Jimmy in various intereviews like to call himself an objectivist. This refers to a philosophy created by Ayn Rand. I've written a few notes about it here

What would Ayn Rand think of Wikipedia?

Maybe someone has some useful comment.

I've been toying with this thought : Can Jimmy himself be an objectivist and yet create a project that embodies the very opposite of what Ayn wanted for the world?

Why don't you look through the numerous threads on this topic before starting a remedial one?

After a search, I see exactly zero threads on this subject.
Maybe you could point to a thread that is on this subject.

This is the sort of thread which begs for an Ambrose Bierce/Devil's Dictionary quote somewhere, isn't it?
Cas

ABATIS, n.
Rubbish in front of a fort, to prevent the rubbish outside from molesting the rubbish inside.

I read a couple of Ayn Rand books about 30 years ago. The two main things I remember are a 60 page self indulgent driveling soliloquy in one book and the rape scene in the other book, where the architect bites a lady and draws blood and she likes it. Feel free to correct my hazy teenage memories everyone

In the movie, based on the book of the same name "The Fountainhead" it was Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal
Gary Cooper Movies on YouTube

They toned it down for the movie. They also cut some redundant sections of the book. It's still a great Gary Cooper movie. That and "Meet John Doe" are the two best of his that I like, which I can find online for free (because I'm cheap and easy).

The main point of that rape scene, was that Gary Cooper was a man who knew what he wanted and took it, and Patricia Neal was a woman who wanted a man like that, but wouldn't admit it because it would break her resolve to never love anything in this world of mediocrity and moral degeneracy. Ayn thought that the majority of people would sell their soul in order to appeal to the mob.

Oh ya, and the lone wolf architect wanted engineers on the jury because they were mean and hard.

Any engineers here ever been on a jury? Attorneys go ape shit when examining potential jury candidates and find that one is an engineer. Hey NYB, why is that?

Did Wjhonson get moderated off some mailing list or something? His posting volume seems to have went way up.

(I wouldn't know because I don't follow a lot of lists, sad to say. Wjhonson being a part of why)

It's not engineers, but any hint a juror will follow the evidence over following the argument. For example, when a jury in England was given instructions on how to properly evaluate evidence under a normal, common-sense, Bayesian framework, the legal people went totally ballistic:

http://homepages.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~vignaux/docs/Adams_NLJ.html

One only need to read quotes like "to introduce Bayes Theorem, or any similar method, into a criminal trial plunges the jury into inappropriate and unnecessary realms of theory and complexity deflecting them from their proper task" to truly understand how fucked up the legal system in the so-called civilized countries is.

The inverse of this situation -- where a juror is suspected of being able to simply ignore the evidence, and reject the argument, and just acquit on principle -- is held with equal contempt by legal professionals. All their carefully constructed arguments ... for nothing! Such jurors are quickly dismissed during voir dire. In the USA, an easy way to avoid jury duty is reputed to simply admit to knowledge of the FIJA.

Basically, knowledge is power. The stupider the juror, the more likely he will sit on the panel.

I think the assertion that Jimmy's project is altruistic is mistaken. From your essay:
If so, Jimmy is lying. Jimmy's project gives him significant personal power, because he controls, through intermediaries, a major propaganda machine. There has been much speculation as well about how eventually he intends to reap financial rewards.

A tribute to your research skills, Wikipedian. Web 2.0 offers the opportunity to repeatedly engage in the same conversation with ever more stupid participants in each round.

Remember that Rand had no objection to pseudo-altruism: in her ethics, it is absolutely permissible to engage in seemingly altruistic behavior as long as you do so with self-serving motives. It is also perfectly acceptable to encourage others to engage in altruism as long as you benefit in some way thereby.

