This argument has gone far away from the original quote. I’m not going to argue about the details. If you want to try to disprove your ability to become successful by using your intelligence, go ahead.
It’s very difficult to make economic comparisons between countries while simultaneously acknowledging all of the cultural differences between countries. You can do it, but the results aren’t necessarily meaningful.
Thanks for the information. My point is that money is a poor predictor of happiness and success.
You just spent half this thread claiming that success is subjective
Really? I’m pretty sure I didn’t. Success is hard to define, but that doesn’t mean it’s subjective.
Bill Gates and James Harrison are going by their own ideas of altruistic success, not yours.
Oh really? Can you read their minds? I’ve read about Bill Gates motivations and I didn’t see the word altruism once. It’s all good and well to claim Bill Gates is part of your movement but for all you know he’s never heard of it.
Why don’t you call Jesus an altruist? Or some other religious figure?
Malnutrition and Starvation are different things. It’s much better to be malnourished than to starve. And it’s much harder to feed people the optimal food than to just feed them some food...
But you’re missing the point. There are successful people in Somalia, if you manage to not be malnourished in Somalia then you are successful (unless you value eating bad food for religious reasons...).
Please tell us more about your inside information on the psychology of Bill and Melinda Gates
I have none. Just an opinion that given my posts downvote counts suggests that I shouldn’t share.
Ayn Rand did not invent the term “altruism”?
Neither did the Effective Altruism people. But Ayn Rand’s books have sold a lot and are read by influential people, so I’ll use her definition until I have a reason not to.
I hadn’t heard of James Harrison before. I would consider him successful, of course that doesn’t mean that he considers himself successful or that you consider him successful.
I wouldn’t view donating blood as inherently good either. There have been times when people were given money to donate blood, but then AIDS came about...
When blind luck can put some random guy in the same league as the world’s top altruist
Ahh… you think the world’s top altruist is successful… That’s what we disagree about. I think the world’s top altruist is the person who desires the image of success the most.
FWIW the definition of Altruism I am using is NOT the same as the EA people… they’ve culturally appropriated that term and made it mean something very different from what Ayn Rand meant when she used it.
The annual US GDP per capita is $55,036. For Somalia, it’s $145
This is availability bias. There are clearly other factors differentiating Somalia and the US. If there weren’t, there would be massive starvation in Somalia because you can’t get by on $145 a year in the US.
I can assure you that successful people are not born in the US by chance.
Really? Do you think successful people don’t have children? And that they don’t try to make these children US citizens by ‘immigrating’ (often illegally) to the USA? I can assure you this happens frequently.
As of 2005, there were 2.6 billion people who lived on the equivalent of under $2 per day
Yes, but most of those people live in areas where $2 goes a long way.
What possible values could they have where that could be considered success?
That’s up for them to define, not for you to define. Why should they care about your standards? Let them say they are successful if they believe they are successful. You lose nothing but your ego by acknowledging somebody else’s success.
Is that supposed to be funny? The fact that you have a computer means you have won something. I’d be willing to guess that more technologies will emerge and you’ll use them. That’s like winning a lottery. But you don’t get more successful unless you make intelligent decisions. Stupid decisions are punished, there are exceptions to this...
But seriously, lottery is a loaded term. It’s often used as a metaphor for ‘capitalist trick’ (which smart people avoid).
The counterexample is the many people who have succeeded through luck
That’s not an example, it’s a claim with no evidence to support it. Give me an example of a person who has succeeded with only luck. There are about seven billion candidates so it shouldn’t be hard to select one.
Everybody gets lucky sometimes, but they might not get lucky on the really important things
What is really important is subjective.
If you’re born to a poor family in Africa, the law of large numbers is not going to make up for this setback.
Time will tell. African people often have different values than non-African people. Their value of success probably isn’t the same as your’s.
Given what I know if Ayn Rand
It seems like what you know about Ayn Rand comes from textbook propaganda. Nothing you’ve said has convinced me you’ve read thousands of pages of what she wrote.
I’m inclined to think that the quote is suggesting that successful people deserve to be successful, so you shouldn’t take their money and give it to unsuccessful people.
This isn’t an unreasonable assumption. But it’s incorrect. Money is just one factor in success. Ayn Rand realized that, which is why her books are still read today and why most authors of her day (all of whom are now dead) don’t have books which sell in large numbers.
Did you read what you linked to?
“No true Scotsman is an informal fallacy, an ad hoc attempt to retain an unreasoned assertion.[1] When faced with a counterexample to a universal claim (“no Scotsman would do such a thing”), rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original universal claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric, without reference to any specific objective rule (“no true Scotsman would do such a thing”)”
Where is the counterexample? Success refers to an abstract concept. Luck and success are different things. Luck usually contributes to success, but luck usually implies undeserved success. So successful people get lucky, but on average everybody gets lucky sometimes. The quote encourages people to focus on the things in which luck plays a minor factor. That’s what intelligence is for, intelligence is not for optimizing luck.
