There is a special place in hell for people who make Ayn Rand look relevant. I haven't read Atlas Shrugs, but will concede that it is a fucking great title for a book, a trailer in two words that promises drama. I have read "The Fountainhead" was given a copy of it, enjoyed it, but even as I enjoyed it, knew it to be trash. A smut like reading experience, a guilty pleasure.
Looking up Ayn Rand, I found some quote saying "objectivism is stillborn as a philosophy" and while that quote and review may be an apocryphal artefact of my imperfect memory, I believe I could defend it regarding "the fountainhead" - It is an argument from accident, the whole story precedes from presuming a protagonist that is basically omniscient.
There's a grain of truth, I myself have brushed up against. People by and large, so the modal person, is risk averse - they are not entrepreneurial, they work for a salary under contract, they are not experimental, they seek out vocational training and credentials, they are not ambitious they make consumption choices based on what everyone else around them is doing.
These are fairly good strategies to survive in the world we live in, but if someone is risk-seeking they swim in a soup of people who actively discourage them from doing so. Even something as simple as booking an international holiday can be met with misgivings, advice to get shots, join tour groups, plan your itinerary, look up trip advisor to make sure none of your experiences touch a frontier.
Then we can turn to reality TV to better understand the reality that renders Rand's objectivism, and to some extent The Austrian School of Economics, philosophically stillborn.
American Idol, or Master Chef, or So You Think You Can Dance, or The Voice, or even popping down to your local Comedy open mic night and you will be confronted with the spanner in the works of a philosophy based on "everyone should get the fuck out of creative people's way."
That spanner I call "delusion" relative to gigging as a musician, or apprenticing as a kitchenhand, or building up a social media following for your dance troupe, these reality shows throw open the doors to a frictionless audition process where anyone can come join a line that is kilometres long, in their nearest metropolitan area and queue all day for the chance to be given a chance by a production assistant to audition in front of a panel of celebrities, we still see a curated sample of the most delusional people in regards to their own abilities.
What we don't see are the vast number of hopefuls that turn up that are neither good nor interesting. From establishing shots of a camera showing the lines, we know that this is approximately 90% of dreamers. I would also point out, that the liberal application format of these shows has also produced largely mediocre results.
Kelly Clarkson, inaugural winner of American Idol can probably be described as modestly successful, what needs must be considered is the incredible success of American Idol then as a publicity campaign. I believe Harry Styles came out of a reality TV process, and there's probably a few others. I'm located in Australia and our inaugural winner Guy Sebastian is a small market analogue to Kelly Clarkson. Later winners were nowhere near as famous, many go financially backwards due to the exploitative contracts they sign and routinely are outperformed on a global stage by people who write their own songs, gig, send demos to record labels, crowdfund tours etc.
The biggest source of friction a talented and creative individual can face, are all the untalented and uncreative people out there that vastly outnumber them but nevertheless compete for the same resources.
All of which is to say, Ayn Rand, The Austrian School of Economics etc. that rail against state interventions like protectionism and regulation and taxation for holding great men back. Its stupid, these things hold back the 90% of us that aren't great from making life hell, a bulwark against stupidity like the human propensity to keep giving money to people who don't need anymore.
I could go on. Hopefully I've impressed upon you, that I in no way endorse making the writings of Ayn Rand the cornerstone of your personal philosophy. To do so requires wilful ignorance of reality.
Bringing me to Peter Keating, Peter Keating is the initial antagonist in "The Fountainhead" an antithesis to Red, I think his name was Howard Rourke. They both go to architecture school, and Peter Keating follows an elite-career strategy, acing his assessment and getting an entry-level position at the most prestigious architecture firm, whereas Red is "too real" for trendy architecture and seeks an apprenticeship with an underappreciated maverick architect.
Peter Keating, and this is the relevant bit, has a viable strategy for gaming his career advancement - he offers to take over the workload of a sleep deprived colleague. That collegiate draftsman simply appreciates the help, being able to collect his wages without doing work. He doesn't realise, presumably because Keating covers for him at no cost, that Keating is making him redundant and taking his position.
This is another area where Ayn Rand is describing a true phenomena - use-it-or-lose-it, though her allegory is a cautionary tale against letting someone else take over the value-producing work you do, the Large Language Model based generative "AI" products apply more to how our brains function.
Yes, this is a comedy segment, edited etc. Also, I literally only use LLMs when coerced to do so, I find them by and large useless and annoying as well as unconscionable in terms of the environmental cost for the benefit they produce.
