It might go a long way toward explaining the kinds of idioms that have
developed over time about how to build software with Common Lisp.

Something I noted about fifteen years ago and should probably look into
more deeply sometime is an apparently extremely good fit and mesh
between Rand's ideas and those expressed by Persig in _Zen and the Art
of Motorcycle Maintenance_.

That seems incorrect on the face of it.  It's also valid to say that no
canned solution exists, but that certain principles should be applied
together with reason.

The one thing I could *never* get into was _Introduction to Objectivist
Epistomology_.  Somehow it just didn't ring true.  I mean, *parts* of it
did, but to me Persig's ideas in ZATAOMM form a better foundation for
Rand's ethics and politics than do Rand's own writings.  And they agree
on just an amazing number of points, including (perhaps most striking),
the relationship between conscious decisions, unconscious decisions, and
one's internalised value system.

Regards,
--
Nils Goesche
Ask not for whom the <CONTROL-G> tolls.

  This is very true.  However, there is a difference between relevant and
  irrelevant traits that affect how you have to interpret principles they
  espouse.  E.g., did Ayn Rand lead the kind of life that she said her
  philosophy had made possible?  No, she did not.  She actually lied about
  several important aspects of her life.  She wanted so very much to be a
  self-made success, she made parts of it up herself, instead, and denied that
  people had helped her at crucial points in her life.  This, to me, was quite
  important -- the standards she set were obviously extremely hard to follow,
  yet when she faced problems following them, she made them even harder to
  follow.  This is the "it's right because I say so" principle of truth, which
  flies directly in the face of everything she wanted to build and defend.
  Indeed, it is such things that caused me to consider possible inherent,
  serious problems in her philosophy.  (Peikoff is even worse, he believes
  something is right because Rand said so, and if there ever were a worse way
  to insult her philosophy, none of her detractors have managed to make it.)

| I find little fault in the early works of Rand, but after 1960 or so things
| went downhill.  The whole 60's "cult" thing is repugnant to me, along with
| the attendent principle that "if Rand said it then it must be correct".

  Yes, precisely.  But we must remember that Rand herself was very much opposed
  to all this cult thing, until there was evidently lots of money in it, at
  which point some other curious thing happened to her ethics and philosophy.

| Do you mean that for a philosophy to be useful (true?), it must provide
| canned solutions to a large class of problems, and thus save you the bother
| of thinking?

  No, not at all.  The time-saving function of a philosophy are at a much
  higher level.  I would argue that Aristotle's syllogisms are time-saving
  devices of this kind -- laying down principles of logic means that you waste
  so much less time with random noise that can lead anywhere except where you
  want to go.  I recently mentioned that relevance is orthogonal to truth,
  which sprung up in a discussion with my father over the role of Kant's
  philosophy in the development of equally strong anti-religious philosophies
  despite the fact that he intended to protect religion from the onset of
  science.  Kant seems to have confounded truth and relevance, because the
  religious belief he wanted to defend also does.  I have argued that a
  religion or a philosophy cannot speak about facts of the world -- if it does,
  it is now or will eventually be wrong -- but it can and should speak about
  the relevance and ranking of facts and observations.  A philosophy or method
  of scientific inquiry and the like will give you the means to establish the
  relevance of the facts you have observed, instead of you trying all sorts of
  ranking orders and stumbling on various ones that makes sense some of the
  time.  So on the contrary, it does _not_ save you the bother of thinking, it
  makes sure that you make thinking mistakes so more seldom if you know what
  you are doing than if you simply try to "think" without a method or a guiding
  principle.

| Hmm.  It's about twenty years since I first idly thumbed through a copy of
| _Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal_ that was lying on a coworker's desk.  I
| borrowed it, then _Atlas Shrugged_, and then bought the rest.  So I should be
| down to 25% by now.  But I don't think so.  The things that my bullshit
| filter passed as being good or interesting ideas back then are, as far as I
| can tell, still now deeply rooted in my value system.

  Most of the people I have known who have read Rand have done so at an
  impressionable age.  My data set could be skewed by this, but the stuff that
  remains is definitely stable at this time with me, too.  I have no idea how
  much or little it might be, however.

