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Summary

Ayn Rand says one important part of living rationally in an irrational society is to pronounce judgment.

In short, if someone attacks your values, say something! Especially if silence could be mistaken as sanction of evil.

If you don’t pronounce judgment, both good and evil know they can’t expect anything from you. So by default, silence favors evil and betrays good. There’s no such thing as moral neutrality or ‘grayness’.

To pronounce judgment, you don’t need to be omniscient or infallible. But you do need integrity.

Many people are afraid of being judged. They like to say “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” They hope to get a moral blank check by writing one for others.

But the reality is that people have to make choices. To make choices, they need moral values. So moral neutrality hurts their ability to make choices. It’s also a slippery slope toward evasions. When people are morally ‘gray’, they say things like ‘no one is fully good or fully bad.’ That just helps evil along.

The moral principle people should adopt instead is: “Judge, and be prepared to be judged.”

Judging means “evaluat[ing] a given concrete by reference to an abstract principle or standard.” It’s not easy and you can’t do it automatically through feelings. It requires deliberate, rational thought. It must be well-reasoned and can’t be arbitrary.

Judging does not mean going around offering your opinion unsolicited or saving others. It does mean two things: “(a) that one must know clearly, in full, verbally identified form, one’s own moral evaluation of every person, issue and event with which one deals, and act accordingly; (b) that one must make one’s moral evaluation known to others, when it is rationally appropriate to do so.”

Sometimes you can just say you disagree, other times you may need to state your views more fully. It depends on your interlocutor and on context.

Pronouncing judgment protects the clarity of your thoughts against society’s irrational background.

Ultimately, society is run either by “the man who is willing to assume the responsibility of asserting rational values” or by “the thug who is not troubled by questions of responsibility.”

So speak out when someone attacks your values.

Yeah or see #2628.

Give this another shot. Should be fixed as of 6c7e74b.

For very deeply nested discussions, you may still need to scroll sideways to see some ideas. But you should now be able to zoom out far enough to always fit any idea into the viewport.

Valid. As of 7af3c7b, the site uses ‘USD’ throughout.

I implemented this a while back.

X caches link previews, so old previews remain the same. But new previews feature the discussion title, see eg https://www.opengraph.xyz/url/https%3A%2F%2Fveritula.com%2Fdiscussions%2Fcriticisms-of-zcash.

No need, see #3420.

This is now a feature, see the ‘Funding’ section of a bounty.

Archiving covers this.

Could this feature be unified with #2811 somehow?

Then I suggest revising #3968 so that it still captures the sentiment without containing factual falsehoods.

Fixed as of bbcefa8.

By definition, there is nothing in the unknowable, since it can't be known.

This isn’t true. There are unknowable things. Look up uncomputable functions, see eg

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_function#Uncomputable_functions_and_unsolvable_problems
• https://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/2s2wgy/what_is_an_uncomputable_function/.

So there are things that computers like our brains can never access – there are fundamental, natural limitations.

In this context, I think of mysticism as restricting criticism and preventing error correction, ie creating a man-made barrier for reason. That’s different.

This issue didn’t only occur on ideas#show.

Fixed as of a44c6c0.

When the code overflows horizontally, a subtle inset shadow on the side shows that you can scroll:

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const posts = [
  {id: 1, title: "Understanding JavaScript Closures in Depth", url: "https://example.com/articles/javascript-closures-deep-dive"},
  {id: 2, title: "A Complete Guide to Modern Web Development Practices", url: "https://example.com/articles/modern-web-dev-guide"},
  {id: 3, title: "Exploring the Node.js Event Loop and Async Patterns", url: "https://example.com/articles/nodejs-event-loop"}
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function formatPost(post) {
  return `${post.id}: ${post.title} -> ${post.url}`;
}

function prettyPrint(posts) {
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console.log(prettyPrint(posts));

Rand writes (p. 161):

The rational (the good) has nothing to gain from the irrational (the evil), except a share of its failures and crimes; the irrational has everything to gain from the rational: a share of its achievements and values. An industrialist does not need the help of a burglar in order to succeed; a burglar needs the industrialist’s achievement in order to exist at all. What collaboration is possible between them and to what end?

…

Consider the case of a business partnership: if one partner is honest and the other is a swindler, the latter contributes nothing to the success of the business; but the reputation of the former disarms the victims and provides the swindler with a wide-scale opportunity which he could not have obtained on his own.

