raginrayguns:

that slate article, “How Ayn Rand Became an American Icon: The perverse allure of a damaged woman”, it describes Atlas Shrugged as

…she imagined the super-rich in America going on strike against progressive taxation—and said the United States would swiftly regress to an apocalyptic hellhole if the Donald Trumps and Ted Turners ceased their toil.

which is… sort of accurate, I mean the strikers are mostly not rich and their explanations for their behavior never mention progressive taxation, but whatever, the part I’m focusing on here is Donald Trump.

L told me now that I’ve read Atlas Shrugged, I’ve got to vote for Donald Trump. So even from someone who likes Rand and Trump, she sees them as consistent.

Which, maybe it’s true in some ways, but the Trump policies I know about–his position on immigration and tariffs–those would make him an Ayn Rand villain, right? I mean, he wants to back out of trade agreements resulting in larger tariffs on imports–artificially raising the prics of foreign-produced goods so American manufacturing can compete, it sounds like the manufacturing equivalent of Jim Taggart convinced him to pass an Anti Dog-Eat-Dog Rule. And he wants to keep legal immigration at historic levels, which I think means letting a smaller fraction of qualified applicants in, since we have more qualified applicants–literacy in China went from 78% in 1990 to 95% in 2010.

Like, Trump is the character trying to tell the businesspeople who they can hire (other Americans) and who they can buy from (other Americans), so I think he’d be a villain in Atlas Shrugged. Like, did you hear that speech when he was saying, if Ford tries to open a factory in Mexico, I’m gonna call the president of the company, I mean the politician calling the businessmen on the phones and telling them what to do is obviously a villain in Atlas Shrugged.

And the general like, spirit of those characters, of wanting only what they’ve earned, makes me feel negatively towards his proposals. I don’t want to be hired just because I was an American, and a more qualified applicant from India couldn’t get a visa. I don’t want to have someone buy my stuff when they don’t want to, when they’d rather be buying it from Guatemala but we backed out of NAFTA (as Trump said he’d have us do if we can’t renegotiate it) so they’d have to pay a huge tariff on it. It’s like Dagny said, I don’t want to be a looter. Like, I can accept that this stuff is maybe necessary for national security reasons (if the car companies went out of business who’d make our tanks, domestic income is taxed to fund our military and foreign income isn’t), or for other reasons I don’t know about, but it’s not something I’m gonna like, it’s not fair.

Anyway, so, this is something that seems really discordant between Trump’s public image and what he says, or between Rand’ public image and what she says, or maybe it’s just my very limited view of Trump’s policies, I mean I went to his website and looked at trade, immigration, and energy, ‘cause those’re the issues I think about, but the rest could be more Randian. Like during the townhall debate he said some stuff about healthcare that I didn’t really follow (eliminating so me kind of……. borders? for insurance?), which sounded kind of Rand-approved.

EDIT: Objectivist reddit seems to dislike him for pretty much the reasons I stated, though it’s pointed out this doesn’t necessarily make him worse than clinton. Also I’m not the first person to associate him with Jim Taggart

raginrayguns:

there’s a certain dishonest charisma boost you can get from claiming you’re the only one who understands something

Jaynes does this all the time. Says like, a Bayesian statistical analysis is good in this way, other kinds of analysis have this problem, and by the way non-Bayesians don’t understand these issues and don’t perceive the problems with what they’re doing. This is important, and by the way non-Bayesians don’t know it’s important.

from the part of the town-hall debate I saw, Trump might do this too? There’s drug imports, there’s ISIS, and by the way Clinton doesn’t think these are problems, nobody in Washington has a problem with this or sees it as a threat, just me

it’s never really true I don’t think.

I don’t see this trick employed that often, is this a thing? like really a thing?

I think this is something that can be true, which I’ll talk about in three different contexts.

First is when it’s temporarily true. That is, someone says “my rivals don’t even consider X!”, those rivals start considering X, and then later they either deliberately do or don’t do things related to X.

And so when you read them as statements at a particular time (“non-Bayesians before 2002″ instead of “non-Bayesians”) they tend to be more true.

Second are actual value and priority differences. In the town-hall debate, my perception of Trump’s answer about Syria was that we’re going to take out ISIS, and that’s the main priority. (In a question about how to deal with the humanitarian issue there, his answer was, if I recall correctly, entirely about ISIS, with no mention of reducing Assad’s ability to tyrannize his citizens or anything about supporting refugees.)

My perception of Clinton’s answer, on the other hand, was that Syria was a proxy war between the US and Russia, with basically no mention of stopping ISIS, which if it’s a priority at all is secondary to the issue of deposing Assad.

In that sort of situation, it does seem fair of each of them to say “look, I care about X, which my rival is either ignoring or putting at a third priority or lower.”

Third are differences in model structure. The difference between evidential decision theory and causal decision theory is whether they use conditional probabilities or counterfactual probabilities, and as it turns out counterfactual probabilities are both more powerful and more suited to decision theory.

And here it does seem fair for a CDTer to point out “look, my opponent doesn’t have the necessary language to provide the correct answer.” This typically only works in situations that are mathematical instead of social–EDT will always describe conditional probabilities, but decision theorists can switch from using one bit of math to using another.

The main time I think this is a trick and bothersome is stealing chaos, as Yudkowsky puts it.

slatestarscratchpad:

1. Have a nightmare about suddenly realizing I’m on call and forgot to turn on my pager.

2. Wake up, laugh a bit about how I’m finally adult enough that I’m having “forgot to do my job at work” nightmares instead of “forgot about an exam at school” nightmares.

3. As soon as I think “forgot about an exam at school”, realize that today is the day I scheduled months ago to do my big yearly training exam, and that I’m actually off from work today, and I totally forgot about this until this second

4. Run to car, rush to hospital just in time to make the exam and avert disaster.

One day, I had an abortive nightmare and woke up three hours early, and was unable to get back to sleep. “Well, might as well make the most of it,” I said, “I’ll go for an early morning run,” something I hadn’t done in years.

I get outside and discover that my apartment, which had failed to give me a parking permit, had decided to tow my car. I spent those extra three hours taking an Uber to the lot and retrieving my car, then driving to work, arriving only a few minutes late. 

(My nightmares, for some reason that I think traces back to when I was twelve, always abort; as I remember it, I realized that I was dreaming and it was a nightmare, tried to open my eyes hard enough that they actually opened and I woke up, and then from then on whenever a dream turned sour I would wake up shortly thereafter.)