The original one is a thorough discussion of Gladwell, his life, and his beliefs. This article was a poorly-written attempt to get hits through controversy alone. It doesn't show Rand off well, and it cites Gladwell out of context.
If you disagree, I'd love to discuss. But let's do it by actually making arguments back and forth. Let's put an effort into it.
Samuel Beckett, possibly the best writer since Joyce, insists that if you perform his play, you do it precisely according to his directions: you use his setting, you follow his directions, you don't edit a line. It is his idea. In Beckett's case, thanks to copyrights it was both legally and morally his right to demand that.
In Roark's case, he did not submit the plan under his own name. Therefore, he couldn't have a legal right to it (Peter's confession is legally shady ground). However, it was his idea and therefore his right to demand that it be created without compromise. I think the ending of that book is a fantasy that would never actually happen, but if I were on that jury, I'd vote to acquit.
I can see how Roark has every right to be pissed off, but I still can't see how that translates to the right to blow it up with dynamite.
Followup question: What if Roark were a lousy architect? (But still thought he was brilliant?) Of course we know he wasn't because the book never gets tired of telling us how brilliant he is, but what if his original plans actually did kinda suck and the alterations were actually improvements? (cf. the Sydney Opera House).
Well, if he isn't then the argument is moot. But we have to trust Rand, and trust context: a famous, controversial architect takes him under his wing and loves his stuff, and the right sorts of people like his stuff. I've found that similar situations occur in real life, where there are particular movements of people with similar beliefs.
If the original plans sucked... well, I think that morally he still has the right. But the point of the novel is that if they sucked he wouldn't BE in that situation. He submits plans because he wants to help the middle class, which will get hurt vastly by this plan. And his plans are good enough that his absolute worst enemy agrees with how practical they are.
Dynamite is the only way to remove architecture, especially if the rights to building it are removed from you. A playwright can choose to remove his play from circulation. An artist can rip apart a painting. Roark can't do that so easily. And I think he has the right to remove his idea even if it's brilliant. In particular, he and Peter signed a contract that Keating would get it built exactly to standards, and Keating broke that. So there's some moral precedent: signs of his anticipating this happening. It's not a random act. Similarly, playwrights can choose to retroactively deny you performing rights if you go to far. It's happened before. There was controversy over Pinter performing a Beckett play a year or two ago, where Pinter changed one of the core parts of the play. It was resolved in Pinter's favor only because Pinter was Beckett's good friend, and understands his work thoroughly.
What's this about the Sydney Opera House? I don't know this story.
And, because I've seen your name pop up before, I feel like I ought to tell you that even though we disagree a lot, I've liked every debate we've gotten into. Thanks. :-)
I disagree with "pompous" very much. Rand is many things, but she's very rarely pompous. She's quite down-to-earth.
She's great in that she's concise and accessible. She writes an incredible "gee-whiz" action story.
And, pardon me if this is off the mark, but I've noticed 4 accounts being made in the last hour, all of whom have the same attitude to this conversation, all of whom comment twice. Are these all throwaway accounts? I've never seen something like this happen on Hacker News before.
I'm not convinced that Ayn Rand says no. She really never addresses the question of how her heroes get to be the way they are -- they just appear in her books fully formed with their brilliance and their values already in place.
I expect that if Ayn Rand were actually pressed on the issue of "do the successful owe at least part of their success to their upbringing" she'd be forced to admit that yes, they do.
Her heroes work hard at whatever they love - it's not established why they love it, but it's established that they act on their love.
Peter Keating (the shadow or antagonist of Howard Roark in the Fountainhead, with comparable ability but different choices) provides a counter-example: he loves painting, but doesn't practice it until after many years of ("aw, hell") architecture. When he eventually does turn to it, Howard Roark gently tells him "it's too late".
Yes, her heroes' ability (brilliance) and loves (values) are already in place - but in this, they are no more gifted than anyone else. What differentiates them is their consistent choice to apply their ability to what they love, seek mentors, etc. As a personal choice, it is within their power, and does not come from their upbringing. It comes from them - as do your choices (of course, they also have many blessings and opportunities - as do you).
Can I jump in and say "It's most likely a mix of the two?"
Steve Jobs was not and is not a huge computer hacker. Not like Bill Gates. But still, he was able to conceive of the idea of a personal computer, before anybody else had the idea. How did he get 10,000 hours working into that? From his own words, he got the idea by dropping acid and deciding that people weren't using this new technology in a way that could change the world. He repeated this again and again with the iPod, the iTunes store, the iPhone, even with how he changed Pixar.