  What struck me in many "believers" (it is, unfortunately, the right term) was
  that they did not manage to sift the arbitrary choices from the central ones.
  E.g., one guy I know colored his hair the same as Roark's, which I considered
  _nuts_.  Peikoff once had to "admit" that he liked horror movies and was not
  all that thrilled with skyscrapers.  *GASP*  So somewhere along the lines,
  people got the wrong message, they hung on to her conclusions, not to the
  method of discovery and reasoning from important observation to conclusion.

| The one thing I could *never* get into was _Introduction to Objectivist
| Epistomology_.  Somehow it just didn't ring true.  I mean, *parts* of it did,
| but to me Persig's ideas in ZATAOMM form a better foundation for Rand's
| ethics and politics than do Rand's own writings.  And they agree on just an
| amazing number of points, including (perhaps most striking), the relationship
| between conscious decisions, unconscious decisions, and one's internalised
| value system.

It seems to me that the "system" or "method" you're seeking must eventually
short-circuit reason. (The method may be consistent with rational thought,
but can it be _generated_ by reason? I don't think so). As far as my puny
brain can determine, instead of "this is TRUE because I SAY it is", sooner
or later we must encounter "this is VALUABLE because I (or we) WILL have it
thus". I hear this whispered between the lines of almost all philosophers.
(Except Ayn Rand, who quietly *shrieks* it ;-).

I'm curious to know how far you've travelled in your quest for this "system"
or "method". Do you regard the development of a system of ranking to be an
act of creation or of discovery? Or have you hit upon something new that
makes this a false dichotomy?

  I think it just became more abstract.  We no longer have consensus on what
  the facts are, we have consensus on the method of ascertaining that some
  claim is true.  The scientific method has a bad habit of shaking people's
  beliefs in what is true if they fail to grasp what _remains_ true as the
  precise facts change.  I believe that consensus is even more important now
  than it was in monocultural dictatorshiplike structures, because we no longer
  have any useful consensus of facts, public policy, values, etc, so we need a
  consensus on higher principles.  E.g., instead of _which_ laws to have, we
  agree on the rule of law principle.  Instead of having to agree on specific
  things, we instead agree on how to resolve our differences.  Instead of
  agreeing on which programming language to use, we agree on the need for
  specifications for those we choose, and how to write those specifications.
  Instead of agreeing on what to do, we are often satifisfied with agreeing on
  what _not_ to do.

| Reason is unable to ascribe value/relevance to its own observations and
| conclusions without becoming caught in an infinite recursion.

  Precisely.  You have to _choose_ some core values and axioms for your system.
  To find them, you can reason from things you "like" before you started to
  think about them back to some fundaemental values and from those forward to
  logical consequences, but then you will probably have to repeat this process
  as you wind up with things you do not like that much after all, and change
  your values in this iterative process.

  Like, my favorite line of reasoning is that I may be frightened by the news I
  read of violent people from the Middle East who form gangs in Oslo and kill
  people in their own gang and in other gangs, and momentarily feel threatened
  by some superficial quality like skin color.  Many people here remain at this
  stage.  Then I may notice that there are non-dangerous people who look
  exactly the same, but that the people who _are_ dangerous all emit the same
  signals as the dangerous "natives" that I have already learned to avoid and
  that there was no need to update my threat sensors at all.  Then I realize
  that the very concept of attaching values to superficial qualities was wrong
  and proceed to search for other instances of same, and then I come across a
  curious group of people who only realized that attaching values to _one_
  superficial quality was wrong.  Instead of racists, they became anti-racists
  -- people who are willing to mistreat others they _believe_ are racists based
  on some superficial quality like a choice of word or disliking bad people who
  just happen to have a different skin color -- and they never understand that
  the basic principle of reacting to other people based on your fears of the
  group _you_ think they belong to, is bad.  They cannot even understand that
  this could be wrong.  "Racists are bad, yes?  So what's wrong with beating
  them up?"  They do not realize that this is _exactly_ what racists think
  about people with a different skin color.  The same goes with those moronic
  black racists, who, instead of getting the point that mistreating people
  based on race is wrong, only think that mistreating _blacks_ based on race is
  wrong, and turn around to mistreat other races based on race.  I _marvel_ at
  the lack of intelligence in both anti-racists and black racists, who I
  consider about twice as bad as racists, because they have seen how bad racism
  is, and they _still_ employ the principles they so despise, but the fact that
  many people have _not_ figured out that reacting to an _individual_ based on
  your feelings towards a group you _think_ they belong to is wrong, shows me
  that thinking in principles requires effort and serious consideration, and
  that most people have never learned a method of thinking and deliberation --
  they just along with whatever they feel like, and end up incredibly wrong.

