| | Bridget, I don't know the man from Adam. I was just googling around to see if there were objectivists involved with Second Life. I take it that you're a veteran member then?
I haven't seen any overt hostility toward the VRs yet from objectivists, but there has always been that rationalist tendancy that Piekoff remarks in self-criticizm occasionally. When micro-computers came along, I had a background in both computers and Montessori, and so someone who followed the objectivist scene much more closely than I loaned me a set of tapes by Piekoff on education...
It's been over a decade since then and details are hazy in my memory but what I recall that was obvious immediately was that he had simply not done his homework, or checked the facts on the ground, and his positions were virtually worthless. He clearly knew little or nothing about Montessori, or early childhood enrichment, even though both were covered in Rand's newsletters, and in books recommended by her, and he knew even less about computers or especially how they could revolutionize education. What he did present was a very traditional system based on a strict hierarchy that Howard Roark would have laughed at.
The logic of his position was very nice, but the premises were largely unsound, antiquated or did not reflect true fundamentals, and thus the impecable logic led to worthless conclusions.
In the early '90's I used to attend a monthly objectivist party in Los Angeles fairly regularly. Several of the other members were professional computer systems programmers. I recall arguing with one guy who had worked for Novell about the importance of objectivists getting in on the ground floor, making sure that we were included in the data bases, that the root definitions that would be used by search engines, etc., reflect valid epistemology. He basically told me that my worries reflected my immense ignorance.
Of course, if he had taken my worries a bit more seriously, then he and perhaps I, as well, who did not have web access yet, would have realized the potential of the domain name properties and we might both be very rich.
That very epistemological advantage is still lieing like a rusted sword, largely unused for anything practical, although I did hear that Kelley was hired by some huge data conglomorate or some such thing to design their underlying logic engines. Perhaps all is not lost...
Maybe it's still too early. But the VRs like SL are growing like weeds and mutating into strange fruits indeed. Too bad if they are not used to their real full potential.
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