Harlan Ellison, who has a large book collection his own, on several occasions has said "What's the point of owning a library full of books you've read?"
Having books across 8 to 20 different topics is good because it's not always possible to predict your day to day goals and energy level two or three months in the future. Having some books on marketing, business, some biographies, some history, some light fluffy fiction, some more intense fiction, some technical books... it means when the inspiration to read about biomechanics and health hits, you've got a book on it, or if you want a light read in the park, you've got a book of good short stories, and so on.
And if you want enough irony to fill half of Williamsburg: I do own "The Road to Serfdom", haven't read it this far. (It is one of the few books I brought along to the US with me, so as soon as I manage to crawl through frickin' Blood Meridian, it's going to be next).
haha...I finally broke down and included my "Man, Economy, and State" by Murray N. Rothbard that I've been intending to read for years in my latest delivery to the goodwill centre (like a 2nd hand shop). I'd love to possess the knowledge contained within without working for it, but honestly, it is hard work reading and really understanding books like this, and it is long.
Plus, as an regular informed investor, I don't think it is too relevant (or actually, useful) anymore in most ways. The gong show in the financial markets in the last 10 years is obviously predictable from the Austrian standpoint, but how one trades it is beyond me (and they don't proclaim to offer this advice, they are only explaining how the world must work over long periods).
There's no way of knowing who to short, for example...a company or now even an entire country can be obviously walking dead, but they can be suddenly bailed out at any time (with money that literally didn't even actually exist the day before), or, rules that have existed for decades can be changed overnight, and can have your ASS handed to you in one hour, for no good economic reason.
I can see how books like this will be read by historians who will shake their heads at how stupid we were, as the perils were already laid out in detail with historic references, but how it can help an individual living through it at the time, is beyond me.
> I finally broke down and included my "Man, Economy, and State" by Murray N. Rothbard
Too dense for me, reading pace was too slow. It's good, but reading it is hard work. I'd recommend "Mystery of Banking" first, which is smaller in scope, easy to read, very informative.
I have all of my book shelves arranged by color. Some were read, others bought/kept to keep the interior decoration up to snuff. Art School training at its best!
Aaah - I was assuming this was similar to the Ayn Rand's books coming back into vogue during recessions, but I guess Glenn Beck works like a recession... Ron Paul probably increased sales of Rand, Hayek, Von Mises, etc. as well.
She's a terrible writer with huge blindspots, and from what I could make out of Atlas Shrugged, a naive and authority-worshipping view of how the world works. I don't think there's a better antidote to her views than actually reading her books, so poorly are they written.
Is this the same book we're talking about? What is 'authority-worshipping' in it? I honestly can't name one single aspect that can be interpreted in that way.
Yes, almost every chief executive portrayed in the book is described in ridiculously idolatrous fashion, with the direct implication that business leaders - specifically those at the heads of organizations - were all but supermen, that the world would collapse without them, and that when they alone were sequestered away together, they could create a fantastical wonderland of advancement beyond the ken of the plebeian masses.
I was a fanatical Ayn Rand devotee at the age of 17. I highly recommend Ayn Rand to intellectually inclined, socially outcast 17 year old boys who enjoy reading about rough sex, if only because she is less obscure than Nietzsche. ("Less obscure" being a relative term--Rand took great liberties in redefining everyday words like "selfishness", "altruism", "mysticism", "sacrifice", and so forth, quite possibly without realizing it. As confusing as that may be, it's possible to learn and apply Rand's definitions of these words to make sense of her. Interpreting Nietzsche is a much higher order of difficulty, and is recommended to either historians of philosophy or angsty, socially outcast college undergraduates for whom Ayn Rand was not nearly dark enough.)
Philosophically, there are a number of technical points that Rand was wrong about. It's hard to blame her for them, but one is almost forced to because she took herself seriously as a philosopher. (On the other hand, most of the points are of little practical interest.) Chief among this are her failed attempts to rationally justify both knowledge and morality, neither of which are satisfactory in the end. Her grasp of the history of philosophy is poor--she claims Kant as her nemesis while appropriating large parts of Kant's ethics, for instance. These are not entirely unrelated faults--on the points of epistemology where she is able to correctly identify her disagreements with Kant, she fails to grasp the reasons Kant is right and she is wrong.
Her epistemological system (as expressed in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology) is not clearly either descriptive or prescriptive in its outlook--it seems to attempt both, risking incoherence in the process. As a descriptive work, it comes across as an amateur's guess at cognitive psychology, written without a hint of empirical data. As a prescriptive work, it falls short (Rand talks a lot about concepts but doesn't make one hint towards the subject of propositions) and is hampered by the same free-floating departure from empirical reality that hold it back on descriptive terms.
