The idea of humans being "imperfect" is not in reference to a Webster's definition, but in comparison to the religious notion of the deity's perfection.
If one believes that Mankind is not some imperfect reflection of a perfect deity whom he must serve, then any notion of perfection must be realizable by humans. So in theory a man or woman could be perfect.
Rand writes about these larger than life types of people. Most of us only see shades of them in ourselves or people we know, but it sure beats the idea of guilt/imperfection as a birthright thanks to original sin!
I bring this up b/c western culture is so heavily influenced by Christianity that it pollutes even people's secular understanding of what perfection means.
As I recall someone got a 10 at the olympics this year.
You're putting words in my mouth (or at least attributing meaning to my words that I never intended) and trying to frame the debate. I am not Christian, nor do I count myself as a member of any organised religion. Such concepts as original sin and all that come with them hold no power for me and I certainly don't agree with them.
My concept of humans being inherently imperfect comes directly from and is directly in reference to the dictionary definition. I think I have already made my point about the attainment of perfection implicitly meaning that further improvement is impossible and how this can only be a bad thing for humanity. Who wants to live in a world where the best has already been?
If however, proponents of Objectivism wish to redefine and narrow the meaning of the words "perfect" and "imperfect" in order to make some point against certain misguided religious concepts, then that is their business. I could only suggest that perhaps they try using different words to avoid future confusion.
Someone got a 10 at the Olympics? Well done them. You may be interested in this story:
But in any case, now it seems that you're switching back and arguing that the dictionary definition of "perfect" is attainable by a human. And it was a good argument too, untill it occurred to me that scores are assigned by imperfect human judges.
I don't see the human inability to attain perfection as a negative, quite the opposite actually. It keeps us growing.
I think that Rand and people who agree with her work see perfection as a relative thing. In her books, the "perfect protagonists" are the ones who always live life according to moral values without ever slipping, and who manage to persevere and create great things. That's perfection in her books: always doing your best, and your ACTUAL best rather than a measly excuse of a best. And when the guy mentions perfect people, I think that's what he's talking about.
Not being intimately familiar with her works, I can only take your word for this. If that is the case, then that seems logical and I have no problem with people being encouraged to do their best.
However, that is not the impression that I got from Brook's quotes. The word "perfect" has one meaning, it is not a relative thing. If you don't actually mean "perfect" then use another word.
I still see a strain of absolutism showing through when you say "the "perfect protagonists" are the ones who always live life according to moral values without ever slipping"... Where do these moral values come from? Who agreed that they are the values worthy of being adhered to? And they live life true to these values "Without ever slipping"? Sounds like we're looking at the dictionary definition of "perfect" again... If there's one place where this kind of perfection could be achieved, I guess it would have to be in a fictional book.
I answered you elsewhere: I think that "perfect" is not necessarily an absolute. It doesn't always mean "incapable of being better." It means "having all desirable traits." It's like if I call somebody unparalleled. It doesn't mean they CAN'T be paralleled, it just means they AREN'T.
Rand says in her works that moral values must come entirely from logic and reasoning, and that that's why her philosophy can be held as a moral absolute: because if it ISN'T logical, she encourages you to disagree with her. It's why people who agree with her seem to do so fanatically: because they're convinced by logic and nothing else that they are right.
And Rand admits from the start that her works portray ideals and nothing more. In her line of thinking if she portrayed only characters with flaws it would make her books subjective and less reliable as a philosophical guide. Nonetheless, there are people who try to live by her words, and many people who have succeeded immensely because of them.
But you've just made my point for me. If you, Rand, Brook and anyone else used the word "unparalleled" in place of "perfect" as it relates to this discussion, then at least the majority of our conversation probably wouldn't have taken place. It's not the same as "perfect". It's not even the same as "having all desirable traits" which is in fact identical to the actual meaning of "perfect". If one has "all desirable traits", "all" being an absolute term, then logically there are no more traits worth acquiring.