  I happen to like the fundamental value of "human life" as a starting point
  and "personal happiness" and "intelligence and reason" go with it, as I see
  it.  Other people evidently value "feeling safe" over "happiness" and that
  means that "reason" is no longer a value, either, because reasoning requires
  effort and thinking tends to involve risk, disappointment, failure, and the
  opposite of "safe" -- you may realize that what you once thought to be good
  is in fact really bad, not by itself, but because of ramifications you had
  not thought about.  E.g., if sexism is bad, using "he" to refer to any man(!)
  is bad, so you use "they", but then make the very grave mistake of thinking
  that those who still use "he" are sexist (because of this superficial quality
  of appearance and stupid, stupid groupthink), upon which conclusion you have
  just killed off your entire cultural heritage as "sexist".  This is so bad
  and so stupid that the decision to use "they" instead of "he" _must_ be
  reconsidered in light of its horrible consequences.  It is now using "they"
  instead of "he" that is sexist, because those who use "they" consider those
  who _innocently_ use "he" as sexist and they _wrongly_ sensitize a culture to
  an issue that was not there.  Sure, there were sexists, too, but you can find
  those by other and much more accurate means than by counting occurrences of
  "he".  In fact, the real sexists go scot free, because they can just adapt to
  a "they" form while any reader would understand that they denigrate females
  and tolerate only males and use the "they" form ironically and sarcastically,
  which the stupid word-counting anti-sexists would not understand because the
  simple formulaic detector they use is provides as many false positives as it
  produces false negatives.  Sufficiently advanced political correctness is
  indistinguishable from sarcasm.

| It seems to me that the "system" or "method" you're seeking must eventually
| short-circuit reason.

  Yes, of course.  Logic by itself does not produce valid conclusions -- it
  only says that conclusions from invalid logic are useless and that only
  conclusions from good premises lead to good conclusions.  How you find those
  good premises is another task entirely, but at least you can work within a
  secure framework where you know that your conclusions will hold and that if
  you do not "like" your conclusions, it is not your reasonsing that you have
  to examine, but your premises.  You can thus show that something is bad
  somewhere "down there" if you can arrive at bad conclusions through logic.
  This is an very valuable debugging tool that people who do not consider
  reason to be valuable do not have.  Thus, they tolerate bad premises and just
  switch the conclusions around as they like, disregaring their bad logic.

| (The method may be consistent with rational thought, but can it be
| _generated_ by reason?  I don't think so.)

  Well, I think it can, but not with a uni-directional application of reason
  and logic from some a priori principles.  (The funny thing with a priori
  principles is that they are _discovered_ through what _must_ have been
  identical to that of a posteriori principles, but because some people are
  hysterical about induction, they invent all these complex things to wrap it
  up in something that looks to the unwary eye like deduction.  I find that
  most humorous.)

  So when you say "short-circuit", I tend to interpret that as that you do not
  like feedback loops in your system.  I disagree.  I think feedback loops are
  just wonderful.  Circular reasoning is not invalid if there is some external
  input to it in each step, i.e., if you apply exactly the same steps round and
  round, you will not end up in the same place.  More than that, I think this
  is a wonderful way of discovering "strange attractors" in human thinking.  I
  would venture that if you kept at this process long enough, you would find
  that certain things are reached no matter where you start, and that those are
  the real fundamental principles of human philosophy.  In all likelihood, they
  are quite counterintuitive.

| As far as my puny brain can determine, instead of "this is TRUE because I SAY
| it is", sooner or later we must encounter "this is VALUABLE because I (or we)
| WILL have it thus".  I hear this whispered between the lines of almost all
| philosophers.  (Except Ayn Rand, who quietly *shrieks* it ;-).