I'm so out of touch, that the idea that people use ChatGPT as an alternative to google baffles me. I looked up and found a reddit post about how I could set my browsers default search engine to exclude "AI" summaries, I scroll through youtube videos and am genuinely confused as to why screen space is taken up by "AI Summaries" of the video, presumably were they any good they would spare me having to watch a video, from Youtube's advertising based business model, this makes little sense to me, but they are not good the general pattern is that a video with a thumbnail and title "Nikola Jokic is the best basketball player in the world" uses litres of water and causes brownouts in New England to produce the "AI" generated summary "In this video a man makes arguments that Nikola Jokic is the best basketball player in the world."
So full disclosure, I don't understand the minds that are excited by "AI" and actually use it daily. I do not understand why people are impressed by these chatbots in any other sense than comparing them to chatbots from 10 years ago.
In the Daily Show remote segment, the last question asked of ChatGPT is "where should I get coffee?" This is actually unconscionable if you are not ignorant of the environmental footprint. It is more appreciable of the dude who asked ChatGPT to devise a meal plan or whatever, to be confused into thinking complicated nutritional bullshit requires excessive computing power. People can easily be beguiled by the promise that if they gain control of what they put in their mouths, they will gain control of their lives, but Ronny Chieng's "stop eating food" I would argue, though played for comedic effect, is actually good enough considering his intelligence runs off something like 100W of energy, and that this guy if I had to hazard a guess, is trying to optimise his calloric and nutritional intake while still drinking excess amounts of beer like some kind of college student every week.
Rename ChatGPT "Peter Keating" and suddenly Ayn Rand looks like a veritable prophet. Here is something that you think is helping you, when in actual fact it is harming you.
Regulatory processes are famously and historically slow moving. Few people alive today appreciate that last century there was a time when a doctor would prescribe you cigarettes for nerves, and it was easy for 12 year old's to smoke. The adverse effects of smoking were known to medical journals, I'm going to guess by the 1960's at the latest, but Australia, that leads the way in many ways on regulating smoking - took half a century before cigarettes could not be sold from vending machines, could not be sold to minors, bore graphic warnings about the health effects of smoking and required generic branding to a specific scientifically determined least appealing colour of diarrhea greenish-brown.
Then vape came in unregulated to the point that my friend enjoyed a few months being able to vape in the cinema and it has in a few short years completely undone all the gains made in half a century of cutting smoking rates.
Maybe by 2060, presuming the AI investment bubble doesn't short circuit the product market, people under 18 or maybe 25 will not be allowed to use AI. We will probably know by then, if regular usage of LLMs significantly increases risk of conditions like dementia, and early onset dementia and generally lowers life expectancy. Due to the environmental impacts, where we already face ecological crises, maybe by 2035 laws will pass that mean you cannot ask an LLM for trivial bullshit like "where do I get coffee?" which is seriously, like asking someone to drive an SUV to the Library and do a google search on "coffee near me."
I have raised it before, and maybe "when did tohm last mention Gordon Neufield on his unsearchable blog?" is a valid question for LLMs to be used, but I'm going to repeat it here so don't - Dr Neufield pointed out in a talk on peer-orientation and all the issues it causes children-come-adults, that by the 90s parenting hadn't figured out TV. TV posed a challenge to raising healthy adults and we hadn't figured out how to incorporate this new reality when we were hit with the internet, a decade later and the internet came on phones, then social media, like the tech sector has literally just been lobbing fucking grenades at parents every couple of years for 3 straight decades.
Alas, it is worse than that, because parents aren't having grenades lobbed at them, but instead they are giving their children grenades thinking it is somehow a good idea.
Peter Keating the LLM maybe bad enough when he is "helping" you lose your job and cognitive capacities, but its worse when you are rolemodelling "how to charge headlong into redundancy" for your children. It may be time to seriously reconsider pulling out your phone and saying "hey Siri, make a reservation at 5.30 for dinner at McCheesables Family Restaurant." because you are teaching your kids not to know shit, and not to do shit, only how to consume.
And what would be truly terrible, in making a prophet out of Ayn Rand thanks to these electronic Peter Keatings, is that Peter Keating is the minor antagonist of The Fountainhead. He is a tragic cautionary tale, as while he plays the game to attain honour and prestige and promotions in his architectural firm, he has no real interest in what he does, he fails to produce any social goods. He loses his glamorous wife and career and winds up trying to rekindle his creative spirit by taking up painting, taking it to the protagonist Red for hopeful validation, whereby Red-the-omniscient uses his fictional omniscience to scare the world by telling Peter that it is too late for him to get into art now.
Red our protagonist "wins" in the end by marrying a horrible woman who was married to or shacked up with both antagonists of the novel, and finally getting the financing to build a skyscraper in Manhatten, the pinnacle of human accomplishment, you know like Trump Tower. Ayn Rand is trash, but the trap of convenience is real and I humbly beg, via a blog post that people stop stumbling into that trap it is getting embarassing.
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