Sure, I suppose you could always try to get ze Germans to make me let you live in my house.
?? If the point is that “real world” business or engineering training makes someone’s perspective more valuable on the philosophical question of “how they should distribute the work and the rewards”, then why on earth should Rand’s own views on these issues be considered worthy of respect at all? She was a screenwriter and novelist with no engineering or business expertise.
On the one hand, you sneer at @scudsucker’s assessment that Rand’s philosophy “did not make much sense”, on the grounds that @scudsucker was studying subjects that you (mistakenly) believed don’t translate well into real-world employability, namely psychology and philosophy. And you feel that you yourself, “as a graduate of relative elite engineering and business school programs”, are better equipped to determine whether Rand’s philosophy does in fact make sense.
On the other hand, you’re credulously taking Rand’s claims about the real-world importance and relevance of her philosophy pretty much at face value, despite the fact that she herself had jack-shit in the way of business or engineering school or any similar “real-world” training.
Your arguments are very much coming across as championing Rand because she says a bunch of ego-stroking stuff about how great businesspeople and engineers are, rather than on any consistent analysis of who should be considered qualified to pronounce on the real-world validity of a philosophical system, and why. I stand by my previous “incoherent defensive bluster” assessment.
I can just testify from my personal experience that the ONLY group of people who will reliably claim to know more about Accounting, Finance, Law and Medicine than accountants, lawyers and doctors do are engineers (broadly speaking, i.e. including software engineers).
Because all those people are stupid.
I think that experience might be unique to you.
From my experience working with a lot of people in tech, accounting, finance, law, even some pharma and health care they all tend to think they are the smartest at everything because they are smart at what they know.
But I’ve worked with enough people in tech and they do tend to have this distasteful air of superiority about them that they are “disrupting” all these legacy dinosaur industries with their tech. Like some guys at Uber who wanted a new line of Uber rides that travel along fixed routes making regular stops. Congrats genius, you just invented the “bus”.
They tend to be the Ayn Randiest of them all
I mention my engineering and business background because I think it has shaped my Rand-like view that economic value is ultimately created by people who design, build, sell, and are otherwise part of the process the produces the products and services we use. STEM degrees are perhaps easy to place because if you need a chemical engineer, you hire someone with a degree in chemical engineering. Philosophy is a bit more challenging IMHO because you have to show me how your education applies to a job that is perhaps a bit more abstract or creative (like marketing or account management).
As a software engineer myself, I can’t dispute you because I do not have the necessary data, but anecdotally, my own opinion is that we as a group are exceptionally aware of the needs of our clients.
I’ve done work in all of those areas. The typical process is to obtain the necessary requirements.
Then to work out what the client actually wants. Then work out a plan to implement the solution. It is quite a long, involved process, involving Business Analysts and Software Engineers first researching the client’s actual needs, following through on those, and, more often than not, showing them what they want rather than what they need - despite having done both. The “what they need” part is often done somewhat subtlety, not hidden, but not too openly.
Everyone benefits.
So who’s the better philosopher, L. Ron Hubbard or Ayn Rand?
L Ron made a lot more money. Both revere the rich as such. Therefore L Ron for the win.
Yeah but Rand at least kept her philosophy grounded on this planet.
Actually that isn’t that far off from the point Ayn Rand makes in Atlas Shrugged. That people should use their minds to come to mutually beneficial agreements that meet their needs and wants, not have solutions forced upon them by all “all knowing” bureaucrats (i.e. Pruitt-Igoe housing project) or be forced into their work or have the fruits of their labor confiscated at gunpoint (i.e. the Nazis in your Schindler’s List link).
I think your background in philosophy and psychology probably give you more insight into the more abstract human requirements and applications of technology. I’ve worked with plenty of engineers who didn’t have such an understanding. Like in my last job we were building a lending platform for high net worth clients and the engineers would get frustrated because they didn’t understand why a customer worth $100 million doesn’t want to just go to a web site and be rejected because their loan request falls below some threshold. They want to speak to a knowledgeable human who will at least try to make it work.
In the context of our Ayn Rand discussion, I think it kind of gets back to the concept of a society where no one is doing any real work. Atlas Shrugged had two types of antagonists - “moochers” who couldn’t or wouldn’t work who still wanted to get paid and get all sorts of free benefits. And “looters” who were people in position of power who didn’t contribute anything in terms of economic growth and leadership but instead forced corrupt deals and wealth transfer schemes to line their pockets, ostensibly to “help the needy”.
I see those parallels with our current society where we see fortunes being made in industries like social media, crypto, AI, something I read about called “prediction markets”, not to mention all the highly speculative finance jobs, that provide dubious economic value while regular people who do “real work” see their purchasing power eroded through inflation or jobs being eliminated altogether.
So I think what maybe is happening feels similar to the world of Atlas Shrugged where people are fighting over dividing up a growing pie made of bullshit because fewer and fewer people are doing things that create real value. I don’t have a problem with Elon Musk becoming a billionaire by being the worlds biggest asshole or even the worst boss in the world if the company he is running profitably makes and sells futuristic self-driving cars and trucks and rockets for more cost-effectively launching of weather, GPS, and com satellites. In contrast, I don’t understand how a woman became the youngest female billionaire (recently surpassing Taylor Swift) for creating what is essentially a betting site for world events.
More importantly it’s not really clear to me from where all this wealth is generated. Bitcoin is another example. 15 years ago it didn’t exist. We burned a shit ton of energy to run some computers crunching made up numbers and now people are super rich off BTC. Libertarian crypto bros complain about “the government just printing money” but isn’t that what crypto is? Just printed pretend money, just not backed by the worlds largest economy and enforced by it’s largest military?
The way I look at it, Atlas Shrugged isn’t so much a blueprint for how to design a functioning economy. It’s obviously flawed and not really detailed enough in terms of the actual mechanics of a functioning society or how to create the checks and balances against the conditions that lead to corruption. But I think does serve as a cautionary tale about creating a society that doesn’t value real work and builds elaborate wealth redistribution and creation systems of dubious merit.
Howard Roark of The Fountainhead famously said that when he looked at the planets, he thought of airplanes.
Define “real work”.
I think this is completely wrong. Jobs in social media, crypto, AI, prediction markets, and speculative finance jobs are people being paid voluntarily by other people or companies who think what they do is of value, and who pay that value. These are new niche ways of earning money.
Or, as @Zoobi got in before me, define “real work.”
Mostly they are just scams, and scams aren’t “productive”.
The short answer is “it’s complicated”, but let me give you a simple example:
If you bought $1000 in Bitcoin in 2010 it would be worth $1 billion today. So where did that value come from? Were any products or services sold? After 15 years, what justified such a huge increase in value?
I don’t know if I would call them outright “scams” but I can give plenty of examples of speculative bubbles that people threw money at that provided no real value.
If anything Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrency has negative value, it sucks up tremendous amounts of electricity and rapidly destroys hardware for no benefit.
Exactly.
I was also reading an article the other day talking about junky plastic products. Something I feel like my house is full of. All these crappy little toys and gifts and swag from trade shows (how many freakin USB adapters do I need) that have less value than the box they come in and are forgotten almost as soon as they are opened. But these all cost energy and money.
I don’t know if this all ends up being an argument for or against Rand’s philosophies.
Why does it have to be justified? People invested in bitcoin, people wanted bitcoin, it’s value grew. Is bitcoin a scam, is selling it a fraud? Or does it meet some genuine need, perhaps the need to feel secure in one’s wealth, so that it is not subject to government seizure.
Like advertising?
At what point does it become a Ponzi scheme?
Interesting question.
A Ponzi scheme depends on the idea the later investors don’t know their money is just flowing right out to the earlier investors. The early investors might suspect, but it’s in their interest to stay silent until they sell. A Ponzi scheme also depends on a central authority to play the role of the eponymous Mr. Ponzi: collecting and disbursing funds one way while keeping the books and PR campaign running a different way.
None of those indicia are present in Bitcoin. The days of wild price appreciation are almost certainly behind it. The same can be said of shares in Amazon or Meta or Apple. Early adopters get outsized rewards. Or they get nothing.