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Ayn Rand Lexicon Quote Checking

In The Ayn Rand Lexicon (book not website), Harry Binswanger wrote in the Honesty section:

Self-esteem is reliance on one’s power to think. It cannot be replaced by one’s power to deceive. The self-confidence of a scientist and the self-confidence of a con man are not interchangeable states, and do not come from the same psychological universe. The success of a man who deals with reality augments his self-confidence. The success of a con man augments his panic.

The intellectual con man has only one defense against panic: the momentary relief he finds by succeeding at further and further frauds.
[“The Comprachicos,” NL, 181.]  

The words, book and page number are correct, but the quote is from "The Age of Envy" not "The Comprachicos".

In the self-esteem section, Binswanger gives the correct cite for part of the same quote:

Self-esteem is reliance on one’s power to think. It cannot be replaced by one’s power to deceive. The self-confidence of a scientist and the self-confidence of a con man are not interchangeable states, and do not come from the same psychological universe. The success of a man who deals with reality augments his self-confidence. The success of a con man augments his panic.
[“The Age of Envy,” NL, 181.]

Justin Mallone found this error and I checked it myself too. I asked him to look into Lexicon quoting accuracy after I found multiple citation errors on the Lexicon website that weren't in the book. This is the only error he found in the book. He did find citation and formatting errors on the website. None of the errors, even on the website, are wording errors. (Note there's a second website for the Lexicon. I compared the "Automatization" page and the only difference I found was whether there were spaces around dashes or not.)

I checked 4 quotes originally and Justin checked 16 more. So the book had 1 partial citation error in 20 quotes, but the website had 5 errors in 20 quotes (counting at most one error per quote). The wordings seem to be reliable, unlike in The Beginning of Infinity, and the Lexicon book seems to be pretty reliable. It seems like a serious effort went into getting details right for the book, but the process of creating the website was sloppier and introduced many small errors.

Even the Lexicon website is much better than David Deutsch's use of quotations in The Beginning of Infinity. Deutsch frequently doesn't give sources, makes frequent changes to wordings (with no indicator of any change), changes punctuation too, and uses ellipses and square brackets incorrectly. Even worse, several of the quotes appear to be made up.


Elliot Temple on July 30, 2021

Messages (1)

Sad to see that Thomas Szasz had some quoting errors, though not as many as Deutsch.

https://blog.justinmallone.com/cite-checking-szasz/

Those are in an early Szasz book. I wonder if books near the end of his career are the same, better or worse.


curi at 12:54 PM on August 13, 2021 | #1 | reply | quote

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