest book yet written” made it seem like you were promoting the closed-system Objectivism that is so easy to despise. The first two paragraphs of my comment were regarding this.
The last was paragraph about the content of the book itself. Indeed, I am saying “I can’t downvote this book because it can help a new rationalist (which is the point of this thread), even though its proponents have been crashingly wrong and annoying (myself included).”
The actual down voters may just not like the book or think that Atlas Shrugged is not that useful for rationalists.
Well I wasn’t really going overboard with praise. This is the best book ever written, as far as I know. This is an awesome thread, as I would love to find something that can outclass Atlas Shrugged.
For now though, it is by far the best book ever written. Many people agree- and not just the cultish fanatics. I’ve had many instances where random everyday people express exactly the same sentiment, at book stores, etc.
Well, I didn’t think that Atlas Shrugged was very good (way, way, way too long), let alone the “greatest book yet written”. But she certainly did do a good job of cataloging the crazy anti-Enlightenment, anti-reason philosophies that seemed to be sweeping the globe at the time of her writing.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
The greatest book yet written, Atlas Shrugged is a foundational text of the philosophy of life, reason, and reality. It is dedicated to those who want to “win” and “do the right thing” in general.
The book’s philosophy is expressed in a deep, self-consistent context, and the rationalist reader will find that much of the material is consistent with many other things rationalists will read in completely different subjects along their journey.
It is a book all about rationality, in the LW sense of “rationality”, and the antithesis philosophies thereof, and it draws the logical conclusions of these opposing philosophies out in the full context of the world at large through a terrific story.
This book is a classic. If you are a rationalist, you would be crazy to ignore it if you haven’t read it yet.
Reading Ayn Rand to learn about rationality is like reading Aristotle to learn about physics.
Really?
I mean come on, that’s a cheap, weak analogy. I haven’t finished yet but I’m compiling all of the good quotes from Atlas Shrugged. The book is full of these awesome quotes and truths that are portable to many other subjects of rationality.
It is far more real and relevant than you are giving it credit for.
How so? What is the meaning of this metaphor? Are you saying Rand’s view is outdated? Or is this a reference to Rand/Aristotle’s use of A priori reasoning? Something else? This kind of comment really does not offer any usable information.
Using an analogy like this seems artful, but does it have meaningful content to someone who does not already hold your view? If not, why bother writing it? Why not just say what you think is wrong with Rand’s view? There is a lot to criticize in Rand’s view of rationality and Aristotle’s physics, this kind of vague declaration isn’t useful to me. I see this kind of thing occasionally in LW, I don’t like it.
So then … what is reading Ayn Rand to learn about Aristotle like? :-P
I have no idea.
I suppose this is a parody?
The affective death spiral that characterizes most of Objectivist thought is well-documented and discussed, so there’s no need to go through all that again...
However, I will say that reading Atlas Shrugged at age 15 did lead me, eventually, to bigger and better topics in rationality. So, I can’t in good faith down vote the recommendation
what the hell?
What does the cultish behavior of followers have to do with the actual content? Affective death spirals can characterize virtually any group. Idiots and crazies are everywhere.
Why is this so down rated??
I realize that you didn’t vote it down, but using this logic to vote it down would be something like a reverse affective death spiral- you let the visibly obvious ADS cast a negative halo on the entire philosophy, and thus become irrationally biased against the legitimate value in the center of the ADS that got blown up by the over-zealous crazies and idiots.
I love Atlas Shrugged; it’s a beautiful novel that’s definitely worth reading, but I downvoted your original comment because it fails to recognize that Rand really was terrible at rationality, compared to what we know now. (ChronoDAS’s analogy is perfect.) I agree that Atlas Shrugged is full of inspiring prose praising the ideals of reason and recognition of objective reality—but actually recognizing objective reality requires a certain, well, empiricism that Rand just utterly fails at. I mean—laissez-faire capitalism follows deductively from the law of identity and the choice to live? What? Sorry. “Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.”
Sorry, I should clarify.
Calling Atlas Shrugged “the greatest book yet written” made it seem like you were promoting the closed-system Objectivism that is so easy to despise. The first two paragraphs of my comment were regarding this.
The last was paragraph about the content of the book itself. Indeed, I am saying “I can’t downvote this book because it can help a new rationalist (which is the point of this thread), even though its proponents have been crashingly wrong and annoying (myself included).”
The actual down voters may just not like the book or think that Atlas Shrugged is not that useful for rationalists.
Worthiness of the Cause does not mean you can spend any less effort in resisting the cult attractor. You clearly went overboard with praise, which is a valid warning signal. The book itself is not that great, even if the cultish behavior of some of its followers is even worse.
On the other hand, we shouldn’t necessarily fault enthusiasm around here. We should be able to articulate why it’s ridiculous to describe “Atlas Shrugged” in particular as ‘the greatest book yet written’.
EDIT: Thanks for adding the last sentence, Vladimir.
Well I wasn’t really going overboard with praise. This is the best book ever written, as far as I know. This is an awesome thread, as I would love to find something that can outclass Atlas Shrugged.
For now though, it is by far the best book ever written. Many people agree- and not just the cultish fanatics. I’ve had many instances where random everyday people express exactly the same sentiment, at book stores, etc.
Well, I didn’t think that Atlas Shrugged was very good (way, way, way too long), let alone the “greatest book yet written”. But she certainly did do a good job of cataloging the crazy anti-Enlightenment, anti-reason philosophies that seemed to be sweeping the globe at the time of her writing.