And yes, that does make it tautological. So what?
Primarily, by pretending that a “usually” is an “always”. “Real success is never accidental” is, empirically, definitely false. “Real success is almost never accidental” would be the less strong, but more correct, version.
That would depend on what you mean by success now wouldn’t it? If you believe people who take calculated risks and get unlucky aren’t successful, then perhaps you’re right. But you can’t claim you can make a statement more correct by assuming you know what every word means. Parsing ambiguity is part of rationality. (Though my downvotes would indicate it’s not...)
Too strong.
Ahh, nothing like discussing the value of strength with somebody named Weedlayer. Seriously, how can a quote be too strong?
Only if you’re using some definition of happiness that includes a term like “Philosophical fulfillment” or some such, which makes the issue tautological.
No, if you define happiness internally (ie something that you feel but others cannot observe) then you can justify the statement based on personal experience and relationship to the person the quote is addressed to.
How do you define happiness? Are you willing to argue about the definition of happiness just so you end up not being happy?
“Don’t let anybody discourage you or tell you that intelligence doesn’t pay or that success in life has to be achieved through dishonesty or through sheer blind luck. That is not true. Real success is never accidental and real happiness cannot be found except by the honest use of your intelligence.”
Ayn Rand
(Note I had to pay 5 Karma to post this)
It’s funny to a relatively small group of people. If you don’t know what dementors are, it’s not funny. If you do know what dementors are and haven’t read HPMOR, it’s probably not funny. Even if you have read HPMOR it’s not necessarily funny.
So… as I see it it fails to be funny for about 95% of people and is confusing for about 25% of people.
“As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.”
Ayn Rand
There will be campfire and chocolates (in case of dementors).
Is this supposed to be funny?
Or is it because you are actually so afraid that if you don’t imitate the holiday of the dominant religion of the USA something bad will happen to you?
The only part I object to what you wrote is emotions shouldn’t interfere with cognition.
This is an ideal which Objectivists believe in, but it is difficult/impossible to actually achieve. I’ve noticed that as I’ve gotten older, emotions interfere with my cognition less and less and I am happy about that. You can define cognition how you wish, but given the number of people who see it as separate from emotion it’s probably worth having a backup definition in case you want to talk to those people.
RE: emotions, affect, moods. I do think that emotions should be considered when making rational decisions, but they are not the tools by which we come to decisions, here’s an example.
If you want to build a house to shelter your family, your emotional connection to your family is not a tool you will use to build the house. It’s important to have a strong motivation to do something, but that motivation is not a tool. You’ll still need hammers, drills, etc to build the house.
I believe we can and should use drugs (I include naturally occurring hormones) to modify our emotions in order to better achieve our goals.
If your hunches have a bad track record, then you should learn to ignore them, but if they do work, then ignoring them is irrational.
If your hunches have a good track record, I think you should explore that and come up with a rational explanation, and make sure it’s not just a coincidence. Additionally, while following your hunches isn’t inherently bad, rational people shouldn’t be convinced of an argument merely based on somebody else’s hunch.
Even if emotions are suboptimal tools in virtually all cases (which I find unlikely), that doesn’t mean that ignoring them is a good idea.
Nobody is suggesting we ignore emotions, merely that we don’t let them interfere with rational thought (in practice this is very difficult).
It’s like how getting rid of overconfidence bias and risk aversion is good, but getting rid of overconfidence bias OR risk aversion is a terrible idea. .
I don’t follow this argument. Your biases can be evaluated absolutely, or relative to the general population. If everybody is biased underconfidence, the being biased in towards overconfidence can be an advantage. There’s a similar argument for risk aversion.
Everything we’ve added since emotion was built around emotion. If emotion will give you an irrational bias, then you’ll evolve a counter bias elsewhere
I’m not sure I agree with this, do you think that The Big Bang Theory is based on emotion? You can draw a path from emotion to the people who came up with the Big Bang Theory, but you can do that with things other than emotion as well.
My issue with emotions is only partly that they cause biases, it’s also that you can’t rely on other people having the same emotions as you. So you can use emotions to better understand your own goals. But you won’t be able to convince people who don’t know your emotions that your goals are worth achieving.
Very interesting… it would seem that Rand doesn’t actually define emotion consistently, that was not the definition I was using. But the Ayn Rand Lexicon has 11 different passages related to emotions.
A. How would you implement that choice?
B. We is a loaded term, speak for yourself. There’s benefit to realizing that as a human you have bias. There’s no benefit to declaring that you can’t overcome some of this bias.
C Wouldn’t that depend on your philosophy?