Sandy

This is the best Dortmunder book so far — he's actually useful in making a plan, and all of the characters are likeable, and it's much less formulaic than most of the books, AND it's not way too long like Drowned Hopes!

Originally posted at: http://sandymaguire.me/blog/atlas-shrugged
See my list of favorite quotes from the book here: http://sandymaguire.me/books/ayn-rand-atlas-shrugged.html

60 long days ago, at the suggestion of my good friend Ariel Weingarten, I started reading Atlas Shrugged. I didn't really know anything about it going in, except that it was the Objectivist manifesto, the Objectivists were pretty similar to the Libertarians, and that nobody seemed capable of reading it without having strong feelings on it. Everyone who made it through either seemed to absolutely love it, or completely hate it coming out. As far as I could tell, there was no middle ground.

I wasn't sure how I felt about Atlas Shrugged during the course of my reading it, so I asked around. Literally everyone I met, whose opinion I thought might be illuminating was asked “have you ever read Atlas Shrugged? What did you think about it?” Reactions were mixed, even between people with relatively similar backgrounds. My mother hated it; her childhood friend, my (paternal) aunt, couldn't say enough good things about it.

Me, I think I'm in the “liked it” camp. I don't think I liked it enough to read any other Rand, and I don't think I liked it enough to read it again, but I'm pretty sure I firmly liked it. But enough about me. Let's talk about the book. I'm not going to intentionally spoil the book, but I will include any details necessary for the plot. Reader beware.

There are so many things I want to address in this novel, and so in lieu of a better ordering, I will start from the beginning. I read an e-book copy of Atlas Shrugged, and I'm glad it did, because otherwise I might not have started it. Atlas Shrugged is a heaving 1200 page monolith, a fact I was blissfully unaware of until a month in. Physically lugging that thing around would have been lame, and an eternal reminder of how much more Atlas Shrugged I had to read.

What first struck me, as I waded through the initial chapters, was the prose. Rand has a very particular brand of writing; I get the impression that not only would I be able to identify unattributed excerpts to her based on the writing style alone, I would also be able to distinguish it from those attempting to write in her style. Rand unashamedly jumps for both similes that express more the emotional attitude of the situation than anything which might actually describe what is going on, and for similes that aren't similes but actually just tell you more about what is going on. It's jarring. Compare:

It was a sense of freedom, as if he stood alone in the midst of an endless sweep of clean air, with only the memory of some weight that had been torn off his shoulders. It was the feeling of an immense deliverance. It was the knowledge that it did not matter to him what Lillian felt, what she suffered or what became of her, and more: not only that it did not matter, but the shining, guiltless knowledge that it did not have to matter.

and

He talked earnestly, but in a casual manner, as if they both understood that this was not the main subject of their interview; yet, oddly, he spoke not in the tone of a foreword, but in the tone of a postscript, as if the main subject had been settled long ago.

As such, I found myself indexing quotes much more frequently than I do for most literature. I would highlight quotes for their sense of poetry, or because they expressed thoughts that I knew I could never experience, or because they were inspiring. My list of quotes for this book is thusly surprisingly long for the actual content that I got out of it.

Let me elaborate on that point. Rand's skill as a writer is in her world building, and certainly not in her storytelling. The plot can be summarized without fear of spoilers as this:

some assholes do bad things to our main characters
our main characters overcome it
nothing has changed
rinse and repeat
There's no sense of rising stakes, or of dramatic tension, or anything really. The novel is more about the eventual collapse of the system, really due to nobody's actions but the zeitgeist at large. Interesting world building, certainly, but not much in the way of a story. But then again, it might not be a fair complaint, as the novel doesn't try very hard to pretend to be anything other than a framework to hang Rand's philosophy on top of.

In that way, I'd compare it unfavorably to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is also unashamedly little but a clothesline for Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality. I say “unfavorably”, because, despite this, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has one of the greatest climaxes of any novel I have ever read. Despite being mostly a interesting-if-wrong treatise into weird philosophy, it still manages to be entertaining as a work of fiction.

