Ayn Rand? Aleister Crowley? How exactly do you get there? What Rubicons do you cross? It’s not the justifications I’m interested in, but the critical moments of thought.
My guess is that Ayn Rand at least applied a “reversed stupidity = intelligence” heuristic. She saw examples of ostensible altruists committing great evil—and from there generalized to the opposite extreme—since altruism leads to evil, the only good must come from selfishness.
(Just to be clear, I am not defending Rand here.)
“Yet the most fearsome aspect of contamination is that it serves as yet another of the thousand faces of confirmation bias. Once an idea gets into your head, it primes information compatible with it—and thereby ensures its continued existence.”
I am not sure I understand this. Once an idea gets into my head, my brain should prime all information related to the idea, not just information that is compatible with the idea. I am of course not denying the existence of confirmation bias, just trying to understand how priming in particular can promote it.