skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It'd be useful to see some support for your claims about the history of philosophy. Specifically:

1. Aristotle's Metaphysics, and the like, had no effect on its readers. I'd also like a clearer definition of "did something." I.e. does changing the way one thinks about practically theoretical fields "do something?"

2. No one challenged the two until the 1600s. Kant, by himself, isn't a good source since his philosophical agenda was to overthrow the relevance of religion (which was tightly coupled with classical thought). See Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind for details.

For my undergrad I studied the classics, and I'd say your generalizations are too general. People, such as Aristophanes, said the same things about Plato in his day that you say in your essay. Yet, generations of great thinkers have chosen Plato over the Cynics and Epicureans, today's relativists and materialists. Your critique of the uselessness of philosophy is more indicative of the fact that many of the humanities in academia today are purposely biased towards relativism or materialism.

While I agree that philosophy should be tested with practice, I don't think practicality should restrict inquiry. Otherwise, we become very short sighted. Math is a great example of this, which you've pointed out in one of your essays.

Finally, you misunderstand Aristotle's support for 'useless' theory. You're confusing 'useless' with 'pointless.' All useful activities are done for a specific goal, they aren't important in themselves. Therefore, the ultimate point of useful activities is by definition 'useless.' Aristotle thinks the final goal we all aim for is happiness, and the highest form of happiness is a kind of knowledge.
Eric Schmidt has passed Steve Jobs on this thing? That has to have been the most lucrative hiring for anyone ever.
Ask the Wizard: No Exit
My favorite part of the annual issue is the bits about how people got their start. A surprising number of them seem to have bounced back from living in their car / not having a home, job, money - but then skyrocketing. I bet their perspective of risk changed dramatically.
Sadly, I do not at the moment. The position is open for any girls who love guys with dorky tattoos. ;)
So what happens if I am merely testing whether people care more about the quality of my comments, vs some ideology I may or may not buy into?

If this is going to be a better community than reddit, the way a person argues and supports their view should matter more than whether they happen to hold a controversial idea. For the most part I've been pretty impressed.
I'm of the opinion that [good] Sci Fi is a weak form of philosophy. Societies that don't exist are constructed and described, and then readers can read and digest the implications.
Considering that the people on this site are more or less exactly the kind of people with whom Rand surrounded herself, and anyone who fancies themselves at all creative or exceptional is likely to identify with the Roark or Galt characters (who are, nonetheless, only ever described from an external perspective) - and frankly, the more likely to so identify the less their achievements tally with their self-estimation - I'd say it's not at all surprising.

I'd also say it doesn't bode well for the future. From my perspective, being a Rand fan is a demonstration of an unfortunate lack of either insight or critical thinking. Maybe the ability to believe bullshit, so long as it's positive bullshit, is a strength in an entrepreneur. But being unable to distinguish harsh truth from desirable illusion is not a strength in someone who is truly creative, whether in thought or in anything else.
If Rand's fans accepted that she was worthless as a philosopher, but half a century ahead of the self-help curve, they'd be a lot less annoying.
MTV Launches Social Network Called ThinkMTV
On what grounds would you call Rand's work "pseudophilosophy", rather than philosophy proper? Just because you don't like something does not mean it is automatically disqualified from the class of philosophies.

I think that to qualify as a philosophy, something must be a system of thought that proposes a notion of metaphysics, epistemology, and a system of ethics. Rand's "output" obviously qualifies, whether you happen to agree with it or not.

Intelligent design and time cube theory ought not to be taught because they can be objectively verified as false. Such a test plainly does not apply to philosophy -- and even if it did, it would disqualify plenty of philosophers who are taught, such as the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales.
Plus it makes you sound like qwe1234. We don't do that here, either.
It depends. I would think that as long as the antibody is human, it SHOULD recognize it. If it doesn't, there is no harm, it won't cause an allergic reaction or anything. However, by targeting this region, the binding of the antibody prevents the HIV from binding to the CD4 receptors. So even if the immune system doesn't recognize it, it still disables the virus.
someone tried to give you an answer here

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14926
Doesn't this come back to the problem of ontology? Given the different possibilities, what makes you so sure SVG will come out on top? Can it exist w/o a standards org like W3C to promote its adoption?

The Doom clone was why I specified 'useful' in my last comment ;)
But there's a lot of pseudoscience being taught today. Maybe Rand shouldn't be taught, but why isn't it? Because of the form of her output (novels)?
I have never understood how people can make this claim. It is so dishonest as to be ridiculous.
> On what grounds would you call Rand's work "pseudophilosophy", rather than philosophy proper?

Well, for a start, there was the fact that she reviewed, and dismissed on "philosophical" grounds, a book of Immanuel Kant's after she read the back cover. Sure, that's an example, but by no means an atypical one. She dismissed nearly everything after Aristotle, usually on superficial grounds. Such wholesale dismissal of the established field, such grandiosity of claims (especially in the face of such shallow thinking) has direct parallels with pseudoscience.

> I would personally say that to qualify as a philosophy, something must be a system of thought that proposes a notion of metaphysics, epistemology, and a system of ethics. Rand's "output" obviously qualifies

...for a definition of "philosophy" you have pretty much quoted verbatim from her work, but without admitting that or even acknowledging the existence of alternative perspectives? You do see the problem with that, don't you...?

> Intelligent design and time cube theory ought not to be taught because they can be objectively verified as false.

No. They can't. That's the whole point of pseudoscience - if their claims were verifiable but wrong, it would just be forgotten. But pseudoscientists make unverifiable claims precisely in order to claim that because their claims have not been disproven, they should be given parity.

As for teaching Thales, how does one teach that Socrates was an advance if one does not teach what he was advancing from? Similarly, the Rutherford model of the atom is still mentioned in science classes - by your logic it should be forgotten as pseudoscience, but it wasn't. One cannot teach science without teaching that models are superseded by better models as they are created - that is the very nature of the scientific process. And the reason science and philosophy were commingled until a couple of centuries ago is that it's at the heart of the philosophical process too. One rejects models because one can demonstrate that an alternative model better fits the observable reality; one doesn't superficially reject them without bothering to understand them first because one finds their implications in disagreement with the conclusions one is seeking to prove!
No. Dishonesty is dismissing any argument with which one disagrees as "dishonest" without actually making a substantive counterargument.

If you don't understand how people can make the claim, fine - but please do grasp that all this demonstrates is the paucity of your understanding.
Extreme Makeover:  What if you spent one year following every rule in the Bible?
I hope this is true! This would be a great thing and everyone's social maps would finally be free!
sure, but these words have precise definitions. Paul alluded to this when he wrote "in fact, it would not be a bad definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise meanings".

"Ratio", "Square Root", and "Integer" have precise definitions, whereas "self interest" is imprecise.
Two wrongs don't make a right. I'd say it's more important to stop teaching pseudoscience in science classes than to use it as a justification for teaching pseudophilosophy in philosophy classes. And in general, novels should be taught in literature classes, not philosophy classes - although the example of L'Etranger suggests that there is room for crossover.

(Anyway, the majority of Rand's work takes the form of non-fictional essays. Her novels made her name, but it's clear she saw them only as means to an end.)
I like Roark, but I think Galt is overrated. He doesn't do much. Dagny is more appealing and more similar to Roark -- they both heroically pursue active goals against stiff opposition.
Then again, even apart from the fact that a qsort() is built into most languages, Quicksort is very nearly as simple to implement as Bubble Sort.
I like how you call Rand's work bullshit but don't provide a single example. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if you haven't read any of her work. Most of her critics haven't.

Also, it's interesting that you don't try to reconcile the fact that the Y Combinator is one of the most successful startup incubators ever, and that there is a large presence of Ayn Rand fans on here. Do ya think there might be a connection there? no of course not, it's just that entrepreneurs like to believe in bullshit.

In my experience it's very rare to meet a person who calls themselves an Objectivist who isn't way above average in intelligence and ambition. And don't tell me about the 14 yearolds you've talked to on various online forums - I don't think you'd want people to judge you by how you behaved when you were a kid. I'm talking about people 25+. All the guys I knew from university who were Objectivists are now either working at Google, some big time law firm, or have started their own company (I'm in the lattermost category.)
The Diogenes quotes are interesting, but don't they lampoon Neo Platonic thought more than Plato himself?
Even more important, was Socrate's Republic meant to be taken seriously?
For a better presentation of the contemporary view of philosophers like Plato, you should read Aristophane's Clouds. It's also alot deeper in meaning than a mere facile mockery of poorly understood ideas.
You can't verify (prove) that ID is false, or that there is no God, or anything like that. It isn't an issue for scientific tests, and certainty is never possible anyway.
Godel was a Platonist.
FYI, Pythagoras also pre-dates Heraclitus.
> In fact it wouldn't surprise me if you haven't read any of her work.

Try "all her novels and at least 4 books of essays". In fact, I seem to have read more Rand than many Objectivists. It was a while ago, though, and the books have long since left my possession.

Let me guess - your next argument will be "you didn't understand it then". If so, we're done here, for the same reason I don't argue with Christian fundamentalists who claim I don't understand Christianity.

edit: Sorry, some of your other assertions amuse me.

> Also, it's interesting that you don't try to reconcile the fact that the Y Combinator is one of the most successful startup incubators ever, and that there is a large presence of Ayn Rand fans on here.

I guess you found "maybe the ability to believe bullshit... is a strength" confusing. I chose the word "strength" for a reason, although "advantage" would fit well too.

I also covered that in another thread, where you were perfectly welcome to reply. Nobody did.

> Do ya think there might be a connection there?

Correlation? Not without better data. But even if there is a correlation, that is not causation; and I find it hard to take someone who would assert otherwise seriously as a thinker.

So here's one for you. What proportion of successful YC startups were founded by Objectivists? What proportion of failed or abandoned ones were?

> In my experience it's very rare to meet a person who calls themselves an Objectivist who isn't way above average in intelligence and ambition.

In my experience it's very rare to meet a person who ridicules Objectivism who isn't way above average in intelligence, perceptiveness and sensitivity.

Shall we get into a pissing match about whose experience is better, or shall we simply agree that personal experience is not a useful data point?

> All the guys I knew from university who were Objectivists are now either working at Google

...so no self-compromise there, then...

> some big time law firm

...where integrity is so highly prized...
Here's a bose site that has much more info about the system:
http://www.bose.com/learning/project_sound/suspension_challe...

Video is included on the last page.
Reading philosophy is still good mental exercise, and it gives you interesting ways to think about the world. Learning to call bullshit on intimidating ideas is a good thing to learn.

I agree that one test of it is whether it changes the way you do things -- or at least gives you an imperative to do so that you're too weak or cowardly to heed (see Nietzche, Thoreau, Schopenhauer, Seneca).

But I dunno -- the whole math versus the world mentality always strikes me as a symptom of too much craving for certainty. Math never told us anything about the rights of man.
What argument of yours should I respond to? then one where you assert without any evidence that her work is bullshit?

You think you can just dismiss an entire body of thought by throwing out ad hominems?

Look, I know that you're smart enough to know that I'm a pretty smart guy, so comparing me to a "Christian fundamentalist" just makes you look ridiculous. Offer a serious argument to support your claims (as I did to support mine, if you read the above posts) or just don't bother posting.

Edit (response to above "edit", since you didn't feel like writing a new post): This really isn't going anywhere, let's just leave it here. I'm sure you're a top notch programmer, but seriously man it's just not cool to go around name-calling people you disagree with. I replied to your posts with respect, so did everyone else on this site.
Yes.

http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/smincomebig.png

My app (http://apps.facebook.com/themafia) is currently doing around 9K a month a revenue, and it's not even that successful by Facebook app standards.
This is a question that you can ask of any web 2.0 company. I don't see why Facebook apps would be significantly less monetizable than any other app.
1. You claim that she dismissed a book by Kant after reading the back cover.

