It seemed to me that EY's point there was not to castigate Rand for not following Bayes, but rather to point out the flaw in ever creating a "closed system":
Science isn't fair. That's sorta the point. An aspiring rationalist in 2007 starts with a huge advantage over an aspiring rationalist in 1957. It's how we know that progress has occurred.
To me the thought of voluntarily embracing a system explicitly tied to the beliefs of one human being, who's dead, falls somewhere between the silly and the suicidal. [...]
The vibrance that Rand admired in science, in commerce, in every railroad that replaced a horse-and-buggy route, in every skyscraper built with new architecture—it all comes from the principle of surpassing the ancient masters.
Moreover, this isn't a "premise". EY is not assuming a premise that Rand (or anyone else) is bad-because-not-Bayesian; he is using Objectivism as an example of what has elsewhere been called "worshiping the finger that points to the moon."
Well, you could read The Last Psychiatrist; some of his posts are on the topic that the first one is just pseudo-feminism because if you pay attention, the protagonist does little or nothing except initially volunteer and then be helped by others.
The protagonist's backstory (and first-chapter-or-two-story) is that she's been spending years sneaking under a security fence to hunt game, keeping her sister and mother from starvation and prostitution after her father died. Anti-feminist still? Two decisions to save other lives by risking one's own is still above average, no? I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of imaginary protagonists have done more, but real-life examples, particularly of teenagers, are less common.
Eliezer may claim that "it is an unvarying rule of fiction that problems are solved by protagonists", and maybe that's important for drama, but the idea that problems are all solved by the same character (or even few characters) is obviously grossly wrong in reality. If an author manages to pull off a story in which the plot-advancing choices are evenly split among many characters but the readers aren't put off by that, shouldn't we be congratulating Collins on her realism rather than criticizing her for not writing a superhero?
(I have my own criticisms of The Hunger Games, of course - please don't interpret this comment otherwise)
This could be interesting. In no particular order.
I'd add Saber and Irisviel from Fate/Zero, but I haven't seen it yet. No doubt you'd do a bang-up job on Fate/Stay Night's Saber.
As in last month's thread, I'll suggest that in these threads, you don't make a "Books thread" as a parent of "Fiction books" and "Non-fiction books", just make the Fiction Books thread and the Non-fiction books thread, no parent between them.
Easy to remember, if you think to yourself that you're only making one level of parent comments, not a whole hierarchy thereof.
The complete works of J. G. Ballard, looks like. I proposed a daily JGB quotes Twitter on the jgb list (a remarkably high-quality list, mostly because David Pringle is present) and it rapidly became apparent that collecting even a year's worth would be work. Read all of The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash over the weekend, extracting about 400 one-liners from them. The trouble is that Ballard wrote in precise and elaborate sentences, and there were so many perfect fragments that came in at 160-170 characters. Most annoying. But AE and Crash are basically made of one-liners. Now I just need to read the rest so it isn't all cars, sex and Kennedys. And by the way, AE and Crash are fucked-up shit as well as literary genius.
I really enjoyed Crash but found it difficult to read (both for being fucked-up shit and for dense style). I will finish it at some stage.
This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that reading the sequences makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.
Rules: