Some reflection about this quote and my time here (FI/CF).
One thing I love about AS is that Rand explains – during Galt’s speech – how morality can be built up from the simplest of principles / axioms. I’ve wanted to be able to do that for a long time – I at least knew that it was important. Some of my ideas from pre-AS are a bit similar to Rand’s. Like: I knew that a morality that destroys its civilization was wrong, that’s similar to Rand’s ideas about living, thinking beings needing to survive (but I got the civilization bit wrong). The similarities mb helped me (some of the time my ideas sorta worked), but all the errors meant I couldn’t make the full chain of reasoning work. At best I knew some of the links (between ideas), but I never could have succeeded. There were errors that were so deep – I’d done so much work to retrofit ideas together – that I don’t think I ever would have been able to reverse engineer consistent principles. So, if I hadn’t read AS, then I would have kept going down that path, making a bigger and bigger tangled knot of ideas, that sorta sometimes worked but also trapped me.
(Note: the reason that some of my ideas worked wasn’t because I was good enough at thinking to come up with something half right, it was because I was bad enough at thinking to pick up only on a few good points from a few good thinkers. The rest was stuff I made up, or things I learned from other poor thinkers.)
With the benefit of hindsight: I think my struggle to understand morality without reading AS is similar to my struggle to understand and communicate ideas without learning grammar. I just didn’t have the skills to build something up from first principles, and I (mostly/often) wasn’t willing to listen to the advice I got. I couldn’t write from first principles, and I couldn’t think from first principles. I was always going to be overreaching.
One thing that occurs to me here, WRT schooling, is the idea that there are kids that are good at english and kids that are good at math/science. It’s like every kid is one, or the other, or neither, but very rarely both. That divide (between STEM and the arts) is super harmful. I think it harmed me – I was a science-y kid. I only changed my mind about English as a subject in the last 2 years of high-school. That probably helped me later, but it was too late for me to learn grammar (from the schooling system). Instead I kept building more and more elaborate ideas about what was good writing – made worse by the sort of advice given to students and the style of writing that’s rewarded. Maybe that’s where the mess that is academese comes from, it’s a knot of ideas that traps academics: they literally can’t write anything else without (at least temporarily) forgetting how to write and going back to first principles. It is the natural consequence of academia (at least the way it’s usually done).
Above, I said:
[…] how morality can be built up from the simplest of principles / axioms. I’ve wanted to be able to do that for a long time – I at least knew that it was important.
I say that it was rly important to me, but I’m not sure I’ve ever discussed it. So I went to go check the FI archives to look at my old posts. I didn’t find that, but I did find some other things in the earliest threads I was involved with.
On 15 Sep 2017, at 8:04, Elliot Temple wrote:
i think Max doubts the importance of these books and wants more demonstrations of their important, previews of their contents, arguments relating important ideas to the books, etc. it’d be especially helpful if he offered initial criticism of the books. why doesn’t he prioritize them above everything else? there must be some things about them he thinks are not so good compared to what i think. but he hasn’t been sharing those disagreements.
Sep 15, 2017, Anonymous FI wrote:
you may not be emotionally or intellectually ready to face this – that
the ideas you value are actually deeply incompatible with BoI,
Objectivism, etc. and it’d be hard to explain it to you due to your lack
of background knowledge.i think it’d be better to start with e.g. discussing FoR/BoI/FH/AS in
detail.
The answers that I needed had been there the whole time. The problem was that they weren’t the answers that I wanted. (really, the answer that I wanted was “you’re a great thinker, Max”. hmm, what would happen if an anon account said that to everyone who wanted to hear it?)
Fri, Sep 15, 2017, Elliot Temple wrote:
On Sep 14, 2017, at 5:48 PM, Max Kaye wrote:
I’ve also abandoned many views I used to have.
Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t have a long way to go, but I’m very committed to fallibilsm. BoI gave me the tools to reject (and understand why I should reject) all other competing philosophies, so between a choice of the ideas (outside fallibilism) and fallibilism, I’ll take the latter. That also doesn’t mean that journey will be easy.
Another way of looking at that is that there’s nowhere else for me to go besides through that criticism.
dozens of people have said similar stuff. they rarely last long. but good luck, best wishes.
I am proud that I am lasting.