I read 5 chapters (17%) of No Time to Die by Kira Peikoff (KLP). Her father is Leonard Peikoff the Objectivist philosopher. She was named for Kira from Ayn Rand's novel We The Living.

The novel is unreadably bad. I'm not going to read further. And it has nothing to do with Objectivism. The acknowledgments (accurately, I guess) don't mention Ayn Rand, Objectivism, or Leonard Peikoff. They don't mention her mother either. I looked at KLP's website and also didn't see anything about Rand, Objectivism or her father.

KLP was homeschooled initially but then went to high school and university.

KLP did not read Atlas Shrugged until she was at college. Source:

Book that changed your life:

Atlas Shrugged. I read it in college, when I was living away from home for the first time and deciding whether to embrace the philosophy I was raised with. It was always important to me--and to my parents--that I come to my own independent conclusions. After I finished the book, I finally knew the answer.

How can you be "raised with" Objectivism but not read Atlas Shrugged until age 18+? And I see no signs of Objectivist thought in her novel. And in the same interview, the book she wants to be an evangelist for is Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson, a thriller involving amnesia and trust (and a bunch of sex fantasies, according to a negative Amazon review). She apparently doesn't want to be an evangelist for Objectivism.

What about the book, No Time to Die? The unlikeable main character wants to be normal and fit in, quit university over teasing, has mean parents, has a nice grandfather, and gets stressed or fearful easily. She's second-handed and nothing like Roark. She routinely tells social lies. She has a medical condition which turns out to be she stopped physically aging at age 14 (she's now 20, and the book has some sort of plot about anti-aging science). The scientific rigor level of the book appears to be that if you say that genes did it, that's intelligent science instead of fantasy magic. Meanwhile there is a criminal conspiracy to kidnap scientists for some reason.

The foreshadowing and setting up where the book is going are awful. I can't tell why most of the material in the book is relevant. It seems there will be some anti-aging science stuff but then we get a bunch of seemingly-pointless stuff about the main character personally.

On finding out she's physically (but not mentally) 14, the protagonist starts thinking of herself as 14 in ways that don't make sense. She just wants to grow up normally. Even the genius doctor makes a comment about getting parental consent because she's under 18. My takeaway is that the author of the book is unintelligent.

This post could use some book quotes to illustrate what it's like, but the book is unimportant and bad and I don't want to do that. What interested me most was that KLP was allegedly raised with Objectivist philosophy, but actually didn't read Atlas Shrugged until college ... at which point she claimed to embrace it, but didn't. I looked into it because of reversion to the mean. Leonoard Peikoff (LP) is far worse than his teacher, Ayn Rand, but still exceptional in many ways. And KLP is far worse than LP, she's normal, there are no signs of greatness.

Be clear and direct about questions or requests.

When asking a question, ask for the information you want. E.g. don’t ask “why” unless you want to know why. Give some basic, simple thought to what your question is and directly say it.

Saying, “If you do X, I will do Y” is not a request that the person do X. It’s giving them information about their options.

Saying “I want X” is not literally a request, even if X has to do with another person. Sometimes that wording may be clear enough, but other times it won’t be, and it’s hard to tell the difference, so don’t rely on it. A clear request is “Please do X”. Requests are often phrased as questions, e.g. “Will you do X?” When in doubt, say “I request (that you) X”. (The parentheses indicate optional words that fit some scenarios but not others.)

Use question marks for your questions. Do not use question marks on non-questions.

Don’t skip steps. E.g. don’t ask “Why do you think X?” if the person has not said they think X. Instead ask “Do you think X?”

Don’t ask a question which is answered by the words “yes” or “no” unless you want a yes or no answer.

If someone asks a question with a yes or no answer, start your answer with “yes” or “no”. If you want to say something else, say it after giving the direct answer. Don’t leave out the clear, direct answer.

In general with all questions, start your answer with the answer. Your first sentence should clearly and directly answer the question. If you want to explain extra details, put those after the answer. Don’t use “But” for the extra details. Don’t contradict your original answer. Phrase the answer to be correct on its own. You can add minor/tiny exceptions in the details (“unless zombie Hitler shows up and points a gun to my head”), but if your answer requires a major exception, your answer is wrong and you should change it. E.g. say “often” instead of “almost always” in your original answer if there are some major exceptions.