Jimmy's involvement in Wikipedia has always been self-serving. The nature of Jimmy's benefit from his relationship from Wikipedia has altered over the years: at first, Wikipedia was a straight-up attempt to create something he could sell off for personal profit. The subsequent conversion of Wikipedia from a for-profit venture (as Bomis) to a nonprofit (as Wikimedia) was done primarily to enable the fraudulent conveyance of assets away from a shell corporation (Bomis) that was about to be attached in adverse legal proceedings (the whole Brian Dowling/Chicago Options Associates mess, which is still in litigation last I heard, and which is now a precedent-setting case in Illinois; perhaps someone should write a Wikipedia article about it) in order to protect those assets from falling out of his effective control. (Why else do you think he and Davis both moved to Florida, a state with an unlimited homestead exception, around that time, and bought the most expensive houses they could reasonably afford?) Since then, Jimmy has come to discover that he enjoys being a celebrity, and continues to milk his status for the personal enjoyment (not to mention the income) it yields him.

Jimmy's involvement in Wikipedia has never been about "making all human knowledge available" or any such grand goals; his paramount interest has always been personal aggrandizement, either in the form of money or in the form of fame and adulation. Nothing inconsistent with Rand in that. The "grand goals" are, for him, a charade, although I would fathom that this is not the case for many of the others involved in the Foundation. I, personally, could not deal with the cognitive dissonance that working with him on the Board or in the Foundation would create, but I suppose others are more able to cope with that sort of thing.

As it happens, I've never handled a jury trial. I've tried cases, but all before a judge without a jury. So I'm not really the expert on this one. Sorry.

Certainly... human beings have nearly unlimited capacity for reinterpreting ideologies in order to achieve whatever outcome they happen to wish to be the case, for whatever reasons (self-serving or altruistic) they might have.

Bingo! So completely on target, Kelly.

If anyone takes the time to truly review the history, this pathway is utterly clear. I'll hopefully be adding another piece to the puzzle in an upcoming Akahele article.

Greg

Seriously, I am surprised that Jimbo never sold WP to Rupert Murdoch or the Google guys or some other media mogul.

I'm sure he's tried. The whole "non-profit" thing has made that harder, but they had to do that in order to gain clear title to the Wikipedia name, which by rights belongs to Brian Dowling. Wikimedia's status as a "charity" makes them more creditably appear to be a holder in due course of the name, instead of the grantee of fraudulently conveyed assets moved in an attempt to conceal them from the execution of a valid judgment debt. Such conveyances are normally rescindable.

If you compare the carefully engineered architecture of Knol to the haphazard organic evolution of Wikipedia, you will appreciate why Google opted for a more intelligent design.

I can't say I really 'get' Knol, I had a quick look at it this afternoon and after not finding anything about the subject I was interested in, found a series of what appeared to be a mixture of blog posts and how to guides. It all seems to be a bit of a random jumble.

To be fair, the internal search engine here leaves something to be desired, and it doesn't help that search results for logged-in members include sigs - and Kurt Weber's sig unfortunately has the word "objectivist" in it. (Assuming that's the word you were searching for.) There also hasn't been a thread specifically about "objectivism" in a few months, so the threads with that word in the title might not have shown up on the first results page.

Moreover, discussion of "objectivism" here is usually secondary to discussion of cultishness and general WP weirdness, as in the following threads:

The Point at Which Objectivism Poisons Wikipedia
Ayn Rand and cults generally
Wikipedia Culture: How Like A Cult
Connelly blocks Damian

There are also a few threads where someone made a point about Ayn Rand or "objectivism" in the middle of the discussion:

Shit on your neighbor
A Scientific Dissent from Wikipedianism

And finally, there's the blog - in Sympathy for the Sanger, I told of an example regarding how Randian business managers have a tendency to make things very unpleasant for their employees, sometimes with disastrous results (at least for service companies that rely on experienced workers).


I believe Google's latest ploy in the restore-internet-diversity game is Google Sidewiki (see this WR thread), in which visitors to a website can pop up a side panel in their browser (using the Google Toolbar, of course) to comment on just about any web page they view. (The wiki-comments are hosted by Google, so presumably the website operator/designer doesn't have much say in it, one way or another.)