I'm not sure I can say that about Atlas Shrugged. I read Atlas Shrugged more as a warning about the future, and a entertaining character study in stoicism. A warning about the future because I think Rand's forecasting is pretty good, and a entertaining study in that I found myself wanting to be more and more like the protagonists in my everyday life, as they struggle against indifferent oppression.

To that end, I was reminded immensely of H. P. Lovecraft's work as I made my way through Atlas Shrugged. I would be very surprised to learn if Rand hadn't been a literary fan of Lovecraft at some point during her life. The reason I say this is that there is no clear overarching antagonist in the novel. There are some agents ostensibly pulling the strings, but they're ultimately incompetent and really not very good at slowing down the protagonists. What is, however, is this cold, clammy sense of doom that pervades the work, that nothing the protagonists do can possibly change anything; that some blind idiot god, much too big for anyone to even comprehend, let alone stop, is ultimately influencing the world for the worse. As a matter of fact, the end of the novel is more the protagonists winning a war of attrition against society and the powers-that-be than it is about them actually winning. It's kinda frustrating, honestly.

I liked Atlas Shrugged, I think, because it gave me some clearer means of expressing a lot of the philosophy already in my head. I suspect this is why other people like it, as well. What Atlas Shrugged does not strike me as, is being good at changing people's philosophy. If you are not already Objectivist/Libertarian-leaning coming into it, I would imagine Atlas Shrugged would push you away in horror. The reason behind this, I expect, is that none of the antagonists (who are ultimately agents of other philosophies) are likable in the least. Let me explain.

If you want to turn people to your side, you need them to identify with you, and then very slowly and very gently show them how your point of view succeeds in places that theirs fails. Atlas Shrugged's biggest failing point is that there are no sympathetic non-Objectivists. Everyone who is not an Objectivist is painted as undeniably evil, completely incompetent, and has no redeeming features whatsoever. Unfortunately, I didn't save any quotes along these lines, but every antagonist spouts out lines like “It's not my fault! It couldn't be helped! There's nothing I could have done!” almost as frequently as they get a chance to speak. The bad guys are all straw-men, and so it's no wonder that so many people can't stand this book.

If you tell your readers that they are evil and that their entire world-views are wrong, don't expect them to thank or forgive you.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a book that gets this overwhelmingly right. In Methods of Rationality, you know Quirrell is Voldemort within the first ten chapters, but that doesn't stop you from spending most of the book thinking “wow, he has a point there.” Yudkowsky has written about how he tried to make all of his bad guys convincing, and I think this is a much stronger way of bringing people into the fold. Find a point of view that your readers can relate to, and slowly subvert it until it's the viewpoint you want them to take away. Don't immediate vilify anybody, because that's just asking to piss people off.

Along those lines, I think Atlas Shrugged would be a better novel if it were written by somebody else. Dagny Taggart is to Ayn Rand as Wesley Crusher is to Gene Rodenberry. That's not to say that I'm immune to this in my writing, but I will say have significantly more self-control than Rand does. Throughout the course of the novel, no fewer than five major, important characters fall in love with Dagny, including the world's top three leading industrialist men, and a married, heterosexual woman. It gets particularly icky during some of the sex scenes, which are thankfully not graphic, but certainly consentually uneasy. Dagny is continually being “taken” by “men who know that she is theirs”. This quote is taken out of context, but it is exceptionally similar to ones which are not:

Ownership—she thought, glancing back at him—weren't there those who knew nothing of its nature and doubted its reality? No, it was not made of papers, seals, grants and permissions. There it was—in his eyes.

Dagny's body keeps being “owned” by those willing to take it, which, you know, is cool and all if it's what she's into. But also I kept being reminded that Dagny Taggart is actually just Ayn Rand, and I was reading all about the sexual fantastics of the author without wanting to. Prudish? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe fuck yourself. Furthermore, this is kind of a weird position for the book to take, whose underlying philosophy is that things belong to those willing to work for them. It's consistent, yeah, if you squint, but remember that Dagny is the primary protagonist and it is not her who is working for these things. It distracts from Rand's point, but I don't know, maybe she's just old fashioned.

Actually, speaking of which, I was shocked to learn that this novel was published in 1999. It struck me as a very '50s kind of thing. But then again, never mind. In doing my research for this paragraph actually it was first published in '57, so there you go.