When you use strong words like “always”, “never”, “all”, “none”, consider if they are actually, literally true (don’t say it if it’s false) and consider if you have a reason to make such a strong claim. In general, when you want to make a strong claim like that, you shouldn’t. Instead, remove the qualifier. E.g. instead of saying “All cats have hair” say “Cats have hair”. Adding the “all” is a way of saying “there are absolutely no exceptions” which is false (in this example and in many cases) and is generally an unnecessary/irrelevant claim. Don’t say “Some cats have hair” either, that’s too weak and defensive, there’s no need to limit it to “some”, that doesn’t represent reality well (more than “some” cats have hair, it’s more common than that).

Don’t use intensifiers without a big reason. In general, just delete it every time you write “very”.

Don’t assert things which other people should judge for themselves or which are being debated in the discussion. E.g. don’t call one of your arguments “good” when 1) it’s other people’s job and privilege to decide if it’s good or not 2) you’re debating with someone who you can expect to disagree with your evaluation of how good it is. Instead, simply call it an argument.

Don’t assert things, without giving an argument, which other people will disagree with. In particular this comes up with claims about people. E.g. if Joe claims Sue is angry and gives some reasoning related to what she wrote, Sue saying “I am not angry” is not a counter-argument, it’s an unargued assertion. Sue should not assume her beliefs about herself are true. Sue shouldn’t expect Joe to believe her claims about her emotions, thoughts, motivations, and so on, just because she says so. Further, Sue herself shouldn’t believe her claims about herself unless she has arguments.

Don’t respond to questions with counter-questions. Don’t respond to arguments by raising new topics. Engage with what people say.

Occasionally you may switch to a higher level meta issue with logical priority. E.g. suppose you’re debating politics. If someone asks you a question about your views on government-run healthcare, or makes an argument about that, don’t respond with a question or argument about immigration or border walls. Don’t change the topic to something else about politics. However, it can be appropriate to change the topic to something non-political like “Hold on, the discussion is getting really chaotic. Let’s try to organize it and go one thing at a time. OK?” Or you could say you were losing interest and suggest dropping it or discussing why it’s interesting, important and productive enough to continue. Those tangents make sense because those issues come before and govern the political discussion. But switching from one political issue to another is non-responsive to what the person said and is a way people avoid explaining their position.

To a first approximation, all mistakes matter. Try not to make mistakes. When you do make a mistake, don’t make the excuse of saying you weren’t really trying. Take responsibility for your error and try to fix it and figure out what caused the error.

Be prepared for discussion topics to change from e.g. politics to non-politics like the thought processes behind the mistake you made about politics.

Be prepared to discuss how you think rational discussion works. Be prepared to disagree with people about that and have to explain your thinking. Don’t expect the methods of productive discussion to be something everyone agrees on and which goes without saying.

Be prepared for people to say things you consider rude, impolite, etc. If they do, it means they disagree with you about how to discuss. You can argue your case or be tolerant and broad-minded and not mind.

Be prepared to use references and for other people to use them. You don’t have to write out every idea you have. Some have already been written down (or audio or video was recorded), in the past, by you or by someone else. You can link, cite or quote stuff to avoid repeating.

Consider, when you claim something, if you think it’s a new, original idea, an uncommon idea, a reasonably well known idea, or an extremely popular idea. If you don’t know which it is, or where you got it, that’s a problem. That indicates you don’t know much about your own idea. If you do know basic info about the idea’s status in the world, that is relevant in some ways. E.g. if an idea is very popular and widely accepted, then someone should have already written the idea down in a good, high quality way. So quote that instead of writing shoddy, half-assed new arguments. If you can’t or won’t do that, why not? What’s going on? Wanting to practice explaining things yourself is one answer. Another thing that can be going on is that millions of people believed it without ever caring whether anyone ever wrote good arguments explaining the matter, which would be an important and relevant fact about the idea.

If you don’t know the purpose of every word you read, you don’t understand it. Don’t ignore or skip some words. Don’t try to give counter-arguments when you don’t understand it (at least not without a warning that you don’t understand it but you’re going to try to say something anyway, so people know the situation – lots of stuff that’s normally bad to do becomes OK if you clearly state what’s going on so no one will be misled). Try to figure it out and/or ask what the text means.