Jobs is unquestionably talented. However, it isn't shown that he's talented solely because he practiced at what he did heavily. I think that part of what makes Jobs as great as he is is his unbridled ego, his belief that he alone is right until proven otherwise. And that's something that you can't entirely pin on the society around you.
There were way too many people responsible for Steve Jobs success. Steve Woznaik, Jonathan Ive, John Lasseter, Gil Amelio and many many others. Steve Jobs didn't have to put in 10000 hours because someone else did it for him.
But that's too easy an association. Jobs has the ability to get rid of excess. While he doesn't make every single thing by hand, he's usually the final arbiter in most cases. And from most stories, he's the one who usually demands that people remove everything but the essentials. And that's absolutely a talent - not everybody can do it - and it's one that isn't explained by the sorts of work Jobs does.
One of his abilities, absolutely, is the ability to spot which people are incredible at what they do, and to put them in a situation in which they can do it. In Pixar, he created the central hub that got people interacting with one another. (I forget the article that talks about this - anybody have the link?) He has a genius ability to fix things, to make them better.
I argued once that if Jobs hadn't found Woz, he'd have found somebody else capable of doing what he needed done. And I think the end result would be largely the same. Woz was a programmer. Jobs was the visionary and the designer.
I wonder if a factor is that Jobs makes many more attempts than most people, and goes from "failure to failure without losing enthusiasm" - but we remember the successes? He's had failures that would wash up most of us. Meanwhile, he gets better and better, while others give up.
I agree that not everybody can "remove everything but the essentials" - but I think that everybody can try to do it; can practice it. The difficulty is in knowing what the essentials are, which requires knowing what you are really doing, and what it needs. Through practice, we improve.
Could it be as simple as believing in your intuition? I mean: to consider what you believe is essential, and then act on it And find out if you were right or not. Then repeat many times. Without loss of enthusiasm...
As a friend of the author, I know that people at Apple and Microsoft used Ted Nelson's Computer Lib as a bible on personal computing. Sadly, you can't buy it cheap (I have a signed reprint), but it's an astounding book.
Rand's vilification of people who disagree with her is irritating, but what's more troublesome is the victim mentality that goes along with it. Inevitably the protagonist (who is handsome, smart, determined, and surprisingly domineering in the bedroom) is held back by the mediocrity of the masses. If only circumstances were different, the books tell us over and over again, our hero could achieve his true potential.
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Hence the blogger's comment:
"Atlas Shrugged is a similar story. In it a group of scientists and tycoons decide in equally petulant fashion that they will "simply take their ball and go home", when society refuses to capitulate to their capricious demands. So what happens? Well, according to Ayn Rand everything in the world grinds to a halt. In her bizarre world view, no replacements are available amongst the rest of humanity to rise up to the occasion and take over from the cry-babies who have gone home in a snit."
Yes, in real life others would have stepped up to the plate.
I think Atlas Shrugged assumes a fantastic future in which the amount of people who CAN step up to the plate have dwindled immensely, and in which many of the ones who COULD are already broken.
In real life as it stands today, Atlas Shrugged is not a plausible scenario. The trick to reading it without casting it aside in horror is realizing that Rand knows that, and that she's drawing things to their extremes to make a specific point about how she thinks human beings work. People who mock Atlas on that point are missing the point of the book.
But her characters are absolutely recognizable as humans. I've met people who talk like Rand heroes and people who talk like Rand villains. I've always envisioned Herb Kelleher of Southwest as a Randian hero. He refuses to compromise, gets mocked for a lot of things that turn out in retrospect to have been brilliant, and has a very flippant attitude about it all.
It's like reading Asimov, who judges most of his characters by their approach to logic. There's an advantage to illustrating a single facet of a human being. It lets you focus and create characters that revolve around a theme. If Rand had made her books more involved, they'd have lost the focus on the attributes that she writes about.
You know, you just proved their point about people who talk like Rand's villains. Is there anyone here who has read Rand's novels and can't imagine those words coming from James Taggart, Floyd Ferris, or Ellsworth Toohey? (Maybe not Ellsworth Toohey. He was more subtle.)
I am aware that neither Rand nor her philosophy is perfect. That said: I think that Rand talks about her ideas in a way that make them very accessible and attractive to people, and I think that her philosophical beliefs are worthy of discussion at the very least. I agree with her statement that it is better to be selfish - in the sense that you act primarily for your own good - than it is to be altruistic.
I don't think she is the end-all be-all. I voted Obama, who will expand the government in many ways and demand some altruism from everybody. But I think that compromise is a necessity: that altruism is a necessary evil rather than an end unto itself.
