> your mind is already fucked. I'm done with this conversation as it's impossible to reason with anyone who thinks highly of that insanity. The only thing Ayn Rand is a good starting point for is how to brainwash young minds with terrible writing and an idiotic philosophy. She's a joke.

That's completely untrue. I'm a very intelligent and very well-educated person, and I agree with Ayn Rand. And there are a lot of people like me.

Ayn Rand's views are actually quite intuitively reasonable---and there is a lot of techincal philosophical work that has been done to show that they are true.

(a) there is an objective reality

(b) we can gain knowledge about it

(c) we should act self-interestedly in the pursuit of happiness

(d) we need freedom (in the classic liberal sense) to do that

Which of these views causes you to automatically dismiss me out of hand?

If you want to make a cogent criticism of Ayn Rand, I will tell you why I think it fails.

> That's a religious statement, not a factual one

It's not a religious statement. I realize that you are accusing me of believing certain things on faith, and I completely reject that. I am a scientist.

I definitely suspect we probably disagree on what "always work well eventually" means, though, which I left undefined.

Not to mention, the logical path between Rand's axioms and the rest of Rand's philosophy goes through a thick layer of vague handwaving and unjustified assumptions.

One is that her ideas were not particularly original, and not particularly well-expressed. Self-centered philosophies are far from new, and actually are pretty well-trod ground, but her work does little to address already-existing critiques and, as literature, is not particularly good (her characters tend to be one-dimensional, plots lack good development/tension/resolution, etc.).

Another is that she has become a frankly cult-like figure, with people approaching her work the wrong way around: rather than "this statement is correct, and Ayn Rand said it", too often there is a seeming attitude of "this statement is correct because Ayn Rand said it". The Objectivist movement (people who follow her work and philosophy) is particularly infamous for this, having an established history of venerating her and doing some rather extreme turns when she was alive and particular people from her circle fell out of her favor.

Finally, most of her work is easy to critique with only very basic reasoning/argumentative skills, despite presenting itself as a solid, rationally-justified framework. More realistically, Rand's philosophy consists of appeals to emotional responses, based on the idea of self-evaluation of one's own greatness and the notion that this greatness exists more or less in a vacuum (one of the famous examples is "going Galt", wherein all of the great people who produce value simply retreat and form their own separate society, to spite the "parasites" who "leeched" off their work).

To continue with the fiction theme, one of Heinlein's stories ("The Roads Must Roll", 1940) anticipated and harshly criticized the type of philosophy Rand ended up promoting. One of the asides there is to a philosophy of "Functionalism"; the founder of the philosophy advocates evaluating people -- and giving them power and prestige -- based on what "function" they can perform, and how valuable it is to society.

The result is large numbers of people who do not really make any unusually-significant contributions, but who all come to the conclusion that whatever they do is the one truly indispensable thing, and if they stopped doing it the whole society would fall apart, so they should be given more power or prestige over others in recognition. As Heinlein puts it, "With so many different functions actually indispensible, such self-persuasion was easy." Heinlein also offers a description of the founder of "Functionalism" which critiques the philosophy and in many ways critiques Rand's later work as well, when he says:

The complete interdependence of modern economic life seems to have escaped him entirely.

(see Wikipedia for a summary of the story, or look it up -- it's been republished/anthologized: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll)

Ironically, your saying that you don't like Rand because other people don't like her is going along with the very principle that Rand most stands against. Make your own opinions, based on your own logic. Don't follow what other people say. Read it yourself and decide.

Ayn Rand begins with axioms, and logically derives her position from there. (Well, maybe. I suspect that at least to some degree, she already had her position, and derived her axioms from there, then argued for her position from her axioms.) So I attack her position by saying that in her third axiom, she mis-defines consciousness, and the rest of her errors follow from her flawed starting position. That's rational. "It leaves me cold" is not a rational response. (It may be an indication that you feel there's something wrong with the position, even if you can't define it or prove it, and that's fine. But it's not a rational response.)

I can see why they do this, but I think Ayn's detractors overstate their case. She is valuable because she is the only major author that writes from her point of view. I read many books in high school with a feminist or socialist moral, I read many literary triumphs that exposed the "failure" of capitalism, only Ayn dared to be different. I think every teenager should have a run-in with Rand, if only to begin the process of developing critical thinking.

However, I do think her complete philosophical system has many more flaws then she would care to admit (the one laid out in the "BFS", "Big Frackin' Speech", at the end of Atlas Shrugged). She tries to lay out a case for the absolute, unassailable truth of her ethics, but absolute truth shall ever elude humans in this complex world.

You clearly know nothing about Rand's philosophy. You would do yourself a favor to correct that error. Even if you ultimately disagree with her, she has very many intelligent things to say and, if you give her a chance, she will challenge many of your preconceptions about morality, ethics, and their postcursors of economics and politics, and raise the level of your discourse significantly.

> her ideas only trend toward sacrificing the many for the needs of the few

She specifically and clearly explains in her work why that is not the implication of her philosophy, and there is no reason to believe it would be.

edit: And I take it for granted that lying is not generally acceptable. I didn't mean to imply that it's worse to lie about Ayn Rand than something else.

another edit: And I don't mean to goad you into discussing this. If you say you don't want to get into a huge philosophical discussion, I'm not going to say "see, you don't have any argument" or some crap like that.

If you are just making a caricature of her beliefs, is that what a reasonable person would do?

And objective reality is not so unintelligent or undebatable to be dismissed at the whim of one sentance.

> Evolution designed them to accept cultural assumptions

It's a bit presumptuous to squarely pin something like that on evolution. Evolution is likely to favor many things, including individualism and rationality. Yes, Aritstotle said that man is a political animal. Yet Aristotle didn't spend time observing baboons on the plains of Ethiopia.

I'm not sure where Ayn Rand stands as a writer because her writing is hard to separate from her philosophy as she chose writing as a tool to transmit her philosophical beliefs. I also loved Roark in the Fountainhead (yet I tend to identify more with her imperfect characters like Gail Wynand), and as I'm currently somewhere around p.300 in Atlas Shrugged (warning: as it is a very long book, my judgement of it may easily be a wrong one), I feel that she wrote Atlas Shrugged when her mind dogmatised her beliefs (the Fountainhead, I think, was written when she was still questioning herself and reading it feels like reading a bit more honest piece to me). Despite her later dogmatism, I respect her as a philosopher because she (a) opened my eyes to how absurd Hegel-derived philosophies are, and (b) made me understand the cult of Athena in the ancient Greece and the impact it likely to have had on Western civilization. Since Ayn Rand was so much courageous philosophically than Marx, I think it would be completely unfair to everyone involved to call Marx but not Rand a philosopher.

> an isolated human is weak and vulnerable

Not really, unless you immerse him/her into an unfamiliar society. Although I'm not a follower of Thoreau, I think he made a fair argument that it is not at all unhealthy to live outside of society. Now I'm not an advocate of moving into a cabin in the woods, I just wanted to point out that there exists a different perspective.

> leaving society amounts to suicide

No, leaving a society is much more like quitting cocaine than committing suicide. Society is a lot like a drug. It takes some time to become hooked, but once you do, it seems nigh impossible to leave. Hence the recent success of Facebook.

Also, have you actually read any of her books, or only reviews of her books? Not trying to be antagonistic, its a genuine question.