@luanrodolfo @nntaleb I want to try this one. I want to write an essay about this so this is a good chance to make some mistakes in short hand form. The essay I want to call “Ayn Rands Smoking Habit: Never let an objectivist manage your risks”
@luanrodolfo @nntaleb So basically Ayn Rand believed in the pure primacy of the human mind both as an inductive and deductive instrument. Basically she believed in the infinite power of the happiness response to determine your behavior and that things
@luanrodolfo @nntaleb That feel good and appear right based on observation should be done by humans. The part of her writing that notoriously illustrates the drastic oversight she made was her writing about John Galt’s smoking habit.
@luanrodolfo @nntaleb She wrote glowingly about smoking cigarettes claiming that the spot of fire was the same as the fire burning in the human mind and that the cigarette was the right thing for every thinking man to have as his symbol. Later she campaigned against
@luanrodolfo @nntaleb The link between smoking and lung cancer, calling it a conspiracy. #Lindy had the last word when she herself got lung cancer, forcing her to quit smoking. Hey at least there was no agency problem there. The incident was illustrative of something
@luanrodolfo @nntaleb I want to expand on later because under skeptical empiricism, the mere presence of a foreign substance in your body is to be avoided because the body is a complex system. Advocacy of things like smoking very quickly can reverse any gains
@luanrodolfo @nntaleb Your philosophy makes for the world. A healthy dose of skepticism is needed for all knowledge in these situations so we aren’t stuck with 20 year smoking habits and other similar problems that mistake absence of evidence for evidence. This is skeptical
@luanrodolfo @nntaleb Empiricism’s yuuuuuge advantage over objectivism and why skeptical empirics would want big distance between themselves and objectivists in spite of the fact that the philosophies do bear some obvious stark similarities, something o hope to flesh out this weekend.