Along those lines though, the novel is very good about not dating itself. I picked up only on the '50s thing based on the writing style and general attitudes of the characters. I mean, it doesn't mention computers or cellphones, but it also barely mentions television. It reads a little like a grimy noir, thus my era guess. The reason I bring this up, is that, like a lot of culture from before my time, I don't know how to put it into context. When I watched Sunset Boulevard, I wasn't sure if Norma Desmond was weird as shit, or if that was just a cultural thing of the era. It's hard to separate fiction from lost culture.

Atlas Shrugged held me in such a state for most of the way through. The philosophical arguments the characters fight against are never named, just described, and their descriptions don't exactly match any viewpoints I've ever encountered. There's a vague sense of disliking postmodernism, and a huge sense of hating communism, but the two feel entangled and mistaken for one another. Again, I'm not too sure what to take away from this, maybe like Plato, it's a critique of philosophies that don't exist anymore. Maybe I'm ignorant of something. Or, maybe Rand just didn't know what she was talking about.

I'm not sure which, but one of the three seems very likely. Your guess is as good as mine.

So that's the majority of my review. I just have a few nits to pick because I can't help myself. It's probably a good thing that Rand focuses Atlas Shrugged as a philosophical narrative more than, say, a sci-fi. I say this, because it too easily could have been science fiction, and it would have been really poor science fiction. One of the protagonists creates an engine that can pull energy literally out of thin air, and goes on to use it to light his house and, later, power a small village. Yawn. A few chapters later, some guys make a giant sound gun that is capable of destroying anything it shoots. Guess what they use it for? Absolutely nothing interesting. It's a really cool idea both technically and sociologically, and Rand falls flat on her face in both regards. Maybe I've been spoiled by the likes of Worm which manages the impressive feat of using magic to its full potential, but it's really frustrating watching all of the in-universe genius characters fail to do anything interesting with an infinite energy source.

While I'm complaining about small things, the twists in this book are... not very good twists. With the exception of one minor one, I saw every one coming at least 300 pages in advance. Where all the capable industrialists were going, what it was called, who invented the infinite energy machine, stuff like that. Maybe it's through cultural osmosis, but I doubt it.

Before I end this review, I want to discuss some of the reception that I've seen to it. Among my friends who didn't like it, I've heard the words “disgusting”, “ruthless” and “dystopian” used. I don't get it. I would describe the hapless antagonists with those words, but not the novel. My mother described it along the lines of “it makes the case that everything is just about money,” which I don't think is the point. To me, the idea is more that everything is about accomplishment, and in fact, this strikes me as being the central theme of the book.

A friend and I were recently discussing Elon Musk, and she was of the opinion that maybe investing in Mars wasn't the best way for him to spend his money. This struck me as a very strange argument: I think what Atlas Shrugged has given me is the opinion that really, it's his money, and he can spend it however he pleases. Anyone who has a differing idea on what to do with a few billion dollars is welcome to make their own, and then spend it in that way. What I'm trying to say is that this novel has given me a better appreciation for people who put their money where their mouthes are. It's one thing to be confident about what someone else should do with their fortunes, and a very different beast to have to put your own money on the line. To my friend's benefit, she took a moment to consider this, and agreed that maybe she should be working towards a few billion, which is a marvelous attitude.

To me, what Atlas Shrugged is saying is not that we should never help anybody, but we should never help those who will never provide us any benefit in return. Any other strategy has an attractive Nash Equilibrium where everybody seeks to receive without returning. The novel is not coy about this point: there's a sixty page diatribe on the point. Rand understands economics: people respond to incentives. She also seems to understand evolutionary game theory: behaviors that can be systematically selected against will be. To me, Atlas Shrugged is a loud warning that communism isn't self-reinforcing, that it can't possibly survive in the long term because it incentivizes communists against communism. And she called it, communism did break down in exactly the ways she predicted. Socialists can hem and haw until the cows come home that maybe communism just wasn't implemented properly, and that might be true, but Rand has history on her side, and the socialists have squat.