Please provide a reference.

2. You don't like his definition of philsophy.

What definition do you like?

3. You claim pseudophilosophy should not be taught in philosophy classes.

Anyone and everyone agrees with that point. You still leave open the issue of whether Rand's work is in fact pseudophilosophy. Please support your claims.
Can you explain how the Republic influenced the Merovingians?
Every reddit commenter is "able to see" that my essays are mistaken. Does that make them smart?
It's about time somebody did that. I thought it might make a good startup, but couldn't think of any way to get random social networking services to sign on.
> then one where you assert without any evidence that her work is bullshit?

I didn't assert that, I implied that in the course of asserting something else.

> You think you can just dismiss an entire body of thought by throwing out ad hominems?

Yeah, actually I do, if it's a very small body and hasn't done much thinking.

> comparing me to a "Christian fundamentalist"

Again (and this is REALLY getting tedious), I didn't compare you to a Christian fundamentalist, I compared Objectivist arguments that I have heard before (and predicted that you would use, partly in order to ensure that you didn't) with those of Christian fundamentalists.

> I know that you're smart enough to know that I'm a pretty smart guy

Er, no - at the moment that is a conclusion I simply cannot draw. Your thinking displays evidence of being muddled and irrational, with little grasp of logic or ability to distinguish between claims made of the argument and claims made of the arguer.

I have no doubt that you think you're a pretty smart guy, and I bet you didn't have to work too hard at school to achieve results. But I also think that because of this, you tend to interpret criticism as a personal attack, and you are slow to recognise when someone really does have something to teach you, especially when you don't think that person is as bright as you think you are.
what does "smart" mean?
I think I would have been stoned several times already (by rocks thrown at me, not drugs).
Macs Really Do Run Windows Better
Aren't some mutually exclusive?
Ok but you're jumping down the rabbit hole to quickly. Physicists assume spherical cows, early mathematicians assumed only integers, why can't Rand assume that "self" is the thoughts and actions encased in one's skin? It is a good jump off point and a lot of useful philosophies can be derived from there. Sure they eventually break down once you push the definitions hard enough, but that just means the model needs to be refined. Newtonian Physics needed to be refined as well, that didn't mean it should have been scrapped.
Google Announcing New APIs?
Facebook: We reserve the right to rip off your idea
Toward Humanity 2.0 - Jeff Skoll (eBay) on making positive change
It's funny, everyone likes Roark more than Galt :)

Yeah, I thought there just wasn't enough characterization with Galt, compared to any of the other characters. He just kind of appears towards the end of the novel and you never really understand what is motivating him on an emotional level. Maybe I'm just not remembering it properly, it's been 6 or 7 years since I read Atlas Shrugged.
If You Dread Planning Your Startup, Don't Start It
Planning isn't writing ponderously about some homework assignment or dull business memo, it's about that business that you want to create. It should be fascinating to you ... what do people want, how are you going to give it to them, how are you different, what do you do better than anybody else ...
"Hobbit" was more unlike us than Neanderthals, despite living as recently as 18,000 years ago
I'm thinking about getting a tattoo. The goal is to get something that is aesthetically pleasing in an abstract sense, to avoid thinking something is ugly years later.

I was thinking about the great wave, a dragon, a dragon fly or something else made up of PCB layout lines. I think that would look very nice on a forearm.
http://www.imakethings.com/2007/09/14/image-to-pcb-app-and-p...

Most science tattoos are very, very ugly. And what if maxwell's equations or the Y-combinator get invalidated in the future :-P ?
Mister Disc, a proto-iPod from 1983
I never understood comments like this. They assume there are no geek girls with similar interests.
Will you stop it, you two? Your dispute is now mostly about itself.
Techcrunch 40 - an attendee's opinion.
No, I meant that when you learn about e.g. the chemical elements, you don't also learn who discovered each of them. It's accepted knowledge; you're taught it as facts.