  Most philosophers start out from believing that Good sort of exists a priori.
  I think this is entirely false.  I think good arises out of knowing that most
  people would not like to be hurt or die, and then you find ways to erect a
  system of defense mechanisms that is such that anyone who tries to be bad is
  more hurt than he can hurt others.  That is, if you had evil in mind, you
  would know that not only the person you hurt would respond, but his community
  would hurt you back.  (Anarchy is the absence of this community right to
  respond through a recognized authority, and it is the worst aspect of USENET.
  It leads to "I feel bad, therefore I am allowed to defend myself"-responses
  instead of the much more mature "I feel bad, how can I avoid that"-responses
  that you do in a community that seriously frowns up those who take the law
  into their own hands.¹)

Usenet is a great example of this.  Read an advocacy newsgroup
sometime.  Ugh.

"Reasonable" would also be /razumnyj/, or perhaps /blagorazumnyj/
(literally, "good" + "reasonable").  The important part of all of
these constructions is /um/, which by itself means "mind", and as a
stem for another word will carry the connotation of using the mind.

/Myslayacshij/ can also be used to describe someone who has reason.
My Russian isn't good enough to break that down further.  I don't
understand its connotations or how the word gets built up.  Perhaps
someone more expert could enlighten us.

Russian also has /ratsional'yj/ but if you try to use the word to mean
Rational as Rand would use it, the listener won't understand what you
mean, and probably offer you a correction of /razumnyj/.  It seems to
have meaning only in a mathematical context.

In particular, a search for "vigilante" on www.FindLaw.com shows a few
usages that suggest it might be a good equivalent for Norwegian's
"selvtekt".  In all three of the uses quoted here, "vigilante"
suggests self-appointed power or authority.  Note that in the first
case, it even draws a distinction between a bounty hunter and a
vigilante.

http://writ.corporate.findlaw.com/misc/okculr.html

  Does this plan constitute establishment of a "bounty hunter" system?
  Certainly. It does not, however, constitute a vigilante
  system. Concomitant with the authority to grant licenses, Congress
  would place in the tribunal the authority to promulgate strict
  requirements and guidelines for private entities to qualify for such
  licenses. This authority would be based on whatever parameters
  Congress chose to enact, just as statutes authorize a government
  agency to promulgate rules to effect the beneficent purposes of the
  statute. Therefore, it is incorrect [*402] and simplistic to assert
  that this control system, in which violators would risk loss of
  their license and their prize, would spawn gangs of reckless
  international gunslingers rather than foster an entrepreneurial
  cadre of trained professionals.

http://supreme.lp.findlaw.com/supreme_court/briefs/99-1613/99-1613.me...

  In 1995, staff at a federal prison in Florence, Colorado banded
  together to systematically beat prisoners whom they believed
  disrespected their authority. Mike McPhee, Vigilante Guards May Do
  Time, Denver Post, July 27, 2000, at
  http://www.denverpost.com/news/news0727.htm.

http://writ.corporate.findlaw.com/dean/20011012.html

  There has been a new rash of hate crimes against Arabs, Muslims,
  Sikhs, or anyone thought by the uninformed vigilante to be a
  potential terrorist or sympathizer.

/Oxford English Dictionary/ online offers some quotes that might be
helpful.

       Hence vigi {sm} lantism (orig. U.S.), the principles or activities
   of vigilantes or vigilance committees.

     1937 Sun (Baltimore) 27 Sept. 2/7 A public investigation of
   `vigilantism' in strike areas was announced today through the American
   League Against War and Fascism. 1942 W. STEGNER Mormon Country 96
   Perhaps even those incidents were purely unofficial and spontaneous
   acts of devout Mormons, the Mormon equivalent of lynch law and
   vigilantism. 1953 Economist 19 Sept. 775/3 In the United States,
   neither private vigilantism nor the government seems prepared to treat
   a favourable verdict as final. 1979 Times 6 Dec. 3/1 Africa was
   confronted, he said, with a choice between a system of collective
   security and a system of international vigilantism. 1985 Listener 10
   Jan. 9/1 The one genuine, spontaneous popular institution in the West
   was vigilantism.