As a consolation prize, Rand also makes the argument that maybe this hyper-capitalist behavior is not as exploitative as it sounds on its surface:

The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the ‘competition' between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of ‘exploitation' for which you have damned the strong.

It's harsh, yes, but I really appreciate the sentiment behind this quote: “bugger off, stay out of my way, and there will be enough spoils for us both to enjoy.” That pretty much sums up my attitude. There's more greatness in this world than we humans can ever hope to exhaust, and in the absence of any god, humanity is all that we have, and human values are all that matter. Rand's argument, and one that I tend to agree with, is that the values we should cherish most are those that bring us collectively as much greatness as possible. She is saying that we must never share our greatness with others, but only that we ask them to share theirs with us in return.

Don't let the introduction of this book fool you! While the front-matter is enticing and exciting, the rest of the book fails to live up to these expectations. This book manages to make an exciting topic boring and hard to suffer through via a combination of flowery, say-nothing prose and a focus on the people rather than the math.

OK, I get it – for the most part, readers do want people stories over math, but those are not the people who are going to be reading this book. Know your audience, Eric Temple Bell. I would not recommend this book in the slightest.

If you're looking for a book that presents the history of nerdy shit well, treat yourself to “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” and skip over this drivel.

Too much technobabble. The author is clearly just throwing cool sounding words together without knowing what they mean. But as someone who knows what all the words mean, it's awfully distracting to have to suspend my disbelief every paragraph about this supposed future technology. Abandoned.

Haskell reinvigorated my love for programming, lifting it up a meta-level and forcing me to reevaluate the way I look at the world.

It's a little below average for a Discworld book, but it's a fun read.

It's just a bunch of Paul Graham's superb essays collected into one book. Unfortunately the selection of technical posts is showing its age. I'd give the first half of the book five stars and the latter half three, so decided to settle on four. You probably aren't going to have your toes tickled by the second half if you aren't ROBUSTLY INTO LISP.

Quick read (~30 minutes?), well worth its weight in inspiration. Go buy a copy, hell I'll buy you one. You won't regret it.

Less lucid than my usual reviews, but here are some thoughts I thought while reading this book. Maybe I'll come back and clean it up. Maybe not. Who knows.

—

succinctly captures the idea of bullshit jobs

shows that having an objective measure of how good is your work is important, and helps separate jobs from bullshit jobs

ikea and buildabear are probably marketed explicitly with the idea that you have to build it yourself. this is the empty calories of doing things with our hands. designing a home by shopping at ikea is merely choice, and not craft or skill. everything has been pre-vetted for being good enough. what differentiates real things? where do we draw the line at actually learning?

^ the process seems to be explicitly one of giving it your all and coming up short, and learning how to do better for next time. the iterated fixed point is where you become a master.

things you build yourself, even if they aren't perfect, are much more important to us. it's easy to see how you might keep a coffee table you built for decades. we take pride in them.

the mechanic has a fiduciary resp. to the customer, but a moral resp to the bike he's fixing. these responsibilities are in tension

the world is being more and more infantilized, as we remove choices, and the responsibility (or even the capability) of understanding from people. sears catalogues used to include schematics of everything they sold — assuming you'd want to know. this is no longer the case. on one hand that's good; it allows us to focus on the things we care about. but the majority of things being built today are intentionally tamper-proof; assuming that you are not smart enough, or allowed to be fucking with your own stuff. do we even own our own stuff anymore?

relatedly, the relationship of democracy and absentee capitalism implies problems are not any one person's responsibility. our global institutions require so many moving pieces that it's impossible to find someone to blame when something goes wrong. cf how terrible customer service is; because everything is so specialized, the people you are talking to have no understanding, no power, and no responsibility. management he says is mostly spent dealing this ambiguity to cover your ass.

misunderstanding of culture; presumably it's what makes a place successful, which is an important detail to capture when you are globalizing

complete misunderstanding of abstraction, and its value. he dismisses his dad as being a man who “traffics in abstractions,” saying ohms law is useless because it doesn't help you fix motorcycles. no, but it does help you BUILD motorcycles. and electronics. abstractions let us deal with the world and understand bigger things than human minds can comfortably contain.

very good description of the experience of mechanics/engineering. the minute to minute frustrations, and sorts of problems you need to deal with. despite having never touched(?) a motorcycle, this chapter resonated the FUCK out of me with dealing with computer systems.

