No?
What does it say about government, then?
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Don’t recall, but there’s no way in hell I’d read it again to find out. 
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I agree, the problem is getting access to the person(s) with a more accurate view and even then views could be wildly disparate - as with the 2 book reviews from VICE.
Then there are things where we could never get the more accurate view, because the whole view has been based on predated views that may be totally inaccurate or not observable!
There’s got to be a common name for that phenomenon/fallacy. I call it Grandma’s recipe fallacy:
The family read grandma’s recipe, which noted placing ingredients in a specific sized pan. Just before she passed, one family mentioned the recipe and mentioned always using that particular pan, while another lamented not having that size pan. Grandma shook her head…she told them the only reason she used that sized pan was her stove and oven were so constrained in space.
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See also: Religion.
Not much from an honest perspective - it was much more focused on the fact that moochers existed at all levels of society and if given power would ruin everything.
Considering that the world in which the story unfolds has worked (with government) for generations prior to the story happening - and it was only the fact that ‘lesser men’ who inherited wealth and power but could not make such on their own began to game the system upon which the structure of society collapsed.
Dagney’s father, for instance was able to make his empire under the government - when it wasn’t being bought out from underneath him. The novel was much more damning to the idea of inherited wealth and corporate collusion and corruption than it was to government - the regulations which stopped all progression were bought and paid for. In fact that utopia under which all the ‘great men’ fled still had rules and regulations - such as not being able to give services for free. Calling them anything but regulations doesn’t change what they are. Just agreeing to a form of payment that takes the form of anything other than goods or services (such as money) is a form of regulation which people agree to adhere in order to form a more civil society.
True. Those 2 book reviews don’t exist in a vacuum of course - there’s a whole litany of people who have experience with Rand’s work. Jill and Milo fit in somewhere along the continuum, and have their own histories that their reviews stands in the context of.
Yes, there are many things where we will have to confess ignorance, and even where we have confidence, we will have to declare such confidence provisional.
Perfect knowledge cannot be a thing, and so it’s kind of nonsensical to suggest that one can only achieve it through direct experience, as Milo insinuates.
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All Matt Ruff is good.
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Bingo!
With all this accumulated knowledge, We try to boil it down to the simplest rules. Sometimes it works, but other times we just get in our own way.
With Objectivism, people have a learned revulsion to it (first hand or thrid), but is it warranted? The only know adherent I know of is artist Steve Ditko. He doesn’t appear to be a rotten egg.
Someone upthread mentioned that the philosophy doesn’t really exist outside the U.S. which is interesting, but also evident since there’s really no one championing it.
Was there a specific point in time or event which prompted the distancing?
Yahtzee!
I dunno - I pretty much raised myself on Heinlein and only some of it stuck. I like red hair, but I never got into incest or libertarianism.
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I felt that I had no need to read Ayn Rand because I read Wilson and Shea’s Illuminatus! Trilogy as a teen.
If that’s wrong, so it goes.
“If Atlas can Shrug and Telemachus can Sneeze, why can’t Satan Repent?”
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Nothing specific - traveling to poor countries (Malaysia), traveling to rich countries (Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Japan), talking to people. Then I re-read The Fountainhead and I was repulsed.
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“I wish a wealthy powerful prince cough i mean a Captain of Industry would rescue me from my boring conventional life” is not a philosophy. Ayn Rand didn’t write philosophy, she wrote romance novels.
At least that’s the impression I get from everything I’ve ever read about her, or them.
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Yeah, as a pretty left-leaning scifi loving teenager, it wasn’t Heinlein’s political views slipped into the books that bothered me so much as his views on gender.
I get that he was kinda progressive by 1950s standards, but to a modern reader that just comes off as “not AS sexist as he could have been”, or, in the case of the bits of Stranger in a Strange Land about how in the future all lawyers are women because ‘female intuition’, just plain weird.
Ayn Rand annoyed me enough that I read all of her fiction (though they’ve found more), some repeatedly. For some reason, I read ATLAS SHRUGGED three or more times (including at least once skipping the stupid monolog entirely). I could even read it again some day, though I’m fairly sure I’ll never bother with ANTHEM again. It may be the shortest, but it’s the most densely packed with ponderous pretension that reading it is like sniffing dry cleaning fumes.
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This is because when most people think of “science”, apparently, they think of the institution of science. Or science as a profession. This is not what I mean by the term, I mean pure methodology. The whole point of scientific method is that since bias is everywhere, it takes being thoroughly systematic to avoid it. Objectivity means knowing that even your own biases do not apply with any relevance outside of your own nervous system.
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Ayn Rant.
…what else to say?
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I was pretty in to Rand for a few months when I was 13, beginning with reading some of her novels, and ending abruptly when I read “For the New Intellectual,” and realized that she was utterly, irredeemably, batshit, bugfuck crazy.
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I didn’t change my mind so much as I broadened it.
Eventually, I realized that Rand was correct in her defense of capitalism, but Marx was also correct in his critique of it. As much as she denied it, self-interest is entirely compatible with altruism: I want a better world to live in, so it is therefore incumbent on me to make the world a better place. I accept the idea that those who work hardest and have the best ideas should reap the greatest rewards- and yet the irony of her models of that principle all having inherited wealth is not lost on me.
The one thing that always stuck with me, though, was a dialogue with the composer/pianist in Atlas Shrugged, although I’ve pared it down to make it readable:
You’ve paid me… I don’t mean your enjoyment,… I mean your understanding, and the fact that your enjoyment [in listening] was of the same nature as mine [in writing it].
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