For Rand as a novelist, I have to question anyone whose idea of a dramatic climax is a 30 page speech about philosophy. I'm not even going to make a joke about the rough sex, because all things considered the rough sex kind of fits into the general atmosphere of her books. She's actually a fairly clear writer if you're predisposed to read logically and literally.
There's a lot good to be said about Ayn Rand, and she's not an entirely bad stop on the path of someone's intellectual development. But as a final destination one can do much better.
Considering that you bring up the 'rough sex' twice, and in a way that makes it seem like the books are full of it and that sex forms a fundamental part of the stories and philosophy, I wonder what it is that makes this single one-page scene in one book the center piece of many reflections on her books on general. If it weren't for that one movie (was it "Cruel Intentions"?) I would've mostly forgotten about that passage. This may be because what is considered "highbrow literature" in my mother tongue (Dutch) contains (relative to English-language literature) a lot more sex, and in much more explicit and colorful ways (e.g. Jan Wolkers but also work by Belgians like Jef Geeraerts), and that reading works like these since early adolescence has blunted my sensitivity to this topic; but still - even when I try to abstract from that personal frame of reference, I find it hard to assign to them the weight that is often done (and that you are implying)
On top of that, I resent your attempt at an ad hominem by suggesting that the main audience is sexually hypertensive adolescents. Which is a shame because the rest of your post is sound (even if I don't agree with all of it), and the sophism detracts from that.
It's not so much the sex, it's more the (pretty much) rape. Sure, there's only one rape scene in the books. There's also only one 90-page speech, and only one scene where the death of everybody on board a train is justified because they all just happened to have one silly political view or another. That doesn't stop these three things being at the top of my "things that annoyed me about Ayn Rand" list.
This is a shame as I agree with her on many points. I'd rather people were reading Hayek than Rand, though, he's temperamentally more sensible and less... nutty.
FWIW the death of the people on the train is in no way justified. It is a tragedy. However, everyone on that train was in some part responsible for the disaster due not only their political views but their actual actions.
I'm sure this debate has been had elsewhere at some point in the past, and I don't have the book here anyway. Whether or not the text actually callously celebrates the death of all these folks, it's still a scene which kinda creeped me out, and I'm sure a lot of other people too.
"I wonder what it is that makes this single one-page scene in one book the center piece of many reflections on her books on general."
Aside from the ambiguous rape scene in Fountainhead, there are a couple of fairly aggressive sex scenes in Atlas Shrugged as well. I mentioned it twice among several paragraphs of serious philosophical criticism, but color of the bikeshed and all that.
"On top of that, I resent your attempt at an ad hominem by suggesting that the main audience is sexually hypertensive adolescents."
That part of my post was autobiographical. But still, I think you're fixating on the sex even more than I was--intellectually inclined, socially outcast adolescents without a taste for rough sex are a better audience for Rand than socially accepted or intellectually incurious adolescents could ever be.
"Usually ships in 1 to 3 months." America holds its breath, while somewhere trees are falling for the sake of the free market. Amazon need to conspire with Beck et al. to get these books in stock before the show airs. What would be really impressive would be to see Das Kapital getting to #1 after a Maddow feature.
Great to see a Hayek book at the top of Amazon today! Woo hoo! That's truly great news.
Reading the comments here, looks like Glenn Beck recommended it? Hey, I'll take folks reading Hayek for any reason. An informed citizenry and all of that.
I don't have a popular cable show, but if I did, I'd do a tour of all the great economists. Talk about raising the discussion level. No matter what their politics, I'll never argue with a talking head that tells his followers to go read some well-known and authoritative work. There's really no downside here.
Can't it be both? (I haven't actually read it, but it's on my to-do list. Apparently not very soon, since every copy in the US has just been sold three times over...)
I think you were down voted unfairly. I know what you mean about the number of conservative views and the support they are given on this site. It may not be more than the normal split in the country, but my experience in the world of tech seems heavily biased to the left so HN really pops out. That said I am in the "People's Republic of Cambridge".
It does stand out when you have a post on Hayek's book sales(which should only really be of interest to his fans) receiving a number of upvotes. I don't know if I've ever seen the likes of Kropotkin, Bakunin, or even Marx get posts like that here. Then again, should they? Perhaps if we're having a discussion of an author's political philosophy as it relates to current tech-oriented issues. Otherwise, I don't necessarily see the relevance for HN.
I don't think the number of "conservative views" on HN is particularly high. There is an exceptional number of semi-libertarians. Hayek is of particular interest because he is one of the few economists to be at least well-respected thinker by the left and the right. I posted the link because I thought it was a very interesting development, not because I found it self-gratifying. I'd be equally curious if Das Kapital showed up as #1. (It ceased to be interesting once it was pointed out that it was bumped due to Beck.)