In philosophy, most of the exam questions have someone's name in them. E.g. "explain x's concept of y."
> Well, for a start, there was the fact that she reviewed, and dismissed on "philosophical" grounds, a book of Immanuel Kant's after she read the back cover.

This is utterly irrelevant to the point in question. Rand's attitude toward other philosophers was pretty uninformed, I agree, but it is evidence of Rand herself being silly, superficial, etc., The point is that those are properties of Rand, not of her philosophy. To equate her (many) imperfections as an individual with inherent properties of her philosophy is essentially an ad hominem argument -- and it's even more debatable that merely dismissing the alternatives to one's theory automatically makes your own theory "pseudophilosophy".

As for my definition of philosophy, sure, it is also Rand's view, but I think it is fairly reasonable. Surely a philosophy must include some claims about 1. the nature of reality 2. our ability to understand that reality, if any 3. how we ought to act within that reality. If you think it's such a flawed definition, what definition would you prefer, and how does Rand's "output" not qualify?

As for ID/etc. being provably false, I agree with you, I mispoke. But I still don't see how you've proven, or even really supported, your argument that Rand is somehow "pseudophilosophy", and other systems of thought are "real" philosophy. That just sounds like superficial bigotry to me -- actually the same sort of thing you accuse Rand of, with respect to Kant.
> Please provide a reference.

See above. The books in which I could have located a reference are long gone; but it's in one of her short essays (if pushed, I'd suggest that it might be found in For the New Intellectual... but wouldn't want to be held to that).

> What definition do you like?

From wikipedia: "Different philosophers have had varied ideas about the nature of reason, and there is also disagreement about the subject matter of philosophy." If not even the people who do it professionally can agree on a definition, it would be presumptuous of me to try.

Nonetheless, you misread my objection. I am objecting to the assertion that Rand's work is without question philosophy, using the definition of philosophy by which Rand identified herself as one. It's tautological; it begs the question.

Likewise, my criticism of Rand is not that her conclusions are not reasonable conclusions (although I have my own opinions on that). It is that the methods by which she reached those conclusions are not those of a serious philosophical investigation. Rand's entire "philosophy" was carefully contrived to justify the conclusions she wanted justified, and that makes it worthless as philosophy - and inherently dishonest, to boot.

> You still leave open the issue of whether Rand's work is in fact pseudophilosophy.

I haven't even presented a definition of pseudophilosophy, let alone one you have agreed upon, so it's hard to see how you can assert that I haven't proved my case. So:

: I define "pseudophilosophy" as "justification masquerading as philosophy" - or, to elaborate, "a contrived rationalisation of a priori conclusions, constructed primarily to justify those conclusions rather than to examine their validity".

: I claim that the evidence of Rand's flight to the US from revolutionary Russia, and the emotions expressed in her early fiction (primarily We the Living and Anthem, but even back as far as The Husband I Bought) demonstrate the a priori nature of her strident individualism and anti-collectivism. I do not criticise this; indeed, I have a lot of sympathy with it.

: I note that her philosophical oeuvre developed over the next few decades, from its clumsy emotive (and none the worse for that) beginnings in Anthem, through its 30-year gestation in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, to its expression in direct form in works such as For The New Intellectual and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

: I therefore conclude that in this case, she contrived her philosophical justification to fit her a priori conclusions about the rightness of capitalism and the abhorrence of altruism.

Note that I remain in sympathy with the feelings that drove her; indeed, I would go so far as to say that I share them. But to look upon her rationalisation of those feelings as anything other than a rationalisation, the self-justification of a woman who could not allow herself to simply be, is something I find absurd.
Actually, Rand had plenty of non-fiction output.
Understand the beauty of Smalltalk in 20 minutes