When given this word as a query, Google retrieves pages where this
word appears in the following contexts: as a name of a mobile
telephony rate plan of a dozen different providers [tarif
"racional'nyj"]; in the name of a Belorussian savings fund
["Racional'nyj dom" = "Rational house"]; in the title of a translation
of the book "Anti-Americanism: Irrational and Rational", by Paul
Hollander; in a page with advice on cough treatment in children
[Protivokashlevaja terapija: racional'nyj vybor = Cough therapy: a
rational choice]; in an article on the organisation of medical
insurance in the City of Moscow [racional'nyj podhod = a rational
approach]; in an advertisement of a "School of Rational Yoga" ["Shkola
Racional'noj Jogi"]; etc. (these results are from the first 20
matches).

Certainly, it is also the word which is used for "rational" as in
"rational numbers".

Curiously, the Administrative offences code of the RF (specifically,
its article 19.1 -- see http://zakon.kolokol.ru/R/P/11097) gives
another definition of the same word: "an unauthorised execution [by a
person] of his actual or assumed right, contrary to the order
instituted by a federal law or another normative legal document, which
has not caused substantial damage to citizens or juridical persons".
Feel the subtlety here?!

The translations in both cases are mine, so please don't try to bring
them up before a Russian court (-;

http://www.dourish.com/embodied/

" ... 'embodiment' is at the centre of phenomenology, an important
strain of philosophical thought beginning at the end of the nineteenth
century. Phenomenology rejects the Cartesian separation between mind
and body on which most traditional philosophical approaches are
based..."

"Drawing from the writings of a number of phenomenologists, and
especially from Heidegger, Schutz and Wittgenstein, Where the Action
Is develops an understanding of embodied interaction organised in
terms of the creation, manipulation and communication of meaning, and
the establishment and maintenance of practice. Rather than embedding
fixed notions of meaning within technologies, embodied interaction is
based on the understanding that users create and communicate meaning
through their interaction with the system (and with each other,
through the system)."

Indeed, this provides the framework for the _exercise_ of a set of
principles, but it necessarily postpones the formulation of a global ranking
system for the resolution of specific controversies, which is its ultimate
purpose. We might as well leap up to the next level of abstraction and
declare: "we agree to the principle of living by best principles, and shall
in due course determine what these best principles may be". And work
downwards from there ;-)

I wonder if there is *always* a higher level of abstraction to which we can
ascend in order to resolve tensions between currently incompatible values? I
don't know; I'm only improvising, but it seems to me that sooner or later
the arbitrary exercise of power will intervene; and that which has been
ordained by a power *subsequently* becomes valued by virtue of having won.
Law is a highly sublimated form of this kind of power. It actually depends
quite heavily on the *stability* of our table of values, but provides little
in the way of guidance for formulating them (other than precedent, which
itself has a questionable principle hard-wired into it). But obviously I
agree that the principle *of* law is orthogonal to the principles *in* law.

"short-circuit" was a bad choice of words, because I was actually referring
to the beginning of the process, not the end of the process. In other words,
interrupting the circuit of tail-chasing indecision and choosing some core
axioms and values to _begin_ with is what I meant by "short-circuiting".

I'm not sure whether you're referring to mainstream psychiatry or to
crazy/ier sects within it. But since we can't get much further away from
Lisp, I might as well pitch in here. I would very much like to see a revival
of interest in the existential/phenomenological approach to psychiatry
investigated by Laing and Esterson (among others) in the 1960s (before Laing
himself went a little too far toward the deep end). They had some marvellous
ideas which have, unfortunately, been swallowed up by the biological /
mechanistic 'disease model' of mental illness. One crucial point, that many
genuinely stupid researchers overlook, is that their work on the
interpersonal relationships was (and is) completely orthogonal to the
question of whether (or how) the brains of psychotic people function
differently from those of typical people. It's a pity that these ideas have,
for all practical purposes, have been lost to psychiatry -- and, strangely,
even psychology to a large extent.

But now we're wandering _too_ far astray.

        I cons, therefore I am.