I hereby define objectivism as using all available information. To reach the best, most powerful conclusions it should be expected that you must use everything available to you. Finding out the truth is no different than designing a building or winning a war- To bridge the longest gap one must take the strongest materials and put them together in the most advanced ways. To defeat a powerful enemy one must use his best strategies and forces, and find a path wherein victory is possible. In bridges and war anyone can tell that if one side uses superior weapons or materials it will come out ahead. It is surprising then, that people think they can get by in philosophy without using the best possible equipment.
During a game of chess you can't afford to grow lazy and stop analyzing the board for new threats and opportunities. However, people have grown lazy about philosophy- after all, whatever philosophy one takes, the primary effects are averaged into the "pool" and dealt with communally. Environmentalists still get to use the electricity they would end up destroying, and communists still get to use the economy they would wreck. These are the looters- those who leech off of the philosophic input of others while tearing down the world around them with their foolish ideas. They often think they are productive citizens, that whatever goods or services they supply will somehow make up for whatever costs they inflict on those around them. However, the truth is not so easy. Under a good philosophy, a company, a nation, a world, will succeed, almost completely ignoring extraneous factors. Under a bad philosophy the same will fail, completely ignoring extraneous factors. The largest impact a person has on his nation is that of his philosophy.
Some people are under the miss-impression that certain information is "dangerous" or "radical" and should not be used. Information is information. Like chess pieces, information can be stronger or weaker, but every piece aids in eventual victory. First off, "dangerous" information- this is a long running debate, and it centers around the idea that some things are evil and anything that supports them should be eliminated. Things are not evil. Things are empty until given a space time location. This is relativity- that reality is based on what surrounds it, both in the third and fourth dimension. Although I would hesitate to ask the American government to use torture for practical reasons, their is no reason not to torture a terrorist if this torture would save a US troop from a worse fate. Such is math, that no matter how terrible X may be, if increasing it in one place lowers it somewhere else, there is no loss. It is obvious that an ideal world would not contain death or pain. This does not allow us to pretend we are in such a world- there is death, there is pain. Ignoring it will only make it worse. America's founders understood this- that is why they created the first amendment. It's also why it's the first amendment.
The general lack of understanding when it comes to "radical" information comes down to the lack of understanding of two principles- Probability and Change. Information that has a 99% chance of being false is still valuable. Say a scientist declared that a giant meteor had a 1% chance of blowing up the Earth unless we act immediately. It's pretty obvious that we should act on this information, weak as it is. Why then, when these same scientists say that their is a 1% chance that the government blew up the World Trade Center do we ignore them? It doesn't require that we treat a 1% chance of a evil government conspiracy the same as a 100% chance of said conspiracy. We're constantly given a false either or, and end up doing nothing. When presented with a 1% chance of a conspiracy, we should do things like- Set up laws that give the government a higher level transparency. Allow more room for independent investigation, and more access to important evidence by third parties. If everything the government knew about the world trade center was released, and a policy put in place banning the scrapping of possible evidence then we'd be in a much better position when faced with future possible conspiracies. Such is probability, that even the improbable is possible, and must be acted upon.
Change however is a even more curious principle. Another way of putting it is this- All throughout history we have held beliefs, the vast majority of which are now understood to be absurd. However, a multitude of people today think that beliefs held in the modern day are solid and cannot be overturned.
Already holes are being bored through such fundamental ideas such as preservation of mass/energy and the lightspeed limitations. Scientists will either have to patch up their theories or invent new ones- and they work every day to do so, and come up with better answers than their competition. And yet, when holes show up in philosophic issues people often think they can just ignore them, that over time they'll just go away. When a scientist presents a claim that contradicts commonly held scientific principles there is a scramble to replicate his experiments and to pull his data into the lattice of scientific principles. However, when a philosophic claim is made, it is ridiculed, ignored and ostracized. While people should be seeking verification they resort to vilification.
The current age was not handed down to us by god, and our current beliefs are no more precious than the ones we discarded hundreds of years ago. Just because certain information goes against the tides doesn't mean that it is not information. However, some information isn't going with or against the tide- It sits out in the darkness, alone.
In a given situation, we must use what we have- even if it's very little. Issues don't go away if we don't address them. People often complain about prejudging immigrants upon whom we lack proper information. Yes, it would be nice to know more about illegal immigrant X, but right now, all we know is that he is a Mexican. Knowing that he is a Mexican, and that if we flood ourselves with Mexicans that we will be like unto Mexico, our best plan of action is to reject him. The possibility that he is a 150 IQ genius that will do vast good for us is a possibility, but if we accept him without truly knowing his nature, than we will have to accept with him 100 pathetic average Mexicans. Hindsight is all well and good, but the fact that we should have accepted a random African here and Arabian there does not infer that we should accept anyone about whom the only knowledge we have is that he is a African/Arabian/etc. Seeking more information and acting on a more solid foundation is always a good idea, but while we lack such knowledge issues still present themselves about important topics, and we must still give answers.
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