# Max Learning Objectivism (Spoilers for AS & FH) **URL:** https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/max-learning-objectivism-spoilers-for-as-fh/487 **Category:** Unbounded **Tags:** learning, objectivism **Created:** [January 20, 2022, 9:31pm UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/max-learning-objectivism-spoilers-for-as-fh/487 "2022-01-20T21:31:57Z") **Posts on this page:** 1 **Showing post:** 5
### Author: ![Max](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/user_avatar/discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/max/32/97_2.png) [@Max](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/Max) #### Post date: [January 21, 2022, 3:56am UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/max-learning-objectivism-spoilers-for-as-fh/487/5 "2022-01-21T03:56:50Z")
Some reflection about this quote and my time here (FI/CF). > [@Elliot Shares Links (2022)](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/elliot-shares-links-2022/464/18): > > The reason I brought up and taught grammar _is because I think it’s generically important and should be a priority for people interested in philosophy_ . It’s an intentional design decision and topic choice by me, which I would do with ~anyone. It was not a request or choice by the student, nor a customization to cover a weakness of theirs. > > If you already know parts of speech, clauses/phrases, sentence diagramming, and the material in Peikoff’s grammar course, you could skip a few bits. But I think you’d still find some things you don’t know in my grammar article. And I’d still think learning grammar trees is worthwhile (those are not standard knowledge that you would already know, though some grammarians already know them), and is a good way to build up to analyzing and making trees for texts. 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:](https://groups.google.com/g/fallible-ideas/c/5M_32Y6J3JE/m/-jXiAiCYBAAJ) > 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:](https://groups.google.com/g/fallible-ideas/c/5M_32Y6J3JE/m/3PFsawCRBAAJ) > 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:](https://groups.google.com/g/fallible-ideas/c/5M_32Y6J3JE/m/rLFwkxamBAAJ) > 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. --- _[View the full topic](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/max-learning-objectivism-spoilers-for-as-fh/487)._