Curiosity – Specialist Creators with Small Audiences

[ActiveMind]

@Elliot

With very rare exceptions, they are perishing in silence, unknown and unnoticed. [edit: added correct quote level]

Why didn’t you perish? How did you keep going?

@Elliot

I’ll tell you a story which was told to me, without shame, in 2005.

I think it could be true, it fits with what the world is like. What do you mean about “without shame”? That the person who told you it didn’t think it was that bad? Or that they had just accepted that this was how the world was like?

@Elliot

You thought if only you could get a hearing, everything would change; then you got one, and it went better than you hoped … yet still nothing changed.

It’s sad the world is like this. But the world has gotten better, we had the industrial revolution and now we have computers. There have been great thinkers like Rand and Popper. We can learn from them and improve our lives with that thinking. So I would say it’s inspiring to think the world could be way better if it was actually rational, and that we could get that world by pushing Paths Forward and rational debate.

@Elliot

I’ll let Rand tell you a similar story (with a different ending):

I’m rereading FH and just read this part. I love this part, in a sad way.

@Elliot

Like the cost of housing in the US is so high that it’s hard for people to have time to think.

Peikoff on Rand crying:

she did not cry easily. There were other times that I knew that she cried were in the early years when she was writing We the Living, had no money, had a full time job and could only write at night. She quite frequently, I understand, in the evening, would cry a bit, just because it was such an awful situation. She was[n’t(?)] established. She didn’t have time to write. She had to write. She had this job, but I never saw her cry in 31 years.

I think this in itself was heroic by Rand. But we can’t expect there to be many others like her.

(Also it seems like it’s almost just as hard for waitress and such to earn a livelihood as it was 100 years ago (I think people leave their parents homes earlier than then though, I haven’t checked statistics.) That’s pathetic, it should be way easier with all the technology we have gotten since then.)

@Elliot

They’re not perfect people but they would do better living in a better society, where they weren’t so isolated, beaten down, surrounded by misinformation, and told by everyone (including often their friends and family) that it’s the prestigious people with high social status who have the most merit and intelligence.

Most can’t do like Rand, and most wouldn’t spend much of the extra time to think. But we don’t need most. We need a few who could be exceptional. I think there are many who could’ve been push over the breakpoint to become exceptional if the world wasn’t so irrational.

I think it’s hard to see how the world is unfair and irrational. It’s not that obvious. I don’t think I would’ve believed it if I hadn’t found Elliot. It requires some confidence in your own independent judgment.