Reading Response for The Fountainhead by Any Rand

Overall, I liked The Fountainhead. It is a great book for thinking and ideas. I personally liked Anthem by Ayn Rand better, but that's for another rant. This was not my introduction to Rand.  I had read one of her nonfiction collections a couple years prior, and I enjoyed it as well. On most topics, I would probably agree more with Ayn Rand than the average American.

The Fountainhead works best for me as a provacative philosophical soap opera than a psychologically authentic literary fiction. 

My Responses (mostly critical)

1. Architecture- the topic and subject matter of architecture is a brilliant metaphor. I really liked that. It worked throughout the entire story.

2. Howard Roark- I get Howard Roark is the symbol of Rand's ideal person. Are readers supposed to think everyone, most, or some people can be like Roark? Is it more that the reader should want to be more like Roark?

Roark has no attachments at the beginning of the story. He is asocial and withdrawn. Rand creates a creative genius, as a philosophical ideal, but he comes off as a robotic person. Roark lacks many of the aspects that make humans human.

Even his refusal to conform can be seen as signaling prestige: showing and proving he is better than Keating, Wynand, Toohey, etc.

This goes against Rand's ideal, but wouldn't Roark be better off if he worked for money, bought land, and then built what he wanted? Trade and division of labor! Do what you're best at, so you can do what you want. Instead Roark struggles to get by and barely builds anything for most of the story. His refusal to compromise is a limitation to build. It's about tradeoffs.

With all that said, many people/readers would benefit from being more like Roark than they currently are, especially the Wynands of the world.

3. Peter Keating- Rand makes Keating especially weak and pathetic. I really like how Keating doesn't know who he is. He blindly lives for status and pleasing others. That's all great. I like that he can become a leading architect without being a good architect. That works. Early in the story, Keating is a very competent person: smart, charming, charismatic, probably good looking, probably tall, etc. His success is not random. But, somehow, he becomes a fat, ugly, unhealthy alcoholic loser? I'm not against that happening, but I don't buy how it happened or how pathetic Keating is. 

4. Mrs. Keating- I like her. She selfishly wants what's best for her son. She manipulates her son, and her judgement is bad. She prevents her son from doing what he wants and marrying the person he loves, but she does so selfishly. She wants what she thinks is best for him. Maybe she saw something readers don't get to see about Keating as a child or young man? Either way, Mrs Keating is a good example of why an individual knows what is best for themselves.

5. Melodramatic- the opening scene was almost laughable to me. The dean was such a terrible performance of a real person. It got a lot better after that, but still. It serves Rand's purpose, but it doesn't;t satisfy my literary snobbery. Says more about me than the novel...

6. Caricatures and exaggerations- continuation of the melodrama and my biggest complaint. I don't see real people. I see too much hyperbole to make philosophical points. Rand hates altruism, so the so called Altruist in the story is really an evil super villain. Toohey evolves into a Nietzschean caricature of a will to power maniac as the story unfolds. He has a few good lines, but otherwise is way too pretentious and influential for me to take serious and see as authentic. Other supporting characters present similar issues.

7. Helping others and altruism- I'm skeptical that altruism exists. Helping and doing things for others makes people feel good, gains status, signals wealth. Rand is correct to question people's motives, especially those of the so called selfless ones, but she exaggerates and simplifies those motives in her characters.

8. Culture and Institutions- Rand under appreciates or underplays how culture and institutions contribute to the production of individuals. Roark is dependent on culture and institutions. He and other creative geniuses have been the recipients of culture and collective knowledge. Newton independently developed (so did Leibniz) calculus, but he didn't create calculus in a vacuum. Creatives are taking, borrowing, and building on what was handed down to them. I'd argue culture and institutions are more responsible for the greatest creations than individuals. The US is the Mecca of innovation because of culture, institutions, incentives, and several other factors, not just having lots of self interested individuals.

9. Christianity and religion- Rand under appreciates or underplays how religions/ideas have gone through a selection process. I don't think any religion is true. Some are more useful than others. But religions provide human needs: like solving/improving barriers to cooperation and cohesion. This process is somewhat like a natural selection where the most useful ideas and ritual spread and the less useful die out. 

The selflessness in religions provides some need. Reciprocity is a good example. One shares with others when they have extra, so others will share when they have extra. It's reciprocal, not just free loading. One reasons religion spread is because they created norms like sharing and reciprocity which helped groups cooperate and flourishing.

It goes both ways. People in power trying to take and keep power, but also the masses selecting what works for them. Over time something like an equilibrium is met. Add in institutions, progress, education, science, and personal rights.

So there is probably something to the helping others and acting selfless besides being a means for people in power to control groups of people.

10. Rape. it's interesting that Rand's ideal man comments rape. I read how Rand said it wasn't really rape. I always came across studies identifying rape as a common fantasy for women and I assume Rand was probably writing some of her fantasies. Still there are two instances where Dominique first thinks Roark raped her and then second tells Wynand.

11. Dominique and Wynand- these are the two most interest characters in the story. 

Dominique is another extreme. She seems way too depressed to me. Her motivation and desire to punish herself is almost laughable.

Wynand gets off on breaking people. The story was setting up a duel between Wynand and Roark. The breaker vs the unbreakable. It never happened! This was very disappointing. Wynand breaks or rather converts, but it wasn't the battle the story set up. Wynand is the only real person in the story. He is the example of what people with wealth and power should do. 

PSA Responses to Population Controls of 1980 Topps

Since I started collecting and following Rickey Henderson's rookie card, 1980 Topps #482, I have been reading and hearing a lot of talk about PSA controlling populations. I'm very skeptical. There are some surprising data and convincing reasons to believe PSA is engaging in a conspiracy to control populations of graded cards.