Rational truth-seeking discussion is about figuring out decisive answers to resolve issues. E.g. criticisms that refute, not weaken, ideas. It’s not about scoring points, it’s about finding (contextually) conclusive answers.

Try to keep track of your discussion so that you know which ideas have been refuted by which arguments, which are not-refuted, which ideas conflict with each other, what questions are open and unanswered, etc.

Discussion is cooperative. Don’t be biased. Don’t argue for “your” side. Contribute arguments, questions and ideas for all sides in an effort to find the truth. And feel free to ask for help from the other guy about anything – he’s your ally, not your enemy.

If something is too hard or confusing or overwhelming, just stop and slow down. State the problem and propose something to do about it or ask for suggestions on what to do about it.

When in doubt, deal with the doubt. Don’t ignore problems. Don’t try to focus on the main topic like physics or immigration. Bring up the problem with the discussion. Ignoring the problem will only break the discussion and confuse the other person who you hid the problem from. Hiding the problem from your discussion partner(s) is dishonest and it sabotages the discussion.

If you’re emotional, take a break from discussing or pause the main topic and communicate about the problem. (Unless the emotions are clearly and significantly positive, that’s OK. But don’t make the excuse that you don’t feel “bad” or it’s not “negative” emotions – if it’s anywhere near neutral plus strong enough that you’re noticing it, it’s a significant concern and you shouldn’t be confident of your understanding of it.) Like other problems, getting emotional during discussions is not something to try to ignore or hide. Do something to solve the problem yourself and take responsibility for it working or ask for help.

Don’t rush. Take as much time as you need. Don’t sit there worrying endlessly for no clear reason either. Take reasonable steps that aren’t careless and which follow your thinking and discussing methods. No more, no less.

It’s easiest to organize and keep track of a discussion, and follow up over time, on the curi forum. That’s easier than FI because you don't have to learn to use and format emails and because it puts the whole discussion on one page. And it’s easier than Discord because it’s easy to find and refer to everything instead of it getting scrolled way up.

Plan to follow up on your discussions over time until they reach a conclusion of some sort. Don’t just end them for no reason because you went to sleep or 24 hours passed or whatever. You can end discussions when you reach answers about the topic or when you have some reason to, e.g. you feel like you learned enough for now. When you end a discussion, explain your reason and be prepared to consider and discuss criticism of your reasoning.

Try to be extremely honest and expect others to be honest too.

Don’t form negative judgments of people until at least one negative claim about them has objectively reached a conclusion in discussion. E.g. you argued your case fully and completely and you think it’s adequate, covered everything, and there are no substantive counter arguments that you haven’t addressed (all the replies are just distractions and bullshit like the person putting effort into misunderstanding what you said, which you covered as a general category but not for each one individually). If you’ve never quoted someone’s error, explained a criticism, and addressed questions and counter-arguments in a way you think is objectively conclusive (should satisfy and persuade any rational person, including the person criticized, who is only resisting the claim due to bias, irrationality, dishonesty, evasion, etc.) then don’t be judgmental. Give people the benefit of the doubt and act with good will and in good faith until there is at least one clearly established reason to do otherwise.

If you don’t like something and don’t say anything about it, you are the one behaving badly, not them. If you just assume it’s bad, you’re dealing with a disagreement (they don’t think what they did is bad) by assuming you’re right, without arguing your case. That’s an irrational, not truth-seeking, way to handle disagreements.

See also these other discussion tips including more in the comments there.

PS This is all related to epistemology because thinking and discussing are largely equivalent. Rational discussion is externalized rational thinking, and rational thinking is internalized rational discussion. For a truth-seeking process that deals with disagreements between ideas, the number of people involved (one, two, more) and the format (text, voice, thoughts in your head) do not fundamentally change what makes it rational and effective.

Blizzard Gives 6-Month Ban To College Team That Held Up 'Free Hong Kong' Sign

Blizzard banned some US college Hearthstone players from competitions for 6 months after they held up a sign reading "FREE HONG KONG, BOYCOTT BLIZZ”. They did this on purpose, as a statement, after Blizzard banned a Hong Kong Hearthstone player for a year, and made him forfeit like 10k of prize money, for a pro Hong Kong statement, and also fired the two casters involved.

