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ARI is EVIL, 2001/07/10:08:46

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There is evil loose in the world. This is not news, but sometimes the scope, the magnitude and most of all the self-righteousness of it stuns me anew. The page linked above is part of the Ayn Rand Institute's "Student Survival Guide", which ought to be subtitled "How to go to college and keep your prejudices intact." I was a teenage objectivist. I know how detrimental just reading a few disparaging lines of Rand and Peikoff on quantum mechanics was. Now we live in the world of the Web, where David Harriman can spew rubbish into young, impressionable minds everywhere, spouting nonsense like: Einstein's theory of relativity is a mathematical formalism describing "appearances," not a causal theory of the physical world (the claim that "space" and "time" are distorted relative to the observer is not a physical explanation). Quantum theory is even more irrational: it denies that the fundamental constituents of matter have specific properties. According to the theory, particles exist in an unreal state characterized as a "superposition" of contradictory properties (the specific properties observed are allegedly created by the act of observation). Many physicists boast that the experimental validation of quantum theory has "refuted reality." Now, aside from the fact that Harriman has conflated one interpretation of quantum theory with the theory itself, he has also failed to mention the two features that quantum theory and relativity have that no alternative theory has: They precisely describe virtually all known aspects of reality, as demonstrated by more experiments than you can imagine They do not describe anything that is not reality--that is, they don't require us to believe in the existence of things that cannot be demonstrated by experiment. To a rational individual, rather than a mindless ideologue who has decided what reality must be without bothering to actually consult the universe on the question, these are considered to be important features of a description of reality: that it describe what is real, and nothing but. That reality does not conform to our prejudices is perhaps unfortunate. But the fact is it does not conform, and misleading young people by encouraging them to resist the truth is simply evil--no different than teaching children that the world was created in 4004 B.C. or that women are fundamentally inferior to men. The ARI is the new Comprachios.

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