Obviously this opens up a certain amount of new free-revenge potential against websites, and possibly their operators (not to mention their subjects). But maybe Google will allow for META tags or some other trick to disable it on specific pages or sites. We can always dream, can't we.

It might be interesting to see the Google Sidewiki entries for Wikipedia pages, but then again, it might not...

I have just started a thread on it in main talk - I have played around with it for an hour, it has some interesting possibilities as far as wikipedia and oversight is concerned.

Thanks! I was just about to do that... I have edited my post above to include a link to that thread, so as to hopefully not derail this one (though I have no reason for hope in this regard).

Also, we call it "General Discussion" around here - "Main Talk" sounds kind of icky.

It truly is a jumble. You can post recipes, short stories, biographies, maps, items for sale, whatever you want. The primary useful purpose of Knol, is to allow Google Sites to meet Wikipedia. That is, with Google Sites, you can throw up a website, that you can edit on-the-fly. But there's no interrelationship with any one else. On Wikipedia, you're compelled to have a single article about each topic, and they are all interconnected.

On Knol, you get half of this and half of that. You *can* if you choose, interconnect your articles to those of others with classic links and a search box, etc. You don't *have* to. That's the advantage. I'm not forced to link to your stupid article about Cary Grant, I can write my own, and make all my work link to it. If mine is excellent you can link to mine. It's choice.

In addition you can have lists of articles, everyone can have their own or use mine, you can create your own categories, no one can squash them, you can use the categories of others. You can create you own directory trees if you like, or not, or attach yours to others, or not.

I love it. I spend hours there. There's very little drama of any sort.

Sounds weird - I guess the litmus test would be looking at articles on popular figures - let's say Obama, Bush, and some others and see how many there are individually on each and how tehy stack up against each other.

On a side note, I did find the conservapedia article on Obama quite amusing...

You can go here to the search toolkit page

Find "Obama" in the
Title or Subtitle
Sort by Page views

What this does is allow you to see what Knols are the "most popular" in order of how many times they've been viewed. I wish Wikipedia had a search like that, it would be most useful to see something like what city in California is the most viewed or whatever.

So anyway once you do that, you will see several articles, including some biographies and other discussion. And you'll be able to tell, presumably, at least that's what knol.google hopes, that those which are most popular either by views or star ratings, are actually... the best.

Is that metric true? I don't think anyone is quite certain yet. But it's still relatively new, at least compared with Wikipoopia.

Ayn Rand wanted something for the world?

I once sent an email to Jimbo asking him what character from Fountainhead he thought he most resembled and why. He reminds me a lot of Gail Wynand, "the man who could have been", who "uses his superlative talent not to create for himself, but to control others". "Gail Wynand is a powerful newspaper mogul who rose from a destitute childhood in the ghettoes of New York City to control the city's print media. While Wynand shares many of the character qualities of Roark, his success is dependent upon his ability to manipulate public opinion..." Wynand lives a life of fame and seeming power, but in private he despises the community he seemingly controls, a control he ultimately loses when the fickle mob turns against him.

Jimbo never responded to my email, though.

As for the specific details of why Jimbo chose to turn Wikipedia into a non-profit, I think Kelly hit the nail on the head. I think she's wrong that "It is also perfectly acceptable to encourage others to engage in altruism as long as you benefit in some way thereby." I don't think Rand would have found it "perfectly acceptable to encourage others to engage in altruism". Rand believed that when people act selfishly, *everyone* is better off. She wouldn't recommend encouraging others to engage in altruism as long as you benefit in some way thereby, because she believed that encouraging others to engage in selfishness would provide the most benefit to yourself.

And I don't think Wikipedia is necessarily an act of altruism, at least not in theory. One can certainly benefit from making a contribution to the world. The way Wikipedia has turned out makes it rather difficult, but in theory you can certainly contribute to a free project and benefit yourself. Fixing bugs in Linux, or mapping streets in OpenStreetMap, for instance. In the first few years, when people were building articles, instead of fighting over them, there was a lot of room for mutual benefit in contributing. Nowadays, I don't see it, though some people (Milton Roe, for instance), say they do.