I listened to this on audio. It was a worthwhile read, but presented few (if any) new ideas to me, someone well-versed in the motivation literature. That being said, I'd recommend it to anyone interested in motivation or who finds themselves “lost”.

This, up there with “The Truth,” “Night Watch,” and “Guards! Guards!” is the best Discworld book. It's oddly inspiring, that all people really want is a show, and are willing to look the other way on most everything if you give it to them.

A fun book and good introduction to mnemonic techniques, but I found it to be more of an exercise in storytelling rather than a how-to of remembering everything.

I read this book a little over a month ago and have no memories of it. It was OK I guess?

I liked it, but I think most of the book has made it into contemporary culture; I found myself not learning as many things from it as I expected to.

Surprisingly delightful. It's the right mix of nostalgia, funny stories about Dumbledore, Harry and Draco smoking in the back alleyway, and hard-hitting emotional stuff. I'm by no means a Harry Potter aficionado, but this book struck the right chord for me. Strongly recommended.

Helped identify /lots/ of potential failure modes for my one-day startup.

I've been thoroughly disappointed with most of the Discworld books I've read since reacquainting with the series as an adult, but Making Money is a welcome reprise. Moist is a fun protagonist, and there are enough side-stories going to keep everything interesting. Crucially, this book doesn't fall prey to the common Pratchett plot point problem, where he spectacularly fails at foreshadowing but never resolving it. This book isn't 5 stars due to the central plot being a small portion of the actual story.

HASKELL IS SO COOL. Also this book slaps.

Ehh. I couldn't get into it. This book presents as a journalistic endeavour, but its chocked full of weasel words which caused me to feel like I was being sold something. Maybe it's a good book, but I didn't care enough about the premise to wade in.

A fun history of the first seven astronauts, as well as the political and cultural factors that got them there. Perhaps most notable about the book is its fun gonzo-esque style; I thought I was reading a novel for the first hundred pages.

Holy shit. I've always been a sucker for film noir, but Chandler has never done it for me. After a weird one man show in which I was reminded about LA Confidential, I picked up a copy (in book format) and it sat on my dresser for a few months, slept on.

Foolish me. What a book! Gritty noir that makes you feel dirty and have contempt for humanity. By my read, there isn't a single redeemable character in the cast of over 100—whom Ellroy somehow manages to differentiate enough that it's not too hard to remember who's who.

Ellroy's style is punchy and omits most words. LA Confidential doesn't read like anything else I've ever read—it's more evocative of imagery and feelings than it actually tells you what's going on. Sometimes it gets rather hectic and thus confusing, but as a whole it's excellent and somehow refreshing. Not a book I'd expect to use to describe a book about police brutality, political corruption, non-stop murder, prostitution, revenge, gang rapes, and aggressive amounts of drug abuse, but we can all be surprised.

This book is showing its age. Or it's aimed at liberal arts majors. Or something. What I did gleem from it is that it's not for me. Your mileage may vary, but I'd doubt it.

It's not a very good book, but it is pretty inspiring in terms of “what could life be like if we hadn't grandfathered in all of these really awful car things.” I think of myself as a pretty radical anti-car sort, but this book gave me an appreciation for all the awful things about cars I hadn't noticed. The book itself is not worth a read, but it is certainly worth a skim.

This is a fantastic, highly-actionable book that you won't regret reading. Insofar as it's a guide to the good life, it boils down to a few high-level principles:

* Be happy with what you've got
* Don't worry about things you can't change
* Strive to become stronger by intentionally putting yourself into uncomfortable situations

They're great high-level goals, and the remainder of the book is tactics for achieving them (and some boring history stuff.)

This book is so good that I'll buy you a copy—even if I don't know you :) Just ask!

This text shows its age – it's heavily wordy and pretty light on presenting things in mathematical notation. Although I have never formally studied set theory, I didn't get much out of it, though it did serve to reinforce my knowledge of some of the algebra behind sets.