I agree with her message that good shouldn’t collaborate with evil, but I don’t think this example works well. The reason somebody might go into business with a swindler is that they are tempted because the swindler does have something to offer them.

Maybe the swindler has a lot of money and offers to invest. The honest man might be too tempted to pass that up.

I do think the honest man should look for money elsewhere. But in such a case, it’s not true that he had “nothing” to gain from this partnership. It might be more accurate to say that there’s a net loss, or that overall the partnership is not worth it.

As I recall from some of the characters in Atlas Shrugged, Rand knew all this – it might just be a matter of wording things more clearly.

Further reading:

• @lola-trimble (as I recall) asked, what is an example of a principle? There’s the principle of pronouncing judgment when silence could reasonably be interpreted as sanction of evil: https://courses.aynrand.org/works/how-does-one-lead-a-rational-life-in-an-irrational-society/

• @tom-nassis asked, when can you compromise? https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/compromise.html

  It is only in regard to concretes or particulars, implementing a mutually accepted basic principle, that one may compromise. For instance, one may bargain with a buyer over the price one wants to receive for one's product, and agree on a sum somewhere between one's demand and his offer. The mutually accepted basic principle, in such case, is the principle of trade, namely: that the buyer must pay the seller for his product. But if one wanted to be paid and the alleged buyer wanted to obtain one's product for nothing, no compromise, agreement or discussion would be possible, only the total surrender of one or the other.

  There can be no compromise between a property owner and a burglar; offering the burglar a single teaspoon of one's silverware would not be a compromise, but a total surrender—the recognition of his right to one's property.

Prevailing explanations tend to put emphasis on the object instead of problem situations, like thinking addiction comes from the cigarette. This theory doesn't.

Over time, the substances or activities change your brain chemistry, and you become desensitized to their effects. You then need more to produce the same effect.

There could be a small grain of truth in this explanation when translated into epistemologically proper terms and divorced from hardware specifics.

Usually, when something is fun, that means you engage with it and learn from it. As the fun wanes, you learn less and naturally direct your attention elsewhere. Think of a video game you’ve gotten really good at: first it’s fun, then it gets boring. Boredom means the game doesn’t solve your problems anymore, it doesn’t fit into your problem situation anymore. So you play another game or do something else entirely.

But with addiction, this feedback mechanism seems to work differently: instead of getting bored and looking for stimulation elsewhere, the addict looks for more stimulation from the same activity.

Did you mean to criticize #733 instead?

I don’t think that alone means my interpretation of HTV is implausible. We’re bound to find contradictions eventually. In a good book like BoI, they’re just rare, so when we do find them, they go against the bulk of the philosophy.

I see why you would interpret the BoI quote in that way, but in the context of the whole philosophy your interpretation is implausible.

How can we tell whether my interpretation is implausible or whether Deutsch really does contradict himself?

I don’t think it’s enough to point out that the quote that (I think) contradicts his philosophy would, if I am right, indeed contradict his philosophy. We’re bound to find contradictions eventually. So I think we’d need some independent reasoning.

Btw, the discussion about HTV has largely moved to #3780 and its children. I’m going to summarize your criticisms there, and I suggest continuing there.

It seems that you've taken the idea of hard to vary as saying that the process of choosing between competing theories is just about measuring how much of this trait they have. One clearly wouldn’t get better explanations from doing that, as it would just be a mechanical way of judging theories.

Yes, but as I understood Deutsch, this process of choosing happens after one has conjectured and criticized a bunch of explanations. I don’t think he suggests that the application of the HTV criterion makes theories better, only that we should use it to choose between explanations after they have been guessed and improved.

So the process of choosing between already existing explanations really is “just about measuring how much of this trait they have.”

Veritula implements unanimous consent …

This notion also maps onto Ayn Rand’s idea that “there are no conflicts of interests among rational men.” (From The Virtue of Selfishness.)

There’s a reason rationality means lack of conflict.

@tyler-mills, both bounties are over.

At the time of writing, the idea saying to keep your job (#3638) has 4 pending criticisms.

The idea saying to quit and do research (#3639) has no pending criticisms.

So at this moment, the rational choice would be to quit your job. Hope this brings you some clarity.