As I recall, she mostly wanted to replace it with her own version, didn't she?

I was going to mention that too, but Ms. Martin did such a good job of explaining earlier how WP actually is consistent with Randroidism, I figured I should just keep quiet about it.

I'm not sure where you're getting that from. My initial objection was with the use of the word "for", as opposed to "of", though.

The Fountainhead was actually a bit optimistic compared to Atlas Shrugged. At least for the world. In the Fountainhead Roark ultimately triumphs against the mob, when he is found innocent.

I suppose in fourteen years she realized that it simply is not possible to fight from within the system. So in AS her heroes all leave the system to collapse under the weight of it's own gluttony and need to control, while they go off into some wilderness to build their own Utopia.

I think the idea is supposed to be, that once the world has descended into barbarity, the heroes can rebuild it all entire according to their own principles.

And do you actually believe any of this? In other words, you don't believe what's really true, which is that the people Rand would have considered "heroes" are themselves the barbarians, that they have no principles to speak of (unless you count greed, gluttony, and brutality as "principles"), and that the rest of us are the ones who will have to clean up after them?

The Fountainhead wasn't about the world, it was about Roark. Atlas Shrugged was about the world - specifically, what happens to it when all the "greedy bastards" in it go on strike.

Right the Fountainhead was about the relationships between a small set of people, but those relationships mirrored the entire world as Ayn saw it. The principles of one set, versus the principles of another set. But even in the Fountainhead, she spoke about how the world was. Roark, Wynand, Tooey, were just the specific examples of the wider issue.

As far as whether "greedy bastards" were the ones who went on strike in AS, I supposed that depends on whether you think her portrayal of the how-the-world-is was accurate or backwards.

The Fountainhead was about Roark, not about "the relationships between a small set of people". The other characters were only there to contrast against Roark.



I put "greedy bastards" in quotes. I think it's fairly clear the people who went on strike are the ones that people like say Michael Moore likes to call "greedy bastards". I don't think they're actually illegitimate children, if that's what you mean.

From the point of view of writing an essay on whether Jimmy is honoring or despising Ayn's philosophy by the creation of Wikipedia, my own viewpoint shouldn't matter. I should be able to lay out the relevant evidence and discussion and determine what seems the most clear and valid presentation.

As far as your belief that the people Ayn would have considered heroes are brutal, etc, I'd look at an example. A writer wants to write a story on Obama, showing how all his campaign promises are inherently empty rhetoric -- no meaning. The Committee on Fair Government, decides to pay the writer for that work. When the writer presents their rough draft, the committee decides to add, delete and rearrange it until it says the exact opposite of what the writer intended to say. Ayn was against subverting your own vision of your work to the whims of your employer. They should like your work for what it is, without the need to alter it. If they want to alter it, then they apparently don't like your work in the first place.

How is that greed, gluttony and barbarity?

Sure it does. Your viewpoint helps determine whether or not you understand Rand's philosophy.



Which one is which? Let's say by "bastard", instead of "illegitimate child" I mean someone who is primarily concerned with him/herself.

Or let's just change "greedy bastards" to "selfish, greedy, capitalists". Is there any question as to whether or not the people who went on strike in AS were selfish, greedy, capitalists?

How is what greed, gluttony and barbarity? The fact that some group who paid a writer for a piece of writing wanted to substantively change it (as if that doesn't happen all the time)? The fact that the writer got paid, presumably for delivering something other than what he was paid to do? Or the fact that they "apparently" didn't like his work in the first place, and yet decided to "pay" him anyway?

Or maybe the "greed, gluttony and barbarity" actually involves the strange, overweening tendency of right-wing Randian snotnoses to bitch about the Obama Administration only a few months into its existence, as though it has somehow "failed," when everyone knows that the situation they were handed by the Bush Administration was so mind-bendingly godawful that it could take literally decades to fix, no matter how competent the leadership is?