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] thread(While today it is #1, it has been in the top 100 a lot recently.)
(Although, part of me would prefer it if you were wrong...)
And if you want enough irony to fill half of Williamsburg: I do own "The Road to Serfdom", haven't read it this far. (It is one of the few books I brought along to the US with me, so as soon as I manage to crawl through frickin' Blood Meridian, it's going to be next).
Plus, as an regular informed investor, I don't think it is too relevant (or actually, useful) anymore in most ways. The gong show in the financial markets in the last 10 years is obviously predictable from the Austrian standpoint, but how one trades it is beyond me (and they don't proclaim to offer this advice, they are only explaining how the world must work over long periods).
There's no way of knowing who to short, for example...a company or now even an entire country can be obviously walking dead, but they can be suddenly bailed out at any time (with money that literally didn't even actually exist the day before), or, rules that have existed for decades can be changed overnight, and can have your ASS handed to you in one hour, for no good economic reason.
I can see how books like this will be read by historians who will shake their heads at how stupid we were, as the perils were already laid out in detail with historic references, but how it can help an individual living through it at the time, is beyond me.
Too dense for me, reading pace was too slow. It's good, but reading it is hard work. I'd recommend "Mystery of Banking" first, which is smaller in scope, easy to read, very informative.
Free here:
http://mises.org/books/mysteryofbanking.pdf
http://josephflaherty.tumblr.com/post/30953971/one-of-my-col...
Via Marginal Revolution, http://hayekcenter.org/?p=2719
http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/books/04/27/ayn.rand.atlas.s...
Also, have you actually read any of her books, or only reviews of her books? Not trying to be antagonistic, its a genuine question.
http://www.amazon.com/People-Believe-Weird-Things-Pseudoscie...
Philosophically, there are a number of technical points that Rand was wrong about. It's hard to blame her for them, but one is almost forced to because she took herself seriously as a philosopher. (On the other hand, most of the points are of little practical interest.) Chief among this are her failed attempts to rationally justify both knowledge and morality, neither of which are satisfactory in the end. Her grasp of the history of philosophy is poor--she claims Kant as her nemesis while appropriating large parts of Kant's ethics, for instance. These are not entirely unrelated faults--on the points of epistemology where she is able to correctly identify her disagreements with Kant, she fails to grasp the reasons Kant is right and she is wrong.
Her epistemological system (as expressed in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology) is not clearly either descriptive or prescriptive in its outlook--it seems to attempt both, risking incoherence in the process. As a descriptive work, it comes across as an amateur's guess at cognitive psychology, written without a hint of empirical data. As a prescriptive work, it falls short (Rand talks a lot about concepts but doesn't make one hint towards the subject of propositions) and is hampered by the same free-floating departure from empirical reality that hold it back on descriptive terms.
For Rand as a novelist, I have to question anyone whose idea of a dramatic climax is a 30 page speech about philosophy. I'm not even going to make a joke about the rough sex, because all things considered the rough sex kind of fits into the general atmosphere of her books. She's actually a fairly clear writer if you're predisposed to read logically and literally.
There's a lot good to be said about Ayn Rand, and she's not an entirely bad stop on the path of someone's intellectual development. But as a final destination one can do much better.
On top of that, I resent your attempt at an ad hominem by suggesting that the main audience is sexually hypertensive adolescents. Which is a shame because the rest of your post is sound (even if I don't agree with all of it), and the sophism detracts from that.
This is a shame as I agree with her on many points. I'd rather people were reading Hayek than Rand, though, he's temperamentally more sensible and less... nutty.
Aside from the ambiguous rape scene in Fountainhead, there are a couple of fairly aggressive sex scenes in Atlas Shrugged as well. I mentioned it twice among several paragraphs of serious philosophical criticism, but color of the bikeshed and all that.
"On top of that, I resent your attempt at an ad hominem by suggesting that the main audience is sexually hypertensive adolescents."
That part of my post was autobiographical. But still, I think you're fixating on the sex even more than I was--intellectually inclined, socially outcast adolescents without a taste for rough sex are a better audience for Rand than socially accepted or intellectually incurious adolescents could ever be.
Although, he'd probably do better to show everyone this (it's educational, hilarious and very well done): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk
Reading the comments here, looks like Glenn Beck recommended it? Hey, I'll take folks reading Hayek for any reason. An informed citizenry and all of that.
I don't have a popular cable show, but if I did, I'd do a tour of all the great economists. Talk about raising the discussion level. No matter what their politics, I'll never argue with a talking head that tells his followers to go read some well-known and authoritative work. There's really no downside here.