Blizzard wasn’t sure what to do at first and delayed a decision, but has now decided that it does want to punish Americans for their political speech in America that is in agreement with American values in general. It’s not even offensive speech in America, it’s just offensive to foreign communists.

Blizzard’s justification for the bans is:

a general rule that states the company can punish players for “engaging in any act that, in Blizzard’s sole discretion, brings you into public disrepute, offends a portion or group of the public, or otherwise damages Blizzard image.”

This is an extremely generic, subjective rule. One can’t predict in advance what will be punished or how much it will be punished. A government with laws like this would be an oppressive tyranny. This is rule of man, not rule of law.

Free Hong Kong. Free the Muslim Uighurs from Chinese oppression.

Fuck Apple for removing the HKmap.live app and lying about why. Fuck the NBA's appeasement of China. Fuck Blizzard for banning the Hong Kong Hearthstone player. Fuck Chinese censorship and its Western accomplices.

Fuck the Chinese government. They are tyrannical communists. Mao Zedong was evil. The 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre was evil.

This topic is for posting what I write about in the comments. Topic, word count, and maybe date if I'm posting it late. I may also mention other activities.

In Defense of Richard Stallman is a decent article on recent events. Stallman lost several jobs because the SJW, fake-news media fraudulently misquoted him. Too few people wanted to stand up to the lies, or bothered to think enough to know it was lies.

Stallman said of his friend Marvin Minsky (allegedly) fucking an underage girl on Jeffrey Epstein's pedophile island:

the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.

and then the media lied like:

Stallman wrote that “the most plausible scenario” for Giuffre’s accusations was that she was, in actuality, “entirely willing.”

This is a major evil. It's dangerous. And it's complicated: it involves the activists, the lying media, and also, most of all, the much larger group of people who go along with it, who aren't SJW activists but do choose to accept the media's lies.

While I don't think Stallman should have been fired for this, I don't agree with him either. Here's how I view it (assuming the allegation is true):

Minsky was 73. She was 17. He was in a weird situation on a private island. What did he think her motivation was? Did he think he was physically attractive to her? Did he think she didn't have better options for recreational sex? Did he think she was an educated fan of his work? Was she trying to gold dig and get a relationship, money, even marriage, from the married Minsky? Did she have a fetish for old guys? Was she trying to social climb in Minsky's social circle? Was she going to ask for favors later like a higher grade (she wasn't in his class), a preface to her book by Minsky, or introductions to important people?

Did Minsky ask her anything about her motivation? Or did he choose not to consider it, not to ask, and to engage in dishonest, biased, wishful thinking?

Why did Minsky want to engage in statutory rape? Or did he not bother to find out her age, and not care? Or did he figure they weren't in the US, so breaking US laws didn't matter, and he thinks it's a bad law which should be repealed (something he's never said a word about in his life, certainly never advocated, he just wanted it not to exist this one time for him)?

I don't know anything. My analysis is all made up. But I think it's much more plausible than Stallman's suggestion that Minsky was duped. You can't really dupe an honest man like this. They have to go along with it. If they were trying not to be duped, they'd have a bunch of questions and there wouldn't be convincing answers.

Sex and sexual consent are things to be careful with. Sex in unusual situations (like on a private island, in a foreign country, with a large age gap, or with someone outside of one's regular social circle), where your regular intuition may not be appropriate, is something to be extra careful with. Sex with especially young girls, who are generally less experienced and responsible, is something to be extra careful with. Was Minsky extra careful? Doubtful. How could he have been careful and ended up going through with it when there wouldn't actually have been good answers to skeptical questions? If he started expressing a bunch of doubts and concerns, would the girl really have been able to come up with persuasive lies to cover every issue? Was she so much cleverer than Minsky that she could fool him despite the facts being heavily against her?