Regardless, Ayn Rand didn't give a shit about most writers, other than maybe herself. She wanted to be around rich, powerful people, and she invented a "philosophy" to self-justify it. That's all it was, and the people who have bought into it are some of the saddest, most pathetic and soulless people in existence, even if many of them are rich plutocrats.

Of course, this is just my personal opinion...

Ayn Rand's philosophy has nothing to do with being rich or poor.

Some wealthy capitalists exploit it in order to justify why they shouldn't be shackled by government regulations. Unshackled by regulation, of course, they could get richer and be considered bastards for exploiting their workers, etc etc.

But the core philosophy was not about how to get rich, or how to stay rich or how to justify wealth.

The core philosophy is about the freedom of a man to work as he sees fits, and to be paid what he wishes and by mutual contract. That is not greedy capitalism.

Those who are opposed to greedy capitalists who use her philosophy to justify their own means, think that somehow that is the only valid interpretation of what she wrote. That it only applies to how to exploit people and things to become wealthy.

If you watch the movie I linked, it's fairly clear that Roark, acting in perfect accord (as she saw it) with her philosophy was quite poor for a long time. And yet, he was the hero. How is that greed?

The simple fact is that Rand's ethics are empty: they boil down to, once you strip away all the layers of poorly-applied varnish, the assertion that "what you want to do is ethical if you feel OK about doing it". This provides no ethical guidance whatsoever; it's just a reflexive "if A, then A" pleonastic nullity. It also makes Randism very appealing to those who lack empathy, because it allows them to justify (in their own minds) ruthlessly exploiting anyone they can without having to feel guilty about it (as they would under virtually any other ethical system).

While I cannot assert that Rand's intent was to create a vacuous philosophy, she certainly succeeded in doing so. Objectivism is a pox on humanity, and my experience is that adherents of it are reliably untrusthworthy, because they can be counted on to betray you if doing so would benefit them in any way, even nonmaterially. The main difficulty in dealing with an objectivist is that you often have no idea what nonmaterial things the objectivist craves, and thus you have no easy way of predicting what seemingly trivial thing will result in the objectivist betraying you for his personal self-satisfaction. (On the other hand, once you know what a given objectivist's personal cravings are, it can be possible to manipulate them relatively cheaply based on those cravings. But that too is a dangerous game.)

Do what thou wilt is the hole in the law.

You seem to have taken *one* aspect of Rand's philosophy, built your own philosophy around it, and then called it Rand's philosophy. Rand certainly would have had no problem calling many of her heroes from Atlas Shrugged "greedy capitalists". She titled a chapter in Atlas Shrugged "the utopia of greed" (a fact you might have missed if you only watched the movie), and she referred to herself as a capitalist and her political philosophy as capitalism. The "Anti-Greed Act" was presented as one of the abysmal acts which helped destroy the civilization in Atlas Shrugged.



I don't know. I looked up exploit: "To employ to the greatest possible advantage". Yeah, I definitely think Rand's heroes knew how to exploit people, and practiced it.

Was exploiting people the only thing her philosophy taught? No, of course not. But a key part of her political philosophy (perhaps even the whole of it) was that in order to employ other men to the greatest possible advantage, you have to deal with them in certain ways. Her ethical philosophy taught that this was the way you ought to deal with them.



Greed comes in different forms. Not all greed is greed for money. Roark's greed was for his work, but many of Rand's other heroes, especially in Atlas Shrugged, were greedy for money. If you want to understand Rand's philosophy, stop watching the movies and start reading the books, for starters.



That would be strange since the philosophy you've described is subjectivism, which is the opposite of objectivism. How much of Rand's ethics have you studied, and how?

It's not my fault that Rand's philosophy is almost entirely incoherent.

It is your fault if you make no attempt to understand it, however.

It's not my fault that a philosophy that calls itself "objectivism" incorporates agent-relative value, which certainly opens the door to subjectivism. Rand's ethics are inherently subjective; all ethical calculations center on whether one's actions benefit oneself, without regard to whether they benefit anyone else; the consideration of impact on others only come into play as higher-order effects ("I should not kill Jones because if I do other people are likely to try to kill me."). Rand also equivocates on the term "value" in a manner that further opens the door to ethical subjectivism.

To be frank, I would say that Rand's philosophy is called "objectivism" precisely because it is entirely subjectivist, simply so that people can make the idiotic (but occasionally convincing) argument that a philosophy that is called "objectivism" could not possibly be entirely subjectivist.

How does that make them subjective? You are the one assuming that what benefits oneself is subjective.

What if all ethical calculations centered on whether or not they benefit someone else? How does that make them objective? That would make objectivity impossible, actually, because how would one objectively determine who they ought to act to benefit, and what it means to act to benefit them?

Are you assuming objectivism is impossible, and using that to prove that Rand was a subjectivist?



When did Rand ever suggest that the reason one should not kill is that if one does so other people are likely to try to kill them? I suspect you got that impression from something written by someone other than Rand.

Ah, Grasshopper, the mists are beginning to part.

I'm quite aware that people have proposed answers to these questions, but the ones I have seen have all fallen short. The most objective other-centered answer of "who ought one act to benefit" would probably be some form of Utilitarianism, but that breaks down when you try to objectively define "everyone". Do evil people count under those we ought to act to benefit? What about non-human primates? Puppy dogs? Insects? Trees? Rocks? And then there's the second half of the question, which Utilitarianism is even less successful at addressing. What does it mean to "benefit" someone? The Obama administration is having fun with this one right now. Obama defines what is in our best interest (health insurance covering A, B, C, D, X, Y, and Z), and then forces us to give up other things to get it, ostensibly for our own good.

Objectivism is not intrinsicism. Objectivism does not claim that an action which is good for one person is necessarily good for another person. But that doesn't make it subjectivism. Objectivism says that some actions are clearly *not* good for some people in some situations, because they are self-contradictory. In subjectivism this would not be the case - whatever you feel like doing, even if it contradicts everything else you feel like doing, is fine by subjectivism.

Rand doesn't have "a philosophy." She was not a philosopher. She has no standing in the academic community. She was a pulp novelist who generate stilted prose and kissed the asses of the rich, an activity that often brings rewards disproportionate to talent. She is of interest only to the kind of juvenile personalities that is overly influenced by the last, or only, thing that they have read. Of course this was ideal for Usenet and its denizens, including Mr. Wales.

I would be good to have Jon around to educate with puns about the Ponze scheme and con artist nature of Wikipedia. You can understand Mr. Wales less from the work of that terrible writer Rand and more from the great writer Twain. Wikipedia is Tom Sawyers fence whitewashing scam, without the charm or goodwill.

If you still think Rand was a philosopher go read another book.

The point of my essay isn't whether Ayn Rand's philosophy is beneficial to society, but whether Wales adheres to it, or only gives it lip-service.

As as as Ayn describing some of her heroes as greedy capitalists, I'm not sure, I'd have to try to find such a statement in her books. Which by the way, I have read, and I do own. The only reason I referred to the movie, is because it's more accessible to readers of this board immediately.

As far as Ayn's heroes exploiting people for their own gain, in every situation, one person can say, this person is using that person for this object. That's true universally, not particularly. I don't see that as black-and-white but as a continuum of gray.

When Roark is asked by his friend, to design housing for low-income or moderate-income families, he agrees, with his only renumeration being that his plans should not be changed. His payment, is merely a contract not to alter his work. That is the sort of payment that, I claim, the majority of even those who call themselves altruists might consider a fair request.

He doesn't demand it of course, he states that this is the requirement under which he will work. You don't have to use him, you can use another architect.

That hardly seems to me, to be something abhorrent. Rather, working for no money, to help the middle-class or poor, only an agreement of that sort, seems more than a bit noble.