I’m satisfied that my next steps will work. I’m planning on concluding this project later today.
I’ll do a proper postmortem / review then, but there are more than a few issues that I ran into. I think this project succeeded, but only because there was so much excess capacity.
I didn’t think anon expected a reply. I’ll reply now, though.
The main reason is probably that I don’t know where I’d share it. Do you think it would be acceptable if I were to make an “lmf shares links” thread or something?
Another reason is that because of this post, I’m a bit afraid of posting some of the stuff that I have in mind because it might be off-topic. E.g. one of the ARI-aligned intellectuals I like the most has some interesting takes on things, but he doesn’t get very deep into explicitly philosophical topics.
Lastly, sometimes when I think an ARI-aligned intellectual creates “really good” material, the meat of the content they created is just an idea that came directly from something Rand wrote, so I imagine that some of the people on this forum would find it uninteresting / redundant.
You can make one topic for each thing. If you think that’s too many small topics, you can group them by theme, e.g. a topic for small physics things or small Objectivism things. Fairly specific themes are best so they don’t overlap too much with other topics or become giant megathreads (in other words, try not to group dozens of things together that aren’t directly related). IMO you shouldn’t worry about clutter unless it becomes a problem, rather than based on predictions that may be inaccurate. If you make a dozen threads and see what happens, you’ll have a better idea of what to do about it at that point. Clutter is not a big deal anyway (and it’s also not hard to merge threads).
If someone can explain Rand without screwing it up, that would be interesting and notable. I have been unable to find any decent, active Objectivist authors/speakers to follow online.
I assume that you mean consistently explain Rand without screwing up, rather than just occasionally explain Rand without screwing up.
I’m somewhat surprised that it’s this bad, though I guess I shouldn’t be because I have a lot to learn wrt Objectivism. I am currently only able to spot a few errors that these people make (barring specific areas like when they talk about epistemological induction or math or physics).
Just trying to get a gauge on how bad you think they are:
ARI has a lot of articles which are explicitly devoted to explaining something like a single idea of Rand’s. If you picked a random one of those, what would be the chances that the article screwed Rand’s idea up?
For example?
The project was a success insofar as I had a plan w/ how to proceed with AS that was clear and easy to follow (whether those steps went well is a different topic). I know it was a success because I was able to move on without revisiting this thread and because LO has plenty to read, covers many elements of the book, and has many good writing prompts (both explicit and implicit).
There are a few things that didn’t go well.
The process I went through felt smooth. In part it felt smooth/easy b/c I’d laid out a brief plan as part of the template, so it was obvious what the next steps were. I didn’t get stuck. Elliot’s suggestion helped a lot.