You started out asking me what possible downside there could be to a person believing they are capable of perfection. After I answered, you took the fallback position that perfection isn't actually perfection. You seem a bit all over the place justifying your argument.
Sorry I'm just not buying it. And I'm sure if you were going to buy my argument, you would have done so by now. so I think we will have to just agree to disagree.
I don't disagree. I was not trying to accuse you of being a Christian, just arguing using a bit of hyperbole -- which was intended to be entertaining b/c in particular a lot of Christians don't care for Rand's ideas... :)
The point of a novel of ideas is not that you agree with every single idea within, but that the novel presents the ideas in a way that brings out their power in a concrete way.
Ayn Rand didn't want people to form a religion, so please don't feel that you have to apologize for "agreeing" with some aspects of her fiction. Those who try to paint Rand's philosophy that way are looking at it through the timid, dark-ages lens of their religion, in which everything is black and white, the way George W. Bush's "good vs evil" nonsense is.
You have too much taste for Atlas Shrugged because of your illustrious bloodline?
If reading Atlas Shrugged is too much work for your taste, then I think the actual ideas contained in it would surely be quite distasteful to you, but I guess the world will never know.
Yes, I do have too much taste to work through Atlas Shrugged, and I attribute this at least partially to good parenting. It always saddens me to read about good minds softened by the writings of Ayn Rand, and I shudder to think about the sorts of childhoods they must have had.
But Catcher in the Rye is a great and captivating story in its own right and doesn't really need to be replaced... though it would be great if schools taught edgier fiction these days.
The article doesn't suggest any books to replace Catcher in the Rye
Scroll down, that's the third one on the list - but yes, I missed them at first glance too, looked like an ad block. I suppose in a way it is and ad block...
the URL is part of the UI, both to the user and to api consumers.
If you think of it that way, REST makes a lot of sense. Sure there can be other elegant approaches, but REST is one that has gathered steam b/c it addresses this in a logical, useful way.
He asked for an example of a web service that doesn't follow the RESTful model. I replied to his request. My point is that almost no web service is truly "RESTful".
Well, I guess it depends how you define "FIT". It's possible to shoehorn just about any service into just about any model, but that doesn't make it a good idea. For example, sending email by doing a PUT to some newly created URL is silly. There's a reason that the english language has more than 5 verbs.
Right, closer analogy would be object oriented programming, where some methods are standard (constructor->post, destructor->delete, copy->get, assignment->put) and some are totally type specific. The point of REST is that these type specific methods do not have to pollute your core / transport and can happily reside in your client libraries.
Sending email is best mapped to POST (create), not PUT (update), and the URL doesn't change for POST.
I think perhaps we're talking about a different aspect of REST.
What I find annoying is people objecting to "POST /actions/subscribe" (with the params in the post body) because it's "non-RESTful" -- the url is a verb and REST demands a noun.
REST doesn't demand a noun. If they all have the same code backing them, there's no functional difference between:
POST /actions/subscribe
and
POST /subscriptions
and
POST /abcdef1234567890
The shape of a URL has nothing to do with REST. However, if a lot of your URLs contain verbs it suggests that you aren't doing REST. It's a design odor.
This is a fun question. I don't, but I'm curious what you think are the most persuasive examples of services that don't fit.
One that comes to mind is a service with semantics that require a preview step. Sure you can use create/read/update via the REST verbs, but I think a lot of the confusion on this issue comes from wanting to embed the concept of events, so a read may be for the purpose of previewing an item, but it feels more natural to fire a "confirm" event than to do a post with a field called state=cofirmed.
At least that's my personal opinion. I agree that any service can be mapped given sufficient creativity, but it often seems like extra work in the context I described.
You can think of RESTful approach as an extreme case of object oriented programming when your methods are limited to CRUD.
Obviously there are cases when there's more than one way to change the state of the object that are only relevant to that object type. In the web world usually the full object state is already on the client so it is not a big deal. You can have your special methods in the client side library and still expose only CRUD methods in the service API.
