1. A new edition of The Letters of Ayn Rand was just published. According to the description:
This edition presents the complete transcripts, including more than fifty newly added letters, restored passages previously cut for space, and extensive new commentary by Berliner. Altogether, the added material expands the book by roughly thirty percent.
In her 2009 biography, Goddess of the Market, historian Jennifer Burns revealed that much of the posthumously published by the Archives was so heavily edited as to be essentially worthless. She did say, however, that the Letters was more or less accurate.
2. The Ayn Rand Institute just published their year end report.
3. The ARI invited neuroscientist Steven Pinker to the 2026 Objectivist Conference, although it’s been reported that a video of his appearance won’t be made available. I’m curious why they would invite someone whose best-known book is The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature and holds views of the relationship between intelligence, personality and genetics which most ARI authors would consider “deterministic” if not evil.
16 comments:
As for Pinker, it wouldn't surprise me if someone invited him thinking they would debate him and "show him up" with their flawless reasoning or something. Never underestimate an Objectivist's ego. Or perhaps some Objectivists are finally softening their stance on some matters of science that simply can't hold up to scrutiny decades after Rand thought them up.
I wonder if it was Pinker who demanded that no video be published.
I doubt they even care about Pinker's intellectual positions. They just want a "name."
Pinker's "invitation" is a desperate attempt to give a veneer of intellectual relevance to OCON and orthodox Objectivism more broadly. Orthodox Objectivism lack among its ranks anyone who commands attention outside the tiny niche of Rand's most fervent followers. Alex Epstein is the most noteworthy orthodox Objectivist, but he's far better known for his advocacy of fossil fuels (in which he rarely mentions either Rand or Objectivism). When Ayn Rand was still alive Objectivism had at least some relevancy because of Rand herself. Despite her distaste of media appearances, she was on Johnny Carson, Phil Donahue, Mike Wallace, and several other notable media worthies of her time. No one who matters on the intellectual or cultural scenes cares a lick about Yaron Brook or is interested in talking to him. His YouTube videos normally only get a few thousand views. It was just blind luck (and possibly an assist by Micheal Malice) that he was able to get interviewed by Lex Friedman. Objectivists are desperate for relevancy, and that's why they've likely paid Pinker to attend OCON. I expect them to be very respectful to Pinker and mainly talk about subjects on which they largely agree.
Pinker has said the high IQ of Ashkenazi Jews has a genetic component and doesn’t want to talk about other groups. This claim gets people denounced as tribalists and racists by ARI guys like Brook.
I imagine they will be asking about other stuff
Anonymouse
You often complain that they won't deal with anyone who isn't in complete agreement, yet here you're complaining about the opposite?
Nobody's *complaining* about it at all. I for one think if they hobnob with more people outside their own narrow frame of reference, that's great! They just might learn something new. It just seems out of character, and so it's not entirely out of line to be skeptical of motives in such a situation.
But what you call "out of character" could be a change in attitude to a degree. You're not willing to benevolently allow for that possibility it seems... Everything is interpreted in the most narrow or suspicious way.
Apparently the Rand cultists view Pinker as a kind of adjacent intellectual who supports the same "Enlightenment values" they profess. It would be interesting to pit the pro-Enlightenment thinkers against an intellectual who makes a good case that important parts of the Enlightenment's project have failed. The collapse in human fertility to well below population replacement levels, for one thing, suggests that something has gone wrong with the process of "human flourishing" (HF), considering that the pairing up of young men and women to start families is HF in the most literal and tangible sense.
Ironically Ayn Rand herself was hostile to this sort of HF, which means she was hostile towards keeping the human species in business through making babies and investing resources into their healthy upbringing. I mean, god forbid than an auto worker would use his company's family dental plan for employees to get his daughter the orthodontic work she needed.
If you're going to put words in other people's mouths, that's a clear sign you're not interested in a real discussion and are just here to, as you say, complain. Sure, it *could* be a change. So what if it is, or isn't? Being suspicious would only be unfair if there somehow was not ever a history of certain kinds of behavior. That they *might* be opening up now does not negate a history of them being particularly close-minded. What's your point, besides white-knighting?
Someone isn't happy about the Pinker invite
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClmXn3-j2t4
Changing the subject a bit, how do Objectivists reconcile the dynamist view of capitalism they endorse with their stagnation-oriented view of Rand's philosophy? If capitalism is supposed to make all aspects of life better, once it has the freedom to do so, then why wouldn't it also make philosophy better?
Or short of that goal, just make Objectivist literature better? It's not unreasonable to wonder why Objectivists with literary talent haven't published their own novels to present the philosophy in ways which are less off-putting and more accessible to ordinary people than Rand's works. (I don't think Objectivist Terry Goodkind's fantasy novels get the job done.)
Yeah, the Pinker invitation definitely seems like an attempt to stay relevant. Didn't OCON host Jordan Peterson a few years ago? And then Yaron tried to come up with his own version of "12 rules for life" in a podcast episode.
Having read a fair amount of Goodkind's main series, I'd agree the weakest parts are where he's trying to lay out an Objectivist worldview. Like Rand, some of his characters come off as puppets dressed up to cartoonishly act in some nonsensical way so that they fit the caricature of the "anti-life" villain, and well, some of the situations feel a bit contrived even for a fantasy setting. This is not to say I didn't enjoy the books, overall, but it was the most Objectivist moments that pulled me out of the immersion and reminded me, "oh yeah, this is just bunk some writer made up".
Possibly one CAN'T inject serious Objectivist values into a work of fiction without being somewhat off-putting to non-believers. Or perhaps true believers are unable to do it because they believe so much, and can't detach their belief from their writing in order to appeal to the heathens outside the fold.
"Having read a fair amount of Goodkind's main series, I'd agree the weakest parts are where he's trying to lay out an Objectivist worldview."
Goodkind in real life said some reasonable things about the writing process which show that he learned them apart from Objectivist indoctrination. For example, he talked about when 12 year old boys came up to him for advice about writing their own fantasy stories, he just told them straight up that they were too young, and that they needed to grow up and accumulate some adult life experience first. He said he even told that to college-aged aspiring fantasy writers.
And this makes perfectly good sense, especially when it comes to depicting female characters, because young men need some experience with girlfriends and with women in other situations like the workplace to write about them plausibly.
Eh, I don't know if I necessarily agree with that. Too young to publish professionally, perhaps, but writing, like any other skill, is something that requires practice, and the earlier you start practicing, the better, in my opinion. If he just bluntly said something like "you're too young to write" I think that would be a shitty and discouraging thing to say to a beginning writer.
Not to mention that he's muffed a few female characters in his time (in my opinion, again), so it's not like being published and experienced makes one infallible.
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