Objectivism can be summarized in four sentences. In this four-sentence form, it’s not extremely compelling. In the form of thousands of pages of fiction, however, it becomes very seductive and has in fact become an “important idea” as far as history is concerned, regardless of its actual merit.
Communication is hard, and even good communicators are unlikely to successfully convey 100% of their intended message to 100% of their target audience on the first try. So even good communicators, if they have what they think is an important idea, will be tempted to communicate that idea again and again and again. The Sequences are over a million words long, and a lot of those words are intentionally repetitive, calculated callbacks to previous Sequence posts establishing a connectome of ideas.
That said, I agree that the core, most minimal expression of an idea or argument is valuable and probably a good exercise to undertake if you are trying to teach something.
Objectivism can be summarized in four sentences. In this four-sentence form, it’s not extremely compelling. In the form of thousands of pages of fiction, however, it becomes very seductive and has in fact become an “important idea” as far as history is concerned, regardless of its actual merit.
Communication is hard, and even good communicators are unlikely to successfully convey 100% of their intended message to 100% of their target audience on the first try. So even good communicators, if they have what they think is an important idea, will be tempted to communicate that idea again and again and again. The Sequences are over a million words long, and a lot of those words are intentionally repetitive, calculated callbacks to previous Sequence posts establishing a connectome of ideas.
That said, I agree that the core, most minimal expression of an idea or argument is valuable and probably a good exercise to undertake if you are trying to teach something.