The immature one is the one who dismisses somebody's argument because they choose to support a flawed person. Frankly, I'd much rather talk with an Objectivist than a Nihilist - that despite Nietzche's being a much more influential and agreed-with writer. I'm trying to argue my points expressively, and to respond to people who disagree. You're either being immature or a troll.
But seriously. What am I doing that's rude? I said that I thought that Rand was misread, and that I thought it wasn't necessarily bad that she writes in black-and-white terms. I also said that I think it's a mistake of the people who follow her more seriously to assume that the world really is black-and-white. I don't think I was being rude or an asshole. Am I wrong?
The SkylerNovak and Robert something accounts have been created only a couple hours ago. They're just trolling. I think you're being perfectly courteous and upmodded you accordingly.
I didn't mention your name, so entering right now is only slightly suspicious. :-)
The fact that you use similar phrasing in all your posts, comment in unsimilar threads with quick, brief responses, and have similar disregards for things like two-way, interesting debates, tend to make me a little suspicious. I could be wrong, but with all due respect, at this point I rather doubt I am.
My question is: why? Are you the blog's author/submitter? I've noticed junk accounts pop up more when I mention my distaste for the article this was written about. You make similar comments to KrisZolar, who submitted this article. Every single response defending this post appears to be made from a spam account: KeshRivya also seems to be in this category. And every single one has the same anti-Rand stance as the original post, and writes in the same style.
The one thing that fascinates me is that a lot of these seems to have been made months-if-not-years ago. That takes a lot of effort. And I wonder why go to all the effort.
I'm sorry if it does turn out I'm raving and wrong, but I flagged this post. I don't know if there's a way of matching IPs, but the evidence all seems to point to a massive amount of throwaway accounts.
Because they both take such extreme positions and often ignore the path of compromise and moderation.
This isn't to say that absolutes are always wrong (or right), but taking absolute positions on so many different items lends itself to arrogance and the inability to incorporate new evidence.
"As for the article being garbage, I appreciate where the author is coming from, but it's not insightful enough to warrant a link. Not to say it won't stir up the Objectivists here a whole lot."
The article has value in that it's stirred up an examination of Positivism. Too many college kids get all caught up in this nonsense. Then the join the Republican Party as a result.
No, it's garbage because it makes a claim, then fails to back it up well.
I read the NYmag article. Gladwell in that article does appear to be Rand's favorite villain. However, the blog post doesn't use those points. It doesn't contrast Gladwell's "cutting down the great man" to Rand's points. It brings up Rand, attacks her, brings up Gladwell, draws no conclusions whatsoever, and then says that the author can see a connection. The fact that a good argument as come up is because of the various Hacker News factions, not because of any merit that article had whatsoever.
The necessary claim to make that assertion, as has been stated in several places here, is that Rand and Gladwell are opposites. There've been a few threads here discussing that in particular.
That claim is not backed up.
If I asked the question "Who is our savior: George Bush or Boy George?", then I would be making a specious claim: that either is a savior. Or, if I ask "Who is right: George Carlin or Lewis Black?", the specious claim is the two oppose themselves. In that case, my follow-up post to the question needs to explain exactly how the two oppose one another. In this case, there is somewhat of an argument to be made, but it's not one that the blog post makes.
Well, according to Ayn Rand everything in the world grinds to a halt. In her bizarre world view, no replacements are available amongst the rest of humanity to rise up to the occasion and take over from the cry-babies who have gone home in a snit.
Then, citing Gladwell out of context:
Then there's the question of why so many Asian students excel at mathematics:
And then there are the math geniuses who, as anyone can’t help noticing, are disproportionately Asian. Citing the work of an educational researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, Gladwell attributes this phenomenon not to some innate mathematical ability that Asians possess but to the fact that children in Asian countries are willing to work longer and harder than their Western counterparts. That willingness, Gladwell continues, is due to a cultural legacy of hard work that stems from the cultivation of rice. Turning to a historian who studies ancient Chinese peasant proverbs, Gladwell marvels at what Chinese rice farmers used to tell one another: “No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich.”
Elsewhere in this thread was an argument from somebody who saw this and assumed that Gladwell was being racist and saying that working in rice paddies make Chinese people hard-working.
Then it sums up:
So the question is then: Are the successful truly independent of the society within which they grew up or do they owe their success, at least in part, to the benefits, attitudes, and advantages it bestowed upon them?
Read the entire article, Why Success Is More Circumstantial Than Personal.
Who is right? Malcolm Gladwell or Ayn Rand?
It doesn't add anything of interest. It doesn't make an initial comparison. It doesn't argue about how they're opposed in any way. We the commenters did that.