To be clear, I don't believe this is hiding a conspiracy. I think the most likely explanation is that PSA had poor quality control when they started. The specialized in grading lots of cards. When grading was cheaper, the quality control was poor. Now, PSA is the dominant company. They care about being consistent and reliable.

The rates of PSA 10s fluctuate. Some cards have lots of 10s and other cards in the same set have less. Even when accounting for the prices of cards and popularity of the players, there are some surprising differences in grades. This article highlights some of the examples. This is a primary source of evidence for the PSA population control conspiracy.

When looking closer at cards, ratios of grades can vary. Here is an interesting analysis of PSA 10 to 9 rations for RH RC. This is an even better source of evidence.

Then rumors from facebook groups and reddit, cite PSA intentionally grading cards lower to keep prices high. Then as a result of high prices, people grade more. PSA can charge more to grade. And there are more less coherent ideas.

I've looked for responses from PSA. Google's AI had cited PSA's responses but then I was never able to track down the actual source. Today, the newer version of GPT finally lead me to a response from PSA! I find the explanation a lot more likely than the population control conspiracy.

From a tweet by PSA:

The most common flaw that keeps this card from earning a PSA 10 grade? Print defects on the front surface. 

To offer some insight direct from the PSA Grading Room: One aspect that sets the 1980 Topps Rickey Henderson card apart from almost all other cards in the set is the large area of black surface on the front of the card, thanks to the shadow cast inside the dugout in the background of the image. 

As was the case with many vintage sets with darker areas on the surface, this created a higher likelihood for white, snowy-looking print dots or yellow "fish eye" defects to show up as heavily visible on this portion of the surface, affecting the overall eye appeal of the card. 

Finding copies with good centering, clean edges and sharp corners is not as difficult with this card as it is to find an example without noticeable print defects on the front.

We've also seen a noticeably larger volume of this card come to PSA since 2020 - especially as more collectors dug into their older collections - which further shrinks the overall Gem Rate.

PSA's response to Darren Rovell's article, by Ryan Greene, PSA's director of communications:

Just to be clear: "Pop Control," while widely talked about and rumored in the hobby, does not exist at PSA.

In talking with our senior graders today, oddly enough, the most common reason there are so few PSA 10 copies of the 1980 Topps Rickey Henderson is very similar to why so many cards made that list Ben Burrows of cllct recently compiled for the "No PSA-10 Club": Print Defects, or "PDs" as our team refers to them.

Finding centered copies of the Rickey 1980 Topps with clean edges and corners doesn't present as the most common challenge for submitters. It's the front surface.

One thing you'll notice about this card is it has a large swath of dark, black surface on the front of the card thanks to the shadowed dugout in the background. Very few other cards in 1980 Topps, if any, have this much black surface on the front of the card.

With that, due to low print-quality issues from many vintage sets, white print dots — or "snowing" — and yellowed "fish eye" print defects are incredibly common on nearly all copies of this card. With vintage cards, print quality and eye appeal factors heavily when a card is approaching the top end of our grading scale.

Also, in reference to the appearance that achieving a PSA 10 on this card grew exponentially harder after January 2020, there was no change whatsoever in the way this card was evaluated or the standards it was held to that changed in 2020.

We simply saw a heavier volume of these coming into PSA than ever before beginning in early 2020, when the entire card market boomed. Our grading standards on this set did not shift or tighten.

We just saw many, many more of them as we did with several popular cards from the '80s and '90s, especially as people dove back into their older collections while at home during the pandemic.

Making Fun of Beliefs

​Good Omens is good! It’s not laugh out loud funny, but, for a piece of writing, it is very funny. At first glance it is making fun of religious people. But then readers notice it's making fun of people. The following is a great job at atheist!

Pulsifer tried he be an atheist, but he didn’t have the self-satisfied strength of belief! 

Newton Pulsifer had never had a cause in his life. Nor had he, as far as he knew, ever believed in anything. It had been embarrassing, because he quite wanted to believe in something, since he recognized that belief was the lifebelt that got most people through the choppy waters of Life. He’d have liked to believe in a supreme God, although he’d have preferred a half-hour’s chat with Him before committing himself, to clear up one or two points. He’d sat in all sorts of churches, waiting for that single flash of blue light, and it hadn’t come. And then he’d tried to become an official Atheist and hadn’t got the rock-hard, self-satisfied strength of belief even for that. And every single political party had seemed to him equally dishonest. And he’d given up on ecology when the ecology magazine he’d been subscribing to had shown its readers a plan of a self-sufficient garden, and had drawn the ecological goat tethered within three feet of the ecological beehive. Newt had spent a lot of time at his grandmother’s house in the country and thought he knew something about the habits of both goats and bees, and concluded therefore that the magazine was run by a bunch of bib-overalled maniacs. Besides, it used the word “community” too often; Newt had always suspected that people who regularly used the word “community” were using it in a very specific sense that excluded him and everyone he knew. 

Then he’d tried believing in the Universe, which seemed sound enough until he’d innocently started reading new books with words like Chaos and Time and Quantum in the titles. He’d found that even the people whose job of work was, so to speak, the Universe, didn’t really believe in it and were actually quite proud of not knowing what it really was or even if it could theoretically exist.

To Newt’s straightforward mind this was intolerable.

Newt had not believed in the Cub Scouts and then, when he was old enough, not in the Scouts either.

He was prepared to believe, though, that the job of wages clerk at United Holdings [Holdings] PLC, was possibly the most boring in the world. 

This is how Newton Pulsifer looked as a man: if he went into a phone booth and changed, he might manage to come out looking like Clark Kent.