This is like an extreme version of a guy who believes a bunch of flattery – without really questioning it or thinking critically – from a pretty woman he just met. Except this time, instead of manipulating him to get a favor, she was just offering sex for nothing, for no apparent reason, not even a free drink. At that point, an honest, old, unattractive man is normally wondering things like whether she's a prostitute, because what else could it be? If Minsky did wonder, it would have led to not having sex with her, and if he didn't wonder then he did something badly wrong.

Apparently Stallman and Geoff Greer (who wrote the defense of Stallman article linked above) didn't think of any of this, either. That's bad. And the media, rather than making these reasonable arguments, lied, which suggests to me that, despite their posturing as defenders of women, maybe they don't know this stuff either. (Disclaimer: I didn't read many articles about this. If you can find one which makes arguments similar to mine, especially from the mainstream media, please link it in the comments, I'd like to see it.).

These are highlights from the Fallible Ideas Discord chatroom. Read discussions about Altruism and Self Interest and about Parental Obligations and Work Ethic.

Social rules are one of the most powerful enemies of reason.

They aren’t all bad. They have some useful purposes. But, regardless of the upsides, they have huge, irrational downsides.

The useful purposes are helping structure or organize how people interact. This gives people more of an idea of what to expect. People don’t realize what it’d be like dealing with a stranger with no customs to guide the interaction. That’s actually a really hard problem. Our social rules handle it pretty well.

When people are “anti-social”, it’s often only a small portion of social rules which they violate. For example, they say taboo words like “retard” or they say something bluntly (directly and honestly) which you’re supposed to tell “white lies” about or avoid saying anything about.

People who violate those rules still use many social customs such as greetings (“hi”), farewells (“bye”), or understanding and using the conversational dynamic of questions and answers.

The small portion of social rules which are commonly violated are not very important. The really important stuff is pretty uncontroversial. Particularly in intellectual conversations. In those conversations, people may be rude or insulting, but it’s basically nothing like trying to talk with a savage or barbarian who is ignorant of civilized modes of interaction.

Politeness helps reduce violence among semi-civilized people. But we’re so civilized today in America that we really expect people to be able to refrain from violence even if they are insulted. We think it’s barbaric to duel over honor.

Social communication rules limit what you say. This limiting makes it much harder to say certain ideas. Some of those ideas are true. Being able to speak freely lets you better focus on speaking the truth without worrying about other factors.

Some truths are very hard to say politely because, socially, you’re just not supposed to say them. For example, people lie all the time but you’re not supposed to point it out. Thinking people lied is common but saying so is considered an aggressive attack (regardless of whether it’s true). What if you want to point out lies so that people can learn to stop lying? What if the goal is improving in many ways including integrity? Then social rules make that hard.

Social rules cause people to take offense rather than rationally analyze what was said. Social rule following involves a way of evaluating statements as polite or rude, which people do before and often instead of evaluating whether the statement is true. This is contrary to truth-seeking. It causes people not to think about whether a criticism is true or not if they find it personally offensive.

There is an interesting issue about what to blame. Did the social rules teach people to get offended by “insults”? Or were they already offended by insults and the social rules just help avoid triggering that underlying flaw? Regardless, one can group it all together under the general heading “social dynamics” or “social rules related issues” and say there is a problem there.

Many problems occur because social rules are unwritten rules which people treat as an automatic, expected default. They won’t say what offends them or what rules they want to be treated by. Actually they often pretend they are willing to hear any criticism, but still expect social rules prohibiting some criticism to be followed.

If people said “I am fragile and get offended by things I perceive as insults. We need to somehow accommodate this flaw of mine in our discussions.” then they’d be easier to deal with. But people don’t honestly face the reality of their situation.

The main things that offend people are criticisms that imply they are bad in some way. This includes being incompetent at something where the social expectation (the general, default expectation of our society or culture) is that adults are competent at it. It also includes being dishonest, being bad at thinking, having immoral ideas, being dumb, not understanding something that people think only a dumb person wouldn’t understand, making dumb mistakes (dumb according to social perception, not objectively), and being irrational.

But people are irrational, dishonest, dumb or incompetent (because our culture’s expectations about skill are actually unrealistic and high in some ways (and low in other ways, they are not very accurate)). Those are crucially important issues for anyone trying to be a rational thinker. People need criticism of those issues. They need to get better at those things, not avoid discussing them. So social rules block intellectual progress.